Tank Tracks to Rangoon Read Free Page B

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 tofade 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