Galahad: Intelligence Aspects

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We had got as far as Auche and taken our last air drop when another of Stilwell's "Hurry up" messages--we had received one on the way to Walawbum that made us abandon at a drop site a good part of the supplies we had just received--caused the time for the roadblock to be set up some 36 hours. Now, in addition to having no air photos, we would have no time for reconnaissance, and would simply have to blunder across the Mogaung river through the Japanese positions and out onto the Kamaing road. I was not even sure the Mogaung was fordable, although the Kachins thought it was.

On 24 March McGee, whom I had sent ahead while I saw to preparing an airstrip for evacuations, got across the Mogaung and found Inkangahtawng dead ahead and too well fortified for the reinforced patrols he sent to envelop it. He dug in yards from the road and withstood repeated counterattacks and shell fire. I couldn't reach him by radio, but I wasn't worried because I expected to catch up with him and take over before he could get hit very hard.

In the meantime, however, McGee received a message from Merrill--my own radio operators were having difficulty communicating with Janpan--to the effect that a captured map showed two Japanese battalions moving to outflank our blocking force. Although it was not an action message, McGee decided to withdraw. When I took a liaison plane to look over the blocks I supposed by now established and perhaps to land on the road, I found his battalion marching back up the trail. I could not object to Merrill's dealing directly with McGee because of the communications difficulties, but in my opinion this message should not have been sent.

It transmitted unverified information from a source that could easily have been a plant. If I were being outflanked by a force close enough to endanger my mission and didn't know it, I should have been relieved and sent back to the infantry school for a refresher. Back at Manpin, at the base of the hills and the point closest to Kamaing on our route, I finally got through to Janpan and we were instructed to move rapidly to Auche to block the trail north: Beach's patrols were fighting a delaying action against Japanese forces advancing north from Kamaing. We took a supply drop before leaving Manpin, and while it was being cleared an OSS Chinese agent appeared.

Operating under a code name, he relayed information by radio to Lt. Ray Peers, commander of Detachment He said that a large Japanese force had left Kamaing on a trail to Auche only four or five hours ago, according to a reliable native informant, a purveyor of milk to the Japanese officers' mess in Kamaing. Luckily the evening patrol of fighter planes came over as I was digesting and plotting this information, and I asked the flight leader to verify it.

When he reported back that the tail of a column could be seen disappearing up the trail in question, I designated it a target and the fighters proceeded to work the Japs over. We knew they were successful, for they returned some time later to buzz Manpin, pull up in a steep climb, and end with the barrel-roll signifying Mission accomplished. Working with Galahad was a pleasure for the fighter pilots and a relief from supporting the Chinese. We pinpointed targets for close-in strafing and bombing and we checked and reported results of missions flown, whereas the Chinese designated whole areas as targets, never reported results, and were quite unreliable in reading maps.

It seemed to me, on the basis of all information available, that with this detachment of Japanese out of the way the important installation at Kamaing must now be wide open; and here I sat with a battalion and a half of troops just five or six miles away. I radioed Merrill for permission to move in on the place; it would be a bigger coup than our now abandoned Inkangahtawng project and would cut off the rear of the Japanese forces we had been ordered to intercept at Auche.

To my disappointment I was told to withdraw; I still believe it was a golden opportunity that should have been exploited. What followed were Galahad's darkest days so far. McGee's battalion, moving back exhausted from Auche to Nhpum Ga on 28 March, was attacked and within two or three days cut off from 3rd battalion and the headquarters staff, which had taken up position in a valley to the north to protect the airstrip at Hsamshingyang.

Merrill had a heart attack and was evacuated. As the situation became critical Father Stuart informed me that the Kachins might pull out at any time. Nevertheless, on 3 April, I ordered Kachins substituted for patrols wherever possible and all able men assembled for a determined drive to relieve McGee.

As this drive made progress the Kachins perked up again and began to feel out the trails. In the meantime Osborne's 1st battalion, after a brilliantly professional job of reconnaissance by its I and R platoon, had surprised the Japanese at Shaduzup on 28 March, set up a block, and held it against counterattacks until relieved by the Chinese with their pack artillery. Osborne's men were now ordered back over the long roundabout trails, the sum of both forces' earlier routes, to join us.

They arrived on 7 April after a forced march on short rations. Exhausted as they were, and with dysentery and malaria widespread among them, were found fit for immediate employment. With these and the help of air photos which had finally arrived, I was able to order a flank attack around the right side, protected by a diversionary move on the left, which cut the Japanese supply line.

By 9 April, Easter Sunday, the Japanese had had enough and pulled out. We were ordered not to pursue. McGee's men had performed a near miracle in holding out against what we thought was an enemy battalion; after the war we learned that it was two mixed battalions of infantry reinforced by a company of artillery. This force, the main Japanese reserve in north Burma, was badly mauled, and its withdrawal ended any serious enemy threat to Stilwell's forces there. As I walked into the defense perimeter that Sunday I paused to look at a motionless horse whose gray color I did not recognize.

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On close examination I was stunned to find that every inch of his body except his hooves was covered with inanimate gray flies, gorged with the flesh of the poor animal, too weak to flick his tail. Bloated animals, also covered with flies, lay with legs grotesquely extended in protest where they had fallen and died from shell fire, thirst, or starvation. An all too familiar nauseating odor lay over the area, heavy as a London fog.

McGee took me around the perimeter, reviewing the events of the past ten days. Here a soldier took a direct hit from a mortar and had to be buried in his foxhole; that scarred tree was used by a bazooka man to fragment his shells over the bunched-up Japanese; this was where Matsumoto crept forward and listened to the Japanese officers giving their attack orders; here a soldier shot his buddy in the morning mist; and there a lieutenant, unrecognized without his glasses, was shot by his own men.

The Japanese, in their haste, had left several dead behind, including the bloated lower half of a body that looked for all the world like a pair of football pants stuffed with gear for an out-of-town game.

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Galahad had 52 dead, wounded, and 77 evacuated sick, as against more than Japanese killed; but it was badly weakened and needed a rest. About the time we had got Nhpum Ga cleaned up Colonel Hank Kinnison, Stilwell's G3 at NCAC, visited us at Hsamshingyang and said that Stilwell was seriously thinking of organizing a task force to seize the airstrip at Myitkyina, head of navigation on the Irrawaddy, the northernmost railhead and the main Japanese base in north Burma.

Although we considered this idea of Stilwell's a wild dream, involving as it would the crossing of the jumbled Kumon range in the rains preliminary to the coming monsoon, I thought the staff would benefit from the exercise of preparing a study on its feasibility while the men and animals were getting back into condition. Laffin made a study of the terrain. Working from our maps, such as they were, and questioning the OSS Kachins and local villagers, he selected routes that might be negotiable over the mountains and south to Myitkyina.

Father Stuart was an invaluable help, not only because of his own knowledge of the country but because he could evaluate for our purposes a Kachin estimate of the usability of a trail. When, a few days later, I was asked to send a staff officer to Stilwell's headquarters, I gave him the staff study to take along as of possible use, incomplete as it was and scratched with pencil on all kinds of paper.

Merrill, on his feet again and active at headquarters, incorporated it into plans he had been making for our next mission and presented it to Stilwell within a couple of hours. Galahad was ordered back to Naubum, where the Myitkyina Task Force would be formed. Naubum, Curl's once recondite retreat, was alive with activity.

Many new bashas had been built around the airstrip, now uncamouflaged with two liaison aircraft parked brazenly in the open. Merrill was there; he was to command the task force. His executive officer would be Colonel John E. McCammon, a Chinese-speaking officer newly brought from Stilwell's Kunming headquarters, for the task force would consist of Galahad and two Chinese regiments being flown in over the hump from China.

I was to command a subordinate Task Force "H" comprising Osborne's 1st battalion and the th Chinese regiment, under Colonel Huang, plus a Chinese battery of mm. Kinnison would have a similar "K" force composed of Beach's 3rd battalion and the other Chinese regiment. Jack Girsham and Laffin would be with H force.

During the few days at Naubum Laffin made an intense study of the trails, leading or sending Kachins out to test routes that looked possible. The problem was not just to find a trail over the mountains, but to find a route that the animals with their heavy packs could take. He finally selected one and proposed that it be tried out all the way to Arang on the other side of the range. The OSS people could talk by radio with Arang, where there was a secret setup similar to Captain Curl's at Naubum, and I asked them to have Arang dispatch a patrol to Naubum over the proposed route to check it.

In a few days the fourman patrol reported in with the information that it was passable and with invaluable detail about it. Laffin was sent ahead with some Kachins and an engineer officer to improve it as far as they could. On 27 April we set out, K force in the lead to cut off to the left from Ritpong for a feint at Nsopzup on the Myitkyina-Sumprabum road, H force to continue via Arang and attack the Myitkyina airfield with a target date of 12 May, and what was left of McGee's battalion, reinforced by Kachins, to take a more direct route south of ours, providing security on the right flank as far as Arang.

Past the improved first portion of the trail the going was brutal. Third battalion, in K force, lost twenty animals with their loads of ammunition and equipment; they would slip in the mud and roll down the mountainside. H force lost several. I once found a soldier struggling along with a pair of obviously heavy saddle bags in addition to his pack; they contained silver rupees, H force's intelligence funds.

He was first incredulous and then dismayed when I ordered him to throw away the supposedly precious burden he had clambered down feet to retrieve from his dead pack-horse. We reached Arang, the OSS headquarters on the Kumon eastern slopes, behind schedule, having been delayed as far as Ritpong by the straggling tail of K force column.

At Ritpong K force had met unexpected Japanese resistance and we had slipped on through without being observed by the enemy. Arang was a pleasant little spot, where we could take our last relatively safe air drop, evacuate those unfit to continue, and receive the latest intelligence and any changes in plan. I was never given any estimate of the Japanese strength to expect at Myitkyina, but I did receive here a large air photo of the town and one of its airfield, about two miles west of the town nearer the downstream settlement of Pamati. Merrill flew in at Arang.

Since I was going to impose radio silence from about the time H force left Seingneing, we agreed on a set of code words to keep him informed and to enable me to order the necessary resupply of food and ammunition when we had taken the airstrip. Galahad carried on its collective human and animal back only enough ammunition for ten to twelve minutes of fire from all weapons, and immediate resupply would be imperative if there were any kind of fight. The codes were as follows:. If I judged that the field needed repair, engineers would land by glider. I repeatedly pressed Merrill for instructions on what to do after taking the airfield, whether to take the town and whether to cross the river, but he would only say, "Don't worry.

I'll be the first man on the field and take over. Laffin stayed at the head of the column with Martin. In two days we reached Seingneing, which was reported to have been occupied by the Japanese at one time. Laffin, scouting it, found no signs of recent occupation, and we could therefore take a supply drop here. I tried to make use of this last opportunity to evacuate those too sick to go on: A few litter planes got in and out of the improvised airstrip until the wind shifted, but then after a near crash on the short take-off the pilots could no longer risk it.

We had to leave two officers and 32 men there in charge of Major Tom Senff, who had a wrenched back and an infected throat. Somehow my request that they be taken care of was lost at headquarters, and they were left untended for five days until Senff in desperation limped the twenty miles to find us at Myitkyina. There were two exasperating incidents with the Chinese at Seingneing. First, I found that they had got tired of carrying the rather heavy batteries of their radios and had thrown them away some days before, and so couldn't be used in a dispersed operation.

And now the commander of the pack howitzers wanted to leave all his ammunition behind because he had several lame horses and mules. It took about two hours to convince him that his battery without ammunition would be as useless as the radios without batteries. Having radioed Cafeteria lunch , we left Seingneing in the afternoon on 15 May, planning a night march in order to cross the Mogaung-Myitkyina road half way to Myitkyina by early daylight.

We were a small force--under Americans, fewer than Chinese rifles, and an untested battery of the lightest of light artillery--to be attacking an important enemy base, and everything depended on achieving surprise. The column could get across the road in three hours by daylight; at night it would take a great deal longer.

Moreover, air observation and Kachin road watchers indicated that any largescale use of the road occurred under cover of darkness. This schedule should give the men a chance to rest the following night before attacking on the morning of 17 May. We were guided on this furtive march by one particular OSS Kachin whose knowledge of the country was a major factor in our successful approach; he had formerly been a forest ranger in the Pidaung National Forest through which we were moving. We also had at the head of the column three or four OSS agents of Anglo-Burmese extraction, not very aggressive but likable men.

Like the sons of other mixed marriages throughout the Orient, the war had put them in the difficult position of having to choose between their opposing inherited loyalties and made them treasonable to the side they chose against. They had now irrevocably committed themselves to the Anglo-American war effort, and they were scared: I wondered each time whether they would come back, but they always did. Courage is essentially self-control under frightening conditions, and these OSS agents had it. Bill Laffin himself was in a similar or worse position.

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The son of an American retired sea captain and his Japanese wife, he had been repatriated on the Gripsholm after signing a pledge not to wage war against Japan. His parents remained in Japan under the watchful care of the Kempi Tai; it would go ill with them and him if he were captured by his mother's people. I often wondered from what source he drew the calm courage that complemented his unfailing dignity and sense of decency. In the wee hours of that night, as we made our way through the intense darkness, I was radioed for permission to use a flashlight: The column halted, waiting for the verdict on our one indispensable man.

His leg was swelling fast, Doc McLaughlin reported, and it would endanger his life to go on. I said he had to go on. I sent my horse forward and told Laffin to disregard Doc's orders and put the Kachin on it and get going. McLaughlin, governed by selfless devotion to his profession and the precepts of the Hippocratic oath, could not bring himself to endanger a human life; but a commander must put the success of his mission above all other considerations. It was not long now before our guide, in great pain but still in command of his faculties, said that the Mogaung-Myitkyina road lay ahead.

Laffin and OSS Lieutenant Martin scrupulously refrained from setting foot on it; they wanted me to have the honor of being the first to cross this so important little ribbon of gravel. Sending security detachments a mile out on either side in the gray dawn, we crossed unobserved and without incident. When the whole column was across I had the radio unslung and transmitted Strawberry sundae --"H minus 24; ready supply transports. The next crossing was the railroad, at a point some five miles from its terminus at Myitkyina.

Here we expected no trouble, and had none. Herbie, one of our Nisei, climbed a telephone pole and tapped the line; there was nothing of importance on the wire.

We did not cut it, not wanting to bring a repair crew down the tracks on us. Beyond the railroad lay the village of Namkwi, on the east bank of the Namkwi Hka. As a precautionary measure I had Martin and his Kachins round up the entire population, man, woman, and child, and bring them along as our guests for the night. Elated at having reached our point of assault without being discovered, we bivouacked on the river south of Namkwi and spent a busy evening gathering information. Martin and his OSS agents engaged the villagers in long periods of questioning about the Japanese strength and habits, the condition of the airstrip, etc.

After dark Laffin sent a patrol to reconnoiter the airfield, and its leader got through and actually onto the runway and back without being seen, although Japanese were all about. As a result of these efforts I was in possession by midnight of excellent information on which to base an attack order, as follows:. The Japanese worked on the airfield at night, repairing any bomb damage incurred during the day. The repair crews were billeted on the far side of the strip toward the Pamati end.

At Pamati there was a Japanese military police headquarters for the area. There was no wire around the airfield, and the revetments around the strip which I had noticed on my air photo and had been worried lest they be fortified were not. Cover was sparse, and observation points between us and the field were lacking.

Laffin's patrol had plotted a compass course that could confidently be used as an axis of attack. It was learned also that a train left Myitkyina for Mogaung at about eleven every morning, that in Myitkyina there had been Japanese some time ago, and that the Japanese had 25 geishas in the area. This last item became one of absorbing professional interest to Herbie, who by the time the city fell on 3 August had an accurate list of the names of all of them.

The attack, at As the troops moved out we sent our message In the ring , the signal for our supply transports to take off. The Chinese swept across the field and dug in on the east, toward Myitkyina, against shell fire. Osborne took Pamati and, leaving a platoon there to hold it, proceeded upstream toward the Zigyun ferry south of Myitkyina, the ultimate objective I'd given him. OSS Lieutenant Martin and his Kachins first blew up the railroad bridge over the Namkwi-the train escaped, coming through apparently ahead of schedule while the charges were still being placed--and then supervised the local villagers in the job of rolling the oil drums off the runway.

By mid-afternoon the field was operational. I radioed Merchant of Venice for transports to come in and land. We had difficulty getting an acknowledgment, so I asked the leader of a flight of P's that shortly flew over--with orders to support us, but we had no targets--to relay it in again. Then the clockwork went crazy. The planes came in promptly, but they brought no ammunition, no food, no General Merrill, only sundry goods and personnel not ordered, not wanted, and not needed.

First it was gratuitous engineers, landing in gliders with great hazard to Col. Huang's men at the edge of the field. Then came a caliber antiaircraft battery that proved useless. Then a battalion of the 89th Chinese infantry regiment that had to be disposed someplace where they wouldn't shoot up the troops doing the fighting. What with taking care of all these arrivals I had no time for running the battle.

The afternoon was a nightmare. Command Problems says it was General Stratemeyer of the Army Air Force who "intervened and upset the planned schedule. The next morning, 18 May, Stilwell did fly in. He would have been welcome if he had brought food and ammunition, or even an idea of what we were to do next. But he brought only a dozen correspondents anxious to show how brave they were in visiting the combat zone. He did not say where Merrill was, and plans to follow up the success of our mission apparently had simply not been laid: This day and the next, however, with ammunition low, I had to hold the Chinese in position east of the airfield.

Osborne took the Zigyun ferry crossing but ran completely out of food and had to be withdrawn. On the 18th we lost Bill Laffin. I had asked him to take a liaison plane to find K force, whom we couldn't reach by radio, and deliver a message outlining our situation. He was in the air when a flight of Zeros, hiding behind a cloud formation that regularly hangs over the Irrawaddy bend at Myitkyina, heard our fighter patrol radio that it was getting low on gas and was returning to base a few minutes early, before its relief arrived.

The Zeros came in, and Laffin's plane either was shot down or crashed trying to get away. This was the only air attack we ever had.

My orderly was killed, my own face was pock-marked by spent dum-dum fragments, and considerable damage was done to the fighter planes parked on the field. Stratemeyer could just as well have kept his ack-ack at home: On the 19th still no supplies. Merrill flew in, but so unannounced and briefly that I saw him only in time to wave an astounded goodbye as he was taking off.

After reporting to Stilwell that afternoon he had another heart attack that put him permanently out of the campaign. He had visited my headquarters, however, and been given our intelligence estimates that there had been between and Japanese in Myitkyina at the time of our attack on the field, that these had grown in a matter of hours to about , and that now there were two and a half battalions, with more coming up from the south.

With a supply of ammunition we could have kept going and got into the town on the 17th or 18th; now it would be more costly. Merrill reported these estimates to Stilwell, but curiously and perhaps with a purpose it was the figure that stuck in young Stilwell's mind at his father's Shaduzup headquarters and in the mind of the intelligence officer at Myitkyina Task Force headquarters, at this time inexplicably still back at Naubum.

More on this later. The supplies finally arrived on the 20th.

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The th, ready to go, moved out against the town, beginning with an embarrassing fumble. I had unwisely given Colonel Huang an azimuth as axis of advance; he read his compass wrong, got off in the wrong direction, and had to come back and start all over. This time we lined his regiment up in a column of battalions, a simple attack formation not easily fouled up.

The initial assault was successful beyond imagination, carrying to the railroad station in the heart of the city. But when overs from Japanese fire intended for the leading battalion began to hit those following in column, the latter stupidly opened fire on their own troops ahead of them; the British lend-lease uniforms the Chinese wore were indistinguishable except by their helmets from the Japanese. Then the entire regiment broke and ran, leaving close to three hundred dead or dying in the streets.

It was every man for himself, and stragglers were even collected by McGee's force now arriving at Namkwi four miles away. On 21 May Merrill was formally replaced by Col.

McCammon, his executive, who began to organize a new task force headquarters at the airfield. He would be commanding the 30th and 50th Chinese divisions, whose remaining elements were then arriving, as well as all of Galahad, which was now under my command; but he kept the two stars of his ad hoc Mexican promotion in his pocket.

Osborne's battalion was kept at the airfield to guard it and the headquarters. The rest of Galahad--McGee at Namkwi and K force at last at Charpate--was assigned to provide security on the north and attack Myitkyina from there. Hardly a man of Galahad was by now free of dysentery or malaria or typhus, and the evacuation rate had become alarming.

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