Japan suffered its worst military defeat at the hands of Indian, British and Australian troops, at Imphal, the town on India's eastern-most fringe.
War Cemetery, Kohima, India.
All the time, the Allies were still determined to regain Arakan. After being beaten back twice, they succeeded at the third attempt, where the breathtaking bravery of so many of Slim's men played their part.
A company commander looking for a missing soldier at night bumped into a Japanese patrol. In a frenzy of hand-to-hand combat, he shot one man, then grabbed the little body and swung it round like a flail, knocking his other two assailants off a cliff.
Then there was Umrao Singh, in command of a forward field gun detachment, who came under sustained fire from guns and mortars. Twice wounded, and while firing a Bren gun, he directed the fire of the surviving gun on the target.
He held the gun pit until dawn, and was found face down in the mud surrounded by ten lifeless Japanese soldiers and holding a hand-spike he had used in hand-to-hand combat. Singh survived and was awarded the Victoria Cross.
Years later, living in penury on his Indian smallholding, he was told he could sell his VC for a good price. He replied indignantly that he would never sully the honour of his fallen comrades.
Yet still the Japanese came. The battles of Imphal and Kohima, fought in the spring of 1944 on the far northeastern border of India and Burma against three Japanese divisions, were the decisive battles of the Burma campaign.
Before Imphal, the Japanese general, Mutaguchi, was so confident of Japanese invincibility that he had arranged for 'comfort women' (mostly Korean women forced into prostitution) to be flown in after the victory.
The Japanese hurled themselves with desperate courage on the British positions, but they held firm. Days turned into months.
A Japanese Lieutenant, Taiso Nishikawa, wrote from the front line in his diary: 'If we do manage to capture a position, the enemy bombards it with mortars and bombs it from the air to a heart-shaking degree; so that those who have dug deep trenches are buried in them, and those who have dug shallow have their hands and feet blown away.'
Eventually, when he realised that what remained of his troops were no longer obeying his orders, Mutaguchi broke off the offensive. With 55,000 casualties, Imphal and Kohima represented the largest defeat in Japanese history.