The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice

When the Emperor addressed the Japanese people to announce surrender he urged them to ‘endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable’. The exhausted population was glad to comply. Apprehensive American troops began almost immediately to occupy key points in Japan. To their delight and amazement they encountered almost no violence and met with almost universal co-operation. For their part the Japanese civilian population soon recognised that the American occupation would be benign and temporary. It is such an irony that the Japanese and Americans, implacable foes during one of the most terrible wars of modern times, soon developed mutual respect and political friendship that has endured to this day.

Notes on contributors

Dr Eric M. Bergerud, Lincoln University, San Francisco, USA

Eric Bergerud received a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 1981. He is now Professor of History at Lincoln University, California. His works include Dynamics of Defeat: The Vietnam War in Hau Nghia Province (Boulder, CO. and Oxford: Westview Press, 1991); Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning: The World of a Combat Division in Vietnam (Boulder, CO. and Oxford: Westview Press, 1993); and, most recently, Fire in the Sky: The Air War in the South Pacific (Boulder, CO. and Oxford: Westview Press, 2000).

Recommended reading

Bergerud, Eric, Fire in the Sky: Air War in the South Pacific (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000) Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific (New York: Viking Press, 1996)

Dower, John W., War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986)

Dull, Paul S., A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy (1941–1945) (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1978)

Gailey, Harry, The War in the Pacific: From Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay (Novato, California: Presidio Press, 1995)

Goldstein, Donald and Dillon, Katherine V. (eds), Fading Victory: The Diary of Admiral Matome Ugaki, 1941–1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991)

Harries, Meririon and Susie, Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army (New York: Random House, 1991)

Sledge, Eugene B., With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)

Spector, Ronald H., The Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Vintage Books, 1985)

Chapter 9 (#ulink_5f687be1-779d-5880-86a5-c6e5b471ed71)

War in the Tropics: East Africa and Burma (#ulink_5f687be1-779d-5880-86a5-c6e5b471ed71)

Phillip Parotti

If war is complicated, war conducted in the tropics seems doubly so; this is a fact to which even cursory studies of the First World War in East Africa and the Second World War in Burma abundantly attest. Physically distant from the main venues in which the ultimate defeats of Germany in the First World War and Japan in the Second were being decided, East Africa and Burma seemed to lodge in contemporary Western consciousness as military backwaters, so much so that combatants in those out-of-the-way theatres of war often came to think ironically of themselves as fighting on or as having fought on ‘secret’

or ‘forgotten’

fronts. Invalided home after two years of combat in the East African bush, W. E. Wynn recalls this incident:

‘The majority of people in England knew nothing about the war in East Africa, and even if they did have a vague idea that something might have been happening down there, they were not in the least interested. There was plenty to think about nearer home. Of course, the average man, or woman, in the street had never even heard of East Africa.

A very stern and leathery faced female once stopped and seized me by the arm. With an accusing ring in her harsh voice she began to ask me searching questions. First, she demanded to know why I was loafing about England, instead of fighting for my country.

I feebly remarked I had just come home from East Africa.

“Young man,” she angrily declared, “you’ve no right to be here. You should be at the front.’”

To the men fighting in these distant geographical regions, their fronts, of course, were really neither secret nor forgotten. Rather, they were vicious fields where life was played out against death in never-ending battles with an elusive and implacable enemy. To make matters worse, nearly every element of climate, geography, health, diet, logistics, and the unexpected, seemed to conspire in multiplying the degree of difficulty with which tropical campaigns were conducted while compounding the stress and intensity with which they were fought. If war is trial, war in the tropics has proved twice so.

Given the particular nastiness of bush and jungle warfare, one might well ask why men would ever fight in such environments. Obviously, men fight where wars find them or send them, and not on the fields that they might choose. More to the point – and this was as true of Burma as it was of East Africa – motives of duty, honour, country, and comradeship defined the dominant considerations in each man’s commitment right down to moments of final sacrifice. Placing these important issues aside, one notices at once an outlook, an illusion, held by men going to war in East Africa that was greatly toned down or utterly missing among the men who fought in Burma. Recalling his departure for East Africa in February 1916, Deneys Reitz says:

‘Before Smith-Dorrien could take over he fell ill, whereupon General Smuts assumed command of the campaign, and he left South Africa in December 1915. I decided to go too. I had no animus against the German people, but I thought then, as I think now, that a victorious Germany would have been a disaster to human liberty. Also, my chief was going and, further, I could not hang back while so many of my countrymen were moving forward to an adventure in the wilds of Africa.’

Reitz’s sense of duty and his loyalty to Smuts are indeed the primary motives here, but the romantic drive to adventure that Reitz expresses appears again and again in the recorded memoirs of veterans from the East African campaign. W. T. Shorthose, writing in Sport & Adventure in Africa, recalls, ‘Needless to state, we were all agog with excitement… The common opinion was that the war would end very soon, and our only anxiety was lest we should miss a chance to fight!’

Christopher J. Thornhill, who was 18 when the war began, remembered, ‘I felt I could hardly breathe until I joined something,’

so at the first opportunity he joined the ‘Rag-time’

soldiers of the East African Mounted Rifles, who, without any training whatsoever, had joined the war straight off their farms. Although he was in northern Canada near the Arctic Circle when the war commenced, Angus Buchanan hastened to return to England, where he joined the 25th Royal Fusiliers. As his unit began its voyage from Plymouth to East Africa, Buchanan speculated, ‘Were they not, after all, starting out on the greatest adventure of all – the stern pursuit of a perilous quest?’

One does well to remember that the men writing these memoirs are, like Conrad’s Marlow, older men reviewing their lost illusions. Nevertheless, early in the war the illusion existed that the war in East Africa would prove to be soon ended and relatively easy, something of a boy’s lark, and a romantic adventure not unlike a chivalric quest.

For a period of time, the chivalric, romantic delusion persisted. W. E. Wynn provides a telling incident when he recalls the pre-sailing conference held before Force B embarked for the ill-fated 1914 invasion of Tanga:

‘The General [Aitken] apologised for our being associated with such a simple affair as the taking of German East Africa. After that had been accomplished he promised he would do his best to have us all sent to France; all who had, in the meantime, been well behaved.

“There is one thing, gentlemen, about which I feel very strongly,” he said, as a finale to the meeting, “that is the subject of dress. I wish officers and men to be always well turned out.” He looked sternly down the table. “I will not tolerate the appalling sloppiness allowed during the Boer War.’”

In the beginning, matters of character, demonstrated through smartness and keen romantic élan, were going to be accorded precedence over professionalism. Following the disastrous battle but prior to the British withdrawal, Richard Meinertzhagen, then an intelligence officer with Force B, negotiated with the Germans to assist British wounded with medical stores; in his 5 November 1914 diary entry, he says:

‘My letter to the German commander was sent through to him and I was conducted to the hospital with my medical stores… The Germans were meanwhile kindness itself and gave me a most excellent breakfast which I sorely needed. Several German officers who were present at breakfast expressed their admiration at the behaviour of the North Lancs, and we discussed the fight freely as though it had been a football match. It seemed so odd that I should be having a meal today with people whom I was trying to kill yesterday. It seemed so wrong and made me wonder whether this really was war or whether we had all made a ghastly mistake. The German officers whom I met today were all hard looking, keen and fit and clearly knew their job and realised its seriousness. They treated this war as some new form of sport.’

Later, in the event that one or the other might be taken prisoner, Meinertzhagen and German Captain Hammerstein exchanged names, addresses and pledges of assistance.

And still later, on 19 January 1915, W. E. Wynn was a member of the attacking force sent to relieve Jassin, and he reports yet another chivalric moment:

‘A little after the following day’s dawn, with troops ready for attack, two figures were seen through the morning haze. They were the two British officers who had been at Jassin post. With ammunition gone they had been forced to surrender.

Colonel von Lettow had offered them parole in tribute to their gallant defence. As a further compliment the German commander drew up the German troops in ceremonial order. The troops presented arms and the two British officers were courteously conducted down their ranks, privileged to inspect the men they had been fighting.’

Thus we see the war’s chivalric beginnings, but eventually disease, continual hardship and the indiscriminate death derived from technological advances like the modern machine-gun would reveal the war’s hard edge. In response, chivalry would evolve into professional respect for a hard-fighting opponent, and romanticism would be cut to shreds by the killing power of modern weaponry loosed upon the unsuspecting amidst the worst of tropical environments.

Speaking about the men who fought in Burma, one can say with relative certainty that when they went to war they knew more about it than had their First World War counterparts. This is not to suggest that they were more experienced, better trained, better motivated, or more logistically prepared than the soldiers of the Great War; rather, that they had a knowledge that their First World War counterparts could not have had: they had a knowledge of the First World War. Psychologically, writers like Graves, Owen, Sassoon, Hemingway and Remarque, a variety of realistic war films and the talk of veterans had better prepared them for the horrors of 20th-century war. Gone was the assumption that war would offer a romantic adventure; rather than setting out on a quest, the men who fought in Burma knew that before they could return home in order to recover mundane normalcy they had to do an extremely difficult and dangerous job, and about that work there was little that one could call romantic. This is not to say, however, that they were free from illusions of their own.

At the outset, the men fighting in Burma suffered from two equally debilitating delusions. In his well-written memoir, Defeat into Victory, Field-Marshal Viscount Slim offered this personal observation:

‘To our men, British or Indian, the jungle was a strange, fearsome place; moving and fighting in it was a nightmare. We were too ready to classify jungle as “impenetrable”, as indeed it was to us with our motor transport, bulky supplies, and inexperience. To us it appeared only as an obstacle to movement and to vision; to the Japanese it was a welcome means of concealed manoeuvre and surprise.’

In order to win in Burma, fighting men had first to dispense with their belief that the jungle was impenetrable, then they had to disabuse themselves of the idea that the Japanese were invincible. Experience, observation and direct contact with the enemy were the keys to exploding these myths, and as a result of his first forays behind the Japanese lines in Malaya, F. Spencer Chapman concluded, ‘The Japanese troops I have seen are good second-class material, well trained but poorly equipped. Their lines of communication should prove singularly vulnerable to attack by trained guerillas.’

Later in the war, Orde Wingate’s Chindits, the OSS, and a host of irregulars drawn from the native tribes were among the first to defy and dispel the assumptions about Japanese invincibility, and their contributions to overturning the accepted wisdom of the time proved invaluable in changing the thinking behind the entire Allied effort in Burma.

One final illusion, widely subscribed to during the First World War in East Africa, was greatly toned down if not altogether absent during the Second World War in Burma. This delusion – no doubt derived from a colonial habit of mind, from an imperial outlook and attitude – had to do with what might be interpreted as false assumptions about racial inferiority and the potential fighting quality of native troops. Having watched a native stretcher-bearer nurse a fire in the dry centre of a mealie cobb, Francis Brett Young speculated:

‘With this slow-burning tinder he had nursed a smouldering fire all night, and the sight of him brought swiftly to my mind the Promethean legend and the Titan’s hollow stick of fennel, so that in this chill dawn I seemed again to be riding in the dawn of the world: and indeed this land was as unvexed by man as any Thracian wild and the people as simple as those to whom the son of Zeus brought fire.’

If this recalls a Victorian/Edwardian concept of the civilised West high-mindedly carrying ‘the white man’s burden’, one must also recognise the downside. Meinertzhagen, who invariably favoured expansion of the native King’s African Rifles, reported this exchange with General Aitken who commanded Force B at Tanga in 1914:

‘When I was in East Africa in 1906 I visited the German military station at Moshi and was shown everything by some friendly German officers. I formed a high opinion of their efficiency and reported them as better trained, disciplined and led than our own King’s African Rifles. I told this to Aitken, who said with some heat: “The Indian Army will make short work of a lot of niggers.’”