Another Man's War

by Barnaby Phillips

  In turn, Isaac told David about Emure-Ile, and about his sisters and his mother and father. Both men wondered what sort of news, if any, had reached their families in West Africa about the disaster that had overcome them. Sometimes they tortured themselves with these thoughts. Perhaps it was just as well that there were things they could not know. Of how, for example, after David Kargbo was listed as ‘Wounded and Missing’ in the Sierra Leone Government Gazette, his parents had gone to the father of his fiancée and asked that they return the dowry payment they’d made the previous year. Or of how, one morning in Emure-Ile in June, a government messenger boy arrived by bicycle. He’d come from Owo as fast as he could, not even slowing down on the final hill, because he was carrying an important message for Joshua Fadoyebo, the church scribe. The letter was in a brown envelope stamped with the red crown of the English king. It was market day, so most people in the village were gathered outside. When Joshua turned and saw the sweating boy offering him the envelope, his body went cold. He tore it open, held the letter tight and let out a cry of despair. Everyone rushed home. ‘The market just vanished that day’ was how a cousin remembered it. The letter said that Isaac was ‘Missing in Action’, but wasn’t that simply the way the white man, the Oyinbo, tried to soften bad news? Joshua’s worst fears had been confirmed. He should never have let Isaac go. The news spread around Emure-Ile, and then around Owo, first among Isaac’s relatives and then his school friends. Over time, ‘Missing in Action’ became ‘Had Not Seen’. The British Army Had Not Seen Isaac.

  Isaac and David’s only hope was to stay alive and undetected. They did not know it, but time was on their side. Because, far from the Kaladan Valley, far from the Arakan itself, events were unfolding that would change the whole course of the war in Burma. On 6 March 1944, just four days after Isaac and David were shot, the Japanese had begun their long-anticipated offensive. This was when the British commanders realised that February’s fighting in the Arakan had been a mere sideshow, intended to pull in their reserves and obscure the fact that the Japanese were deploying a much greater force some three hundred miles to the north. In the momentous weeks that followed, the Japanese swept down onto the Imphal plain, in Assam, in north-east India. The general leading the attack, Renya Mutaguchi, argued that, if his men were victorious in Assam, they should push on, and take Bengal. General Mutaguchi believed that the presence in his ranks of anti-British Indian soldiers, as well as memories of the recent famine, would ensure his force would be greeted as liberators in India. Calcutta would be theirs, and the famous ‘March on Delhi’ would begin. Other Japanese generals were more sanguine. They argued that the destruction of General Slim’s army at Imphal was a valuable objective in its own right. Once and for all, the threat of a British return to Burma would be excised. They also hoped that the capture of Imphal’s huge airfields, which the Americans were using to stage supply runs to Chiang Kai-shek’s army, would transform the war in China.*

  Whatever the ultimate Japanese objective, General Slim was in no doubt that the Battle of Imphal could ‘change the course of the World War’.* He was caught off-guard by the scale of the attack, but he sensed an opportunity. This great Japanese offensive, he realised, could be turned to his advantage. If he could inflict a serious defeat on the enemy on ground of his own choosing, a counterattack into Burma, even through the daunting mountain country, would be that much less perilous.

  It was a close thing. The British hurriedly flew in reinforcements from the Arakan, but General Slim had also underestimated the strength of a second Japanese force attacking the ridge at the mountain town of Kohima. If the Japanese could take Kohima, they would certainly cut the road to Imphal, where the bulk of British forces were concentrated, and establish a clear route to advance further into India. The fighting on Kohima Ridge was ferocious, but a small British garrison held out for days until reinforcements finally arrived. Slim later admitted, ‘I was saved from the consequences of my mistakes by the resourcefulness of my subordinate commanders and the stubborn valour of my troops.’*

  The Japanese attack around Imphal itself was also repulsed, and by the beginning of May the British started to move forward. It now became apparent that General Mutaguchi had risked everything on the assumption that he would smash through the British lines and seize their supplies. His troops were exhausted, already running short of food and medicine. They trudged back over the mountains, abandoning their artillery and transport and, increasingly, their sick and wounded. When the monsoon started, cholera, dysentery and malaria spread through the weakened ranks. Tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers died, most of starvation and disease. Many soldiers simply collapsed on the mountain paths, or committed suicide in pacts with their colleagues. A British lieutenant leading East African troops would be haunted by the sight of piles of decaying bodies for the rest of his life: ‘Glossy black scalps lay inside khaki field service caps, separated from the skull by decomposition. Clusters of writhing maggots feasted on the wounds of the dying and in the eye-sockets and mouths of the dead. Sated flies lay like a black cloth on the bodies that had fed them; swarms of hungry flies hummed ceaselessly overhead as they waited for their place at the table.’*

  The British pursued the Japanese with a confidence and ruthlessness they had not shown before. As in the Arakan, the Allies had the advantage of complete supremacy in the air, meaning those Japanese still strong enough to march were forced to do so at night to escape the relentless strafing and bombing from above. The Japanese called their retreat into Burma the ‘Road of Bones’. It was as crushing a defeat as the Germans had suffered at Stalingrad, and in the context of the war in Asia, as significant. If the Battle of the Admin Box had taught the British that they could beat the Japanese, the Battles of Imphal and Kohima convinced them that they would win the war in Burma.

  In the Arakan, however, the monsoon rains made for wretched conditions, whether fighting or merely trying to stay alive. Following the defeat at Pagoda Hill, and the difficult marching in the weeks that followed, General Woolner had received orders to withdraw the 81st Division back to the Indian frontier until the rains were over. This news came as a relief to his weary men. The West Africans set off back to the hills, on tracks turned liquid. The water was a perpetual sheet, from the sky to the ground. The overwhelming sensation, according to Kofi Genfi from the Gold Coast, was one of never being dry: ‘For three weeks you are not taking off your top dress, you are not taking off your shoe…oh! Woe betide you when you take off your shoe! The foot will be very white, as a pig’s trotter. And – it – will – stink!…up to a mile away! Oh dear, dear, dear!’* Many men suffered from stinking boils and sores, as blisters and cuts invariably turned septic in the filthy and damp conditions.

  In the soaking vegetation and raging chaungs, they also discovered a new enemy: leeches that clung to their skin. These slimy creatures with concealed fangs could work their way between trouser leg and boot, or even through lace-holes. Arthur Moss remembered that his men’s feet were ‘a soggy, bloody mess when at night they removed their boots’.* The leeches became bloated, up to eight inches in length, as they gorged themselves on the soldiers’ blood. Initially, the men tried to pull them off, but this caused a wound that often became infected. The best way to get rid of the maddening bloodsuckers was to burn them, they learnt, using a flame or cigarette; rubbing salt into their slimy skin also worked. Even then, it was difficult to stem the bleeding or stop the wound from festering; with more experience and a bit of luck, some soldiers noticed that ash from a campfire did the trick.

  The jungle’s ubiquitous insects presented other dangers. There was scrub typhus, spread by mites that lived in the dense vegetation. Victims became debilitated as they lost their appetite, and often grew mentally confused and depressed. One British officer reported that Nigerian soldiers with the disease committed suicide. However, malaria was a far greater worry for General Slim. The disease had severely weakened British troops in the defeats of 1942–43. The General estima
ted that the annual rate of malaria was 84 percent in the British Army in India and Burma, and even higher among the troops actually fighting in the jungle.* Many of the West Africans were distrustful of the mepacrine tablets that turned their white colleagues a jaundiced yellow. It was rumoured the drug could affect a man’s potency. In any case, when the African forces joined the war in Burma in 1944, their malaria rates turned out to be far lower than in their British or Indian counterparts.

  By the beginning of June 1944, the West Africans had pulled all the way back to Chiringa, where they had started out six months earlier. General Woolner estimated that the average infantryman in his division had marched an astonishing 1,500 miles during the campaign. In Chiringa, they recuperated, in preparation for a renewed offensive down the Kaladan Valley once the rains eased off. They would, however, be without General Woolner. He was replaced in August by Frederick Loftus-Tottenham, who’d spent most of his career in India and proven himself at the Battles of the Admin Box and Kohima – ‘dashing and brilliant…a jungle go-getter’, the newspapers called him.*

  As one of his last duties as commander of the 81st Division, General Woolner tallied the casualties from the first Kaladan campaign. He had lost more than a thousand men to death, illness and injury; a further 157 men were missing. Among these, of course, were Isaac and David, who were trapped inside Japanese-controlled territory, about seventy miles to the southeast of the Chiringa.

  There were other Nigerian soldiers who carried on fighting and marching through much of Burma’s monsoon season that year. At the end of 1943, shortly after the 81st Division had arrived in India, a whole Nigerian brigade, several thousand men, were told that they would not be joining the rest of their colleagues in the Arakan, but instead had been put under the command of Major General Orde Wingate, mastermind of the Chindit campaigns. General Wingate had developed a theory of ‘long-range penetration’, whereby a substantial British force should operate deep inside Japanese-held territory, disrupting communications and supply lines in guerrilla actions, while simultaneously bolstering Allied morale. The Chindit campaigns were certainly exploited by the British for propaganda purposes, though some generals remained unconvinced of their military effectiveness, given how they drained precious resources.*

  The Nigerian Chindits were flown by Dakotas into remote jungle ‘strongholds’ in northern Burma at the end of March 1944. There, behind coils of barbed wire, they withstood days and nights of ferocious Japanese assaults, all the while choked by the stench of bodies rotting around them. By the time the Nigerians were ordered to evacuate their stronghold and begin a march to the north, the rains had come. Unlike the 81st Division, the Chindits made their trek with the help of mules, but the animals flailed about on the treacly mud slopes and would frequently slip and fall, thrashing and kicking frantically, with no way to get back up on their feet. Then, the Nigerians would remove the wireless sets, batteries, mortars and machine guns from the mules’ backs and stagger up the hills with the heavy loads on their own heads. Their courage, strength and generosity of spirit made an impression on many British officers. Captain the Reverend Miller, a senior Army chaplain with the Chindits, recalled, ‘When the sick and wounded were so exhausted that they could only sink down by the track, it was the West African who bore them to safety on his wide strong shoulders. When men were dying from hunger a West African would be the first to share his own rations. As far as I know no one has sung their praise in this campaign. But their unwearied, unselfish and Christ-like service will not be forgotten by the men who came to rely on them.’*

  Captain Charles Carfrae led Nigerian soldiers on the second Chindit campaign. He wrote, ‘Rain was absorbed by and penetrated packs, haversacks and pouches, adding so greatly to their weight that we staggered under them. Hoarded food was ruined, cherished letters from home became shreds of sodden paper.’* The men marched on and on, and more and more of them collapsed. Jack Osborne, also commanding Nigerian Chindits, remembered hurried burials by the pathway, without any time for a service. ‘We didn’t even keep a record of where we left them,’ he said.* Carfrae estimated that in his column, for every man who had been killed or wounded, a dozen fell sick to malaria or typhus. And still it rained, ‘the sun wholly deserting us, dry clothes a dream of wildest luxury, and worst of all the occasions when flames couldn’t be conjured from soaking wood’,* making even a cup of tea an impossibility. Everyone and everything was covered in mud, and at night even the most ingenious shelter could not keep the water out. Food drops from the air became less and less reliable as the weather worsened. General Wingate himself was killed when his plane flew into mountains during a thunderstorm, and, by the time Carfrae’s men were finally withdrawn, they were too weak to march further than two or three miles a day.

  The rain also brought the farmers from Mairong out into the rice fields. Isaac and David could hear the men shouting ‘Bor bor tit!’ at the water buffaloes, yoked in pairs, as they slowly ploughed up and down the paddies. David, grateful for any distraction, would creep from the shelter to a secluded position, and watch the farmers urge the animals through the mud and water for hours. At times, the rain fell so heavily that he could not even see across the field, but, when it relented, the gleaming buffaloes and the stoic farmers were still there, making their steady way up and down the mud ridges. Isaac tried to accompany David on these little expeditions, but still lacked the strength to move more than a few yards.

  Mosquitoes, or po, as Isaac had heard the villagers call them, were now a major pest. They came out in swarms at dawn and dusk, but at the height of the monsoon they never really went away. Isaac and David were reduced to forlornly waving their hands in a half-hearted attempt to keep them at bay.

  Time passed listlessly, and there were days when the boredom, the discomfort and the ever-present worry was too much, and the two men snapped at each other. One subject of contention was David’s smoking. Of course, he had no cigarettes, but Shuyiman brought him a regular supply of locally grown tobacco, which he called pata. Shuyiman also supplied bena, a type of rope that would burn slowly over many hours, so that David could light his pata. Isaac argued that a passing Japanese patrol might see or smell the smoke, but David ignored him. In the end, Isaac also took up pata smoking. At least it was something to do.

  One afternoon, Isaac was sleeping when David woke him with a shake. Two Japanese soldiers had just walked past the shelter. They had been carrying rifles and they looked alert, as if they were on patrol. David’s eyes were wide with fear. He said that they must move immediately. They might not get another chance. Isaac resisted. He felt too weak. He wasn’t convinced. How could they be sure they were going somewhere safer? Maybe right here was the best. He argued that, if the Japanese found their abandoned shelter, they would conclude there were British soldiers in the area anyway, and carry out a more comprehensive search until they found the new hiding place. So what was the point of moving?

  Isaac drifted back to sleep, and into a familiar dream. He was walking into Emure-Ile. Villagers were lining the streets, waving at him, but he could not hear their voices. He entered a room, everyone greeted him, but once again he could not remember their names. His father was talking to him, but his words were drowned out by the howls of hungry jackals, and then a long cough-cough of machine-gun fire. The hacking bursts in his dream woke him up. There was no machine gun. It was only him coughing. And he saw that he was alone.

  David, fed up with what he took to be his friend’s fatalism, had determined to at least save himself. He had climbed out of the shelter, and hidden in the undergrowth a few hundred yards up the slope. There he waited, but the Japanese did not come back, and he returned to the shelter at dusk. The two men were too proud to greet each other. Isaac kept himself busy that evening waving away mosquitoes, while David studied their improvised calendar with great intensity. The next day, the chill between them had thawed, and they told Shuyiman about the Japanese soldiers. According to Isaac, Shuyiman did not seem overly wor
ried, but calmly cut some branches so as to make their shelter harder to see.

  But David remembered the events of this episode slightly differently. He said that, after they had seen the Japanese pass by several times, Shuyiman came to them in the middle of the night with some other ‘Indians’, and dug a deep hole which he then covered with grass. Henceforth, Isaac and David would retreat to this hole whenever they heard Japanese soldiers nearby.

  After the shock of the Japanese patrol had worn off, they started to befriend other villagers. Two young boys in particular seemed to enjoy visiting them. Mohammed Ali was about eight years old and Ismael Suleman roughly fourteen. Ismael, a ‘rascal’ according to Isaac, was eager to teach the local language, patiently using his hands to convey his meaning. He liked to boast of his father’s wealth: ‘Am bap gur rupee pisi, colombasa ase, hamoni ase,’ he would say – ‘In my father’s house there is a lot of money, there is a gramophone and a harmonium.’ Mohammed explained that he was an orphan. Could he accompany them, he wondered, back to Africa one day?

  Isaac found that it was getting much easier for him to communicate with the villagers. They had a name for him: Sutha Bacha, ‘The Young One’. His vocabulary grew larger and larger. Chicken, he learnt, was murghi or koora, because the villagers liked to say that the noise a fowl made sounded like koora ki, kiri-ki, kiri-ki, kiri-ki. Rice was kana. Milk was doof. Beef was grugusa. He was enjoying learning, and was secretly pleased that he’d picked up more of the language than David. If David had done a better job of convincing everyone that they were Muslims, now Isaac was able to make himself useful in a different way.