Why Japanese Soldiers Feared the British Army More Than Any Other Enemy
In 1953, a Japanese sergeant who had survived the Burma campaign sat down with an interviewer and was asked one question. What surprised you most about fighting the British? He was quiet for a moment, then he said, “They would not stop.” In 1942, we pushed them and they stopped. In 1944, we pushed them and they pushed back.
We pushed harder and they pushed back harder. I have never been able to explain it. This video is the explanation he could not give, because what happened to the British Army between 1942 and 1944 is one of the most remarkable transformations in the history of modern warfare, and it began with the worst military defeat Britain had ever suffered.
15th February, 1942, Singapore. Lieutenant General Arthur Percival walks toward the Japanese lines carrying a white flag. Behind him, 85,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers are laying down their weapons. The Japanese force that has just accepted their surrender is less than half that size. It is the largest capitulation in British military history.
Churchill calls it the worst disaster and largest surrender in British history. He is not wrong. For Japanese commanders, Singapore confirms everything they have believed about their enemy. The British Empire is in decline. Its soldiers are soft. Its officers are inflexible. General Yamashita, the man who accepted Percival’s surrender, puts it plainly, “The British will not stand and fight when they are outmaneuvered.
They will retreat then surrender.” He has just proven it with 85,000 prisoners. What Yamashita cannot know, sitting in Singapore in February 1942, is that he has just made the most expensive mistake of the entire Pacific War because somewhere in the wreckage of that defeat, a British general is taking very careful notes, and he is going to use every lesson Japan has just taught him to destroy three Japanese armies.
>> His name is William Slim. He grew up in Birmingham, left school at 16, and talked his way into the army during the First World War by pretending to be older than he was. He had been wounded at Gallipoli, fought in Mesopotamia, and he had just spent months leading the most exhausting retreat of the entire war, pulling what remained of the British army out of Burma in 1942 through jungle and monsoon rain, losing men every single day.
He was not a drawing-room general. He did not come from money, and he did not pretend to be something he was not. His soldiers respected him because when things went wrong, he told them why without making excuses, and right now, things had gone very wrong indeed. Most generals who survive a defeat of that scale spend the rest of their careers explaining why it was not their fault. Slim does something different.
He sits down and asks himself one question: Why did we lose? The answer he arrives at is uncomfortable. The British soldier in Burma, he concludes, is not poorly trained or poorly equipped. He is badly prepared for the specific type of war Japan is fighting. The Japanese infantryman moves faster through jungle than any British unit had thought possible.
He endures conditions that break Western soldiers. He infiltrates at night, cuts supply lines, encircles defenders, and holds those encirclements until the British, convinced they are trapped, begin to retreat. And once the British retreat, they cannot stop. The retreat becomes a route. The route becomes a disaster. Slim has watched this happen repeatedly, and he has arrived at a conclusion that nobody else in British High Command has been willing to accept.
The Japanese soldier is not beatable with the army Britain currently has in Burma. That army has to be rebuilt from the ground up, and Slim is going to be the one to do it. Slim takes command of what will become the 14th Army in 1943. And the first thing he does is go and talk to his men. Not inspection parades, not formal briefings.
He goes to units in the field, sits down with soldiers, and tells them the truth. He tells them that they have been beaten because they have been fighting the wrong way. He [snorts] tells them that the Japanese are very good soldiers, and that pretending otherwise will get them killed. And then he tells them something that nobody in the British Army in Burma has said out loud before.
He tells them exactly how they are going to win. The order he issues is simple enough to memorize. If the Japanese cut the road behind you, you are not surrounded. They are. Hold your position. Supplies will come by air. Counterattack at the first opportunity. There will be no more retreats. But orders only work if soldiers believe them.
And soldiers in 1943 Burma have very good reasons not to believe anything their officers tell them. They have retreated for 2 years. They call themselves the forgotten army because London has forgotten them. Because the newspapers write about Europe and never about Burma. Because they are fighting with equipment that other theaters have already rejected.
Slim knows all of this. And so before he can change how his army fights, he has to change what his army believes about itself. He has roughly 12 months to do it before the Japanese come again. Whether it will be enough, nobody knows. Including Slim. February 1944. The Arakan, Western Burma. The Japanese 55th division launches the operation that will either prove Slim right or expose his transformation as wishful thinking.
The plan is the one that has worked every time before. A deep flanking move cutting the road behind the 7th Indian division, overrunning a brigade headquarters in the early hours, and waiting for the British to do what they have always done. Panic, retreat, collapse. The 7th Indian division stops. It forms a defensive perimeter in the jungle that becomes known as the admin box, and it fights where it stands.
Japanese soldiers who expected to walk through undefended rear areas find cooks and drivers and clerks shooting at them from prepared positions. The aerial supply Slim promised arrives on schedule. The garrison is encircled and it does not care. A Japanese soldier who survived 17 days of that fighting wrote about it afterwards.
“We had cut them off, and instead of panicking, they kept fighting. The RAF was dropping them supplies from the air. We could not understand it.” The 55th Division suffers over 5,000 casualties in 17 days against a force it expected to destroy in 48 hours. For the first time in the Burma campaign, a major Japanese offensive has been stopped and reversed.
Japanese field reports from the Arakan describe the British conduct with a word that appears several times across different documents. The word is unexpected. It would appear many more times before the year was out. The real offensive, the one that Japanese High Command believes will settle Burma once and for all, is already being planned.
It is called Operation U-Go. Its target is a small hill station in Nagaland called Kohima. And what waits there will turn that word unexpected into something the Japanese army had almost no experience of, defeat. To understand what the Japanese walk into at Kohima, you have to understand what they think they’re walking into.
Lieutenant General Sato commands the 31st Division, 15,000 veteran soldiers tasked with taking the hill station and cutting the road that supplies the entire British position at Imphal. His intelligence assessment of the garrison defending Kohima is accurate. Fewer than 1,500 men, many of them administrative troops, hospital staff, line of communication soldiers who had never been expected to fight as frontline infantry.
Sato’s calculation is straightforward. A force that small, that lightly armed, surrounded by 15,000 veterans with no ground resupply. 72 hours, perhaps four days, and it will be over. The Japanese encircle Kohima on 5th April, 1944. What happens over the next 15 days rewrites everything Sato thought he knew.
The garrison holds a perimeter that shrinks daily. The front line at its most intense runs across a tennis court that had belonged to the district commissioner. The bungalow itself changes hands multiple times in a single day, room by room, with men fighting at distances where they can hear each other breathing. Water comes from a single small tank that Japanese snipers have zeroed in on.
Medical treatment happens in open trenches under fire. Men are wounded, patched up, and sent back to their positions because there is nowhere else for them to go. A Gurkha soldier in the garrison described the nights. The Japanese would attack at night, always at night, screaming and coming through the wire. We would wait until they were close enough to see, then open fire.
They kept coming. We killed many, and they kept coming. In the morning, there would be bodies on the wire and in the trenches, and the next night they would come again. We were very tired, but we did not think about stopping. There was nowhere to stop to. Somewhere in those words is the thing that was breaking Sato’s division from the inside.
Not the casualties, though the casualties were severe. It was the realization, arriving slowly across 14 failed assaults, that the men on Garrison Hill were not going to give them what every British Garrison before them had eventually given, a way out. A sergeant in the 31st Division wrote in his field diary as the siege entered its second week, “We have attacked the British position on Garrison Hill 14 times.
We have not taken it. Each morning we count more of our men dead. Each morning there are still British on the hill.” Sato sends urgent messages to his superior, General Mutaguchi. He needs resupply. His men are beginning to starve. His entire plan depended on capturing British supply depots, which required the British to retreat.
They are not retreating. Mutaguchi sends nothing and tells Sato to continue attacking. On 20th April, the relief force from the 2nd British Division breaks through to Kohima after 10 days of fighting through Japanese blocking positions that had been specifically placed to stop them. They were not stopped. A Japanese officer captured near the relief corridor described the British assault on his fortified position with a bewilderment that tells you everything about how much had changed.
“They fixed us with one company and attacked with two others from the flanks. Close in at a run with grenades and bayonets at the end. They shouted as they came. British soldiers are not supposed to shout.” Fighting at Kohima continues for two more months. When it is over, the 31st Division has been effectively destroyed.
Sato, relieved of command for withdrawing without orders, makes no apology. His assessment of the British at Kohima is this, “The British soldier we fought was not the soldier we anticipated. He expected to be encircled and was not afraid of it. He had confidence in his commanders that we assumed the British soldier never possessed.
I say this as an officer who lost his division to these men. 40 miles to the south at Imphal, the same transformation is being felt on a larger scale. Mutaguchi’s army, 85,000 men, drives forward expecting the collapse the formula has always delivered. What it finds is a prepared army fighting on ground of Slim’s choosing with air supply arriving on schedule and no sign of the hesitation that had defined British operations in 1942.
Through May and into June, as the monsoon breaks over the Assam hills, Japanese units that had been attacking the same positions for weeks begin running out of food, ammunition, and men. A private who’d been with his battalion since the retreat of 1942 wrote home during the worst of the fighting. I am not the same man who ran from them 2 years ago. None of us are.
We know now that they can be killed the same as any other soldier. I think they are beginning to know that we know it. That shift, a British army that had stopped fearing the Japanese and started expecting to beat them, was visible to every Japanese soldier who faced them at Imphal. And it was the one thing Japanese tactical doctrine had no answer for.
By June 1944, Mutaguchi accepts the operation has failed. The retreat to the Chindwin begins. What happens on that retreat defies easy description. The monsoon turns every track into swamp. Wounded men who cannot walk are left where they fall. The men who can walk do so on starvation rations through rain that does not stop for weeks.
The track back to the Chindwin becomes known to every Japanese soldier who survives it as the road of bones because it is marked for its entire length by the bodies of men who fell and could not get up. 30,000 Japanese soldiers die on that retreat, more than died in the battles themselves. One survivor described it years later, quietly.
We walked for 3 weeks through rain and mud. Men were dying every day. I kept thinking the British would stop following us. They did not stop. They kept coming. Three Japanese divisions destroyed. The strategic initiative Japan had held in Burma since 1942 gone permanently. Mandalay fell in March 1945, Rangoon in May.
The 14th Army lost 40,000 dead in Burma. The Japanese lost over 180,000. The most forgotten British Army of the Second World War, fighting with whatever Europe did not need in conditions that killed more men through disease than combat across whole stretches of the campaign, achieved the most complete land victory over Japanese forces of the entire war.
Slim became a field marshal. His men came home without fanfare to a country that had been following the news from Normandy and had no room left for Burma. Many of them never spoke about it again. The soldier who had written above Kohima that nobody had told the British they were broken survived the retreat to the Chindwin, survived the monsoon, survived the collapse of 1945, and came home to Japan in 1946.
Six years later, a local interviewer asked him what he thought of British soldiers. He was silent for a long moment, then he said, “In 1942, we defeated them easily, and we thought we understood them. In 1944, they defeated us completely, and we understood nothing. When you think you understand your enemy, that is when you should be most afraid.
” The last veterans of Kohima and Imphal are gone now, but on the memorial at Kohima Cemetery, carved in stone, are 14 words that every visitor reads in silence. “When you go home, tell them of us, and say, ‘For your tomorrow, we gave our today.'”
