Pacific Alternate 02 Battle Pacific by Max Lamirande

Author:Max Lamirande [Lamirande, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Alternative History
ISBN: 9798435522938
Google: InIRzwEACAAJ
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp
Published: 2022-03-18T22:00:00+00:00

Beyond Rangoon

Fighting the Chinese in Toungoo, July 16th, 1942

After the fall of Rangoon at the beginning of July 1942, the Allies attempted to make a stand in the north of the country (Upper Burma), having been reinforced by a Chinese expeditionary force. Two divisions had also reinforced the Japanese from the victorious Dutch East Indies campaign.

On the Allied side, General Slim arrived to take command of a newly formed Corps for the defense of Burma, which included the 7th Armoured Brigade, 1st Burma Division, and 17th Indian Division. The British finally accepted the offer of Chinese help. The 5th and 6th Chinese Armies entered Burma from the north to form the left-wing of the new allied line, giving Alexander and Slim around 165,000 men, 95,000 of them from the two Chinese armies under American General Stilwell.

The Japanese reinforcements – the 17th and 51st divisions - gave General Hisaichi Terauchi and Lieutenant General Shojiro Lida around 85,000 men. 15th Army already had the 57th, 33rd, 71st divisions, the elite 18th Division, and two armored brigades (Type 94 tanks). Despite their numerical advantage, the British and Chinese were fighting at the end of very long and tenuous supply lines. The Japanese had command of the air, so the Allies came under constant air attack.

Severe fighting resumed in mid-July, after about ten days of a lull while both sides either consolidated their gains (Japan) or licked their wounds (Allies). The Japanese concentrated three of their four divisions against the two Chinese armies, with the 17th and 18th Divisions advancing in the center, to Toungoo (16 July) and Mandalay (21 July), while the 51st Division (it was a recruit division) advanced in the east, inching toward Lashio to eventually cut the Burma Road, the last overland supply route into China.

Such was the setting in which private soldier Ishiro Tanaka was fighting. And not just another fight, He was back slugging it out with the hated enemy, the Chinese. To the rugged soldier, they were the only enemy worth fighting against, for they needed to be removed from the face of the earth.

Over the years of fighting in mainland China, he’d learned to hate them so thoroughly that it almost blinded him with fury every time he was ordered to fire a rifle in anger at them.

Blessedly, he’d been again ordered to do so in the battle of Toungoo. He’d given up on getting to face Nationalist forces after being transferred to the Asian Southeast. Still, they’d decided they hadn’t had enough of him and the Japanese, for they asked not only to be beaten up in their country but also in Burma!

Tanaka was but a simple soldier with limited information (and he didn’t want more), so he didn’t know that the reason the Chinese had come to the help of the Allies was because of the threat the Japanese offensive represented to their last lifeline of supply from the external world, the Burma Road.

But little details like these did not and could not bother Ishiro in the least, for he was a fighter, and he fought what they who and where they told him to.

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