Jungle Warfare: Experiences & Encounters

By John Cross

The physical conditions of jungle warfare and the closeness of contact with the enemy pose unique problems and call for special soldiering skills. Colonel John Cross, a life long Gurkha officer, has an unrivalled knowledge of this demanding warfare and uses it to best advantage in this instructive yet personal account of techniques and experiences. He uses examples from British and Japanese sides in the Second World War and goes on to demonstrate how tactics and strategy developed in the Malay, Borneo and Indo-China theatres thereafter. He laces his work with vivid recollections and assessments of friend and foe along with entertaining anecdotes from a wide range of sources. This excellent book offers a perfect blend of factual military history and personal recollection and the reader gains a unique insight into this most challenging form of warfare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 21, 2008
• ISBN: 9781783034703

John Cross

John Cross is an executive coach, author and former CEO of iSolon. John's 30 year career has spanned the commercial, public and voluntary sector. John has translated this knowledge into the design of leadership and management development programmes and delivered them around the world to major corporations, and has acted as an invited guest speaker for a number of leading institutions including Henley Business School and the LSE.

Book preview

Introduction

If sweat be the price of jungle-ship,

Lord God, I ha’ paid in full.

With apologies to Rudyard Kipling

Since I wrote the Introduction for the first edition of Jungle Warfare twenty years ago, much, maybe too much, has happened. Probably nowhere has the world stood still. History is being rewritten, often savagely, even as I am writing these words. Many reading this will agree with the statement that ‘no history is innocent, contemporary history least of all. Memory, myth and manipulation see to that.’ However, the history of jungle warfare may have changed the least of all.

Nowadays the focus of military activity has changed. Whereas twenty years ago infantry battalions usually fought as one, though companies or even platoons would be away on detachment, the start of the twenty-first century has seen single companies operating under some sort of unified command, made up of different nationalities, often on a different continent, let alone country, from its parent unit.

In the present-day British Army pluses and minuses abound: for the pluses, gizmos of modern technology have made communications instantaneous; satellites allow a small hand-held device to tell the holder an exact position; rations have become more varied, more sustaining and more compact. Uniforms have dinky little chips in them so that the wearer is tagged; helmets have facilities for personal contact; body armour, something unheard of since the Middle Ages, is par for the course – or should be – and a whole lot more. Quite properly, a soldier has become more precious than ever before.

And yet, and yet . . . that leads on to the first minus: the closer and quicker communications are, the more say a commander has over sub-units, often two below him, the less initiative can be shown by the individual who bears the brunt of combat – Tommy Atkins, Doughboy Jo, or whatever name that is current at the time. Strange to an Old Sweat: normal, possibly, to a Young Blood.

The second minus comes from another source: the different weapons that are used by different types of enemy or, if ‘enemy’ is no longer a politically correct word, ‘hostile combatant’. It was hard enough in Vietnam, especially with tunnel complexes with an invisible enemy above which at least one US army camp was built in ignorance, and booby traps; there are now suicide bombers and various hideous remotely controlled devices, kidnappings and torture. Fear as a weapon is more common than ever before. However much ‘Western countries’ wring their hands and the cry of ‘human rights’ is loud and clear, that of ‘inhuman lefts’ is sadly muted, if not silent.

I admit that such tactics will be unusual in the jungle itself, but hiding in a jungle environment and emerging as a civilian – as happens in the southern part of the Philippines – to carry out dastardly acts is no supposed scenario.

Much concern is shown by ‘tree huggers’ that forested areas around the world are declining. Certainly the arboreal sabotage in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) is egregious for original inhabitants, two- and four-footed, and flora. Nevertheless, satellite photography has shown an overall increase in wooded areas. Maybe not primeval ‘tropical rain forest’ but a tree is a tree is a tree.

In the last twenty years nomenclature has changed, both for members of the staff and describing various levels of warfare. Asymmetrical warfare is seen to be new, but in the days of the Malayan Emergency, aircraft bombing and strafing a group of men armed only with rifles and with no support weapons or air assets of their own, can hardly be termed otherwise.

Another instance: the British Army now refers to Tropical Warfare, not Jungle Warfare. Indeed, when initially writing about Vietnam, I purposely excluded certain US operations in the Mekong Delta area because the terrain was so barren by comparison.

As an aside, I find it ironic and risible that the original meaning of ‘jungle’ was a place bereft of trees.

And yet another change has affected all types of operations: mobile phones, the Internet, embedded – not enmeshed? – reporters and the ever-inquisitive, real-time eye – television cameras and goggle boxes. Fighting in privacy seems to be a relic of the past. Propaganda – that branch of the art of lying which consists of nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies – has become more acute. Now rallies, chiefly negative because they have been organized by people leaping to unwarranted conclusions without adequate examination of the evidence, are a feature of modern life.

Such differences reflect an evolving society: on the one hand, as a certain US colonel remarked in 1979 after the abortive attempt to rescue the imprisoned US embassy staff in Teheran, ‘You can’t make chicken salad from chicken shit. You won’t get a proper army as long as soldiers prefer home comforts to hardship.’ On the other hand, for many reasons, some debilitating, others incomprehensible but all germane, the Cause has evolved into a weapon against which it is almost impossible to guard against – the suicide bomber. The nearest to that phenomenon in the Second World War was the lack of pilot training in the Japanese Air Force that resulted in Kamikaze attacks as more likely to be successful than bombing or strafing.

The Cause, certainly at the beginning of the twenty-first century, was no longer worldwide and all-embracing Communism. Instead, an unhealthy mixture of religious bigotry, lust for oil and over-educated idiots with no sense of history rising to the top of the political tree have broken the pattern known to me and other Old and Smellies. It has created a new type of situation for which no real and lasting answer has yet been found. Harsh words, indeed, and changes will continue.

But, despite all these differences, without the man on the ground to dominate an area, nothing else can secure it – and that is as true for jungle warfare as ever it was.

Even twenty years ago, the nearest most people got to jungle warfare was by watching ‘instant’ history on television or reading about it in books. Since then actual combatants have become an ‘endangered species’. Almost paradoxically, much more interest has been shown during the last two decades with anniversaries for veterans, documentary programmes and books that have benefited by the opening of official records. All these have added greatly to what little knowledge many had before.

The scars of American involvement in Vietnam are still visible on the body politic, although now there is less scar tissue in evidence. It resulted in a worldwide debate about the ethics of such a phenomenon, yet the ‘meddling’, as some saw it, of Western powers in Asia was neither new nor necessarily more degrading than in previous instances.

The aim of this book is to present a dispassionate and clinical record of jungle warfare. Its theme is to show how and why warfare ever had to be undertaken in jungles; leaving aside the morality or otherwise of such ventures, I am primarily concerned with the military aspects once soldiers have been committed to jungle operations. How was it that those presumed to be eventual victors – the ‘superior’ white races – twice finished up as the vanquished? What did those, presumed to be the underdogs, have that their adversaries from affluent and developed societies did not? As a military historian I write: ‘to identify the complexities and establish the perspective’ of jungle warfare.

But purely to describe the conduct of war without looking at the political, social, cultural, climatical, geographical and historical roots of a conflict results in false premises being drawn, false lessons being identified but hopefully not learnt, and false precepts being followed. It is for these reasons that I have included in some detail those aspects that are germane, especially that post-Second World War phenomenon, Communist Revolutionary Warfare.

I must have set up a British Army record of serving for six weeks short of thirty-eight years in Asia without a home posting. In the first thirty, time spent ‘under the canopy’ was ten years – thankfully not all at once! I met many whom I regarded as better ‘jungle hands’ than I, whose experiences I saw as more profound, whose deeds were braver by far than mine. By the time the British pulled out from ‘East of Suez’ in 1971 – less Brunei and Hong Kong, where the British government did not have to pay for most of the costs – the majority of these warriors, my heroes, had returned to their own country and I, a smaller fish in a fast-drying pool, was, by default, regarded as the ‘expert’. It then struck me that, for those countless others who have even less experience than have I, jungle warfare was in danger of becoming forgotten, mystique-ridden, thought of as being something only men of above-average qualities could cope with, regarded as something vaguely heroic even before the first leech bite!

I therefore felt that jungle warfare would be put in its own particular perspective of ‘modified soldiering’ by tracing its historical origins, its developments over the years, its operational aspects, its training requirements, the constraints of the jungle’s ‘armed neutrality’ that means it can never be taken for granted – in other words, ‘what it’s all about’ – so that layman and military buff alike can see it as a whole, untainted by any hyperbole of presentation, untrammeled by ethical issues, untouched by civilian, noncombatant hands.

Prior to 1939, jungle/bush warfare was regarded more as warfare in jungle, forest or bush that did not need any novel tactical thinking – this I have shown as background. Post-1939, to make best use of experience and research, I have analysed how conventional warfare met the challenge of the jungle in the Burma and New Guinea campaigns. There are already countless books about these so my treatment of events there is from the viewpoint of how the various components of the military machine were utilized and what it was like for the man on the ground, not a campaign history.

From 1945 to 1966 I have concentrated on the Malayan Emergency and Confrontation in Borneo in more detail than I have French and American involvement in Indo-China/Vietnam – while only just touching on Laos and Cambodia.

I finish with a review of some aspects of jungle warfare that merit ‘training emphasis’ and a bold glimpse into the future, with a plea not to forget jungle warfare, nor to commit the mistakes of the past through neglect. The appendices speak for themselves. What I write should be read as a warning, not a predicament – a caution, not an indictment.

Fair-weather soldiers make gloomy regimental histories!

PART I

Setting the Scene

Chapter One

The Background to Jungle Warfare

There were four of us on patrol late that afternoon in the Malayan jungle, myself and three Gurkhas. The jungle was thick and dark. After an hour, just as we were about to return to our overnight bivouac, we heard the noise of an axe on wood. Stealthily we moved forward, all senses alert and tingling, adrenalin pumping. We had not had a contact for many months: now was our chance. The semi-darkness grew lighter as we came to where Chinese guerillas had cleared the jungle and made a vegetable garden to eke out their rations.

We crept to the edge of the clearing, fenced to prevent wild pig and deer from entering, eased ourselves over it and saw two men at the far end, dressed in khaki, bent over, digging. We crawled between the raised ridges of soil to a large felled tree to give us cover. I recollected that that was the first time I had crawled as taught when a recruit eleven years before, in 1943.

At the felled tree I gave out my orders softly, two of us at one man, two at the other. My target’s body was bent over so, not being able to see his head, I aimed at his back. Fire! The bullet struck and as he toppled forward he turned and faced me. I immediately squeezed the trigger but my carbine jammed. I gasped audibly, instantly put my weapon down and pinched myself to see if I was awake. Even as they were firing, my men, thinking I had been hit, turned to look. Their rounds also missed.

Not normal behaviour for any commander but I was seeing for real what I had been haunted by in my dreams: bright in the middle, dark both sides, firing at a guerilla, my weapon always jamming. The man I had fired at had always turned and killed me and I had always woken up in a muck sweat. Here it was for real – bright in the middle, dark both sides, a guerilla hit and turning round, looking at me.

My men, seeing I was not wounded, opened fire again, but just too late to be effective. The guerillas were already at the far fence. I scrambled to my feet and shouted the Gurkhas’ battle cry, Ayo Gurkhali, Charge! – Here come the Gurkhas. But we were too late. The two guerillas were already over the fence. We tried to follow them up but soon lost their tracks in a maze of others. Time and our few numbers were against a detailed search.

They had left a rifle behind them so I turned to the one soldier whom I knew did not smoke, told him to wait behind with me and ordered the other two to return to camp. My idea was to hide in the jungle near the rifle and kill anyone who came to recover it; probably a bit of self-punishment was also involved. We waited till dawn – no food and no water, having travelled as unencumbered as possible. That’ll teach you, I told myself. It rained most of the night. Once a tiger’s growl throbbed nearby – we found its pugmarks next morning – which I wrongly thought was the death rattle of the man I had hit, and a mouse deer whickered in fright by our feet.

Apart from discovering that the abandoned rifle had been carried by our commanding officer when he was killed in an ambush some months before over 60 miles away, the incident was just another botched contact. It was seldom, if ever, that security forces came across such an easy target. But at least we had had a contact. We followed them up the next day after the platoon had arrived and we had had a brew and a meal.

JUNGLE WARFARE

Jungle warfare is something that many people have heard about but, by the turn of the century, there were even fewer than before who had ever been caught up in it, many now being dead. It evokes visions of sweaty, dirty, heavily-laden soldiers hacking their way through dark, dank, impenetrable undergrowth, trying to avoid snakes, scorpions and a host of other creepy-crawlies, while overhead, monkeys swinging through the branches gibber at them and wild beasts call to one another as they smelt a succulent meal. If it is not little men with poisoned darts lurking in the foliage to have a pot-shot at a red-faced, pack-encumbered, sweating European, it is a superbly camouflaged and cunning Asian enemy of great savagery waiting to impale the by-now-even-sweatier soldier on some dread, spiked booby trap or rise up from nowhere and ambush him. A little of ‘yes’ and a lot of ‘no’!

Jungle warfare is, however, different from other types of warfare and is slightly special – as, indeed, are the desert, arctic, mountain, tropical and urban varieties. To me, the essence of jungle warfare is when phases of war, tactics, training, logistical support and administration have to be modified because of trees. It is the nearest to night fighting that troops will get during daylight. In jungle warfare there are always areas where there is no ‘jungle’ as thick as popular imagination would have it. (Indeed, the first Gurkhas to go to London described what strange happenings they had seen of an evening in the ‘jungle’ of Hyde Park!) It is for this reason that mention of relevant ‘non-jungle’ aspects in the Indo-China/Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia conflicts has been made.

What is certainly true is that the jungle presents as much, many say more, of a psychological challenge as it does a physical one. In his book about his time in the jungle during the Japanese occupation, The Jungle is Neutral, Spencer Chapman describes how some British soldiers who were left behind during the retreat to Singapore died ‘not of any specific disease, but because they lacked the right mental attitude’. This may have been as much fear of capture by the Japanese bogeyman as fear of the jungle itself.

Fear of the jungle is indeed real, even without an enemy and in peacetime. A potential leader in the Duke of Edinburgh’s award scheme which involves physical dedication to a certain degree, a British civilian schoolmaster stationed with the Royal Air Force (RAF) in Singapore went into the jungle with the British Army’s Jungle Warfare School (JWS) instructors to ‘walk the course’ he was to take his boys on. Before an hour was out and, still in earshot of traffic, he collapsed. Within a few minutes he was dead. Nothing wrong was found in the post mortem. The only rational explanation was that he had, literally, died of fright.

IN ASIA AND THE PACIFIC REGION

Countries that have been the scene of jungle warfare are chiefly in Asia: Burma, north-east India, Malay(si)a, Indonesia, Borneo, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, New Guinea and islands in the Pacific Ocean. Jungle country varies from thick, tropical rainforest to some patches of open spaces, with a monsoon and, in the more open cultivated and coastal areas, subsistence farming. Military characteristics common to all jungle areas are limited visibility for both air and ground forces, scarcity of tracks and difficulty of cross-country movement by any vehicle.

In general terms there are three types of jungle: primary, secondary and coastal. Primary jungle is natural vegetation that has never been touched and is still in its original state. Visibility is limited to 20 to 30 yards, varying with the slope of the ground and nearness to streams. On the tops of hills the foliage is thin and in valleys it is extremely dense. Sometimes a blocked stream has formed an impassible swamp, so needing a detour. This will need good navigation to keep on the original axis. Tracks were seldom shown on wartime maps. The jungle is never impassible, despite all the old soldiers’ stories to the contrary. A cutting blade is, however, required for clearing undergrowth when making a bivouac. The practice of cutting tracks declined after the Burma campaign, which was fought with forces many times bigger and against a dedicated and battle-hardened enemy, compared to after the war, in Malaya and Borneo, against a local enemy who had a different background and was much less of a fanatic so less liable to stand and fight. Stealth and cunning dictated slower, quieter and less obvious movement.

Secondary jungle occurs where primary jungle has been cleared. No longer is sunlight obscured by high canopied trees so growth at ground level is in tangled profusion, nor to any great height. In some places the only way of progress is by treading on and walking over it. In such places, it can be dangerously hot – and exposed.

Along coastal areas mangrove swamps and grasses also preclude observation and hold the heat, despite cooling breezes from the sea.

Rivers in low country are broad and sluggish but in the hills can be deep and swift. Torrential rain may cause dangerous surges, sweep away fragile bridges, wipe out tracks, inundate bivouac areas and landing grounds. Even a few hours’ rain can make the difference of ‘from ankle-deep to neck-high’.

Paddy fields are a problem in the rainy season, though in dry weather they pose no obstacle to men on foot – only to vehicles because of ‘bunds’, the ridges between the individual fields.

Rubber plantations vary according to the age of the trees and the care, or otherwise, of their upkeep. When young they have been likened to fields of potatoes; when mature their symmetrical lines allow up to 200 yards’ ground visibility and give reasonable cover from the air. Some have a ground-cover crop of only a few inches, others have taller and thicker undergrowth; all are a haven for mosquitoes and mouse-sized spiders.

Fully grown tea bushes give good cover for men but do not provide cover for artillery, vehicles, elephants or even mules.

In 1943 one Indian Army training manual classified the jungle into three different types:

Dense: so thick that a man on foot could not get through without cutting his way.

Thick: in which a man could force his way through with the aid of a stick but without having to cut.

Thin: in which a man could move at a fair pace without cutting or damaging his clothes, by picking his way.

Such descriptions, I opine, show the imagination of a staff officer without experience.

In the same year yet another manual, The Jungle Book, gave dull descriptions of jungle areas but almost always referred to ‘forests’. Reading them, I wondered if the fear of the jungle had permeated to even the training people in far-off Delhi and, by not mentioning ‘jungle’, the terrain would not sound so frightening. In fact, ‘normal Burma’ was officially described as ‘having a good road, bordered by generally difficult country’, but was anywhere in Burma ‘normal’?

THE JUNGLE

The didactic note and dull tone of the training manuals and pamphlets were pallid compared with descriptions by men who knew better. The Australian, Henry Gullet, in his book about fighting in New Guinea, Not as a Duty Only: An Infantryman’s War, describes primary jungle as ‘sunless, dripping, curiously silent, without birds or wild animals, yet somehow alive, watching, malignant, dangerous. Men spoke quietly . . . and laughed seldom . . . faces gaunt and yellow. Smoke fires, lukewarm food, wet blankets, damp cigarettes and a nagging insistent consciousness of one’s physical weakness.’

In Malaya, Spencer Chapman was impressed with:

the absolute straightness, the perfect symmetry of the tree trunks, like the pillars of a dark and limitless cathedral. The ground itself was covered with a thick carpet of dead leaves and seedling trees; there was practically no earth visible and certainly no grass or flowers . . . out of [the] wavy green sea of undergrowth of a myriad tree trunks . . . rise straight upwards with no apparent decrease in thickness for 100 or a 150 feet before they burgeoned into a solid canopy of green which almost shut out the sky.

My unpoetic and practically minded Gurkhas merely said that if the soil in Nepal was as fertile as in the Malayan jungle there would be no need to enlist to have enough food.

While the jungle, dense, thick or thin, captures the imagination, other areas of differing terrain pose their own problems of tactics and operating drills. These are scrub, swamp, elephant grass, rice fields, cultivations such as rubber, oil palm and coffee plantations and opencast tin mines. The dry area in central Burma and the Mekong delta, the coastal plan and the central plateau in Vietnam are not jungle.

The very nature of primary jungle, its close-horizoned, all-pervading, never-ending green of trees, vines, creepers and undergrowth, prevents the eyes from seeing as far as the ears can hear, so voices have to kept low and noise kept to a minimum. It is a litany of sounds and a living lexicon of lore for those who understand it. It is a state of permanent semi-twilight, gloomy even when sunshine does dapple the jungle floor with shadows, and dark in creeks and narrow valleys at noon. It is a state of permanent dampness, rain or sweat, of stifling, windless heat, of dirty clothes, of smelly bodies, of heavy loads, of loaded and cocked weapons, of tensed reflexes, of inaccurate maps, of constant vigilance, of tired limbs, of sore shoulders where equipment straps have bitten in, of a chafed crutch, of the craving for a cigarette and a cold beer for some and a brew of tea for others. At night it is darkness, when fireflies prick the gloom with flickering lights and rotting leaves shine eerily. It is a state of mind that has to be stronger than mere physical robustness. It is a challenge. It can never be taken for granted. It is hated by hundreds. And yet, for those who have the jungle as their first love, no other type of terrain can ever measure up to it for its infinite variety and the subtle beauty of its primordial nature.

Yet, even for those who were able to ‘take it’, the lonely, primitive life of the jungle could, and did, sear its way into the minds of men long exposed to it. They became ‘jungle happy’. On their return to normal conditions they felt unnatural in, if not afraid of, bright lights and crowds. After I emerged from a three-month stint on the Malay-Thai border – one of three such in a year – with nine Gurkhas, I was told I was awkward with friends and that there was a strangeness about me which an unsympathetic commanding officer wrote up, for ever to remain in that confidential report, as weakness of character. ‘Peace has its defeats as well as war.’ But the almost unachievable standard of my men during those months had the power of an epiphany on me which made up in no small way for the negative side of the business.

The ‘semi-night’ conditions that pertain become engrained and it is difficult to react quickly and correctly when suddenly emerging from thick, dark jungle into an open stretch of paddy cultivation or a large clearing where, even on an overcast day, the dazzle of the open sky hurts the eyes and puts the soldier at a disadvantage to anyone already there waiting for him.

Living, moving and fighting ‘under the canopy’ competently and for protracted periods require the soldier to keep himself fit enough to react automatically, instinctively and instantaneously to the unexpected under all circumstances. The official history of the Australian New Guinea campaign gives examples of where it was not uncommon for soldiers of the 3rd Australian Division to exist on long patrols like wild animals.

Such conditions of rain, mud, rottenness, stench, gloom and, above all, the feeling of being shut in by everlasting jungle and ever-ascending mountains, are sufficient to fray the strongest nerves. But add to them the tension of the constant expectancy of death from behind the impenetrable screen of green and nerves must be of the strongest, and morale of the highest, to live down these conditions, accept them as a matter of course, and maintain a cheerful yet fighting spirit.

In the highlands one group of soldiers reported taking one hour and fifty minutes to go 250 yards through thick bamboo. The two forward platoons of one company took an hour and a half to bash through a hundred yards of jungle. Taking three hours to collect water when in the high hills was not rare. On one clay slope, elements of 39th Battalion took seventeen hours