Churchill appointed Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten supreme Allied commander of the South East Asia Command (SEAC). The American General Joseph Stilwell was the first deputy supreme Allied commander. On 15 November, Auchinleck handed over responsibility for the conduct of operations against the Japanese in the theatre to Mountbatten. The initial land forces operational area for SEAC included India, Burma, British Ceylon and Malaya. Operations were also mounted in Japanese-occupied Sumatra, Thailand and French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos). Initially SEAC commanded: British Eastern Fleet (based in Ceylon) British 11th Army Group (Commonwealth land forces; HQ in New Delhi) Air HQ India (New Delhi) China Burma India Theater (CBI), (all US forces in theatre; HQ in New Delhi). In October 1944, CBI was split into US Forces China Theater (USFCT) and India-Burma Theater (USFIBT). On 12 November 1944 Eleventh Army Group redesignated by Allied Land Forces South East Asia (ALFSEA) combining Commonwealth and US forces, with an HQ at Kandy. On 1 December ALFSEA HQ moved to Barrackpore, India. On 15 August 1945 responsibility for the rest of the Dutch East Indies was transferred from the South West Pacific Area to SEAC. SEAC was disbanded on 30 November 1946. 11th Army Group British 11th Army Group ( November 1943 – 12 November 1944) was on paper the main Commonwealth army force in South East Asia which directed British Fourteenth Army British Army in Ceylon (Ceylon Army) Northern Combat Area Command under the command of Joseph Stilwell. On 12 November 1944 the 11th Army Group was redesignated Allied Land Forces South East Asia, still under SEAC, because it was felt that an inter-Allied command was better than the purely British headquarters. Command problems with General Stilwell and his interactions with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had precipitated the change. Japanese command structure The Imperial Japanese Army Unit controlling all army land and air units in South East Asia and the South West Pacific was the Southern Expeditionary Army headquartered in Saigon, Indochina. It was commanded by General Count Hisaichi Terauchi, who commanded it from 1941 to 1945. The Japanese also deployed the South Seas Force, a combined force of Army and Special Naval Landing Force personnel. The Southern Army's major field commands were the 14th Army, the 15th Army, the 16th Army and the 25th Army. These consisted of 11 infantry divisions, six independent infantry brigades, and six tank regiments, plus