Road of Bones Page 15
Tojo then climbed out of the bath and towelled himself before subjecting the colonel to a detailed interrogation on the strengths and weaknesses of the plan. Eventually Nishiura was told that the order would be signed. But Tojo warned that 15th Army was not to be ‘too ambitious’. When the order was finally issued a week later, Tojo stressed the defensive nature of the operation. ‘In order to defend Burma the Commander-in-Chief, Southern Army may occupy and secure the vital areas of north-east India in the vicinity of Imphal by defeating the enemy in that area at the opportune time.’ Count Terauchi was warned to keep a tight rein on Mutaguchi. As one Japanese officer put it to Mutaguchi when the latter told him he wanted to die on the Indian frontier, ‘It would no doubt satisfy you to go to Imphal and die there. But Japan might be overthrown in the process.’
Tojo had delayed in approving the operation because he recognised that it was a significant gamble. Yet he reported optimistically to the Emperor that ‘we will achieve the objective before the rainy season which begins in mid-May, defeat the enemy in northern Burma and thoroughly cut the route from India to China’.
As 1943 came to an end two complementary Japanese offensives were being planned. Before Mutaguchi would launch across the Chindwin there would be the diversionary strike in the Arakan. The 55th Division would attack General Christison’s 15 Corps, and would be supported by loud propaganda that they intended to march on Calcutta. While this was underway Mutaguchi’s 15th Army would ready itself to cross the Chindwin and catch Slim unawares, striking the decisive blows at Imphal and Kohima. The British and Indians would be swiftly overwhelmed. On this assumption was disaster built.
* * *
* Bushido, The Way of the Warrior, was a code originating in the Samurai era which emphasised the virtues of discipline, sacrifice and courage. Every Japanese officer was enjoined to embrace bushido as his guiding principle.
* It should be pointed out that the rescript also emphasised that ‘superiors should never treat their inferiors with contempt or arrogance … making kindness their chief aim’.
* The first election with adult male suffrage in Japan did not take place until 1928. Two years later a right-winger shot the prime minister, and two years after that young naval officers killed his successor. The slide into military rule and international isolation quickened. In 1931 the army, ignoring the Cabinet, staged an incident in Manchuria that led ultimately to Japan’s departure from the League of Nations.
* The coup might have succeeded if Emperor Hirohito, in whose name the rebels claimed to act, had chosen to support the Imperial Way. But he was appalled by the attacks on his most senior advisers and condemned the plotters; martial law was declared and the mutinous officers either committed suicide or were captured and executed. But the 26 February incident boosted the military, which used the instability that followed as an excuse to increase their grip on the levers of power. It was the critical moment after which the march to war in Asia became inevitable. John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936–1945 (Pen and Sword, 2005), p. 17.
* Japanese forces stationed in China under an international agreement provoked a confrontation by staging night manoeuvres on 7 July 1937. After a dispute with the Chinese over the alleged kidnapping of a Japanese soldier during the operation the Japanese opened fire on Chinese positions. The soldier was later found unharmed.
* Major General Charles Orde Wingate (1903–1944) has remained as divisive a figure after his death as he was in his lifetime. His ideas for long-range penetration operations behind enemy lines, and the use of air power to deploy and supply these troops, foreshadowed the special operations forces of today. Perhaps his most important achievement was in boosting public and troop morale with his first Chindit expedition in 1943. Coming after the humiliation of the retreat from Burma and the failed first Arakan offensive, the image of the British forces surprising the Japanese behind their own lines was a morale and propaganda coup. It also inadvertently hastened the Japanese to disaster by convincing them that they could send large forces of men across the mountains into India. They did not appreciate the appalling human cost of Wingate’s operations or the extent to which he increasingly depended on the diversion of huge air resources to deploy and supply his troops. Of the 3,000 Chindits who entered Burma on the first expedition, one thousand never returned and a further six hundred were too ravaged by illness to ever fight again. On the second Chindit expedition – ‘Operation Thursday’ – a force of some 12,000 men sustained 944 dead, 2,434 wounded and 452 missing. Wingate was killed on 24 March,1944 when his plane crashed near Imphal.
* The Japanese plan for a ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ approved by the Cabinet in 1940 made no mention of India, nor did the Japanese officials who outlined the Empire’s territorial ambitions in their discussions with Germany ever suggest such a conquest. When the British conducted an inquiry in 1948 and interviewed fourteen top ranking Japanese officers, it concluded that ‘a search of all the available records failed to reveal any documents which would provide a conclusive answer to the question of whether or not the Japanese government entertained concrete plans for the invasion of India by the Japanese Army.’ (Cited p. 142, The Imperial War Museum Book of the War in Burma, Julian Thompson, Sidgwick and Jackson, 2002.)
NINE
The Hour of the Warrior
Across the Arakan, in the camps of the British and Indian troops of 15 Corps, and in the tunnels and bunkers of the Japanese, a sense of expectation was spreading as the two armies scouted out each other’s positions, uncertain when the other would strike. The 4th West Kents arrived in early November after sailing across the Bay of Bengal and marching for seven days to reach Chota Maunghnama, a coastal fishing village on the fringe of Japanese-occupied territory. The heat on the march would suck the energy from the fittest of men after a couple of hours. Vehicles passing them on the road threw up clouds of dust, covering the troops who responded with shouts and curses. In places locals were sent out to douse the dust with gallons of water; this was intended to prevent rising clouds of dust that could betray their presence to Japanese aircraft. ‘Despite their efforts,’ Ray Street recalled, ‘dust rose everywhere, but we weren’t attacked.’
After a day of this Colonel Laverty issued an order that all marching would be done at night. Accordingly, the column swapped the dust for the attentions of the Arakan’s plentiful mosquitoes, which descended in malign clouds after nightfall. The advance into Burma had its moments of comedy. In the middle of one night the column collided with a long mule train coming in the other direction. Men and animals became entangled in the darkness and the strict order of silence was quickly forgotten amid a welter of curses and slaps. From their camp near Chota Maunghnama, the troops began patrolling the surrounding territory, a mix of jungle, swamp and hillocks, or ‘pimples’, as the troops called them. Laverty was preoccupied with creating an an anti-infiltration force that could respond quickly to any Japanese attempt to sneak around the back of his units.
An Australian brigadier who had fought the Japanese in New Guinea was brought in to lecture on tactics. Ray Street learned to move silently through the jungle, with anything that might rattle – a water bottle, ammunition pouch, or weapon – carefully secured. The men made their bivouacs away from streams and rivers where the populations of leeches and insects were most numerous. Still, one sergeant made the mistake of falling asleep beside a stream and became covered with leeches. An officer wrote that he died from loss of blood, although septicaemia from one of the wounds is another possible explanation.
The West Kents began to use the rivers as a source of food. Lieutenant Tom Hogg of B company took his men on ‘fishing’ expeditions using home-made bombs. ‘I used gun-cotton primers on short fuses which were dropped in the water and all nearby fish leapt out of the water half-stunned. They were easy to pick up from the surface, as the native Burmese also realised, until one of our lads dropped a primer into one of their dugout canoes to discourage their the
ft of “our fish”.’ As a rule British troops did not mistreat the local Burmese, but there could be rough handling of anybody suspected of refusing to divulge important information. General Sir Philip Christison, who would lead the Arakan offensive, recalled an incident in which two men were taken from a village and questioned about what they knew of Japanese movements. They were too scared to talk. The Japanese troops might return at any time. The British interrogators told them they could either talk or be shot. Still there was no cooperation. One of the men was hauled off into the jungle. A shot rang out. The remaining man talked and gave the British vital intelligence about three Japanese battalions in the area. His friend was then produced unharmed. General Christison later wrote: ‘This information was vital, and the means of getting it justifiable.’ It did not tend to win Burmese hearts and minds, however.
On 5 December 1943 the 4th West Kents’ war diary records that the artillery opened fire on a sampan, believing it to be a party of infiltrating Japanese. The boat was filled with Burmese. The diary does not record how many were killed or wounded. The last few days of December were spent celebrating Christmas with extra rations of beer, rum and Christmas cake, and a delivery of mail from home. Ray Street ate his Christmas lunch of roast duck and vegetables, washed down with a bottle of beer, sitting on the wall of a rice paddy. He felt lucky. The men out on patrol had to content themselves with bully beef and biscuits.
The padre, the Reverend Roy Randolph, led a Christmas Day service and was available to any men troubled by news from home, or who simply wanted to try and talk away their fears. Randolph was tall and thin, with melancholy eyes and a gentleness of manner that seemed out of place on the battlefield. He had an abiding hatred of any kind of physical violence, but he believed that men’s souls were all the more needful of salvation in the places of death. The men would come to regard him as one of the bravest among them.
The new supreme commander, Lord Louis Mountbatten, came to visit. Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes was amazed at how a man who was related to the king, and ‘looked like a movie star’ in his spotless uniform, could be so down-to-earth, calling the lads from the battalion to gather round him in a semicircle. On the morning he set off for his visit Mountbatten had recorded the ‘terrible tragedy’ of the death of his pet mongoose Rikki Tikki, who had been accidentally stepped on by his steward, Moore. ‘Poor Moore was quite white from the shock of having been the cause of her death.’ But Mountbatten did not let his grief over the dead mongoose deter him from cheering up the men of 4th battalion. After shaking hands with the officers, Admiral Mountbatten announced that Germany would collapse by the end of 1944 and all the allied war effort would be directed towards defeating Japan. He was well aware of the resentment felt in 14th Army over the priority given to European operations. The subtext of his speech was important for the men: they would be going home sooner once Hitler was defeated. Giving Europe priority made sense when you looked at it like that. He made a joke. ‘Optimism is not allowed in England because the people would stop working.’ There was loud laughter. Then he told them a story from his days as a naval commander about a ‘fat old Admiral coming on board my destroyer and saying “Gad, go in and fight ’em” when they knew the old b—would be back in his bed’. The battalion war diary recorded that the supreme commander ‘had an enormous reception … Morale was raised as if by magic’.
On the night of 30 December, under the code name Operation Jericho, 4th battalion and their Indian comrades in 161 Brigade – the 1/1 Punjab and 4/7 Rajput – set out to attack the bunkers that covered the road in front of the major Japanese position at Razabil. This fortress blocked the only road along which troops and supplies could be moved across the Mayu range. Without securing the road, Christison’s forces would be divided on either side of the mountains and vulnerable to being cut off and encircled. In the darkness men bumped each other. There were whispered curses, but no voices were raised. Laverty had drilled into them the necessity of silence. ‘Success on this op is dependent … on surprise … [there will be] no imprudent talk or movement.’ To make the point, the NCOs moved up and down the line of men preparing to march off. They glared at the more loquacious characters in the ranks. But the usual suspects were quiet. All knew by now that within a day or less they would face the Japanese for the first time. The men had left behind all traces of their old lives. Laverty had ordered that no pay books, letters or regimental cap badges were to be taken, nothing that could identify a man or his unit if he were killed or captured. The mules were all loaded and were fresh from their own bout of training; the handlers had been warned to make sure every animal had been made accustomed to crossing water. There would be plenty of streams and rivers ahead of them in the jungle and they could not risk the heavily laden animals delaying the column’s advance.
Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes was scared of what lay ahead. In training he had been ‘horrified’ at the noise the rifle made when he first fired it. Hours on the range had cured him of that. Now he was waiting to march off to battle and wondering if he would be a competent killer. ‘How do you know what it is to kill another man? You have never done it before. You never thought you would. I thought oh Christ this is the sharp point. This is it. We either perform or not.’
John Winstanley, now promoted to major after the depletions in North Africa, had spent several nights on reconnaissance with his company behind Japanese lines, filtering back and forth in the darkness until he and his men had an intimate feel for the ground they were to occupy once the attack started. The plan was that the West Kents would infiltrate and blockade the Japanese lines of communication, while the 4/7 Rajput launched the frontal assault and 1/1 Punjab joined the attack from the east.
The 4th West Kents marched through the night and before dawn they were in position astride the Japanese line of communications. Dennis Wykes lay crouched in the darkness waiting for first light. All around him the sounds of the jungle morning began to rise, a chorus of birds and insects. The waiting was torture. He wanted the fight to be on and then done with, but he wished he was anywhere but lying in this rice paddy with the battle-hardened Japanese a few hundred yards away. He heard the first shell come in and hugged the ground. Ray Street saw a man’s face torn off by the explosion. He would always remember the look of horror on the face of another soldier as a fragment of steel sliced into his chest, killing him where he stood. Wykes looked fearfully upwards and saw one of the battalion veterans standing coolly smoking a cigarette, apparently unmoved by the thunderous explosion. It felt reassuring to the young soldier – until he thought about it later, about what the man must have already seen and heard. Three men were killed in that first shelling, among them a popular company sergeant major.
On 6 January 1944 Wykes joined a night attack on the Japanese positions. As they waited to move off he couldn’t get out of his head the thought that he might be about to die. He walked at a steady pace with fixed bayonet and listened for anything that might alert him to where the machine guns were sited. The West Kents were nearly on top of the Japanese positions when they were hit by withering fire. A friend of Wykes’s from Birmingham, Billy Danks, aged twenty-three, ‘was shot to pieces’. Wykes kept moving forward. Afterwards he would ask himself was it his training, or not wanting to let the rest of the lads down, or some kind of trance, that kept him going forwards in spite of the bangs and screams. He couldn’t remember whether he had opened fire or not. The wounded called out for stretcher-bearers, but they were shot too. The West Kents lost twenty men but kept advancing until the Japanese pulled out of the forward defences. Dennis Wykes felt the relief of all soldiers who survive. ‘We knew we was all in the same boat and it could easily be one of us. You were just thankful it wasn’t you. We knew somebody was going to get it.’ When the battalion entered the Japanese positions they found one dugout ‘literally soaked in blood’, but with no bodies. Nearby they found the freshly dug grave of a Japanese corporal. His left hand had been amputated. In this way the West Kents learned ho
w the Japanese kept their promise to their dead comrades: some part of them, be it as small as a nail clipping or a lock of hair, would be brought back to be buried in the homeland, so that the soul could enjoy eternal rest.
Much of the killing around the Razabil positions was carried out by snipers. The NCOs had warned the men not to remove their jungle kit for fear their white skin would show through the vegetation and offer a target. There was a lad named Heath – they called him ‘Happy’ Heath because of his easy-going nature – who made the mistake of showing too much skin. ‘There was a shot from somewhere far off and this chap Heath went down.’ Private T. J. Heath, aged twenty-nine, died on 1 February 1944.
Patrolling by night was hindered by the bright moonlight. It lit the rice fields and threw shadows across the jungle. Wild animals wandered into the lines, including a bear attracted by the scent of the empty bully-beef tins. Wild fowl frequently set the sentries’ nerves on edge as they moved back and forth through the undergrowth. Men staring out into the night found their eyes playing tricks: a distant tree became a Japanese soldier and started a rush of adrenalin, until the sentry realised he was mistaken; what looked like the shadow of a palm tree turned out to be a Japanese, and the sentry opened fire in the nick of time. Three Japanese were killed and three wounded just ten yards from C company’s position on a hilltop. They were led by a big NCO who had hacked his way steadily through the jungle until a grenade exploded on his chest. It blew off part of his head and ended the incursion. Dennis Wykes remembered the shock of his first encounter with a Japanese corpse, not so much because of the sight of a dead body but because of the size of the man: ‘Before we went into Burma they had always portrayed these Japanese as little men, like monkeys climbing through the trees … I thought it would be a piece of cake. We would knock this lot over in no time. We saw this dead Jap and he was six foot!’