Tank Tracks to Rangoon Read Online Free PDF

Burmese decided that the British were not so bad after all, and welcomed them back; not very sincerely, I feel, since a year or so later they left the Commonwealth voluntarily and at tremendous speed.
    * A table of approximately equivalent ranks can be found in Appendix C .

2
The Armies which Passed in the Night
    ‘You’re going the wrong way!’
    In the high days of the British Empire this had been the derisory greeting whenever two troopships passed within hailing distance of each other. In this instance the motley collection of rear personnel and RAF ground crew, outward bound to safety and comfortable billets, received very little change from the passengers aboard SS
Ascanias
, pushing up the wide estuary on an opposite course, bound for the port of Rangoon. Whether anyone aboard
Ascanias
replied to the ragtag and bobtail across the water is not recorded; since they were travelling to fight, and since they came from the opposite end of the military spectrum, they seem to have dismissed the yelling mob as being exactly that.
    For on board
Ascanias
was the most experienced and battle-hardened formation in the British Army, the 7th Armoured Brigade, the original Desert Rats, victors of Sidi Barrani and Beda Fomm, who had counted their prisoners by the acre at Buq Buq and who had fought the Afrika Korps to a standstill in the bitter battles around Sidi Rezegh.
    Originally destined for Malaya, they had been diverted upon receiving the news that Singapore had fallen, and were now heading towards the rapidly deteriorating situation in Burma. Only two of the brigade’s three regiments, 7th Queen’s Own Hussars, commanded by Lt-Colonel F. R. C. Fosdick, and 2nd Royal Tank Regiment, commanded by Lt-Colonel R. F. Chute, were present, the remaining regiment, 6th Royal Tank Regiment, having remained in the Middle East.
    Already irritated by the glib remarks of the evacuees, the brigade’s officers were somewhat depressed by the comments of the civilian river pilot, who told them that for some reason he did not think they would be permitted to land, and that if permission was granted, no one would escape since the Japanesewere getting close to Rangoon.
    As if to emphasize the point, whilst the
Ascanias
and the SS
Birch Bank
, which carried the brigade’s vehicles, were manoeuvring to take up their berths, the town’s air-raid sirens began to wail dismally, although no air attack developed.
    However, one crumb of comfort was provided by the Brigade Commander, Brigadier J. Anstice, who had flown in ahead, and was now waiting for his men on the dockside, apparently unaffected by the depressing atmosphere. Anstice was able to tell his senior officers that the Japanese did not possess an adequate anti-tank gun, and if their tanks could be got to show themselves, they were easy meat.
    Rangoon was in a state of chaos. The civilian population, including the dock workers, had been evacuated, and, possibly for their own protection, someone had liberated not only the town’s criminal element, but also its lunatics as well, and this unholy alliance was well and truly on the rampage. Nor did this orgy of liberation end there, as Captain the Rev N. S. Metcalfe, 7th Hussars’ chaplain, discovered, on arrival at Rangoon Zoo with the transport officer for the purpose of supplementing the regiment’s meagre transport resources with RAF vehicles abandoned there.
    ‘Fortified by the report that all the animals of a dangerous nature had been destroyed, we made our entry only to discover that some were very much alive, and
outside
their cages! There was a tense moment when it was discovered that a “tree trunk ” was really a crocodile, and a “rope ” hanging from a tree was a full size boa constrictor!’ There was also an orang-utan loose in the town itself, handing out a nice line in assault and battery to anyone who crossed its path.
    Very few facilities were available to assist the brigade’s arrival, and the philosophy of self-help