Road of Bones Read online

  Ursula became briefly famous in the British and American press. She was the subject of a comic strip, ‘The Jungle Queen’, and was described by Time magazine as ‘pert, pretty … an archaeology student who looks like a cinema actress … [who] declared war on Japan’. The piece quoted her mother back in Wiltshire as saying, ‘An extraordinary girl; she never would sit still.’ With the coming of independence she and her husband returned to England in 1948. She longed for the hills. ‘How could one explain that home was no longer home, that it was utterly foreign, that home was in the Assam hills and that there would never be any other, and that for the rest of our lives we should be exiles? … We had gone, we had striven, we had tried, we had loved the tribesmen in spite of ourselves and they had loved us, and though everything else might perish – our bodies, our memories – nothing could ever wipe out and destroy that.’

  The West Kents passed bodies all the way down to the Chindwin and across into Burma. On the advance 4th battalion lost Major Winstanley. First he was shot in the leg and then he went down with typhus. It was enough to see him evacuated out of the war for good. Major Donald Easten was gone too; the wound he took at Kohima became infected and he was shipped back to Britain to be reunited with his wife Billie after an absence of nearly four years. Lieutenant Tom Hogg fought on for two more months before being selected for a staff officer course. Captain Harry Smith, who had been hit by mortar fire on the last day of the siege, woke up in a hospital in Assam with a lump of metal on his bedside table. It had been removed from his skull after Kohima. Smith rejoined the battalion and crossed into Burma for Slim’s advance. But the CO, John Laverty, was gone for the time being. The 14th Army sent him on a lecture tour around India to tell other battalions the story of Kohima.

  His fellow commander at Kohima, Hugh Richards, spent the months after the siege at Dimapur visiting the wounded and making arrangements for their welfare. There was no fighting job for him now, but he accepted the life of the rear echelon with equanimity. At Dimapur he heard that some of the men from his old outfit, the 3 West African Brigade, were in the Poona base hospital 1,800 miles away. Back in 1943 Richards had been preparing to lead these men into Burma when Wingate had judged him to be too old. What had happened to them he wondered. Who was left alive? Lieutenant Barry Bowman, who was recovering from dysentery at Poona, recalled Richards’s arrival and the West Africans’ welcome. ‘His was officially an inspection of the base but in practice it took the form of huge groundnut stew lunch which he wolfed into with great relish. He departed around three hours later well watered (Ginned) and nourished. A quiet, courteous truly great man – a pivotal figure in the 14th army.’

  Slim went on to smash the Japanese as he had promised, driving them out of Mandalay by March 1945, and retaking Rangoon, abandoned by the Japanese as it had once been by the British, on 3 May. Privates Ray Street and Ivan Daunt, Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes, and the other footsloggers of 4th battalion fought their way south with Slim. Often on the road they would talk about what had happened at Kohima and, remembering the men lying on the ridge, pray that they would never see anything like it again. Private Daunt was thinking of getting back to Chatham and his wife Audrey. He thought about all the days that had passed since the fall of France, when he had escaped from behind German lines. He grouched to his mates. ‘What with bloody Dunkirk, with the bloody desert and now this lot, where is it going to end?’ Some men contracted cholera from drinking water contaminated by Japanese bodies. Dennis Wykes contracted typhus from lice and did not wake up for a fortnight. ‘As I woke up and looked around, the orderly said: “I thought you wouldn’t wake up. I had a hole dug for you outside.”’ Wykes made up his mind to eat and continue eating; he would eat when he was hungry and when he wasn’t. There was no way he was going into a hole in the ground.

  The worst thing that happened to him after Kohima was not the sickness but an incident that took him into the heart of war’s madness. It was around midnight, somewhere near the Sittang river, and Wykes was on the Bren gun watching A company’s perimeter. He heard noise coming from the right. There were not supposed to be any British patrols in that direction. He had seconds to make a decision. If it were Japs they would be in among A company in seconds. Wykes pressed the trigger. The rounds thumped into the muggy night and he heard screams echoing back. Fuck. They were British voices. No mistaking it. He had hit a returning officer and sergeant of the West Kents coming on the wrong route to the perimeter. Dennis Wykes stood up and hurled his Bren to the ground. ‘That’s me finished,’ he shouted, ‘when I start shooting our own blokes even if they was going in the wrong place.’ The company commander rushed over to calm him. ‘“It wasn’t your fault. You did the right thing.” I said, “No. I couldn’t stand it.” So he said, “I can see you’re upset about it.” I said, “Of course I’m upset about it.”’ The officer told Wykes he needed a few nights’ rest and sent him back to the lines. On the way he passed one of the men he had wounded. It was the officer, and he thanked Wykes. The bullet had hit him in the leg and he would be going home. ‘You’ve done me a favour,’ he said. Three days later Dennis Wykes was back on duty. ‘Everybody was needed. You didn’t feel it was right staying away.’

  It was not until they were near Rangoon that Wykes noticed a change in the Japanese. There were Hurricanes strafing the Japanese up ahead of 4th battalion and he spotted two of the enemy under a tree. They were sitting there when a Hurricane flew low and they looked up and shook their heads in resignation. They were taken prisoner soon afterwards.

  Ray Street was weary of the war. On guard at night, always soaked from monsoon rain, he thought of what was happening at that moment in Birmingham. ‘Dad would be getting his last pint of beer to take home … Mum would be preparing supper. Then I would perhaps sing a song to myself, or simply daydream of walking home through Birmingham.’ But when he went home to Birmingham on leave he found that he wanted to get back to the front line. Street could not settle and he missed his friends. He even missed the danger.

  The 1st Assam, who had held the tennis court with the West Kents, did not join the immediate pursuit of the Japanese after Kohima. They could not make up their losses as easily as the British battalions. There was no steady supply of already trained recruits from the hills. With half the battalion dead, sick or wounded, Lieutenant Colonel ‘Bruno’ Brown and Major Albert Calistan needed months to rebuild. By August 1944 they were still in barracks at Shillong. There was a medal ceremony that month for their dead hero Wellington Massar, with all of the survivors of Kohima drawn up on the square facing the Governor of Assam on a raised dais. It was a scene from the imperial twilight. The ranks of sepoys in starched jungle greens, the white commanding officer standing in front of them, and the King Emperor’s proconsul gazing with studied benevolence upon the entire scene. ‘Wellington Massar belonged to these hills,’ declared the Governor, Sir Andrew Clow. Lieutenant Colonel Brown came forward and turned towards a diminutive woman in the crowd. ‘His bereaved aunt, to whom we all offer our sincerest and deepest sympathy, is here in his stead,’ he announced, ‘and we can assure her that she has an undeniable right to feel as proud of her nephew as we are. Will your Excellency be pleased now to bestow this symbol of his Emperor’s gratitude on Miss Florestie Massar.’ Five months later ‘Bruno’ Brown was dead, shot in a Japanese ambush near the Chindwin, still wearing the polo sweater given to him during the siege by Charles Pawsey. His soldiers buried him in Burma, across the river from where he had helped to raise the regiment; they would have been glad to see what was written on his identity card under the designation ‘nationality’. The Cambridge-born soldier had declared himself Indian.

  When they reached Rangoon the West Kents were sent to what Dennis Wykes called a ‘posh barracks’. After the months of mud and fleas, anything with four walls and a roof would have satisfied that description. They were supposed to start training for the amphibious invasion of Malaya. Lance Corporal Wykes could tell the men had no stomach for more figh
ting. ‘We’d had enough of it. You began to think “you can’t be lucky all the time”.’ The army command and the government in London knew it too. In September 1944, as Slim was accelerating his pursuit of the Japanese into Burma, the future of 14th Army was being raised in the House of Commons. The Labour MP Aneurin Bevan wanted a delegation of members sent to Burma to assure the troops they were not ‘a forgotten army’. Bevan then produced a letter from his pocket. It was in the form of a poem, short and passionate, and it came from a soldier in Burma. Bevan was mildly patronising about its literary merits. ‘I will not say that he has put his ideas into the form of poetry,’ he said, ‘because I do not think he has achieved that level, but there is no doubt about his sentiments.’ It read:

  These are the men who

  shed their blood,

  Amongst the filthy Burma mud,

  On the Arakan Front and Imphal Plain,

  In blistering heat

  and bloody rain.

  Later on, in years to come,

  When you speak of battles

  fought and won,

  Remember these men

  who fought so well,

  And lived and died

  in that green hell.

  The Liberal MP John Loverseed, a former serviceman, said he had read letters from 14th Army men ‘whose homes have been broken up, who have lost everything that was dear to them simply because of the length of time they had been required to spend outside this country’. By December, an official inquiry led by Churchill’s friend the Earl of Munster, Geoffrey FitzClarence, reported to Cabinet that troops looked ‘above all for a definite and firm date to which they could look forward … I was, however, impressed with the requests made on many occasions … that a statement on this subject should be made by the Prime Minister, in whom every man has complete confidence and trust.’ It was a none-too-subtle nudge to the prime minister. The tour of duty in the Far East was reduced from four years to three years and four months, and by a further four months in June 1945.

  There was medical evidence to back up anecdotal reports of disillusionment. The 2nd Division psychiatrist Captain Paul Davis worried about the rise in the number of cases being sent to him. During the fighting for Kohima the psychiatric toll had been just under 10 per cent of the total wounded. During the advance into Burma it nearly doubled, ‘though the fighting was nothing as bitter and the death toll substantially lower … the “repatriation consciousness” … and sheer war weariness may have contributed to this’.

  The British saga of command stuttered on. In May 1944 Mountbatten sacked the Army Group commander, General Sir George Giffard. ‘I had the most difficult of many difficult days in this command,’ he told his diary. ‘I had to tell my Army Group Commander-in-Chief … that I had lost confidence in him, and was asking for his replacement … I suppose it really is that he is orthodox and extremely cautious, whereas I really feel that we must push on and take all the risks with the troops this monsoon.’ This, as Mountbatten well knew, was only part of the truth. Giffard’s fatal error had been in refusing to accept the younger man as his boss, or to take him remotely seriously as a military figure. What Mountbatten viewed as his intolerable slowness in getting troops to the front back in March confirmed Giffard’s fate. But Giffard’s support to Slim as he built 14th Army into a force to fight the Japanese had been immense and, as Slim commented, ‘we saw him go with grief’. The man chosen to replace him, General Oliver Leese, came from 8th Army in Italy, but was destined to fail in Burma. Shut out of key decisions by Slim and Mountbatten, he was the latecomer to the party and, as Slim’s biographer Robert Lyman notes, ‘was never able to dominate as he wished’. He moved against Slim, with spectacularly awful timing, in early May 1945, just as 14th Army was consolidating its hold on Rangoon and pursuing the defeated Japanese southwards. Leese tried to remove Slim on 7 May, but such was the political row that followed that within six weeks Leese was himself removed and replaced by Slim. Once before, in the gloom of the first Arakan, he had been sacked and survived to see the man who gave the orders removed himself. The general seen by the troops as bluff and hearty, as close to one of them as a general could be, had proved himself not only a superb military tactician, but a doughty political survivor. He had an influential ally in Mountbatten and had won the confidence of Brooke; but it was his victory over the Japanese, and the overwhelming support of his generals and men, which made the decision to sack him seem so ludicrous and which ensured its reversal. With exasperating discretion, Slim referred in his memoirs only to ‘a considerable reorganisation of the higher army command’.

  One August evening, when Rangoon was at its sweltering summer worst, Dennis Wykes and a few friends heard that Japan had surrendered. ‘The blokes just went mad,’ Wykes recalled. The West Kents cheered in the streets. Men hugged each other and jumped on to passing cars. Japan had surrendered. Ray Street was walking in Rangoon when he heard shooting and thought some Japanese had infiltrated. Instead, he saw officers riding around in jeeps and firing pistols in the air. He was guarding Japanese prisoners at Rangoon jail, who at first refused to believe the news. ‘Finally they realised it was true and became scared of what was to become of them.’ Neither Street nor any other West Kent harmed the prisoners. When asked, sixty years later, if he had been tempted to abuse the hated enemy, he replied, ‘Naw. You can’t be like that. I felt sorry for them. They were fighting for theirselves and we were fighting for ourselves.’ It has to be said that those who felt sorry for the Japanese were in a minority. Hatred of the enemy, even if it was not expressed as brutality towards prisoners, was the dominant emotion of those days.

  Kohima had changed them all. It would become apparent in different ways, and in some sooner than others. The West Kent medic Frank Infanti encountered Padre Roy Randolph, the ascetic and peace-loving chaplain to the battalion, helping another officer to make a booby trap. ‘I said to him, “I don’t understand, you’re a man of God.” And he said, “Well, eh, after Kohima I had to go and look at one of our men and he had been tied up and tortured with wire. Then I decided that God had forsaken the Japanese.”’ Dennis Wykes was in convalescent camp after the surrender when an administrative officer called him to his tent over some minor problem. As the officer talked, a Japanese prisoner walked in. Wykes began to feel unsteady on his feet. His anger swelled. He told the British officer that he had to leave; he could not be around the prisoner. Outside he saw a group of prisoners standing chatting. ‘I made them dig a trench. And I kept them digging. A bloody big trench it was!’

  From the ship he should have been able to see the smoke from the big chimneys. But there was nothing at all. The men around him became quiet as the ship approached harbour. Most had wondered if they would ever see home. Now that they did, the sense of shock was profound. Masao Hirakubo landed at Otaki, one of the ports of Hiroshima, and was sent with the other repatriated men to be disinfected. They were told by the Americans to take their clothes off and were covered in powder. What a sight, these beaten men sprinkled with the cleansing dust of the conquerors. ‘Hiroshima was dead. Nobody was in the street.’ There was acre upon acre of smashed emptiness. So this was what the new weapons could do! He took a train to Yokohama but when he got there people told him his old neighbourhood had been destroyed in an air raid. He went into a business and asked to use the phone so that he could call his father’s office. Would he be alive, and if so would he have given up hope by now of ever seeing his son again? The first call told him that his father had changed companies but that he was alive. ‘I telephoned to the new company in Tokyo and spoke to my father and said, “I have come back now.” He was surprised. He thought I was dead already. They had heard nothing from me in Burma except one mail. No communication for two and a half years!’ They arranged to meet at Shinbashi station in downtown Tokyo. Hirakubo saw his father from the train. He was the same portly little man with a worried expression that he remembered from that other life before the war. Stepping off the train, he walked toward
s his father, but as he came closer it was clear that he did not recognise his son. ‘I told him “It is me. I have come back.” He was amazed. Japanese people never show feeling to the face but we can understand.’ They went to a restaurant and ate together and then took a train to a relative’s house where the family were being sheltered. When they arrived, he saw his grandfather sitting in the front room. The old man shouted for joy. Then his mother, his two sisters and his niece rushed out. ‘Everybody was crying. They had been wondering about my funeral.’ After a few weeks he found a job with his old trading company and tried to resume the life he had known, but his mind constantly turned to Kohima. He could not escape thoughts of death.

  His 138th Regiment counterpart, Chuzaburo Tomaru, returned to find that his father had been killed in an air raid. For Chuzaburo the end of the war had been a time of madness. An officer he knew, a man who had survived the march out of India, took a pistol and blew out his own brains when he heard news of the surrender. Chuzaburo was sad at the defeat, but he had never been a committed warrior like so many of the others. The war was a hell that followed him into peace. The images flashed before him constantly. He saw himself running in torn shoes; he saw a man slip into the jungle and kill himself with a hand grenade, another shoot himself in the mouth; one time when he had amoebic dysentery he saw a wild dog slink out and eat his shit. The pictures kept coming into his old age.

  In the Japan to which he and the other veterans returned, the old military was a leper caste. Men deserted in droves after the defeat and there was widespread criminality. The eminent American historian of Japan, John Dower, described how ‘officers and men engaged in looting, sometimes on a grand scale, and police reports expressed that public disgust would extend upward to “grave distrust, frustration, and antipathy towards military and civilian leaders”, even “hatred of the military” in general’. About 70 per cent of the military’s remaining supply stocks, including machinery and vehicles, were stolen by the upper echelons and much of them sold on to the black market. By contrast, disabled veterans and war widows were abandoned to fend for themselves. Prices soared by 539 per cent in the first year after the surrender, and nearly four million people were left without housing. Destitute veterans begged in the streets of ruined cities. Hans Baerwald, an American brought up in Japan, returned to work for the Occupation administration and saw ‘vast stretches of flatness, dotted with shacks made of cardboard, corrugated tin, and bits of wood for most of the way from the docks of Yokohama to downtown Tokyo’.