Another Man's War

by Barnaby Phillips

  Some British officers asked themselves what on earth their African soldiers made of the sacrifices being asked of them, now that they were in the midst of war. The Nigerians, according to Captain Carfrae, ‘found themselves in a forbidding country pitted against strangers altogether irrelevant to them, a people they hadn’t known to exist and with whom they could have had no conceivable quarrel until we made our enmity theirs…The Nigerian soldiers, most of them peace-loving and none with the least urge for self-sacrifice, fought simply because they had promised their white leaders that they would. We imposed greatly upon their generosity.’* Still, most officers were convinced that the British had done the right thing in taking Africans to Burma. Trevor Clark, slogging down the Kaladan Valley in early 1944 with the Gambian battalion, wrote, ‘I never for one moment questioned whether we, and our Africans [his italics], were right to be fighting the war, both to defeat the totalitarians and to save the parts of the Empire that they had taken (or intended to take) from us; nor have I ever since.’*

  As the men of the 29th CCS carried on downriver, and the hill country gave way to the broad floodplain, they made quite a spectacle. They stayed on the river through the worst heat of the day, and, as they began to pass a few settlements, the local people, mostly Buddhists, came down to the water to stare at them. When afternoon arrived, they would steer the rafts over to the river’s banks and tie up. Villagers crowded round the rafts. Many of them had hidden in fear from the combat units that had passed by in previous days. Now they ran their fingers up the Africans’ arms and through their hair, touching and feeling a black person for the first time in their lives.

  The soldiers, for their part, admired the herds of wallowing buffalo and the precision with which the villagers waded along rows of partially submerged bamboo fish-traps, checking for any catch. The soldiers had underestimated how much food they should have carried on the rafts, so, on the second and third evenings of their journey, some of them took to raiding the farms along the river. It was shameful, Isaac felt, a violation of the order not to deprive civilians of their property. It was also a betrayal of the trust of those villagers who had greeted them with well-intentioned curiosity. But the soldiers were desperate to eat something fresh after the unexciting diet of recent weeks.

  The officers chose to ignore the thefts, it seemed. As for the villagers, they silently directed the Africans to the best fruit, carefully avoiding eye contact. Their very meekness encouraged everyone to join in. Isaac grabbed melons, papaws and cucumbers – a feast. But his theft would nag at him.

  Two other incidents troubled Isaac during those days on the river. The first was when Lance Corporal Felix Okoro slipped off a raft, and disappeared into the brown water. He was there, and then he was gone. When the men eventually managed to recover his body the next morning, all they could do was dig a shallow grave at the riverside, lay the corpse inside and shovel mud over it. The second occurred on the evening of the burial. Maybe it was the death of Lance Corporal Okoro that had affected Major Murphy’s mood. He had hoped to get his unit through the war without a fatality, and he had failed. The men were boiling up tea after supper, laughing and joking, when the Major came storming over. ‘Don’t you know you’re in the battlefield?’ he hissed, and kicked the kettle off the fire. He ordered them to turn in immediately. ‘I beg, master, we know we are in the battlefield, but before we go die make you no forget my chop-o,’ someone muttered under his breath.

  The Major, like Captain Brown, was considerably older than most of the men under his command. He’d left a wife, Margaret, and a son and a daughter behind in Scotland. In the last mail drop, he’d received a letter from Margaret, letting him know she was expecting their third child. Major Murphy didn’t doubt that all of his men wanted to get through this war alive. But sometimes he looked at these young African soldiers, and couldn’t help feeling that he had a more acute sense of what they stood to lose, of which risks were worth taking, and which were not.

  At five o’clock on the evening of 1 March, at the end of their fourth day on the river, the 29th CCS put ashore on the west bank of the Kaladan. There was still enough daylight for some of the men to walk to the nearby village, and a sergeant went with them, to see if he might buy some bags of rice. Along with the rice, they brought back some encouraging news. The village, the place they called Mairong,* was Muslim, not Buddhist, and the local people were friendly. Major Murphy was reassured. The death of Okoro had delayed them, but they had only another eight miles to go. They would be in Kyauktaw the following afternoon.

  Just before dusk, the Major received an unexpected visitor, a British officer who was travelling in the opposite direction. Lieutenant Colonel John Hubert was heading upriver with two of his men in a dugout canoe with an outboard motor. They pulled over to spend the night with the 29th CCS. Hubert was in charge of a battalion of Punjabi troops who had recently taken up a position further north in the Kaladan Valley. He was returning to his unit, having spent the day south of Kyauktaw, in talks with General Woolner.

  That night, the sky was clear, the stars a million glittering lanterns, and the Southern Cross shone brightly. As they sat overlooking the river, Hubert told Major Murphy that the bulk of West African soldiers were now some way south and west of Kyauktaw. As a consequence, the 81st Division was stretched over a considerable length of the Kaladan Valley. But there were many things that these two officers could not have known that night.

  They could not have known that the Japanese, trying to regain the initiative after their defeat at the Battle of the Admin Box, were about to launch a counterattack of their own. Or that, at that very moment, a Colonel Hiroshi Koba was leading thousands of Japanese soldiers through the paddy fields on the east side of the Kaladan River, with an eye to storming Pagoda Hill. Or that Colonel Koba’s advance patrols were already pushing northwards, all the way to the riverbank opposite of the 29th CCS’s temporary camp. In short, they could not have known that they, and the few dozen British and African men who slept peacefully around them, were in great danger.

  ‌

  ‌7

  ‌Juju on the River Kaladan

  Some of the Africans think there is a juju on the River Kaladan and I am beginning to believe it myself.

  Captain Stephen De Glanville,

  the Arakan, 26 March 1944*

  2 March 1944

  Mairong, Burma

  After the shooting, there had been screaming. And after Captain Brown had come back to try to help the wounded, the Japanese had taken him away. This much Isaac could remember. He knew also that he had been shot twice. He could feel a searing pain in his right leg, but there was also blood coming from the left side of his stomach, just beneath his rib cage. Warm and sticky, it oozed down his side. He must have drifted in and out of consciousness in the hours that had followed. He craned his neck to try to identify the bodies around him. There was Archibong Bassey Duke with his red tea mug. And there was Private Essien. And was that Lance Corporal Daniel Adeniran, also lying face down? None of them was moving. Isaac was alone, and everything was quiet. He began to weep.

  Why had the Japanese not killed him, as well? he wondered. He was dimly aware that they had ransacked the medical equipment on the rafts, then combed through the belongings of his dead colleagues. With that done, they’d gone back to the river and boarded motorboats. They seemed to have headed upstream. How strange that they had just left him lying there, on the riverbank. But then, Isaac was able to grasp the cold truth. The Japanese had decided not to waste a bullet on him. He was going to die anyway.

  He heard voices. Some militiamen in uniform, local people, he thought, came upon the scene. They looked around and quickly departed, without saying a word. A little later, he had a faint impression of a crowd swarming around the rafts, looting whatever the Japanese had not taken. There was bickering – a flourish of hands, raised voices – and then they were gone. Then, just as it turned dark, he woke to see yet more visitors. Men, they looked like ‘Indians’
to Isaac; he supposed they must have come from the nearby village of Mairong. He was right. The Muslim men had come to collect the bodies of two boys who had been killed during the attack.

  Slowly, it came back to him. The boys had come down to the riverbank in the morning to take a look at the British and African soldiers. They were still standing there when the Japanese opened fire, and they’d paid for their curiosity with their lives. Perhaps these men were relatives of those boys. They carried the boys’ bodies away, and Isaac was left in the dark, alone again.

  But then the men returned. Two of them walked over to where Isaac was lying on the ground. They seemed to be showing signs of sympathy, but they spoke no English. He knew that he needed their help; he had to get away from this place, as soon as possible. If the Japanese came back and found that he was still alive, they would surely kill him on the spot. He could feel the pain in his stomach as he stretched to open his breast pocket. That’s where he kept his pay book, with a five-rupee note folded inside. It was all he had.

  The men took Isaac’s money and lifted him from the ground. They carried him some distance away from the river, he could not say how far, to an area of open vegetation, and laid him down in some tall grass where he would be concealed from passers-by. They spoke to him in their language, but he could not understand. They seemed to be saying they would be back, that they would come with food. And then they walked away into the evening gloom. Would he ever see them again? He passed a sleepless, feverish night, his leg and stomach throbbing, his throat desperate for water. He was horribly wounded, in a land he did not know, at the mercy of an enemy from whom he could expect no pity. What would become of him?

  But Isaac was not, as it turned out, alone. Because the following morning, the Muslim men did come back, with rice wrapped in leaves and water in a bamboo container. He ate a handful of the rice and gulped down the water. The men seemed nervous, and spent only a few minutes with him before returning in the direction from which they had come.

  Soon afterwards, Isaac spied a cloud of black smoke rising over the nearby jungle. Then he heard cracking noises, and caught sight of flames dancing above some of the trees. It was a fire, and it was being fanned by the midday wind directly towards him. He lay there, helpless. It would have been better, he thought, to have been shot by the riverbank like Bassey Duke or Essien than be slowly roasted to death, too weak to escape the blaze. He closed his eyes and prayed. Shortly afterwards, the skies clouded over and a gentle rain fell. The fire died down. He had been saved, he thought, by divine intervention. ‘Incredible, unbelievable,’ he mumbled to himself.

  He tried to form the words of another prayer, but his head ached, and he passed out once more. Darkness fell, and the rain started again, much heavier this time. He was soaked, and feeling alternately feverish and cold. But he could not move his broken body, and so he lay there, waiting for his long night to end.

  The two men returned the next day, with more rice as well as some herbs. Isaac ate but he could not sit up. He propped himself up on an elbow and tried to examine the mess above his right knee – the pulpy, red flesh and the gash of white that ran through it. He recalled what he’d been taught at the army hospital in Abeokuta: that was his femur, exposed and broken. The men rubbed herbs into the wound, and gave him some straw to lie on. They came back the next day, and the one after that, always with small parcels of rice, until the days blurred one into another.

  Isaac started to think of the villagers as the ‘good Samaritans’; they meant well, he could see, even if their gestures were pathetic. He felt his body getting weaker and weaker. He was losing weight. At night, his sleep was disturbed by his sweat and groans. Lying there, in the tall grass, he thought of home, of his aunts and uncles, of his father. Faces danced before his eyes, but he could not remember names.

  Maybe a week had passed, or so Isaac thought, and it was the middle of the afternoon. He had spent the days in a dull daze, semi-conscious most of the time. So he was only half-aware of the group of villagers walking towards him. They were new faces, not the familiar men. And trailing behind them was, well, how could it be? It was a black man in British uniform. It looked like David Kargbo, the sergeant from Sierra Leone who had been his rafting partner in the days before the attack. They were coming closer now, and Isaac could see clearly: it was Sergeant Kargbo. He was limping, from what looked like a wound to his right ankle, but otherwise he seemed okay. In fact, he had an expression of relief on his face. He was smiling! For the first time since he’d been shot, Isaac felt a burst of hope. He was in pain, he was hungry, but he was sure that David Kargbo, leaning down to embrace him, had been sent by God. He had somebody to talk to, somebody to share this ordeal with. As the villagers went away, they indicated that they would come back with some food. By now, Isaac knew to trust them.

  Still, as he and David tried to piece together what had happened during and after the attack, they spoke in whispers. David had been shot and, like Isaac, had been left to die of his injuries, somewhere in the grass near the rafts. David said that some men from Mairong had found him and had carried him to the village, where they hid him in a hut. The following morning, they’d indicated that it was too dangerous for him to stay there, because the Japanese sometimes came by and searched the huts looking for enemy soldiers. They’d carried David back into the jungle, and he’d gleaned that the village headman had given instructions that he should be fed for a month. For some reason, it seemed the village had decided it was safer to unite the two Africans. Maybe different groups of benefactors had learnt what the other was up to, and decided to pool their meagre resources to assist them.

  Isaac told David what he knew of Major Murphy, of Captain Brown’s attempt to rescue them, and that he had seen Bassey Duke and Essien, both shot dead. But that left about seventy-five, maybe eighty, men unaccounted for. How many more had been killed? Were there others injured, perhaps scattered in the nearby jungle, who needed help but were too weak or frightened to call out? And there was still another possibility, one which they clung to. Surely, most of the men had managed to escape, in which case, wouldn’t help be on its way? They weren’t being unrealistic, they thought. But how little Isaac and David knew.

  After weeks of steady progress, the fortunes of the British Army in the Kaladan Valley had suddenly turned. At 7.30am on 2 March, at about the same time that the 29th CCS was coming under fire on the west bank of the Kaladan River, the Gambian battalion of the 81st Division was busy crossing over to the east bank, eight miles or so to the south. The river at that point was some 750 yards wide, and the Gambians were ferried across in small boats. They had been sent to rescue the situation on Pagoda Hill.

  The previous night, a unit of lightly armed East African scouts had been attacked by a much more powerful Japanese force. This was the beginning of Colonel Koba’s surprise counterattack. At divisional headquarters, on the west bank of the Kaladan near Kyauktaw, an anxious General Woolner could hear the sound of mortar explosions and gun-fire coming from the hill. He ordered that it must on no account fall to the enemy. His instructions were in vain. As the bombardment intensified, some of the East African soldiers fled.

  If Pagoda Hill was to stay in British hands, everything would depend on the Gambian soldiers who took up their positions the following morning. The British officers who led them, including John Hamilton and Trevor Clark, remembered a strange and confused battle, in which some platoons and companies fought valiantly, while others waited and waited for an enemy who never appeared, and were then mystified when ordered to withdraw without having fired a single shot. General Woolner’s verdict was that the battalion commander had dispersed his forces too widely, and thus allowed the Japanese to infiltrate their ranks during the night of 2 March.

  To add an element of farce to this dire situation, a Sierra Leonean battalion that had been sent under cover of darkness to help the Gambians landed on an island in the middle of the Kaladan River but believed it to be the river’s east bank. They soon
realised their mistake, but had to wait until dawn on 3 March before they could join their colleagues. By then, the Gambian defence had disintegrated. Pagoda Hill was lost, and the various African units were hurriedly ferried back to the west bank of the Kaladan.

  All told, the Battle of Pagoda Hill was, in Woolner’s words, ‘a disaster’.* Accurate artillery and mortar fire from the heights of the hill could reach across a long stretch of the Kaladan Valley. As a result, the 81st Division was forced to retreat, ceding control of the area to the Japanese. The recriminations were bitter. A number of British officers were removed from their positions in the coming weeks and months, including Woolner himself. Some officers blamed Lieutenant General Philip Christison, the overall commander of British troops in the Arakan. They said his instructions to Woolner were unrealistic, and even contradictory. While General Christison had ordered the 81st Division to hold Pagoda Hill and the town of Kyauktaw, he also told Woolner to carry on advancing, so as to cut Japanese supply lines and thereby assist British and Indian troops further to the west. This, Woolner said, had presented him with a ‘grave dilemma’*: he had been asked to attack and defend at the same time in different places, without enough men or equipment to carry this off. The result was that, when the Japanese attacked Pagoda Hill, many of his soldiers were ten miles to the south. Woolner did not have sufficient men to try to retake the hill until 4 or 5 March, by which time he believed that the Japanese would have prepared strong defences. He also thought that crossing the wide Kaladan River, this time right under the noses of newly placed Japanese guns, was too dangerous, all the more so since the muddy banks afforded no cover for boats. It was simple. The Japanese, Woolner conceded, ‘had been too quick for us’.*

  Woolner’s official report on the events of Pagoda Hill was written in measured language, and he refrained from criticising even those colleagues whom he felt had let him down. In private, however, he was less diplomatic. In later years, he referred to one of the officers involved in the hill’s shambolic defence as ‘not only a dud but a coward too. He was flown out from the next Dakota strip’ – unfit for further command in Burma, in Woolner’s assessment. Another key officer ‘chose that moment to crack up’. He too was flown out at the first opportunity.*