Jungle warfare
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[edit] Introduction
Jungle warfare is a term used to cover the special techniques needed for military units to survive and fight in jungle terrain. It has been the topic of extensive study by military strategists, and was an important part of the planning for both sides in many conflicts, including the Vietnam War and World War II.
The development of jungle warfare, as understood in modern military terms, was initiated during World War II when Allied forces fought the Japanese Imperial Army in the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia. The Japanese, against common belief, were not the ones who invented jungle warfare, as the Imperial Japanese Army did not develop a dedicated jungle warfare curriculum. However, Japanese soldiers were tough, highly disciplined and proficient in fieldcraft, which made them readily adaptable for fighting in the inhospitable tropical rainforests in Southeast Asia. At the beginning of the Pacific War (1941-1945), Western soldiers who dominated the Allied forces came from their native lands of Europe, North America, and Australia where open sky, rolling fields, and towns were the common landscape. Without adequate training and preparation for fighting in the tropics, they were physically and psychologically unaccustomed to the strange and claustrophobic jungle environment, and suffered for it. As a result, the more nimble and hardy Japanese soldiers were able to outfight Allied forces in the tropics at the beginning of the Pacific War, which thereby created the myth that the Japanese were masters of jungle warfare.
[edit] What is Jungle Warfare; What is Not?
To understand "jungle warfare" in its true sense, one has to understand the meaning of "jungle" in operational terms. The article "Vietnamprimer: Lessons Learned" (listed in References) by Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall and Lieutenant Colonel David H. Hackworth, both of the U.S. Army, provides the definition:
"The term ['jungle'] is misapplied every day. Men fresh from a fight say something like this, 'We engaged them in impossibly dense jungle'. Then a detailed description, or a firsthand visit to the premises, reveals it was nothing of the kind; it was merely the thickest bush or heaviest tropical forest that they had yet seen. So for the purpose at hand some definition is thought necessary, rough though it may be. If troops deployed in line can proceed at a slow walk, with one man being able to see three or four others without bunching, and each having a view around him somewhere between 20 and 30 meters in depth, this is not jungle, though it may be triple-canopied forest. The encumbrance to movement out of tangled vegetation and the extreme limiting of personal horizon due to the obstruction of matted vines, clumped bamboo, or banyan forest with dense undergrowth such as the "wait-a-minute" thorn entanglement are evidence of the real thing irrespective of how much sunlight permeates the forest top. The impediment to movement and the foreshortening of view are the essential military criteria. When we speak of jungle we therefore mean the condition of the forest in which forward movement is limited to 300-500 meters per hour, and to make this limited progress troops must in part hack their way through."
Many of the major battles fought in the early stage of the Pacific War, such as those in Malaya, Burma and the Pacific Islands, were not "jungle warfare" in the true sense of the word. They were battles that employed conventional warfare tactics, fought by large opposing infantry-dominant forces, equipped with such heavy weaponry as armour and artillery, in a tropical-forested terrain. The invasion of Malaya, for example, was a classic conventional battle fought with infantry and supported by tanks and artillery, with rapid advances using existing roads and mountain tracks. As Gordon L. Rottman, a retired Master Sergeant of the U.S. Special Forces and an established military author, writes in his book Japanese Infrantryman 1937-45: Sword of the Empire (NY: Osprey Publishing, 2005, p. 13), "The myth that the Japanese soldier [of W.W.II] was a natural jungle fighter was just that; the Japanese had conducted no such training and the terrain and climate in Japan and China did not provide the right training environment. They were initially successful because they were tough, conditioned to hardship, disciplined, and had total faith in their will." Hence, paradoxic it may sound, battles fought in jungle terrain may not necessarily have involved jungle warfare in the true sense of the word.
[edit] A Brief History of Jungle Warfare
The real pioneers of jungle warfare, who methodically developed it as a specialized branch of warfare--the unconventional, low-intensity, guerrilla-style type of warfare as it is understood today--were probably the British. Examples of such early jungle-warfare forces were the Chindits, Ferret Force and Force 136, who were small bodies of soldiers, equipped with no more than small arms and explosives, but rigorously trained in guerrilla warfare-style tactics (particularly in close-quarter combat). Formed in the later stage of the Pacific War in support of conventional forces, these were the true jungle-warfare experts whose unconventional combat skills and tactics were specially developed for use in the jungle environment. The very beginning of it all probably traces back to immediately after the fall of Malaya and Singapore in 1942, when a few British officers, such as the legendary Freddie Spencer Chapman, eluded capture and escaped into the central Malaysian jungle where they helped organize and train bands of lightly armed local enthic Chinese Communists into a capable guerrilla force against the Japanese occupiers. (Chapman's war experience was recorded in his memoir The Jungle is Neutral, which has since become a classic--see References.) What began as desperate initiatives by several determined British officers probably inspired the subsequent formation of the above-mentioned early jungle-warfare forces.
After the war, early skills in jungle warfare were further honed in the so-called Malayan Emergency (the term was carefully chosen to avoid the null and void of insurance coverage for businesses due to war and civil unrest), when in 1948 W.W.II guerrilla fighters of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) turned against their former British ally. Early British tactics against MCP guerrillas were unsuccessful, as W.W.II-style conventional-warfare jungle operations were ineffective against an elusive guerrilla force. The British were quick to realize that it would take unconventional means to fight an unconventional enemy in an unconventional war, and the Special Air Service, which was created for unconventional warfare in the deserts of North Africa in W.W.II, were re-activated as the Malayan Scouts. It was the post-war SAS who pioneered the special counter-insurgency tactics in the dense Malayan jungle.
In addition to jungle discipline, field craft, and survival skills, special tactics such as combat tracking (first using native trackers), close-quarter fighting (tactics were developed by troopers protected only with fencing masks stalking and shooting each other in the jungle training ground with air rifles), small team operations (which led to the typical four-man special operations teams) and tree jumping (parachuting into the jungle and through the rainforest canopy) were developed to actively take the war to the Communist guerrillas instead of reacting to incidents initiated by them. Of greater importance was the integration of the tactical jungle warfare with the strategic "winning hearts and minds" psychological, economic and political warfare as a complete counter-insurgency package. This was the earliest form of counter-terrorism warfare in modern times. The Malayan Emergency was declared over in 1960 as the surviving Communist guerrillas were driven to the jungle near the Thai border, where they remained until their giving up of armed struggle in 1989.
The British experience in counter insurgency was passed onto the Americans during their involvement in the Vietnam War, where the battle grounds were, again, the jungle. The Americans further refined jungle warfare by the creation of such dedicated counter-insurgency special operations troops as the Special Forces ("Green Berets"), Rangers, Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols (LRRP) and Combat Tracker Teams (CTT). During the decade of active US combat involvement in the Vietnam War (1962-1972), jungle warfare became closely associated with counter insurgency and special operations troops. However, although the Americans managed to have mastered jungle warfare at a tactical level in Vietnam, they did not seem to have understood the strategic aspect of winning a jungle-based insurgency war. Hence, the American military is perceived to have lost the Vietnam War even though U.S. forces, especially special operations troops, defeated the Viet Cong guerrillas and the North Vietnamese Army in almost every battle.
With the end of the Vietnam War, jungle warfare fell into disfavour among the major armies in the world, namely, those of the US/NATO and USSR/Warsaw Pact, which focused their attention to conventional warfare with a nuclear flavour to be fought on the jungle-less European battlefields. US special operations troops that were created for the purpose of fighting in the jungle environment, such as LRRP and CTT, were disbanded, while other jungle-warfare-proficient troops, such as the Special Forces and Rangers, went through a temporary period of decline, until they found their role in counter-terrorism operations in the 1980s.
In the early 21st century, with the decline of jungle-based Communist insurgency throughout the world and relative peace reigning among the countries located in the tropical rainforest zone, jungle warfare is not in the main training curriculum of most conventional soldiers of major Western armies. In its place, desert warfare in both the conventional and unconventional scope has become the required syllabus because of operational requirements in the hot, arid climate of the Middle East and Central Asia.
[edit] References
Books and Articles
Barber, Noel. The War of the Running Dogs: How Malaya Defeated the Communist Guerrillas, 1948-60. London: Orion Publishing Group/Cassell Military Paperbacks, 2005. (This book has been published by a number of publishers, including one by Collins in 1971.)
Chapman, Spencer. The Jungle is Neutral. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2003. (First published by Chatto & Windus in 1949.)
Forty, George, Japanese Army handbook 1939-1945. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1999.
Marchall, Brig. Gen. S. L. A. and Lt. Col. David H. Hackworth. "Vietnamprimer: Lessons Learned." Headquarters, Department of the Army, U.S. Army, 1966 (?). (Published on the Internet at: http://www.geocities.com/equipmentshop/vietnamprimer.htm.)
Shortt, James G. and Angus McBride (illustrator). The Special Air Service. London: Osprey Publishing Ltd., 1981.
Taber, Robert. War of the Flea: Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare. London, Granada Publishing Ltd., 1965.
Interviews (interviewees wish to remain anonymous)
With a former combat tracker, Singapore Army.
With a former Jungle Warfare School veteran, British Army.
