Weller's War

by George Weller

  “We desert rats,” attests a corporal, “understand how the South felt after the Civil War. That's the way we feel about those correspondents who write articles about how swell life is in the desert without ever coming here.” The company politician puts it like this: “Persia for the Persians; that's our motto.”

  In the shimmering heat that makes the telegraph poles ripple to the horizon like a snake, you cross the last stretch of desert to where the Shatt-al-Arab slides lifelessly into the Gulf. The door to Khorramshahr is two 20-foot pedestals with a traffic island. On the right side of the road, where northbound truck convoys can see it, is an arrow and RUSSIA. Khorramshahr has many such gates, like a stockyard for humans, where the m.p.s work with the British, in their red-rimmed caps.

  Elmer Stoneberg says, “We broke down in the desert and were out there for fourteen hours. I'd read about prospectors out west holding stones in their mouths to keep saliva flowing, so we did that.” John Urban, who was on the truck that found Stoneberg, says, “His tongue was hanging out about a foot.”

  But these men have competition. The two towns of Andimeshk and Dizful, glowering at each other across a tepid desert river, are the hottest places on earth. Andimeshk is an American railroad center, where the trains that have been broiling their way across the desert change to double engines to meet the mountain grades. Dizful, with a claimed record of 189°, is the dwelling place of a unique underground people who prefer the blindness of cool caves to the blindness of the sun.

  Between the towns, on the stone bridge above the muddy rapids of the Karun River, stand the American military police, frying in their white helmets. They have a special burn on right now, because another Chicago newspaper asserted that the temperatures reported from Iran were impossible.

  “There's no sense telling people how hot it gets here,” they say. “They wouldn't believe us, anyway. A thermometer hung out in the sun broke. You spill a glass of water and hardly any reaches the ground. Heat! Yeow! I don't even want to hear the word—that one syllable puts a guy through a million agonies in this unfair country. Iran is a hot shower, just without the water. In Dizful it gets so hot you can hardly breathe. And I don't know which is worse, Andimeshk or hell, never having been in hell yet.”

  “Weather like this is hard on chaplains,” admits a man of the cloth. “It deprives us of half our talking points.”

  Soldiers' Verse from a War Correspondent's Notebook

  Persian Gulf Command

  (Tune of “Shanty Town”)

  It's only a shack in old Basra, Iraq,

  It's a heck of a place and I'm not going back,

  The sun's hot as hell, and oh! what a smell,

  The natives don't wash their feet and it's goat that they eat,

  They all wear a dress and I'm forced to confess,

  That I can't tell Charlie from Mamie or Bess,

  There's a queen waiting there, she has lice in her hair,

  In that shack in old Basra, Iraq.

  She's only a whore from old Bandar Shahpur,

  A sweet Persian maiden and need I say more.

  Her price 50 rials, and not a bad deal,

  When she wiggles her butt, oh! my! how you feel.

  She's strictly illegit but I don't mind a bit,

  And if she weren't so dusky I'd chew on her tit,

  There's a queen waiting there, she has crabs in her hair,

  Just a whore from old Bandar Shahpur.

  It's only a bar in old Khorramshahr,

  We waded through mud from our camp so afar,

  They had vodka and gin, and oh! what a din.

  It's the worst goddamned place I have ever been in,

  There were soldiers and sailors and Merchant Marines,

  They were thinking of home and all that it means,

  There's a war to be won and a job to be done,

  They left that bar in old Khorramshahr.

  We're stationed now in Ahwaz, Iran,

  Wherever you look it's just desert sand

  Where the wind starts to blow, and the dust hides the glow

  Of the moon as it shines o'er the crappy Karun,

  We drink Persian beer, and there's no nooky here

  And we won't get none if we stay here a year,

  It's a damned dirty place, it's a lousy disgrace,

  This asshole called Ahwaz, Iran.

  We are in the command, but Tehran leads the band,

  They are the minds, we are just hired hands,

  They write letters galore, and endorsements more,

  They demand more reports than there are Persian whores.

  They move supplies with a flick of their eyes,

  They make inspection complete from 10,000 feet,

  But we tell no lies, they're a swell bunch of guys,

  The tops in the Persian Command.

  *Peter II (1923-1970), last king of Yugoslavia; his father was assassinated in 1934. He was run out by the Nazis in April 1941, fled to Britain, and joined the RAF.

  XIX

  From Burma to China

  From New Delhi in June, Weller wrote to his editor: “I may disappear for a week or ten days on a special job. Do not be worried if you do not hear from me, or tell anyone who inquires that you knew it was in the offing.”

  This was Weller's two weeks behind Japanese lines with the Jingpaw Rangers, young Burmese guerrillas led by intrepid American officers. Originally, he was to parachute in—his training in New Guinea made it feasible to get to the story—but at the last minute he was landed on a secret airstrip “seemingly no longer than a bowling alley” by a tiny plane coming to take away a wounded Ranger. This world of improvisatory war and constant movement, where roads “are only places for planting ambushes” and those “taken by Japs die slowly and with torture,” was ideal for Weller. “They cannot reveal even to their wives what they're doing. Some have ceased writing home. One Ranger, surrounded by Japs, had a letter dropped with his ammunition supplies. It contained divorce papers served by his wife's lawyer. Her love could not outlast his enforced silence.”

  I have included the full magazine-length treatment of the story rather than dispatches that the newspaper ran—both included descriptions of Japanese waterboarding. Weller then set out to drive the harrowing, curlicue “Burma Road” to China (a crucial supply route before the British had lost Burma), reopened at the insistence of U.S. general Joe Stilwell. Weller ended up in Chungking, and until August he covered border

  clashes between Communist and Nationalist forces. In a couple of weeks, following the atomic bombs, the war with Japan would be over.

  ASIA'S LITTLE STATES PIN HOPES ON U.S.

  New Delhi, India—May 28, 1945

  The Balkans of southeast Asia stand on the threshold of freedom. These include Burma, Thailand, Indo-China, the Federated Malay States, and the Dutch East Indies. All have national movements which desire self-government without excluding guarantees of their sovereignty by the great powers.

  The Japanese, when evacuating the Asiatic Balkans, leave behind in each country grants of “independence,” which are political time-bombs. The dying Japanese idea of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere* may be revived at the outbreak of the next European or Middle Eastern war if the United Nations cannot win back the confidence of Asiatics.

  As in the European Balkans, these peoples look to the United States as the key to what they hope will be more liberty. But though American seapower, directed against the Philippines, has been largely responsible for weakening the doomed limb of the Jap empire, America political policy is nonexistent. Complete obscurity surrounds the question of what attitude the United States intends to take toward the aspirations of freed people and the traditional rights of their European protectors.

  The most to be said of the American position in southeast Asia is that it is still publicly uncommitted. At Tehran President Roosevelt acceded to dividing the European Balkans into spheres of Russian and British influence. Though the 15th Air Force (with the
Soviet army) was the strongest factor in the crisscross strategy which liberated the Balkans, Roosevelt signed away all but a rubber-stamp role for the United States. Despite American airmen having sacrificed their lives over Ploesti and Sofia, Rumania and Bulgaria are now barred to the American press. Today not one country in the Balkans except Albania is without a foreign army on its soil. These precedents make Asiatic nationalists watch Burma as a test case of their probable destiny. Will the United States accept its responsibilities, or turn them over to other powers as it did in Europe?

  As Asiatics see the issue, Truman's hand is perfectly free. It is hazarded that the United States may delay formulating its attitude until a landing has been achieved on the Chinese coast. The American habit of acting militarily first and letting a political policy tag along afterward is as much a mystery here as in the Middle East. The Asiatic view toward America now is: “It's later than you think.”

  CONFLICTING VIEWS ON EMPEROR

  New Delhi, India—May 30, 1945

  Two conflicting cries directed to Superforts [B-29s] bombing Japan come from the lowly Allied bleachers at China's back door. “Kill that Emperor! Kill him!” yells one savage chorus. “Let him alone. We need him,” comes an opposing singsong.

  Neither party is thinking about nice questions like whether the royal line should endure or Japan become a republic. They think of the Emperor in practical soldiers' terms. Their views about the Emperor depend strictly on whether he can get them out of the monsoon—their hot, humid present environment—by Christmas.

  One school thinks that every palace of the Emperor should be plastered by Superforts in the hope of sending Heaven's Son heavenward. Then, as they opine, Japanese resistance would collapse. But the other school of bleacherites says: “What if the Emperor does meet with a super accident from a Superfort? Where does that leave us? It may leave us digging these disagreeably determined little men out of their holes for the next ten years. No, what we want is for Japan to remain unified until its surrender under the Emperor. Because only the Emperor can uproot wholly this tiresome Co-Prosperity Sphere which takes so much trouble now.”

  Ask either party in the bleachers what ought to happen to the Emperor after he has whistled the last Japanese infantryman down from a sniper's tree-nest, or out from a foxhole, and all you get is a baffled stare. Where do umpires go after games, anyway? Who cares? Certainly not Asia's bleachers.

  BEATEN JAPS FIGHT ON IN BURMA

  New Delhi, India—June 4, 1945

  Dead on its feet in rain-sodden Burma, Japan's army nevertheless bitterly refuses to lie down. British imperial forces hold every major city except Moulmein, which planes crack every time the clouds open, attempting to diminish the Jap pullout south toward Bangkok, capital of Thailand.

  But Japan's retreat is no rout. It is a stubborn, well-calculated withdrawal, with every jungle road held milestone by milestone. The northern part of their army is seeking refuge in the Shan Hills. If it succeeds, they will still be able to claim a foothold in Burma as they do in bypassed New Guinea and the Solomons.

  It is essential for the Japanese to practice frugality, because if the Americans land in China, both land and sea routes from the enemy homeland will be cut and their Southeast Asian command can expect praise but little wherewithal. The Jap aim in clinging to parts of Burma is less to harass than to form a kind of bucket brigade along which the last man, the last bag of rice and the last grenade may be passed eastward.

  SAFE AND COZY BEHIND THE JAPANESE LINES

  Bhamo, Stilwell Road, Burma—July 7, 1945

  The idea that this war, despite military and political censorship, is being better reported than all its predecessors has reached such general acceptance that a man who doubts it finds himself on a par with one who throws acid at an oil painting. As news the war is yielding to the peace; as history the war is still unaccepted. Ian Hamilton, one of the good war correspondents of the earlier, European conflict, once said that history had to be written on the day of the event. By break of the following dawn, he observed pessimistically, the facts have put on their uniforms.

  It would be helpful, certainly, if history could be written immediately on the scene, before rain has filled the shellholes, before the bodies are covered, and before the general begins to yearn for a samurai sword. Such promptness has not, of course, been achieved in this war. It cannot be attained by correspondents in any way. If an event is great, like a mighty landing on a defended beach, it is also critical. Since it is critical, the correspondents cannot describe it fully in public, where the enemy would benefit. So it must be described afterward, and afterward is too late. If an event is small but brimming with meaning, it is often accidental, and never becomes known but at second or third hand. At a distance of hours, even minutes, it is already exaggerated, adulterated or deformed. A day is distortion, a week is deadly. Thus correspondents find themselves forever writing not about what they saw, but what they just missed seeing. What happened was malice and blood, but at the time the correspondent was face down in a foxhole, his weaponless hand clasping his exposed neck, or a plane-leap away on an aircraft carrier, previewing history on a radar screen. It is for these unavoidable reasons, plus a few others, that the remarkable exploits of the American Jingpaw Rangers behind Japanese lines in Burma, which have been going on for more than two years, must already be regarded, in a historical sense, as forever lost. Narratively speaking, nobody was there. And an invisible condition, though ideal from the point of view of a guerrilla, simply baffles a historian.

  Of course, there are records. The United States is long on keeping records. There are flimsies of the unemotional messages that were flashed to these guerrillas, sometimes when they were surrounded by search columns of kempeitai, the Japanese military police. “All other battalions now engaged. No other units are near enough to help you,” says one message, needing no gloss.

  The messages that flew over the heads of the Japanese back to the American headquarters contain few gifted or sententious passages. Their style goes like this: “Food drop fell outside our perimeter. Saw Nips get it. Please try another tonight, or if pilots unable, tomorrow morning.” … “Holed up in caves because our Shans took a powder. Our coordinates are unchanged. If possible drop us Chinese mortarman and about six Kachins preferably with Bren guns and our mail.” … “Our Gurkha outpost on his six o'clock sked says that village Mong-sa has been visited by Indian believed Jap agent. He asked headman location our camp. Headman played dumb. Gurks think that he may have letter from Japanese commander to me, this being excuse for visiting our camp.” … A sheaf of such messages, assembled by correspondent or historian, adds up to nothing. Yet it is as close to the event, as near to a contemporary battle record of what the Jingpaw Rangers have been doing in Burma, as exists.

  As this is written, the Jingpaw Rangers are still fighting in the rear of the Japanese lines. It is mid-monsoon, not a good season for war. Yet a Ranger outfit still sits alone on the highway near Loi-lem, east of the Japanese fortifications on the mountain escarpment at Taunggyi. Their presence, won by six weeks' fighting, blocks the otherwise free retreat of two Japanese divisions into Thailand. They have beaten off dozens of attacks. Yet their work is almost unknown. In communiqués of the Southeast Asia Command they are rarely mentioned. (The guerrillas do not resent their omission, but attribute it to security.)

  Only three correspondents have served in the field with the Rangers in the past year; the two besides this writer were both sergeants with army publications. No civilian correspondent save the writer has ever been with a Ranger detachment behind the Japanese lines, an undertaking which has been open to all and is not nearly so risky as it sounds. An editor of the Reader's Digest spent some time in residence at Ranger headquarters when it was in Myitkyina (the place India-Burma veterans mean when they speak of “Mishinaw”). A sergeant commanding a company of Shans, an eastern Burman people whose devotion to war is desultory at its best, was able to keep his men beyond their enlistmen
t by reading the resulting article to them, and assuring them that if they chose to fight all the longer they would be famous. The Shans, after thinking it over, decided that they still wanted to go home a while, make a few children, and return after the monsoon … History is something the guerrillas do not exactly shun, but they have found that history shuns them.

  The American task of raising and equipping a native army in Burma was not one of drafting or shanghaiing unwilling cannon fodder. The British call these tobacco-skinned little men “levies,” but the term is inexact. The several native tribes who serve under this wholly American command have not been coerced into service. They are volunteers. They have simply been asked whether they wished to do their Jap-fighting under the American flag for a rupee (30¢) a day and have responded affirmatively.

  To like wholeheartedly an ally is a rare thing, but it has occurred in Burma between the hill tribes and the Americans. The highlanders of the Shan States, a great area of northeastern Burma as different from the rest of the country as Mexico is from the United States, have respect, admiration and what seems like affection for Americans. They have proved willing to follow Americans into very questionable situations, such as into open space through the door of a tinnily rattling C-47, or uphill into the ominous, chugging fire of a Japanese heavy machine gun. They have been the more willing, perhaps, because in proportion to the trail of Japanese corpses they have littered across the scene, the losses among these skimpily trained riflemen, most of whom are less than twenty years old, have been unbelievably small.

  The job of a guerrilla is disrupting enemy communications and sowing sabotage. Killing, as in gangsterdom, is incidental and opportunities to kill are often passed by. Yet the Jingpaw Rangers, in their two years fighting behind the Japanese, have managed to kill, so to speak with their left hands, 5466 fully vouchered enemies, and to capture and bring back 63 more. Only 160 natives have met death, many of them accidentally. The American deaths total three. Vertical warfare directed at the Japanese rear has proved by far the most economical offensive in the East. But the Shan people consider these one-sided results only natural because they are covered, and as they believe protected, by a close-woven chain mail of blue tattooing. These indigo whorls, extending from the neckline to the wrists and below the kneecaps, are invulnerable to Japanese fire. “As a matter of fact,” one American officer told me with wonder, “bullets go through every part of their clothing without touching the tattoo marks. I don't know why it is, but cartridges seem to take a curve the minute they see a Jingpaw.”