![]() ![]() For example in the Malayan campaign, the Japanese deployed around 200 tanks against the Allies. However that's not to say that the Pacific theatre was entirely absent of large scale tank deployments and a war of movement. The tropical rainforests didn't really lend itself to large scale wars of movement. Tanks weren't really deployed en masse primarily due to the difficulties of terrain. It's important to consider that the Japanese like pretty much everyone else apart from a few German generals and Fuller considered the tank to be an infantry support weapon. So was the above, in fact, generally true in the "south Pacific?Īnd was the (occasional) Japanese use of tanks also limited to infantry support (outside of China, Manchuria, Mongolia) or were there instances of Japanese large scale encirclement movements in the tropical regions? I didn't see evidence of large scale tank deployments by the Allies even in relatively large areas, such as the Philippines or Burma (Myanmar), probably because of the weather, rough terrain and generally bad topography. Put another way, tanks were used in "French" style, that is on a small scale for infantry support, rather than in "German" style for large scale encirclement movements. but not for the breakthrough and encirclement movements that characterized the European "blitzkrieg." Therefore, tanks tended to be deployed in multiples of ten at a time, not hundreds at a time. ![]() My understanding is that on most Pacific islands, tanks were useful for overcoming strongpoints, demolishing bunkers, etc. By "Pacific" war, I am specifically excluding the use of tanks by the Russians (or Japanese) in Manchuria, in 1945, or earlier "border clashes" along the Mongolian border in the late 1930s. ![]()
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