Bill Slim conducted a brilliantly successful campaign to recapture Burma. This was irrelevant to the outcome of the war – as both Slim and Churchill anticipated from the outset – because the United States Navy had already established a stranglehold on Japan in the Pacific. But it did something to restore the battered confidence and fallen prestige of the British Empire, and laid bare Japan’s vulnerability. Churchill had sought to avoid a thousand-mile overland advance through some of the worst terrain in the world, preferring an amphibious assault on Rangoon from the south. But the Americans insisted on an attack through north Burma, to fulfil the only strategic purpose they valued in the region – reopening the overland route to China. Slim’s army, dominated by Indian troops and including three divisions recruited from Britain’s African colonies, was much stronger than that of the Japanese – 530,000 men to 400,000 – and supported by powerful armoured and air forces. Its chief problem was to supply an advance across mountainous and densely vegetated country almost bereft of roads.
