Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45

Discipline was summarily enforced. A saddler with an Indian Army mountain artillery unit asked for some grenades, to protect himself in the event of a Japanese night attack. Instead, however, he deposited one in the bunk of a sergeant-major, killing him, and threw a second which wounded a British officer. It emerged that the man had a grievance about pay. After a swift trial, he was shot by firing squad. When John Hill’s company of the Berkshires was approached by Japanese who got alarmingly close before being challenged, it emerged that two sentries had been asleep. On waking and seeing the Japanese, they simply abandoned their position and fled. Hill had one man court-martialled and sentenced to two years’ detention, because it seemed essential to drive home the message that such lapses cost lives.

Burma offered no châteaux or champagne to senior officers. Slim’s chief of staff, Brig. John Lethbridge, described to his wife rats eating the soap in his ‘basha’ and running over his bed at night; his sense of loneliness and remoteness; gnawing uncertainty about how long the campaign might continue. He begged for news of his garden in western England. ‘This place is vile in October. The sun is sucking up all the vile humours out of the stinking ground, and one sweats and sweats. I have ten GSO1s under me, and five are in hospital with malaria or dysentery, some with both!’ Slim, paying a night visit to the headquarters map room, found himself almost stepping on a deadly krait. Thereafter, in that snake-ridden country, he used a torch fastidiously.

If such things were so for red-tabbed staff officers, conditions were infinitely harsher for men living, eating and sleeping within shot of the enemy. ‘Perhaps the reason why the old soldier is reputed to dramatise his story,’ wrote Raymond Cooper, ‘is because he cannot create for those who do not know “the tiny stuffless voices of the dark”, nor can he fully explain the change in the vital values of the ordinary things of life. The contrast is too great.’ Victory at Imphal and Kohima had done much for the morale of Slim’s army, but remoteness from home was a corrosive force. Private Cecil Daniels, a twenty-three-year-old former Kent shop-worker, began his military service as an Aldershot mess waiter in 1939, became an officer’s batman, served in the Western Desert and Persia. By the winter of 1944 he had become an infantryman with the 2nd Buffs in Burma. Like so many others, this simple young man found himself bemused by the extraordinary experiences which befell him, so far from home. One night in his foxhole beside a pagoda, he lay awake gazing at the moon. ‘The thought went through my head that this same moon had been shining over the home of my family not so very many hours before, and I wondered what they were doing at this same moment, and what thoughts they were having of me.’

Though the army’s morale was high, said a War Office report dated 31 June 1944, ‘infidelity of soldiers’ wives is still a grave problem’. A company commander of 9th Borderers described an encounter a few minutes before an attack: ‘Waiting in the dark for reports to reach me that all were ready, I was approached by a man who blurted out in a hurried whisper that by that morning’s mail his wife had asked for a divorce. “I’ll talk to you about it in the morning” seemed an inept reply to a man in his frame of mind, with five hundred Japs between him and the sunrise.’ The regular morale report on British forces overseas, compiled for the War Office by Brig. John Sparrow, asserted in November 1944: ‘Anxiety about domestic affairs is rife among the troops, particularly long-serving men. Nine times out of ten it is caused by selfish women. Few officers or men feel completely secure. In one unit both the CO and RSM asked privately for my advice about their matrimonial troubles.’

Mountbatten told the army’s Morale Committee that the average British soldier ‘does not like India or Burma, and never will. The country, the climate and people are alike repugnant to him.’ Sparrow’s report noted continuing concern among British commanders overseas about ‘deliberate’ desertions by some of their men—as distinct from drunken leave overstays and suchlike. ‘All seemed agreed,’ wrote Sparrow to the adjutant-general, ‘that re-introduction of the death penalty would be the only satisfactory deterrent…It was generally realised, however, at any rate by staffs and senior officers, that [this] is not practical politics.’ After a few months in Burma, John Hill of the Berkshires concluded that about 25 per cent of his men were potentially brave, about 5 per cent potential cowards, and the remainder neither. This seems a fair, indeed generous, valuation of most Allied units in the Second World War.

The strangest elements of Slim’s army—in the eyes of posterity, if not of those who grew up amid the exotic panoply of Empire—were three divisions, 17 per cent of the entire strength, recruited from Britain’s African colonies. What can have been the thought processes of such men, some from the remotest bush country, who found themselves shipped halfway across the world, albeit as volunteers, to serve in a white man’s war for less than half the pay a white man received, against an enemy with whom a Nigerian, Kenyan or Tanganyikan could have no conceivable quarrel? Non-Christians among them had sworn an oath of loyalty on cold steel, usually a bayonet, rather than upon the Bible.

One West African divisional commander, Hugh Stockwell, circulated an angry memorandum when he heard that some white officers had spoken scornfully of the men they commanded: ‘I get reports that certain officers and British ORs…have, in idle conversation, been considerably indiscreet in their remarks about the capability of the African soldier in battle…Any who talk in such a way merely “foul their own nest”. I myself consider that it takes a great deal of moral courage to set the African the example he deserves or give him the leadership which is so necessary. I hope that you have the guts that your breeding as a Britisher should give you to overcome your difficulties.’

Stockwell warned that he would court martial any officer deemed guilty of ‘defeatism’. In correspondence with higher commanders, however, he admitted that some of his units had performed poorly, especially when subjected to Japanese night attacks. The African, he wrote, ‘has not a fighting history, and as a rule therefore battle does not come naturally’. Some men had proved very good soldiers, ‘but others are very, very “bush”…[The African] moves stealthily when on patrol, but cannot react quickly to any sudden emergency, again due to an inherent dislike of the unknown and lack of intelligence which precludes quick thinking. He has a doglike devotion to his leaders he can trust and admire, and who respect him…The whole fighting potential of the Division is in the hands of the European officers and NCOs.’ Stockwell deplored the poor quality of many of these. Some units were officered by Polish exiles, who had been encouraged by Churchill to emigrate to West Africa. Most of these Poles spoke the same pidgin English as their men. Stockwell was obliged to report to 11 Army Group on 4 August 1944 that ‘a small outbreak of desertion or absenteeism among native West African troops has been found to be due…to a belief…that if they can get to Calcutta they will be able to join units of the USAAF as labourers or servants. Steps are being taken to refute this idea.’

Col. Derek Horsford observed that though his Gurkhas had little regard for the unfortunate Africans as fighting soldiers—‘they would go out on patrol if you held their hands’—they were impressed by other attributes. ‘During the advance into the Kabaw valley, I found some of our chaps crouching behind a bush, watching a party of East African soldiers bathing. The Gurkhas were gazing fascinated, uttering exclamations of unwilling awe, at what they perceived as the extravagant dimensions of their black comrades’ private parts.’ There was much bitterness after the war that in Slim’s expressions of gratitude to his soldiers, he never mentioned the Africans. Some British officers evinced deep admiration for them. They cited examples such as that of Private Kewku Pong, a Gold Coaster wounded and left for dead when his unit was overrun by the Japanese. Pong found an abandoned bren gun and kept firing until overcome by loss of blood. The British discovered him next day, just alive, still clutching the butt of his gun. He was awarded the Military Medal. A British chronicler wrote of Pong: ‘On his own, in the dark of the night, quite badly wounded, with…Japanese rampaging behind him. No Britisher to tell him what to do, no African NCO, no other African; he ought to have been hopeless and helpless, and no one probably would have blamed him if he had discreetly gone to ground until all was quiet…Did Slim ever hear of Kewku Pong?’

In November 1944, Sierra Leonean troops had to carry fifty stretcher cases over the Pidaung hill range. A British officer wrote: ‘Bamboo ladders were built to get the stretchers up the rock face…Nothing…will ever compare with the perilous descent from the 2,300-foot escarpment…The European and senior African NCOs went out with torches and guided the column in…By the light of bamboo flares the stretchers were passed hand over hand down the cliff faces, some Africans going on hands and knees to form a human bridge over the worst places. The last stretcher case was safely in the advanced dressing station by 9.30 that night, after fifteen hours on the march.’

Radio Tokyo denounced the African divisions as ‘cannibals led by European fanatics’. Yet perhaps the most convincing and passionate testimonial to their contribution is that of one of their officers, Maj. Denis Cookson: ‘Without a murmur of complaint they defended a country whose inhabitants they despised, in a quarrel whose implications they did not understand. They had volunteered to fight for the British, and if the British brought them to a wilderness, that was a sufficient reason. They squatted down in their trenches, polished the leather charms they wore next to the skin, prayed to Allah for his protection, and good-humouredly got on with the job.’ They deserved more gratitude from their imperial masters than they received, and perhaps contributed more to the campaign than their critics allowed.

Behind the infantry of both sides toiled one of the most extraordinary gatherings of pack animals ever mustered with a modern army. Only beasts could cover mountainous ground, especially during and after the monsoon. White bullocks were dyed green, to render them less conspicuous targets. British soldiers found themselves receiving special training as mule handlers, and many grew fond of their charges. All ranks had to be carefully instructed in packing saddles, for overloading caused girth sores, or worse. The four mules designated for an infantry rifle company headquarters, for instance, could carry 158 pounds apiece. A typical load was expressed in regulations as one signal pistol; two x two-inch mortars plus eighteen bombs; five hundred rounds of .303 ammunition and a thousand rounds of 9mm sten. The Indian Army’s mountain batteries’ light guns were dismantled for mule portage. Their British officers were also issued with chargers, which rather than riding most used to carry personal effects—blanket, mosquito net, rifle in a saddle bucket. When supplies were air-dropped, these included corn in vast quantities for the pack train.

Beyond mules, Japanese and British alike exploited elephants. The animals and their local riders—‘oozies’, as they were known—had been employed before the war in Burma’s teak forests. Slim’s tusker supremo was Lt Col. Bill Williams, a First World War Camel Corps veteran who had been handling elephants for the Burma-Bombay Trading Corporation since 1920. ‘Elephant Bill’ adored his charges, and worked devotedly not only to make them serviceable to the British cause, but also to protect the animals’ interests. In the winter of 1944 he led a force of 147 elephants across the Chindwin, reinforcing his herd with abandoned Japanese beasts as the army advanced. Although, surprisingly, each elephant could carry little more than a mule’s load, their bridge-building skills were much in demand. It was an awesome sight, to see an elephant lift in its trunk a log weighing a quarter of a ton. The great animals built 270 crossings for Fourteenth Army. Men sometimes glimpsed, for instance, a broken-down amphibious DUKW being towed by a tusker. John Randle’s unit was impressed by the elephants provided to carry its heavy mortars, but dismayed to find them eating their camouflage foliage.

The best ‘oozies’ were what Williams called ‘real Burmans, the Irishmen of the East’, inveterate gamblers who cared as much as he did for their animals. Some were careless, however, causing terrible suffering by allowing battery acid to leak from loads onto elephants’ backs. Williams established a field veterinary hospital to care for the injured, but nothing could be done on the night when a horrified sapper officer drove into his camp to report that one of their favourite beasts, Okethapyah—Pagoda Stone—had trodden on a landmine. ‘I gave Alex a good tot of rum, told him I could not amputate an elephant’s legs, and we could only do our best to prevent such accidents in future.’

Williams scoured parachute dropping zones for broken bags of salt, which his animals adored, and strove constantly to prevent the casual cruelty of soldiers. Once, an Indian Army Service Corps driver, enraged by an elephant blocking his road, simply shot it in the leg. In October 1944 Williams’s favourite elephant, Bandoola, forty-eight years old, got loose in a pineapple grove and contracted acute colic after eating nine hundred fruits. Bandoola recovered from this experience only to be found dead a few months later with one tusk removed, and a wound inflicted by a British bullet. Romantic though the elephants were, they suffered grievously for their role in a struggle of which they knew nothing. Many used by the Japanese were wounded or killed by RAF strafing. Most of those recaptured had had their tusks sawn off for ivory. Some 4,000 elephants are estimated to have died in Burma between 1942 and 1945.

It was a strange world, that of Fourteenth Army, divorced from anything its soldiers had known in past life. ‘We had entered an enchanted zone—a place of evil enchantment, if you like,’ wrote Brian Aldiss. ‘You could not buy a ticket to get where we were…No women were allowed, or hairdressers, or any kind of extraneous occupation. Lawyers, entertainers, politicians—all were forbidden…To attend this show, you had to be young and part of the British Empire.’ There was no loot to be scavenged from the battlefield, such as the armies fighting in Europe enjoyed. There were only the enemy’s swords and pathetic banners, though Aldiss was once bemused to see a man marching with an old Japanese typewriter lashed to his sixty-pound pack.

There were few illusions about the loyalties of Burmans, in whose country this bitter struggle was fought out. A 20th Division report described 10 per cent of the locals—often tribesmen from minority communities, persecuted by the Burman majority—as pro-British, 10 per cent as diehard anti-British, and 80 per cent as ‘lukewarm, assisting whichever superior forces they are forced or persuaded to’. John Randle once entered a village to find a badly wounded Japanese, obviously dying, ‘with his left leg shattered, bloated and gangrenous’. A group of Burmans surrounded him, one of whom was driving a stick up his anus. Randle shot dead both the Japanese and his Burman torturer.

Men learned to beware mist on the hills, which often persisted until mid-morning, screening enemy movements. They were respectful of Japanese 90mm mortars. At night, two green verey lights from the enemy lines usually signalled an attack. Officers found it prudent to dress indistinguishably from their men, to avoid attracting the attention of snipers. The first of 114 Field Regiment to be killed in action was John Robbins, a newly-arrived young forward observation officer who went into action alongside the infantry wearing badges of rank, binoculars, and a map case prominently slung round his neck. One burst from a Japanese light machine gun removed Robbins.

In Indian and African units some British officers grew beards, to make their white skins less conspicuous. When Captain Ronnie McAllister joined 1/3rd Gurkhas at the beginning of 1945, he was warned to avoid exposing himself unnecessarily. One Gurkha colonel was notorious for making his white officers lead from the front, with the consequence that some twenty were killed within months. There had been a legendary 1/3rd incident in 1943, when in battle the CO himself started firing at the Japanese with a bren gun. Afterwards, the subadarmajor reproved him fiercely, saying: ‘This must never happen again. It is our job to fight, sahib, and yours to command.’ McAllister said: ‘The people who lived through 1944 had no illusions. They told us not to rush about too much, to stay alive.’

Some of those who marched into Burma in the winter of 1944, including McAllister, had been waiting years to see action. Maj. John Hill was a pre-war regular soldier, now a company commander in the 2nd Berkshires, who had spent forty months on garrison duties in India: ‘The war took a long time to reach us.’ The Berkshires were shocked by their first sights of battle: ‘Jeep ambulances came slowly past us with the groaning, bloody, bandaged forms of three men. I remember saying to myself: “So this is it,” and others must have thought the same. The ambulances passed the whole battalion slowly, as if to emphasise the moment. It seemed odd that, after five years of war, this was our first sight of casualties…To most of us, the next few short months would seem as long as years. To a few, they would be positive enjoyment; to most, a time when a job had to be done; to others, positive purgatory.’

Men’s battle careers were often brutally abbreviated. Charles Besly of the Berkshires was a twenty-six-year-old BSc, who before the war had worked in a circus and as assistant stage manager of a London theatre company. In Denmark when war broke out, he hitch-hiked home to join the army. By January 1945 he had served for a year with his battalion as a platoon commander, without seeing action. Within days of his first contact with the enemy he won a Military Cross in a clash with the Japanese. He was severely wounded, however, almost losing a leg. Besly disappeared from the regiment, never to fight again.

Thousands of soldiers followed behind Slim’s infantry, performing the myriad support functions of an army. Some maintained themselves in tiny cocoons of Britishness, upon which the war and foreign places scarcely impinged. Joe Welch was a south London joiner’s son, working in a power station, who joined the army in 1939 and became a linesman in a signals company. He and a little cluster of comrades served successively in Iraq, Greece, Libya, India and Burma, without any of these campaigns leaving much mark upon them. They were awed by the scale of India, but Burma was simply ‘lots of trees…I once saw an elephant…There were all these monkeys and spiders that came up when we were eating. I never saw a Burman.’ The campaign, to chirpy little Joe Welch, was simply ‘rain, rain, rain and bully, bully, bully’. He and his mates—a fellow Londoner named Joy, Garner from Manchester, Vince from Sheffield—carried their own little British world across the Chindwin in their Chevrolet truck with its wooden Indian-made body as composedly as they had rattled through Greece and the Western Desert. They laid their telephone lines from division to corps to army in the hills of Assam, then on the path to the Irrawaddy. What did the war mean to Joe Welch? ‘I didn’t worry about it—just one of those things, innit?’ That is how the 1939-45 experience was for millions of uniformed men, no poets they, yet all warriors of a kind.

Every man, whatever his rank or specialisation, was expected to turn a hand to anything. At the end of November 1944, the Berkshires found themselves roadbuilding just inside the Burma border. ‘Even the miners among us found it tough going,’ wrote Maj. John Hill, who wielded a pick with his men, ‘but it was all part of Fourteenth Army’s philosophy of self-help and DIY, in modern jargon…blasting trees, bamboo roots, rocks and eternally digging and shovelling, digging and shovelling until we longed for knocking-off time at 1600.’

During the advance from Imphal to the Chindwin, Slim’s men met only sporadic Japanese resistance, for the enemy was in no condition to fight a serious battle. In consequence, beyond the strains of the march, among many units there was almost a holiday atmosphere. The long files marched each night for eight or nine hours, each man following a wooden tag dipped in phosphorus tied to his predecessor’s backpack. Then, when morning came, they bivouacked. ‘Very soon companies would have settled down in their allotted areas on perimeters,’ recorded the History of the 3/1st Gurkhas. ‘Cookhouses and latrines would be built; the men, after consuming quantities of sweet tea, would make “sun shades” for themselves and the sahibs, and everyone would settle down for a very pleasant day, which everyone could spend pretty much how he liked.’ When they reached the Chindwin one officer, John Murray, spent hours fishing vainly with rod and line. He was chagrined to hear a loud explosion, then to meet a triumphant party of his men clutching a large fish, secured by judicious use of a grenade. The Gurkhas enjoyed the spectacle of African soldiers potting monkeys with rifles, until stray bullets started to fly about their own heads.

Yet even when organised Japanese resistance was slight, almost every yard of the Burma war provided unwelcome surprises. John Cameron-Hayes was disturbed in the night by a weight descending on his mosquito net, which proved to be a cobra. When one of his men shot a boa constrictor, its falling corpse knocked him into a stream. During the hours of darkness, both sides employed ‘jitter parties’, patrols whose function was to disrupt their opponents’ repose. Beyond these, there were plenty of unscheduled encounters. One night a Gurkha NCO awoke from sleep to see seven figures standing together on the road just beside him, huddled over a map. He rose, challenged them, and was met by startled Japanese grunts. He smote one enemy soldier with a spade, while the others scattered and ran. A British officer, awakened by the racket, found two figures struggling hand-to-hand in the darkness beside him. Joining the fray, it was some seconds before he realised that he was fighting a fellow officer. There was a desultory exchange of fire, then silence fell. The camp returned to sleep, only to be wakened once more by a thunderous explosion. A Japanese officer had blown himself up on an anti-tank mine. The Gurkhas slept again. At dawn, but for the presence of four dead Japanese in their positions, they would have been tempted to dismiss the alarums of the night as mere fantasies.

Beyond casualties inflicted by the enemy, there was a steady trickle of accidents, inseparable from all military operations. The air-dropping of supplies became a dominant feature of Fourteenth Army’s advance, and soldiers and pack animals were sometimes killed by loads falling upon them from the sky. As columns threaded up precipitous mountain tracks, at intervals a mule slipped, plunging into the valley below. A report noted wearily that the animal lost was invariably carrying a vital radio set—it was essential to ensure that some wirelesses were manpacked. A private of the Buffs performed a notable little feat of heroism, wiping out a Japanese machine-gun post with his bren gun. Yet as he ran on forward, he tripped and fell. The spade protruding from his pack caught and broke his neck. In action shortly afterwards, a Buffs sergeant called to his runner, Cecil Daniels, for a bag of grenades. The NCO was infuriated when Daniels told him they were not primed. ‘I’m not carrying a haversack full of primed grenades,’ said Daniels firmly. He had been rendered cautious by seeing so many comrades fall victim to accidents with munitions.

‘We seem condemned to wallow at half-speed through these jungles,’ Winston Churchill complained bitterly in October 1944, describing the progress of Fourteenth Army. Yet for those at the sharp end, every yard of movement meant pain and difficulty. Conventional fieldcraft demanded that men should avoid the few tracks, which were likely to be covered by enemy fire. Yet movement through thick cover was so desperately slow that only tracks and chaungs—riverbeds—offered any prospect of advancing at tolerable speed. Distances measured on the map were meaningless—what mattered was how far men had to march. They learned not to smoke or talk at night anywhere within reach of the enemy, for scent and sound alike carried far. They cursed the relentless damp, which misted the optics of gunsights and binoculars, rusted weapons overnight. Newly-joined replacements often buckled under the weight of their packs. Training had not prepared them for the burdens men must carry in a country where vehicles were few and mules precious. Air-dropped artillery had to be manhandled into firing positions by sweating gunners.

If a man was lucky, every few months he was granted a brief leave in India. Soldiers resting from Burma were entitled to ‘convalescent scale’ rations. A transport aircraft carried them to rear base, from which an Indian soldier still needed days of travel to reach his home. Wartime trains in the subcontinent were notoriously congested and slow. When a Tokyo propaganda broadcast on Christmas Eve 1943 asserted that Japanese forces would reach Delhi in ten days, a chorus of listening Punjabi soldiers, just returned from an irksome leave journey, chorused: ‘Not if they go by train, they won’t!’ Yet many of Slim’s soldiers had no homes in India. On leave, they sought what pleasures they could discover. Sgt Kofi Genfi of the Gold Coast Regiment described a touching experience: ‘Oh, the Indians were very kind to me. In Madras I went to dance—I am a ballroom champion dancer. I sat down, but I couldn’t get a partner. I was shy. I didn’t know how to engage a lady. A man came and said: “Do you want to dance?”…He said “Come, come.” He gave me his wife…We started to dance, and they all stopped and looked at me as if I was giving a demonstration. At the end, there was applause. Then every lady wants to dance with me!’

For the white as well as black soldiers of Fourteenth Army, there was a shameful divide between the luxuries offered to officers on leave in clubs and messes, and the pitiful delights available to other ranks. These focused upon bars and brothels of notable squalor. When John Leyin’s tank gunner heard that he was to be repatriated to England, his joy was tempered by the misery of finding himself impotent, after repeated treatments for venereal disease. The British class system shaped the lives of the nation’s soldiers overseas, even more in Asia than in Europe. Signaller Brian Aldiss wrote cynically: ‘Most rankers expected little from life, had been brought up to expect little. And received little.’ Few men returned content from leave. But the experience granted at least a brief reprieve from toil, sweat and fear.

Throughout the Burma campaign, American transport aircraft, fighters and bombers provided vital support to Slim’s operations. Chuck Linamen, a twenty-year-old steelworker’s son from Ohio, flew fifty-two B-24 Liberator missions from India to targets in Burma and Siam. The first that he and his crew knew of their posting to the Far East was when they opened sealed orders over the Atlantic, en route to the Azores in August 1944: ‘I couldn’t even pronounce the names of the places we were going.’ But from the moment he joined the 436th Squadron at Madagan, 130 miles north-east of Calcutta, he found himself one of the relatively small number of men who relished the task which war had imposed upon him: ‘I enjoyed every minute of it.’ He loved his crew, a characteristic all-American mix: Ray Hanson, ‘the best navigator in the world’, from Minneapolis; Will Henderson, the co-pilot, from Montana; a Texan bombardier; Kentuckian radio-operator; gunners from New York, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Ohio. They mined Bangkok harbour, dropped bombs on railyards, bridges, Japanese positions. By the standards of Europe, all their missions were long-haul, cruising at 165 knots for a minimum of ten hours, a maximum of eighteen. By way of compensation, however, opposition from flak and fighters was slight. On some low-level missions they strafed Japanese positions like excited schoolboys from three hundred feet, gunners whose turrets would not bear shouting over the intercom: ‘Give me a shot! Give me a shot!’

This did not, however, make the assignment risk-free. Beyond the hazards of mechanical failure, the Japanese could spring unwelcome surprises. Over Bangkok, Allied aircraft weaved to avoid barrage balloons. At 6,000 feet above Karneburi on 3 April 1945, Linamen’s Liberator was hit by enemy anti-aircraft fire which inflicted punishing damage on its systems, severed an aileron cable and removed the starboard wingtip. They fell 4,000 feet before the pilot regained control, and then he had to nurse the plane every mile of the way back, for seven and a half hours, to the RAF emergency strip at Cox’s Bazaar. Over the base, he invited the crew to jump. A gunner asked: ‘What you doing, Curly?’ ‘I’m going to ride her down,’ responded the pilot. The gunner said: ‘What are we waiting for, then?’ The other nine men took up crash positions. Unable to slow the plane for landing without losing control, Linamen settled for a high-speed skid onto the beach, touching at 150mph, frantically shutting down fuel, power, systems until they shuddered to a halt. The crew, terrified of fire, bolted out of the hatches. One man found himself lying on the sand inches from a propeller that was still windmilling, and could have removed his head. ‘You laugh about these things afterwards, but any of them can cost a life.’

Another day, over a target, the co-pilot suddenly shouted ‘Yowie!’ Linamen turned in bewilderment, demanding: ‘What’s your problem?’ A 20mm cannon shell had clipped off part of the man’s leg, mercifully without damaging the aircraft systems. They hastened home, to deliver their casualty to the medics. If Linamen loved to fly, others did not: ‘A hell of a lot of people were pretty despondent. They didn’t like India, they didn’t like the job.’ One day, ‘The colonel leading the mission screwed up. The wing found the target fogged in, but farted around waiting for visibility to clear, and got a few shot down.’ Among the pilots lost was a Californian named J.C. Osborne, one of Linamen’s closest friends.

During the monsoon, when the weather was unfit for bombing, the Liberators were transferred to transport duty, carting fuel over the Hump into China. One night on the ground at a Chinese airstrip, they found themselves in the midst of a Japanese air raid. The airmen crowded onto the roof of a revetment to watch the fireworks, until a stick of bombs landed a few yards away, driving the Americans hastily into cover. Linamen exclaimed: ‘My daddy always taught me that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and he sure was right!’ Yet he felt no great animosity towards the Japanese: ‘They were just there, they were the enemy. I had volunteered to fly, I was doing a job.’ Linamen achieved some fame, as one of the airmen who attacked the bridge over the river Kwai, built by prisoners on the ghastly Burma-Siam railway. Yet they felt little emotion even about this mission. They knew that Allied prisoners were on the ground, but had heard nothing of their unspeakable sufferings. Bombing the bridge was just another mission.

Tactical air support was a critical force in the British advance, rendered even more formidable by the fact that Japanese fighters had almost disappeared from the sky. Day after day, Fourteenth Army situation reports—‘sitreps’—recorded: ‘Enemy air activity: NIL.’ Hurribombers—Hurricanes adapted for ground attack—mounted over 150 sorties a day, aided by American Thunderbolts. Strafing was always hazardous. Even when enemy resistance was slight, the perils of the jungle and mechanical failure persisted. A Beaufighter crew of 211 Squadron once jumped from a damaged aircraft over their base in the Arakan, rather than risk a landing. Their parachutes drifted into a rainforest of 150-foot trees. Though within a mile of their airfield, the airmen were never seen again.

Beaufighters—big, tough, twin-engined aircraft which weighed ten tons and carried a two-man crew—flew long ‘intruder missions’ of up to seven hours, usually against Japanese rear areas. They tried to time their attacks for dawn or dusk, racing in at fifty to a hundred feet, weaving to confuse the ground gunners. They carried a formidable armament—aimed by a reflector sight on the canopy, a red ring with a blade to direct rockets, a dot for the guns. The whole aircraft shook violently when the 20mm nose battery fired. Exploding cannon shells raised a dustcloud around a target, or sometimes prompted more dramatic effects when they hit river sampans loaded with fuel. ‘For an instant,’ twenty-one-year-old Anthony Montague Browne of 211 Squadron wrote lyrically of such a moment, ‘the flight of shells caught the sunlight, shimmering like a swarm of silver bees.’ His unit’s ‘Beaus’ usually attacked in flights of three or four, preferring to do so without their squadron commander, a devout Catholic who could be seen crossing himself before making a dive. Other pilots begged him to desist from this practice: ‘It looked doom-laden and distinctly disconcerting.’ Once, over the Irrawaddy, Montague Brown saw a string of boats carrying a brilliantly-clad wedding party. Hapless guests sprang into the water as soon as they glimpsed the Beaufighter.

On the ground, at their airstrip, there were few comforts or diversions. Food was poor, the chief consolations a monthly ration of one bottle of whisky and four cans of Australian beer. When these were exhausted the pilots—a typical RAF mix of British, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand—had recourse to a local palm toddy arak, known as Rum, Bum and Broken Glass. Between operations every two or three days, they played a lot of poker. One squadron commander, with an implausible past as a ballet instructor, sought to raise the cultural tone by playing Les Sylphides on the mess gramophone before take-off. Beyond the airstrip, there was nowhere even to go for walks, amid unbroken swamps and jungle. The fliers had no contact with local people, except once when some aviation spirit was stolen. The British drove around the area in Jeeps, pleading with rice farmers not to use the high-octane fuel as a substitute for paraffin in their lamps. The Burmans took no heed. ‘That night, the sky was red with flames from burning huts, and pathetic little queues formed outside the medical units for treatment,’ wrote Montague Brown.

The area was notorious for extremes of weather. Once, a tornado blew down all their huts. In the air, they met violent thermal currents and thunderstorms. A hailstorm could strip the camouflage paint from wing leading edges, leaving the aluminium shining like silver. When a crew was lost, the squadron usually had no notion of its fate. An aircraft literally went missing. It was an unglamorous existence, detached from the rest of mankind and the war, though by a quirk of communications they received airmail editions of the London Times only five days after publication. Montague Brown—who became Winston Churchill’s private secretary a decade afterwards—wondered if the campaign would ever end. ‘Our progress to the liberation of Burma was extraordinarily lengthy,’ he wrote. ‘We had superiority in every arm, and after the early toe-to-toe slogging at Imphal…the terrain progressively improved for armour and transport…Why were we so dilatory?…Surely, we could have moved faster. I was later intrigued to find that Churchill shared this view.’ Hall Romney, a British PoW on Japan’s infamous Burma railway, wrote in his diary on 19 November 1944: ‘When one considers what the Americans have done in the Pacific, one cannot help thinking people have moved slowly in Western Asia.’

This was a widely-held view, even among those with less cause than Romney to yearn for haste. The Japanese army in Burma was crippled at Imphal and Kohima before Slim’s army even left Assam. From that point onward, the British invaders were overwhelmingly superior to their enemies. It would have been shameful indeed had Slim’s forces been unable to crush a Japanese army which lacked tanks or effective anti-tank guns, possessed negligible air support and little artillery, was starved of supplies and ammunition, and heavily outnumbered. Logistics, climate and terrain, much more than the Japanese, determined the snail’s pace of the Burma campaign until its last weeks. Scarcely any of the advanced technology used by the Allies in Europe for movement or bridging was available to Slim’s army. His was a ‘make-and-mend’ campaign, unloved by Churchill, barely tolerated by the Americans, woefully underacknowledged at home in Britain.

‘This army is like Cinderella,’ Slim’s chief of staff ‘Tubby’ Lethbridge wrote ruefully, ‘and until the German war is over one can only wait patiently for all the things we want. One gets an awful feeling of frustration when every request, whether it be for equipment or individuals, is turned down.’ Fourteenth Army deserved more credit for its advance into Burma than sceptics such as young Flying Officer Montague Brown were minded to offer. In the early months of 1945, notable deeds and spectacular successes lay ahead for Slim’s soldiers. What is remarkable, however, is not that the British prevailed, but that their Japanese foes sustained resistance for as long as they did. Victory in Burma was painfully long delayed.

4 Titans at Sea (#ulink_f64cabac-78a7-5444-a853-067870a5f3f4)

1 MEN AND SHIPS

As Slim always perceived, though his campaign engaged more men than MacArthur’s, it was a sideshow. The critical struggles to defeat Japan were taking place far to the east, in conditions very different from those of the Kabaw Valley and Chindwin approaches. Most Americans in the Pacific theatre learned to regard saltwater as their natural element. To be sure, scattered across the ocean there were pimples of rock and coral adorned with brilliant vegetation, barely visible on a hemispheric map. The value of these as unsinkable aircraft platforms caused their possession to be contested with terrible ferocity. Until the last months of the war, however, ground forces were relatively small. Navies dominated. From 1942 to 1945, hundreds of thousands of sailors grew accustomed to waking each morning to horizons of sky and sea interrupted only by ships and aircraft. The greatest fleets in history sailed the Pacific, yet shrank to nothingness in its immensity. When the American cruiser Indianapolis was sunk, it was four days before anyone noticed that she was missing, far less located her survivors. Many American, Japanese, Australian and—in the last phase—British sailors lived afloat for years on end. The US carrier Essex once steamed continuously for seventy-nine days, during which she flew off her flightdeck 6,460 planes, which dropped 1,041 tons of bombs, fired over a million rounds of .5 machinegun ammunition and consumed 1.36 million gallons of avgas.

The wartime expansion of the US Navy was an extraordinary achievement, which should never be taken for granted. Between 1941 and 1945, its tonnage swelled from three million to almost thirty. Of the service’s total war spend of $100 billion, more than a third went to ship construction. The pre-Pearl navy mustered 8,000 officers. Each war year thereafter, an additional 95,000 were granted reserve commissions, becoming ‘feather merchants’ or ‘ninety-day wonders’ at the end of their three months’ training. The precipitous quality decline of the Imperial Navy contrasts starkly with the proficiency achieved by the Americans. As the Japanese lost experienced seamen and aircrew, those replacing them proved ever less competent. Suicide pilots might be brave enough, but in the battles of 1944-45 many of Tokyo’s aviators and warship captains displayed astonishing diffidence. The US Navy, meanwhile, grew better and better, in seamanship, gunnery, replenishment, submarine warfare, aircraft handling. This prowess was achieved mostly by men who, before the war, knew the sea only as a place to swim in. The fighter direction staff of the carrier Langley, for instance, included an advertising executive, a lawyer, a college teacher, and an Atlanta architect who specialised in designing Methodist churches.

America’s shipbuilding programme almost defies belief. President Roosevelt was always a committed supporter of a strong fleet. Following the 1940 ‘Two Ocean Navy’ Act, Congress granted the navy the most generous open cheque in history. Admiral Ernest King, its profane, intemperate, womanising overlord, seized his opportunity and never let go. He set about creating an armada whose size owed little to rational assessment of the resources needed to defeat Japan, and almost everything to his own grandiose vision. By late 1943, the US was building seven battleships, twenty-eight carriers, seventy-two escort carriers, seventy-three cruisers, 251 destroyers, 541 destroyer escorts and 257 submarines. These new hulls were destined to join 713 ships already in service. ‘The inescapable conclusion,’ an American historian has written, ‘…is that navy expansion goals had become completely divorced from strategic planning and were influenced more by political possibilities than any thorough reassessment of the fleet’s long-term requirements.’

King’s programme prompted staggering growth in America’s shipbuilding industry. Mare Island Navy Yard expanded from 6,000 employees in 1939 to 40,000 in 1944, Boston Yard from 8,700 in June 1940 to 50,000 three years later. Forty-two cruisers were ordered from a single private builder in New Jersey. By 1944 more than a million workers were building and repairing ships, 55 per cent of them on the Atlantic coast, 27 per cent on the Pacific, while a further two million served supporting industries. Most were working forty-eight-hour weeks on multiple shifts. Extraordinary ingenuity was deployed to maximise production. Many smaller vessels, submarines and escorts, were built in sections at plants as far inland as Denver, then transported to the coasts for completion. Thousands of landing ships were constructed on the Great Lakes and sailed to the sea—one imperfectly navigated LST approached within a hundred feet of Niagara Falls before being saved by grounding. Productivity increased dramatically, so that the man-hours required to build a destroyer halved from pre-war levels to 677,262; those for a light cruiser fell from 7.7 to 5.5 million. The consequence of this immense activity was that by late 1944 the American Pacific Fleet outnumbered the Japanese by four to one in ships, and overwhelmingly more in combat power. The USN was larger than the combined strengths of all the other navies in the world.

The navy made no attempt to consult with the army about the two services’ respective needs. King merely declared magisterially that since the war cost his country $200 million a day, building ships saved money by hastening victory. He projected USN losses—and thus necessary replacements—for the period 1 May 1944 to 30 September 1945 (actual sinkings are given in parentheses): four battleships (0), nine carriers (one), twelve escort carriers (five), fourteen cruisers (one), forty-three destroyers (twenty-seven), ninety-seven destroyer escorts (eleven), twenty-nine submarines (twenty-two). By late 1944 the navy could call upon 3,000 carrier-based planes. Warships were coming off the slips faster than crews could be mustered and trained to man them. The navy never assessed its manpower needs, it simply enlisted every sailor it could get. In 1944, 8,000 new naval aviators entered training. On 2 July that year, King asked the joint chiefs for extra manpower to increase naval strength by June 1945 to 3.4 million men, a million of these at sea. Yet, to crew all the ships he had ordered, 4.1 million would have been needed.

All this reflected the fact that, with Pearl Harbor to be avenged, there was no political will to challenge the ambitions of the US Navy. Americans had a historic, visceral scepticism about big armies, but since the late nineteenth century they had shown no such inhibitions about seapower. King served his country well by creating the greatest fleet the world would ever see, crewed by men who showed themselves worthy of it. But only a nation so absurdly rich could have built two hundred battleships, carriers and cruisers in the war years, as well as a thousand smaller ships. It may be argued that King’s megalomania was no greater than that of Arnold and the air force, which also imposed a disproportionate drain on manpower. But the US Army, always the Cinderella service, paid the price for both, with its chronic shortage of fighting infantrymen. Only late in the war did it dawn upon America’s leaders that their monumental industrial mobilisation was generating far more ships and planes than it had conscripted men to serve them.

By the autumn of 1944, the principal American naval forces committed to the Pacific were submarine flotillas operating out of Pearl Harbor and Brisbane; Seventh Fleet, commanded by Vice-Admiral Thomas Kinkaid—a motley gathering of cruisers, escort carriers and old battleships which operated under MacArthur’s orders in support of his land operations; and Nimitz’s heavy units, dominated by fast battleships and carriers. These were led alternately by William ‘Bull’ Halsey, whose belligerence had made him a popular legend, and Raymond Spruance, the cooler and cleverer hero of Midway. The rationale for this odd arrangement was that it was difficult to plan operations in the cramped conditions of a warship. Each admiral therefore took it in turns to work ashore at Pearl, preparing for the next phase, or to direct the task groups at sea. To increase confusion—not least among the Japanese—Halsey’s command was known as Third Fleet; when Spruance took over, the same ships became Fifth Fleet. Under either designation, this represented the greatest concentration of naval power in the history of the world.

For those who served at sea, spasms of intense action served only to emphasise the dreariness of life between. ‘The thrills were brief and far apart,’ wrote a crewman of the carrier Belleau Wood. Except for its flight crews,

day in and day out life at sea was pure monotony…Boilers, engines, bulkheads, decks, mess halls, offices and shops always look the same, no matter what goes on above. Every day was a duplicate of its predecessor and model for its successor: reveille in the dark to sit around battle stations for an hour until sunrise; launch aircraft for routine patrols which 90 per cent of the time saw nothing save air, clouds and water; land aircraft; launch aircraft; land aircraft; three meals a day; scrub bulkheads; swab decks; run boilers and engines; then fade out with another hour after sunset at battle stations. ‘Relieve the watch. On deck section three. Relieve the wheel and lookouts.’ Relieve the watch, relieve the watch, day after day, week after week. The sea and sky rolled endlessly by from one port period to the next; our eyes became ‘waterlogged’.