Crossing the Irrawaddy
‘The first sound of gunfire, distant but unmistakeable, came at night. To avoid detection we were marching through the dark, along sandy tracks over a range of low bare hills. In the early hours we began the descent to the Irrawaddy plain. The night had a cool warmth. The sky was open, starlit, and there was a feel of space everywhere. Then came that distant thud, thud, thud, thud, sharper than thunder, ominous, exhilarating. […] We plodded on, tired, thirsty, straight toward the guns’.
In the middle of February 1945, 19-year-old Second Lieutenant Patrick Davis was marching towards his first battle. A few months before he had joined the 4th Battalion, 8th Gurkha Rifles in the aftermath of the Battle of Kohima. After a period of restructuring and line holding, 4/8GR was sucked into the 14th Army’s effort to cross Burma’s formidably defended Irrawaddy river. The march left such an impression on the young man that he would describe it in his memoirs years later, as quoted above.
The Irrawaddy is the largest river in Burma. At certain points it can stretch to over a mile wide. For Lieutenant General William ‘Bill’ Slim, commander of the 14th Army, it presented a major obstacle – his hopes to draw the Japanese into battle in the plains around Mandalay required that the river be crossed.

Lieutenant General William ‘Bill’ Slim photographed during the Second World War. Prior to the war Slim spent 20 years as an officer with the 6th Gurkha Rifles.
In mid-January, the 19th Indian Infantry Division crossed the river north of Mandalay. The division held three Gurkhas units, including the 1st Battalion, 6th Gurkha Rifles, who crossed on 17 January. 1/6GR would spend the next 16 days in constant contact with the enemy, fighting a number of intense battles in the Yeshin-Minbantaung area and inflicting an estimated 300 casualties on the Japanese.

Soldiers of the 4th Battalion, 6th Gurkha Rifles, part of the 19th Indian Infantry Division, crossing the Irrawaddy, January 1945.
The 2nd British and 20th Indian Divisions made their crossings on 14 February. The 4th Battalion, 10th Gurkha Rifles, crossing as part of the 20th Division, advanced on Talingon, beginning a brutal week-long battle. Although 4/10GR successfully captured the village it suffered severe casualties, losing 50 men killed and further 127 wounded.
The crossings of the 2nd,19th and 20th Divisions caused the Japanese to frantically draw their reserves northwards. This, however, was what Slim intended. Further south, he had quietly sent the 7th Indian Division across the river at Pakokku, landing a massive force of men and material to threaten the Japanese flank.

4/10GR soldiers on the approaches to Talingon, February 1945.

Gurkhas of 4/10GR moving past a burning village during the Irrawaddy operations, February 1945.
The way for the crossing at Pakokku was laid by the 4th Battalion, 5th Royal Gurkha Rifles. On 5 February 4/5RGR captured Kahnla, a strongly held village on the approach to Pakokku. Five days later, 4/5RGR attacked Pakokku itself, capturing it after a tough fight in which six men (including the battalions commander, Lieutenant Colonel John Turner) were killed.
For the next several days the battalion held onto their positions against heavy Japanese counterattacks, suffering several more casualties. But the Gurkhas held, and their determination gave the 7th Indian Division the bridgehead it needed to cross the river and carry forward the offensive.
As 4/5RGR was fighting in Pakokku, Patrick Davis and 4/8GR had been on the march. They crossed the river unopposed on 14 February. Despite Slim’s diversion, the 7th Indian Divisions crossing was not easy. A battalion of the South Lancashire Regiment, crossing the river just a few hours ahead of 4/8GR, had taken heavy casualties. However, by the time Davis and his men boarded their boats the scene was peaceful. Running his hands through the water as they motored along, Davis likened his part in the longest opposed river crossing of the war to ‘a jaunt at Margate’.
Because many Japanese units had been hurried north towards Mandalay, once the 7th Division was across the river they found increasingly few Japanese to fight. As February drew on, 4/8GR moved through the dry landscape, seeing little of the enemy. What they saw more of was the destruction caused by the fighting, with Davis recounting the sobering experience of passing through Burmese villages that had been destroyed by British bombing. 4/8GR reestablished contact with the Japanese in late-February, when they destroyed several Japanese bunkers at Kinka with no serious Gurkha casualties.
Fighting would continue in the 7th Divisions area for weeks to come, with Allied troops stubbornly defending their bridgeheads against Japanese counterattacks. But by the beginning of March, the heaviest fighting had shifted firmly toward Meiktila and Mandalay, where the Gurkhas would trade jungle warfare for running firefights amidst narrow streets and towering pagodas.
The Path to Victory series will continue on 10 March, picking up with the 17th Indian Division’s assault on Meiktila.
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