Road of Bones Read online

  The events that followed the fall of Singapore had done much to stoke the prime minister’s paranoia. On their surrender, between 40,000 and 60,000 Indian prisoners of war had joined the new pro-Japanese Indian National Army (INA).* The INA, under the leadership of the charismatic former Congress politician Subhas Chandra Bose, would play only a minor role in the fighting to come. But Bose’s promise that India would rise once his men had crossed the border encouraged the Japanese and worried the British.

  One of Slim’s most able commanders, General Sir Philip Christison, found himself being teased about army loyalty at the birthday party of the Maharajah of Mysore, Jayachamaraja Bahadur, in Krishnarajasagara. The general’s host was one of the most sophisticated men in the East, a philosopher and musicologist who once sponsored a concert for Richard Strauss at the Royal Albert Hall. He was also regarded as a friend of the British. ‘This was a great occasion,’ recalled Christison, ‘and not affected by any wartime restrictions.’ On the night of the party the palace was lit with 30,000 light bulbs and fireworks banged and whizzed across the sky. At the top of the palace steps Christison was greeted by the genial figure of the maharajah, who was standing between two huge stuffed bison. There was a grand procession into the dining hall and after a lavish banquet the ruler decided to take the general into his confidence. ‘He told me he had two sons. When Japan entered the war he sent one to Japan … the other to serve in the British Army. “Who knows who will win?” he said.’

  The Japanese intelligence officer Lt.-Colonel Iwaichi Fujiwara, who worked closely with Bose, learned to be circumspect about the INA’s military capabilities, writing of Bose that ‘the standard of his operational tactics was, it must be said with regret, low. He was inclined to be idealistic and not realistic.’ However, the British were certainly alert to the political and intelligence danger posed by the INA. During the Bengal famine of 1942–43, when between one and a half and three million people died, Bose had announced that he would send Burmese rice to feed the starving, and INA broadcasts placed the blame for the catastrophe on British indifference and incompetence.* The Japanese war leader, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, fanned the flames assiduously, declaring in the Diet on 16 June 1943: ‘We are indignant about the fact that India is still under the ruthless suppression of Britain … we are determined to extend every possible assistance to the cause of India’s independence.’

  Between 1942 and 1943 there had been several failed INA probes into British territory.† As 1943 drew to a close Mountbatten asked for an intelligence assessment of the INA. It was delivered to him on 13 November, with the instruction that henceforth the INA should, for ‘counter propaganda purposes’, be called JIFS – for ‘Japanese Inspired Fifth Columnists’ – an acronym designed to strip away the nationalist image of Bose’s army. The British also set up ‘josh’, or ‘enthusiasm or verve’, units to boost troop morale. The 750 josh groups were intended to ‘inculcate the doctrine that India must destroy the Japanese or be destroyed by them and to prepare Indian units for possible encounter with armed JIFS in the field’.

  Propaganda broadcasts and leaflet drops were also stepped up, urging INA men to return to British lines where they would be treated fairly. But troops were told that if they encountered former comrades in the field they were to be shot if they did not surrender. General Slim would later say that some Indian units had to be restrained from shooting surrendering INA troops. Sepoy Gian Singh of 7th Indian Division heard Bose’s passionate calls for an uprising but was unmoved. ‘He promised to liberate India and said the Japanese were the friends of India. Not many truly believed him. Least of all us who saw the Japanese in their true colours. Much as we felt sorry for our brothers who had taken the salt but turned traitor even though they had an excuse. We often gave them no mercy.’

  But the question of loyalty was nuanced. Soldiers of the 1st battalion, Assam Regiment were reminded of their duty of loyalty at josh sessions. Sohevu Angami, from the Naga village of Phek, listened to the propaganda about the INA and resolved to kill any of Bose’s men he came across. ‘We did what our officers told us to do and followed them. The Japanese and the INA were against the British and that made them our enemies. Did I really know what I was fighting for? No.’ Yet he had a sneaking regard for the INA leader. ‘I think his ideas were good. Even though we were opponents I came to respect him and what he was fighting for.’

  In the case of many – perhaps most – soldiers, their loyalty was to their unit and not to the Viceroy or King Emperor. Indian officers did not as a rule feel that they were defending British overlordship, or that serving the Raj meant rejecting the ideals of Gandhi or Bose. A senior British civil servant at the War Department in Delhi wrote that ‘even those who were most convinced they had been right to go to Sandhurst and enter the King’s service saw it as a way to serve the independent India of the future … at the end of the war when the whole truth was known, many of the loyal Indian officers who would be the backbone of India’s new army felt some sympathy with those who had followed Bose.’ The growing realisation among officers and men that independence must come after the war tended to act as a brake on discontent. Major Ian Lyall Grant of King George V’s Own Bengal Sappers and Miners had fought alongside Indian officers since the retreat from Burma and was confident of their loyalty. ‘I remember saying that Independence was inevitably coming … I think it was generally known that we were on the way out … which made it much more difficult for them to hazard their lives on our behalf but they gave absolutely no sign of that to me.’

  The Indian Army had also embarked on a transformation of its officer corps.* Discrimination in pay between Indian and British officers had been ended and, having started the war with only a thousand Indian officers, there were more than 6,566 by 1944. Although senior command positions were still overwhelmingly the domain of British officers, there were now Indian battalion and company commanders who gave orders to white subordinates.

  Slim was an influential advocate of reform. ‘The fair deal meant’, he wrote, ‘no distinction between races or castes in treatment. The wants and needs of the Indian, African, and Gurkha soldier had to be looked after as keenly as those of his British comrade.’ However, Slim acknowledged that some of the newer British officers thought that all an Indian or African required was a ‘bush to lie under and a handful of rice to eat’. If paternalism had dominated the Indian Army of old, ignorance of culture and environment could be a hallmark of the younger officer class. Sepoy Gian Singh was crouching behind a small bush during a training exercise when he heard a hiss. A snake was lurking somewhere very close. Singh carefully backed away, only to see a deadly krait sitting where his head had just been. The training officer came up and began to harangue Singh:

  ‘What the hell are you up to,’ shouted the Captain coming up to me.

  ‘What’s all the fuss about such a small snake!’

  ‘That, Sir, is a krait,’ I replied.

  He had to be told by a Subhadar that it was just as deadly as a .303 bullet. He shook his head in disbelief. That man had a lot to learn and little time to do so.

  To many young British officers arriving in India the daily routines of Indian Army barracks life could seem little changed from a century before. On his first morning with 7/2 Punjab Regiment, Lieutenant John Shipster was woken by his bearer with a mug of sweet tea and a banana, and the salutation ‘Sahib, bahadur ji jagao’ – ‘Mighty Warrior, arise’. ‘Servants were plentiful and one could live like a king on a pittance … For those in the army it was a sportsman’s paradise,’ he recalled. Shipster had arrived in India aged nineteen and fresh from Marlborough College. He was based at Meerut, headquarters of India’s most prestigious pig-stickers, the Meerut Tent Club, although Lieutenant Shipster’s forays on horseback were confined to the Ootacamund Foxhounds, chasing the indigenous jackal. The young officers wore tweed jackets and jodhpurs while the master and whips besported themselves in hunting pink. But Shipster was far from the stereotype of the ‘p
ukka’ young sahib. He walked the lanes of the poorer districts to practise his Urdu and on his first leave he went with his orderly, Khaddam Hussein, to stay at the man’s home. The two men hired a camel to carry their bags and walked to the village. ‘I wanted to see how they lived, and I liked my orderly, and I knew that there were some distinguished Indian Army officers living in the area, and I called on them and they all, without hesitation, invited us to a meal, usually a curried chicken or this or that, and I enjoyed the friendship.’

  In late 1943 Shipster’s 7/2 Punjab were ordered to the Arakan as part of General Sir Philip Christison’s 15 Corps. By now Shipster was a captain with the temporary rank of major. Before they left, the officers were gathered together in an old cinema in Ranchi and given a rousing talk by their divisional commander. ‘It was nothing short of a call to war. It was brief, with flashes of humour and full of confidence … exciting and uplifting, but … it left me feeling apprehensive about the future.’

  The Commander of 15 Corps was an old colleague of Slim’s, with whom he had taught at the Army Staff College between the wars. During the First World War Christison had been badly wounded at Loos and awarded the Military Cross. A keen shooting and fishing man, with a countryman’s eye for landscape and fauna, Christison revelled in the fecundity of the natural world in the Arakan. ‘Monkeys, gibbons, hornbills, woodpeckers and Scops owls were common and their eerie cries frightened many a Madrasi soldier and were extensively used by the Japs to communicate with each other. There were few snakes but one day a large python was brought into my headquarters. Inside was a barking deer which, contrary to belief, had been swallowed head-first.’ On occasion, clouds of butterflies appeared so that the ground seemed ‘as if it was shimmering’. Christison was particularly taken with the sight of wild orchids growing on rotting tree stumps. The general had a dangerous encounter with an elephant that pushed his jeep into a ravine when they met along a jungle track. Other soldiers could retell the cautionary tale of the young RAF officer who set off with a machine gun ‘to bag a “Tusker”’ but was found trampled to death.

  Christison’s immediate priority was to restore the morale of the men under his command. He decided that worms might be a factor contributing to poor morale. He set about removing men from the line, giving them a de-worming treatment and a fortnight’s rest at the coast playing games on the sand. At the end of this, he reported, ‘they were raring to have a go at the Japs’.

  As the end of 1943 approached, Slim and Christison made final plans for an offensive in the Arakan. The main target was the island port of Akyab, 120 miles south of the Indian frontier on the Bay of Bengal. Akyab offered strategic airfields and access to the main waterways of the Arakan. Whether the allies ultimately decided to try and retake Burma by land or by sea, or a combination of both, they were going to need air cover all the way to Rangoon. Akyab offered the best facilities. The operation would also pre-empt any Japanese attempt to use Akyab as a base to encroach into India.

  There was also another, more directly political, reason for an assault towards Akyab. The airfields had been used to launch Japanese raids on Calcutta at the end of the previous year, a strike that had little military importance but had sent thousands of refugees flooding into the countryside where there had already been massive displacement due to the famine of the previous year. There were five hundred civilian casualties and only a tenth of the normal workforce remained at work on the docks. The 5 December raid also saw fear-stricken merchants close down their grain shops, forcing the government to requisition stocks in order to avoid civil unrest. ‘A false alert the following day did nothing to improve morale in the city,’ the official history noted. Any suggestion of Japanese strength undermined attempts to project to the Indian population the image of an unruffled Raj.

  The original plan was to mount a joint sea and land operation but at the last moment the landing craft were taken away for use in Europe. General Christison’s 15 Corps would have to do it the hard way, advancing overland in a three-pronged attack on Japanese positions on both sides of the Mayu range. To blast them out, Slim’s artillerymen would use their 5.5 inch guns, although the armchair generals in Delhi feared they would never succeed in hauling them into the mountains. ‘Stroking their “Poona” moustaches,’ a young officer wrote, ‘they remarked that these pieces would never get over the trails and through the jungle of Burma.’ As in so much else, Slim’s soldiers would prove the doubters wrong.

  * * *

  * The official breakdown of these figures is 916 killed, 2,889 wounded, and 1,252 missing, including prisoners of war. S. Woodburn Kirby, The War Against Japan, vol. 2: India’s Most Dangerous Hour (HMSO, 1958).

  * What American opinion tended to ignore was the human cost of the USA’s own expansion. The conquest of the West had been achieved only at the expense of the native tribes. The inhabitants of Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, where America had fought a savage war of conquest, had been given no say over the annexation of their lands. The racist segregation within the American army, to say nothing of the discrimination practised in the Southern states of the USA, suggest a convenient myopia on the part of those who condemned Churchill for his imperial revanchism. Roosevelt could himself adopt a tone of condescension towards Asians which would have resonated with the most reactionary of British imperialists. Writing to Churchill on 16th April, 1942 he declared: ‘I have never liked Burma or the Burmese and you people must have had a terrible time with them for the last fifty years. Thank the Lord you have HE-SAW, WE-SAW, YOU-SAW under lock and key. I wish you could out the whole bunch of them into a frying pan with a wall around it and let them stew in their own juice.’ (PSF/BOX37/A333EE01, Franklin D.Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.)

  * In such circumstances, Churchill wrote, ‘the United States Government would after the victory feel greatly strengthened in its view that all possessions in the East Indian Archipelago should be placed under some international body upon which the United States would exercise decisive control.’ (Winston Churchill memo, 29 February 1944, cited p. 412, Allies of A Kind, Christopher Thorne, Oxford University Press, 1978.)

  † With this aim in mind work began in late 1942 to build a 400-mile-long road across mountains and through jungles to connect the railhead at Ledo in Assam with the 717-mile road that ran from Lashio in Burma to Kunming in China. The new road would bypass the part of the old ‘Burma Road’ now in Japanese hands. This immense project was driven forward by the American general Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. It involved 17,000 American engineers and around 50,000 Indian labourers and huge numbers of Chinese troops. From the outset Slim was sceptical, writing that ‘if it were left to me I would have used the immense resources required for this road, not to build a highway to China, but to bring forward the largest possible combat forces to destroy the Japanese army in Burma.’ (p. 249, Defeat Into Victory, Field Marshal Sir William Slim, Cassell, and Company Ltd, 1956.) Completed in January 1945, the ‘Ledo Road’ contributed little to the defeat of Japan. The airlift on the ‘Hump’ route across the Himalayas delivered more than four times the amount of war materiel to the Chinese Nationalists than the ‘Ledo Road’. The plan to use bases in China to attack Japan proved a failure. When American raids were launched from bases in Eastern China in May 1944 the Japanese counter-attacked furiously and by January 1945 forced the removal of the bombers to India and thence to the Mariana Islands where the major bombing effort against Japan was based. A US Army historical analysis concluded that ‘the air effort in China without the protection of an efficient Chinese Army fulfilled few of the goals proclaimed for it.’ (‘World War II: The War Against Japan’, Robert W. Coakley, American Military History, Army Historical Series, Office of the Chief of Military History, United States Army, Washington, 1989.)

  * Eight million Indians were employed on war-related work during this period.

  * The Official History, vol. 111, p. 317, gives a total of 41 fo
r Assam, Manipur, Eastern Bengal and Calcutta.

  * Even before war broke out there had been problems. As early as August 1939 a Sikh platoon in the Punjab Regiment deserted after a religious leader ‘so lowered their spirit that they deserted rather than face the dangers of war’. Later that year a group of Sikhs in Egypt rebelled when asked to load lorries, believing such coolie work was beneath them. A year after the first outbreak in the Punjab a squadron of the Central India Horse refused to board ship in Bombay. A mutiny and hunger strike among Sikhs of the Hong Kong and Singapore Royal Artillery in 1940 was provoked by orders that the men should wear solar topis. The investigators sent from India blamed the ‘faulty administration’ and told the regiment to back down on the helmet order. The troubles prompted one far-seeing intelligence officer, Colonel Wren, to write in 1940: ‘We have by our policies towards India, bred a new class of [Indian] officer who may be loyal to India and perhaps to Congress but is not necessarily loyal to us … The army would be helped by a more positive policy on the part of His Majesty’s Government … which will transform our promises of independence for India into reality in the minds of the politically minded younger generations.’

  * The desire to escape the hellish conditions of Japanese prisoner of war camps was a decisive factor for many. Among the officers there were undoubtedly substantial numbers who had been alienated by the racist treatment they received at the hands of colonial officials in pre-war Malaya. This could range from being forced to sit in separate compartments from Europeans on trains and excluded from clubs where a colour bar operated. The INA also drew thousands of recruits from Indian communities in South-East Asia, many of them from the rubber plantations of Malaya and drawn by Bose’s promise of a new India in which the restrictions of caste would be overturned.