Triumph at Imphal-Kohima: How the Indian Army Finally Stopped

Triumph at Imphal-Kohima: How the Indian Army Finally Stopped the Japanese Juggernaut (Modern War Studies)

In the spring of 1944, on the eastern front of India near the Burmese border, the seemingly unstoppable Imperial Japanese Army suffered the worst defeat in its history at the hands of Lieutenant General William Slimâ€™s British XIV Army, most of whose units were drawn from the little-esteemed Indian Army. Triumph at Imphal-Kohima tells the largely unknown story of how an army that Winston Churchill had once dismissed as â€œa welter of lassitude and inefficiencyâ€ came to achieve such an unlikely, unprecedented, and critical victory for the Allied forces in World War II.

Long the British Empireâ€™s strategic reserve, the Indian Army had been comprehensively defeated in Malaya and Burma in 1941â€“1943. Military historian Raymond Callahan chronicles the remarkable exercise in institutional transformation that remade the British Indian forces to reverse those losses. With the invaluable help of the American DC-3 on the Burma front, Slim overhauled the British XIV Army with the Imperial Japanese Army's strategic weaknesses in mind; namely, an utter disregard for logistics and an unrelenting addiction to the attack. Callahan shows how, on an enormous battlefieldâ€”over five hundred miles from north to southâ€”the XIV Army surmounted the challenges of terrain, disease, wretched communication, and climate to draw the Imperial forces under Lieutenant General Mutaguchi Renya ever deeper into ever stronger British defensive arrays until the Japanese Armyâ€™s vaunted offensive aggression finally exhausted itself.

Following this epic battle from build-up to aftermath, this book brings overdue detailed attention to Lieutenant General William Slimâ€™s handling of perhaps the most complex battle any Allied commander fought during World War IIâ€”and to the long-belittled British Indian Army that became the magnificent fighting force that triumphed at Imphal-Kohima and went on to reconquer Burma.
Country USA
Brand University Press of Kansas
Manufacturer University Press of Kansas
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 9780700624270
ReleaseDate 2017-03-27
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780700624270

Country	USA
Brand	University Press of Kansas
Manufacturer	University Press of Kansas
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	9780700624270
ReleaseDate	2017-03-27
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780700624270

Triumph at Imphal-Kohima: How the Indian Army Finally Stopped the Japanese Juggernaut (Modern War Studies)

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