China, Burma and India · United States and China vs Japan
Siege of Myitkyina
17 May 1944 – 3 August 1944
Merrill's Marauders and two Chinese regiments marched over the Kumon Range and seized the airfield at Myitkyina in northern Burma, the key to reopening a land route to China. The town itself held out for eleven weeks of monsoon fighting that finished the Marauders as a unit. Its fall allowed transport aircraft to fly a lower and safer route over the Hump.
Explore Siege of Myitkyina on the interactive map · Wikipedia
Day by day
— The airfield
Merrill's Marauders and two Chinese regiments have crossed the Kumon Range by a track thought impassable, sixty-five miles in a fortnight with the mules falling off the path. They come out of the hills behind the town and take the airfield in the morning; transports are landing that afternoon and gliders bring in engineers before dark.
— The town holds
The first attacks on the town go in on the 17th and again on the 19th and fail: the Chinese regiments lose their way in the streets and fire on each other, and the garrison, a few hundred men at the start, is being reinforced across the Irrawaddy faster than it is being killed. What was to have been a coup de main becomes a siege.
— The monsoon
The Marauders are finished as a unit: they have marched and fought since February and are going down with typhus, dysentery and scrub typhus faster than they can be replaced, and the evacuation of the sick begins. Chinese divisions, American engineers turned infantry and half-trained replacements take over the ring and dig in for eleven weeks of rain.
— Mogaung
Fifty miles to the south-west the Chindits of 77th Brigade take Mogaung after three weeks of fighting in flooded paddy, having lost two thirds of their strength; the Chinese 38th Division comes up beside them. The railway by which Myitkyina was being supplied is cut, and the garrison is on what it already has.
— The town falls
With the perimeter down to the riverbank, Mizukami sends about six hundred survivors out on rafts and in boats down the Irrawaddy and then shoots himself. The town is occupied on 3 August after seventy-eight days. It cost the Marauders their existence, but transports can now fly a lower and safer route to China and the Ledo road has its terminus.
