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Japanese Armored Personnel Carriers

It is tempting to examine Imperial Japanese "armored personnel carriers" of the Pacific War in search of precursors of modern APCs. The history of tanks is frequently written through the rear view mirror, with the inevitable emergence the modern tank archetype - single major caliber gun mounted in a rotating turret on a tracked chassis - superceding other less successful configurations. It is tempting to follow this line of inquiry with early Japanese APCs, some of which appear startlingly modern in some photographs. But the idea that these vehicles were direct antecedents of modern APCs does not withstand close scrutiny.

A Whig History of Japanese Armored Personnel Carriers

A discussion of Imperial Japanese "armored personnel carriers" of the Pacific War is a good place for a digression on historiography. Such armored personnel carriers have generally comprised track vehicles. The advantages that are derived from the use of track vehicles in areas of highly adverse terrain are well known. The use of track vehicles came into vogue during World Wars I and II which were fought over vast areas and under such differing adverse terrains as beaches, farmlands, trenches, mountains, etc. Generally, armored personnel carriers have fully enclosed armored hulls that provide more protection than regular thin-skinned vehicles, but not as much as a tank. And armored personnel carriers may or may not mount weapons, but these weapons would range from machine guns to minor caliber cannons.

The Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus wrote that "it is history's highest function to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.... the purpose is not to relate at length every motion, but only such as were conspicuous for excellence or notorious for infamy...."

Historical inquiry that is charged only with the task of providing historical antecedents to current practice is a key assumption of what the historian Herbert Butterfield (1931) called “Whig history” — in which a supposedly more enlightened present is seen as having replaced the "bad old days" in an unbroken march toward progress and enlightenment. “Whig history” is history as written from the perspective of the present day victors, a story of constant progress, that life ­ whether in terms of political participation, technological advantages or amount of leisure time ­ has always improved over time.

The history of weapons started as an activity undertaken by practitioners and enthusiasts, rather than professional historians, always viewing the field from the top down and producing an exceptionally “Whiggish” perspective on the past. The notion of 'progress' was for many 19th and early 20th century historians the scientific premise that history had to be written with. It worked as a frame of reference for 'change'. All history was supposed to be about progress, one only had to find substantial predicates for the concept, i.e. to answer the question "In what respect is something considered progress?". The Anglo-Saxon Whig-historians, as their school was called, believed in a progress.

By rejecting contingency and context and embracing narratives of chronology and progress, they represent the distillation of teleology and Whiggish notions in weapons history. The central actors in programmatic histories have typically been the artifact. The framework here is one of delay and conspiracy, of heroes and villains, and represents a ‘Whig history’, with an assumption of value-free engineering merit, and the notion of progress towards a correct course of action.

The term “Whig history” originated with Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1931) was an early critique of historical narratives centered on the “march of progress”. His examination of British constitutional history found a historical narrative that framed history from a presentist stance without taking into account the viewpoints prevailing during the times of the figures under study. The Whig historian studies the past with reference to the present. He looks for agency in history. And, in his search for origins and causes, he can easily select those facts that give support to his thesis and thus eliminate other facts equally important to the total picture. The Whig historian tends to judge, to make history answer questions, and to overdramatize by simplification and organization around attractive themes.

The British historian and philosopher of history, Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979), wrote in the Preface to this 1931 book, "The following study deals with 'the whig interpretation of history'... What is discussed is the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, and to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present... The theory behind the whig interpretation --- the theory that we study the past for the sake of the present --- is one that is really introduced for the purpose of facilitating the abridgement of history. .... the application of this principle must produce in history a bias in favour of the whigs and must fall unfavourably on Catholics and tories."

Premature inventions are those that engineers do not attend to in a timely way, and are retrospectively described as having been “ahead of their time”. There are also postmature inventions, those which are judged retrospectively to have been ‘delayed’. Both prematurity and postmaturity can be recognized only by retrospection. They differ in that prematurity is a matter of actual historical observation while postmaturity is a matter of retrospective conjecture. Such formulations would seem to smack of ‘Whig History’, the inclination, according to Butterfield, “to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present". But, they are designed to serve quite the contrary purpose. The ideas of premature and postmature discovery provide convenient handles for analyzing discontinuities in the growth of engineering art, and support a nonlinear and complex model of advancement in weapons engineering.

The historiography of weapons is no backward-oriented history of progress [i.e., no Whig history], not a representation of episodes that, from the vanishing point of today’s truth, are obsolete. Rather it wants to investigate and to make intelligible to what extent notions, attitudes or methods which are nowadays obsolete were themselves innovations at their time and to what extent, as a consequence, the obsolete past remains the past of an activity which still deserves to be called scientific. Most of the history of weapons was about errors. In order to understand the current state of affairs, it is necessary to reflect on the histories of both the obsolete and the confirmed.

Historians have taken leave of finalism. No longer do they write teleological histories of progress. Instead of a grand narrative of the triumph progress, they now tend to write small stories on local knowledge. This is the result of several decades of criticism of Whig history. Starting with neo-Marxist critique in the interwar years, enhanced in the social history of the 1970s, artifacts [including weapon systems] were seen as economic commodities and as social products. Cultural history and anthropology added the view that engineers and weapons designers are mere mortals, muddling through messy life. This critique was topped off with postmodern criticism of knowledge as power, which translates into the accusation that historiography is only legitimating cultural and political oppression.

To counter these allegations, many historians have insulated themselves into a kind of retro-historicism that shies away from any teleology, coherence, meaning and evaluation. It depicts the production of knowledge as a practical, local activity that is strictly limited to its cultural context. No claims to truth, validity, let alone progress or even development were allowed. This situation of rampant relativism could not last. Total abstinence of any evaluation of knowledge claims, quality of research or success of theories has proven unsatisfactory. The need has arisen to study broader issues of traveling knowledge and longer lines of development. There is a shift of interest into traditions of knowledge that spring the bonds of locality and context. Why do some design theories and engineering practices succeed in surpassing paradigms and bridging epistemic ruptures?

But excellence is more often a matter of fits and starts, of limitless gray areas, all bereft of the guarantee that later attempts to reconcile conflicting requirements and possibilities will necessarily be better than earlier ones. It is a mistake to view past choices that resulted in un-successful technologies as unquestionably the wrong decisions. Such views are classic exercises in Whig history, judging the past in terms of its contribution to the present. In contrast, digging more deeply into why people made the conscious or subconscious technical choices that they did is a worthy attempt at understanding the tight interactions between the social relations of people and the development of technology.

The "armored personnel carrier" of the late 20th Century came of age in response to specific operational requirements and technological opportunities. Modern warfare often poses quite different problems. For example, terrorist activities or insurrections may require the deployment of a relatively small number of troops over a substantial distance at very high speeds. Such deployment must be carried out under conditions of substantial comfort if the personnel are to arrive at the scene of conflict in a relatively fresh condition. Once at the scene the deploying vehicle must be capable of operating over highly adverse terrain. These requirements are very different from those confronting in Imperial Japanese Army in 1941.

Japanese Armored Personnel Carriers

Always interested in speed, the Japanese developed a number of soft skin vehicles for moving infantry from place to place. Indeed, as early as 1934, the Japanese had been experimenting with mechanized formations in China. Nevertheless, the Japanese development of armored transport was rather belated. The general view seems to have been that armored transports were slower than their soft-skin cousins and were, as a result, less than valuable in the support of Japan's infantry blitzkrieg doctrine. As such, the Japanese never took the armored truck concept beyond a prototype phase, and half-tracks were given relatively short shrift. Most support tracks were used primarily as artillery tractors, but they were not (for the most part) armored.

Two armored personnel tracks that did make the transition from concept to deployment, however, were the Ho-Ha and the Ho-Ki APCs. Because the Japanese developed doctrine for independently operating armored divisions only late in the war, Japan's half-tracks differed from most of those used by the other belligerent nations in that they were designed as support units for mechanized and infantry detachments as opposed to being developed for use by "armored infantry".

The Type 1 Ho-Ki was developed in 1942 as a result of a request from the Army for a heavy prime mover which could also serve as a personnel transport. It featured an unusual silhouette, in that the driver's cab did not reach across the front of the hull, but stopped short about mid-way across the center line. Only one operator was required, a driver, who manipulated a pair of tiny steering wheels which could adjust the left and right movement of the tracks. Transport capacity was about fifteen men, and the maximum armor thickness was about 6mm. While the Ho-Ki is often classed as a half-track, it was in fact a fully tracked vehicle which incorporated some unusual control features common to half-track vehicles.

The Ho-Ki had been designed to pull artillery as well as to carry infantry, and it differed from other vehicles of the type in that there was no rear exit hatch. It was apparently felt that the towed weapon might interfere with the rapid exit of any onboard crew and/or riflemen. All entry and exit, therefore took place through three doors mounted side by side on the driver's side (left) facing of the vehicle. Top speed achieved was fairly respectable for a prime mover, about 21- 22mph under ideal conditions.

The Ho-Ki was not, normally, armed, but a ring had been provided to the rear of the driver, which allowed for installation of an anti-aircraft/anti-personnel machine gun. In the style of most armies, Japanese squads carried by the vehicle could mount their squad machine guns in the same position. The Type 1 Ho-Ki was deployed wherever the Japanese Army went, but production seems to have been fairly light. It was primarily encountered by the Chinese and by the Americans in the Philippines.

The second Japanese armored half-track of note was the Type 1 Ho-Ha, developed in prototype form in 1941 but not actually accepted for production until 1941. Like the Ho-Ki, it was a diesel vehicle, but it differed significantly in that it was based upon the German Sdkfz 251 halftrack, and bore at least a passing resemblance to that vehicle in profile.

Like the German vehicle from which it had drawn inspiration, the Type 1 Ho-Ha featured a pair of road wheels mounted to the fore supported by a pair of short tracks. It could do about 25mph and had excellent mobility. As with the Ho-Ki, a towing hitch was provided. The Ho-Ha was armored to a maximum thickness of about 8mm. The hull of the Ho-Ha was longer than that of the 251, and it could carry about fifteen men (as in the case of the Ho-Ki). This number seems to have been arrived at as a means of transporting both a rifle squad and the crew for a weapon in tow.

The weaponry of the Ho-Ha was a bit unusual. It carried three light machine guns as standard, but these were mounted in somewhat inconvenient places. One each was mounted along each side, just to the rear of the driver's compartment, and had a rather constricted firing arc, which made firing directly forward or directly rearward impossible. A third machine gun, mounted to the rear, was intended as an anti-aircraft weapon (as in the case of the 251). It had a slightly wider arc of fire, but was (once again), in capable of being fired directly forward. This was, obviously, a bit of a tactical dilemma for the Japanese. Ho-Ha was produced in only limited numbers, with most seeing action (once again) in China or the Philippines.

A third APC developed for use was the so called Ka-Tsu. It had been developed for the Navy and was, essentially, the stripped down hall of the Ka-Chi amphibious tank. It does not seem to have gone beyond the prototype phase, however, as an APC. It was, however, fitted with torpedoes and intended for use in an audacious scheme as a sort of amphibious kamikaze during the events of 1944. It was never actually used for this purpose, however, all examples being abandoned or captured before they could be put to such a use. This must surely rank as the only time in the history of warfare in which an armored personnel carrier has been armed with torpedoes.