The reverse at Pagoda Hill was also a very personal disaster for Isaac and David. It meant that they were now stranded in Japanese-controlled territory. In effect, they had been abandoned by the British. They did not know it yet, but there was no prospect of their being rescued. In fact, as his defence of Pagoda Hill was unravelling, General Woolner was aware of the fate of the 29th CCS. On the afternoon of 2 March, while Isaac lay wounded on the riverbank, a shaken officer from the unit had arrived at the divisional headquarters. He had managed to escape to the south on foot amid the confusion, and staggered ten miles in search of safety. He told the General what had happened.
Major Murphy’s unexpected guest, Lieutenant Colonel Hubert, had also got away, but in the opposite direction. He and his two Punjabi soldiers fled into the jungle and took cover. After they had gone a little way, one of the soldiers, Lance Corporal Kesar Singh, bravely offered to turn back and retrieve their canoe. It was the quickest way to put some safe distance between them and the Japanese, he reasoned. He stripped out of his uniform, so as to pass himself off as a local farmer, and returned to the scene of the attack. But, when he got there, he decided that it was too dangerous to take the canoe. The Japanese might be advancing north, and travelling on the river would leave them exposed. The three men then headed off on foot, and eventually arrived safely back at Paletwa, where they rejoined their regiment.* Hubert estimated that there had been some fifteen Japanese soldiers involved in the attack, armed with two machine guns. It was a small number, but they had the element of surprise, and more firepower than the 29th CCS.
When General Slim took command of the British Army in Burma, he had stressed that there was no such thing as a non-combatant in jungle warfare. He wrote, ‘Every unit and sub-unit, including medical ones, is responsible for its own all-round protection, including patrolling, at all times.’* Major Murphy and his men clearly had been caught off-guard, and they paid a heavy price. Many of the soldiers in the 29th CCS had been ambling back from the village of Mairong when the Japanese opened fire. If the Japanese had waited only a little while longer, and allowed the men to board their exposed rafts, they would have inflicted even greater casualties.
On 5 March, the Punjabi regiment received information that the bulk of the survivors from the 29th CCS were walking north up the Kaladan Valley, following the route that Hubert and his men had taken. Seventy-seven of Isaac’s colleagues would struggle back to Paletwa over the next few days, many of them wounded. They were joined by more than thirty Gambian soldiers, survivors of the Battle of Pagoda Hill who had lost touch with their commanders in the chaos of the defeat.
Unfortunately for Isaac and David, Woolner had far bigger problems to contend with than a handful of missing soldiers from the 29th CCS. With Pagoda Hill abandoned, the 81st Division was hemmed in by wide rivers, and, just as he had feared, it was coming under fire from Japanese gunners. Colonel Koba sought to divide and destroy the 81st Division on the plains around Kyauktaw. Woolner could see that his troops were shaken, ‘unable to understand why their long and victorious advance had suddenly become what felt like a retreat’. He sensed that his men were not suited to a fight in the open country, and decided to make a move for the forested hills to the north-west. ‘It had become necessary to go into close harbour, hidden in the friendly jungle, for a period of moral consolidation,’ he said.*
As the West Africans waited to cross yet another chaung, panic set in, especially among the unarmed porters, who felt the most exposed in the paddy fields. There were some stampedes. In a secret memo dispatched to his officers on 8 March, Woolner admitted that ‘a dramatic change came over the situation’ with the Japanese now on the offensive, and that this had ‘produced a feeling of frustration and even of bewilderment’ among his men.* In truth, the 81st Division was exhausted. The West Africans had been marching and fighting for ten weeks without a pause, and their mobility was severely hampered by the large number of casualties they were carrying. Yet Woolner spurred his troops on, gathering them together in a safe position in the jungle hills. There, at a place called Kyingiri, they were able to build a landing strip for Dakotas. Casualties were flown out, and food and equipment flown in.
In the days that followed, the 81st Division regained its composure, and carried out a number of successful ambushes against the advancing Japanese. Despite these efforts, lasting damage had been done to the division’s reputation. When Woolner flew by Moth plane to meet with General Christison on 23 March, he was appalled to discover what people at Corps HQ had been saying about him. He wrote, ‘A completely erroneous impression prevailed about the morale of the Div. It seemed that it was believed to be in a state of demoralisation amounting almost to disintegration. Grossly exaggerated rumours had been spread by stragglers from Pagoda Hill and by sick personnel flown out, including some senior officers who should have known better.’*
These ‘calumnies’ had their effect; Woolner would be relieved of his command in the coming months. He took the news with dignity, assuming full responsibility for the decisions he’d made. And what of his West African men? In a final report, he said it was ‘impossible to express in words my gratitude to them for their irrepressible cheerfulness under all circumstances, or for their unfailing and enthusiastic support whatever I asked of them’.*
Shortly after Isaac and David’s reunion, the villagers brought some unexpected visitors to see them: a British captain, accompanied by two Gambian soldiers. Maybe this was the rescue party they had hoped for? Far from it. The captain explained that he and his men had been cut off from their unit during the retreat from Pagoda Hill. They had spent the past several days wandering through the countryside, trying to discover in which direction the 81st Division had moved. The captain had painted his face dark green, and he was armed with a Sten gun. Despite the perilous circumstances, he exuded a calm confidence. The two Gambians, who had lost their weapons, appeared more anxious.
Isaac and David learnt about the defeat at Pagoda Hill. While they were exchanging information with the new arrivals, there was a further surprise. Out of the jungle emerged Tommy Sherman, another member of the 29th CCS, who had been hiding nearby and was not injured. A Sierra Leonean, Tommy had always been a self-confident character, and now Isaac was struck by his fresh and healthy appearance. Tommy told them that only the previous day he had buried the body of one of their colleagues, another Sierra Leonean by the name of Moigboi Jagha.
As Isaac and David absorbed all this news, the captain announced that he wanted to escape from the area as quickly as possible. This was Japanese-controlled territory, after all. He was prepared to try to take Isaac, David and Tommy with him, but insisted they leave at once. He made the villagers understand that he needed two men to carry Isaac on an improvised stretcher, and this was agreed. The party set off along the edge of a paddy field, making for the hills and – they hoped – British positions.
They made slow progress. The stretcher-bearers did their best, but stumbled over the ridges and troughs of the paddy field. Isaac tried not to scream, but he had no support for his fractured femur, and every jolt brought tears to his eyes. David hobbled along beside him. They had not gone far when a group of men from Mairong came running up with news that several Japanese soldiers had been seen on the route they were planning to take. The captain stopped and assessed the situation. He studied his map and worked out an alternative route. He also checked his ammunition, and saw that he had fewer bullets than he had thought. He would struggle to defend the group if they came under attack.
A decision had to be made. The captain could see that Isaac was a liability, and he was also sceptical of David’s ability to complete a long strenuous march, or run if necessary. He ordered David to accompany Isaac back to the hiding place where he had found them. Perhaps the captain realised that Isaac would certainly die if he were left alone. Whatever David’s thoughts at this time, he had to obey the orders of a senior officer. Isaac, however, felt sure that David, a devout Christian, would have vol
unteered to stay behind and look after him, even if the command had not come. The captain took down their names and numbers, and promised to pass on the information should he get through safely.
Then, just as Isaac, David and the stretcher-bearers were turning back, an argument broke out between Tommy Sherman and the captain. Tommy said the new direction that the captain proposed to take would lead them straight to the Japanese. The captain again consulted his map, and insisted he had the right route. He pressed on with his two Gambian soldiers, while Tommy set off alone in the opposite direction, carrying a small parcel under his arm. Isaac watched him disappear into the trees. Tommy was never seen by his colleagues again. The captain, meanwhile, managed to get through the Japanese lines, and would duly report to his superiors that he had seen two injured members of the 29th CCS, stranded near where their unit had been attacked, so many days before.
Isaac and David were in a deep gloom. The captain had explained to them that all signs indicated that the 81st Division had pulled out of the Kaladan Valley. They could not see where help would come from now. Soon the monsoon rains would begin, during which any change to the military situation was extremely unlikely. The British would not even think about a new offensive before the dry season began in November. That was eight months away. Isaac doubted whether he would survive that long.
He was in a wretched condition. He had not washed for weeks, and his hair was filthy and matted. He had already lost so much weight that he could see the outline of his rib cage jutting through his grey, clammy skin. The injury on the left side of his stomach, where the bullet had not penetrated as far as his intestines or vital organs, no longer hurt so much. But his right leg was sore and swollen, and pus seeped out of the messy wound. The stench was so bad, he noticed in helpless shame, that the villagers held their noses whenever they had to come close to him. An angry swarm of flies hovered above him during the day. He did not have the strength to wave them away, but tried to protect the wound with an old blanket he had been given by one of the villagers. He struggled to turn on his side when he needed to eat, scooping up rice with one hand, and straining to raise his head to sip water from a bamboo cane. He was not strong enough to sit up unassisted, let alone crawl, so he went to the toilet where he lay, and the foul smell of his shit and piss mixed with that of the pus and the exposed flesh of his leg.
David pleaded with the villagers to bring some sort of improvised shovel, so that he could clear away Isaac’s mess from time to time. He chose to sit and sleep several yards away from Isaac. In part, this was to escape the stench, but there was another, unspoken reason. He was giving himself a chance of escape should a Japanese patrol hear Isaac’s periodic groans of pain and despair.
Isaac knew that he had no chance of staying alive without David’s help. David, for his part, could see that they would both die unless the villagers from Mairong were prepared to carry on feeding them and keeping them informed about Japanese troop movements for many months to come. For now, the villagers appeared to be friendly, and there was no doubting their pro-British sentiments. But how long would this last, now that the Japanese were once again firmly in control of the Kaladan Valley? At some point, the people of Mairong were going to conclude that co-operating with the Japanese was their best option. It would take only one person to betray David and Isaac, with fatal consequences. So they needed to do everything within their limited powers to ingratiate themselves to the villagers. They had no money or possessions to hand over, but they did have faith. Or at least, they could pretend to have it. The villagers had already asked them several times if they were Muslim. Now, David and Isaac set out to convince them this was indeed the case.
David found it easy to pass himself off as a Muslim, because he had been born one. His original name had been Umaro, and his father, Foday Marro Kargbo, was a teacher of Koranic verse known as a karamokoh. There was no mosque in their village of Rogbin in northern Sierra Leone, but the selkendeh, a pebble-littered clearing reserved for daily Islamic worship, was just next to the family home. This was where the children gathered round a fire every evening, to hear Rogbin’s karamokoh, including Foday Kargbo, recite the Koran in Arabic. Young Umaro had learnt the verses by heart. He had only converted to Christianity, and become David, when he went on to the American Wesleyan Mission Primary School in the town of Gbendembu, some ten miles from his village. Throughout his life, he had benefitted from the discipline of rote learning. He could still recite large parts of the Koran, and had an enviable knack for remembering spelling, literary quotations, poetry and mathematical formulae. The villagers of Mairong were suitably impressed. Isaac, on the other hand, knew no Arabic, and little about Islam. It was only since joining the British Army that he’d spent any time with Muslims; there had been very few in Owo and the surrounding countryside during his childhood. He tried to explain that he had been taught Koranic verses, but only in English. Somehow, communicating mainly through hand gestures, he and David managed to persuade the villagers that they shared their religion.
The African men were also quick-witted enough to give themselves Islamic names. Isaac said that he went by the name of Suleman, and David introduced himself as Dauda Ali. Perhaps it was David’s fluency with Islam that covered up for Isaac’s hesitations. In any case, the ruse worked. The villagers fell for it.
For a while, they received food from a trickle of people, different each time, who sneaked over from Mairong to their hiding place. Isaac started to recognise some words in the villagers’ language, which he assumed to be a dialect of Bengali.* ‘Pani kaigha? Bath kaigha?’ the villagers asked. ‘Do you want water? Do you want rice?’ Isaac learnt to reply, ‘Pani ni, Bath ni,’ meaning they had no water and no rice. Sometimes he would say this even when it was not true, in the hope that he and David would be given extra portions to tide them over on the many days that none of their friends came visiting. But they had nowhere secure to keep the food; on some mornings, they would wake up and find that the little pile of rice that they had carefully set aside was covered in ants and other insects. At times, the villagers would come, pressing their hands to their hearts as they looked down on the injured Africans, and say, ‘Bahut togolip, bahut acha.’ Isaac could only presume it was an expression of sympathy, or apology.
Gradually, the trickle of visitors bearing gifts dried up. He couldn’t blame them, really. The villagers had little to give away and, with no prospect of the Africans being rescued, they couldn’t be expected to bring them food indefinitely. David would limp out of their hiding place, to a nearby track, where he would beg passing villagers for food. This was a risky move. If a Japanese soldier, or even an unfriendly person from a nearby Buddhist village, were to walk past, David could have been caught. But he had no choice. The alternative was that he and Isaac would starve to death.
Isaac’s mind was rambling. He often thought of Captain Brown, and the enormity of that officer’s courage now struck him. The Captain must have waited for hours before deciding to return to the scene of the attack to try to help the wounded. When the Japanese appeared, Captain Brown had not reached for his weapon, but had allowed himself to be taken prisoner. Had the Japanese shown him some mercy? It seemed unlikely, but Isaac hoped so. He did not know then that one day in late March a small British patrol had ambushed five Japanese soldiers in the hills to the west of the Kaladan River. The Japanese ran, and so did their porters, numbering more than thirty men, all of whom dropped their loads as they fled. The British soldiers rummaged through the boxes and found that they included the medical supplies taken from the 29th CCS. Among the kit was a greatcoat with the tab of an Edinburgh tailor and a nametag that read ‘Captain Brown, Royal Army Medical Corps’. It was to be the last, and only clue, as to his fate. Captain Brown, the draper’s son from Aberdeen, left a grieving mother and sister behind, tormented for years by the loss of their beloved Richard. ‘He just disappeared,’ his sister would say to her neighbours many years later, and shake her head sadly.* The little information the
family received from the British authorities only added to their distress. At first, the Army reported that Captain Brown was missing, and believed to have been killed. In June 1944, for no apparent reason, his status was changed to ‘prisoner of war’. It wasn’t until 11 March 1946, more than two years after the Japanese soldiers led him into the jungle, that the War Office issued a death certificate for Captain Brown.*
It became more and more difficult for Isaac and David to keep track of the passing time. They had no watch, no calendar, not even a pencil or scrap of paper. So they weren’t sure whether it was late March, or even April, when a villager came to them, and said that another African was nearby, and that he needed help. David limped away with the man to see who it could be, and was astonished to find Sergeant Moses Lamina, a fellow Sierra Leonean with the 29th CCS, lying under a tree only fifteen yards away from where he and Isaac had been hiding. Sergeant Lamina was delirious, muttering only a few incomprehensible words. He looked weak and pale, and he had a leg wound that had become badly infected. In vain, David tried to ask him where he had been and how he had survived the previous weeks. In the following days, David hobbled over to where Sergeant Lamina lay, bringing him a portion of the food that the villagers had donated. Isaac, still unable to move, asked that David pass along messages of support. But Sergeant Lamina would not eat, and he died about one week later. David had no tools to bury him, and anyway he doubted that he had the strength to use a pickaxe or shovel. That night, David and Isaac heard jackals fighting over their colleague’s body. The jackals came back the next night, and on the third night they were still howling, fighting and snarling over whatever remained of the Sergeant. David could not bear it anymore. The following morning, he did his best to sweep the torn limbs and bloodied and gnawed bones under a pile of leaves. Then he and Isaac prayed for Sergeant Lamina’s soul.
Another Man's War Page 13