Jungle Warfare: Tactics and Strategies in Hostile Environments

By Fouad Sabry

What is Jungle Warfare

Jungle warfare or woodland warfare is warfare in forests, jungles, or similar environments. The term encompasses military operations affected by the terrain, climate, vegetation, and wildlife of densely-wooded areas, as well as the strategies and tactics used by military forces in these situations and environments.

How you will benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Jungle warfare

Chapter 2: Tatmadaw

Chapter 3: Malayan Emergency

Chapter 4: Special forces of India

Chapter 5: Chindits

Chapter 6: Special operations

Chapter 7: Orde Wingate

Chapter 8: Robert Grainger Ker Thompson

Chapter 9: Air assault

Chapter 10: Indonesian Army

(II) Answering the public top questions about jungle warfare.

Who this book is for

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of Jungle Warfare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: May 29, 2024

Book preview

Chapter 1: Jungle warfare

Warfare in jungles, woodlands, or other comparable areas is known as jungle warfare or woodland warfare. The phrase refers to both the techniques and tactics employed by military personnel in these circumstances and locations, as well as military operations impacted by the topography, climate, fauna, and flora of heavily forested areas.

The consequences of the jungle on military operations are numerous. Dense vegetation can hinder lines of sight and fire arcs, but it can also offer lots of cover for concealment and materials for fortifications. Due to the difficulty of logistical supply and transport in jungle terrain, which frequently lacks decent roads, a premium is placed on air mobility. Engineering resources are crucial because of the transportation issues because they are required to develop bridges, airfields, and better roads and water systems. Additionally, because of the numerous tropical diseases that must be avoided or addressed by medical services, jungle surroundings can be fundamentally harmful. Large-scale deployment of any type of force, including armored forces, might be challenging due to the terrain. Effective small unit tactics and leadership are emphasized in successful jungle combat.

Military strategists have studied jungle warfare extensively, and both sides of many battles, such as World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Nicaraguan Revolution, heavily relied on it in their planning.

Forests have been crucial locations for many of the most famous wars throughout history. For instance, the Germans ambushed the Romans in the woodland during the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE between the Romans and the Germanic tribes.

The Japanese Imperial Forces were able to advance on all fronts at the commencement of the Pacific War in the Far East. They repeatedly sneaked through stationary British troops based on road blockages during the Malayan Campaign in order to cut off the British supply line and attack the British defenses from all directions.

Early in 1942, the Burma Campaign's opening battles had a similar feel and led to one of the longest retreats in British military history. The majority of British Indian Army soldiers believed that the Japanese were unstoppable in the jungle when they departed Burma.

3,500 members of the Chindits, a special unit, carried out Operation Longcloth, a deep penetration mission into Burma under Japanese control, in February 1942. They entered on foot and transported provisions with mules. Although the operation was not a military success, it gave the Allies better propaganda since it demonstrated that Allied forces could move and fight successfully in jungle terrain far from highways. Orde Wingate, the eccentric Chindit commander, was given the means to expand his command to divisional level as a result of the propaganda's success, and the USAAF sent the 1st Air Commando Group to support his activities. The accessibility of air travel transformed Wingate's operating decisions. Operation Thursday was started in February 1944, when air transport support was given to 1st Air to enable the Chindits to establish air-supplied outposts deep behind enemy lines from which aggressive combat patrols could be dispatched to disrupt rear echelon formations and obstruct Japanese supply lines. In order to defend the workers constructing the Ledo Road, the Japanese 18th Division was consequently compelled to withdraw frontline troops from the conflict with X Force, which was moving across Northern Burma. A base might be abandoned and relocated to another remote area if the Japanese got close enough to it to be within artillery range. In the next decades, the capacity to maintain bases that solely relied on air power would serve as a model for numerous more operations of a similar nature.

Thanks to the training the regular forces were receiving, the Chindits' example, and new divisional tactics, the regular units of the Fourteenth Army were able to gauge the enemy and the jungle after the first Chindits mission. When the Japanese began their Arakan onslaught in late 1943, they slipped behind Allied lines to attack the 7th Indian Infantry Division from behind, taking control of the divisional headquarters. Contrary to earlier instances when this had happened, the Allied forces resisted the attack and received supplies via parachute. The Japanese were unable to penetrate the fortified box's perimeter during the Battle of the Admin Box, which took place from February 5 to February 23. The British again retreated within the protective box of Imphal and the Kohima redoubt as the Japanese turned their attack to the middle front. The leading British divisions encountered Japanese forces as they began to retire to the defensive lines surrounding Imphal, but unlike in the past, they adopted the attitude that the Japanese forces behind them were equally cut off as the British. Because both forces were using the jungle to their advantage, the battle along the highways leading to Imphal had scenario maps that resembled a piece of marble cake. The use of air support as an offensive weapon to replace artillery and as a logistical tool to move personnel and supplies was another significant adjustment made by the British. For instance, the 5th Indian Infantry Division was airlifted directly from the central front, which was suddenly quieter, up to the Arakan front, and was in action days after arrival. By the end of the campaigning season, the Japanese were completely retreated from Kohima and Imphal.

The lessons learned in Burma about how to use air transport to move troops around and engage in jungle warfare would serve as the basis for large-scale jungle battles in future conflicts.

Several British officers, including Freddie Spencer Chapman, managed to evade capture and flee into the jungle of central Malaysia after Malaya and Singapore fell to the Japanese in 1942. There, they assisted in organizing and training bands of lightly armed local ethnic Chinese communists into a potent guerrilla force against the Japanese occupiers. The early jungle-warfare units mentioned above were likely formed as a result of the desperate efforts of several determined British officers.

The unorthodox, low-intensity, guerrilla-style kind of warfare known as jungle warfare was developed in part by the British and the Australians. Small bodies of soldiers and irregulars made up V Force and Force 136; they had only small weaponry and explosives, but they were well-trained in guerrilla warfare techniques, especially in close-quarters fighting, and they battled behind enemy lines. OSS Detachment 101, an American liaison organization, led, armed, and directed them until they were joined in Burma by American-led Kachin fighters.

The Australian-led Z Special Unit, another tiny force fighting in the Far East, conducted 81 covert operations in the South West Pacific theater, some of which featured jungle warfare.

After the war, guerilla fighters of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) turned against the Commonwealth in 1948, further honing their early knowledge of jungle combat during the Malayan Emergency. Special tactics like combat tracking (first using native trackers), close-quarter fighting (tactics were developed by troopers who were only protected with fencing masks and stalked and shot 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 rain fore.

The combination of tactical jungle warfare with strategic winning hearts and minds psychological, economic, and political warfare as a comprehensive counter-insurgency strategy was of greater significance. The Communist rebels who survived the Malayan Emergency were expelled to the bush close to the Thai border in 1960, where they remained until they ended their violent resistance in 1989.

Portugal conducted jungle warfare operations against the guerrillas of Angola, Portuguese Guinea, and Mozambique in Africa in the 1960s and the early 1970s. The operations were a part of the Portuguese Colonial War, as it is commonly called. The Angolan Independence War, the Guinea-Bissau War for Independence, and the Mozambican War for Independence were in fact three distinct wars. The scenario was unusual in that Portugal's small military fought three massive counterinsurgency campaigns concurrently, each in a different theater of operations thousands of kilometers away from the others. Portugal created its own counterinsurgency and jungle warfare theories for those operations. The Portuguese divided their forces into the grid (quadrilha) units and the intervention units for use in counterinsurgency operations. Each of the grid units was in charge of a specific region where they had the duty to safeguard the local inhabitants from the insurgents' influence. The intervention forces, which were mostly made up of special units (commandos, paratroopers, marines, etc.), were highly mobile groups that were employed to temporarily reinforce grid units under heavy attack or to perform planned offensive operations against the guerrillas.

During their engagement in the Vietnam War, the Americans learned counterinsurgency techniques from the British, By creating such dedicated counterinsurgency special operations forces as the Special Forces (Green Berets), Rangers, Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols (LRRP), and Combat Tracker Teams, the Americans improved jungle warfare (CTT).

Jungle warfare became intimately connected with counterinsurgency and special operations forces during the ten years of the United States' active combat involvement in the Vietnam War (1962–1972).

However, while having achieved tactical mastery of jungle warfare in Vietnam, American troops were unable to put in place a comprehensive strategic plan to win a jungle-based guerrilla war. As a result, even though American forces, particularly special operations personnel, won nearly every significant military conflict against the Viet Cong rebels and the North Vietnamese Army, the American military lost the political war in Vietnam.

The major armies of the world, particularly those of the U.S.-led NATO and the Soviet-led