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By Root 6004 0

Japanese and belonged to Corporal Hayashi. Another tank had been immobilized near where they crouched, perhaps even that of Major Toda himself: its track, struck by a shot from an anti-tank rifle, had unrolled and lay flat on the road; nevertheless, its guns continued firing into the jungle. A few moments later the leading tank, attempting once again to batter a channel through the defences, touched off another mine and was wrecked. Small, dark shapes rose and fell against a patch of moonlit sky. Grenades! Corporal Hayashi paternally gripped Kikuchi’s head and thrust it down into the ditch; Kikuchi felt the ground shake all around him. But the Corporal’s grip on his neck had loosened and when Kikuchi raised his head again, the hand fell away. Hayashi had been struck on the temple by a fragment of shrapnel but his spectacles, untouched, continued to glint in a friendly way at Kikuchi.

Meanwhile, other tanks had come up and grouped themselves so close to each other that it seemed as if a battleship, guns blazing, had moored here in the middle of the jungle, pouring a steady, concentrated fire at each side of the road. Time passed. Another tank was knocked out by an anti-tank gun firing from a fortified position. More time passed. Still tracer zipped into the jungle, still the cannon and mortar boomed. The British fire, though, had diminished. The anti-tank guns were silent. Now the tanks had left their solid formation and were nudging into the jungle. Kikuchi could make out other figures huddled not far away in the cover of the ditch; among them Matsushita crouched, giving orders to the men with him. Soon they would make a bayonet charge to put an end to the stubborn resistance of the Punjabis.

Only a few yards from where Kikuchi waited for the fateful moment when he would have to leap up from the shelter of the ditch, Charlie Tyrrell was kneeling behind a buttress of earth in a litter of spent cartridges trying to estimate from the flashes of their guns whether the tanks were making any progress in their efforts to force a way through the defences. If the tanks could be held until daylight there might be some prospect of a counter-attack, either by the Argylls or by the Punjabis of the 28th Brigade who were resting some miles further back. On the other hand, his own battalion had already suffered such heavy losses from the tank barrage that he doubted whether they would be able to hold off a determined assault by the Japanese infantry. Charlie himself had so far escaped unscathed except for a flesh wound in the calf which had soaked one sock with blood causing it to squelch disagreeably when he walked; but this wound, combined with the shattering noise of the guns and his own fundamental weariness, cast him into a dream-like frame of mind in which he found it hard to think constructively. But even if his state of mind had been more normal he would have found it no easier; it was almost impossible in the darkness, with communications within the battalion difficult and those between the battalion and the Brigade H.Q. now severed, to form a clear idea of what was happening.

The Brigadier, meanwhile, was anxiously prowling about his headquarters in the rubber plantation. All the telephone wires had been cut by this time but he knew that, as he had expected, the Japanese had broken through the Hyderabads and had been halted, at least for a while, by the Punjabis. He now summoned a despatch rider and sent him up the road to the Punjabis, ordering them to hold on to their positions by the road even if the Japanese tanks broke through. At the same time he ordered the Argylls to set up road-blocks.

It was the Argylls’ habit to take breakfast early in order to fight on a full stomach. So, having breakfasted before dawn they set to work improvising road-blocks in the darkness, one where the trunk road first entered the rubber, the other a hundred yards in front of the bridge at Trolak (that is, the first of the two bridges the Japanese would reach): this road-block was covered by two armoured cars with anti-tank rifles; at the same