From: Mark Crispin <mrc@Ikkoku-Kan.Panda.COM>
Subject: 50 YEARS AGO: December 16/18 - Burma/New Guinea
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Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1992 20:43:47 GMT

On December 16, the British began an offensive along the Arakan Range on
Burma's coastline.  This was a limited offensive; the major British push in
the Arakan Range would not be for another two years.

Part of what the British were fighting was the Japanese propagandists' myth of
the ``Japanese superman'' who would fight to the bitter end and never be taken
prisoner.  Outnumbered Japanese soldiers would hole up and not leave until
their bullet ridden corpses were dragged out.  [Later, flame-throwers were
used to deal with holed-up Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender.]
Wounded Japanese troops would ask their comrades for a grenade, so they could
blow themselves up; those who did not do so in time had to have their arms
tied down by Allied doctors because they kept on ripping off their bandages
and trying to commit suicide.

The Japanese lust to die rather than surrender was based in part on their
treatment of Allied prisoners.  Prisoners held by the Japanese were starved,
beaten, and tortured; only one out of three survived until the end of the war.
The prisoners were forced to labor for their captors, as glamorized in ``The
Bridge on the River Kwai'' (although the movie only touches on the torture and
brutality the prisoners faced); however, the construction efforts were
hampered by the workers dying all the time.  As one Commonwealth ex-POW
sardonically observed after the war, ``If they had fed us, we could have build
their bloody railway and not feel it.''

The objective in the 1942 offensive was to crack holes in this Japanese notion
of racial superiority; to harass the occupiers of Burma.

On December 18, the Allies on New Guinea began a major offensive on Buna, the
last beachhead of the ill-fated Japanese offensive on Port Moresby that began
on July 22.  Buna would finally fall to the Allies on January 2, and with that
the threat again Australia would end.

This will be my last 50 YEARS AGO posting for this year.  I have already
posted a retrospective, but to recap; 1942 began as a year of major Japanese
victories as the forces of Dai-Nippon Teikoku swept through the South Pacific,
Indochina, and even the islands of Alaska.  Japan had become truly the Great
Japanese Empire.  With the cutting of the Burma Road, supplies to Chiang
Kai-Shek's Chinese government in Chungking depended solely upon airborne
supplies over ``the hump'' between India and China.  The surprise American
victory at Midway destroyed Japanese naval air power; this combined with
Japan's failure to hold its newly-built airfield on Guadalcanal was the
turning point of the war.  [Note: some Japanese historians believe that
Japan's fate wasn't sealed until the loss of Saipan in July 1944.]

Japan still held a vast empire, and in spite of a series of losses in 1943
would hold that empire throughout 1943.  I'll begin telling that story when I
resume this series in January.  Until then, best wishes to everyone for the
winter solstice, and a happy new year.