Tank Tracks to Rangoon (37 page)

On the right, A Squadron had sent two troops round the flank into a cut-off position. During this move one tank was hit and burned out after being penetrated twice. The offender, a 70-mm gun, was spotted and destroyed before it could fire a third round. The squadron lost a further tank to a buried bomb, which blew out the final drive assembly, and badly wounded the driver and hull gunner.

The infantry suffered severely from mines and booby traps, and one company, badly hit, were rallied by Major Umrao Singh, 13th Lancers, who was on attachment to A Squadron.

A further Rajput company was committed, and the fight raged on. The village was stiff with tank hunters equipped with pole charges, some of whom remained hidden until after the attack had rolled past them. One was discovered in his foxhole by two sappers, who dragged him out and were setting about him with their rifle butts when their Jemadar, his judgement clouded by rage, snatched up the man’s pole charge and struck him with it; the resulting explosion killed the tank hunter, the two sappers and badly wounded the Jemadar himself.

Eventually, it was decided that the village could only be properly cleared by a second wave, and 1/3rd Gurkhas, supported by five tanks of the Deccan’s C Squadron, put in a battalion attack. Japanese survivors, running from blazing buildings into the open, were shot down trying to escape. The village was cleared by 1700 hours, but only six miles had been gained during the entire day.

Whilst the battle for Payagale had been taking place, one troop each from 7th and 16th Light Cavalry, commanded respectively by Lts Gurchuran Singh and Kundan Singh, had been moving across country to cut the Payagyi–Waw road, which was the principal escape route into lower Burma, and also, it will be remembered, the place where 7th Armoured Brigade had fought its first actions against the Japanese.

The little force had been fired on from a village
en route
, but
had been able to bring down artillery fire which silenced the opposition. By evening the block had been established, and a company of 1/3rd Gurkhas had come up and dug in round the vehicles.

At 2030 hours a Japanese convoy, heading for Waw, approached the block with headlights glowing. It consisted of a staff car containing a major-general of the Indian National Army, two Japanese colonels and a captain, followed by three lorry loads of men. The concentrated fire of three tanks and three armoured cars ensured that there were no survivors, but by ill chance the Gurkha company commander was mortally wounded by wild return fire from the staff car. Half an hour later a further truck drove up, halted to survey the wreckage, and was knocked out in its turn.

The following day’s bag amounted only to an officer on a bicycle, but by then Payagyi had been entered unopposed. For ‘The Curse of Scotland’, the elderly 7th Hussars’ Stuart converted to the role of 7th Light Cavalry’s command vehicle, the wheel had come full circle.

The 29th saw Probyn’s once again in the advance guard role. The unexpected ease with which Payagyi had been occupied was a bonus which compensated for the delay imposed at Payagale, and it was decided to press on to Pegu itself, and during the late afternoon an attack was put in on the high ground east of the town. This started too late for any progress to be made, and detailed plans were made for a full scale assault the following day.

Pegu, like Meiktila and Pyawbwe before it, was to be crushed in an iron fist. 63 Brigade, with the Deccan’s C Squadron, would come in from the north; Probyn’s, with the support of 1/3rd Gurkha Rifles, would continue to exert pressure from the east; whilst from the south, the Deccan, with the composite light squadron under command, would fight its way northwards until it met 63 Brigade in the area of the bridge over the wide Pegu river.

The following morning the attack went in. The tanks found the going very restricted because of bunds and water channels, and the Deccan could not get to the road bridge because of a deep nullah. Half a dozen AA guns, being used in the anti-tank role, were captured, and the infantry supported in their fight for the built-up areas. By nightfall, the town had only been partially cleared, and the tanks retired into leaguer.

Dawn patrols by the infantry revealed that the Japanese had evacuated the east bank during the night, and had also blown the road and railway bridges.

The engineers at once began building a Bailey bridge, which was ready for use the next day, 2nd May. A composite force under Lt-Colonel J. N. Chaudhuri, composed of A Squadron 7th Light Cavalry, B Squadron 16th Light Cavalry, C Squadron Probyn’s, a troop of SP guns and engineers, roared across. The road was heavily mined, and progress was slow, but Hlegu was reached the next day. The main bridge had been blown as had every bridge up and down-stream for several miles. Here, at Milestone 32|, the long advance halted, and as bridging material was in short supply, awaited the arrival next day of 26th Indian Division, pushing out of Rangoon with A Squadron 19th Lancers as its spearhead.

4 Corps felt cheated of the prize, if proud of their achievement. They had come 300 miles in three weeks, carrying out one of the longest continuous advances of the war. In defiance of one of the natural laws of war, which dictates that the momentum of an advance decreases in proportion to its progress, their momentum had not merely been maintained, but actually increased towards the end, although during the last few days petrol and ammunition had taken priority over food in the supply tables, and 17th Division and 255 Tank Brigade had been on half rations.

The Japanese Army in Burma had been utterly broken as a fighting force. It was the custom in 14th Army not to claim an enemy as killed until his body had been physically counted. Between 1st January and 14th May 1945, 28,700 Japanese bodies were counted, not including bodies buried or burned by the enemy themselves. In the same period 617 prisoners were made, more than at any time during the war. By contrast, 14th Army’s own casualties amounted to 13,000, of whom only 2,800 were killed. The Japanese also lost 430 guns, a very large percentage of the total available, and of course all their armour. 14th Army lost no guns, and about thirty tanks.

For all that the Burma Area Army had ceased to exist, its generals fugitives, its lifeline cut, its heavy equipment destroyed and its organization disrupted beyond hope of repair, there were still tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers in the country, and the majority of them were as willing to fight as ever.

As individuals, in groups, and in parties seldom larger than
battalion strength, they moved across country with their few guns, hoping to pass through the Shan hills under cover of the monsoon, and gain the shelter of Thailand. The largest groups came from those divisions which had been serving in the Arakan, who, whilst they had the farthest to go, had avoided the annihilating effects of the twin thrusts from Meiktila to Rangoon.

The progress of these thousands of wretched stragglers, many diseased, all starving, some naked and barefoot, was an epic of misery from which only one in three emerged. The Shan tribesmen were raised against them, and numbers of Burmese armed and organized to hunt them down; in the latter case, these levies often consisted of nothing better than dacoits acting under a cloak of respectability, professional bad men who willingly exchanged their ancient firearms and shotguns for modern rifles, sub-machine guns and grenades. For many months the only safe way to travel the country, even for British and Indian troops, was in well armed groups; not that Burma had ever been considered the place where the traditional maiden with her bag of gold was to be seen in any numbers.

For the British and Indian armour, this final phase, conducted in appalling weather which reduced mobility to a minimum, consisted of either reinforcing stop lines designed to block the Japanese exodus, or in destroying stubborn pockets of resistance. Many Japanese knew nothing of the nuclear bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and fought on until word of their country’s surrender reached them. A Squadron 116 Regiment RAC was actively involved against them six days after the official end of the war, setting a double record in being the last British armoured regiment to come out of action in World War II, and incidentally the farthest away from home. Fortunately, their only casualty in these battles fought after the final whistle had blown, was the squadron leader, who ricked an ankle.

Whilst the contribution made by 14th Army’s tanks and armoured cars should be seen as an integral part of the whole, it should also be seen that they were the primary executive instruments which tilted the scales irrevocably against Kimura once the Irrawaddy was crossed. Without the tank brigades, it would have been a different kind of war, which would have spluttered on until the atomic bomb put in its malevolent appearance.

It is very easy to offer a superficial comment that the tanks’
victories were won against a backward, virtually tankless army with almost no air cover. That, however, ignores the fact that the Japanese had long learned to accept such deficiencies as the norm, yet still refused to be intimidated by the British and Indian armour, against which they fought with suicidal zeal to the bitter end. Had the Japanese not remained as formidable an enemy in adversity as they had been during their years of conquest, they would have broken far sooner and there would have been little credit in the victory.

*
The Carabiniers were still using the tanks in which they had fought at Imphal. There was a saying in the regiment at the time, ‘Divs may come and divs may go, but the Carbs go on forever’. 7th Light Cavalry felt much the same way, when at the end of the Mandalay battle, they were detailed for ‘just one more little job’; it turned out to be the capture of Rangoon!

*
This was the only occasion during the war when a complete regiment of Lees made a regimental attack. In the Western Desert the establishment of Lee regiments was two squadrons of Lees and one of Crusaders or Stuarts.

*
Major F.B. Boyd, OC C Squadron PAVO, in a letter to the author.

*
Small place, not to be confused with the town of the same name, south of Mandalay, which was on 4 Corps’ axis.

*
Instantaneous fused HE shells can explode on contact with a branch, and in wooded country the effect is highly dangerous. By beginning the engagement with AP shot, Shepley was simply making a ‘hole’ for his successive HE rounds.

*
Taken from
A Change of Jungles
, by Lt-Colonel Miles Smeeton.

*
Myitkina was in turn the triumph and tragedy of that famous Anglophobe, Lt-General Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell. ‘Boy, will this burn up the Limeys!’ he had gloated when his tired Marauders had captured the town’s airfield. The town itself defied all the efforts of his Chinese divisions for many weeks, although they had a regiment of Stuarts with American advisors, which did not distinguish itself especially. Most of the Chindit effort was redirected towards extricating Stilwell from his predicament, for which he was not unduly grateful. This embarrassing episode, plus his bad relationship with Chiang Kai-shek, whom he referred to as The Peanut, contributed towards his recall to the United States.

†
During interrogation, Major-General Sawamoto Rikichiro, Chief-of-Staff Japanese 33 Army, admitted that ‘Claudcol’s’ approach from the south-west had been most unsettling, and praised this thrust as being a finely executed manoeuvre.

  He went on to add, strangely that, the Japanese had not planned on holding Pyawbwe for more than two days, having calculated that if they stayed longer, they would be surrounded and wiped out. The remark probably contains a large degree of ‘face’, for annihilation had not worried Japanese garrisons previously, and in view of what took place a few days later at Yamethin, they had taken quite extraordinary measures if their stand was to be for forty-eight hours only.

*
The previous day had seen a 16th Light Cavalry patrol involved in a brisk little action in Yamethin. The citation reads as follows:

  ‘At 14.30 hrs on 10th April 1945, on the outskirts of Yamethin an armoured patrol was moving into the town from the north-west. The leading armoured car, commanded by Dafadar Badan Singh, engaged some infantry well dug in, when suddenly from a flank, behind cover at 200 yards, an enemy medium tank appeared and fired at his armoured car but narrowly missed. Realizing the position, Dafadar Badan Singh immediately advanced towards the enemy tank and fired at it with his 37-mm gun. His first shot, already loaded, was HE, which blinded the enemy. The next shell was AP and penetrated the tank which exploded. Its crew and some infantry behind the tank broke and were engaged by Dafadar Badan Singh with his machine gun, killing nine Japanese.

  ‘By his bold and quick action taken with no regard for his personal safety he masked and destroyed an enemy weapon which constituted a the greatest danger to his own troop. The moral effect of the tank’s destruction turned what might have been a serious situation into a decisive success, and enabled the recce of Yamethin to be continued unhampered. Awarded immediate MM.’

*
Lt-Colonel Blackater, in 255 Independent Tank Brigade Operations Report, period 1st April – 7th May 1945.

†
Ibid.

In spite of any strictures in the preceding pages, I think it is important to emphasize that Japanese tank crews were of the same stock as their infantry and artillerymen, and every bit as dedicated to their Emperor’s cause. Their clumsiness arose because they did not really understand the nature of mobile warfare, always played the role of a subordinate arm, and never produced an officer with muscle enough to push through radical and much needed changes in doctrine.

One suspects that the Japanese never felt quite ‘comfortable’, fighting in armour. There is a good historical reason for this, for Japan is a mountainous country, and as the war-lord armies had always been dominated by infantry, the mounted arm had played little part in the country’s military history. Even during their war with Russia, the cavalry element of the army had been tiny, and could not compete with the Russian cavalry on even terms. Mounted on small, wiry mountain ponies, their primary function was reconnaissance and not shock action or
manoeuvre en masse
in the European or Indian tradition.