The Forgotten VCs

The Victoria Crosses of the War in the Far East During WW2

Brian Best

• Verlag: Frontline Books
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526717993
• Thema: Historia
• Thema: Segunda Guerra Mundial

Fought amid the most challenging terrain of any theater during the Second World War, the campaign in the Far East saw heroic actions against the unyielding Japanese that resulted in the awarding of more than forty Victoria Crosses greater than a fifth of all the VCs of the war.Such actions include that of Major Frank Blaker, whose battalion of the Gurkha Rifles was held up by Japanese machine-guns on 9 July 1944. After climbing for five hours up a 2, 100-foot hill, Blaker crawled on his hands and knees through dense jungle alone until he was close enough to stand up and charge the strong enemy position. Though mortally wounded, he urged his men to follow and the hilltop was taken.During the famous Chindit operations, Lieutenant George Cairns was with the South Staffordshire Regiment as it attacked a Japanese position on top of Pagoda Hill. The Chindits reached the summit and, charging into the Japanese, a vicious hand-to-hand battle ensued. In the fighting a Japanese officer hacked off Cairns left arm but, astonishingly, the young Londoner then killed the enemy officer, picked up the sword with his right hand and carried on fighting. He died the next day.The Gurkhas are renowned for their courage and it is unsurprising that many of the Fourteenth Armys VCs were won by these tough Nepalese soldiers. Rifleman Bhanbhagta Gurung found his battalion of the 2nd Gurkha Rifles pinned down by an enemy sniper. So he stood up in the open and killed the Japanese soldier. As his battalion advanced again, it once more came under enemy fire. Bhanbhagta Gurung charged the enemy positions, taking five Japanese foxholes, one by one in the face of almost pointblank fire.The wide-ranging nature of the conflict in the Far East saw awards being granted for actions not just in Burma but also in India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, Borneo, New Guinea and even off the coast of Japan itself. The recipients came from across the Commonwealth, including Australia, Canada, Fiji, Great Britain, India and Nepal.These VC actions are told in great detail in The Forgotten VCs, the first book to examine in depth the Victoria Crosses of the war in the Far East. Brian Best brings to life the daring deeds of a group of courageous men in the most inhospitable of battlefield conditions, filling a glaring gap in the historiography of Britains most prestigious award for valor.

Part 1

The Protagonists

The Japanese

When Japan defeated the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima in 1904, the British were the first to applaud the victory against one of their main rivals. The Imperial Japanese Navy grew to be the third largest in the world after the Royal and American navies. In 1902 the two countries signed the Anglo–Japanese Alliance, which was twice renewed before the First World War. However, within twenty-five years this spirit of friendly co-operation had changed radically. Japan experienced increasing isolation, exacerbated by a political crisis that resulted in the assassinations of two prime ministers. The 1920s and 1930s was a time of turmoil and fear in the country.

In 1931, the Japanese took control of mineral-wealthy Manchuria and, besides a half-hearted Chinese reaction, the military began to behave autonomously and influence events in Japanese politics. An attempted coup in 1936, which saw several government ministers assassinated, gave the military even greater power to the extent that an act was passed stating that only serving officers could become military ministers.

The military began to impose its thinking on children’s education and primary schools became tools of the state. They were given the title of ‘National People’s Schools’ and reflected their mission of training loyal subject for the Japanese empire. When they graduated, the students were taught vocational skills that would aid in future major militaristic expansion.

The ancient term bushido referred to the samurai way of life and was loosely akin to the concept of chivalry in Europe. During pre-war and the Second World War the Japanese military sought to use bushido to present war as purifying and death as a duty. Bushido would provide a spiritual shield to let soldiers fight to the end. Although the original bushido called for the samurai to be aware of death it was not meant for one to waste one’s life in a pointless suicide. This concept was corrupted by the military establishment, which identified bushido as the sacrificing of one’s life for Japan.

Another scheme of national bonding was the introduction of emperor-based ideology. Before Emperor Hirohito ascended the Japanese throne in 1926, an emperor wielded no political power. He was regarded as a figurehead and leader of the Shinto religion but the military saw in the new emperor another way of binding the Japanese people into manageable and obedient followers of their extreme patriotism. After the war Hirohito claimed not to have had any influence on the actions and behaviour of the military but it was he who had chosen the hard-line General Hideki Tojo as prime minister and was complicit in Japan joining Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in forming the Axis Powers. To the public he was regarded as a deity who had descended from the gods who created Japan. The Japanese were taught to lay down their lives for the Emperor, rather in the way that today’s brainwashed fanatical Islamists are prepared to die for a warped cause.

After the First World War, Japan perceived the apparent decline of Europe as a world power and saw herself as a natural leader for all of east Asia. With the slogan ‘Asia for the Asians’, Japan began supporting the anti-colonial movements in India and South-East Asia. With the Fall of France in 1940 and the emergence of the Vichy Government, Japan was able to use its alliance with Germany to occupy French Indo–China.

Japan had gone to war with China in 1931 but the fighting was localised, centring mainly in Manchuria. In was not until 1937 and the start of the Second Sino–Japanese War that Japan made great inroads into the country. The ordinary Japanese soldier underwent a harsh training that brutalised him. The so-called ‘Rape of Nanking’ saw the Japanese perpetrate the most appalling crimes against the population, which was mirrored countless times during the Second World War. Gone was the Japanese Army much admired by the world in 1905 to be replaced by an arrogant force holding its subject populations and prisoners in utter contempt. The Japanese soldier believed in a spiritual essence that could overcome all obstacles. It was called seishin or strength of will, which gave him a sense of invincibility that would allow him to defeat even the more technologically and numerically superior foes.

Although the Japanese Army had modernised, its equipment was not on par with those of its enemies. It lacked enough artillery and its tanks were too light. Although it gained a reputation for leaving snipers behind to kill as many of the enemy as possible, these were not good shots. The Arisaka rifle was almost as tall as the average Japanese solder, which affected his aim considerably. The Japanese machine-guns were inferior to the Bren gun, but still accounted for many casualties. The one weapon that was most effective was the one-man grenade launcher, widely used during the Burma Campaign.

The Great Powers demanded that Japan withdraw from China but were actually powerless to do anything about it. The United States, in particular, was a strong supporter of China and had not enjoyed good relations with Japan. It had been wary of Japan since the 1900s, viewing her as an economic threat but happy, nonetheless, to provide it with most of its oil. In order to force Japan to withdraw it imposed a 100 per cent embargo on the sale of oil, which would have crippled the country’s economy. Tokyo saw this as a blockade to counter Japanese military and economic strength and, with the possibility of a war with the United States, began stockpiling around fifty-four million barrels of oil.

Without a declaration of war, the Japanese launched a sudden carrierborne attack on the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The date chosen was 7 December 1941 to coincide with attacks on Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaya, Dutch East Indies and Singapore. The plan was that the Americans would be unable to react for at least half a year, giving Japan enough time to grab oil from the Dutch East Indies and rubber from Malaya.

The main targets were to sink or cripple America’s aircraft carriers, so delaying any retaliatory action until Japan had completed her conquest of South-East Asia. Poor intelligence resulted in the sinking and damaging of several old capital ships, but no aircraft carriers. By good fortune, all the American carriers were at sea on exercise.

The unleashing of a determined Imperial Japanese Army on South-East Asia found the West’s colonies in a state of unpreparedness. Victory after victory gave the Japanese a sense of invincibility. They were encouraged in the main by the indigenous populations of the colonies they had purportedly liberated, who were anxious to throw off the European yoke. They sold the idea of a perverted version of the European Union with its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It would not take long, however, before the natural arrogance, inherent racism and brutality of the Japanese was exposed, but by then it was too late.

The Americans

On 8 July 1853, a squadron commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy sailed into Tokyo harbour. Perry, on behalf of the United States government, demanded that Japan open her ports to American merchant ships. Having no navy with which to defend itself, Japan agreed to the ultimatum. For the Japanese it was the end of the ancient system and the start of an economic boom. Over the following decades, the Japanese economy expanded at the expense of the traditional Shogunate. In its place was a new centralised government with the Emperor as its symbolic head.

With the help of French and German instructors, the Japanese developed a modern army along European lines. The Imperial Japanese Navy was modelled on the lines of the Royal Navy, who supplied advisors to train the fledgling naval establishment. Having opened up Japan to the rest of the world, America developed a great wariness of Japanese economic success. Furthermore, the US was opposed to Tokyo’s expansionist policies and did all it could, short of war, to thwart them. Relations between the two countries became increasingly tense after the invasion of Manchuria and the seizure of much of China in 1937–39.

In 1940, President Roosevelt approved military aid to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army and supplied experienced personnel including a retired aviator from a flying circus, Clair L. Chenault, who commanded the American Volunteer Group ‘The Flying Tigers’, the American Military Mission to China (AMMISCA) under Brigadier General John Magruder and Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell, head of the China–Burma–India theatre and known as ‘Vinegar Joe’. America’s support was not entirely altruistic. It was hoped that the Nationalist Army would occupy a large number of enemy troops that would otherwise have been involved in the defence of the many Pacific islands that the Americans would have to overcome.

The Chinese Nationalist Army had been driven from all major seaports and forced to retreat south-west to Chungking, on the upper Yangtze gorges some 700 miles from the coast. Here Chiang Kai-shek established the Army’s headquarters and new capital of the republic. The Chinese Army was hardly a united unit, with many sections governed by former war lords. Another obstacle was the ongoing fight between the Nationalists and Mao-Tse Tung’s communist Army. General Stilwell was scathing about the way that American war material was being used in this civil war instead of against the Japanese.

Another huge problem that became almost insurmountable was the means of supplying American aid. With the coastal ports controlled by the Japanese, and French acquiescence allowing Japan to occupy Indochina, this left the nearest port of Rangoon in southern Burma, which was some 14,000 miles by sea from America. Once material was delivered to Rangoon, it then involved a train journey to the north to Lashio, followed by a tortuous journey on the Burma Road into Kunming in the Chinese province of Yumman. Commanding the army in Yumman was a war lord named General Lung Yun, who had used the Burma Road to amass a fortune from shipping opium and taxing the traffic. This came to an end when the Japanese Army swept into Burma; Rangoon was the first important target it attacked and, at a stroke, this cut off aid to China via the Burma Road.

The severing of the vital link now involved America, which was supporting and supplying Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army with material to continue its fight against the Japanese in China. Unlike the mutual support in the European theatre of the war, there was American resentment for what it saw as supporting the British Empire in Burma and India. Two divisions of the Nationalist Army, unable to reach China, were marooned on the Assam border and under Stilwell’s command.

Stilwell proved to be an uncompromising critic of the British Indian Army High Command and expressed the view that the British soldier had behaved in a cowardly manner against the Japanese invader. The open contempt between the two allies meant that there was not to be the close co-operation between the two countries that largely existed on the Europe front. Stilwell was also scathing about his Chinese commander, Chiang Kai-shek, who he thought, correctly, was corrupt and hoarding American Lend-Lease supplies in order to fight his communist rivals.

This left Major General George Stratemeyer, commanding Eastern Air Command, to use his fleet of transport aircraft to ferry material over the eastern end of the Himalayas, colloquially known as ‘the Hump’. Not only was this dangerous but also it could not deliver sufficient supplies. The alternative was to link up with the old Burma Road. This strategic route employed the railway that ran north from the port of Rangoon, through Mandalay to Myitkyina. Running parallel was the road that branched off at Mandalay, through Lashio and over the Chinese border into Yunnan Province and Chiang Kai-shek’s headquarters at Chungking. If the road and railway was severed at Rangoon it would starve the Chinese Army of vital American supplies.

The original Burma Road linking Burma with south-west China was 717 miles long, with its terminals at Kunming in China and Lashio in Burma. It was built to convey supplies to China during the Second Sino–Japanese War in 1937. Under Stilwell’s command, a new road was hacked through the mountains from Ledo in Assam, through the important town of Myitkyina to link up with the old road at Wanddingzhen in the Chinese province of Yunnan. This was accomplished in January 1945, a little too late to make a difference.

With the fall of the British colonies of Malaya and Singapore, her understandable focus was on Germany. Australia now looked for an ally to help keep the Japanese from threatening their homeland. For the Americans, Australia was perfectly situated as a base from which to start their advance on Japan. Over the following years, thousands of American servicemen arrived, trained and moved on to take part in the South Pacific War. The Commander in Chief was General Douglas MacArthur, a vain, outspoken but brilliant soldier, who virtually sidelined his hosts, making it clear that he wanted American-only troops to carry the war north to the Philippines.

A natural resentment grew between the two allies as Australia was tasked with clearing the Japanese from the island countries to her north; Papua New Guinea and later Bougainville and Borneo. For the most part these were mopping up operations as by 1943 the Japanese had become isolated, with supplies and reinforcements denied them by the Allied navies and air forces. However, any suggestion that the Japanese had lost their fanatical fighting spirit was quickly dispelled in the tough campaigns the Australians fought in the jungles. The battles on the Kokoda Trail and Milne Bay still resonate in today’s Australia. In the course of three years, the Australians were awarded eleven Victoria Crosses.

The British

Japan had been an ally of the West at the beginning of the twentieth century. The British had even sent Royal Navy instructors including the torpedo expert, Arthur Knyvet Wilson VC, to help build its navy. The British Army had a great admiration for the Imperial Army. After the First World War, senior officers and military attachés were advising the British government not to object to Japanese expansion in China. Britain’s rather muted response to Japanese aggression was similar to Neville Chamberlain’s ‘Peace in our Time’ reaction to Nazi Germany’s expansion into Czechoslovakia and Austria. Still recovering from the losses of the First World War, the Great Depression, and a reduction in spending on equipment and personnel for her armed forces, Britain was in no position to seek another war.

The Japanese reaction to Britain’s perceived weakness was contempt. It took a fellow fascist, Benito Mussolini, to voice what many critics felt, that Britain was ‘a decrepit, weary nation which would inevitably give way to a youthful and virile power’. Japan’s actions in China and indifference towards Britain were signals to the rest of Asia that Britain would count for less and less in the Far East.

The outbreak of the Second World War and the fall of the European democracies saw Britain standing alone with every chance of being invaded. The fact that it was not was down to several factors; the evacuation of the British Expedtionary Force (BEF) from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the destruction of the flotilla of the Kriegsmarine’s new destroyers in the Battle of Narvik, the shift of fighting to North Africa and material supplies from the United States. With her eyes fixed on events in Europe, Britain was totally unprepared to add Japan to the list of enemies. Also, financially Britain could not afford war with Japan. With the British defence policy resting on Singapore, Winston Churchill was confident that the Japanese would not dare to take on such a formidable fortress.

In the confusion of the swift and sudden attacks by the Imperial Army, the weakly defended colonial countries were soon overrun; the Dutch in Indonesia, the French in Indo-China and the British in Malaya. Burma was starved of air cover and could call on only eight old Curtiss Mohawk fighter planes stationed at Calcutta. There were no bomber squadrons and the only armour were old carriers and armoured cars used for training. There were just two British battalions stationed in the country; 1/Gloucester Regiment and 2/King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. The local regiments were the Burma Defence Force and the Burma Rifles, both of which were woefully short of equipment.

The invasion of Malaya and the threat to Singapore, Britain’s main military base in South-East Asia, caused many of the troop ships bound for the North African campaign to be diverted to defend the ‘Gibraltar of the East’. Many arrived as Singapore fell. The Royal Navy sent two of her most powerful battleships to ward off the threat of Japanese landings on the east coast of Malaya. Instead, in a brief encounter with Japanese dive bombers and torpedo planes, the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse eliminated Britain’s sea power and her main Far East base at Singapore soon fell. About 80,000 British, Indian and Australian troops became prisoners of war, joining the 50,000 captured in Malaya. Churchill called the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942, the ‘worst disaster and largest capitulation in British military history’.

With the United States now involved with fighting Japan and the main command structure shifting to Australia and New Zealand, Britain was ill-prepared to give much support in manpower or equipment. The German threat was of the greatest concern while events on the other side of the world received scant priority. When Burma was invaded, it was considered very much an Indian Army affair. The campaign was the last great adventure of Britain’s imperial Army. Only two British divisions fought in Burma and only one in thirteen of all ground troops was British Army; Gurkhas, East and West Africans, Sikhs, Jats, Baluchis, Madeassis, Dogras, Rajputs, Punjabs and others made up the balance and all were volunteers.

The prevailing view was that Burma was nothing but a buffer between the Japanese troops and India. In Churchill’s view, it was not worth fighting in Burma other than to defend the line on the Indian border.

India and its Army

When the Second World War began in September 1939, Britain made India a belligerent without consulting her elected councils. The first the Indian public learned of this was the announcement by Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy, that war had broken out between His Majesty and Germany. In 1935, the Congress Party had won seven out of eleven provinces and this high-handed approach by the British caused much anger. Jawaharlal Nehru later wrote that: ‘One man, and he a foreigner, plunged four hundred millions of human beings into a war without the slightest reference to them.’ They responded by declaring that India would not support the war effort until it had been granted complete independence. In 1942, the Congress Party was so sure that Britain could not win that it sponsored mass civil disobedience to support the ‘Quit India’ campaign. The British authorities responded by imprisoning the entire Congress Party leadership, including Mahatma Gandhi.

The Indian political establishment was far more concerned with ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: The Protagonists
• Chapter 2: The Malayan Campaign
• Chapter 3: The Fall of Singapore
• Chapter 4: Defeat in Burma
• Chapter 5: The Chin Hills
• Chapter 6:Second Arakan Campaign
• Chapter 7: Wingate’s VC Chindits
• Chapter 8: The Battle of Imphal
• Chapter 9: The Siege of Kohima
• Chapter 10: The Follow-Up – Arakan Singh, Ram Sarup
• Chapter 11: Marching South
• Chapter 12: Australia’s War
• Bibliography
• Plate section