I was watching an NHK special last night on the Imphal campaign - a key turning point and decisive defeat of the Japanese army in WWII's Southeast Asian campaign. It is a name that stands out in education in Japan though perhaps some of the details are not covered so greatly in a junior highor upper elementary school level history course - sort of like knowing that Antietam is a key Civil War battle with a lot of deaths but not much else.
Given the US centric coverage I had not really studied much on the British campaign in India/Burma and the little that I did was primarily from Anglo-Australian sources and not the Japanese.
In retrospect the blind pride and incompetence of Gen. Renya Mutaguchi was evident in the documentary. So many assumptions of best case scenarios and refusal to accept reality were a major cause of the great loss of live and supply strength of the Japanese.
Little was discussed on the cooperation of the Indian separatists Azad Hind who were recognized by the Axis powers and had postured to overthrow the colonial British rule in India - though they did play a role in the battle.
The locals interviewed for the doc still had very clear recollections of the Japanese troops and their way of life in Imphal does not seem like it has markedly improved since then.
Also quite poignant were the very elderly Japanese rank & file survivors who were still feeling shamed to have left such a futile fight. It is a tragedy that alongside the locals who greatly suffered that so many reluctant people caught in the war died so futilely while Mutaguchi himself survived till 1966.
What are some other events in this part of the war which largely did not figure in the American battle path stand out for you?
While this battle in particular is one that I had not heard of on its own, I am familiar with the Burmese Campaign/Theater in relation to efforts to resupply Nationalist Chain by recapturing the Burma road. I think this even featured on one of the episodes of the old serious "Clash of Warriors that used to air on History International, back when that was a thing (like 15 years ago now).
I think the whole war in mainland China does not get enough attention. Kind of like the USSR and the Nazis, China bore the brunt of the fighting and sustained insanely high levels of casualties fighting Japan and aside from just referencing it indirectly, both in relation to the start of the war (motivating the embargos) and then in relation to battles the US/UK fought, the battles and war itself really get overlooked I think.
Aside from the Philippines, the US Army was not really engaged in much land campaigning. Most of it was amphibious assaults, followed by brutal fights to secure an island and its airfield. And while these were important in terms of shrinking Japan's reach, destroying its navy and providing the launch base for strategic bombing, Japan had a massive army being fought in the field by a range of players, but most US history text books focus primarily on the island hopping because that stood out, but it ignores the brutal fighting in China, India/Burma, Borneo and elsewhere.
Indeed - the whole Pacific Island hopping especially Midway, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa those are central in the stories of the war that we get over here.
Obviously there is the dark days of the 1930's with Japanese fighting in China which is a well-discussed topic.
And we have the Bridge Over River Kwai which is a well regarded movie here in the US and the testimonies and stories of the British, Aussie, and other Commonwealth troops fighting the Japanese and their Axis proxy accomplices.
Through the lens of colonialism in Asia the war there takes on a new dimension - for instance the Azad Hind despite fighting with the Japanese were seen by some as revolutionary precursors - perhaps misguided but fighting for their own country to overthrow the British.
Naturally, Chinese state TV has a slew of movies and TV shows set during the time of fighting the Japanese - I've noted a number of them each time I visited China and happened to turn on the TV in my hotel room for a bit. They are interesting from a propaganda POV - though obviously hard to follow without subtitles.
Korean TV and movies have some stories as well about this topic - of course with more focus on the Manchuria campaign and Northeast Asian theater.
I am definitely interested in learning more of the Asian land wars with my wife's maternal grandfather having served there in the coding/communications department giving it a personal connection. I've got cousins and relatives who fought in the US Army and Marines including in the Pacific and those stories are well-told and familiar. He was, according to my wife, enamored of the Russian women he saw in the Far East Manchuria area during his own time in the Kwangtung army, echoing the stories many Japanese servicemen had reported. He left before the end of the war - perhaps seeing the writing on the wall of the powerful advancing Soviet Army that crushed the Japanese and interned well over 500,000 Japanese servicemen - over half of them more than 2 years past the end of the war - which saw 60,000 confirmed by USSR records dead in Siberian internment camps (and perhaps 3-4 times that number by other non-Soviet studies).
Of course given the brutal POW & civilian treatment of British, Commonwealth, Chinese, and other troops by the Japanese Imperial troops - they were actually by some accounts more likely to just massacre civilians and enemy surrendered troops than the Nazis - it is hard to mention the suffering of the Axis troops, even the rank & file members. In the end in places in Imphal where the Japanese suffered their largest single military defeat many died of malaria, dysentery, starvation, and infection rather than actual battle wounds. They were told that they would be killed if they ran so some committed suicide, others when they died were talking about loved ones and their fellow unit members. This is similar to the stories we saw in for instance All Quiet On the Western Front - rather than the propagandist view that they were fighting for the Emperor and saying "Yamato Damashii" or some other nationalist phrase like that and going out like we see in the movies.
