Word soon went around about their destination: Rangoon, Burma. This, everyone knew, was at one end of the road to Mandalay, where the flying fishes play, and the dawn comes up like thunder out of China ’cross the bay, but that was about it. By the time they were out in the open Indian Ocean, Rangoon had fallen to the Japanese and their destination became Bombay, whence they moved inland to Ahmadnagar, then across the subcontinent to Bihar province and the jungle of Ranchi.
This was early April 1942. Duties were fairly non-specific for the Battalion which was part of the mobile reserve charged with the defence of India against the seemingly unstoppable Japanese, but that changed in the August. India’s Congress Party was demanding independence from Britain. The British position was that such matters would be settled in whatever way the Indian people wanted when the war was over. On 8 August, Congress demanded that the British ‘quit India’ immediately. If the demand was refused, there would be ‘mass struggle on non-violent lines on the widest possible scale’. Gandhi, Nehru, and the other leaders, were all arrested overnight and imprisoned, many in the fort at Ahmadnagar.
The struggle did not erupt on a wide scale. Most people, including the Indian armed forces, carried on as before, sure that the demand to quit was no more than another card played in the long game, and equally certain that life under the British was rather better than life would be under the Japs.
So, there was very little non-violence but there was quite a lot of violence, and the Battalion was detailed to keep the peace, first where they were in Bihar province, and then in Bengal. They settled at Contai, by the Ganges delta, where internal security suddenly became an entirely different matter on 16 October. Torrential rain during the night was followed by a cyclonic wind and a tidal wave which overwhelmed all defences and destroyed everything before it, except the strongest buildings on the highest ground.
Nobody had heard the word ‘tsunami’ in those days, but that’s what it was. The War Diary described the scene on the morning of 18 October:
‘Palms, strongest of trees, had been uprooted or bent at right angles by the force of the wind, entire villages had been swept away, and vast stretches of country were submerged. Dead humans and animals were everywhere.’
The death toll was in the many thousands and the Battalion’s new role was disaster relief, reconstruction and mass burials. The Jocks’ own losses, fourteen men drowned in the storm, were forgotten for the moment as labours of Hercules were performed every day for ten days, until the posting came further inland to Kharagpur. Three more weeks of internal security were followed by transfer back to Ranchi and to training.
Over the winter and spring, the Japanese threat to India increased. In May 1943, the Battalion moved to the curiously-named seaport of Cox’s Bazaar in the southernmost little finger of Bengal (now Bangladesh), close to the border with Burma and the province of Arakan.
Patrols were mounted into Jap-occupied territory and first contact with the enemy was made south of Buthidaung, fifteen miles or so beyond the border. The Jocks came across a temporarily unoccupied position, waited until the occupiers came back from the river where they were bathing, and then gave them a warm welcome. It was the first Japanese blood to the Battalion, at no cost.
Extract from the American Intelligence Bulletin (January 1944):
‘A high-ranking British officer stated that the major slogan for jungle warfare against the Japanese is “Patrol! Patrol! Patrol!” A patrol, he said, must avoid taking up a static defense; it must be “offensive” in its tactics. It should stay out two or three days, sometimes up to six days, and it should be self-sufficient.
“You must outfox the Jap,” this officer explained. “The main point is to confuse him as to what you are doing; then you have an even chance of inflicting casualties. The Japs watch and listen all the time. They attempt all sorts of ruses to deceive our patrols. You can frequently catch the Jap on the loose – swimming, eating, resting, playing, and so forth. Usually when he is caught under such circumstances, he is absolutely unprotected. Once, during a recent campaign, one of our platoons caught more than 100 Japs completely off guard; the platoon killed 30 of the enemy while the others fled in confusion.”
‘The British patrols usually moved by day, and frequently caught the Japs unaware. At night the patrols generally hid out, away from streams, watering places, and trails.’
In the summer came another move for the Battalion, back into Bengal to Deula; then another, to Bangalore where, on 7 September, Colonel Green, now Officer Commanding, ordered a muster parade. The dramatic news he had for the assembled Jocks was that they were to become Chindits.
Most of them thought they knew what that meant. They’d heard about a man called Wingate and his expedition earlier that year. Being a Chindit seemed to mean marching for weeks on end in the jungle and coming out looking like starved tramps.
One or two there did know the truth exactly, including Jim McNeilly: ‘I’d been with the guerrillas for four months on an exercise. There were fourteen of us Black Watch and twenty-eight Gurkhas. All top secret jungle training. We had no idea why, naturally, but they were turning us into jungle instructors. That’s what I became. Being in the jungle you have no eyes, you can’t see beyond a few feet, so you have to rely on your other senses. If there’s a Jap patrol following you, you need to be able to hear it, to hear them talking. Jungle training teaches you to use every possibility, and how to live with rations strictly curtailed. It’s a state of mind you have to get into, with your mind being questioned all the time by the jungle’s own special noises that you have to learn to recognise, or you’d be a nervous wreck. The other stuff is more straightforward, jungle craft, crossing rivers with livestock, all that.’
Just how straightforward, the Battalion was about to learn. By this time the Cameronians were already learning, including a draft of Black Watch recruits who had ‘proceeded overseas’ as the army records have it, embarking on 12 March, 1943, at Gourock on the Polish ocean liner MS Sobieski . Among that draft, with no idea of where they were going, was my father and an apprentice joiner from Blairgowrie called Fred Patterson. There seems to be no evidence that they knew each other, but they had at least one thing in common; they were both excellent shots.
Fred Patterson: ‘Conditions on this ship were like any other trooper, with men packed like sardines. Beds were three tiers high or if you didn’t like the company you could always sleep up on deck in the open. Our CO was a Black Watch colonel and the first evening on board he called the Black Watch on parade, all 120 of us, and told us we had the honour of being the ship’s U-boat watch.’
The convoy put into Freetown, Sierra Leone, on 27 March and reached Durban on 14 April, where the 120 men camped on a race-course. They stayed for some weeks, keeping fit with forced marches and cross-country runs, before embarking on the SS Strathaird on 24 May, destination still unknown. This turned out to be Bombay on 11 June, and thence by train to Deolali, a military town about 100 miles to the north-east which was established in Victorian times but which, according to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, lives on in our expression ‘doolally’, meaning ‘bonkers due to locally prevailing circumstances’.
After a few weeks of nothing much happening in the constant rain of the monsoon, volunteers were sought for a new venture called LRP – Long Range Penetration.
Fred Patterson: ‘What LRP was we didn’t know, but the Black Watch draft were given the order “three paces forward”, that is called volunteering, army style, and told to report for medical examination the following day.’
Arriving in Saugor, central India at the end of July, the 120 men found the 1st Battalion Cameronians on a 180-mile jungle-march, and joined in with 100 miles to go. It was still the monsoon but at least they had barracks with hot baths to come back to. Serious jungle training was about to begin.
Fred Patterson: ‘We slept on the ground or made beds raised up a few inches to let the rain pass underneath. We lived like animals.’
Chapter Three
Why They Were There
To understand why hundreds of men of two famous Scottish regiments should eventually find themselves wandering for months around a mortally dangerous Burmese jungle, seemingly without purpose and certainly without many other essentials, we need to go back a little in time, to examine two ambitions.
First was the Japanese desire to subjugate the continent of Asia. Second was the compelling urge of a man to prove that he was right.
Of course this is a simplification, but we could simplify it even further. Ask one of the Jocks why he was there, after he’d had an exhausting day’s march to nowhere carrying a 70-pound pack, spending his post-rations moments picking leeches from intimate areas of his person, and he would say ‘Because Orde Wingate decided this was the best way to stop the Japs’.
We shall try to comprehend General Wingate shortly. The need to stop the Japs is an easier concept.
Japan’s short-term objective after Pearl Harbor on 7 December, 1941, was the conquest of the Pacific islands and of Malaya – in particular the British naval base at Singapore. With Malaya went Burma, buffer and possible bridge to India. The British had expected this to be Japanese policy and had planned for it well before war broke out. In the unlikely event of Japanese aggression, the Royal Navy, probably joined by the US Navy, would sail from Singapore, preventing all enemy movement further to the south and taking the war right to the Japanese mainland.
Following Pearl Harbor, the US Navy had its own problems and only three days after that, 10 December, the Royal Navy became the first such force ever to lose a capital ship to aerial attack on the open sea. In fact they lost two, the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse, with 840 men dead against eighteen for the Japanese. The sinking of those two mighty ships turned Singapore from a massive source of wave-ruling power into something it was never meant to be; a defensive fortress. Singapore surrendered on 15 February, 1942.
Meanwhile in Burma, an inadequate mixture of heroic British regulars – including the 1st Battalion of the Cams of course – local troops, other conscripts and one Chinese Division, was failing to hold back an enemy superior in every resource. Rangoon fell on 8 March. Japanese progress to the Burma Road, until then chief supply line from the Allies to Chiang Kai-Shek’s Chinese forces, could not be stopped either and the British retreated into India. Burma was gone and, it appeared, nothing could be done about it. India would be next.
One man who had a clear idea about what to do was a British army major, Orde Charles Wingate DSO. His difficulty was that his superiors did not believe in his idea, partly because it sounded mad, and partly because Wingate himself was considered odd. He was not the typical officer even though his father had been an army colonel in India, where Orde Charles was born in 1903.
Returning to England soon after that, he was brought up in a family of Plymouth Brethren, his parents being almost entirely occupied with Christian missionary work. He was made closely familiar with the Bible but not allowed ‘normal’ books. He was kept away from other boys, educated at home and looked after by two elder sisters, and so grew up devoid of what would now be called social networking skills.
He was sent to boarding school aged twelve where, hardly surprisingly, he struggled to cope. As well as his psychological disadvantages, he was short, with a big nose. He had nothing in common with sporty types. He didn’t know how to join in, and his defence was solitary prayer in the school chapel.
There seemed to be few choices open to him for a career. The army was the obvious one, so he took it. Nothing much happened at first in his peacetime Empire duties which were spent largely in the Sudan, but progress could come from his studies of Arabic in the hope of becoming a qualified interpreter. Progress, he felt, was essential. ‘I cannot be a nobody,’ he said. ‘I cannot be a nothing.’ He also said he was fated to lead a country.
The change came with a posting to Palestine in 1936 – then ruled by the British as trustee of the League of Nations. Trouble was brewing. The Balfour Declaration of 1919 had envisaged a permanent home for Jews there, but no one had foreseen the rise of the Nazis. The British, Arab, and Jewish leaders had differing viewpoints about a Jewish homeland, but even the Arabs were fairly comfortable with it in the expectation of a general lack of interest among most European Jews. Why would they want to exchange their regular, civilised lives for the hardships and uncertainties of desert farming? A few Zionist pioneers could be absorbed and everyone would rub along. Then the German Jews started pouring in, pushing the Arabs out, and the response was bloody. Arab gangs were going out at night and killing.
Wingate, the devout biblical student, was sent to Palestine as an Arabic-speaking intelligence officer to join officer colleagues who were mainly pro-Arab and anti-Jew. But he saw himself as a kind of herald of the Old Testament; an instrument of government in the Promised Land. The hardy, determined new Children of Israel were to be admired and supported.
For the first time in his life, Wingate had a chance to assert himself. All the better that it should be in opposition to general policy, in rebellion, almost, against the accepted situation which was that Jews were not permitted to fight for themselves; the British would do any defending necessary.
Wingate’s idea was to train groups of Jews to form patrols with British soldiers and go out into the country into combat with the Arab gangs, with himself in command. He was wounded and awarded the DSO while doing it, but he took it too far. He became involved politically and so an embarrassment to the British authorities, who banished him from Palestine for ever.
General Archie Wavell had been his CO in 1937: ‘His personality was pigeonholed in my mind as that of a leader for unorthodox enterprise, if ever I had need of one.’
This story has nothing to do with Scottish regiments. Neither – except to illustrate his nature – have Wingate’s subsequent, and hugely successful, adventures in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), when Wavell’s need of a leader for unorthodox enterprise saw him posted, in effect, as officer commanding Emperor Haile Selassie’s tiny rebellion forces against the masses of Italian conquerors. Wingate wasn’t just willing to try something different; he thought something different was bound to be the answer because those in high authority were incompetent.
Unfortunately for him, nobody seemed to be impressed by his efforts in Abyssinia, the bar to his DSO, or even by his magnificent trickery in getting 10,000 Italians to surrender to his force of one platoon of regulars plus a few hundred tribesmen. Deeply unappreciated, kicked out of Israel, going nowhere in his personal crusade to be a somebody, he cut his own throat. An officer in the next room heard him fall, broke down the door and saved his life.
God had not forsaken Wingate after all and, at last, his achievements with the raggle-taggle irregulars in the Abyssinian desert and in his guerrilla raids in Palestine, somehow percolated upwards and solidified into a reputation. Here was an original, a queer fellow to be sure, but a man who could find ways around and through where orthodoxy could not. Just the chap to send to Burma.
The situation there in 1942 was disheartening to say the least. British soldiers had found the climate and the country entirely alien. There was also the widely held belief that the Jap was by nature more suited to jungle warfare and so suffered less than the westerner in the heat and the flies. He had been specially trained to be a ghost on top of his innate superiority, and he could live on half a banana a day, or whatever it was that grew in the jungle – wild rice maybe – and so needed no supplies.
The British soldier felt he was no match. Wingate disagreed, arguing that the British soldier was more intelligent and more able to learn. Training would make him more than a match, especially when deployed in a revolutionary new stratagem which Wingate called ‘long range penetration’. Jungle-trained and jungle-confident troops would reach far behind the front line, supplied from the air. Dropping everything soldiers needed from aircraft had not been tried on any kind of large scale before, and not at all wh
ile flying over miles and miles of terrain with no distinguishing features, and many senior people thought it would never work.
In any case, Wingate’s arrival more or less coincided with total defeat in Burma and withdrawal of almost all of the last exhausted remnants over the river Chindwin into Assam. There were no fit men there for him to train and the reconquest of Burma was an impossible dream.
When General Slim took command of the Fourteenth Army in 1943, he saw straight away that its health and morale were not satisfactory. The sick and wounded were not having the benefit of new drugs and best medical practice. Field hospitals were often too far away from the action, and there was little in the way of air-ambulance facilities to counter that. Discipline and sanitation were not good enough. Preventive measures against malaria in particular were far too lax.
The standard method against malaria was a daily tablet of a synthetic quinine called Mepacrine (US trade name Atabrine). It didn’t cure malaria but it did suppress the symptoms. Slim was very keen on it, mounting ‘surprise checks of whole units, every man being examined. If the overall result (of the blood tests) was less than 95 per cent positive I sacked the commanding officer. I had to sack only three; by then the rest had got my meaning.’
It took a while but Wingate was able to persuade a few of those in the highest places, including General Slim and the C-in-C Field Marshal Wavell, that his Long Range Penetration Groups (LRPGs) offered hope of some sort. With the temporary rank of Colonel, he was given command of a unit to be formed as the 77th Indian Infantry Brigade, composed of a mixture of Gurkha Rifles, Burma Rifles and various others, and including a battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment, there for police work and a unit not previously known for assignments like this which was to be called Operation Longcloth.
Jocks in the Jungle Page 4