My good friends at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra have published an article of mine in their latest magazine, Wartime. Its well worth while subscribing if you can. Its carefully edited and full of interesting articles and reviews.
The article was prompted by my research for A War of Empires, and initiated by a conversation with my friend and ‘old’ tutor at King’s College, Dr Tim Moreman. Tim helpfully pointed me in the right direction for my research. The result was fascinating, as it demonstrated that while no Australian units or formations were involved in the fighting in Burma, the influence of Australian learning and experience from New Guinea was profound. The British and the Indian Armies fighting the Japanese in Burma in 1944 and 1945 owed much to what their Australian Army colleagues were able to teach them in 1943.
Do buy and read the magazine if you can, but a synopsis of the argument follows.
In May 1943, as the disastrous First Arakan campaign on Burma’s Bay of Bengal coastline withered away in ignominy, the British in India were forced to face an uncomfortable reality. Despite the war against the Japanese now being eighteen months old, British and Indian soldiers remained incapable of defeating the Japanese in battle. The truth was that man for man, neither British nor Indian soldiers matched the standard of training or competence in battle of their Japanese enemy.
In 1942, in response to the Japanese successes in Malaya, Singapore and Burma, schools had been established across India for specialised arms and services, and infantry regimental centres were expanded to cope with the rapid growth in the numbers of recruits. However, it was not the quantity of training that was at issue, but its quality and relevance to the war that would need to be fought in the east. It was only in June 1943 that the first centralised steps were taken to reform the army’s approach to individual and collective training. The Commander-in-Chief, General Archibald Wavell, created an Infantry Committee to examine the causes of combat failure in the Indian Army in the First Burma (1942) and First Arakan (1942–3) campaigns. The committee initiated the first systemic change in the process of training in India Command. It was to have as profound an impact on the warfighting capability of British and Indian troops in India Command (and South East Asian Command in late 1943) as the Australian innovations had on its two deployed divisions in New Guinea. Critically, the Infantry Committee took ideas that Major General William Slim had already built into XV Corps (the inheritance he had received following the withdrawal from Burma), and adopted them as policy for the entire army.
First, recruit training was immediately focused on preparing men for war, rather than on the drills and routines of peacetime soldiering. Battle drills were systematised: the idea was that, when the bullets began to fly, troops would be able to follow a series of rules and respond appropriately to whatever situation they faced, rather than having to make things up as they went along. For the advance to contact, the attack, defence, patrolling, and withdrawal in contact, troops were no longer left with the vague ‘principles of war’ to frame their conduct of operations. They now had a precise set of instructions as to what to do under certain circumstances. The key task was to enable men to learn how to fight the Japanese on more than equal terms, in difficult terrain and climatic conditions, in the face of the curse of malaria, a long way from home with the minimum of domestic comforts, and far fewer support functions of the sophistication that the Eighth Army was able to enjoy in North Africa.
Second, it was recognised that the regimental training centre approach was not working. By late 1942 the evidence was overwhelming that the previous system, designed to support an army of 190,000, could not cope with the challenge of an army soon to reach a strength of nearly two million. Large numbers of new recruits needed consistent battle drills. Equally importantly, the massively increased number of instructors across India Command, most of whom had only a fleeting acquaintance with the Japanese – or none at all – needed to be given the means to train their recruits. Simple drills, based firmly on lessons passed down from experience in Malaya, Burma and New Guinea, would enable them to do this. Likewise, there was overwhelming evidence for the need for change from the Arakan debacle, when Japanese forces repulsed British attempts to retake Arakan, Burma’s coastal littoral. That experience was reinforced by the dramatic results secured by the Australians in New Guinea after they had thoroughly rethought their approach to training, and also from the results of Slim’s relentless retraining of XV Corps. What was needed was ruthlessly enforced uniformity in a new way of fighting that placed greater emphasis than ever before on the individual fighting skills and mental fortitude of each soldier. Regular studies of morale undertaken by GHQ India indicated the effect of better training on the confidence of the troops.
Two Indian training divisions were established at Chhindwara and at Saharanpur, near Dehra Dun in Uttar Pradesh, through which all recruits who had completed nine months of basic training would undergo two months of ‘battlefield inoculation’. Eleven months of training! A training headquarters was created specifically to organise the collective training of one infantry division at a time in combined operations and jungle warfare. This training was compulsory for all British and Indian troops proceeding to the battle area, whether they were experienced soldiers or new recruits. It included a significant component of jungle training as well as more traditional military skills such as weapon training, physical fitness and tactical skills. One of the conclusions of the Infantry Committee had been that some troops in Arakan were not much better than mobs ‘of partially trained village youth’. This changed, and did so dramatically.
At the level of section and platoon, the emphasis was on battle drills in heavily forested or jungle terrain, by day and by night: how to engage the enemy in close terrain with a selection of weapons; how to patrol, lay ambushes, build defensive positions, operate at night, and launch attacks on defended positions. Men were taught to look after themselves rather than expect others – Indian ‘followers’, for example – to do it for them. They were taught to navigate for themselves, stay dry in wet weather, and make the jungle their home. All of this training was designed to enable soldiers to operate with confidence in the tangled hills of eastern India, far from the logistical certainties of the battlefields for which the Indian Army had traditionally trained. After this training was completed, recruits would move to one of twelve divisional Rest and Reinforcement Camps before being posted to battalions. When batches of recruits (‘drafts’) were ready to be sent forward to their front-line units, they were accompanied by experienced NCOs, to ease the inevitable challenge of joining their new units. British or Indian battalions coming to jungle fighting for the first time had to go through a unit training regime provided by the specialist 116 Brigade (joined by 150 Brigade in 1944), which took units through a range of realistic training simulations with live ammunition, explosives, and physically and mentally tough exercises to prepare all ranks for combat.
In addition, a series of specialist schools were established on the model of the Jungle Warfare School at Canungra in Queensland (such as the Tactical School near Poona and two Jungle Warfare schools at Sevoke near Darjeeling and Shimoga in Karnataka) to build on the pre-existing Jungle Warfare Training School near Dehra Dun. The syllabus for each of these schools was refreshed with newly developing tactical doctrine, and the number of places for students was considerably increased. It was agreed that all troops in India – British or Indian – needed to study a centrally endorsed tactical doctrine, with centrally tested and locally applied tactical training. Finally, a raft of changes included the abolition of ‘milking’ (i.e., removing experienced non-commissioned officers from existing units to create new units); improving the quality of infantry recruits, including via their pay and conditions; and improvements to battlefield cooperation between infantry and other arms: artillery, armour and aircraft. From the individual infantryman up to company level, fixed battle drills for dealing with tactical situations were laid out in comprehensive detail. The aim was to ensure that whatever situation soldiers found themselves in, they could immediately adopt a process of activities allowing them to control the situation and defeat the enemy. In this sense, the emphasis on carrying out a set of drills was no different in this army from the practice of its forebears in the 18th century, for instance: the requirement to drill against a set of specific instructions had been part and parcel of the Indian Army for most of its life.
Auchinleck, the incoming Commander-in-Chief, pushed through the necessary changes without ceremony. Indeed, he provided the direction and drive for the changes that were ultimately to transform both the British and Indian armies in India. He took the leading role in transforming the Indian Army, and in believing in its potential. Unlike Churchill, who looked on the Indian Army as an army of potential mutineers, Auchinleck was, as his biographer wrote, ‘one of them [an Indian Army soldier] in every fibre of his being’ and knew what the army could achieve. The radical egalitarianism achieved by the ‘new’ Indian Army in 1944 and 1945 was built on his earlier reforms, as was the mass recruitment from what had earlier been described as ‘non-martial races’. Likewise, it was Auchinleck’s complete embrace of robust jungle training that led to the development of specialist jungle warfare schools, such as that at Comilla in East Bengal, which ran 15-day courses for all ranks, British and Indian, focusing on living and fighting effectively in the jungle. He revamped the training syllabus of Indian recruits so that they were taught the need for all combatants to possess exemplary fieldcraft, tactical and weapons skills in a jungle environment. In the second half of 1943 a dramatic transformation could be seen in the quality of Indian recruits and British conscripts.
As Slim made clear in Defeat into Victory (written when he was Governor General of Australia), it was the Australians who first broke the Japanese Army’s spell of invincibility , and they did much to guide and advise the Indian Army when it was most in need. The Australian Army in New Guinea led the way in the centralised application of training knowledge and expertise, down to the minute detail: for example, how to live and fight in the jungle, to patrol effectively, to master a fire fight in the jungle, attack an enemy bunker, camouflage a platoon harbour, carry out a successful ambush and to stalk an enemy sniper. Systematic, top-down training for war on a doctrinal basis had begun in the Australian Army as a reaction to the poor showing of ill-prepared Citizen Military Forces in New Guinea in 1942. The shock that Yamashita’s forces had given first to Australian Army regular soldiers in Malaya and Singapore, and then to the part-timers of the CMF on their first engagement in New Guinea, was profound.
The effectiveness of groups of Australians subsequently sent as reinforcements to New Guinea confirmed the urgent need for better approaches to battle preparation. By the end of 1942 the famous Jungle Warfare School at Canungra in southern Queensland was producing its first recruits, as young officers completed an intensive six-week battle training course to prepare them to lead their platoons in combat. Australia had dramatically upskilled its soldiers: starting at Milne Bay in August 1942, along the Kokoda Trail by mid-November 1942, and then in wiping out the Japanese diehards at ‘Bloody Buna’ (Buna–Gona–Sanananda) in January 1943 and at Wau the same month. These efforts served as a light in the gloom of British despondency about the failures of British and Indian forces, most recently in Arakan. In November 1942, Wavell wrote to the Australian Army C-in-C, General Thomas Blamey, whom he had come to know well in the Middle East, to ask for assistance. “All my best congratulations on the successes in New Guinea. I shall be very interested to hear the story of them, as the country seems to be much the same as many parts of Burma. I should be very grateful if you could send me as much detailed information as possible of the operation and of Japanese tactics and methods.”
While Wavell was C-in-C Middle East, he had formed a strong appreciation of the fighting capabilities of the soldiers under Blamey’s command. Australian successes were building up at a time when British failures in Arakan were starting to cause embarrassment in New Delhi, although some months were to pass before substantive exchanges could take place between India and Australia, all with the purpose of learning from Australian experience. Between July and October 1943, two experienced company commanders toured India Command, giving lectures on minor tactics from their experience of fighting on the Kokoda Trail and at Buna–Gona–Sanananda. In October a group of 50 British and Indian Army officers began an attachment to the Australian Army in New Guinea, first completing the platoon commander’s course at Canungra. They returned to India in February 1944, many having commanded troops in action, to promulgate the lessons and methods they had learned as part of small training teams despatched across India. Simultaneously, No. 220 Military Mission under Major General John ‘Tubby’ Lethbridge, who was to become Slim’s Chief of Staff in 1944, toured Australia between October and December, looking at best practice in terms of fighting organisations, equipment and tactics. After less than a month in Australia, Lethbridge reported to London:
The Australians have seen more fighting against the Japanese than anybody else, and are morally absolutely on top. They are confident, man for man, they can beat the Japanese anywhere, and at any time. Their ideas on training are eminently sound, and they have all facilities for training large numbers. I am convinced that very serious consideration should be given to using existing Australian experiences and facilities for training British instructors for British troops in jungle warfare.
Brigadier John Lloyd had successfully commanded the Australian 16 Brigade on the Kokoda Trail and at Buna in 1942 and 1943 before becoming chief instructor at the Land Headquarters Tactical School. In December 1943 he began a seven-month posting to India Command to provide up-to-date jungle warfare experience and advice to the Director Army Training. Lloyd explained that before being committed to battle, Australian troops were taken through “a period of progressive individual, sub-unit and unit-level jungle training”, as well as a period of physical and psychological acclimatisation in actual jungle conditions. A new range of specific individual skills and knowledge was required – collectively called ‘jungle craft’ and ‘jungle lore’ – for troops to live and move in the jungle with comparative ease. Instruction in anti-malaria/hygiene discipline also formed an essential part of preparation for jungle fighting. Finally, “knowledge of Japanese military characteristics and fighting methods was also badly needed to prepare troops before being committed to battle.”
The lessons paid off. In the fighting in 1943 the Australians had demonstrated that success could be achieved against the Japanese through high-quality patrolling skills and infantry tactics. The key lesson was that with careful preparation and the right tactics, the Japanese could be beaten. Tactical flexibility became a watchword of Australian operations, an uncanny precursor to Indian Army operations in 1944. Well-trained, confident and courageous infantry remained key to success, as did their integration with artillery and armour. Command flexibility, enabling troops to be moved to where they were most needed, was key to maintaining offensive operations. Flying troops into battle by air, and conducting well-thought-out amphibious landings, were fundamental components of the Australian military repertoire in 1943. The influence on India Command, by means of the mass of printed pamphlets and memoranda that it produced based on the AIF experience in New Guinea, was profound. In June 1944 Auchinleck attempted to have 600 experienced Australian officers transferred to India Command, not for combat, but for training purposes. He got 168. It was enough. The lessons derived from Australian experience managed to inject into the armies in India in 1943 and 1944 (both British and Indian) helped transform its bloodstock, and its resulting performance in battle, in 1944 and 1945.
A most interesting read. My late neighbour was one of those CMF sent to West Papua as part of Merauke force. But he was from Queensland and was climatised. He said once the troops he met from the southern states struggled under the humid and wet conditions but got used to it within a few weeks, though nothing could make up for the lack of training except time in the field