Battle Story (8 page)
Authors: Chris Brown
22. Japanese machine-gun crew.
The standard squad light machine gun was the dependable and accurate Type 99, which was very similar in appearance to the British Bren gun, even to the thirty-round curved magazine. Japanese officers were expected to purchase their own pistols and many favoured foreign-made weapons over the underpowered and unreliable Nambu models. Japanese officers and NCOs were much more inclined to carry swords into battle. Some were treasured antiques handed down through generations; others were mass-produced weapons of poor quality. One squad in each platoon was equipped with the Type 89 grenade discharger, which could fire a fragmentation grenade or a high-explosive shell weighing about 2lb. The platoon’s offensive power went some way to compensate for the lack of a mortar platoon at battalion level, as was common practice in most armies.
Each regiment had an integral gun company with two sections, each with two 75mm guns, and an anti-tank gun company of six 37mm or 47mm guns. Each division would normally have one regiment of field artillery, one of engineers, a transport regiment, a signals unit and a medical unit; however, divisional structure varied widely depending on location and the nature of the formation. A division with horse transport required a lot more manpower so, for example, with strength of 22,000 men, 18th Division was almost half as large again as 5th Division with 15,000.
A
RISAKA
The Arisaka was the standard rifle of the Imperial Japanese Army throughout the war, though in practice a large number of its predecessor, the Type 38, remained in use because Japanese industry could not meet the demands of the army. The Arisaka took a 7.7mm cartridge and had a five-round box magazine. Introduced in 1939, the Arisaka was, overall, a good-quality weapon, though neither as sturdy nor as accurate as the Allied Lee-Enfield and with only half the magazine capacity; the quality of production also declined after 1942. Over 3 million Arisakas were made; many saw service with Indonesian nationalists after the war.
23. Riflemen with the Arisaka rifle.
J
APANESE
P
ISTOLS
The Japanese Army adopted only one revolver, the model 26. It was a double-action, 9mm, six-shot weapon based largely on Smith and Wesson designs of the late nineteenth century. The most common automatic pistol was the Type 14 Nambu, which fired a low-velocity 8mm round. Neither model was especially popular and, since Japanese officers were obliged to provide their own side arms, many of them chose to purchase foreign models privately or to acquire them on the battlefield. The Nambu was quite accurate, but was prone to jamming. Something in the region of 200,000 Nambus were produced between 1906 and the end of the war in 1945.
A divisional field artillery regiment would usually have one howitzer and two field-gun batteries. The gun battalions consisted of three batteries each with three sections of two 75mm pieces, a total of eighteen guns. The howitzer regiment would normally have four batteries each with two sections of two 105mm weapons, a total of sixteen.
Estimates of the number of tanks available to the Twenty-Fifth Army run as high as a little over 300. The British Official History gives figures of 70 medium and 100 light tanks but makes no mention of armoured cars at all, though some were certainly in use with reconnaissance units. The Japanese never really developed an armoured doctrine as such and the normal practice was to deploy tanks as infantry support. Since they encountered
very little in the way of enemy tanks in China and none at all in Malaya, Japanese armoured units enjoyed great success and carried out some daring and devastating forays penetrating positions, seizing bridges before they could be demolished and overrunning columns of Allied transport or artillery units that were still limbered up. Bicycles – either army issue or seized from civilians – were used in great number and to great effect. As tyres wore out, they were discarded and the troops cycled on the bare rims of the wheels. On at least one occasion the grinding, rattling mechanical noise generated was mistaken by Allied troops for tanks.
K
NEE
M
ORTARS
The Type 89 Grenade Discharger was widely known as the ‘knee mortar’ by Allied troops throughout the Asia and Pacific theatres, from the widely held belief that the weapon could be fired when braced against the thigh; a practice which would almost certainly result in a broken femur or hip. The discharger was issued in large quantities – often fifty or more to a battalion – and was in service from 1929 until the end of the war. Smoke, incendiary, fragmentation and high-explosive rounds were available and large numbers were used by the Indonesian forces during the war of independence against the Netherlands from 1945.
24. The Japanese knee mortar grenade launcher.
The Japanese military establishment did not include a separate air service, but two bodies: the army air force and the
navy air force. In late 1941 the two air arms had well over 4,000 combat aircraft, but low industrial capacity meant that losses could not be made good – a problem that was exacerbated by the increasing difficulty of getting materials to the factories because of attacks on Japanese shipping and bombing raids on the factories themselves.
25. Making gas masks in Singapore.
In Malaya the Twenty-Fifth Army was supported by 3rd (Army) Air Division. Air divisions nominally consisted of two or three ‘Air Brigades’. Each brigade would generally consist of either three of four ‘Air Regiments’ and often with more than one type of aircraft in each regiment. The regiment would normally have three squadrons of either nine bombers or sixteen fighters so one regiment might
have anywhere between twenty-seven and forty-eight combat aircraft in total. Airfields were staffed by specialist battalions with responsibility for the defence and maintenance of the airfield and the provision of ordnance for regiments on their station, while the air regiment staff tended the aircraft.
H
URRICANE
F
IGHTER
Designed by Sydney Camm and brought into service in 1937, the Hurricane was the workhorse fighter of the Royal Air Force. Over 14,000 Hurricanes were built – 10 per cent of them in Canada – before production ceased in 1944. The Hurricane was a big improvement on the Buffalo fighters which had been deployed to Malaya and Singapore, but struggled against the Japanese ‘Nate’ and ‘Zero’ fighters. The Hurricane was normally equipped with four 20mm cannon, had a maximum speed of 340mph and a range of 600 miles.
26. Hawker Hurricane Mk IIC. (Ad Meskens)
Z
ERO
F
IGHTER
The official Allied code name for the Mitsubishi A6M Zero was ‘Zeke’, though the name is seldom used. The Zero was built for the Imperial Japanese Navy as a carrier-borne fighter and entered service in 1940. For the first two years of the war the Zero enjoyed great success in combat, being more than a match for the Buffalo and Hurricane fighters deployed against them in Malaya. Although the Zero was not as fast as the Spitfire or the Hurricane, she was more manoeuvrable and had a better rate of climb. The Zero weighed about 2½ tons when fully fuelled and armed, carrying two 7.7mm machine guns, two 20mm cannon and two 60kg bombs. As the war progressed, naval fighter development failed to match that of the Allies. Over 10,000 Zero fighters were built between 1940 and 1945.
27. A long-wrecked Japanese Zero fighter plane of the Second World War. (Bartosz Cieslak)
The most well known of the Japanese aircraft of the Second World War is the A6M Zero, a carrier-borne fighter. The Imperial Army’s Nate and Oscar fighters were probably a more familiar sight over the skies of Malaya and Singapore. The Nate was somewhat dated by 1941 but was still widely used as a bomber escort, but the Oscar was a first-rate aircraft more than capable of taking on the Brewster Buffaloes (the only Allied fighters in the theatre at the beginning of the campaign) and were a match for the Hurricanes, which arrived in the closing stages of the fighting. The Zero was completely underestimated by the British, despite the fact that they had been given all of the information relating to the aircraft by Chinese government sources after a Zero had been captured intact.