Tank Tracks to Rangoon (28 page)

Day after day throughout March, composite columns left the brigade’s new harbour areas west of the southern lake, and proceeded deep into enemy held territory, looking for trouble and generally finding it, before returning at nightfall. Sometimes the
columns stayed out for two or three days, forming close leaguer at night under the close protection of their Bombay Grenadier escort. The effect of these regular excursions upon the enemy, trying to settle down and conduct a formal siege, can well be imagined.

A few examples of the sort of action fought by these columns will have to suffice.

On 2nd March, i.e. before Meiktila had fallen, a 16th Light Cavalry patrol was ambushed north of Milestone 343 on the Mandalay road. The Japanese had let the leading armoured car troop pass, and then destroyed an APC of the rifle troop with a 75-mm gun. Risaldar Abdul Razak, commanding the leading cars, had at once turned about and covered the withdrawal of the surviving riflemen at great risk to himself, as the 75-mm could easily have destroyed his car. Coolly reporting the situation over the radio, he asked for an air strike, and then withdrew himself.

A column was organized to destroy this road block the following day. The column, consisting of C Squadron Probyn’s Horse, two troops 16th Cavalry, one Company each Sikh Light Infantry and 6/7 Rajputs, an artillery battery and an air control station, assembled at Milestone 342, and decided to tackle the job by a wide left hook, swinging back onto the road at Milestone 344½, and coming up behind the Japanese.

The move was completed satisfactorily, but on approaching the road C Squadron’s No 4 Troop, commanded by Lt Elder, was fired on by 37-mm and 75-mm anti-tank guns on the other side, both of which were silenced.

Captain Riazul Karim Khan’s troop approached the road some way to the left of Elder’s, and was at once engaged by two 75-mm guns in the scrub on the north side. Dafadar Mahommed Sarwer’s tank received a glancing blow on the offside, sufficient to split the petrol tank and cause a major fire in the engine compartment. The extinguishers could not cope, as the fumes were reignited by clothing smouldering in a storage bin and, as the tank was being plastered with HE, Sarwer was in a tight spot. However, the other tanks now engaged the guns, from which the gunners fled, and the crew were able to evacuate safely.

The block was cleared, and the armoured cars passed through, only to report a further block two miles on, which was quickly disposed of. The column then returned to Meiktila, towing the four captured guns.

On 6th March a composite force known as Ralphcol, consisting of two squadrons of Probyn’s Horse, one squadron 16th Light Cavalry, 1/7th Gurkha Rifles, a company of 6/15th Punjabis, with artillery and engineers, set out to sweep the area Ywadan–Hanza–Thedan–Wundwin under the command of Colonel Ralph Younger.

During the first day, the column advanced as far as Hanza without encountering opposition, although at Hanza the armoured cars were fired on from railway carriages near the level crossing. A troop of Probyn’s Shermans arrived, and quickly eliminated this isolated pocket, setting the carriages blazing.

The following day Colonel Younger split his force into two sub-columns, Fredcol, under Major F. Kennedy of Probyn’s, consisting of that regiment’s C Squadron, a Gurkha company and a mountain battery, and Chapcol under Lt-Colonel Chaplin RA, made up by one troop 16th Light Cavalry, one troop of Probyn’s under Captain Babar, a Gurkha company and another mountain battery.

The mission of Fredcol was to patrol up the railway and clear the village of Thedan, which was accomplished with the destruction of a Japanese light tank and three armoured tractors.

Chapcol was ordered to capture a supply dump at Shawbin, which again was successfully accomplished. As the supplies were being loaded, a party of Japanese about fifty strong was spotted by the armoured cars. They were marching down the road towards Shawbin, and were ambushed by Babar’s tanks, forty being killed and the rest escaping.

The following day the re-formed Ralphcol, having ascertained that Wundwin was only lightly held, withdrew to Meiktila.

As the Japanese closed in on the town, the work of the columns became harder, and the enemy contested possession of the surrounding villages ferociously. Generally, the leading armoured cars would be fired on, sometimes losing a vehicle, and a contact report would be received by the column commander. A troop of tanks would be despatched to cover the withdrawal of the cars, and a plan would be made to capture the village with artillery and air support. More often than not, the village was blazing fiercely when the attack went in, and occasionally the flames barred the tanks’ passage. A cut-off force would be sent out round the flanks of the fighting so that when the defenders broke, they were shot down as they ran away.

Now and again, the Japanese produced an unpleasant surprise.
Fighting their way into Wetlet village on 8th March, the Deccan’s A Squadron lost a tank to a 75-mm gun firing hollow charge ammunition, and lost a further vehicle from the same cause later the same day. At Shawbyuggan on 18th March, the regiment’s C Squadron sustained the hardest knock of the Meiktila fighting, losing five tanks and having four men killed and eleven wounded, and ceased to operate as a squadron for some days. An enterprising Japanese officer had opened some irrigation sluices around the village, softening the ground so that the tanks were offered a choice between bogging down or traversing an anti-tank gun killing ground.

The effect of General Cowan’s sword and shield tactics was fully admitted during interrogation of officers of the Japanese 18th Division, the main element of the besieging forces, after the fighting had come to an end in Burma.

For them, Meiktila had been essentially an anti-tank battle. The tanks had caused most of the division’s casualties, and had given the divisional commander most of his headaches. The division had been forced to abandon an entire sector of the perimeter, along the Mahlaing road and round Myindawgan village, where they had lost three of their tanks as well as a number of guns, as this was tank country. They wished they had been given more time to train their
nikuhakukogeki
(human combat destruction) tank hunting teams before the division had been rushed into action. They thought that the intense heat in which the Meiktila battle was fought would prove a severe handicap to the tank crews, and had not counted on continuous periods of tank activity. The apparent immunity of the tank crews to the stifling heat caused them to enquire whether they had come from the Western Desert, although there had been no fighting in Africa for two years. The speed of 17th Division’s advance to capture Meiktila had suggested that the Tank Brigade was travelling light, and did not possess heavy repair facilities; they were, therefore, surprised that there was no visible reduction in the tank strength available. One officer suggested that if the Japanese had possessed tanks like the Sherman, they would have been used a——sight more boldly.
*
There is nothing in the history of 14th Tank Regiment to support this view.

On 17th March, Cowan was reinforced by the fly-in of a brigade from 5th Indian Division, and the scales tilted further
against the attackers. The landings were made under shellfire, which surprisingly, caused few casualties, but destroyed a number of aircraft on the ground.

From the high ground north of Meiktila, the Japanese could see right into the defences. They could see tents and guns in the central gun area near the golden pagoda, and vehicles moving up and down. The wire, with its festoons of tin cans, glinted in the sun, and could be seen from a great distance. The main airfield, they decided, was the weakest point in 17th Division’s defences, and a successful attack there would not only uncover the way into the town, but would also cut the division’s lifeline, bringing about a speedy collapse.

Encouraged by their success on 18th March, they mounted an attack during the night of 20th, and secured a lodgement. This was contained, and counter-attack measures put into effect at once. For several days bitter fighting took place in the broken country north of the landing ground, with the Japanese being pushed steadily back. Fighter-bombers smashed their deadly cargoes into the ground 100 yards ahead of the advancing tanks and infantry, but still the enemy held, his guns dominating the airfield at point blank range. To the Japanese, dusk was a friend and dawn an enemy which would bring him face to face with tank and infantry teams. Even his denial of the landing ground to his opponent was a hollow victory, for day after day hundreds of parachutes drifted down into the town, supplying the garrison’s needs, whilst light aircraft, carrying the wounded, could be seen taking off from an airstrip well inside the defences.

Then, suddenly it was all over, and the Japanese had gone. Their attack had been made too late to make any difference, for, as we shall see in the next chapter, their main defensive front along the Irrawaddy, centred on Mandalay, its communications hanging in the air after the fall of Meiktila, had collapsed, and the survivors were fleeing east and south. The 18th Division at Meiktila had received orders to disengage and withdraw to Thazi on 22nd March, and shoot off its artillery ammunition.

The second capture of Taungtha, dealt with in the last chapter, cleared 17th Division’s communications with the bridgehead, and the administrative tail, followed by the remainder of 5th Indian Division, swept through to Meiktila without opposition.

The battle of Meiktila was the decisive battle of the Burma campaign, and has been described by the Japanese themselves
as the Master Stroke. Before Meiktila, Kimura and his Army Commanders, had been able to exercise command and control over their various formations, even if the apparatus for so doing had been rickety. After Meiktila, these factors were never reestablished to anything like their former level, and without them any army becomes a crowd of individuals, acting on their own initiative.

Conceived by one of the ablest British generals of this century, entrusted to an energetic Corps Commander, and carried through by an experienced and tough divisional commander whose principal executive instrument was a brigade of Indian cavalry regiments which would ‘go’, the battle of Meiktila represents a classic example of the use of the Indirect Approach to achieve Strategic Paralysis, an example which bears comparison with the high noon of the German Blitzkrieg, O’Connor’s destruction of Grazziani in 1941, or the Israeli thrusts through the Sinai in 1967.

*
Later Chief of General Staff, Indian Army.

^†
This regiment had a number of excellent reasons for wanting to do well. First, it was the first armoured regiment to be ‘Indianized’, and was determined not to let the side down. Secondly, it had not seen action in the war so far, nor in World War I, and had every intention of making up for lost time. And finally, in spite of its low number, was the senior Indian cavalry regiment, tracing its descent to the 3rd Cavalry, raised in 1776, and yielding precedence only to the Viceroy’s (now President’s) Bodyguard.

*
Some Japanese officers, including General Honda, the commander of 33 Army, had always regarded Meiktila as a sensitive area. On the day that 17th Division began its advance, Honda was attending an Army Commanders’ conference at Meiktila, when a message arrived that a column of 200 vehicles had broken out of 7th Division’s bridgehead, and was heading for the town. Little knowing that the signal in its original form had read 2000, General Tanaka, Kimura’s Chief of Staff, dismissed the column as being little more than a hit-and-run raid, and no immediate steps were taken to safeguard the position. Honda was later given the task of recapturing the town, and must have reflected bitterly on one of the most incredible communications blunders of the entire war.

*
This passage was written by the regiment’s commanding officer, Lt-Colonel M. R. Smeeton, and is taken from his book
A Change of Jungles
, published by Rupert Hart-Davis.

*
The equivalent of a British brigade. The total strength of the Meiktila garrison is estimated at 3,500.

*
Taken from extracts of 12th Army Intelligence Summaries Nos 9 and 11.

If any British citizen was asked to name a town in Burma, he would probably answer Mandalay. He might answer Rangoon, but even in the heyday of the British Empire, few Britons were quite certain where Rangoon was, although they knew it was east of Suez and probably west of Hong Kong.

With Mandalay it was different, for there is a rousing song about the place,
The Road to Mandalay
, an evergreen favourite with music hall artistes and drawing-room tenors, which most people know by heart, but which places the city in a highly debateable geographic context, as the administrative capital of Burma is many hundreds of miles from the sea, and the prospects of seeing flying fish, old flotillas of British Ironclads, or the possibility of watching the dawn rise over China, ‘cross the bay’, suggests that the poet was under an unusual strain.

Mandalay had little strategic, but immense propaganda, value. In Japanese hands, the town provided them with ‘face’, proving to the world that they were still the masters of Burma and, as we have seen, their armies had been deployed with the specific object of defeating the Allies in the Mandalay area. Conversely, if they were deprived of the city, their credibility throughout the country would be suspect.

The Irrawaddy is one of the great rivers of the world. Its width varies between 500 yards, where it flows through the northern gorge, and 4,000 yards, where it is joined by the Chindwin. In the narrower stretches the banks shelve steeply, but where it is wider and the banks lower, passage is made more difficult by islands and sandbanks which shift their position during the monsoon. It rolls along at a rate of two miles per hour, increasing to six in the rainy season, when the water level can rise by as much as thirty feet in places. The problems facing any commander trying to force a crossing of the river were enormous, and as Slim himself wrote, ‘I do not believe a river
crossing on such a scale had ever been attempted, let alone succeeded, with such meagre equipment.’ To put the matter into perspective, all the Irrawaddy crossings were made with simple infantry assault boats, followed by tanks and guns on rafts, consolidated with bridging equipment which had sustained considerable damage in a journey of several hundred miles, each phase being completed with a universal shortage of outboard engines; whereas the Rhine crossings, made over half the distance, were assisted by a wide variety of landing craft, Buffaloes and other amphibious AFVs, and an enormous bridging train.