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

As history has shown, General Aitken, soundly defeated, would have cause to reconsider his judgement. Arnold Wienholt, another British officer serving with the Intelligence Corps, seems to express the general attitude when he calls the natives ‘big children’

, but at the same time – and this eventually became the general view – he speaks for the mature army when he concludes that, ‘The German East campaign proved, at any rate, that, with training and discipline, the negro can become a first-rate soldier.’

Although slow to change, attitudes nevertheless changed, and among the men who fought in East Africa, former prejudices were humbled.

In Burma during the Second World War racial attitudes were much changed. General Stilwell, for example, said, ‘If I can prove the Chinese soldier as good as any Allied soldier, I’ll die happy.’

This is not to say that Stilwell was without prejudice – his ludicrous references to the English as ‘limeys’ were legion – but such nonsense was always professionally and politically competitive.

British and Americans who served with the Karens and Kachins invariably spoke highly of them. Brigadier Bernard Fergusson has paid continual tribute to the Karen scouts of the Burma Rifles who were assigned to serve under his command

, and about the Kachins, OSS man Neil H. Barrett said this: ‘Any time a movement was started to fight the Japs the Kachins were the first to respond and, I might add, they were fearless, ruthless fighters, and the Japs feared them.’

Vague notions that Wingate harboured a prejudice against the Indian Army were put to rest by Brigadier Michael Calvert who described the multi-ethnic character of the Special Force in these words:

‘In all there were seventeen British battalions, five Gurkha battalions and three West African battalions in the Special Force. No Indian battalions were used, owing to the difficulty, at that time, of special feeding, cooking, camp followers, etc, insisted upon by the Indian army, whereas all the battalions in Special Force could, and did, eat any type of food, although certain special provisions were sometimes made for the Gurkhas.’

With admiration, Calvert later wrote, ‘At one time my brigade major, Francis Stewart, had to compete with seven different races in Brigade HQ, comprising British, Indian, Burmese, Karens, Chinese, West African, and Gurkhas.’

Finally, on the basis of his personal experience, Slim offers this appreciation, an appreciation that puts some of the racial delusions entertained early in the East African campaign fully and finally to rest:

‘In Burma we not only fought against an Asian enemy, but we fought him with an army that was mainly Asian. In both respects not a few of us with little experience of Asians had to re-adjust many ideas, among them that of the inherent superiority of the white man as a soldier. The Asian fighting man is at least equally brave, usually more careless of death, less encumbered by mental doubts, little troubled by humanitarian sentiment, and not so moved by slaughter and mutilation about him. He is, by background and living standards, better fitted to endure hardship uncomplainingly, to demand less in the way of subsistence or comfort, and to look after himself when thrown on his own resources.’

One subject about which no man fighting for any side, either in East Africa or Burma, harboured a single delusion was the difficulty to be faced in contending with raw nature. And raw nature in the tropics was a matter far divorced from raw nature as it was experienced in Europe. With the vagaries of weather everyone had to contend, but there all similarities between the fronts ended. To the lasting misfortune of the men who fought in the tropics, the threats and dangers imposed by nature arrived in a multiplicity of forms.

Occasionally, one supposes, soldiers fighting in Europe were bitten by dogs, scratched by cats, or bedevilled by lice and insects; if so, their problems with the animal kingdom were minuscule when compared with those of the tropical fighting man. Writing about East Africa, Christopher J. Thornhill recalled:

‘Charging rhino were to be a feature of this campaign – we had to get used to them and more or less dodge their cyclonic onslaught; for nothing but death will stop a rhino once he takes it into his head to charge, and it is not always prudent to let off firearms when enemy patrols are about. That day I counted no less than eight full-grown rhino disturbed by our advance, three of which charged, two of them being shot.’

At Maktan on 3 September 1915, Angus Buchanan recorded this diary entry:

‘Out on reconnaissance, to position enemy holding about eight miles west of our camp. Moving quietly through bush – our party two whites and two porters. On outward journey ran across a rhinoceros, who charged on hearing stick break underfoot; but he stopped about ten yards short, when he then got our wind, and cleared off rapidly with a quick turn and snort, apparently afraid of us. Self and companions, at the sound of the rushing crash of the charge, had backed behind stoutish trees, with rifles ready, but the natives, in an incredibly short moment, had squirmed frantically into the bushes overhead.’

As W. E. Wynn wrote, ‘In peace we laughed at the rhino, behind his back… In war the rhino was no longer funny. He was a nuisance. To my own knowledge eight men were killed by charging rhinos.’

W. T. Shorthose, after reporting a number of men killed or wounded by buffaloes, went on to state: ‘Not only from German rifles did our men suffer in the East African campaign. I am correct in stating that numbers of carriers were taken by lions, also sentries, others crushed to death by elephants or tossed by buffaloes and rhinos, and many poisoned by the bite of snakes.’

Given the incredible abundance of East African wildlife and the utterly uncertain nature of its reactions to man, the threat it posed was ever-present. Francis Brett Young describes a fine bull oryx several times charging his column before a thin line of machine-gun porters finally parted from before its straight horns, which allowed the cornered beast to escape into the bush.

The aggressive African honey bee – today called ‘the killer bee’ in the United States – several times disrupted entire military columns on the march.

And at least once, at Tanga, the viciousness of the bees played a significant role in a British defeat:

‘As a matter of fact, wild bees worried the Lancs a good deal. It sounds ridiculous, but I saw it myself. Apparently wild bees were in abundance in some of the palms, and bullets happened to break up their nests. They all came out angry and stung anything in their way. I myself got stung twice by angry bees, and some of the Lancs were stung all over by hosts of these little pests. Of course, they said the Germans had let bees lose on them, but this must be nonsense.’

When a predator was involved, a sudden attack could be far more threatening:

‘The enemy soon got to hear that we were in their neighborhood, especially as we were getting in the Government tax food from the various villages, to prevent it falling into the enemy’s hands. However, we had our own troubles close at hand, for a few days after making our temporary camp and erecting shelters, a leopard, coming into the camp at night (we had, of course, no fires), seized and terribly mauled my white companion. The horrible beast, sneaking in, had seized his victim by the head, and, dragging him off his stretcher, had actually taken him away some fifteen yards before we were able to help him. Being asleep at the time, I was rather muddled for a few seconds when his shrieks started, and I fear was all too slow in coming to his assistance. It was not till he had cried out “chui” (leopard) that the situation was made plain to me, and meanwhile the man-eater was worrying him.’

Minutes later, at the opposite end of the camp, the same leopard attacked and attempted to drag away an askari. Throughout the East African campaign, raw nature could be as dangerous as the enemy.

In Burma, the threat – if slightly different – proved no less ubiquitous and appeared again in a variety of forms. When the 7th Armoured Brigade arrived in Burma straight from combat in the North African desert, Rangoon was already under attack and in a state of chaos. Captain the Rev N. S. Metcalfe, Chaplain to the 7th Hussars, went with the transport officer to the zoo in order to recover some RAF vehicles thought to have been abandoned there: ‘Fortified by the report that all the animals of a dangerous nature had been destroyed, we made our entry only to discover that some were very much alive, and outside their cages! There was a tense moment when it was discovered that a “tree trunk” was really a crocodile, and a “rope”… a full-size boa constrictor!’

Training in eastern India before Wingate’s 1943 penetration into Burma, David Halley relates a narrow escape:

‘One dark and starless night, a Gurkha sentry was standing to his post, alert and keen as Gurkhas always are. The jungle here seemed to us thick enough by day, as the visibility was never more than about fifteen feet, but at night it was impenetrable. The Gurkha strained his eyes this way and that. It was coming near the hour of dawn, when the enemy is most likely to make his attack. The slightest unnatural movement would herald his arrival. At last came the sound for which he had been tensely listening, a stealthy crackle in the undergrowth… He crouched, ready to spring. A slinking shape materialised, blacker against the surrounding blackness. The Gurkha leaped and clutched, then, with a startled cry, let go his hold and departed at speed into the night.

It was a tiger he had grabbed. And the tiger, equally startled, lost no time in departing at an equally high rate of speed.’

After waking up one morning to find that a few of his ‘friends’ had put a baby tiger into his bed, Neil H. Barrett goes on to report a far less innocuous event:

‘Three men from the quartermaster outfit driving along the Burma Road in a jeep saw a tiger jump from the brush on the side of the road and lope slowly towards the opposite side. At this point, one of them did a very foolish thing. He fired at the tiger with a .30-calibre carbine, hitting him just hard enough to wound him. It takes a much heavier weapon than this to kill a tiger. The tiger turned in a blind rage and attacked the jeep. Of the three occupants, only one lived to reach the hospital. The jeep was a complete wreck – the hood, radiator, and windshield were completely torn off by the terrific power of the tiger’s paws.’

If tigers were the most powerful animals that men had to contend with during the Burma campaign, snakes were, perhaps, the most unnerving. In Back to Mandalay, Lowell Thomas records a story told to him by Dick Boebel, one of Col Phil Cochran’s Air Commandos, whose glider broke loose and crash-landed beyond the Chindwin but before reaching the ‘Broadway’ jump zone where it was supposed to have landed. In his party were four Americans, five Burmese, and eight ‘Britishers’, and after they had escaped from the crash site, they stopped to rest:

‘When we thought we were safe from Jap pursuit we crouched in a thicket to rest. We were worn out. I was lying exhausted when in the darkness a noise started crackling. I saw the shadow of a snake coming down the side of the gully to my right. There was enough light to see that the thing was about five inches in diameter, a huge python… Luckily, I remained still. He came down. It all took about ten seconds. It seemed eternity. The python crossed over my right foot, straight across my left, and up the other side of the gully. He never hesitated a second, never slowed down. He must have been twelve feet long.’

On 8 February 1945 Slim moved his Tactical Headquarters to Monywa:

‘The Japanese had left behind a number of booby traps which were disconcerting, but my chief frights came from snakes which abounded in the piles of rubble. They seemed specially partial to the vicinity of my War Room which lacked a roof but had a good concrete floor. It was my practice to visit the War Room every night before going to bed, to see the latest situation map. I had once when doing so nearly trodden on a krait, the most deadly of all small snakes. Thereafter I moved with great circumspection, using my electric torch, I am afraid, more freely than my security officers would have approved. It seemed to me that the risk of snake bite was more imminent than that of a Japanese bomb.’

Having set up a target range upon which to teach Shan tribesmen marksmanship, OSS man Neil Barrett found his first training exercise suddenly and swiftly broken up by the appearance of a king cobra not more than 20 feet behind him. ‘His head was puffed out at the sides as it is when he is attacking. I was running in a zigzag fashion, because this is supposed to be the only way to keep one of them from running you down. They practically have to stop to turn.’

Eventually the snake gave up the chase, but the curious Barrett turned and followed from a distance, attempting to shoot the cobra with his .45-calibre pistol. When the snake turned on him a second time, Barrett gave up both his interest in the cobra and his target range.

Setting aside the threats of immediate death posed by tigers and snakes, the armies fighting in Burma had daily to deal with a wide variety of other annoying creatures. Duncan Guthrie, dropped into the Karen Hills in order to raise native levies, reported waking one morning to find his clothes, rucksack, and all of its organic contents eaten by big brown and white ants.

David Halley wrote of clouds of disease-bearing flies gathering around wounds and the difficulty of sleeping in the bush when covered by thousands of ants.

Leeches were among the worst of these annoyances, and throughout Burma, they were ubiquitous. Brigadier John Masters has written:

‘Our short puttees, tied tightly round the join of boot and trouser, kept out most of the leeches, but a halt seldom passed without an oozing of blood through the boot eyelets telling us that some particularly determined beast had found its way in. Hair-fine when they passed through the eyelet holes, they fed on our blood, and when we had taken off puttee, boot, and sock it was a bloated, squashy, red monster the size of our little finger to which we applied the end of a lighted cigarette.’

Fred O. Lyons, one of Merrill’s Marauders, even reported leeches crawling into men’s ears and noses, ‘so the medics would hold a cupful of water under the leech-sufferer’s nose or ear. As the leech reached down, the medic would tie a loop of string to the tail and pull tight.’

A lighted cigarette would then be applied and the leech removed so that the head would not break off beneath the skin and start an infection. ‘All of us were more or less bloody all the time,’

Charlton Ogburn Jr judged. But still, nature had not finished with the tropical combatant.

In both East Africa and Burma, flies, mosquitos, airborne and waterborne micro-organisms, and general fighting conditions visited so many and such debilitating diseases on the troops that it is difficult to keep track of them. Slim, writing about 26 days of combat during the 1944 monsoon, reported that 9 Brigade ‘had only 9 killed and 85 wounded, but lost 507 from sickness.’

In East Africa, the profile was much the same: ‘By 1916 the ratio of non-battle casualties to battle casualties was 31.4 to 1.’

Malaria, typhus, jaundice, blackwater fever, dengue fever, spotted fever, dysentery… the list was endless, and sooner or later almost every man who fought in a tropical theatre of war was struck down by something. Indeed, many British officers who later wrote compelling personal accounts of the war in East Africa – Meinertzhagen, Wynn, Young, Buchanan, Thornhill, and others – were eventually knocked straight out of the theatre, not by the enemy but by fever and ill health. Returning to Burma, on 25 May 1944, Col Charles Newton Hunter reported that before Myitkyina where the American Galahad Force was fighting, ‘Almost every member of the unit was suffering from either malaria, dysentery, diarrhoea, exhaustion, or fever.’

Weeks later, conditions were worse: ‘The rains continued to fall heavily as the June days dragged inexorably on. Three or four days of steady rain would be followed by a day or two of searing humid heat. Men sitting endlessly in wet foxholes began to develop trench foot. Malaria, fungus, and fever were afflictions common to most everyone.’

Writing of approximately the same time, Mike Calvert reported the same problem in 77 Brigade: ‘We fought and lived most of the time in mud and water and everything and everywhere was at best damp and at worst soaking.’