ABSTRACT
The word ‘great’ has been used to describe the clash between the Japanese Fifteenth Army and the British Fourteenth Army at Imphal in 1944. One historian has called Imphal ‘one of the greatest Allied victories of the war’. 1 Some have described the battle as ‘the greatest defeat on land ever suffered by the Japanese in the course of their history’. 2 Another has written that Imphal/Kohima was the ‘greatest Japanese military disaster of all time’ 3 and ‘one of the four great turning-point battles in the Second World War’. 4 And then there is, of course, the naming of Imphal/Kohima as ‘Britain's Greatest Battle’ by the United Kingdom's National Army Museum in April 2013.
