V Force V Force was a reconnaissance and intelligence - gathering organisation established by the British during the Burma Campaign in World War II . Establishment and organisation . In April 1942 , when the Japanese drove the British Army from Burma and seemed likely to invade India , General Sir Archibald Wavell ordered the creation of a guerilla organisation which was to operate along the frontier between India and Burma . This frontier ran for 800 miles ( 1200 kilometres ) , from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal . V Force was envisaged as a " stay - behind " force . If the Japanese had invaded India after the monsoon season ended late in 1942 , V Force was to harass their lines of communications with ambushes and sabotage , and to provide intelligence from behind enemy lines . The first commander of the force was Brigadier A . Felix Williams , formerly the commander of the Tochi Scouts , a paramilitary unit on the North - west Frontier . When the Army failed to proved the 6 , 000 rifles it had promised to V Force , Williams arranged for weapons manufactured by gunsmiths in Peshawar to be delivered . The force was organised into six area commands , corresponding to the Indian Civil Service administrative areas , which in turn corresponded to the ethnicity of the inhabitants of the various parts of the frontier . Each area command had a Commander , Second - in - Command , Adjutant , Quartermaster and Medical Officer , four platoons ( about 100 men ) of the paramilitary Assam Rifles and up to 1 , 000 locally enlisted guerillas or auxiliaries . The area commanders and other officers were rarely Regular Army officers ; the qualification for appointment was more often expert knowledge of the local language and peoples . Some commanders were police officers , former civil administrators , or tea planters . Even one woman , the anthropologist Ursula Graham Bower , was appointed an officer in V Force . The Japanese did not invade India in 1942 as had been feared . V Force was able to consolidate itself in the wide area between the Allied and Japanese main forces . Bases and outposts were set up , standing patrols instituted and intelligence gathered and collated . By the end of 1943 , the force had been reorganised into two main zones : Assam Zone , including Imphal and all the frontier north of it , and Arakan Zone to the south . Detachments in Tripura were disbanded as they were deep inside India and unlikely to be threatened . An American organisation later took over the northernmost areas around Ledo . When the Indian Eastern Army carried out a small - scale invasion of Japanese - occupied Arakan in early 1943 , V Force provided a degree of warning about the movements of Japanese reserves to the threatened area . Later operations . The threatened invasion of India finally happened in 1944 . The V Force detachments forward of Imphal were engulfed . They could provide some intelligence of Japanese moves during the invasion , but they lacked supplies ( the local dumps had been drawn down over 1943 ) and there were too many demands on Allied transport aircraft to allow supply drops to them . As a result they were unable to harass the Japanese lines of communication as had been planned , and had to disband or make their way back into Allied lines . The Lushai Brigade was formed from Indian infantry battalions and several thousand of V Force ' s former levies in the Lushai Hills , west of Imphal . Under Brigadier P . C . Marindin , they achieved great success against the lines of communication of the Japanese 33rd Division , and later spearheaded the Fourteenth Army ' s advance to the Ayeyarwady River west of the Chindwin River . When the Japanese retreated late in 1944 and the Allies advanced , V Force changed its character . Small detachments of native - speaking personnel operated immediately ahead of the advancing regular formations , to gather short - range intelligence . Ambushes were also conducted against the retreating Japanese forces when possible . A very similar unit , Z Force , established by Fourteenth Army , operated further ahead , its parties being deployed by helicopter or parachute between and ahead of the main forces . Once Burma was largely reoccupied in 1945 , V Force began deploying parties in Siam and Malaya in readiness for future operations . The war ended before they could be used in their intended role . Results . Inter - community relations . In the Arakan , V Force became involved in a local conflict between the mainly Moslem Maugh and Buddhist Arakanese peoples . The Maughs provided most recruits for V Force , the Arakanese supported the Japanese . Over the three years during which the Allies and Japanese fought over the Mayu peninsula , the Maughs engaged in a campaign against Arakanese communities , in many cases using weapons provided by V Force . In defence of the force , it can only be said that the conflict was no part of official policy , and possibly unavoidable in the situation . Effectiveness . Overall , V Force provided a useful screen for the Allied armies in India during the stalemate of 1942 and 1943 . It proved unable to carry out its intended role of sabotage against enemy lines of communication , although the Lushai Brigade showed what was possible with assistance from regular units . Regular formation commanders were occasionally scathing about the intelligence provided by V Force . One such was Lieutenant - General Geoffrey Scoones , Commander of IV Corps . Concerning the arrival of Japanese reinforcements at the height of the Battle of Imphal , he wrote : Incidentally , the arrival of this Division or elements of it unheralded on this front is a pretty poor chit for our higher intelligence organisation . I sent in a long letter the other day setting out my views on the amount of money and manpower we are wasting on these hush - hush organizations and which , so far as I am concerned , produce nothing useful . Scoones was not referring to V Force alone . However , one of his subordinates at Imphal ( Major - General Douglas Gracey , commanding Indian 20th Infantry Division ) broke up his best battalion ( 9 / 12th Frontier Force Regiment ) to provide his own forward screen , rather than relying on V Force . For most of the Burma campaign , Allied formation commanders treated reports from organisations such as V Force as reliable only when a British officer personally gained the information . V Force was also hampered by lack of Japanese translators or interpreters to deal with captured documents . Lessons . V Force established certain principles in Britain ' s handling of guerilla or irregular operations , which were to be important in later conflicts such as the Malayan Emergency . It was accepted that " civilians " with local expertise were entitled to command regular officers . Above all , V Force depended on the goodwill and loyalty of the local populations among which they operated , and made great efforts to gain this .