This country is at war with Germany.

We shall go on to the end.

I remember the sheets of plane which came up and almost blinded us from our guns. Hello and welcome to another episode of the World War II podcast I'm Angus Wallace

when we think of the fighting in the far east between Britain with their allies and

the Japanese we picture thick jungles, impossibly steep hills and dense

terrain. It is easy to see it as an infantryman's war. But armour was successfully deployed in the theatre.

For this episode I'm joined by Jack Bousher, whose book, Forgotten Armour,

starts with a failure to fully mechanise the interwar Indian Army then traces the development of armoured training, logistics and tactics.

Once tanks have arrived in the theatre and bunker busting methods were devised, armour proved decisive in their encounters against the Japanese

and sent countless allied lives.

Well, Jack, thanks for joining me. Let's start with a look at the Indian and British armies in the Far East, before the war.

Pre-war, the Indian army can be seen as a colonial police force or undertaking internal security duties.

It also needed to defend the North West frontier.

Had there been a move to mechanise the Indian Army and

introduce tanks and armored vehicles before the war?

Well yeah they do look at how they're going to mechanise the Indian Army as a whole and they do start to mechanize it. It's worth saying

that tanks are basically the last thing and they don't get mechanized in time for the beginning of the war.

Everything else is actually motorized, might be a better way to describe it.

And it's the arm of the missing link. There are British units like the Royal Tank Regiment and so on. They do go out to India and they do in the late 20s and 30s

there are examples of tanks being used but we're talking about the little Cardenloid

tankettes we're not talking about large scale things the big

problem that they find is is that whenever they've tried to do that whilst they show

...