ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of indigenous volunteer forces, specifically the Northern Kachin Levies and Kachin Rangers, in Special Operations Executive (SOE) and Office of Strategic Services (OSS) covert operations during the Second World War. Whilst scholarship on the Burma Campaign (1942–5) has acknowledged Japan’s failed invasion of India, and rightfully likened the large pitched Battles of Imphal and Kohima (1944) to the pivotal events of Stalingrad, Midway and El Alamein, there has been relatively less attention given to asymmetric (or irregular) manifestations of warfare in the region. When the question of Allied irregular warfare in northern Burma has been addressed, the focus has tended to be on the role of Long Range Penetration Groups, famously known as the Chindits: formed at the behest of the eccentric Brigadier Orde Wingate, and composed of British Army regulars and colonial forces in the China-Burma-India (CBI) Theatre. Driven by this specific focus on the Chindits, the scholarly debate on irregular warfare in this arena has therefore been shaped by discussions over whether Chindit operations were of either strategic or psychological value to the Allied war effort (the latter in terms of boosting morale for an army suffering the effects of jungle warfare). Yet importantly, this narrow lens underwrites a neglect of the impact of Kachin guerrilla resistance on Allied covert operations in this arena and overshadows their role - both logistical and infrastructural - in irregular warfare to resist Japanese military expansion. This chapter resuscitates this ‘forgotten’ history of jungle warfare in northern Burma, shedding light on the strategic significance of the Kachin region and of the Kachin indigenous groups themselves. In so doing it challenges dominant Allied discourses pertaining to the faithfulness of Hill Tribe draftees and questions the prevailing perception of ‘martial races’ that prefigures colonial understandings of the Second World War.
