Another Man's War

by Barnaby Phillips

  Jack Osborne, a gentle man from the English Midlands who was a lieutenant in Burma commanding a unit comprised mostly of Nigerians, said his men made a formidable impact on the Japanese. ‘They scared the Japs to begin with,’ he said many years later, with a sparkle in his sunken and blurry eyes. ‘When the Japs saw these hulking great blacks with filed teeth and slashed cheeks, they were pretty scared, as I must say too were some of the English white soldiers who were mixed up with them.’* Japanese soldiers, interrogated after the end of the war by British intelligence officers, said ‘the Japanese consider [the Africans] to be undoubtedly our best jungle fighters…The Africans were also admired for always contriving to rescue their dead and wounded after an action.’*

  In comparison with the troops already in the Kaladan Valley, Isaac and the men of the 29th CCS had had it easy. They had walked hard for days, and learnt to eat and drink whenever the opportunity allowed. They had blistered feet, and those who carried the heaviest loads had swollen necks. There had been some sleepless nights, as they struggled to attune themselves to the noises of the jungle. But of war, and of trying to track and kill the enemy while worrying that he is in fact creeping up behind you – of that, they had seen nothing. The British officers in their unit had been issued with pistols, and the non-commissioned officers, the sergeants and warrant officers had rifles. But the majority of the men were not armed. They were not, after all, in the Kaladan Valley to fight. They were there to tend to the wounded.

  One afternoon, Isaac and his colleagues staggered over yet another ridge and came to a stop. Beneath them was a wide and shallow river, flowing gently through the hills towards the south: it was their first sight of the long-awaited Kaladan. A ragged cheer went up. They descended into the valley and followed the river’s course, before arriving at a town of dilapidated wooden houses, weed-clogged gardens and fallen, twisted fences. The hospital and government building were in ruins, hit by British bombs, it seemed. Many walls were pockmarked with bullet holes and the gashes of shrapnel. Thousands of people must have lived here in peacetime, Isaac thought, but they had all vanished now.

  The town was called Paletwa and here they were reunited with Major Murphy and the heavy medical equipment that had travelled by jeep convoy.

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  ‌6

  ‌Full of loneliness

  The jungle is eerie and troops are not ‘At Home’ in it. It is full of loneliness and surprises.

  General Noel Irwin, 15 May 1943*

  February 1944

  The Arakan, Burma

  In the final days of February 1944, General Kit Woolner had good reason to feel satisfied. For all the 81st Division’s struggles, for all the loss of men, it had pushed the Japanese back some seventy miles in a handful of weeks. It was not a huge distance, but it had been covered on foot, across the thick jungle. The West Africans had penetrated further south into Burma than any British Army troops had managed since the great retreat of 1942. Even more impressive, less than a year had passed since these recruits had been thrown together. If many in the British high command remained sceptical of their abilities, their achievements now spoke for themselves. The West Africans, General Slim acknowledged, had shown ‘great dash in the attack’.* General Philip Christison, the commander of the British Army in the Arakan, passed on a message of congratulations to Woolner.

  As the West Africans moved down the Kaladan Valley, a ferocious battle was being fought about fifty miles to the west. Earlier in February, the Japanese had outflanked the much larger British force that was advancing closer to the coast. Yet again, the Japanese showed daring and courage, moving through the jungle at surprising speed. For several days, thousands of troops from the 7th Division, comprised of British and Indian men, were facing the worst. They had been pushed back into a small defensive ‘box’ – a flat, open area of about one mile square surrounded by hills and jungle – and forced to resort to hand-to-hand fighting in order to keep the Japanese at bay. Conditions inside the box were hellish. ‘Flies in their thousands flew in and around the men,’ wrote Anthony Irwin, a British officer who survived the battle, ‘and nothing anyone could do could destroy them.’ The reason was horrific: ‘the whole area was turning into a graveyard of British, Indian and Jap dead and added to that were the mules and other animals whose bodies lay rotting on the maidan, out of reach of burial parties’.* Despite the success of the 81st Division, it seemed as though the British were on the verge of yet another defeat in Burma.

  The consequences would have been disastrous. Isaac and his colleagues in the Kaladan Valley would have been left dangerously isolated and exposed. The British would have been forced to put more men and resources into defending the Arakan frontier, in a desperate effort to prevent a Japanese advance into Bengal. The impact would also have been psychological. General Slim had struggled hard to dispel the idea that, when it came to jungle fighting, the Japanese were unbeatable. Another Japanese victory would have shattered the British morale that he had rebuilt so assiduously.

  But the battle did not go as the Japanese had expected. The trapped men held their ground in the box for three bloody weeks, receiving ammunition, food and medicine, not to mention bottles of rum, from the reliable Dakota pilots. Then columns of Indian troops from the 5th Division fought their way through the Ngakyedauk Pass to join forces with the men in the box. On 24 February, the British broke the siege. Thousands of Japanese troops were killed, and the enemy pulled back to avoid even greater losses.

  They called it the ‘Battle of the Admin Box’, a prosaic name that obscured its great significance. It was a turning point. At long last, the British had evidence that their planes, tanks and artillery were superior to those of the Japanese. Anthony Irwin wrote, ‘It was a victory, not so much over the Japs but over our fears. For the first time in Burma we had stood and fought the Jap and the Jungle and beaten both.’*

  On the afternoon of the victory of the Admin Box, West African soldiers from the Gambian battalion of the 81st Division marched into the town of Kyauktaw, forty miles downstream from Paletwa, in the Kaladan Valley. The capture of Kyauktaw was a proud moment for Woolner’s men. Before the war, the town had been a trading and administrative centre, a place of two-storied colonial edifices and broad avenues, where steamers from Akyab moored at busy jetties and loaded up with rice to take back downriver. The triumphant West Africans admired the corrugated iron pagodas and mosques – proof that they had captured a place of consequence.

  Kyauktaw had fallen into decay in the two years of war, however. The temple courts were wrapped in weeds, the communal water tanks coated with bright-green algae and white lilies. Stray dogs roamed the streets. There were few other signs of life. The Japanese had retreated to the south, only a short time before and apparently in something of a panic. Among the first British officers to enter Kyauktaw was Richard Terrell. He found huts full of personal belongings, including handwritten letters from Japan, and beautiful sketches of the Burmese countryside.* But there were no prisoners to be taken.

  Discouragingly, most of Kyauktaw’s native residents had also abandoned their homes and businesses. Those that remained met the invading Africans with sullen stares from their darkened doorways. ‘They showed none of the joyous symptoms of newly liberated people,’* admitted a captain in the Gambian unit. Perhaps they wanted to know which army really held the upper hand before they decided whom they should be cheering on.

  By now, those West Africans at the front of the advance had left the hills and jungle behind. They were marching across the Kaladan’s floodplain, a flat mosaic, about eight miles wide, of rice paddies adorned with palm trees, bamboo huts and water buffalo. It was still the dry season, and the river was languid. But the tides swept up across the flat expanse from the Bay of Bengal, some fifty miles to the south, with surprising speed, and then the river submerged the slimy mud banks and sand islands, before the waters fell once more.

  On the floodplain, directly across the river from Kyauktaw, a single hill,
about a mile long from north to south and covered in brush and jungle, rose sharply against the surrounding paddies and loomed over the town. ‘An isolated whale-back hump’ was how John Hamilton described it.* A Buddhist temple had been built at its highest point, with a gilded pagoda roof that punctured the vegetation and glistened in the last sunshine of the day. The local people called it Pagoda Hill.

  Immediately, the British officers appreciated that whoever held the hill would control not only Kyauktaw, but also the surrounding plain, for many miles. It was a vital strategic point to anyone hoping to take command of the Kaladan Valley. To their relief, the African soldiers that were ordered to capture Pagoda Hill met no opposition. The Japanese had chosen to melt away into the jungle instead.

  Many of the villages around Kyauktaw were still inhabited. The people were subsistence farmers, and, if they had little by way of possessions, life did at least seem more comfortable here than up in the hills. There was plenty of rice, the buffalo looked content, even lazy, and flocks of chickens scurried around the bashas.

  At first, each village was indistinguishable from the next, but the West Africans soon noticed that they were passing through two very distinctive kinds of settlements. In the Buddhist villages, the ones they called ‘Burmese’, the people were reserved.* The British officers began to suspect that these villagers were passing on information about troop movements to the Japanese. Isaac would come to think of the Buddhists as ‘brothers to the Japanese’. In other villages, they found people with brown skin and Bengali features. These ‘Indians’, as the West Africans called them, flashed broad smiles and cried out, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ as the soldiers approached – they were Muslims. ‘Aleikum salaam,’ the West Africans would reply, heartened to hear a greeting they knew from home.*

  On the east bank of the Kaladan, a few miles to the north of Kyauktaw, British officers identified a suitable stretch of flat land for a camp. Over the next six days, hundreds of local farmers, paid in rupees and highly coveted parachute silk, cleared the land for an airstrip, so that the Dakota pilots could deliver more supplies. The first Dakota landed on 21 February. In the subsequent days and nights, there were dozens more flights as the division settled into position.

  The planes brought equipment that could not be dropped from the air: heavier guns, folding boats, outboard motors and motorbikes. The British even flew in seventy-four bullocks that had been dyed jungle green, to be used as pack animals in the next stage of the advance. The position was secure, and it was now time to push on.

  Back at Paletwa, Major Robert Murphy received his new orders for the 29th CCS. The bulk of his unit was to travel south by raft down the Kaladan River, in order to catch up with the 81st Division’s fighting units. A smaller rear party, would follow some days later with the 29th CCS’s heavier equipment.

  On the evening of 26 February, the Major addressed his men. He told them that they would set out from Paletwa the following day, heading for Kyauktaw. They would aim to reach their destination by 1 March, paddling downstream at a speed of about ten miles a day. He might have been worried about how the many uncharted sand banks in the Kaladan River, as well as the upcoming tides, would slow their progress, but his plan was not overly ambitious. He knew his little flotilla of flat bamboo rafts laden high with medical equipment would be as good as defenceless on the Kaladan. But he, like his superior officers, was operating on the assumption that there were no Japanese stragglers left to the north of Kyauktaw. General Woolner himself had travelled by raft down the same stretch of river just a few days previously, with no incident.

  It was another Scottish doctor, Captain Richard Brown, who read out the names of the soldiers who would be travelling the next day. Captain Brown was a wiry, small man with red hair, whose valiant efforts to speak West African pidgin had endeared him to the soldiers. He’d celebrated his thirty-ninth birthday during the march from India, and while the men called him baba agba – old man – they respected his prodigious appetite for hard work. Maybe that came from his upbringing, in a poor Presbyterian family in Aberdeen. His father George, a draper, had died of tuberculosis when Richard was just seven years old, leaving him and his sister in the care of his mother, Jeannie. But he’d managed to secure a place to read medicine at Aberdeen University, and had gone on to become a GP. Now, as he ran through the list, in the accent that his men sometimes struggled to follow, they listened closely. ‘Company Sergeant Major Archibong Bassey Duke…Sergeant David Kargbo…Lance Corporal Daniel Adeniran’, and so on, until he reached the end of the list, ‘Private David Essien…Private Isaac Fadoyebo’.

  They set out at dawn on 27 February. The men were glad to leave Paletwa behind. It was a forlorn place, they said, with bad spirits. When they punted off the riverbank, the shallow waters came alive with the disturbed flight of basking mudfish. They watched jet-black cormorants skim past, close to the river, and tribes of squawking green parakeets cross the canopy overhead, their flight direct and urgent. On an overhanging branch, a kingfisher perched rigidly still. But of human life, the men saw little. At least, at first.

  Isaac shared his raft with Sergeant David Kargbo, a short man and a heavy smoker. He and Isaac had first met at the military hospital outside Freetown. David, a Temne from the northern part of Sierra Leone, had worked in the hospital as a clerk. They were friendly with each other, if also somewhat detached. It wasn’t simply their differences in nationality that kept them from forming a closer bond. David was ten years older than Isaac, as well as being senior in rank. He knew about bookkeeping, and how to touch-type and write in shorthand, which gave him a certain status in the unit. Back home, he said, he had a fiancée, and he would be marrying her soon after he got back to Sierra Leone. Such talk made Isaac feel that he was, in comparison, a mere boy. Their conversation slowly dried up. They paddled away under the fierce sun, both men concentrating on keeping up with Major Murphy’s raft.

  In the evening, the men drew up by the bank, and tied their rafts to the trees. After a supper of corned beef, they laid canvas sheets on the ground and huddled under blankets, hoping to catch some sleep. They talked in whispers about what the next few weeks might bring.

  This was among the last days of innocence for the men of the 29th CCS. That evening, some argued that it was futile to resist whatever fate had in store for them. ‘If death should come, it will come, and, if it doesn’t come, it won’t come,’ said Isaac. As the men debated their future, a strange thing happened: the British officers, who usually sat apart, talking among themselves, joined the conversation, sharing food, drink, cigarettes and intimate fears with the Africans. The days of marching and rafting through a hostile land had brought them together. The differences imposed by race and rank had eroded. Afterwards, the Africans wondered why this was. ‘Maybe the closer we are to our graves, and to our Maker, the better we behave,’ suggested Isaac. At this, some of the men murmured in agreement, but most were silent, lost in their own thoughts.

  Other British and African soldiers who fought in Burma also experienced the falling away of barriers in the intensity of the jungle war. A Kenyan corporal, serving with the King’s African Rifles on the Kalewa battlefront to the north of the Arakan, wrote, ‘among the shells and bullets there had been no pride, no air of superiority from our European comrades-in-arms. We drank the same tea, used the same water and lavatories, and shared the same jokes. There were no racial insults, no references to “niggers”, “baboons” and so on. The white heat of battle had blistered all that away and left only our common humanity and our common fate, either death or survival.’* British officers felt the same bonding process under way. Captain Charles Carfrae, leading Nigerian troops through the Burmese jungle, wrote, ‘colour and other racial differences signified little. We lived together, ate the same food, carried the same back-bending loads, suffered privation equally and fought literally side by side.’* John Hamilton, who was working his way down the Kaladan with the Gambian battalion, just a few miles ahead of Major Murphy and Isaac
, said it was ‘difficult to see how you could not like men who tolerated so much so patiently, and…with such good humour and so little grumbling’.*

  A sense of common purpose and shared sacrifice – these are surely prerequisites for the success of any army fighting against a formidable enemy. The British in Burma in 1944 were not the first to discover this, just as they were not the first to do away with many of the protocols of hierarchy during the heat of battle. But the British Army had to remain an effective fighting force, and there were limits to the process of fraternisation. No doubt General Slim was sincere when he wrote that ‘the wants and needs of the Indian, African and Gurkha soldier had to be looked after as keenly as those of his British comrade’, and that any soldier in his army ‘was judged on his merits without any undue prejudice in favour of race, caste, or class’.* But his was ultimately an army where the African was at the bottom of the pile. It was inconceivable to almost everyone in it, white or black, that things could be otherwise. Imminent danger may have brought men together, but it also reinforced the need for rigid discipline. Besides, even British officers who lived and fought in close proximity to Africans for many months felt there was a great gulf in thinking and morality between themselves and their men. Sergeant James Shaw, who trained Nigerian soldiers in Kaduna before accompanying them on a harrowing march in Burma, wrote that one of his men had been caught stealing extra rations in the jungle, and was tied to a tree and whipped as punishment. He wondered if the thief felt guilty but concluded that ‘the percentage of Africans possessing consciences is something no white man can judge accurately; they’re much too enigmatical’.*