Thunder Run Meiktila with Jack Bowsher

Well, hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Pacific War Channel.

I'm joined here by historian and author, Jack Bausher. How are you? I'm amazing. Thank you very much, Craig. Thanks for having me on. Not a problem. And of course, you've got a book coming out this June, Thunder Run, Nictilla, 1945. And I guess in some ways, is this an expansion onto your previous book, which great title, by the way, Forgotten Armor, Tank Warfare in Burma? Yeah, I couldn't miss the opportunity writing about the Burma campaign, the Forgotten Army, Forgotten Armour thing.

Yes, yeah, yeah. It really was born out of the inspiration from the first book, which is all just very specifically about tank warfare in that campaign, in the Berber campaign. It's not just jungle and infantry slogging through, that sort of thing. And I knew about the Reconquest campaign. I've studied this campaign and so on. But it was just when I really got into looking at that chapter in particular, it was my favorite chapter to write.

And I was like, there's a much bigger story here because there's so many moving parts that you just don't get the opportunity to do when it's a single chapter. So I was like, that's got to be the next one. And the other interesting thing is that the title for the second book, Thunder Run, is inspired by a couple of different things.

When I was doing my master's, where I first got into the tank warfare in Burma thing, was we were studying the thunder run to Baghdad in 2003, but it was at the same time that Putin invaded Russia and he did the invasion south from Belarus, the drive to try and capture Kiev in three days, that failed miserably. And it was kind of like we started talking about in our little master's group on the comparisons between what happened in 2003 in Iraq and what was going wrong in 2022 in Ukraine.

And I was about to start the dissertation about tank warfare and all those three things happened at the same time. And that's where it all came from. And a fantastic time I've had writing it because it's such a great story. Yeah, of course. And I think I could... Well, speaking for the general public, for those who even know a little bit about the Pacific War, I think Burma is... It's one of the last theatres that comes to mind. And I think for the general public.

There's quite a vagueness about Burma, and I think it's due to the geography. It's a little complex. I think it's a little alien to Western audiences. And to be blunt, it's never emphasized. I've read more than 50 books in the Pacific War, and I have to admit, it's always cast to the side. And it's tragic because it's one of the most interesting theaters.

It's very unique. Like you said, it's not just jungle, but my God, it is quite an interesting terrain when it is the jungle warfare with the Chindits, for example.

But yeah, I guess the first question I have to say before we jump into, you know, the Battle of Mictilla is like, exactly why is there a Burma campaign in the first place? Yeah, yeah. And so just to address what you're saying there as well, I think it's quite important to think about how the Burma campaign is, as part of the Pacific campaign, you know, it isn't the central decisive theory. And I'm not trying to pretend that. And no legitimate historian really should be.

None of my friends and colleagues who study this, we know that the Burma campaign is not... The forgotten army thing is a real thing for multiple different reasons, the reason they're called that. They are called that because it is not an existential threat to the British Isles from the British point of view. And the Pacific War and the Pacific campaign, or the Philippines campaign, obviously, the rivalry between the Navy and the army and MacArthur and so on.

That is the central drive to Japan. This is not about pretending that. The Burma campaign though, and again, apologies to your listeners who may be expert on a lot of this stuff, but the main point of the Burma campaign really is about trying to keep China in the war so that all of those Japanese soldiers that are fighting in China, however many divisions it is, they don't get redeployed into the Philippines, into all of the different islands on the island hopping campaign.

That is the ultimate point. I think for the audience sake, something that I always like to remind my audience is at the very beginning of this conflict, out of 51 divisions the Japanese are actually sporting late 41, 35 of them are stuck in China, Machiria. They're not going anywhere. The Japanese have very little to work with. They have about 11 divisions to throw across the Asia Pacific in Burma, for example, after Thailand.

And yeah, like you said, when it came to the China theater, the whole reason we have a Pacific war is because China was not going anywhere for the Japanese and they wanted to stop the leaks of supplies going into China. And here we are in Burma. This is one of the major leaks, famously the Burma Road. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is the Burma Road is that crucial thing is they have to keep the supplies going to China in some way.

And when Japan invades French Indochina and obviously Malaya and so on, but it's Indochina in particular, that's why the Burma Road is built. And when Burma is conquered in 1942, that's why the British and the Indian Army, what will become the 14th Army in the end of 1943.

That is there firstly to sustain the hump airlift, but then push the Japanese back out of Burma at least enough to open the Burma road, because a road network, sorry, a road supply line, sorry, and rail supply line to a degree as well, will be more efficient than any airlift, even in the modern day. And so the idea is we must reopen the Burma Road.

That will involve at some point at least pushing the Japanese out of the northern half of Burma, which is why, for example, and still well, Marauders are primarily focused up in the Hukong Valley in northern Burma.

But the overall point is that they need to get the Japanese at least far enough away to reopen the Burma Road in the medium term, to keep the Chinese fighting, keep the Japanese in China, and to a degree in Burma, but more so keep them in China, so they don't reinforce anywhere else and make the Pacific campaign horrifically more bloody than it already was. Absolutely. And considering the relationship that Stilwell and Chiang Kai-shek will have, it is very eventful, the entire campaign.

And it's not just a battle of soldiers, but certainly there's a lot of diplomacy. Yeah, exactly. No, yeah, the relationship between them is fascinating. And obviously, still well thrown into the mix is unhelpful. But you know what? The diplomacy, Lord Mountbatten, Louis Mountbatten, the Queen's uncle, he has a really important role there because he's very, very charming. Everybody loves him, generally speaking. I mean, the Irish, not so much,

perhaps, but considering what happens. But you know what I mean. I think the other thing as well that we just have to consider is that there is the wounded pride a little bit of the British, the loss of Malaya and Singapore. Singapore is a far more serious thing than Dunkirk in a lot of ways. Certainly for Britain's prestige as an imperial power, certainly it's a really

important reason for the retreat back west of Suez. no longer being British Empire is no longer east of Suez and so on after the Second World War. And Indian independence and all sorts of independent movements across Asia from the British Empire really stem from the loss of Singapore. And obviously, a lot of those consequences I'm referring to are after the Second World War.

But the sense that they need to do something to regain that pride in Asia, a very Asian concept of face, the British in particular need to save face, which is mostly seen as a Chinese concept, but it does exist across the whole of Asia. And so they feel the need to go back. Now, the interesting thing is that in London in particular, they would like it to be an amphibious operation.

One of the reasons Mountbatten ends up there is because he's been formally in charge of the commando, a very famous thing. Another people he's not popular with will be the Canadians, because he's blamed for the disaster at Dieppe as well. Not completely innocent of it, but I also think some criticism is a bit unfair. But, you know, a classic revisionist view is not completely his fault, but also he does bear some responsibility as well.

And like so many people, he's kicked over to Asia because that happens to other commanders as well. It's famous. Most commanders in the North African campaign, if they brushed Churchill wrong, they just get sent to Southeast Asia.

Yeah. Yeah, well, the classic example is Frank Mesavy, who was in charge of the 7th Armoured Division in Gazala, gets captured by the Germans, pretends to be an assistant, and eventually escapes, just, you know, legs it, basically, and steals a lorry with some other soldiers. But he's seen as, you know, you messed up there, so he's over in the Far East.

But to be honest, then, like so many of them, they find their niche fights in the Japanese, and, you know, their various skills in other ways then serve them really, really well there. Yeah, and it's quite interesting that you also have a lot of units that were trained at desert warfare initially, and then they end up in Burma, which is quite different for them. Well, I mean, that's the thing. At the beginning of the war, the Indian Army was being trained for deployment to North Africa.

The expanding Indian Army was for that purpose. So the 17th Indian Division, who are sent to Burma during the retreats when Japanese first invade. They have been completely trained with their mechanized tail, vehicle logistics and so on. And it's completely unsuited. After 1942, once Slim gets control of the army properly by the middle of 1943, by that point, he's completely overhauling the system so that it's either man-carried supplies or pack animals.

So in particular mules, that's how they're doing the logistical service because it's just in the jungles of southern and also northern Burma and the border with India, the frontier region between India and Burma, it's just geographically completely unsuited to vehicle logistics.

And so they get rid of it. But in 1942, that's what everybody was prepared for and it's what goes so wrong for them because they're stuck to the roads and the Japanese are using the jungle as a way to outflank every single defensive position that the Allies end up fighting over. Yes. And of course, in the early phase of the Pacific War, so six months in, the overwhelming success of the Japanese Imperial Army.

Especially in Southeast Asia, it builds this kind of image of the superhuman Japanese jungle night fighter. And this actually instilled some fear into, you know, the British. The American forces and the Philippines and such that they were honestly, they were going from very racist beliefs prior to this, mind you, where they thought the Japanese couldn't do things like fly at night.

Could it they would be prone to see sickness have issues with their brains in such a way that it you know didn't all those things all those things but now they believe that the japanese are superhumans and they can do all these things and that they are proficient at night fighting and jungle warfare which the jungle warfare i would argue not so much night fighting yes they trained specifically for that but when general slim finally like you says gets his hands on the leadership role because

he's thwarted by many characters like noel comes to mind yeah another oh yeah him famously but it's it's slim who who actually gets them to you know learn some basics in the jungle warfare don't let the japanese flank and go to your rear you know stand your ground do not don't route right away in a lot of ways but yeah he he really was the guy that kind of strung everybody together and gave him that punch but uh for the burma campaign for

i guess for my audience who might not know anything about it.

More or less, there's basically four phases of it. As you've alluded to, the beginning is the Japanese completely running them right out of Burma, right to India, taking Rangoon everywhere that was a significant city. The second phase is failed attempts to try and, you know, mount an offensive back against the Japanese.

The third attempt is something I covered recently, the insanity that was General Renyum Muruguchi, trying to invade India, and that opens the door to so many casualties that at the end, where your book will come into it, the Allies can actually launch a proper offensive. And for, I guess, the first time, they will have air supremacy, armored supremacy at that matter. They're fighting on equal, if not superior terms against the Japanese, and it's the Japanese, for once, who are collapsing.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so one of the big things about that is that when we're You covered this anyway, but when Mutaguchi invades India, one of the things that Slim is doing is choosing specifically to give up ground to fight on territory of his own advantage.

So the Infal plane, he can use lines of internal communication to rush things like the 3rd Karabinias, the main tank regiment that fights Infal, to all different sort of wheels, sort of points of the compass, depending where the biggest Japanese threat is and other reinforcements and so on. And his use of air power to resupply, you know, you said, you know, we were saying about how.

If you're surrounded by the Japanese, well, they're also surrounded because they're behind you and you've got allies on the far side of them. So it's just a mindset shift. And because we have air power to make up the difference, we can drop everything we need onto the infile plane. Whereas the Japanese have got hundreds of miles of mountain and jungle that they need to actually resupply through. And it's why the Japanese take so many casualties.

So many of their casualties are actually from starvation. And to a degree, disease, which again comes down to the lack of logistical services and evacuation services and so on. And that's what creates this sort of opportunity that Thunder Run comes into. So I begin Thunder Run really with the end of In Fall. Because that story has been told lots and lots of times in books and so on, and I want to tell something new. And the crucial decision that Slim makes, the Japanese lose 30,000 dead and

23,000 wounded there. It's the biggest defeat that the Japanese suffer in the war, really. It's an individual battle because obviously the Pacific Islands don't have that many troops in a lot of cases.

Philippines would be a different example, but in an individual single battle over a couple of months. And so what happens is instead of slim seeing out the monsoon, which starts during the battle towards the middle of the battle, so half the battle is fought in these horrific monsoons, which, you know, they get something like, I think I've read somewhere, it's like 600 millimetres or something like that. I might get my stats wrong now.

I can't think now, but it's a crazy, crazy number how much they get per day in the monsoon, you know, per day. And all of the problems that has, the fact that it's mountainous terrain and jungle at the same time, the rivers and the mountains that run sort of against the direction you want to travel, the fact that makes you easy to canalise down different routes that you can, the Japanese can fight withdrawals down.

But Slim takes the opportunity that, you know, he knows how many the Japanese have lost. I mean, in a literal sense, but, you know, they've seen the bodies, they've seen the actions that's been reported to him. And so his decision is, once the Japanese are clearly retreating, instead of seeing out the monsoon, rebuild his army and so on, because his army has got bigger, because the Indian army has continued to expand, you know, two and a half million men, all volunteers, by 1945.

Although obviously some of them were in Europe in Italy at that point, He is able to continue the battle through the monsoon and still rest some of the divisions from the 17th Indian Division, who I mentioned earlier. They fight it in file, but they are rested whilst another of the divisions, the 5th Indian Division, who had fought in a couple of battles already in 1944, they continue fighting whilst other units are resting.

And they push the Japanese back to the border with Burma because they're at their weakest because of all the casualties and during the monsoon. And it's not just them, sort of one of the forgotten things. And again, my first big chapter, my first main chapter is about the 11th East African Division who do the same thing. So it's African soldiers with British officers fighting down the Kabor Valley,

which is another route out of Imphal to the Burmese border. But it's this amazing thing where they are trudging through this rain and jungle. It's the cliche of what the war in Burma is at that point. Tooth and nails stuffed with the remnants and whilst they're fighting the first reinforcements, because the Japanese do bring reinforcements to Burma coming from a couple of different sources. Some come from China, some come from Thailand and so on, and some from Japan as well.

They run the gauntlet of an American submarine blockade. So they bring about 30,000 troops. They've lost 53,000 in file, and there are obviously losses up in the Hukong Valley against the Northern Combat Area Command. There are losses in Arakan, but they do take on 30,000 reinforcements at this point. It's not like the whole army is defeated, the whole system. It's not the end of the war. There is a long way to go.

They push through these valleys and eventually they cross the Chindwin and it's the longest ever Bailey Bridge that's ever been built until about six weeks later, which is annoying because then the Canadians build one over the Rhine, which is about 300, 300, 400 yards longer, 500 yards longer. The first really big one is at the Chindwin.

And that's again it's an amazing thing because they have to go over two mountain ranges to get this bay bridge to the front line you know kohima and then in file there are two mountain ranges and then build it at the end of the logistical supply line and then they break into northern burma and this is where uh where the the geography changes because once you're over the chindwin and over a low set of hills to the east you have got this

dry central plain it's like it's almost desert-like, near enough. Slim is desperate to fight the 1945 battle here on this northern part of the central dry belt because obviously big open desert, tank warfare, air power, ground attack aircraft and so on will come into their own here. They've got 105mm priest self-propelled guns.

Again, this is perfect terrain for these people to be charging around the desert, when, or desert in inverted commas, I suppose, because it's not literally a desert, but charging around these deserts, encircling the slower moving Japanese who are primarily a light infantry army, encircle them, destroy them. And that's the whole point is Slim is out to destroy them. And that central plane is perfect. You know, that's what he wants to do. And that's the point of 1945.

All right. I guess at this point I would ask, what is, if I'm a general audience member, What is the value of a location like Mandalay or Mictilla in the grand scheme of things? So, I mean, interestingly, what happens that leads up to it is that originally Slim is going straight for Mandalay. That's his original plan because it's the most sort of famous place, really. It's the traditional home of the Burmese people. And bear in mind, Burma is a very ethnically diverse place.

You know but the central part of Burma is the Burma of the Burmese people the Burmars, traditionally and Mandalay is one of two capitals you know and again we're getting into complications of ethnicity but basically there's a place called Pagan and there's a place called Mandalay, is by far the more famous one to the western world mostly because of Rudyard Kipling he wrote a poem about it on the road to Mandalay and that was why it was famous it was people if If they'd heard of Burma,

they had heard of Mandalay and maybe Rangoon as well, which is now Yangon, but at the time it was Rangoon. That's Slim's initial target. He knows the Japanese will defend it. It's a morale-based target. Also, it's on the eastern side of the Irrawaddy River, so the far side of the river. The Irrawaddy is a huge obstacle. It's three times wider than the Rhine. We think of the psychological effects that the Rhine has in the German psyche, that final bastion of defense.

Going back to Roman times, it's been that great bastion. The Irrawaddy is three times wider. and shifting sands. It's not particularly fast moving, but it's powerful. And it cuts through the middle of Burma. And there's the northern dry belt I've referred to already, where Slim wants to destroy the Japanese. And then Mandalay is on the eastern side of that river. And there's another dry belt as well.

And this is where Mekatila comes in because what happens is Kimura, Hytaro Kimura, the Lieutenant General, who's in charge of the Japanese army, Burma area army, me it's called he doesn't play to slim's tune he he's a new commander to the theater because of because of the failure in file a lot of the leadership has been culled and kimura is the replacement and he had been in the ministry of war in tokyo in 43 up to this point and he's posted

out there and he is an unknown quantity he's also traveled around the west and including with the British staff college in London as well. He's worked with the Weimar government immediately after the First World War as well. He understands a Western ways of war better than most of his contemporaries. And so he doesn't, like I say, conform to Slim's expectation. Slim is expecting him, Kimura, to fight tooth and nail for every inch of northern Burma.

And Kimura doesn't. He makes a perfectly logical decision of retreat behind this massive river and defend the river. Make them cross this mile-wide stretch of the Irrawaddy, which it roughly is for most of central Burma. It gets wider towards the Bay of Bengal, obviously, and it's more vicious at the northern end or it's closer to its source. It is crossable further north. Basically, he retrieves behind it knowing full well that it would be a really big operation for Slim to get across.

He's hundreds and hundreds of miles from his railhead, which is in northeastern India. Again, it's over another major river and those two mountain ranges and all the jungles and so on we've talked about. That's what makes the operation at Mek Teela so amazing. Slim makes the decision that Mandalay is the obvious target. He wants the Japanese to believe that's still his target. But what he actually does, he decides to send an entire corps. So that's three divisions in the 14th Army.

A corps can be unlimited in size. So compared to European standards, it's not a particularly big corps, but for Burma, it's a corps. He sends this corps of, it will be three divisions in the end, although it's spearheaded by certain troops, coming down another valley to outflank the Japanese secretly. They do it with, it's all in radio silence. It's another couple of hundred miles. They use local Indian troops called the Lashai Brigade.

It's an independent part of the Indian army. So it's not part of any corps. It belongs to Slim on a personal level as the commander of the entire army. So when the Japanese are fighting them in this valley, it doesn't look like Slim has sent one of his corps this way because they're not part of any call. They're independent. And so it helps guard the fiction that this is just a normal part of the thing and that Mandalay is still the target.

But what it means is that suddenly when this brigade of Indian soldiers breaks out of this valley 80 miles south of Mandalay, still on the western side of the Irrawaddy, but they're now 80 miles much further south. And Slim's plan is to cross the Irrawaddy, capture this town of Mechtila. Knowing full well that firstly, the Japanese will have sent loads of reinforcements to Mandalay, which is 80 miles to the north.

So if he comes across and captures Mectila, he will trap most of the Japanese army north of him. But the other thing is that Mectila is in the southern part of the central dry belt, because the dry belt stretches either side of the Irrawaddy River. And what he wants to do is, once the Japanese are drawn into Mandalay, he captures Mectila.

And because Mectila is this big supply base, so it's where the railway from Rangoon, which is where the port is fed, where the Japanese supplies come in by the port, and also the Thai Burma Railway, famous in the bridge on the River Kwai, you know, the one that the prisoners were built. Yeah, that comes through Mectila as well. So basically, all of the Japanese supplies come from Thailand by land or by sea from Rangoon.

And also, again, the roads go through here as well. So all of the supply networks go through here and there's an airfield, a large airbase there as well, or a medium-sized airbase. They capture Mectela and the Japanese have to take it back. They can't survive without it.

And so Slim now will have his battle on a central plane. Okay, it's a different central plane to the one he originally planned, but he has his battle and the Japanese will come to him. And so he assigned us a guy called Cowan, and rather romantically in a way, Cowan is the commander of the 17th Indian Division. Now, again, listeners might remember earlier in this pod, they were the guys that were sent to Burma at the very beginning of the war and were kicked all the way out.

They fought tenaciously in the Battle of Infal, and now they kind of have the honor, as it were, to be the division that takes this masterstroke. And the reason why it's such a master troke, and again, this is back to the name Thunder Run, when they crossed the Irrawaddy, which is a huge operation, which we probably don't have time to go into too much now, but I do talk about it a lot in the book. Is to punch this 17th Indian Division with a brigade of tanks.

So about 120 tanks, because it's a weak brigade. It's only two regiments. They punch them across the desert from the Irrawaddy River to Mectila, but they have no intention whatsoever of having a supply line. So this grouping of about 17,000 men, 16,000 men, plus the tanks as well. 3,000 vehicles in total, and the whole thing will be supplied 100% by C-47s, many of them of the United States Army Air Force and also the RAF and Indian Air Force as well, but a huge number of them Americans.

There are a couple of Americans that I follow in the book as well, and some Canadians as well, as well as African and Indian soldiers, and obviously the British soldiers. But Cowan's plan is we do this thunder run, which is a term I use. In fairness, he doesn't say that, I say that. He punches through 80 miles behind Japanese lines, and they will be supplied by air for six weeks and basically defend themselves when the Japanese counterattack.

And between the battle that's going on at Mandalay, which is another brilliant story if we had time for it, and Mectila eight miles to the south, the Japanese will be crushed between the two. And Slim uses a metaphor that he actually uses in a couple of different battles. For any of your listeners who have read Defeat into Victory, they might recognize this metaphor. But he says that Mandalay is the hammer and Mectila is the anvil that he's going to crush the Japanese in between.

And Cowan, who is the commander of 17th, the Indian Division, his plan is basically, well, I've got all these tanks so the Japanese don't have any, and they don't have very good anti-tank weapons or anti-tank doctrine either.

My plan is I will use their armoured mobility and also his superior intelligence, so he's got aerial reconnaissance and he's got men on the ground interviewing locals who are sick of the Japanese themselves by now, and armoured car patrols to find the Japanese as they form up and then strike them with a couple of squadrons of tanks here, a couple of squadrons of tanks here on these big armoured sweeps in multiple directions all at the same time, as many as six different sweeps a day going

out in multiple different directions and destroy the Japanese before they can really get. Organized, basically. It's a fantastic and amazing, amazing battle. To make matters worse, like you've alluded to, the Japanese don't just not have any anti-tank weapons, if at all. They're relying almost entirely on their artillery, which would have to be brought to the forward point, which is unusual. You don't want to do this.

So it means that their potential for protecting their infantry when they're trying to move over distances is completely hampered because they're so afraid of the tanks. And if I'm not mistaken, I do believe the infamous Lunge Mines come into this point of the war, which young audience members who play video games will be familiar with. It's kind of a bit of a meme now, the famous Japanese Lunge Mines.

But it's desperate for the Japanese. I mean, the suicide tactics by Japanese are really extreme here. So in Forgotten Armor, I talk about near Mandalay. There is an instance where a Japanese artillery officer climbs the back of an M3 medium lead tank. And he kills the commander of the tank with his samurai sword.

He then climbs inside the turret of the tank, kills the gunner of the 37mm in the turret, and then has a hand-to-hand fight with the loader of the gun, a guy called Trooper Vernon Jenkins. He actually manages to finally kill the Japanese soldier, but they fight hand-to-hand inside a Lee tank's turret. It's not even the whole thing, just the turret. Honestly, the mind boggles. He gets given a military medal, which is one of the braving medals in the British Army.

He's in a British tank unit fighting him. But after the war, he gets to keep the sword and is now in Edinburgh Castle. So if anyone goes to Edinburgh Castle to the Scots Dragoon Guards Museum, you can actually find that and a silk, one of those silk flags that the guys used to get the family members write messages on that was off the same guy's body. They're both in the museum there, the regimental museum. If anyone's in Edinburgh, you know, I recommend that. But it's an amazing, amazing story.

And also things like, you know, I've got in Thunder Run, I talk about the time where, you know, they literally charge like, I mean, I say rugby, but, you know, if you think about like an American footballer charging through the line. You know, like literally just a Japanese guy jumps out from a bush, charges like an American football player through some infantry who kind of don't quite clock what's going on. And he dives underneath a tank and blows himself up.

You know, it's just, you can't, I find it hard to comprehend it. I've studied this for quite a few years now. It shows you just how powerful the Bushido, the whale, the warrior, and so on, that was instilled in the brutalization of Japanese soldiers. And what's so fascinating, you talked about the Japanese superman myth earlier, and also the savagery that goes alongside that. Soldiers see it as savagery in a way. But at the beginning of the war, they're scared of the Japanese for all of this.

But one of the guys I follow quite closely, Lieutenant Colonel Miles Smeaton, who's the commander of Fifth Probin's horse, who is on the Thunder Run. By the end of the, or sorry, by the time of this battle, he pities the Japanese. He said something like, you know, like their anguished look of determination was something we couldn't comprehend, but we did pity.

And it's that journey, that mental psychological journey that the soldiers have been through from ultimate fear of the Japanese to feeling sorry for them by the end because of the resort to suicide tactics against tanks. And the thing is, the suicide bombs are not that powerful. So a lot of the time, the Shermans are repairable and they're back in action. It's horrible for the crews and British soldiers and Indian tank drivers and so on die.

But it's a wasting asset at the end of the day. And it's just for the Japanese losing their infantry like this. And it's not doing enough damage to justify it, to be honest. But their artillery isn't good enough. Their anti-tank artillery is not good enough. And it comes down, it's so ironic given the battles they have on the frontiers of Manchuria with the USSR. The Kwangtung Army highlighted the issues that they faced and anti-tank warfare was one of them.

Yeah, it's a problem in 1939 for them, you know, at the end of the day. And the thing is, even the solution to the problem is wrong. You know, the British six-pounder anti-tank gun that first comes in North Africa, which is reasonably good. I mean, the 17-pounder is what's needed later in the war. But it's the same as the American 57-millimeter anti-tank gun. And to be honest, by 1944, the 57-millimeter, the British six-pounder, is only just good enough against, say, the Panzer IV.

But really, you need something bigger for Panthers and Tigers and so on. The Japanese never go above 47mm in anti-tank guns. And it's not good enough. It's good enough for a Stuart tank at the beginning of the war, or the beginning of the Pacific campaign, but it is not good enough against Sherman at the end of the day.

And there are lots of reasons for that. The American bombing campaign, the submarine blockade that stops both raw materials coming in but also finished products leaving to supply places, all those famous pictures of Japanese tanks that are now diving spots on sunken ships in Pacific archipelagos. That's the point of doing all this is so that they're not at the front line, so that they don't have an impact.

It sucks to be you if you're facing a Japanese tank and you don't have an anti-tank weapon yourself, but... There aren't many of them in comparison to how many the British and Indian army are bringing to the battle. No, only very rare occurrences in some Pacific islands, very rare.

And of course, in the China theater, the Japanese tank does reign supreme because it doesn't really have competition and it does adequately against the more lightly armed Chinese who resort to suicide tactics similar to what the Japanese use. So there's a dichotomy between the Chinese and Japanese with the suicide squads.

It's horrifying. but yeah the japanese at this point they have no answer yet again to uh tanks in burma and i don't think they expected there to be much armored warfare in burma so uh don't blame them for that but yeah i mean it's like you know you're saying that is that you know i talk about this in the um forgotten armor you know one of the reasons why tanks are so decisive at places like infall and kahima at the battle

of the tennis court is because the the british put supreme efforts into putting tanks, using things like the Royal Engineers, the Indian Engineers, they put a huge amount of effort to get tanks there because they know it's an advantage that the Japanese can do nothing about. The thing that I talk about in Forgotten Armour is the Battle of the Tennis Court is 16 days of horrific siege by the Royal West Kent, the Assam Rifles and so on.

Now, I'm from Kent in the southeast of England, the bit that's closest to France, the bottom right-hand corner. And so one of my reasons I'm interested in the Burma campaign is because I'm from West Kent and it was the Royal West Kents who fought at Kohima. Theoretically, if I was drafted or if I'd volunteered and I ended up in the 4th Battalion of the Royal West Kents, I'd have been at Kohima. That would have been my story if I was there.

And that's always been my sort of link to it. And the war memorial in the place that I grew up had soldiers who were killed at Kohima and so on. And so that's kind of like my origin story to the Burma campaign. But what happens is they hold the tennis court for 16 days. Then there's another 23 days when they're relieved and the second British division then take over, famously the second, Dorsets. So Dorset is on the south coast of England near the Isle of Wight, just west of the Isle of Wight.

The Dorsets push the Japanese or fight the Japanese for 23 days. Over 100 Dorsets die in those 23 days. The Royal West Kents lose dozens and dozens as well. And it's 39 days in total. When they bring the tank up on the 13th of May, by a hero of mine, Jerry Waterhouse is the tank commander, they get his tank on there in 80 minutes. 39 days, in 80 minutes, that one tank is the only difference and that's how they clear the tennis court. Him methodically just destroying Japanese bunkers

one by one with the 75mm gun on his Grant tank. He's an M3 Medium Grant. And it's not just that it's over in 80 minutes. They lose one guy dead in the whole operation from the doors. The infantry that support. The infantry lose one guy. And that's the difference a tank makes. You know, 39 days, over 100 dead, hundreds more wounded, hundreds of dead Japanese. 80 minutes, one tank, one dead. Hey guys, this is Craig from the Pacific War Channel.

Please don't forget to check out my YouTube membership or my Patreon account over at www.patreon.com slash the Pacific War Channel, where you can join the ranks and gain access to a hell of a lot of goodies. At the base minimum, you get access to the exclusive monthly podcast, early access to all of my content, voting rights for what subjects I will tackle next, and at higher tiers, I have much more goodies to come. So please click that link and check it out. Yeah, of course. Of course.

And then, you know, of course, in the island hopping warfare, it's the fire tank over everything that turns out to be the most efficient killer, if not just putting gasoline in cave openings and then letting it on fire, basically, is what most of the battles end up being. And that happens in Burma as well. They have to resort to the same thing where the Japanese burrow into some of the hills, like Mandalay Hills, a good example of that.

I mean, it shows the extremes that you have to go to because the Japanese don't surrender particularly. Yeah, actually, a lot of the tactics the Japanese use for using the terrain and digging into things, the Viet Cong will famously use a lot of these tactics later in the Vietnam Wars. It's pretty similar. There's a fascinating moment as well. I don't know if you're aware of it, but in 1946, the British and French actually re-armed Japanese prisoners. Yes, I know.

Yeah, like a real message with your mind thinking of that. Yeah, all the independence movements you see in Southeast Asia, they're very complicated because you could argue they were fomented by the Japanese, sometimes against the Japanese because of how brutal they were to the people there. But they get aimed at who are the former allies during World War II. So a lot of Japanese commanders find themselves in unique positions in Southeast Asia where their expertise is used by different groups.

Yeah, absolutely. I was actually wondering, so as far as the battle for Mictilla is concerned, what do you think?

Do you have any personal stories or anything you've come across from individuals and all that? Yeah, so yeah, there's a couple of really amazing ones. I mean, so the battle of Mictilla can be split into, once they've got to Mictilla, so the thunder run is this charging across the desert and so on and surrounding the town. But then what they do is there's the fight to capture it, which lasts about four days. Then there's a couple of weeks of the armored sweeps that I mentioned.

And then there's another two weeks really where the fight is all about a duel over the airfield because the airfield becomes the focus because that's where all the supplies are coming. So sort of the couple of big stories in the initial battle when the Japanese fight tooth and nail. And this is, again, what people don't know about is, but, you know, this is a street battle.

The Japanese have used, well, Mkhitila is a westernized city, lots of European colonial style, like European Asian colonial style architecture. Architecture it's brick buildings there's concrete and it's slightly industrial because it's a it's a Because it's a transport hub of all these different things coming in and out. It's not like a wooden Asian, like an ancient Asian city. It's not like that. And lots of pagodas, the big golden and white pagodas and so on.

So there's fighting in these places. And there are some really amazing ones. Things like when they're capturing these things, there's a guy called Fazal Din, who's in the 17th Indian Division, an Indian soldier. When they're attacking some Japanese bunkers, one of the particular bunkers, they decide instead of waiting inside their bunker to be killed for them to come and drop grenades in, they charge out of their bunker before they're killed.

And basically his section, his squad of about six to eight men, they have a hand-to-hand fight just outside a bunker that they were attacking. And Fazal Din ends up with the Japanese officer stabbing him. And the report says that the tip of the sword came out of his back, so all the way through.

He manages to wrestle the Japanese officer off him, remove the sword and kill the Japanese officer himself, and then rescues a colleague before then reporting back as a wounded soldier five minutes later. And he does die later that afternoon or the next morning. And he's awarded the Victoria Cross, so the British version of the Medal of Honor.

And the next day, a guy called William Weston, who's a 21-year-old second lieutenant in the West Yorkshires, so from West Yorkshire in the north of England. They've just finished mopping up, or they think they've finished mopping up an area of bunkers. And interestingly, some Japanese soldiers had tried to swim across a lake. There was a lake in this particular part.

And they'd had a bit of a turkey shoot at the guys swimming and literally like tanks lining up and just machine gunning them as they're going. So it's a really vicious battle in general.

But as this is happening, one of the bunkers they thought was empty that these guys who were swimming away had come from had actually just remained quiet and they start machine gunning the guys from about 50 yards in the back so pretty much point blank range and he runs to one of the tanks who starts to put a bit of machine gun fire down and he then with a couple of other guys heads for the japanese bunker and just as he reaches it he's hit

by the machine gun or a rifle or whatever and he collapses sort of near the door and he's 21 years old. There was a thing in this country in Britain earlier this week where one of the One of the politicians said, you know, like, oh, kids today wouldn't be able to, you know, do this sort of thing. And the thing is, it's complete nonsense because people were saying that back in the 1930s about the guys that did it in the second time.

You know, they weren't as good as their dads in the first world or all this stuff. You know, he's 21. He's wounded and he's fallen, collapsed at the side of this bunker. He takes a grenade from his belt and just rolls into the Japanese bunker and blows it up. and his colleagues throw a couple of phosphorus grenades in there and drag him out by his feet. He's already dead, obviously.

But he gets a Victoria Cross as well. So real, real pretty grim stuff, but stirring in another way, like that sacrifice for someone so young as well. And also that thing about how young lieutenants are as well, lieutenants, sorry, just how young they are. There are a couple of other great ones. I mean, Miles Smeaton I've mentioned, he's charging about on his tank. To be honest, he's a proper old-school British cavalry officer.

I imagine if you're going to think about it, he is the cliche that you think of, you know, tally-ho caps and all this sort of stuff on the back of his tank. And he does treat it like, you know, he talks about the way that the soldiers talked about their experiences in the moment when the adrenaline's pumping, like excited soldiers at the end of a fox hunt and things like that.

But it's not just them as well. there's another guy, a medical orderly who, this is during the phase where the battle over the airfield really intensifies because each morning the Japanese basically realised that the airfield is the central part of the British plan here. Cut off the airfield, the British will starve and the Indians will starve. And so... What this leads to is the Japanese manage to encroach on the airfield every morning.

And then what's called the RAF regiment, which is a bit like infantry for the Royal Air Force, basically. They go out every single morning and push the Japanese off the airfield. Because one of the problems is that they don't have enough men to build a proper front line, which is another reason why Cowan does these armored sweeps. He can't hold the front line. So he has just six defensive boxes dotted around and he sends all his troops out from there. But that includes the airfield.

He can't guard the perimeter of the airfield. He doesn't have enough men. I didn't say this earlier, but I probably shouldn't have done. They know they're going to be outnumbered in this weak division, although reinforcements are airlifted in, against two and a half divisions. But also, 15th Army's artillery is added. You mentioned the artillery. They are outnumbered and also outgunned, including larger caliber Japanese guns.

And this is what they're using to basically plaster the airfield and infiltrate it. So every single morning, the Japanese have dug in over cover of night and before any planes can land with supplies and also get the wounded out, because they're using it to get wounded out as well, they're having to go out and clear the airfield.

And on one of these occasions, after they've cleared the Japanese off, there are still some Japanese further down that they don't realize are there with an anti-tank gun. And as a C-47 is taxing to take off, as it reaches the end of the runway, a Japanese anti-tank gun fires straight up the runway. It tears through the engine on the port wing, collapses the undercarriage. The aircraft dips down to its left as the undercarriage collapses.

And it's full of wounded because it's unloaded of supplies and filled with wounded. And one of the guys inside, and the Japanese now start machine gunning the plane as well, But from quite a long distance, it's not close range, but they are being under artillery and machine gun fire. And basically, this medical orderly, he drags all the guys out. There's a Sikh soldier that's like head to foot covered in burns who's completely wrapped up.

He drags him away. He gets this poor guy who he was wounded in the back and the arm, I think it was, off the top of my head. But the shrapnel that's come through the bodywork or something, the top of his scalp has been ripped open.

But he's still alive and he and I talk about this in Thunder Run he heard the conversation where one of the guys was basically like oh he's had it and this medical order he says well no I don't want his body to burn so he drags him off anyway and the guy survives the war and everything, his head obviously the head wound didn't kill him or anything but obviously one guy said leave him he's had it but he's like no I don't want to leave him

I don't want to leave the body kind of thing and I suppose they're not wanting to leave a man behind and he didn't know that guy He just felt he couldn't on a moral level. It's not like he's a comrade and felt like he wanted to get him out. He was nobody to him, but he still did it. And it's amazing. He also gets a military medal as well, one of the other medals for bravery. I mean, he could have got more, but it's not about that really, I guess.

But yeah, there are loads of great stories like that, though, the armoured sweeps. I was so lucky when I was making this, when I was writing this. A guy who now lives in Portugal, retired to Portugal, He, about 15 years ago, sat down with his dad and filmed him on a video camera for a couple of hours talking about he was an artillery observer. So he was driving around in a Sherman tank observing the artillery.

And here's another one who's just having a great time. He described it as, I was charging around, shooting from the hip with my artillery guns, radioing back to get the artillery landing.

And he genuinely he would say he always used to end sentences in a really particular way in this video in this film footage and like I said I've used this in the book you know stuff like he would say yes of course we had to you know we're charged across and then I had to call down this fire on these Japanese and they all start running and great fight great fight like every single sentence ended like that he's like such a character

you know and you know he's another one the guys that were in the armor, they appeared to have a great time because it's like they're they're unleashed, from all of the responsibilities earlier in the war and it's not as dangerous as being a tank man in the European theatre. Surely not. Yeah, yeah, 100% it's not. And they're having a great time. But if you're in the infantry, it's horrific because it's hand-to-hand, you know, your listeners will know exactly what I'm talking about.

You know, because the Japanese fight with an intensity that is just unheard of in pretty much any other theatre of the Second World War. You know, I'd like you to.

Yeah the uh you know the japanese have to do all these things to try and overcome an enemy that's superior in every possible matter at that point so infiltration always the key to any japanese operation they love to infiltrate they love to infiltrate at night they love to get as close as possible to take away the enemy's ability to use their own artillery etc it's gruesome and yeah the japanese love to get up close and personal you know one thing that i know is it's always criminal

No one likes to talk about the experience of the civilians, but in a town like you were mentioning, like Mictilla, I imagine the local population had a really rough time of it. Yeah. So, I mean, this is very true of lots of different places, but, you know, the Japanese take whatever they want. And, you know, the whole, the fiction of the great East Asian co-prosperity sphere is very quickly undone. And also just thinking about the experience of the Indian soldier.

The Indian army is volunteer and there has been some pretty rubbish stuff written about how, oh, it's because they're all peasants and it's the only way to make money. I mean, that takes so much agency away from them as human beings. The rape of Nanking in the 30s, that's front page news all over the world. And that's what Japanese imperialism represents to a lot of Indian soldiers. To the Burmese, it's a little bit different. Obviously, it depends on what group you are within Burma.

If you're one of the hill tribes, if you think about Burma as just like, if you're going to massively simplify what Burma is like, if you were to make it just like a circle, the center of the circle and a little bit to the south, almost like how Keyhole looks, that's kind of what is the actual Burma people, the Burmese population.

And all of that periphery, which is up in the hills and the jungles, the border with India, the coast of Arakhan, the Shan states that borders China and Thailand and so on, they're the ones that, generally speaking, are supportive of the British. But the Burma people, the Burmans in the middle, they're the ones who are very anti-British, very nationalistic.

And they're the ones at the side of the Japanese. but obviously they realise that really, I'm massively simplifying here, but effectively that the Japanese have used them. And so Aung San, the person who leads the Burmese nationalist thing, to the British he betrays them at the beginning of the war but then he betrays the Japanese back. But he's an opportunist and he wants to go the way the wind is blowing. His objective is to make Burma an independent nation, not to be on anyone else's

side. He's on his own side. And fair play to him. And he's successful at it in the long term, although he's assassinated just after the war. And his daughter also then goes into politics in Burma as well, which has also not gone very well for her either, particularly. But yeah, so at Mactila itself specifically, what you find is when the Thunder Run arrives, because the Burmese are unhappy with the Japanese, they know that really that they're losing. That's a big part of it.

But also because they dislike them as much as they do the British to the degree that because the British and Indians are winning, therefore that's who they side with, they are turning up and they are telling the British everything they want to know. So the British have loads of human intelligence because the Burmese people basically are coming over to this. Most of them left the Mechtila town when it was bombed by the Allies in 1943-44.

So they're still living in the villages around mectila and they're coming into mectila they're effectively commuting to their their jobs working for the japanese often their old jobs but you know and there's some amazing things you know when i was doing my research i found there was a lady called kaisanesa ahmed and so she was an indian burmese she's nobody to history she's an ordinary person but i found a letter that she sent in the file of someone else so there's there's

a guy that I follow in the book called Donald Maitland. Now, he's not a household name, but he actually becomes quite important. He actually works for the British government. He becomes what is effectively ambassador to the United Nations for Britain in the 1970s, works for the prime minister in Downing Street and so on. But when he's a young man in his early 20s, he's the intelligence officer of 17th Indian Division in Mactila.

And so there's quite a lot of files on him. He's well documented as a person.

But I found this letter from this lady, this indian burmese indo burmese lady and she basically has you know i think for for a lot of, men there there is an there is something here that will be familiar she's basically written saying, oh my god my husband has gone missing and i've been told that two british officers came and took him away he's a good man anything he did for the japanese is you know you know he worked he did this that and the other before the war for the

british he loves the british he's he's not a traitor and all this sort of thing. The response by one of Maitland's assistants, you know, one of his other soldiers, he's written a response and it basically says that he's just been helping us. The husband just didn't tell his wife what he was doing. So she thinks, she has no idea where she is.

She's panicking. It's the classic thing. I don't know if this is such a big thing over in North America, but we have a thing in this country where when you're down the pub, when you're called by your wife or your girlfriend or something, how long are you going to be? And it's like, oh, I'll be leaving when I finish this one. And that's normally the signal for your mates to buy you one more so that the one you're finishing is a brand new one.

And then you're actually leaving. You're leaving half an hour later, not five minutes later. So yeah, I'll leave after this one. I'll be leaving after this one. I feel like there's a little bit of that going on. He just didn't tell her what he was up to. And he was actually helping the British. And she panics they've arrested him. Yeah. And I've got lots of tiny little things like that. You know, I like to use, where I can, I like to use letters from the time.

You know, I've got another guy that was at the airfield who was defending the airfield.

Some letters from him. And he's really interesting because you see over the course of these letters, he's quite sort of gung-ho just before he goes in and then by the end of it you know and i use a quote where he he writes to his brother and he says i've you know it's been it's been pretty bad and i thank god that i've i've been carried through but you know i'm really worried i sent mother a shaky letter last week i hope she's not upset and it's just so interesting this this the

tone change it's hard to describe i think it is easy to read it because i quote from him and stuff But, you know, that human, I love that human drama of it and the immediacy that you get from a letter rather than a, you know, some, you know, you know, because I love things like, you know, hearing the audio, the audio recordings, you know, in this country have a really amazing audio archive of hundreds of thousands of people from both world wars.

And, you know, right up, you know, I've got a friend who served in Afghanistan and then he's been interviewed for this exact same thing. And they've been doing it since the 1960s when the first world war generation were beginning to pass away. Yeah. But a lot of them recorded it as old men. So the World War II generation sort of started in the late 80s, early 90s, and a lot of them as late as the 2000s.

It's a long time, and I have to corroborate a lot and read between the lines, try and work out where there's exaggeration or the memory has changed and that sort of thing. And maybe they're sometimes a little bit vague. I don't mind using them, but I always put a lot of effort into corroborating the story with war diaries and all those sorts of things.

But when you read those letters and the immediacy of it, you know, it really is fantastic and the way that you can chart their emotions in a completely, in a fairly fresh way. I love doing that.

All right. I think one of my more final questions would be, well, what are the consequences of the Battle of Mactilla in the grand scheme of things? So the Battle of Mactilla and also really the sort of the co-battle at Mandalay, which I don't, you know, I've written about it in Forgotten Armour, but the thunder on Mectila 1945 is about Mectila. So the Mandalay battle is in the background. They are both huge successes. They are touch and go at times. They are, and again, they're very vicious.

But basically, the Japanese do eventually run out of steam and they begin to withdraw eastwards and then southwards, first towards the jungles of southern Burma, where Rangoon is. And what this basically leads to is the race to Rangoon is sometimes what it's called, I call it Thunder Run 2, the chapter for this. Because basically what happens is the British basically, and again, using a quote by another British commander, John Randall, he says it's shit or bust, basically is his phrase.

So they're jumping on the tanks again, and they're using them to just charge through the Japanese. They have a pretty vicious battle at a place called Pure Boy. If any of your listeners have heard of a memoir that I'd recommend called A Quartered Safe Out here by George MacDonald Fraser. He then goes on to write the Flashman novels, which again are quite British, but you might have some listeners who may have heard of them. They're quite uniquely British, but they are read outside of Britain.

Basically, he's a witness to these battles as well, and I follow him a little bit. They charge through these Japanese things down into the jungles, and it gets to the point where they're overtaking retreating Japanese soldiers because they're desperate to get to Rangoon before the monsoon because they've got nearly 800 miles of logistical tail.

Because again, the thing that is so, we've barely even mentioned it, you know, Mactila is 600 miles from the railhead and is another 200 miles to Rangoon.

And all of that supply line, obviously aerial resupply will be very difficult in a monsoon, but also with the land route, because of all the mudslides, there are two major rivers to cross the Irrawaddy and the Chindwin we mentioned earlier, and the two mountain ranges, the one to get to Imphar than the ones to get to Kohima and then back into India. So Slim knows he has to get to Rangoon before that monsoon.

And so that's where this really comes from. We've got to push, push, push, ignore the flanks, forget that. This is all about just get to Rangoon. That's the priority. And it wouldn't have been possible. And Slim knew this. It's why he wanted to battle in Central Plain if he hadn't had that big army battle with Mandalay and Mekatilo at the same places.

Because he destroys the Japanese in those two places and particularly at Mectila where it's such an important battle because it's a honeypot the Japanese have to take it back so the Japanese come to Mectila to try and recapture it. Because Slim is so successful in destroying the Japanese there when they strike south for Rangoon whilst there are these couple of small battles and medium sized battles like I said Pure Boy generally speaking it's a quick thing.

They managed to get these last 200 miles in about two and a half weeks, three and a half weeks. The trouble is the monsoon does come just before the end. I follow Cowan, who is the commander of 17th Indian Division, and his chief of staff, a guy called Hugh Pettigrew. And the horrific thing, actually, Cowan, like I said, the commander of the whole Mecatele operation, he loses his son fighting at Mandalay. He died. His son is killed. His only son is killed during the battle.

And he just has to get on with it. He's lost his son, has to get on with it. And, you know, I sort of follow that story. To a degree through this chief of staff who was there the whole time. And he talks about the fact that with everything that's happened to Cowan, because he was there in 1942 at the retreat, the lowest ebb, the moment that the bird turned to ashes, and by 1945, that's a phoenix now. He doesn't get to Rangoon first, and it really hurts him, and others.

Other people wrote about how they'd been there since 1942. They'd been through the darkest, darkest days. And when they're 50 miles away, the monsoon hits. And so an amphibious operation called Operation Dracula actually then captures Rangoon. There's another amazing story there.

A British pilot in a mosquito flies over Rangoon and they realize the Japanese are gone because the British, Australian, Dutch, even prisoners in the Rangoon jail have gone out on the roof of the jail, which is one of those old Victorian ones that stick out in the cells. They've written on the roof they've painted extract.

Japs gone extract digit now extract digit means like a finger digit, extract it from your ass because the Japs are gone and they're basically saying get your asses in gear get down here because the Japs are gone because they're all starving you know 40% of them died in that prison you know, your listeners I'm sure know all about you know the plight of Faris, POWs and so on you know the guys in the Bataan Death March and so on you know so you know these are

the survivors of that you know 40 percent of them have died and it's the 60 who have done this and he basically lands his mosquito and just walks into rangoon and and it's you know the japanese are gone and so they they reload the amphibious invasion they get back on the boats and they take them into the port and they capture it now none of this would have been possible if you hadn't had the mectila battle because the japanese are defeated there and all of this then becomes a walkover.

What should be, you know, like they were worrying it would be the equivalent of something like the Battle of Berlin or the Hercule Forest or something like that because of how important Rangoon was, especially with the way that the Japanese fight. Because they defeated them on the central plane where the Allied advantages were in particular tanks, but also in air power and artillery. They were able to just finish the job in Burma very, very quickly.

And of course, the Burma road has now been open for six months as well. So the surprise will continue to pull across there. And the Allies are planning for 1946 now, not knowing, because no one in Burma knows about the atomic bomb, obviously. Truman didn't know, so of course Slim doesn't know.

So they're all planning to take Malaya. Cowan was going to command the Commonwealth Corps for the Japanese invasion, so he would have been in charge of all of the British, Indian, Australian soldiers that would have taken part in the invasion of Japan if it had gone ahead. He was already being groomed for that command immediately after Mekatila and the Rangoon battle. Of course. And yeah, Operation Dracula certainly took its time.

And it is kind of funny how it ends up being the way it does, you know, given how much effort, how many meetings took place and just kept getting delayed and delayed. Yeah, well, that's because of D-Day, really. And all that, you know, they just don't have the resources to send the Far East. But, you know, from the moment that the British have lost Burma. London in particular are desperate to just do amphibious assaults.

And they just can't send the equipment, which is why Slim comes into his own. That's why Slim is so important, because he manages to do it without, basically to win the war in Burma without doing what everyone else thought was the only way to do it. And it's why he's such an amazing commander, really.

Now, in this country, he's widely accepted, not entirely accepted, but Montgomery is seen as the cliched answer to say, the the thinking man says slim yeah and i love montgomery don't get me wrong but but he has a lot of advantages that slim doesn't yeah i think has to improvise a lot more to be honest this is a nicer guy the uh the the tables have turned on montgomery he's he it seems i keep seeing if you go on twitter today he's just being attacked maliciously

by american historians mostly mind jew but i mean he has a better reputation here but like you know but but he's not seems perfect where slim is essentially seen as near enough perfect yeah no second world war it is rare to find anyone who says anything bad about slim or about gurkhas in books except for uh wingate yeah wingate was one of the few people who seemed to not like his gurkha soldiers. I think the problem with Wingate is that he kind of just wants everything his own way.

Or anyone that gets in the way of that, therefore becomes an enemy. And also just a basic... I mean, it's interesting, actually, when you think about racist attitudes of the mid-20th century, is that actually he's perfectly supportive of, say, African soldiers. Yeah. That's a problem with African soldiers.

Which is interesting, I think, because you would expect him to be more prejudiced towards African people than you would Indian people, say, which he is very much, he is also quite prejudiced towards. Yeah. Not unusual for the time period and an unusual person. Yeah, I mean, yeah. We definitely don't have time to go ahead to Wingate as well. That's why they're talking about enough of your time, haven't they? Of course. Yeah, yeah, precisely.

So before we leave, please, can you tell my audience, when can they expect this book to come out? Yes, so Thunder Run is out on the 27th of June.

So we're recording this sort of, it's a few weeks after we've recorded this. I don't know how quick you're going out, Craig. But yeah, 27th of June is released. We do ship to North America as well. You know, we, and Australia and so on. So, you know, you can catch it wherever you need to. I mean, easiest way would be Amazon, but you can go to my publisher as well, chiselbreed.co.uk. If you just Google Jack Bausch or Thunder Run, you'll find it.

All right. Well, you heard it here, folks. Everybody, please check out his new book, Thunder Run, McTill in 1945 by Jack Bousher. And thanks again for coming over to this podcast. This was a lot of fun. Yeah, wonderful. Thank you so much, Craig. Really appreciate it. Great for having me.