The Burma Campaign spanned the entire breadth of the war in the Pacific, from December 1941 to August 1945. While British and American forces participated in the campaign, and while the major force, the British Fourteenth Army, was under the command of British general Sir William Joseph Slim, most of the fighting on the Allied side was done by colonial troops and troops of other nations, including Indians as well as Burmese, Chinese, Chins, Gurkhas, Kachins, Karens, Nagas, and native soldiers from British East Africa and British West Africa. The bulk of the campaign was fought by an Indian army under British command.

The Japanese sought occupation of Burma to guard the flank of their forces in Malaya and those advancing to effect the capture of Singapore. Once these objectives had been achieved, Japan saw Burma as strategically important for three reasons. First, the so-called Burma Road was a major supply route into China. Second, Burma would figure as the westernmost anchor of the new, greatly expanded Japanese Empire. Third, Burma was an essential staging area or stepping stone for a massive invasion of British-held India. The Japanese also exploited Burma for political purposes by granting it ostensible independence in August 1943 to demonstrate that Japan intended to liberate Southeast Asia from European colonial domination in what it called the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The British were especially anxious to retake Burma because they had lost it in ignominious military defeat. However, the China-Burma-India theater (CBI) was always at the bottom of the Allies' list of priorities, and adequate forces were not made available. British planners hoped that a prolonged and costly land battle could be avoided by naval action and an amphibious campaign to take the Burmese capital of Rangoon. Rangoon would serve the British as a springboard from which to retake Singapore, while it would simultaneously serve the Americans as a staging area from which to launch operations to clear the Burma Road into China. Yet plans for an amphibious assault never materialized because the CBI was at the end of the line for the distribution of landing craft, which, throughout the war, were in extremely high demand and short supply. Instead, by default, the retaking of Burma was achieved through an arduous and long overland campaign. . .

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