by Trevor Royle
With air cover provided by aircraft of the Fleet Air Arm flying from the carriers Indomitable and Illustrious, the first assault was made against Diégo Suarez on 5 May. Although Operation Ironclad achieved complete surprise, the resistance was surprisingly strong, and the fighting for the port and the town of Antsirane (later Antseranana) lasted for three days before the French capitulated. During the attack 1st Royal Scots Fusiliers made an eighteen-mile forced march before running into heavy defences to the south of Antsirane, consisting of pill-boxes and an anti-tank ditch. Much of the fighting ended up being close-quarter combat involving generous use of the bayonet. In his account of the battle, Jim Stockman of 6th Seaforths provided a graphic account of the moment when bayonet practice was translated into the reality of battle.
As I kept going, I suddenly came across this huge Senegalese coming at me. For a moment I panicked, hesitated. Then, on thankful impulse, stopped him in his tracks by thrusting forward and shoving the bayonet right through him until it emerged on the other side.
At first, I did not realise the ferocity with which I had struck him and then found to my horror that I could not pull it out again. I had to fire a round, twist savagely and pull in order to disengage it from his body.27
The Seaforth charge succeeded in taking the Vichy French position and Antsirane fell overnight. It was not the end of the struggle, as the French governor retreated to the south of the island with the rump of his forces. In the original plans for Ironclad the capture of the naval port had been deemed to be sufficient, but following its capture the South African prime minister General Jan Smuts insisted that the whole island and its 900 miles of coastline should be captured.
During a lull in operations, 2nd Royal Scots Fusiliers was moved to India on 11 June when 17 Brigade resumed its deployment to the subcontinent to join 5th Division for the defence of India following the Japanese invasion of Burma; these forces were replaced by 22 East African Brigade, 7 South African Motorised Brigade and 27 North Rhodesian Infantry Brigade, which arrived during June and August. The campaign reopened ahead of the rainy season on 10 September when 29 Brigade and the East African forces landed at the ports of Majunga in the north-west and Morondava on the west of the island. Although progress was slow, the capital Tananarive fell two weeks later, and 1st Royal Scots Fusiliers was also involved in the operations to take the eastern port of Tamatave. The last major action was at Andriamanalina on 18 October. Annet surrendered near Ilhosy, in the south of the island, on 5 November. By then 1st Royal Scots Fusiliers had withdrawn from Madagascar for rest and recuperation in South Africa. At the beginning of the following year it moved with 29 Brigade (now part of 36th Division) to Poona in India for training in jungle warfare in preparation for deployment on the Burma front.
In the Far East the fall of Hong Kong and the later collapse of Singapore had been followed by the Japanese invasion of Burma and the consequent threat that India itself might be invaded. In July 1942 the Japanese high command made plans for ‘Operation 21’, a three-pronged attack from Burma towards Ledo, Imphal and Chittagong. It was over-ambitious in concept as the terrain in northern Burma was not suited to rapid offensive operations, but the fact that India was threatened was enough to concentrate British minds about the precariousness of their position. Allied to increasingly strident demands from Indian nationalists for Britain to quit India, there was an immediate need to restore British standing by taking the offensive back to the Japanese and retrieving lost ground in Burma. The first of these initiatives was the first Arakan campaign, which opened in September 1942 and was aimed at capturing the Akyab peninsula following an advance from Chittagong by way of Cox’s Bazaar and Donbaik. It did not achieve the desired result. By the following May the Japanese had retrieved all the ground won during the advance; for the British it was not only an expensive failure which cost over 5,000 casualties, but it inculcated a belief that the Japanese were unbeatable jungle fighters.
Amongst those taking part in the operation was 1st Royal Scots, which fought in 6 Independent Brigade Group, together with 1st Royal Welch Fusiliers, 1st Royal Berkshire Regiment and 2nd Durham Light Infantry. Originally, the formation’s role was to attack Akyab from the sea, an undertaking that involved the Royals in their first experience of combined operations, but shortages of landing craft necessitated a change of plan to more conventional operations. As a result the Royals went into the line on 6 March 1943 for the attack on Donbaik, and the subsequent fighting gave them their first experience of taking on the Japanese who had created heavily fortified positions in ‘chaungs’, river beds or deep tidal creeks. The Royals’ commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel R. W. Jackson, originally a Sherwood Forester, provided a telling description of these obstacles in an article written after the war in conjunction with the battalion’s Intelligence Officer, Captain J. S. Purves.
The position held by the Jap here [near Donbaik] was a small strong-point made out of the main chaung (or river bed) stretching from the sea to hills 500 to 800 feet high. These hills overlooked the chaung and were held by the Jap. The chaung itself was well dug, revetted [strengthened] sufficiently to withstand shelling from 25-pdrs or 3.7 howitzers. It also included some tanks sunk into the ground. Our lines approached in places as close as forty yards and gave the Battalion an inkling of what trench warfare used to be like, as part of the Battalion perimeter ran through a narrow chaung.28
The description presaged the kind of fighting which followed. Despite facing heavy incoming fire, the Japanese showed that their positions were well defended and, as Jackson and Purves confirmed, ‘a period of trench warfare set in’. One Japanese pill-box, known as ‘Sugar 5’, proved to be particularly impervious to attack, and for a time the Royals were involved in an attempt to dig a mineshaft underneath it. An order to ‘straighten the line’ put paid to their efforts when 6 Brigade pulled back and ‘angry and disgusted, the miners left their work uncompleted’. On 27 March the Brigade Group was ordered to move back to the north along the coastal plain, and during fierce fighting at Indin on 6 April, 1st Royal Scots suffered heavy casualties in an action which one officer described later as ‘utter pandemonium’. During the Japanese attack on the brigade headquarters Brigadier R. V. C. Cavendish was killed, and crucial documents including code-books fell into enemy hands. There was no option for the Royals but to withdraw towards Kyaukpandu where there was a chance to regroup. By then the first rains of the monsoon had begun and marching was difficult, with the result that ‘most of us were sleeping on our feet . . . we looked like ragamuffins’.
The loss of the Buthiadaung-Maungdaw defensive line and the subsequent withdrawal were counted as victories for the Japanese, whose forces commanded by Lieutenant-General Takeshi Koga had shown dash and determination in their counter-attack. However as the battalion moved back towards the frontier Captain Purves remembered that many of the men thought that ‘we should have been going SOUTH against the Jap and not NORTH’. Nevertheless the retreat continued and the battalion moved back into India on 24 May. In the aftermath of the failure of the operation the British high command criticised many of the frontline units for the lack of fighting spirit and their willingness to surrender when facing heavy odds. During the latter stages of the campaign a staff officer at the headquarters of Lieutenant-General N. M. S. Irwin reported that most of the infantrymen were ‘either exhausted or browned off or both’, and were ‘obviously scared of the Jap and generally demoralised by the nature of the campaign’; or ‘hate the country and see no object in fighting for it, and also have the strong feeling that they are taking part in a forgotten campaign in which no one in authority is taking any real interest’. The report was written after a visit to the brigades fighting on the Maungdaw Front in the second week of May, but the author of the report made an exception of 6 Brigade ‘who had had a hammering, but were still staunch’.29 During this first Arakan campaign the Royals’ casualties were 6 officers and 26 soldiers killed, and 10 officers and 117 soldiers wounded. Another 500
had fallen victim to malaria, with the result that when 1st Royal Scots finally reached Chittagong it only numbered some 400 soldiers.
Another Scottish battalion was also taking part in the defence of Burma at this time: this was 2nd King’s Own Scottish Borderers (KOSB), which had spent the opening months of the war fighting in a little-known campaign to put down an uprising led by the Faqir of Ipi in India’s North-West Frontier Province. Following a deployment in Razmak which lasted over a year the battalion joined the Fourteenth Army in August 1943 for the second phase of the Arakan operation. Its eventual destination was the Arakan peninsula, but before then it trained with the rest of 7th Indian Division between Peshawar and Rawalpindi. This was followed by specialist jungle training at Singhori near Chindwara in the Central Indian Province (today Madhya Pradesh) where the battalion was joined by training teams made up of soldiers who had already experienced the vastly different conditions of fighting in Burma. According to the regimental war historian it was a steep learning curve for all the Borderers.
These courses of instruction, ranging from divisional level down to companies and platoons, gave every man in the division a chance to learn quickly and thoroughly all that could be taught to make him fit for battle in the jungle. The individual training was carried out in company jungle camps where the men spent five days, returning to Singhori for two days and then back to the jungle camp. The Borderers were shown how to use bamboo, how to navigate in dense jungle and elephant grasses, and how to live on the land; in brief, how to conquer the jungle as a necessary preliminary to beating the human enemy, the Japs.30
This was very much the credo which was later adopted by the British and Allied armies in Burma: the jungle need not be a hostile place but approached differently it could be an environment which offered a measure of protection. And above all, the Japanese opposition were not supermen but ordinary soldiers who were capable of being beaten. Training also included live-firing and other toughening-up exercises which were carried out in all weather conditions to make sure that the troops were readied for whatever the shock of battle would throw against them.
The chance to put theory into action came at the end of August when 2nd KOSB moved by train from Ranchi to Madras, where they boarded the troopship Ethiopia for a four-day voyage across the Bay of Bengal to land in Chittagong on 20 September 1943. By that stage of the war this formed the southern front of the Allied operations against the Japanese, the other two being the central front with its main battlefields at Imphal and Kohima, and the northern front bounded by Yunnan and Ledo. By the time the Borderers reached the Arakan the monsoon had arrived, and both sides were more than content to sit it out until the weather improved. As a result 2nd KOSB saw little of the enemy as they settled into their positions between the Mayu Hills and the Naaf River which was described as ‘a waste of flooded fields with hillocks covered in jungle scrub’. Although the hills were not particularly high they had steep precipices, and the ravines were deep and threatening with their fair share of insects and snakes. As was the case on other fronts in Burma, rations and ammunition had to be carried in by mule trains.
As the weather began to improve, 2nd KOSB was able to send out fighting patrols to engage Japanese ration parties, and scored a first success on 8 October when an ambush succeeded in killing thirty of the enemy who came from an Imperial Guards regiment. This was followed by a similar encounter a few days later on a position known as the ‘horseshoe’ in which the Japanese had unwisely advertised their presence by flying their national flag on the high ground. However, on the debit side it soon became apparent that casualties would not just be caused by enemy fire; sickness, too, was a problem. In the first months in the Arakan the battalion’s casualty rate was 120 sick men (mainly malaria and dysentery) to every man killed or wounded by enemy action. Gradually better standards of hygiene were introduced and by 1944 the ratio had fallen to six to one.
Following a period of recuperation, the battalion moved south by way of the Ngakyedauk Pass (known throughout the Fourteenth Army as ‘Okedoke’ Pass) to new positions opposite the Japanese lines at Tatmin Chaung. The aim of the commander of XV Indian Corps, Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Christison, a Cameron Highlander, was to recapture Akyab so that its vital airfields could be used to operate against Rangoon. This phase of the operations provided the Borderers with their first set-piece battle against the enemy, but it was preceded by a lengthy game of cat-and-mouse. At that stage of the fighting the British and Indian armies in Burma lacked detailed intelligence about their opponents, and a high premium was placed on reconnaissance patrolling with the objective of bringing in a live prisoner. (To add a sense of competitiveness to the process there was a reward of 250 rupees and 28 days’ leave.) Although 2nd KOSB failed on that score – a raiding party did bring in one prisoner but he was found to be dead on arrival following a blow to the head as he tried to escape – the deployment did bring a successful engagement with the Japanese at the beginning of 1944. This took place on a position known as Able Hill where the objective was to cut the Japanese lines of communication with Mungdaw, and it was conceived, in its first stages, as a night operation. With 1st Queens on the right and 4/5th Gurkhas on the left, 2nd KOSB attacked in the centre towards Ledwedet Hill and immediately ran into fierce enemy fire which killed the commanding officer Lieutenant-Colonel W. G. Mattingly. After two weeks in the line the battalion was relieved by the Gurkhas and returned to the start line, where the men were treated to comforts such as warm food, clean clothes and blankets, and rum and cigarettes.
After a short period of rest the battalion moved to a new position in Wet Valley where it relieved 1st Queen’s and then prepared to move again – north towards Taung Bazaar, which had been occupied by 4,000 Japanese troops. This was a difficult and demanding operation which had to be carried out in unknown territory, and as the regimental war history explains, it involved a night march, something that most soldiers fear and dislike: ‘There were no guides, no maps, and this stretch of the country was unfamiliar. A course was set on a compass bearing and the column set out. A mule column is not easily kept quiet, but the animals seemed to sense the danger. The eerie march in the misty moonlight took four hours, and the column was duly navigated to the rendezvous. The mules by a mischance had acted as the spearhead of the brigade on this move, but the column had luck on its side.’31
On arrival at its new position at Allwynbin, four miles south of the Ngakyedauk Pass, 89 Brigade constructed its ‘Admin Box’, the main centre for communication, and in reality shaped more like a bowl than a box in the lea of a position called Sugar Loaf Hill. There the brigade was joined by 33 Brigade and 114 Brigade, all three of which were now fenced in by the opposition. Air supply became imperative; here the brigade was helped by the fact that the RAF enjoyed air superiority, and its Spitfires were more than capable of shepherding the Dakota transports to their targets. The arrival of food, cigarettes and other comforts came as a much-needed relief to the men of 2nd KOSB who had gone five days without a square meal. Expectancy turned to disappointment in one instance where the containers were full of ammunition, but this was balanced by others which were replete with ‘food and smokes’. This provision from the skies was a real morale-booster while fighting in difficult terrain and facing an unyielding enemy. Not only did it bring much-needed provisions to the beleaguered men in the Admin Box but it produced solid evidence that others knew about their plight and were doing their best to help them. Bucked by that kind of support, battalions like 2nd KOSB always rediscovered the urge to take the fight back to the enemy. Despite the difficult conditions morale rarely slumped, and in the pages of the SEAC (South-East Asia Command) newsletter there were glimpses of the kind of humour expressed by an anonymous Borderer about fighting in the Arakan (to be sung to the tune of a popular, if vulgar, rugby club song).
Japs on the hilltops
Japs in the Chaung
Japs in the Ngakyedauk
Japs in the Taung
J
aps with their L of C [lines of communication] far too long As they revel in the joys of infiltration . . .32
