Battle Story by Chris Brown Page A

against the thigh; a practice which would almost certainly result in a broken femur or hip. The discharger was issued in large quantities – often fifty or more to a battalion – and was in service from 1929 until the end of the war. Smoke, incendiary, fragmentation and high-explosive rounds were available and large numbers were used by the Indonesian forces during the war of independence against the Netherlands from 1945.

    24. The Japanese knee mortar grenade launcher.
    The Japanese military establishment did not include a separate air service, but two bodies: the army air force and thenavy air force. In late 1941 the two air arms had well over 4,000 combat aircraft, but low industrial capacity meant that losses could not be made good – a problem that was exacerbated by the increasing difficulty of getting materials to the factories because of attacks on Japanese shipping and bombing raids on the factories themselves.

    25. Making gas masks in Singapore.
    In Malaya the Twenty-Fifth Army was supported by 3rd (Army) Air Division. Air divisions nominally consisted of two or three ‘Air Brigades’. Each brigade would generally consist of either three of four ‘Air Regiments’ and often with more than one type of aircraft in each regiment. The regiment would normally have three squadrons of either nine bombers or sixteen fighters so one regiment mighthave anywhere between twenty-seven and forty-eight combat aircraft in total. Airfields were staffed by specialist battalions with responsibility for the defence and maintenance of the airfield and the provision of ordnance for regiments on their station, while the air regiment staff tended the aircraft.
    H URRICANE F IGHTER
    Designed by Sydney Camm and brought into service in 1937, the Hurricane was the workhorse fighter of the Royal Air Force. Over 14,000 Hurricanes were built – 10 per cent of them in Canada – before production ceased in 1944. The Hurricane was a big improvement on the Buffalo fighters which had been deployed to Malaya and Singapore, but struggled against the Japanese ‘Nate’ and ‘Zero’ fighters. The Hurricane was normally equipped with four 20mm cannon, had a maximum speed of 340mph and a range of 600 miles.

    26. Hawker Hurricane Mk IIC. (Ad Meskens)
    Z ERO F IGHTER
    The official Allied code name for the Mitsubishi A6M Zero was ‘Zeke’, though the name is seldom used. The Zero was built for the Imperial Japanese Navy as a carrier-borne fighter and entered service in 1940. For the first two years of the war the Zero enjoyed great success in combat, being more than a match for the Buffalo and Hurricane fighters deployed against them in Malaya. Although the Zero was not as fast as the Spitfire or the Hurricane, she was more manoeuvrable and had a better rate of climb. The Zero weighed about 2½ tons when fully fuelled and armed, carrying two 7.7mm machine guns, two 20mm cannon and two 60kg bombs. As the war progressed, naval fighter development failed to match that of the Allies. Over 10,000 Zero fighters were built between 1940 and 1945.

    27. A long-wrecked Japanese Zero fighter plane of the Second World War. (Bartosz Cieslak)
    The most well known of the Japanese aircraft of the Second World War is the A6M Zero, a carrier-borne fighter. The Imperial Army’s Nate and Oscar fighters were probably a more familiar sight over the skies of Malaya and Singapore. The Nate was somewhat dated by 1941 but was still widely used as a bomber escort, but the Oscar was a first-rate aircraft more than capable of taking on the Brewster Buffaloes (the only Allied fighters in the theatre at the beginning of the campaign) and were a match for the Hurricanes, which arrived in the closing stages of the fighting. The Zero was completely underestimated by the British, despite the fact that they had been given all of the information relating to the aircraft by Chinese government sources after a Zero had been captured intact.
    Perhaps the single most telling strike by