The Chieftain's Hatch: US Army Tanks in the Jungle Pt1

One thing I like about Harry is he is more than willing to devote attention to significant, but lesser-known issues. The jungles of the Pacific are justifiably associated with infantry actions, but the tanks played no small role either. Anyway, I am pleased to hand over the keyboard to him for this two-parter. - The Chieftain

Article by Harry Yeide

US Army Tanks in the Jungle in World War II

The US Army did not have a doctrine for using tanks in jungles when it entered the war. If someone had told the masters of doctrine at Fort Knox that somebody was going to, they probably would have just laughed. The 192d and 194th Tank battalions sometimes fought in jungle conditions during the futile defense of the Philippines after the Japanese invasion in December 1941, but Luzon’s looked more like Europe’s than did many islands in the Southwest Pacific. Luzon, for example, had roads. Only the US Marine Corps employed tanks on Guadalcanal, so the army learned nothing from the battle that would help it use tanks on the next jungle-clad island on which the Americans would have to fight the Japanese: Bougainville in the Solomons.

The Battle for Bougainville

The 3d Marine Division on 1 October 1943 had landed on the west coast of Bougainville. In November, the 37th Infantry Division joined the Marines. The 754th Tank Battalion arrived on 6 January 1944, and the Americal Division, with which the tankers had partnered while training on New Caledonia, disembarked a week later. The tank battalion was subordinated to XIV Corps rather than either of the infantry divisions, and initially it deployed to secure the perimeter at Empress Augusta Bay as corps reserve.

Soldiers on the scene were going to have to come up with a way to use tanks with the infantry on the fly, largely through trial and error. Planners at XIV Corps drew on lessons learned during tank-infantry training conducted on Guadalcanal before the operation and had gathered what information they could on the prior use of tanks to support infantry in the Pacific. They implemented a training program for the tank-infantry-engineer teams the corps intended to use in Bougainville’s rain-soaked jungles. “This [combat] experience has been limited both in number of times tanks have been used and in number of tanks used in any one attack,” the corps noted in a training memorandum issued on 20 January. “Therefore, the principles enumerated cannot be considered as final.”

Some of the concepts taught on Bougainville were old-hat, such as using tanks only on appropriate terrain. Others were novel. “In the jungle, the firepower of the tank assumes far greater importance due to the inherent limitations of maneuver and shock action. Therefore a portion of the tanks must be formed in line in order to exploit maximum firepower.” Combat experience had shown that 37mm canister rounds and machine guns could clear jungle growth to reveal pillbox openings. High-explosive rounds and flamethrowers could then be fired through the opening or, failing that, armor-piercing rounds often created a hole big enough for HE fire.

Formations had to be extremely simple to permit any control, and tanks were to be pre-positioned behind the line of departure. Advances had to be short and by bounds with frequent halts for reorganization and reorientation.

The corps mandated that tanks be used en masse, at least one company at a time. This notion doubtless reflected the hand of some unrecorded armored officer, trained in Fort Knox notions of tank warfare, and it was so inapplicable in the jungle that it was among the first to be ditched in practice. Planners said the infantry had to protect the tanks during approach, attack, and withdrawal, and the tanks had to support the “doughboys,” as tankers called the infantry, by fire. This insight was the heart of armored warfare in the jungle.

Training emphasized that the infantry and tanks maintain constant communication, but the means were primitive. The armor and the infantry commanders were to establish a radio link at the tank company-infantry battalion level (only possible if the tankers loaned a radio to the doughboys). At the tank platoon level, a sound-powered or field telephone was to be run between each tank and the local infantry commander by taping the phone wire to a light cable towed by the tank.

Engineers were crucial to the team to help tanks overcome terrain obstacles, such as by using bulldozers to clear paths or by bridging streams. In cases where mutually supporting pillboxes could be bypassed, small engineer-tank-infantry teams were to destroy them.[1]

The tankers saw their first action on 30 January with the Americal Division’s 132d Infantry, before any of the new training could take place. The operation featured massed use of armor—twenty light tanks—to support the GIs. The regiment’s journal indicates that the tanks advanced some 200 yards beyond the perimeter, stopped, and shelled Japanese positions, accounting for eleven pillboxes. A Japanese 90mm gun destroyed one tank, and a second bogged down and was abandoned. At least on one flank, a squad of infantry provided effective cover for a platoon of tanks.[2]

The infantry and tankers had undergone XIV Corps’ training regimen and received their allotment of Sherman tanks by early March, when the Japanese Seventeenth Army launched a desperate and ultimately pointless counterattack to eliminate the XIV Corps lodgment, which was only 8,000 yards deep. The Japanese confronted a daunting objective, for the American line consisted of fortified pillboxes and firing positions, protected by barbed wire and minefields. The first serious Japanese attacks hit before dawn on 9 March. On 12 March, elements of the Japanese 45th Infantry Division attacked the 37th Division’s 129th Infantry on a narrow front. The American regiment held a stretch of low ground in the center of the division line, where the Japanese established a salient 200 yards deep and 100 yards wide into the 2d Battalion’s line. The Japanese drove the GIs out of seven pillboxes, and efforts to retake the ground recovered only two pillboxes.

The next morning, the Japanese attacked again and grabbed another pillbox. At 0945 hours, the 1st Platoon, Company C, 754th Tank Battalion, which consisted of three Shermans and two light tanks, arrived to support a counterattack using the new tactics. Major General Oscar Griswold, XIV Corps commanding general, had released the tanks with the stipulation that they be used in an attack rather than defense. The tanks moved out as expected, but the infantry failed to stay close or to designate targets, and the sally broke down. The tanks had difficulty firing at the Japanese, who were hunkered down in ravines with steep slopes. The team tried again at 1315 hours, and again the infantry failed to stick close. Japanese infantry surrounded two tanks for a few nail-biting minutes but were driven off.

The 2d Platoon—also consisting of three medium and two light tanks—arrived to relieve the 1st Platoon, and at 1700 hours, the team made its third attempt. This time, the infantry stuck close to the tanks and designated targets by telephone and colored smoke. The tanks approached within fifteen yards of the Japanese positions and hit them with 75mm and machine-gun fire. One 75mm round killed eighteen enemy soldiers sheltering in the roots of a Banyan tree. The combined assault reclaimed the former line with hardly any losses among the doughboys.

The Japanese on 15 March again penetrated the line in the 2d Battalion’s sector and seized a pillbox. A counterattack supported by the 2d Platoon’s tanks failed because even infantry NCOs riding in the tanks could not distinguish between the pillboxes held by friend and foe. The tanks fired at visible targets from a distance, but the Japanese had moved in heavy weapons and held firm.

The tank-infantry team tried again at 1635 hours. “Coordination between infantry and tanks was good,” a corps report related, “until several telephones were shot away. Although infantry accompanied the tanks, close-in protection was not continuous, and the enemy succeeding in exploding two mines on the tanks. . . . At one point, a group of enemy swarmed onto one of the assault tanks; several well-placed charges of canister from the support tanks swept them away without damage to the assault tanks. When the fierce fighting ended at dark, our forces had completely annihilated the enemy.” One hundred ninety Japanese dead were counted within the original American line.

The whole cycle repeated itself on 17 March. In the American counterattack, “ideal coordination between the tank platoon and its supporting infantry platoon was realized,” XIV Corps reported. “Infantry squad leaders could see the fresh dirt which indicated enemy entrenchments, halted the tanks just short of these, tossed out colored smoke grenades, and gave directions for fire. 75mm and 37mm shells blew the enemy from the ground. Jap machine guns delivered a stream of fire against the tanks but inflicted no damage. Infantry quickly spotted the gun positions, some of which were only fifteen yards off on the flank. These were designated as targets to the tanks and were quickly knocked out. By 0950, our [main line of resistance] was restored, and 200 enemy dead were counted within our wire.”[3] (The 754th, like most battalions in the Pacific theater, put rubber block or rubber chevron tracks on the tanks. These proved better than steel chevron tracks for gripping mud.[4])

On 4 April, after having tested its ideas in combat, XIV Corps issued a memorandum that concluded most of its doctrine had proved sound. It had nevertheless refined its model attack formation. The new infantry-tank-engineer team consisted of one “platoon” of tanks (in fact an ad hoc platoon consisting of three medium and three light tanks), a platoon of infantry, and a few attached engineers. Three medium tanks led the assault spread across a frontage of fifty yards. Their mission was to advance slowly, firing cannons and machine guns to drive the enemy to cover and to strip camouflage from pillboxes. A second echelon of two light tanks followed by twenty-five yards, each behind a medium tank on one flank. The light tank could fire the extremely useful canister round, which the medium tank could not. Their mission was to knock out bypassed pillboxes, shoot snipers from treetops, and to protect the medium tanks using machine guns and canister fire from attack by foot troops carrying magnetic mines or charges. Two GIs acting as target designators, a telephone orderly from the tank battalion attached to the squad leader and talking to the tank crew through a field telephone, a squad of riflemen and BAR men, and a few engineers with demolitions and flamethrowers walked immediately behind in a wedge formation to avoid canalization in the tracks of the tanks. The designators showed the tankers what to shoot, while the others rooted out enemy infantry and protected the tanks from close infantry assault. The platoon reserve and a third light tank came last. An entire infantry company could be arrayed with three such formations side by side.

The target designators were an effective invention. “Tanks proved to be almost blind in thick jungle,” the corps noted. Tracer fire proved inadequate for designating targets such as well-hidden pillboxes. A red or violet smoke grenade only obscured the target. Trial and error showed that if the grenade’s fuse was unscrewed and half the charge removed, the level of smoke was just right. Target designators either tossed the modified grenades by hand or fired rifle grenades at longer ranges.

In a jungle advance, tanks could operate for about three hours before needing reservicing. Typically, the tanks could conduct two such sorties during the day. The pace of jungle combat—tanks advanced in first gear for only twenty-five to seventy-five yards before stopping—was tough on the engines and could result in vapor lock.

Communication plans had fallen short of needs. Only one fix had worked under fire on Bougainville: Placing an EE-8 field telephone inside the each tank’s turret, and running a wire to a handset mounted on the rear of the tank. The soldiers had learned that if the box itself were strapped outside the tank, enemy fire would damage it. The telephone orderly from the tank battalion, armed only with a pistol, could translate the wished of each infantry squad leader into words the tank crew would understand.[5]

37th Infantry Division GIs on Bougainville advance behind a Sherman belonging to the 754th Tank Battalion on 16 March 1944. They are using a formation developed on the island for jungle warfare, with target designators at the rear corners of the Sherman and riflemen, BAR men, and engineers in a wedge behind. (Signal Corps photo)

New Guinea: Hell in the Heat

In small-island jungle-type warfare, the relation of tanks and infantry should be comparable to that of Siamese twins.

Lt. Col. W. M. Rodgers, 710th Tank Battalion

While vast amphibious operations were taking place at Saipan and Normandy in June 1944, separate tank battalions were just reaching the southwest and central Pacific in growing numbers. Like a boxer hitting with his left and then his right, the Southwest Pacific forces under General Douglass MacArthur drove toward Formosa, while the Pacific Ocean forces under Admiral Chester Nimitz carved a path directly toward the Japanese home islands.

The New Guinea operation was the first stepping-stone to MacArthur’s planned re-conquest of Leyte in the Philippines. “The campaign on New Guinea,” observed a U.S. Army history, “is all but forgotten except by those who served there.” The island had everything a soldier might hate: Heat, torrential rains, thick jungle, disease, and a tenacious enemy. Australian and American forces had never been ejected from the island, and by mid-1944 had reclaimed considerable ground from the Japanese invaders.[6]

The 44th Tank Battalion was the first separate battalion to arrive in the southwest Pacific and the first to join Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army, which by June 1944 had pushed up the New Guinea coast to the offshore island of Biak, some 900 nautical miles southeast of Mindanao Island in the Philippines.[7]

The 44th had become a separate tank battalion when the 12th Armored Division released it upon its arrival at its port of embarkation in Vancouver in March 1944. The battalion had arrived at Milne Bay, Dutch New Guinea, on 21 April 1944, having adopted the unit slogan “Wolf Pack” after learning the signature wolf call used by the Dutch crew that carried them across the Pacific.

During the last week of May, the battalion sent a composite tank crew to fight on Biak Island with the 603d Tank Company to gain battle experience. The 603d Tank Company on the 28th fought the first tank battle in the southwest Pacific, when a platoon of Shermans chased off some Japanese light tanks. The next day, the American Shermans destroyed seven of the flimsy Japanese tanks.

On 3 June, Company C parted from the battalion—after strenuous objections from the company’s officers—and shipped to New Guinea, first to Hollandia and then to join the 6th Infantry Division in the Wadke Island-Sarmi area on the northwest coat. The 6th Division had landed on the New Guinea in mid-June to relieve the 41st Infantry Division, which had been supported by only a single platoon of the 603d Tank Company. The Company C tanks deployed along the “No Name River” with the GIs, and the tankers settled in for a nervous first night. Shortly after midnight, a jumpy sergeant opened fire on an imagined Japanese gun, which set off a storm of shooting that punctured the drums in the company’s fuel depot.

Serious business followed. The 1st and 20th Infantry regiments attacked vigorously westward on 20 June to capture an objective known as Lone Tree Hill, which overlooks the north coast between the Snaky River and the Maffin airfield and which was defended by elements of the Japanese 36th Infantry Division, who had beaten off an attempt in May by the 41st Division to take the heights. An LST transported two tank platoons across the Tor River, one of which was attached to the 1st Infantry and the other the 20th Infantry. The next day, the 3d Platoon worked with the 1st Infantry Regiment’s 3d Battalion, destroying Japanese pillboxes, while the 1st Platoon knocked a path through the jungle for the 20th Infantry’s 3d Battalion toward Lone Tree Hill. The 1st Platoon tanks were held up by the Snaky River just east of Lone Tree Hill until engineers arrived to fill in the cut, and then the Shermans plowed through to the far side ahead of the infantry.

Here, the tanks encountered fierce resistance, and the five tanks opened fire on the green-clad flanks of Lone Tree Hill to cover the infantry. The company’s history recorded the outfit’s baptism of fire: “The tanks destroyed all active pillboxes, machine guns, plus numerous Japs. Carl Fisher as bow gunner in Death Dealer, Sgt. [Paul] Elkins’ tank, sighted a Jap leaving his foxhole to seek better security behind a tree. Halfway to the tree, tracers from Fisher’s gun finally caught up with the Jap, almost tearing him in half.” One tank threw a track, and sniper and mortar fire was so heavy that the crew had to remove the firing mechanism of the gun and abandon the Sherman.

The 3d Battalion was unable to form a perimeter and pulled back across the Snaky River for the night. The next day, the 3d Battalion, followed by the 1st Battalion, seized positions on Lone Tree Hill. The 3d Platoon tankers were sent alone into enemy territory, an action that amounted to a raid, after which the tanks returned.

The Japanese began a series of vicious counterattacks that succeeded in cutting off the 3d Battalion, and the 20th Infantry Regiment’s GIs became embroiled in the toughest fight of their lives—bereft of tank support because no suitable route to the top of the hill was available. On 24 June, the 1st Infantry Regiment’s 3d Battalion joined the 20th Infantry with orders to conduct a flanking amphibious operation around Rocky Point, which extended into Maffin Bay from Lone Tree Hill, to force the withdrawal of the enemy to the west.

The 6th Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop, which had been equipped with amtanks and amtracs, ferried Companies I and K to a beach below a cliff honeycombed with caves hiding Japanese guns, where the doughboys were pinned down with heavy losses. The 3d Platoon tankers received a call for help. The tanks were ferried by boat to the beach, where they offloaded but could not advance beyond the sand because of an embankment. The company’s history recorded, “The only alternative was to line the tanks on the beach facing into the jungle. From this position, they fired into the jungle with 75s and machine guns. . . . The tanks stayed on the beach with the infantry all that night. We could not open the hatches because of mortar fire, and the tanks became so warm inside that the men could hardly stand it. Several got sick from the heat, and each crew drank over five gallons of water each.” The next day, other infantry elements reached the trapped men; the fight around Lone Tree Hill had cost 700 casualties.[8]

The physical misery experienced by these tankers in conditions of high heat and humidity were to prove common in the Pacific theater. A post-war study of ten armored battalions by the Pacific Warfare Board concluded that carbon-monoxide buildup from gun fumes played a major role in making crewmen sick, which was a particular problem when the turret was buttoned up. Malaise, nausea, and vomiting were common, and almost every unit reported cases of men passing out in combat. The most common firing pattern contributed by rapidly building up fumes: Gunners typically fired five to ten bursts as quickly as possible—one minute or less—as targets were spotted, and firing forty rounds in ten to fifteen minutes was common.[9]

Company C next supported the drive toward Maffin airfield, just beyond Hill 265. The company history recorded an example of how decisive tanks could be against the often lightly armed Japanese: “[Hill 265] was a large hill covered by dense jungle and high grass. The grass made perfect camouflage for enemy machine guns and snipers. Dug in on this hill, the Japanese commanded every approach and were effectively supported with artillery and mortars. There were no enemy guns large enough to be dangerous to our tanks, so we moved forward spraying the grass with machine guns. At the foot of the hill, we turned our guns upward and raked the hilltop with 75mm and machine-gun fire. This was too much for the Japs, and they beat a hasty retreat. The infantry quickly took up the chase. . . .”

After weeks of combat, the company was moved to Maffin Bay for rest and relaxation. Four Australian officers appeared to study the use of medium tanks in the jungle and learn about the company, especially discipline and morale. “Our discipline was poor,” noted the company’s history, “but morale was quite high.” Morale jumped higher when the crews received their first beer since leaving the States.[10]

End of Part 1

Further Reading

See my website: World War II History by Harry Yeide

See the book from which this article derives: The Infantry's Armor