Road of Bones (15 page)
Authors: Fergal Keane
In late 1943 Shipster’s 7/2 Punjab were ordered to the Arakan as part of General Sir Philip Christison’s 15 Corps. By now Shipster was
a captain with the temporary rank of major. Before they left, the officers were gathered together in an old cinema in Ranchi and given a rousing talk by their divisional commander. ‘It was nothing short of a call to war. It was brief, with flashes of humour and full of confidence … exciting and uplifting, but … it left me feeling apprehensive about the future.’
The Commander of 15 Corps was an old colleague of Slim’s, with whom he had taught at the Army Staff College between the wars. During the First World War Christison had been badly wounded at Loos and awarded the Military Cross. A keen shooting and fishing man, with a countryman’s eye for landscape and fauna, Christison revelled in the fecundity of the natural world in the Arakan. ‘Monkeys, gibbons, hornbills, woodpeckers and Scops owls were common and their eerie cries frightened many a Madrasi soldier and were extensively used by the Japs to communicate with each other. There were few snakes but one day a large python was brought into my headquarters. Inside was a barking deer which, contrary to belief, had been swallowed head-first.’ On occasion, clouds of butterflies appeared so that the ground seemed ‘as if it was shimmering’. Christison was particularly taken with the sight of wild orchids growing on rotting tree stumps. The general had a dangerous encounter with an elephant that pushed his jeep into a ravine when they met along a jungle track. Other soldiers could retell the cautionary tale of the young RAF officer who set off with a machine gun ‘to bag a “Tusker”’ but was found trampled to death.
Christison’s immediate priority was to restore the morale of the men under his command. He decided that worms might be a factor contributing to poor morale. He set about removing men from the line, giving them a de-worming treatment and a fortnight’s rest at the coast playing games on the sand. At the end of this, he reported, ‘they were raring to have a go at the Japs’.
As the end of 1943 approached, Slim and Christison made final plans for an offensive in the Arakan. The main target was the island port of Akyab, 120 miles south of the Indian frontier on the Bay of Bengal.
Akyab offered strategic airfields and access to the main waterways of the Arakan. Whether the allies ultimately decided to try and retake Burma by land or by sea, or a combination of both, they were going to need air cover all the way to Rangoon. Akyab offered the best facilities. The operation would also pre-empt any Japanese attempt to use Akyab as a base to encroach into India.
There was also another, more directly political, reason for an assault towards Akyab. The airfields had been used to launch Japanese raids on Calcutta at the end of the previous year, a strike that had little military importance but had sent thousands of refugees flooding into the countryside where there had already been massive displacement due to the famine of the previous year. There were five hundred civilian casualties and only a tenth of the normal workforce remained at work on the docks. The 5 December raid also saw fear-stricken merchants close down their grain shops, forcing the government to requisition stocks in order to avoid civil unrest. ‘A false alert the following day did nothing to improve morale in the city,’ the official history noted. Any suggestion of Japanese strength undermined attempts to project to the Indian population the image of an unruffled Raj.
The original plan was to mount a joint sea and land operation but at the last moment the landing craft were taken away for use in Europe. General Christison’s 15 Corps would have to do it the hard way, advancing overland in a three-pronged attack on Japanese positions on both sides of the Mayu range. To blast them out, Slim’s artillerymen would use their 5.5 inch guns, although the armchair generals in Delhi feared they would never succeed in hauling them into the mountains. ‘Stroking their “Poona” moustaches,’ a young officer wrote, ‘they remarked that these pieces would never get over the trails and through the jungle of Burma.’ As in so much else, Slim’s soldiers would prove the doubters wrong.
*
The official breakdown of these figures is 916 killed, 2,889 wounded, and 1,252 missing, including prisoners of war. S. Woodburn Kirby,
The War Against Japan
, vol. 2:
India’s Most Dangerous Hour
(HMSO, 1958).
*
What American opinion tended to ignore was the human cost of the USA’s own expansion. The conquest of the West had been achieved only at the expense of the native tribes. The inhabitants of Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, where America had fought a savage war of conquest, had been given no say over the annexation of their lands. The racist segregation within the American army, to say nothing of the discrimination practised in the Southern states of the USA, suggest a convenient myopia on the part of those who condemned Churchill for his imperial revanchism. Roosevelt could himself adopt a tone of condescension towards Asians which would have resonated with the most reactionary of British imperialists. Writing to Churchill on 16th April, 1942 he declared: ‘I have never liked Burma or the Burmese and you people must have had a terrible time with them for the last fifty years. Thank the Lord you have HE-SAW, WE-SAW, YOU-SAW under lock and key. I wish you could out the whole bunch of them into a frying pan with a wall around it and let them stew in their own juice.’ (PSF/BOX37/A333EE01, Franklin D.Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.)
*
In such circumstances, Churchill wrote, ‘the United States Government would after the victory feel greatly strengthened in its view that all possessions in the East Indian Archipelago should be placed under some international body upon which the United States would exercise decisive control.’ (Winston Churchill memo, 29 February 1944, cited p. 412,
Allies of A Kind
, Christopher Thorne, Oxford University Press, 1978.)
†
With this aim in mind work began in late 1942 to build a 400-mile-long road across mountains and through jungles to connect the railhead at Ledo in Assam with the 717-mile road that ran from Lashio in Burma to Kunming in China. The new road would bypass the part of the old ‘Burma Road’ now in Japanese hands. This immense project was driven forward by the American general Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. It involved 17,000 American engineers and around 50,000 Indian labourers and huge numbers of Chinese troops. From the outset Slim was sceptical, writing that ‘if it were left to me I would have used the immense resources required for this road, not to build a highway to China, but to bring forward the largest possible combat forces to destroy the Japanese army in Burma.’ (p. 249,
Defeat Into Victory
, Field Marshal Sir William Slim, Cassell, and Company Ltd, 1956.) Completed in January 1945, the ‘Ledo Road’ contributed little to the defeat of Japan. The airlift on the ‘Hump’ route across the Himalayas delivered more than four times the amount of war materiel to the Chinese Nationalists than the ‘Ledo Road’. The plan to use bases in China to attack Japan proved a failure. When American raids were launched from bases in Eastern China in May 1944 the Japanese counter-attacked furiously and by January 1945 forced the removal of the bombers to India and thence to the Mariana Islands where the major bombing effort against Japan was based. A US Army historical analysis concluded that ‘the air effort in China without the protection of an efficient Chinese Army fulfilled few of the goals proclaimed for it.’ (‘World War II: The War Against Japan’, Robert W. Coakley, American Military History, Army Historical Series, Office of the Chief of Military History, United States Army, Washington, 1989.)
*
Eight million Indians were employed on war-related work during this period.
*
The Official History
, vol. 111, p. 317, gives a total of 41 for Assam, Manipur, Eastern Bengal and Calcutta.
*
Even before war broke out there had been problems. As early as August 1939 a Sikh platoon in the Punjab Regiment deserted after a religious leader ‘so lowered their spirit that they deserted rather than face the dangers of war’. Later that year a group of Sikhs in Egypt rebelled when asked to load lorries, believing such coolie work was beneath them. A year after the first outbreak in the Punjab a squadron of the Central India Horse refused to board ship in Bombay. A mutiny and hunger strike among Sikhs of the Hong Kong and Singapore Royal Artillery in 1940 was provoked by orders that the men should wear solar topis. The investigators sent from India blamed the ‘faulty administration’ and told the regiment to back down on the helmet order. The troubles prompted one far-seeing intelligence officer, Colonel Wren, to write in 1940: ‘We have by our policies towards India, bred a new class of [Indian] officer who may be loyal to India and perhaps to Congress but is not necessarily loyal to us … The army would be helped by a more positive policy on the part of His Majesty’s Government … which will transform our promises of independence for India into reality in the minds of the politically minded younger generations.’
*
The desire to escape the hellish conditions of Japanese prisoner of war camps was a decisive factor for many. Among the officers there were undoubtedly substantial numbers who had been alienated by the racist treatment they received at the hands of colonial officials in pre-war Malaya. This could range from being forced to sit in separate compartments from Europeans on trains and excluded from clubs where a colour bar operated. The INA also drew thousands of recruits from Indian communities in South-East Asia, many of them from the rubber plantations of Malaya and drawn by Bose’s promise of a new India in which the restrictions of caste would be overturned.
*
The famine was caused by a complex interplay of factors: a cyclone that devastated huge areas of rice cultivation; the loss of Burmese rice imports after the Japanese occupation; rumours about shortages and subsequent hoarding of food; incompetence and corruption in the regional government; and the failure of the British and Indian governments to act speedily. Food was being shipped out of Bengal to support the war effort while the population starved. As the historian of the famine, Richard Stevenson, writes: ‘The famine in Bengal was caused by a lack of money, not by a lack of food. A hyperinflation was created in Bengal in 1942 as a result of the war and as a result of government policies. A part of the population, British and Indians connected with the war industries, was protected … the other part, the cultivators and the fishermen, was not protected … The economy of rural Bengal was too simple and impoverished to withstand the profound and prolonged disruptions applied to it by the government, a British government, in pursuit of its war goals.’ Richard Stevenson,
Bengal Tiger and British Lion
(iUniverse, 2005), p. viii.
†
Twenty out of twenty-four INA soldiers trained in espionage and parachuted behind allied lines were captured; two raiding parties landed by submarine were also arrested.
*
The transformation was directed by General Sir Claude Auchinleck who replaced Wavell as C-in-C India in 1943. Auchinleck began his career in the Punjab Regiment before rising to become one of the most senior British generals. He was immensely popular with the Indian troops.
Jungle Wallahs
By the time they reached the training camp at Ranchi, the officers and men of the 4th West Kents were an exhausted mass. Stiff and sore, they climbed on to waiting trucks which took them to the base where Colonel Saville had imagined his subalterns playing polo and the old soldiers in the ranks had spoken of armies of punkah-wallahs cooling their afternoon naps. The shock of the Ranchi base was profound. It was desolate and dusty and they would live in tents; the place was generously populated with snakes and scorpions, one of the latter giving a painful sting to Ivan Daunt as he worked on repairing a storage building. Daunt recovered after a few days but found little of the Ranchi experience to his taste, although with considerable sangfroid he went on to help his company win the weekly snake-finding contest, organised to entertain the men and keep the serpent population at bay.
One of the first challenges for the West Kents was to get used to living and working with the great and unsung hero of the Burma campaign – the mule. During the misery of the retreat from Burma in 1942, General Slim had realised the imperative of creating armies that could move swiftly, unencumbered by dependence on ‘the tincan of mechanical transport tied to our tail’. The immediate answer to this problem was the mule, a crossbreed of horse and donkey with greater intelligence and endurance than either. Without these beasts the armies would never have been able to fight in the trackless expanses of the jungle, where trees barred the way to jeeps and the ground became a sucking swamp in the monsoon. As John Winstanley recalled, ‘The mules, of course, were with us all the time.
They were our lifeline. We were now an animal borne infantry battalion.’ The search for sufficient mules for Slim’s army ranged far and wide. In one instance 650 mules were transported from Bolivia by an Anglo-Argentine cattle-rancher, Robin Begg, who brought a team of Argentine gauchos with him on the ship to India. The animals were so well cared for that all but three survived the rigorous journey.
Lieutenant Tom Hogg was allocated five chargers and sixty-five mules. As the son of a farmer, he was judged the right man for converting the 4th West Kents to animal transport. There were several London bus and taxi drivers among his men and he wondered how they would make the transition. There was no need to worry. ‘Many became so attached to their particular mule that they would not allow anyone else to touch them, and later on, grieved terribly when some of the animals unavoidably got wounded or killed in the fighting.’ But Ivan Daunt remembered how the mules learned to regard the approach of a soldier with foreboding. ‘Oh dear, oh dear … as soon as the mule sees you coming towards him … Cor blimey, poor buggers, I felt sorry for ’em. Some of the climbin’ they had to do.’ A mule could take loads of up to 80 pounds on each of its flanks, and in the case of mountain artillery mules more than twice that amount. The mules had one major disadvantage, though. In the still of the jungle, their braying carried long distances and alerted the enemy. The 14th Army solution was to cut out the vocal chords of the unfortunate beasts. A Chindit remembered one mass de-braying: ‘Round came the doctor with a chloroform rag, put over the mule’s mouth or it may have been an injection, I don’t remember. However, one soldier had to sit on the mule’s head with a thing like a dunce’s hat as soon as the doctor cut into the mule’s sound box! The chloroform and blood was so unbearable that the bloke on its head could only stop for a few minutes as it nearly put the soldier to sleep; so all had to take turns. It was horrible – I took my turn!! … When the operation was completed [we were] told to undo our ropes and await the water-man … After one or two splashes the poor animal looked up, all glass eyed, struggled to its feet and tried to use its voice … with no sound coming out!’