Naked Commandos: Burma, 1945
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- Опубликовано: 7 фев 2025
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The term "going commando" takes on new meaning in the context of a little known and highly challenging amphibious invasion in January, 1945.
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This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.
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Script by THG
#history #thehistoryguy #WWII
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Now I have a question to ask you that pertains to this as well as a few other things biblical and technology first off are you acquainted with Greek mythology as well as versed in biblical time
I'm not looking so much as hisstory as to ourstory
Going commando goes back to the days of the first Zulu, Matabele & Boer wars and the Boer commandos. They the boers sometimes wore no underwear due to terian, weather or supply issues. The original meaning was a unit of volunteer boers fighters (spelt kommando) mostly mounted infantry. In fact the SADF still use the commando system.
@TheHistoryGuyChannel, the US Army made more Amphibious landings in the South Pacific than the USMC during WWII.
One such veteran was my barber 40yrs ago.
He reported that once they got off the beach, they stripped down to their skivvies after every landing.
The Marines didn't strip down because they got all the press attention. The Army didn't. The Marines got hot chow after landing. The Army ran on C-Rations.
US soldiers have a history of fighting nearly naked in hot humid climates. The Infantryman's Hsndbook even advises exposing as much skin as possible in hot humid climates.
Slick intro!
They’re really great lately.
US Soldiers and Marines went "commando" in NAM to reduce jungle rot. We were taught by WWII and Korean War Vets. A friend who was a Marine and in the second wave at Betio(WWII) said that the new camo coveralls were so hot that by 1000 hrs, most Marines were stripped down to pistol belts and skivvies. Good Luck, Rick
Year and a half in a helicopter squadron it was skivvies and utilities.Back in tanks,just the jungle utilities.
My 3 years in a special forces amphibious command at the tail end of Vietnam had me either sweating through my skivvies in a jungle environment or hard core desert environments. We frequently found skivvies to be an unnecessary inconvenience.
God bless you for all the crap you went through I know that when you came home people thought you were Killers but you were doing God's work I thank you so much for everything it's a shame that the government wasn't as patriotic as you were
Interesting, did you wear nothing under your pants for this six years? @@Future-Preps35
We didn't even wear socks cuz of the rot.
We wrapped our feet like the Russians do but even with the jungle boots fatigue pants, jacket and that was it.
Excellent piece.
My late uncle served in Burma during the war, helping rescue legionnaires from POW camps. He helped build the roads deep into the jungles to march these poor, starving men out.
I really wish he was still alive so that I could get more stories out of him. He served in Burma, China, Japan after the surrender and during the Korean War and never once fired his rifle in anger.
He passed a year and a half ago at the age of 98, still sharp as a tack.
May your uncle rest in peace, it would be useful if his secret could be communicated to the White House/Nursing Home!
I had never heard of this. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. The war in Burma needs to be told more often. Thank you for posting.
"A nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools." - Thucydides
When I was a wee boy, my dad's then boss (who passed away just a couple of years ago), told us he was sent his conscription papers on his birthday, and shipped off to Burma in the last few months of the war. Like most young lads, he had rarely been further than to the next city, let alone abroad and in a jungle. He said at night it was so incredibly dark that the sentries were just a token, they couldn't see anything. Sometimes on night sentry duty he would suddenly feel hands around his ankles, followed by a "it's only me, Jock" to the Scottish soldier - this was one of the famous Gurkhas. They would slide out of the camp at night, in the pitch black, creeping to the Japanese positions, then silently dispatch a few that their comrades wouldn't notice until morning light. They felt around the ankles because the kind of puttees the British soldiers had around their ankles let them know if they had crawled into a friendly or enemy sentry. As you can imagine his heart when at a hundred BPM when he felt those hands in the dark, then sudden relief as you realised it was a Gurkha, out for his "evening constitutional" in the jungle. Staggering to think now what we asked of such very young men.
The "Chindits" in Burma (British & Commonwealth special force raiding brigade) were sometimes forced to go naked, because they suffered from severe dysentery, as well as that clothes could be filthy or rotted from the horrible conditions.
So that's a more likely source of the phrase IMHO :)
Always a pleasure to watch your videos! :)
Really didn't find history interesting back in school but it has grown onto me over the years.
That's because it is no longer taught properly. Just like the videos you see where scenes are blurred. History can be brutal but you can't learn from it if you do not see it as it was.
We used the term since the early 1970s. We thought it was from Viet Nam. I also once had a patient who was a Chindit. I do a fairly uncomfortable test. He sat stoically through the exam and at the end shook my hand and said "I will always remember two faces, yours and that Imperial Japanese Marine interrogator".
Good Monday morning History Guy and everyone watching. Woke up to snow in North Texas. It's 11° at the moment.
Was -6 in KC this morning. 🥶😄
Woppy ding dong! Come to Canada. That would be a warm winter day!
The success of the 14th Army was down to General Slim, who deserves a mention here!
You would not know this but the Royal Marines say: " Four Two Commando" rather than forty two. The same with the other Commando units numbered in the 40s. Another very interesting historical analysis of a scary military action.
Trades my Piss Cutter for a Green Beret at Olongapo,Phillipines. Probably they were aboard the Ark Royal.
It was a large SEATO exercise!Subic Bay was packed with ships.Four Two commando was the unit!
..pretty much S O P for military commo to pronounce/say numbers separately
e.g. Extortion 17 pronounced Extortion one seven..
@edwinsalau150 haven't heard the term.'piss cutter" in years!!!
..they were called c*nt caps in basic (Jun- Aug 1971,Ft Dix A-3-3)...
It's an odd quirk of the Royal Marines.
30 Cdo IX and 40 Cdo are referred to as Thirty and Forty; 42 Cdo, 43 Cdo, 45 Cdo, 47 Cdo, 29 Cdo RA, and 24 Cdo RE are referred to as Four-Two, Four-Three, Four-Five etc.
Kudos to you and your son for excellent research, as always. Still my favorite history program on RUclips.
Thanks!
Thank you!
I'm about to learn something, thank you History Guy and awesome Team!!!🙏👌🦉❣️
If you can locate a copy, check out "Quartered Safe Out Here", George MacDonald Frasier's account of his experiences with the XIV. (Frasier authored the hilarious "Flashman" series and later became a prominent writer for the Hollywood film industry.) Indeed the Burma campaign has been seriously short-shrifted!
Really appreciated the sponsorship this episode. Definitely going to check it out. Already a big Warships player. Love the history of it all.
Did you ever try Enlisted? Do you like it? I used to play it before they added the BR system. I don't like it but I've kinda wanted to try playing it again since I enjoyed it before.
Fascinating piece of history - excellently re-told Thank you so much.
I appreciate you and thank you for making content.
Always a pleasure with your lectures, this one excellent! Happy New Year to you and yours.👍👍👍
Excellent history!
Thanks History Guy 😊
For 20 years now I've been a total commando believer. I have no idea how i lived for 33 years with my boys smothering like that.
I decided to forgo them about 30 years ago and never looked back...but when I look DOWN today, I recognize the evidence for supporting the boys over time. Not unlike a bra. I'll let you infer from there...
Hey THG. Good Morning fellow classmates.
THG, you rock! Peace ✌️
A MARS Task Force treatment would be cool. Had an uncle with them. They are so unknown that last i checked, they don't even have a Wikipedia page.
Commandos go full commando… great play of words.
I enjoyed your story, as it adds to some of the stories my father told me about his duty serving with the Chinese army in Burma, India, and China. He was one of just a small handful of American’s assigned to the supply routes.
And yes he would talk of marching through the jungles and everyone would have leaches covering their legs. He said the trucks would struggle in the mud carrying the supplies. They also used aircraft to drop bags of rice into the jungle for the troops. Once, as the Chinese standing in the door spotting the clearings was pushed out by his fellow Chinese as a joke.
My father said he refused to fly with them again.
"We don't plan to fail, we fail to plan"
Thank you for the lesson.
This episode immediately brought to mind a story by my favorite author, Rudyard Kipling, entitled "The Taking of Lungtunpen", in which a unit of British soldiers in (curiously enough) Burma capture a village in a complete state of undress. Although fictional, the similarities are uncanny (and comical).
One of my Army ROTC instructors, a Vietnam vet, told me a story one time about a battle. They fought defending their special forces firebase, where he and his A Team wore, only their underwear, sandals, and load bearing equipment all through the night fighting.
T.H.G. ---> Thanks for the video remembrance of this action by the British Commandos (and other Allied Forces members) in Burma. The C.B.I. (China/Burma/India (and Indonesia) Theater is often referred to as "The Forgotten War". Horrible climate and terrain.
{[ Note: the U.S.A.S.F. (Green Berets, Fort Bragg) learned their stuff from the British Commandos in the late 50's early 1960's. The brand-new U.S. Army Rangers formed in WW2 learned their stuff (Extreme Infantry) also from the British Commandos.]}
It existed before the Falklands War in '81.
I'm a plankholder in the 3d Ranger Bn. In 1984, the phrase "going commando" was widely used & was introduced to many of us young Rangers by the senior NCO's.
It's a common thing to do in the jungle, to let your privates dry out some to stave off "jungle rot." I'll leave that phrase to your imagination.
Morning my friend
Thank you, History Guy!! Are you still teaching at University?
No- haven’t been for many years.
A great loss. I remember my University history teacher with great fondness. He was much like you and was always giving us extra little insights.@@TheHistoryGuyChannel
I've never heard that Friends used the term, probably because no one I know watched that show, but it was certainly familiar to us in the military well before the 90s.
Understanding this I'm seeing seeing more understanding more .. one thing that I need to is how do you know about silent hill pueblo co. Or the Honor farm in pueblo
Seinfeld episode predates friends by almost 10 years. Kramer goes "commando" with the unfortunate zipper results.
Seinfeld didnt predate Friends by ten years.
@JeffreyGlover65 Reply OK it was 4 2010.
@pluribus_unum well played 😎
My wife’s grandfather served with the Australian “Double Black” commandos in Papúa New Guinea in World War II. You (and others) may find their exploits of interest.
Interesting.
At 11:39 mention is made of a “thick smoke screen” laid down by air to cover the landing. Got me to wondering, why didn’t they use smoke screens in Normandy? All the film we see on D-Day show haze but we never see actual thick smoke. Anybody got a clue?
the Scottish have been going Kilted long before Commandos or the term existed, by several hundreds of years😂
Under my kilt? Boots & socks of course!
Interestingly, Kipling wrote a story, " The Taking of Lungtungpen" wherein Pvt. Mulvaney led a successful attack with his troops having stripped to swim a river. Also in Burma!
By the time I was in school in the 80’s going commando was ubiquitous enough that us kids knew it.
Could've been a 2nd Dieppe... I'm sure for other fellow Canadians that makes it hit a bit harder this pacific campaign of (nearly) forgotten history, truly deserves to be remembered.
I can't say when the term going commando started , but I know my dad used when my brother was a teen in the early 60's and reused it on me in the late 60's when I enlisted . So I think that it started sometime during the war just who and when is anybody's guess .
I've just started "A War of Empires" by Robert Lyman. It's all about Burma 1941-45. I wonder if it's going to be mentioned much later in the book?
I remember reading accounts of soldiers in Viet Nam who had problems with trousers and cotton underwear rotting away. I am not sure if the clothing simply rotted away, or if the soldiers discarded them as being useless. I read of an account where a Long Range Recon Patrol team returned to post, and there was a USO show going on. They were escorted up to the front of the audience, and the commander took stock of the men's decayed uniforms. He arranged the fellows with intact trouser crotches up front to avoid flashing the actresses up on stage. The rest of his men fell in behind them. I always assumed that "going commando" was the result of decayed underwear from jungle rot.
Amazing how CIB is almost forgotten.
Having seen many WW2 documentaries, it has always surprised me how blundering, stupid, and ill planned most of ALL amphibius landings were. The "Planners" who never seemed to actually participate in the landings, made the same mistakes, over and over. IE, landing at low tide.
Still, the story told here was the beginning of the defeat of the Japanese army. It reopened our supply line through Burma.
Great story. ;-)
Thank you, HG. I'm perhaps most ignorant on this "East Asian"(?) theater in WWII. There was very little glory for the mixture of Allied troops in that region, and I can't imagine news/press coverage of those guys (at the time) was anything near sufficient. God bless those brave and determined soldiers.
i thought they called it freeballing
🎶 free falling , ya free falling 🎶
Good night
Please make an video on Subhash Chandra bose and his army
I learnt commando in Korea in 1986. Most went from normal skivvies to running shorts. I went commando and have never went back. I've got a couple pair of silk boxers if I "must" wear a suit.
I go commando so often somewhere there is a Navy Seal saying he is going Jeremy
I served on a submarine in the early '70s, and "going commando" was a common term used then.
I encourage people to look up Merrills marauders. A good example of the pwrils many paratroopers faced in asia
As a young teenager i always found the CBI more interesting. What always bothered me was why General Stilwell never received a corp 25,000 to 50,000 of American Troops.
Wow! Tom Selleck was in WW2? 5:05
Was that a Reising m50 SMG!? Never seen one in a game. I have one. 875rpm Flawless without Pacific sand and saltwater.
Exactly why hot weather BDU's had a flap across the inside of the fly.
Interesting, that Burma & Laos are two campaigns remembered with uttermost terror in Japanese native historiography... remembered as places where both nature & enemy forces conspired to turn every living moment hell.
on the video's stated topic... for the Japanese side, many non-ranked army sailors (lowest crew for small gun-boats and conscripted laborers on supply craft) would wear nothing but a traditional lion cloth as a matter of standard uniform when posted in the tropics.
The problem with underwear in a combat environment is that they hold sweat close to your body and promote "jock itch." The opportunity to bathe may (almost certainly will) be infrequent and high levels of physical activity cause a lot of sweating.. You want your nethers to remain as dry as possible or your combat experience will become even more miserable than it already is.
As a modern day commando, 3/75 Ranger. A combat veteran of Afghanistan. I can assure you that wearing underwear is very common practice. Especially for us bigger boys. The thighs , oh the thighs! My burning loins. The demon chaff!
History guy
I thought the reason it was called "going commando" is because commandos are always getting... debriefed.
I remember the term in 1970s, pre Falklands conflict.
I believe it was a British commando way, by time saving cleaning, underwear, can be time doing something else.
I thought it was Regimental. Nothing under your kilt.
Regimental under kilts
Damm the balls this men had yo do all that damm good men
Certainly the expression could not predate existence of Comando as a person 😂
The first record of the military term Commando dates to 1791.
Here's one to ponder. What were electric eels called before there was electricity?
Friends? Lol been around longer than that 😂
Somehow I thought it had something to do with the Scots not wearing anything under their kilts... Or maybe that was "going regimental".
No this I'm not fighting with a gun or swinging a sword I'm using my words trying to find out what is going on please help me out and understanding
If it weren’t for the Bridge over the River Kwai movie…
Back in the Saddle Again Naturally!
The AVG The Flying Tigers did most of there aerial combat over Burma in defense of Rangoon
We were still learning how to fight the Japanese. The answer was to not do what they expected and wanted you to do
I wonder if the Japanese ever realized how close they could have gotten to stopping the landing had they just tried?
The Man In The Black Pajamas.
✌️✌️
The Forgotten Army...
One Chindit officer was butt naked washing in the river when he spotted a Japanese soldier doing the same. They set on each other with bare hands and teeth, fighting to the death. The only difference was that the Chindit officer had his boots on and this resulted in him surving the fight.
Shadow fight of my life 🧬 everything seems to be in shadow
I knew about going commando in the late 1960's At the time I think it was Viet Nam War returnees that coined it, but it fit right in with the counter-culture of "Mr. Natural" aspect of back to nature and let it all hang out sort of penchants. The girls burned their bras and the guys went without underwear, each mutually beneficial.
32nd, 15 January 2024
Shadow is shadam witch is sadom
I went "indian" (as we called it) in 1967.
Okay, but what did Alexander the Great call it? Huhhn?
FPS Ad is annoying
Sounds like the intel boys were busy playing cards instead of gathering intel....
No, it doesn't seem funny at all HG, it sounds miserable.
Algorithm
Naked commando is redundant.
Your historical battle videos should be required watching for today's active troops. They have no idea what real fighting men were in past wars.
HMAS NAPIER
A single dad almost always rises above and is in control of the family's life. At the slightest mistake his kids will be taken away.
A single mom almost always is leaning on multiple people, has runaway debt, emotional problems, and a general mess surrounding her. She can be drug addicted and an abuser, and the system will bend over backwards to help her keep her kids.
They are not similar in any way whatsoever.
Isn't "Naked Commando" an oxymoron? 😅