Bad-a** of the week

2,255 Views | 3 Replies | Last: 4 yr ago by Rabid Cougar
nortex97
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AG
Old news to many history buffs but somehow I learnt about this one today. Not really a part of history I've studied much (British war in Asia/Burma in WW2 against the Japs).

https://www.badassoftheweek.com/hughrichards

Quote:

The British line was anchored on a city called Imphal, which was easily resupplied by an airstrip a few miles deeper into India that served as a landing zone for resupply flights coming over the Himalayas from China. The road that connected the depot to the city was one of those windy terrifying death trails that twisted and turned along switchbacks through miles of super-dense jungle one of those things where you have to charter a tour bus to drive through it and you spend the entire trip convinced that your janky-ass 1980s Isuzu is going to roll off a cliff face at any moment and send everyone careening to a fiery death hundreds of feet below.

The road was anchored at a small town called Kohima, which was garrisoned by a tiny group of Commonwealth troops, most of them admins, supply, and logistics guys who did their best work with a socket wrench or a ball-point pen and hadn't picked up a rifle since basic training. There was also a small hospital there, where sick and wounded men could recover, but basically this tiny little hilltop town was just a glorified truck stop along the road from the supply depot to the front lines at Imphal. It was tiny, in the middle of thick jungle, and there was NO WAY ANYTHING BAD WOULD HAPPEN HERE GUYS if you haven't seen where I'm going with this yet, so, naturally, when it came time to build up defenses against the impending onslaught of hundreds of thousands of badass Japanese soldiers, the British concentrated on fortifying Imphal and didn't bother reinforcing positions at Kohima.

Then they received intel that Japanese forces were somehow traversing the impenetrable jungle on a sweeping maneuver towards Imphal, and that the men of the General Sato's 31st Division had not only managed to storm 160 miles through ultra-dense jungle in just two weeks, but that they'd also somehow dragged a bunch of big-ass artillery pieces with them, and now they were poised to strike Kohima and cut off the only road connecting Imphal to its resupply lines.

...

The first attack came at dusk. Supported by thundering artillery and mortar fire from unseen positions deep in the jungle, the men of the 31st Division charged forward from the jungle, firing and screaming towards the hastily-constructed defenses. The men of the West Kents and the 161st Brigade, had orders to wait until the enemy was 30 meters out before opening up, thumping the Bren guns and Enfields into the jungle in a desperate attempt to slow this massive onslaught. Fire poured into the Japanese lines, yet on they came, rushing and diving into British trenches and devolving the combat into brutal fighting with fists, knives, swords, and shovels. From his command post, Colonel Richards did his best to coordinate his defenses, aided in no small part by a team of Sikh linesmen who spent most of the battle running into artillery fire to repair damaged radio wires, but the situation was grim from the very beginning at one point, Richards had to reinforce a collapsing flank by sending out an assault team consisting of seventeen mule drivers and a handful of admins because that was all he could commit to a counter-attack.

The fighting was brutal as one historian put it, "nowhere in World War IIeven on the Eastern Frontdid the combatants fight with more mindless savagery" but when dawn arose, the Brits had held the line.
Now they just had to hold out for 17 more nights of basically the exact same thing, and do it without any additional food, water, medical supplies, or ammunition.
BigJim49 AustinNowDallas
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expresswrittenconsent
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Party like it's 05!
Stive
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Wow! That's a wild couple of weeks I've never heard of
Rabid Cougar
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The M3 Grants finest hour...
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