End of The Battle
On 28 March, Lieutenant General Shinichi Tanaka, Kimura's Chief of Staff, conferred with Honda at Thirty-third Army HQ. Honda's staff told him that the army had destroyed about 50 British and Indian tanks, half the number of tanks in Meiktila. In doing so, the army had suffered 2,500 casualties and lost 50 guns, and had only 20 artillery pieces left. Tanaka accepted the responsibility of ordering Honda's army to break off the siege of Meiktila and prepare to resist further Allied advances to the south.
It was already too late. The Japanese armies in Central Burma had lost most of their equipment, and their cohesion. They would be unable to stop Fourteenth Army exploiting to within striking distance of Rangoon. Furthermore, with the loss of Mandalay, the Burmese population turned finally against the Japanese. Uprisings by guerilla forces and a revolt by the Burma National Army, which the Japanese had formed two years previously, would contribute to the eventual Japanese defeat.
Read more about this topic: Battle Of Meiktila And Mandalay
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“Forty years after a battle it is easy for a noncombatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to have to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)