Tank Tracks to Rangoon (3 page)

The code of
bushido
was accepted by Japanese officers as part of the natural order of things, and symbolized this acceptance by the constant wearing or carrying of the
samurai
sword, which was intended for use and not merely for ceremony. Similarly, the rank and file, already held in the vice of iron discipline, accepted these standards quite unequivocably, for since birth the virtues of
bushido
had been rammed well and truly home, and it would never have occurred to the average soldier, brought up in a hierarchal and ceremonious society, to question them.

To this already formidable philosophy must be added the quite sincere belief that Japan was first among the nations of the world, and that the very Spirit of Japan existed in the physical sense in the person of the Emperor. If the Emperor demanded sacrifice, the Spirit of Japan, the essence of its life, both religious and secular, would benefit, and the sacrifice must be made, however painful and personal; the family photograph in the tunic pocket existed in the Japanese Army, like any other.

These then, were some of the moral forces at work in the mind of the Japanese soldier during World War II, and whilst it is almost impossible for the occidental to grasp the power of such forces on human behaviour, I cannot emphasize them too strongly, since what motivates the soldier is often more important
than the weapons he fights with. Even today, thirty years after the events of which I am writing, there have been isolated cases of Japanese soldiers who have had to be convinced that the war ended a generation ago before they will submit. Perhaps there are some who will never submit.

Physically, the Japanese are a small but hardy race, used to extremely hard work and a simple basic diet which is all that their harsh environment will sustain. The cult of physical fitness played an important part in their daily life, and even in civilian life most men belonged to some organization which practised certain aspects of the ancient martial arts of
jujitsu
or
kendo
, or to an athletic club. Sickness in the Japanese Army was barely tolerated, and the medical element of any formation was totally inadequate for service in areas where the men would be at the mercy of a dozen virulent tropical diseases; for this omission a terrible price would be paid.

The Japanese Army of World War II was basically an infantry army, and tactics which it favoured were those of Ludendorff’s 1918 storm troopers. The offensive spirit was something of an obsession, and if opposition was encountered the attack simply flowed round it until it was eliminated by the follow-up troops. Mechanization of transport had a low priority in the Japanese order of battle, and supplies were carried on mules, bicycles or by the men themselves if they could not impress local labour. This enabled them to take to the jungle tracks which their opponents considered unsuitable for use by a modern army, and suddenly appear several miles in their rear, setting up ambushes and road blocks which paralysed movement of troops and supplies along the motor roads which formed the vital arteries of the defence. Both in Malaya and Burma this method jangling the nervous system of the British defenders led to the abandonment of position after position, and represented a classic application of the principle of the indirect approach.

Generally, road blocks were sited in a defile or similar position which could not be by-passed. The favoured method of construction was to snap up the first vehicles to pass, which then formed the basis of the block. As further vehicles arrived, they too would be added to the obstruction, as well as felled trees, farm carts and other local material. There might be several such barricades in the space of one mile. The block would be well covered by mortars, machine-guns and small arms, and occasionally an anti-tank gun as well. Snipers were posted in the trees,
and men with explosive charges posted close to the road to deal with any vehicle which attempted to batter its way through. Usually held in company strength, these road blocks exercised an influence out of all proportion to their size, and were often extremely difficult to clear, although the damage they caused was more moral than physical; the effect on demoralized or dispirited troops, already committed to withdrawal, and finding themselves apparently surrounded again and again, can well be imagined. Fortunately, road blocks were seldom if ever mined and wired, or the story of the first campaign in Burma might have ended a lot earlier. On the other hand, if the tables were turned and the Japanese were themselves surrounded or cut off, they hated it, and would pile up casualties in frenzied and unscientific attempts to break out.

Whilst he was on the offensive and winning, the Japanese soldier could supplement his meagre marching ration of rice and tinned fish from captured stocks, but if the defence held and he was a long way ahead of his forward supply depot, he tended to go hungry, since priority was given to ammunition on the long mule, bicycle and coolie trains. He would, in time, suffer horribly for his quartermaster-generals’ misplaced optimism that Japanese troops could always be fed at the expense of the British and Indian taxpayer.

Once put on the defensive, the Japanese soldier was adept at turning any position into a warren of well constructed and beautifully concealed bunkers. He was a tremendous digger who could very quickly get himself underground, and he would then provide himself with a thick headcover of logs, laid crossways in layers, covered with earth. Having built one such bunker, he would connect it with the next, and so on, plant bushes on top and at the entrances for camouflage, and mask the fire-slits until the last moment. Artillery fire and bombing scarcely touched such positions, and in fact seemed merely to enrage the defenders, who would meet any assault with a viciously directed storm of fire. One could never guarantee that any one bunker in such a complex had been knocked out until they had all been knocked out; the tenants were often in the habit of changing their position, using their tunnels to do so, and it could be fatal to assume that because a particular bunker no longer returned fire, that it would never do so again.

Once British troops had come to accept the peculiarities of the Japanese way of fighting, the vision of the Superman began to
fade almost at once; in fact, whilst accepting all his other qualities they found the average Japanese soldier’s standard of training and battlecraft was not very good, and that some of the more important weapons in his armoury were completely obsolete. Again, his signals and communications organization was extremely primitive, so that co-ordination between formations was the exception rather than the rule. At the vital battle of Meiktila, contact between the two Japanese divisions ordered to recapture the town was limited to a single visit made by a liaison officer, which decided nothing.

His field artillery was adequate for what he asked of it, and his small arms and automatic weapons were quite comparable to those in use anywhere in the world. He was something of an expert with mortars, of which he used large numbers, a fact which was duly noted by Major M. F. S. Rudkin, who commanded C Squadron 2 RTR in Burma.

‘The weapon which did most damage to the tanks was their mortar, which was approximately 50 mm. They used this with extreme accuracy, and they penetrated the top of the tank where the armour was thinnest. One tank of B Squadron stopped for a few moments in an open bit of ground, and within one minute received six direct hits.

‘The Japanese 75-mm gun, used over open sights, was fairly effective and stopped a tank, but though this did not penetrate the front, it often penetrated the side or rear and would only damage the front. About a quarter of the tanks hit by 75-mm guns were knocked out.’

In both cases the tanks referred to are Stuarts, which were lightly armoured. The heavier Lee/Grants and Shermans, used later in the campaign, could stand up to both mortars and 75-mm guns, although use by the Japanese of captured British 25-pounders in the anti-tank role did produce results.

In Malaya, the Japanese had used tanks in small numbers, and the British not at all. Until far too late, the British had considered the country un-tankable, although tanks had been used in the jungle during the Chaco War of 1933–35 between Bolivia and Paraguay, by the former, whose armoured commander, a German mercenary officer, was unlikely to provide them with much advice since he was now serving in an SS Panzer Division. The Japanese seem to have studied this little war, and to have digested its lessons before committing their tanks, which provided invaluable,
if local support on the few occasions that their infantry were held up.

In the Japanese Army the tanks were dispersed amongst the infantry according to operational requirements, generally in small numbers, and did not undertake operations on their own account. Whilst of some interest mechanically, the tanks themselves were thinly armoured, obsolete in their internal layout, and their guns were hopelessly outclassed; nor do their crews appear to have understood the correct use of their vehicles, which they treated as mobile pillboxes, paying scant attention to the use of ground. The types encountered in Burma were the two-man tankettes of the Type 94 Class, more commonly the Type 95 light tanks, and the general purpose medium Type 97s. A self-propelled gun based on the Type 97 was also encountered, and a further ageing medium, the Type 89B, was present during the early stages. Further information on these vehicles is contained in
Appendix A
.

The campaign in Burma was the last fought by the forces of the old British Empire, and was in many ways the best. No finer description of the composition of XIVth Army can be found than that written by John Masters in his book
The Road Past Mandalay
, and it would be an impertinence on my part to attempt to improve upon it.

‘There were English, Irish, Welsh and Scots, and in the RAF, New Zealanders, Australians, Newfoundlanders, Canadians and South Africans. There were Chinese; there were tall, slender Negroes from East Africa, and darker, more heavily built Negroes from West Africa, with tribal slits slashed deep into their cheeks—an infantry division of each. There were Chins, Kachins, Karens, and Burmans, mostly light brown, small-boned men in worn jungle green, doubly heroic because the Japanese held possession of their homes, often of their families too.…

‘Lastly, and in by far the greatest numbers, there were the men of the Indian Army, the largest volunteer army the world has ever known. There were men of every caste and race—Sikhs, Dogras, Pathans, Madrassis, Mahrattas, Rajputs, Assamese, Kumoonis, Punjabis, Garhwalis, Naga head-hunters—and from Nepal, the Gurkhas in all their tribes and sub-tribes, of Limbu and Rai, Thakur and Chhetri, Magar and Gurung. These men wore turbans and steel helmets and slouch hats, and berets and tank helmets, and khaki shakos inherited from the eighteenth century. There were companies that averaged five feet one inch
in height and companies that averaged six feet three inches. There were men as purple black as the West Africans, and men as pale and gold-wheat of skin as a lightly suntanned blonde. They worshipped God according to the rites of the Mahayana and Hinayana, of Sunni and of Shiah, of Rome and Canterbury and Geneva, of the Vedas and the sages and the Mahabharatas, of the ten Gurus, of the secret shrines of the jungle. There were vegetarians and meat-eaters and fish-eaters, and men who ate only rice and men who ate only wheat; and men who had four wives, and men who shared one wife with four brothers, and men who openly practised sodomy. There were men who had never seen snow and men who seldom saw anything else. And Brahmins and Untouchables, both with rifle and tommy gun.’

The purpose of this book is to study but one aspect of this great congregation—the armoured troops, who, during their operations, proved that the tank could still be a weapon of decision in the unlikeliest of landscapes and in circumstances which did not prevail in any other theatre of war; for, whilst the campaign in Burma was primarily fought by infantry, and there were infantrymen who never clapped eyes on a tank, there were also other infantrymen who spent all their fighting lives alongside them, and, at the end, it was a brilliantly handled combination of both which resulted in the worst military defeat ever suffered by the Empire of Japan.

The origins of XIVth Army’s armoured regiments were as diverse as that of the Army itself. First came two British regular cavalry regiments and one battalion of the Royal Tank Regiment. Between the wars there had been an antipathy between the cavalry and the RTR, who each regarded the other’s
modus vivendi et operandi
as respectively approximating to that of the Cavaliers and Roundheads of the English Civil War. After two and a half years of war, this feeling had been eroded by common experience and replaced by mutual respect, without either side giving ground on its traditions and methods. Today the quarrel, provoked by suspicions that each constituted a threat to the continued existence of the other, is but a memory.

A third cavalry regiment was raised in India from British personnel, and four infantry battalions, three from Yorkshire and one from the Highlands, were converted to armour. Given numbers the latter obstinately maintained the identity of their parent regiments, but in spite of this, I have throughout my text, save where the meaning is obvious, used their numerical designation
as Royal Armoured Corps regiments, since the parent regiments had other battalions fighting in the theatre, and confusion might ensue were I to do otherwise.

Whilst three British cavalry regiments fought in Burma, this number was exceeded threefold by the Indian cavalry regiments present. There were regiments which could trace their roots back to the days of the Honourable East India Company, regiments which had been raised to deal with the Great Mutiny, and regiments founded in the Golden Years of the Raj, and their battle honours covered an area from the Taku Forts in China to Palestine and beyond.

The reader will already have gathered from the extract of John Masters’ book that I have quoted, that Indian life is a richly woven tapestry in which the threads of caste, race and religion intertwine inextricably. Since the Great Mutiny each sabre squadron in an Indian cavalry regiment was recruited from a particular race, although the Headquarters Squadron would contain elements of all three. For example, whilst Probyn’s Horse contained one squadron each of Punjabi Mussulmen, Sikhs and Dogras, the squadrons of the Royal Deccan Horse were composed respectively of Punjabi Mussulmen, Sikhs and Jats, and so on.