The ambitious offensive that drove the Japanese from Arakan - the amphibious landing at Myebon - was a deadly learning curve for the newly formed 3 Commando Brigade, the first combined operation for armed forces of British India and the first phase in an offensive which led to the bloody defence of Hill 170, writes James Hoare.
Burma Commando: Part I
A great sodden strip of mangroves and malaria following the coast down eastern boundary of the Bay of Bengal, the Arakan was the key to taking occupied Burma. Driven in humiliation from this verdant hinterland in May 1942, a tentative British offensive to retake it between December 1942 and May 1943 had been viciously rebuffed by the Japanese 15th Army.
The sprawling patchwork of islands and peninsulas, each separated by unpredictable tidal waterways (called chaungs) and sundered from the claustrophobic jungle interior by the foreboding ridge of the Arakan Mountains, was a landscape that suited the Japanese way of war far more than it did the British. Japanese soldiers were resilient and resourceful, travelling lightly and attacking swiftly. They made use of the landscape to conceal their numbers, their intent, their snipers and their ambushes. They fough…
