Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45

As supreme commander, Mountbatten floundered when he sought to exercise authority, but distinguished himself as an ambassador and figurehead. Both he and his wife Edwina had a gift for regal informality. Peter d’Cunha of the Royal Indian Navy was once at his post in the wireless office of a patrol boat anchored in a creek off the Arakan, immersed in music from Radio Ceylon. Suddenly a pair of hands removed his headset. He turned in astonishment to perceive Mountbatten, who held it to his own ears for a moment. He then asked the operator’s name, and said: ‘You seem to be very fond of English music.’ The supreme commander replaced the phones on d’Cunha’s head and departed, saying: ‘Enjoy yourself; but just be a little bit alert. You never know who’s coming!’ The young man loved it, of course.

Yet Mountbatten could do nothing to undo his Command’s absolute dependence upon an American vision. Pownall wrote bitterly in his diary in February 1944: ‘If…we are relegated to mucking about in Burma, they may as well wind up this unlucky SE Asia Command, leave here if you like a few figureheads, a good deception staff and plenty of press men to write it up.’ If we recall Slim’s scepticism about Stilwell’s hopes for the Chinese—the British general’s declared belief that the American advance across the Pacific would defeat Japan without an Asian land campaign—these strictures applied with equal force to anything which a British army might do in South-East Asia. Britain’s field commander understood as clearly as her prime minister that the new Burma campaign would be launched to restore imperial prestige and to indulge American fantasies about China, not because British action could contribute substantially to victory over Japan.

In 1944, however, before the British could launch their grand offensive, the Japanese had one more throw to make. With extraordinary boldness, Tokyo’s commanders embarked on an operation to seize the positions of Imphal and Kohima in north-east India. Even the Japanese at their most optimistic did not at this juncture suppose that they could conquer the country. Rather, they sought to frustrate the British advance into Burma. More fancifully, they hoped to precipitate a popular revolt against the Raj by showcasing during their advance units of the so-called Indian National Army, recruited from prisoners-of-war.

The Japanese high command’s approach to the Imphal assault was recklessly insouciant. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi of 15th Army, whose concept it was, sacked his chief of staff for suggesting that the operation was impossible, mainly because of the difficulties of moving men and supplies in Assam, the wettest place on earth, with an annual rainfall that sometimes attained eight hundred inches. Mutaguchi, fifty-six years old, was a scion of an old but now somewhat diminished southern family. Like many Japanese generals self-consciously virile, he never wearied of proclaiming his enthusiasm for women and combat. He was an ambitious political soldier, prominent among those who had precipitated war in China. Belligerence, together with connections in high places, won him promotion to army command.

Mutaguchi found himself largely dependent on bullocks to move stores and munitions across some of the worst terrain in the world. Experiment showed that a laden beast could travel just eight miles a day. The Japanese army’s supply line into Assam would be extraordinarily tenuous. A staff colonel was dispatched to Tokyo to secure endorsement for the operation from prime minister Tojo. A preposterous discussion took place while Tojo splashed in his bath. ‘Imphal…yes,’ said the prime minister, who had never displayed much interest in Mutaguchi’s front. Japanese generals had a droll saying: ‘I’ve upset Tojo—it’s probably Burma for me.’ They called the place ‘jigoku’—‘hell’. Now, the prime minister demanded: ‘How about communications? Have they been properly thought out? Eh? Eh? It’s difficult country towards India, you know. What about air cover? We can’t help him much. Does he realise that? Are you sure it will make things better rather than worse? What’ll happen if the Allies land on the Arakan coast? Has anyone thought of that? Eh? Eh?’ Mutaguchi’s staff colonel outlined the plan while Tojo stood naked before him. At last, the prime minister said: ‘Tell Kawabe’—commander of the Burma Area Army and Mutaguchi’s superior—‘not to be too ambitious.’ Then he signed the Imphal operation order.

The battle which ensued became one of the British and Indian armies’ proudest memories of the war, and decided the fate of Japanese arms in South-East Asia. Slim had expected an attack, but was caught off-balance by its speed and energy. Japanese forces first hit the British in the Arakan coastal belt in February 1944, then moved the following month against Imphal and Kohima. The early weeks of the struggle were touch and go. ‘The whole time I had been in the theatre,’ wrote a cynical British officer, ‘the campaign had been conducted in an extremely leisurely manner by both sides. The only time I [saw] either protagonist hurry [was] when the Japs were heading for Imphal.’ Mutaguchi risked everything to move men fast through heavy country to gain surprise, and almost cut off an Indian division. The Japanese were successful in breaking land links to the British positions.

However, though the British faced Japanese troops on every side, the besiegers were in far more precarious condition than the besieged. Through the months of desperate fighting which followed, Slim’s men held almost all the cards. Their numbers were much superior—albeit not locally at Kohima—and supported by tanks and artillery such as the Japanese were unable to deploy. They possessed command of the skies, and sufficient transport planes to achieve a feat unthinkable earlier in the campaign—the air supply of Imphal and Kohima. British and Indian troops were notably better trained and equipped for jungle warfare than in the past. They defeated the Japanese Arakan thrust so quickly that Slim, with the help of American aircraft secured by Mountbatten’s intercession, was able to shift two divisions from that front to reinforce Imphal and Kohima.

Finally, the British were led by their ablest field commander of the war. Bill Slim—no one called him William—was born in Bristol in 1888, younger son of a hardware wholesaler whose business failed. The boy grew up in difficult circumstances. He always wanted to be a soldier, but spent the years before the First World War first as a pupil teacher, then as a clerk in a steel business. He wangled his way into Birmingham University Officers’ Training Corps, and thence to a commission in 1914. He survived the bloodbath of Gallipoli, which killed or wounded more than half his battalion. Slim transferred to the Gurkhas and was serving with them when hit in the lung. In Mesopotamia he was wounded again by shrapnel and won a Military Cross. He finished the war as an Indian Army major.

Broad and burly, with a heavy jaw and much solid common sense, between the wars he advanced steadily in rank, assuaging financial embarrassment by the somewhat unexpected means of writing magazine stories under the pseudonym of Anthony Mills. It was Slim’s misfortune to command Burcorps, the British force in Burma, during the disastrous retreat of 1942. It was generally acknowledged that he bore no personal responsibility for that defeat, but he himself liked to tell a story of his later return to Burma. One night he slipped unnoticed into Fourteenth Army’s operations room, to perceive two staff officers standing before the map, one pointing confidently and proclaiming: ‘Uncle Bill will fight a battle there.’ The other figure demanded why. ‘Because he always fights a battle going in where he took a licking coming out!’

In contrast to almost every other outstanding commander of the war, Slim was a disarmingly normal human being, possessed of notable self-knowledge. He was without pretension, devoted to his wife Aileen, their family and the Indian Army. His calm, robust style of leadership and concern for the interests of his men won the admiration of all who served under him. ‘Slim is a grand man to work for—he has the makings of a really great commander,’ enthused his chief of staff, Brig. John Lethbridge, in a 1944 letter to his wife. A soldier wrote of Slim: ‘His appearance was plain enough: large, heavily built, grim-faced with that hard mouth and bulldog chin; the rakish Gurkha hat was at odds with the slung carbine and untidy trouser bottoms; he might have been a yard foreman who had become managing director, or a prosperous farmer who’d boxed in his youth.’

An Indian artillery officer told a typical ‘Uncle Bill’ story. Suddenly summoned to order a full regimental shoot, the gunner dashed into his command post, knocking aside a big stranger who impeded his passage. Emerging shortly afterwards, he recognised his army commander, and began to stammer an apology for treating him so brusquely. ‘Don’t bother about that, my boy!’ said Slim cheerfully. ‘If everybody worked like you, we’d get to Rangoon a lot sooner!’ The only people who seemed doubtful of Slim’s merits were his superiors. Churchill never warmed to this bluff, understated officer, fighting a campaign with which the prime minister had no sympathy. Throughout Slim’s career as commander of Fourteenth Army there were attempts to ‘unstick’ him, even in his final glory days. His blunt honesty, lack of bombast and unwillingness to play courtier did him few favours in the corridors of power. Only his soldiers never wavered in their devotion.

In a lecture to the officers of 10th Indian Division, which he led earlier in the war, Slim voiced some of his thoughts about command: ‘We make the best plans we can, gentlemen, and train our wills to hold steadfastly to them in the face of adversity, and yet to be flexible enough to change them when events show them to be unsound, or to take advantage of an opportunity that unfolds during the battle itself. But in the end every important battle develops to a point where there is no real control by senior commanders. Each soldier feels himself to be alone…The dominant feeling of the battlefield is loneliness, gentlemen.’

So it was through the bloody spring and early summer of 1944. On the plain at Imphal, and in the soaring Naga Hills where Kohima stood, British, Indian and Japanese troops struggled for mastery. ‘The scenery was superb,’ wrote one of the defenders, ‘the Highlands without heather, the Yorkshire fells without their stone villages, all on a colossal scale which made our trucks look very puny…On such an immense landscape, it felt like defending the Alps with a platoon.’ Ammunition consumption was prodigious. One battalion, 3/10th Gurkhas, expended 3,700 grenades in a single day’s clashes. The Japanese, short of artillery support, likewise used showers of grenades to cover their attacks. Three British brigadiers died at Kohima. The tennis court of the former district officer’s bungalow became the scene of some of the most brutal fighting of the war. Slowly, steadily, superior firepower told. Allied aircraft pounded the overstretched Japanese supply line. As well as losing ground, Mutaguchi’s soldiers began to starve.

To the fury of the Japanese general, on 19 June, after eighty-five days, Kotuku Sato, his subordinate divisional commander at Kohima, abandoned the assault and began to fall back. The monsoon, which struck with exceptional force, reduced the tracks behind the Japanese front to mudbaths. ‘Despair became rife,’ said Iwaichi Fujiwara, a staff intelligence colonel. ‘The food situation was desperate. Officers and men had almost exhausted their strength after continuous and heavy fighting for weeks in the rain, poorly fed…The road dissolved into mud, the rivers flooded, and it was hard to move on foot, never mind in a vehicle…Almost every officer and man was suffering from malaria, while amoebic dysentery and beriberi were commonplace.’

Still the Japanese army commander would not abandon Imphal. When Sato, back from Kohima, reported to Mutaguchi’s headquarters on 12 July, a senior staff officer coldly offered him a short sword covered with a white cloth. Sato, however, felt more disposed to kill his superior than himself. He declared contemptuously: ‘15th Army’s staff possess less tactical understanding than cadets.’ He recognised, as Mutaguchi would not, that the Japanese forces should have acknowledged failure and fallen back before the monsoon broke. Japanese often spoke scornfully of the long and cumbersome British logistic ‘tail’. Now they discovered the cost of themselves having no ‘tail’ at all.

Mutaguchi’s hapless soldiers fought on at Imphal, being driven back yard by yard with crippling losses. Their commander’s behaviour became increasingly eccentric. Having ordered a clearing made beside his headquarters in the jungle, he implanted decorated bamboos at the four points of the compass, and each morning approached these, calling on the eight hundred myriad gods of Japan for aid. His supplications were in vain. On 18 July the general bowed to the inevitable, and ordered a retreat. His ruined army began to fall back towards the Chindwin river, into Burma, Slim’s vanguards pressing on their rear. ‘One battle is much like another to those who fight them,’ observed Captain Raymond Cooper of the Border Regiment, who was wounded at Imphal. This is indeed true. But the consequences of Imphal and Kohima far transcended any British achievement in the Far East since December 1941.

The campaign was a catastrophe for the Japanese. Of 85,000 fighting soldiers committed, 53,000 became casualties, five divisions were destroyed, two more badly mauled. At least 30,000 men died, along with 17,000 mules, bullocks and pack ponies, both sides’ indispensable beasts of burden. The Indian National Army, in British eyes traitors, collapsed when exposed to action, and surrendered wherever Slim’s soldiers would indulge them. Fourteenth Army suffered 17,000 casualties, but its spirits soared. ‘We knew we had won a great victory,’ said Derek Horsford, commanding a Gurkha battalion at the age of twenty-seven. ‘We were chasing Japanese up and down thousand-foot hills, finding everywhere their dead and abandoned weapons and equipment.’ An eyewitness with Fourteenth Army, advancing in the enemy’s wake, wrote:

The air was thick with the smell of their dead. The sick and wounded were left behind in hundreds…We saw dead Japs all along the road, some in their stockinged feet, and where the hills were highest and most exhausting, they lay huddled in groups. They carried only a mess-tin, steel helmet and rifle. Some lay as though asleep, while others were twisted and broken by the bombs which had rained down on them. Five hundred dead lay in the ruins of Tamu. The pagoda was choked with wounded and dying. They had crawled here, in front of the four tall and golden images, to die. Hand grenades littered the altar. In the centre of the temple was a dais, and carved into this was a perfectly symmetrical pattern on the foot of Buddha. It was littered with blood-soaked bandages and Japanese field-postcards.

No men in this war can have been reduced to such a terrible condition. I saw two prisoners who were revived with hot tea. They were tiny men with matted hair which stood up like a golliwog’s. One of them put his head in his hands and cried like a child. It was a disgrace for him to be alive. [Some Japanese] killed themselves where they stood with their own grenades…lousy, half-mad from hunger and explosions, and deserted by their officers. This is a picture of a shattered army…These small men with the savage hearts and the hands that can paint exquisite water-colours in the diaries which they leave lying in the red mud.

Lethbridge, Slim’s chief of staff, wrote home:

The Jap retreat must have been worse than Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. The whole jungle stinks of corruption. I counted twenty-five dead Japs on the side of the road, between two successive milestones. There must have been hundreds more who had crawled away into the jungle to die. In some places there are Jap lorries, with skeletons sitting in the drivers’ seats, and a staff car with four skeletons in it. All these Japs had simply died of exhaustion, starvation and disease. I have never seen troops in such good heart as our people…I’m so delighted that the British Army has at last come into its own again, and shown the world how we can wage war. I really don’t see how the old Hun can last much longer. Once we’ve finished him, we’ll simply knock the hide off these little yellow swine.

On the Japanese line of retreat, correspondent Masanori Ito approached Renya Mutaguchi, architect of his army’s disaster. ‘He seemed tired out,’ wrote Ito, who noticed that the general was shamelessly sipping rice gruel, even as starving survivors of his army stumbled past. ‘You want a statement?’ Mutaguchi growled. ‘I have killed thousands of my men. I should not go back across the Chindwin alive.’ Mutaguchi did not kill himself, however, and lived to be sacked a few months later. Of all the Imperial Army’s commanders, he had become the most detested and scorned by his own officers and men.

‘Sometimes it is impossible to carry out very difficult orders, but even though the command recognise this, they will not admit their mistake until every man has died trying to carry them out,’ a Japanese officer prisoner told his British captors. ‘The unreasoning obedience of men in carrying out idiotic orders is pitiful to behold. It was often impossible for me to give the actual orders—sometimes I only passed on half of them. “We get all the fighting but none of the food—why?” No one dared say this, but everybody thought it.’

In the autumn of 1944, as Fourteenth Army began its own advance towards the Chindwin river and Burma, at first the Japanese could deploy only four very weak divisions, totalling some 20,000 men, against Slim’s six, plus two independent brigades—a British ration strength of 260,000 men. In the north, Chinese divisions under Stilwell were making sluggish progress towards the clearance of the Burma Road between India and China. The only significant achievement of the second Chindit expedition was to assist the capture of Myitkyina, a vital link on the route, which finally fell on 3 August. It required the efforts of three Chinese divisions, aided by the American ‘Merrill’s Marauders’, together with several thousand Chindits, to achieve this success against the weak, poorly-equipped Japanese 18th Division. But the prospect now beckoned of opening the China passage.

Slim’s invaders were supported by forty-eight fighter and bomber squadrons and a total of 4,600 aircraft in the theatre, many of them American transports. The Japanese had just sixty-six planes. Though they were able to reinforce their ground forces before spring, the scene was set for Fourteenth Army to commence its recapture of Burma. Mountbatten’s chief of staff, Gen. Henry Pownall, perceived an urgency about this task. Like others of his time, place and nation, he saw Britain engaged in a race between the recapture of her Asian colonies and American victory in the Pacific. If the British lost the contest, if they failed to secure physical possession before the Japanese flag came down, the Union flag might never again fly over this great region: ‘There’s not much time to lose. The Yanks are going to have Japan beat by Xmas 1945. We have got a lot of cleaning-up to do by then. The Yanks are not going to wait for us (no reason why they should) but we really don’t want our Far Eastern Empire…handed back to us entirely by American single-handed victory. So we aim at all Burma by next summer and Malaya not too long afterwards.’

The twin battles of Imphal and Kohima had been essential, to halt the Japanese advance westwards. British victory had crippled the fighting power of the enemy on the Burman front, where Japan no longer possessed resources to frustrate any significant Allied purpose. Slim’s chief foes were now terrain, disease, weather, logistics. Mountbatten supported an important decision: to keep fighting through the monsoon, when in the past all significant operations were halted. Thereafter, Slim was called upon to move a modern Western army across hundreds of miles of the most inhospitable country in the world, devoid of road communications, to redeem the humiliations which Britain had suffered in 1941-42, and to keep alive a dream of empire which thoughtful men knew to be doomed. Churchill badly wanted to retrieve Burma and Malaya, but was determined, he told the chiefs of staff in September 1944, ‘that the minimum of effort should be employed in this disease-ridden country’. Here was a prospect rich in pathos, tragedy or absurdity according to viewpoint. As so often in wars, brave men were to do fine and hard things in pursuit of a national illusion.

2 ‘THE FORGOTTEN ARMY’

A British officer returning from home leave recorded gloomily: ‘In the UK…I found everywhere a dreadful ignorance about Fourteenth Army and also generally about Burma.’ But Slim’s men had learned to take a defiant pride in their status as ‘the forgotten army’. In the autumn of 1944 they advanced with spirits infinitely buoyed by victory at Imphal and Kohima. Some of the men who now began hacking a path towards the Chindwin river, sweating up the soaring hills and scrambling down the steep valleys towards its bank, had been fighting thereabouts since 1942. A young British signaller who joined 2nd Division was awed by the veterans with whom he found himself: ‘I was a pale white thing; they were tanned the colour of a mule’s backside. I knew nothing; they knew everything and could say nothing.’ The same soldier, Brian Aldiss, wrote home as the advance to the Chindwin began: ‘The grand scenery here produces a great calm, and seems to reduce war to the useless squabble it really is.’ He was as moved as many other participants by the spectacle of Fourteenth Army negotiating the hills of Assam:

When our lorry was labouring to the top of a crest, we could see the thread of vehicles far away behind us, below clouds; conversely, when we were in a valley, we could look up through clouds and see that thread continuing far ahead of us, climbing the next series of heights…To be part of this inset of war was most thrilling after dark. Dim headlights scarcely penetrated the muck we threw up. We could scarcely see the tail lights of the vehicle ahead. Speed was almost down to walking pace. The impression of an animal bent on traversing a strange planet was at its strongest. On either side, unknowable, thrilling, fearsome, stood the jungle, pale as a ghost jungle in its layers of dust.

The 1944-45 battle for Burma was the last great adventure of Britain’s imperial army. It brought together under Slim’s command British soldiers and Gurkhas, East and West Africans, above all Indians: Sikhs and Baluchis, Madrassis, Dogras and Rajputs, pride of the Raj. Only a fraction of those who fought for the Allied cause in Burma were British—two divisions—and just one in thirteen of all ground troops under Mountbatten’s command in South-East Asia.

To a man, Britain’s Indian troops were volunteers, many from the north, where soldiering was a traditional career. The dramatic expansion of the Indian Army between 1939 and 1945—from 189,000 to 2.5 million men—caused a dilution of quality, and especially a shortage of suitable leaders, which significantly affected its performance. Yet the exotic traditions, the romance and prowess of great regiments, still thrilled British officers who felt privileged to serve with them, usually on a scale of around twelve per battalion. ‘Gurkhas were wonderful chaps to command,’ said Derek Horsford, who made his military career with the little Nepalese soldiers. ‘They had a lovely sense of humour. You had to prove yourself, but once they liked you they would do anything for you.’ Gurkha riflemen ate goat and rice, their British officers sardines and bully beef. Slim enjoyed telling a story of encountering 17th Indian Division’s famously feisty and colourful little commander, Pete Rees, leading a group of Assamese soldiers in the singing of a Welsh missionary hymn. ‘The fact that he sung in Welsh and they in Khasi only added to the harmony.’

British officers were often much moved by the loyalty and courage of soldiers who were, to put the matter bluntly, mercenaries. A man of the 1/3rd Gurkhas said to his company commander one morning: ‘Today I shall win the Victoria Cross, or die.’ That Nepalese died sure enough, but his shade had to be content with the Indian Order of Merit. Such was the rivalry between two Indian officers of John Cameron-Hayes’s gun battery that each declined to take cover on the battlefield within sight of the other. Personal honour—‘izzat’—meant much. Captain John Randle was moved when his subadar Moghal Baz suddenly said as they ate one night: ‘I would like you to know, sahib, that with you I have served with great “izzat”.’ Every man in Slim’s army heard stories such as that of a Dogra jemadar badly wounded and taken to a dressing station. The NCO insisted on crawling back to his position, and fighting on until wounded three times more. As he lay dying, he repeated again and again the war cry ‘Mai kali ki Jai!’ His British captain crawled to where he lay. The jemadar said: ‘Go back and command the company, sahib, don’t worry about me.’

Slim’s chief of staff wrote to his wife: ‘One can’t help feeling very humble when one deals with men like that. This army is truly invincible given a fair chance.’ Of twenty Victoria Crosses won in Burma, fourteen went to men of the Indian Army, three to a single unit, 2/5th Gurkhas. When a British officer met a Sikh colonel whose battalion he was relieving, he noted his immaculate turban, beard glistening in the monsoon rain: ‘I saw something in him that was new to me: relish for war. The Sikhs gave every impression of enjoying themselves.’

It never occurred to the British government to consult Indian political leaders about the conduct of the war, any more than they sought the views of Burman exiles. Reports of dissension among the Allies about Asian policy, freely aired in the British and American media, were shamelessly censored from the Indian press. The subcontinent was treated merely as a huge reservoir of manpower. An army psychiatrist’s report on Indian troops asserted that on the battlefield, most were ‘welladjusted’, as long as they were able to serve alongside men of their own racial group. ‘The sepoy,’ observed the report with imperialistic condescension, ‘accepts the army, its discipline, its customs and leaders uncritically. He is not greatly interested in the ideologies of the war, because he has a job which gives him a higher standard of living than before, an interest is taken in his welfare, and he gets leave fairly regularly. He does not ask a great deal more.’ Few British officers in Indian regiments perceived that the day of the Raj was done, or heeded the alienation of most Indian civilians from Britain’s war. ‘We took it for granted that Burma and Malaya would remain parts of the British Empire. We never thought India might go,’ said Captain Ronnie McAllister of 1/3rd Gurkhas, whose stepfather was a senior officer of the Indian Police. ‘I remember dinner parties at my stepfather’s house where there were police, Indian Civil Service people, Indians. Nobody even mentioned the possibility. We were cocooned against reality, you see, because the Indian Army was so staunch.’

That army’s cultural complexities aroused some bewilderment among newcomers. Pathans in John Cameron-Hayes’s gunner unit not infrequently used their leaves to pursue tribal vendettas at home, before returning to the British war. John Randle, a company commander in the Baluchis at the age of twenty-two, was informed by his colonel of two taboos essential to maintaining respect for sahibs: an officer must never let himself be seen naked before his men, and should ensure that excretion was carried out in privacy on a ‘thunderbox’, even in action. The officers’ mess sweeper, a little man named Kantu whose broad grin never failed, thus sometimes found himself excusing the colonel’s temporary absence from a battle, saying as he saluted: ‘Command officer sahib, pot par hai’—‘The CO’s on the pot.’ Randle was so impressed by the spectacle of Kantu crawling out under fire to deposit the hallowed contents of the thunderbox in a latrine pit that he successfully submitted the sweeper’s name for a Mention in Dispatches. Less happily, Randle was informed that a homosexual British officer had been making advances to sepoys. His soldiers, mostly Pathans, were plotting to kill him. Randle saved the man’s life by having him removed for court martial.

Once, an attached platoon of British troops arrived triumphant in the Baluchis’ lines with the carcass of a wild pig they had trapped. Randle’s subadar-major said firmly: ‘Sir, that thing is not coming into our position to defile us.’ The British sergeant said: ‘Sir, you know what the rations are like—we’re all hungry and browned off to hell with bully and biscuits.’ Randle told the sergeant to remove the pig, dismember it and come back with the meat discreetly concealed in the men’s haversacks, for transfer to their own cookhouse. The subadar-major acquiesced. Likewise when tins of mutton were delivered to the 4/1st Gurkhas, bearing labels which showed images of female sheep. The men declined to eat them. The battalion CO instructed his quartermaster to find a crayon and draw testicles on the beasts. The amended mutton was found acceptable.

There was rivalry between British and Indian units, with some disdain on both sides. Derek Horsford of the Gurkhas said: ‘We thought nothing of the British Army. They seemed to us terribly inefficient.’ War in Burma produced wild incongruities, such as the spectacle of the gunners of 119 Field Regiment singing ‘Sussex by the Sea’ in honour of their native county as they heaved twenty-five-pounders across a jungle clearing. The culture and language of the Raj seeped into the veins of every man who served under Slim. Whether you were a Borderer or a Dragoon, tea was ‘char’, the washerman a ‘dhobi-wallah’, a mug a ‘piyala’, food ‘khana’, and so on. They smoked Indian ‘Victory V’ cigarettes, packed in brown paper packets for European consumption, green for Indian and African. Soldiers found both ‘unspeakably vile’.

The foremost tactical reality for both British and Americans fighting the Japanese was that when the enemy moved, he became vulnerable to their firepower, but while dug into his brilliantly concealed and meticulously protected bunkers, he was hard to see and harder still to kill. One of the more ridiculous documents produced by the wartime British Army, marked ‘Most Secret’, was an August 1944 report from the Directorate of Tactical Investigation, summarising tests on bombarding simulated Japanese bunkers with infantry weapons. Researchers garrisoned a position with two cockerels, two goats and two white rabbits, ‘one somewhat dull in behaviour and suffering from mange’. After a two-inch mortar barrage, reported the study, the animals were covered in dust, but otherwise little affected. ‘They appeared mildly surprised but in other respects were apparently normal. The goat was coughing slightly.’ PIAT anti-tank bombs caused the goat’s pulse to slow and blood pressure to fall. On the battlefield, no doubt with scant help from the above study, ‘beehive’ charges, tank gunfire, or an infantryman tossing a grenade into a bunker with one hand while firing a tommy gun through the slit with the other, were found most efficacious.

But first it was necessary to find the enemy. A British officer noted that when his soldiers dug a foxhole, a pile of earth rose around it: ‘With the Japanese, you could never see that soil had been moved.’ A Borderer in Raymond Cooper’s company was astonished to hear a ‘woodpecker’—a slow-firing Japanese light machine gun—chattering under his feet. Without noticing, he had stepped onto an enemy bunker. Cecil Daniels’s platoon of the Buffs, advancing warily through the jungle, received their first intimation of the enemy ‘when there was a sudden bang and the sergeant who had been walking by the side of and slightly in front of me went down like a log. Firing seemed to break out all around. A shout of “Stretcher-bearer” went out, but I shouted “No need” as I could see that he was already dead, twitching in the throes of involuntary muscle convulsion. He wasn’t breathing.’ The company runner, ‘Deuce’ Adams, shouted: ‘Look out, there’s a bloody Jap.’ Somebody shouted ‘Take him prisoner.’ Someone else shouted: ‘Balls.’ Adams emptied a tommy-gun magazine apparently into empty ground, at point-blank range. The other men could see nothing. When they closed in on Adams, they found him peering into a foxhole containing a dead Japanese soldier. ‘He smelt pretty much, a sickly spicy smell such as all Japs seemed to have.’

The suddenness and savagery of such encounters made a profound impression on every man who experienced them, especially at night. The 25th Dragoons, an armoured unit, never forgot a moonless moment in the Arakan when the Japanese broke into their main dressing station: ‘The screams of the patients, doctors and medical staff as they were shot and bayoneted, the blood-curdling yells of the attacking Japs through the night, was for all of us a nightmarish experience…This brutality and inhuman behaviour…affected us profoundly.’ Some British commanders favoured fighting whenever possible in daylight, because they acknowledged Japanese mastery of darkness. Maj. John Hill’s men of the Berkshires were disgusted to find human body parts in the haversacks of dead enemy soldiers. They knew nothing of the cultural importance to every Japanese of returning some portion of a dead comrade’s body to his homeland. ‘The war in Burma was fought with a savagery that did not happen in the Western desert, Italy or north-west Europe,’ wrote John Randle of the Baluchis. ‘I never once recall burying Jap dead. If there were sappers about, they were simply bulldozed into pits. Otherwise we shoved them into nullahs for the jackals and vultures to dispose of.’

By the autumn of 1944, courage, ruthlessness and fieldcraft were the principal assets remaining to the forces of Nippon. The Allies were overwhelmingly superior by every other measure of strength. Yet a War Office report based on prisoner interrogation noted that ‘The Japanese still considers himself a better soldier than his opposite number on the British side…because [we] avoid close combat, never attack by night and are “afraid to die”.’ The author of this document recorded with some dismay that the Japanese thought less of British soldiers than of Indians or Gurkhas, and considered Fourteenth Army ponderous and slow-moving. They respected British tank, artillery and air support, but criticised their camouflage, fieldcraft and noisiness.

Since 1941, however, the British and Indian armies had learned a lot about jungle fighting. First, dense cover and chronically limited views made conventional European tactics redundant: ‘All experience…has demonstrated the utter futility of a formal infantry attack supported by artillery concentrations and barrages against Jap organised jungle positions,’ wrote Frank Messervy, commanding 7th Indian Division. ‘The dominating assets are good junior leaders and skilful infantry. The right answers…are infiltration and encirclement.’ In early encounters with the Japanese, the British repeatedly allowed themselves to be outflanked, and assumed a battle lost if the enemy reached their rear. By 1944, men understood that in jungle war there were no such comfortable places as ‘rear areas’, nor such privileged people as non-combatants.

Every man of the support arms must be trained to fight, and all-round defence was essential. Units had to be untroubled by encirclement. At night, anywhere within enemy artillery or mortar range, each man dug a ‘keyhole’, a slit thirty inches deep and six feet long, sufficient to protect him from anything but a direct hit. The British had a healthy respect for the enemy’s skills: ‘The Jap selects the most unlikely line of approach…irrespective of the steepness of the slope or difficulties of terrain,’ noted Gen. Gracey in tactical instructions to his division. ‘He hopes to overrun the forward edge of a position by surprise. To this end, he crawls up very quietly and patiently to our wire. His fieldcraft is excellent.’

Movement was hampered by limited vision and poor maps. So much landscape looked alike. Patrols found themselves lost for hours, even days. Captain Joe Jack of 3/1st Gurkhas wandered fifteen miles at the head of his company before finding himself back where he started. In thick jungle, a mile an hour could represent good progress. Squads ‘froze’ to verify the significance of every sound. In an advancing file, the first man was trained to look forward, the second right, the third left, the fourth to the rear. Rest was a luxury. Five hours’ sleep in twenty-four, day after day, was not an unusual quota. The two commonest adjectives among British soldiers were ‘smashing’ and ‘deadly’, the latter often applied to their rations—soya sausages, baked beans, bully beef and Spam, ‘compo’ biscuits, jam, tea and porridge, heated on meths blocks. Even if men seldom suffered serious hunger, food was always short. A rum ration was sometimes parachuted in, but in that climate beer would have been more popular. South African-made boots and Australian socks proved best suited to cope with jungle conditions.

Light artillery, often the only available fire support for Slim’s infantry, was useful for keeping the enemy’s heads down, but unlikely to kill. Short-range weapons such as tommy guns and grenades were most valued. Whereas in Europe artillery and automatic fire dominated the battlefield, in Burma marksmanship mattered. An unaimed bullet was likely to damage only vegetation. Communication was problematic, because portable radios seldom worked. It was hard to see hand signals from officers or NCOs. Intensive training was essential, to make men respond instinctively to emergencies.

‘It seemed a terribly old-fashioned kind of war,’ wrote one of Slim’s soldiers, ‘far closer to the campaign my great-uncle fought when he went with Roberts to Kandahar than to what was happening in Europe.’ Douglas Gracey, commanding 20th Indian Division, summarised differences between operations in Burma and Europe: lack of good road and rail communications, endless water, jungles and swamps which limited movement, ‘but NOT to such an extent as inexperienced commanders and troops think’. Visibility was drastically reduced, and vehicles wore out fast. ‘Every Japanese in a defensive position must be dealt with. He will fight to the death even when severely wounded.’ Gracey concluded, however, with a fierce homily against allowing these considerations to induce defeatism: ‘EXPLODE THE JAP BOGEY AND THE JUNGLE BOGEY. WE ARE ALL ROUND BETTER THAN THE JAP.’ By the winter of 1944 this was true, chiefly because Slim’s men had more of everything.

Even when Fourteenth Army was winning battles, it never entirely conquered its other great enemy, disease. Many men disliked the marble-sized mepacrine tablets of which a daily dosage prevented malaria, at the cost of turning their skins yellow. In 1942-43, tablets were often discarded—not least by men who preferred malaria to combat—and perhaps also by a few who believed Japanese propaganda that they rendered a man impotent. By 1944, most units held parades to ensure that mepacrine was ingested as well as issued. Men were ordered never to expose more flesh than necessary after nightfall. In the conditions of the Burmese jungle, however, chronically inimical to human health, sickness caused more losses than gunfire. A six-month breakdown of 20th Indian Division’s losses showed 2,345 battle casualties, and a further 5,605 non-battle hospital admissions. The latter included 100 accidents, 321 minor injuries, 210 skin diseases, 205 venereal, 170 psychiatric, 1,118 malaria and typhus, 697 dysentery.

Insects laid their curse upon man and mule. Fires were lit in bivouacs whenever security allowed, to keep mosquitoes at bay. A British surgeon described the difficulty of addressing patients: ‘One orderly was deputed to deal with the flies. He chased them off the instruments, the sterile dressing, the blood-soaked blanket, clothing and stretcher of the patient, the very wound itself, and swatted them as they tickled the defenceless, half-naked operator.’ Chronic skin and foot infections, hepatitis, water rendered distasteful by purifying tablets, clothing never dry or clean, were the lot of every infantryman. Nor were tank crews more comfortable. In a steel box, sweat poured down men’s torsos into the sodden waistbands of their shorts. Often it was impossible to clamber on the hot hull without using rags to protect skin, and especially knees. Crews were coated in dust, and breathed through handkerchiefs tied over mouths and noses. When a tank’s main armament fired, the stink of cordite lingered in the turret. There was noise, perpetual noise. John Leyin’s crew sang ‘The bells are ringing, for me and my gal’ as their Lee lumbered into action, knowing that neither friend nor foe could hear the chorus above the roar of its engine.

Another tankman, Tom Grounds, described the aftermath of battle: ‘Back in harbour we faced the bleak task of getting the dead men out…I shall not forget the burned and wizened, half-crushed head of the loader. In shocked silence they were passed through the side-hatch and lowered to the ground. We dug two graves near the side of the hill…Padre Wallace Cox conducted a short service, and rough wooden crosses were put up. White ants would soon have eaten the crosses and the jungle grown over the graves.’

Like every battlefield, Burma demanded instant decisions about life and death. One day Col. Derek Horsford of 4/1st Gurkhas found his medical officer bent over a casualty with half his intestines trailing out of his abdomen. In his agony, the man was clawing mud from the ground and stuffing it into the wound. ‘Has he got a chance?’ Horsford demanded. The medical officer shook his head. ‘Give him an overdose of morphine.’ A year later, the man amazed them all by writing from Nepal not only to report his survival, but to thank his officers for saving him. In attacks, junior leaders learned to be ruthless about leaving wounded where they lay, to await designated stretcher-bearers: otherwise there were far too many volunteers eager to escape carnage by carrying casualties to the rear.