Seventy minutes before the attack on Pearl Harbour, the Japanese forces launched the invasion that in five months rolled unstoppably across the whole of Burma. In March 1944 the Japanese commander stood on the border to India, his eyes bright with the vision of marching in triumph into Delhi. What followed was the ten-week long siege of the border town of Imphal and the biggest defeat the Japanese Army ever suffered. Then the Allied forces turned on their ruthless enemy and drove him southward to the sea even more rapidly than he had advanced in 1942. By mid-June 1945 the Japanese Army in Burma was completely disorganized and destroyed. Of the 300,000 Japanese soldiers who swaggered into Burma, only 118,000 ever returned home.