Tank Tracks to Rangoon: The Story of British Armour in Burma

1

Briefing

Once, within my father’s lifetime, the streets of Yokohama were bright with Union Jacks, and across the world the peoples of the British Empire toasted, with equal enthusiasm if differing motives, ‘the plucky little Jap’ who had defeated his clumsy but formidable Russian opponent both on land and at sea.

The Japanese, emerging from centuries of isolation, had brought their medieval country into the twentieth century with frightening speed, and had shown an amazing capacity to adapt, choosing their instructors from the best the world had to offer, basing their army on that of Imperial Germany, and their navy upon the British Royal Navy.

During their 1905 war with Russia they had enjoyed the initiative, and the moral support of Great Britain, from the outset. Never particularly enthusiastic about the Russians, the British had been quite ready to wade in on Japan’s side when the Tsar’s Baltic Fleet, suffering a bad attack of jitters in the North Sea, had engaged and sunk a number of their fishing boats. In the months that passed, the Japanese had enjoyed the Tsar’s humiliating public apology and substantial indemnity almost as much as the British had revelled in the news that Admiral Togo had sent the same fleet to the bottom of the Tsushima Straits.

The ‘Trafalgar of the East’ placed Japan firmly amongst the World Powers, and completed the process she had begun several years earlier in sending a contingent to join the international force combating the Boxers in China. When war broke out in August 1914, her naval treaty with Great Britain was honoured punctiliously, her warships providing escorts for British convoys and assisting in the search for von Spee’s East Asiatic Squadron, whilst her army captured Germany’s only colony on the Chinese mainland, the port of Tsingtao; to further the allied cause, she even handed back to Russia several elderly relics which had preferred surrender to sinking at Tsushima.

With the end of the Great War came the first signs of deterioration in the hitherto happy Anglo-Japanese relationship. The United States, pursuing a well intentioned policy of international disarmament, succeeded not only in limiting the number of capital ships available to each major power, but also in achieving the abandonment of the mutually beneficial understanding on spheres of naval influence which had bound Great Britain and Japan together. The Japanese delegation left the Washington Naval Conference feeling that their nation had lost ‘face’, a most important Oriental concept which in essence means that in any confrontation one should emerge with the honours at least even, and they blamed the British for not standing up to American pressures. From now on, Japan would be more circumspect in her dealings with the West.

However, other factors were at work as well. The curse of industrialization had by now taken root in Japan, and the British found themselves competing in once traditionally safe markets against a flow of low priced goods, a situation which in turn did little to endear their former allies to them.

Inside Japan, industrialization inevitably led to a steeply rising birthrate in an already crowded environment, and this in turn provided the driving force for outward expansions in the search for what the Germans called lebensraum. A political hierarchy dominated by military caste, and a long list of foreign ventures brought to a successful conclusion by force of arms, showed how this objective would be attained, and it was therefore no surprise to the world when the Manchurian imbroglio turned into full scale war on China, provoked on the flimsiest of excuses.

Pious finger-wagging by the toothless League of Nations led simply to a derisive rejection of that organization by Japan. On the other hand, to pursue a mechanized war she needed resources of oil, rubber and other vital commodities which she did not possess, and which she could only trade for, and the application of economic sanctions by the United States proved to be a serious embarrassment which prevented her from giving China the coup de grâce.

The war in China showed the western public some rather nasty sides of the Japanese character. The bombing and machine-gunning of civilians could perhaps be written off as accidental, but no such excuse could be found for the numberless decapitations, especially when the heads were photographed showing the late owner’s genitals sewn into the mouth. For a brief moment, the western ostrich pulled its head out of the sand, blinked in surprise, and having told its neighbours that the Japanese were after all only funny little men with pointed helmets, oversized false teeth and pebble glasses, went back to sleep. Never was there a graver understatement.

The bite of economic sanctions, and the apparently impotent state of Great Britain, France and Holland after Germany’s blitzkrieg victories of 1940, impelled the Japanese to take by force the resources they could not trade for. In Japanese eyes, the attack on Pearl Harbour was not a treacherous act, but simply a pre-emptive strike in what was intended to be a short war which would leave Japan in a strong negotiating position at the end—in fact, a repeat performance of the surprise attack on Port Arthur which had begun her war with Russia. The truth, which was fully appreciated by the Japanese, was that their country could not afford a long mechanized war.

The offensive phase of their war was brilliantly executed. Within a matter of weeks the United States Pacific Fleet had almost ceased to exist, and all Allied warships east of Ceylon had been sent to the bottom. French Indo-China was occupied without a shot being fired, and the Dutch East Indies fell after what could only have been a token resistance. The garrison of Hong Kong went down after a gallant struggle, whilst in Malaya the road-bound British troops were consistently outflanked or bypassed until they were forced to evacuate the mainland for the supposed security of the island fortress of Singapore. The surrender of this hollow refuge set the seal on the greatest military disaster ever sustained by the British Empire. The conquest of Burma followed quickly, so that by mid-1942 the Allies felt that they were dealing with an unstoppable military machine controlled by men of ferocious genius and natural aptitude for war. In fact, those most deeply concerned with these events saw them from a rather different viewpoint, and knew that their defeat was the result of overwhelming naval and air superiority at the point of contact, and to a refusal of the enemy to stick to rigid tactical concepts of mechanized war which had their roots firmly implanted in a European landscape; to which, of course must be added the years of political ineptitude which had ensured that the Great Powers’ Far Eastern possessions could never be adequately defended with the forces made available for the task.

So, in a little over twenty-five years, the world had given three images to the Japanese soldier; first, the plucky little Jap, then the sadistic moron who took his pleasure in torture and mutilation, and finally, the military superman, the little man with the long bayonet against whom none could stand.

There are thousands of men alive today who will never have any other feeling for the Japanese than pure hatred, but there are very few of them who will deny that the Japanese soldier was the bravest man he ever met. In the attack he would come on and on over the bodies of his comrades until he was himself killed, and then he would expect more like him to run over his body in turn. In defence he had to be exterminated before the position was taken.

The word fanatical is most often used to describe this approach to war, but it is not quite the right word. Certainly he believed in his Emperor, his Country and his Cause, and his belief was unshakable, but he was no more immune to fear than any soldier of any other army, whereas the fanatic is anaesthetized by the very power of whatever drives him. What, then, kept him running forward in the hopeless attack, and why did he stay in his bunker knowing that he would be burned alive?

The answers lie in a complex amalgam of iron discipline, national tradition, religion and philosophy, all of which were utterly alien to Western thought. The discipline of the Imperial Japanese Army could not have been borne by any other army in the world, and the intention of that discipline was to reduce the individual to an automaton who would obey his orders absolutely and to the letter. It was a discipline in which physical violence featured prominently, and this violence could be administered for the most minor infringement and on the spot. Sometimes, mere hard repeated slapping across the face would suffice, but fists, boots, clubs and the flats of the officers’ swords were quite commonplace instruments for emphasizing a point of view. Such punishments could be administered by anyone to another soldier provided he was junior in rank, but even these faded into triviality in comparison with the expert treatment handed out by the military police to those who crossed their path.

However, discipline alone did not make the Japanese soldier the formidable opponent he was. His tremendous devotion to duty came from deep within himself, and had been implanted there since boyhood. During her long centuries of isolation, Japan’s history had been one long brawl between war-lords, and in this troubled story the dominant figure in Japanese life was the Samurai, the professional fighting caste which lived by a code known as bushido, a concept similar to Chivalry in that the primary virtues were bravery, loyalty, benevolence, good manners, and the unimportance of the individual in relation to the cause. The code demanded that failure in any martial undertaking could have but one ending, and that was death, either in combat or through the revolting ritualistic suicide known as hara kiri, in which the principal, after due spiritual preparation, slashed open his own belly with a horizontal stroke, ending with an upward slice. Either form of death was considered honourable and carried much face, and in the latter case the victim was even permitted to shorten his agony by blowing his own brains out. To fall alive into an enemy’s hands was utterly disgraceful, but to surrender voluntarily was literally unthinkable, since the dishonour would not only taint one in the afterworld, where eternal abhorrence would be shown by the prisoner’s ancestors, but would also involve his family in this world in such loss of face that if they were high bushido, atonement would have to be made by at least one member committing hara kiri.

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.

It might be imagined that with such diverse elements present in any one regiment, that the potential risk of internal friction was high, but the reality was that within the Army, these differences meant a lot less than outside, where they could be exploited by religious and political characters on the make. As a senior Indian officer recently remarked to me, What did such differences mean to us when we were commanded by heathen Christians anyway!’

At this point it is necessary to explain that the command structure within an Indian cavalry regiment differed radically from that of a British regiment. On leaving Sandhurst, the young British officer destined for the Indian Army would be posted for one year to a British regiment serving in India. During that year he would make a start at learning the Indian Army’s lingua franca, Urdu, and possibly take the language examination. He would also visit the Indian regiment he hoped to join and stay for a few days, giving the officers a chance to decide whether he was acceptable or not. In many regiments, all the officers from the colonel to the junior subaltern had an equal say in this assessment of a candidate, which was most important since the total strength of British officers in a regiment would seldom exceed a dozen, of whom not more than eight would be present at any one time, and this could drop to four during the hot weather, when leave was taken and training courses attended. Obviously, in such a close community, anyone who could not fit in would become a menace.

Even if he was accepted, the young officer still had to pass the Urdu examination within a set period. If he could not, he was out, since until he knew the language he was no use at all, since all orders were given, and administrative matters attended to in this language. The Indian soldiers themselves also had to learn Urdu, and although many words could be found in their own dialects, it was nevertheless, a language in its own right.

Below the British officers came the Viceroy’s commissioned officers (VCOs), who were a vital link in the chain of command, for which there is no exact parallel in the British Army. The VCOs were men who had served all their lives in the regiment, and received their commissions after, say, eighteen years’ service. They had their own mess, and knew everything that happened within the regiment. The senior VCO, the Risaldar-Major, wore a crown on his epaulettes, and was the colonel’s adviser in all things relating to the internal welfare of the regiment, having joined at much the same time as the colonel. Below came the risaldars, who wore two pips, and the jemadars who wore one. The VCOs were saluted by Indian, but not British, troops.

In the Indian Army the cavalry was recruited only from the martial areas of the sub-continent, and the men loved soldiering. Their families may have served in the regiment for several generations, and whole villages depended on