Another Man's War

by Barnaby Phillips

  The crowd that had been pressing against them had parted. A soldier was walking towards them, with a smile of disbelief on his face. He was holding his hands out, in what looked like a gesture of peace. He was wearing a British uniform.

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  ‌Home again

  The most famous ballad of all is ‘Home Again’. The intensely home-loving African sang it as he embarked for India; he sang it during the voyage, and he will greet his native land with it when his ship steams into Lagos Pool or Freetown Harbour, and there will be many a British soldier, too, who will sing it as he sights the shores of home.

  Victory Magazine, 23 July 1945*

  December 1944

  Burma

  The next few hours, days even, took on a dreamlike quality for Isaac. He could vaguely recall he and David hugging each other, and whooping with joy. They shouted ‘Hallelujah! Hallelujah!’ and ‘Praise the Lord!’, instantly forgetting that as far as the villagers were concerned, they were fellow Muslims.

  There was so much to do. Khatoun immediately arranged for a party to fetch Shuyiman from the fields, while Isaac and David were desperate for information from the British soldiers. There were about a dozen of them, a small patrol from an Indian regiment that had been probing forwards ahead of the advancing 81st Division. Isaac’s first question to them was what date it was. Their answer was 6 December, almost Christmas. He and David laughed. According to their calendar, they were sometime in late August. Out by four months. Then Shuyiman showed up from the fields, full of joy. He clasped their hands, smiled from ear to ear and dashed into the basha to wash and hurriedly change his clothes.

  That at least was how Isaac remembered the day. David had a slightly different but no less colourful account of their rescue. It placed Shuyiman at the centre of the event, and went like this:

  In the month of December the 6 this man [Shuyiman] saw our patrols (Indian troops) in this village he ran to them and said ‘Are you English soldiers?’ The patrol NCO said ‘We are English Troops.’ This old man then said to these people, ‘Oh my Indian friends, for nine months I had kept two wounded Africans under enemy condition. Please come and take them away’. The troops ran into the house with gladness. They shouted ‘Praise be to God’. They brought us to our African friends once more.*

  Rescued. In those final few weeks, as Isaac and David heard the British planes and as they watched the Japanese retreat, they had struggled to suppress their rising optimism. Deep in their own thoughts, they had each reached the same irresistible, incredible conclusion. But an unspoken rule had formed between them that they would not discuss it, not speculate on how it might happen. It seemed safer, somehow, to stick to the same morbid topics they had dwelled on for these long, long months. What would the Japanese do to them if they were captured? Would they be shot straight away, or tortured first for information? Isaac had expected no mercy. The Japanese would see that they had made a mistake by not finishing him off the first time. They would not waste a second opportunity. Finally, he could banish these dark fears. Because Khatoun was still laughing, and Gulasha was still skipping round them. This was really happening.

  The villagers were raising the hands of the soldiers in the air and ruffling their hair, and the soldiers were smiling bashfully in return. Everyone was speaking so fast that Isaac was struggling to understand what was being said. It was the corporal leading the patrol who called an end to the celebrations. He wanted to pull back from Mairong. He didn’t have many soldiers, and nobody from the village could tell him with any certainty whether the Japanese were nearby. It was too risky to stay, and, in any case, the patrol was already a notable success. He organised two of the villagers to carry Isaac on a stretcher, and they were off. Just like that.

  Isaac didn’t recall saying goodbye to Khatoun or Gulasha. But one image stayed with him. When he lifted himself on his elbows to look back from his stretcher, he saw mother and daughter standing in the midst of the happy crowd, outside a basha on the banks of the Kaladan, celebrating a small miracle in the middle of this incomprehensible war.

  The soldiers were already on their way back to their camp. David followed, and behind him were the stretcher-bearers carrying Isaac. Next came Shuyiman, and a ragtag group of men and women and many small children, who were forced to run to keep up with the soldiers’ pace. At the edge of the village, the corporal told the crowd to disperse; only Shuyiman and the stretcher-bearers were allowed to accompany them any further.

  They had a long walk ahead of them and it was evening by the time they arrived at the British camp. They had stopped at one point when they suspected a Japanese patrol was passing nearby. Isaac watched the Indian soldiers fan out into the bush, clutching rifles, machine guns and grenades. It was a false alarm. Their good fortune had not left them.

  The camp was like a beehive. Everywhere, there were men digging trenches, unloading mortars from boxes, rushing from one company to the next with orders. There must have been thousands of soldiers, although the camp was skilfully designed to blend into the jungle. Isaac and David were taken to the field hospital, and an officer soon came to see them and offer congratulations. Word spread, and another and then another officer came to talk to them, each armed with a great smile and a thousand questions. Company commanders, battalion commanders, brigade commanders; all of them wanted to see and hear what Isaac and David had to say. One of them – was it a brigadier? – hugged Isaac and gave him a packet of Sea-to-Sea cigarettes and a bunch of bananas. Isaac was suddenly conscious of how filthy he was. He was still wearing the jacket that Shuyiman had given him months ago, just after they’d been robbed in the jungle. His hair was once again wild and unkempt. He stank. Yet here were these British officers, queuing up to embrace him.

  But what of Shuyiman? He had been called away in all the confusion, soon after they entered the camp. General Loftus-Tottenham, the divisional commander, had heard the news, and had sent for the Muslim villager who had sheltered the two West Africans. Isaac and David expected that Shuyiman would return to the field hospital, but it was now dark, and they started to wonder whether he would be able to find them, in the warren of paths and camouflaged positions that made up the jungle camp. Time passed, and Isaac’s fears grew. He wanted to tell Shuyiman that they owed him everything. He wanted to say farewell. But they never saw him again. Even amid the excitement of their rescue, this failure saddened him.

  They slept that night on stretchers, underneath warm blankets, but the following morning Isaac and David were on the move again. This time, Isaac was carried by four stretcher-bearers, with a second team standing ready to take over as soon as they tired. They travelled all day, and slept again in the jungle. After dark, they heard shooting coming from across the valley. The soldiers dived for cover in the narrow trenches, which they’d dug when they’d stopped to make camp for the night. In the confusion they left Isaac out in the open, on his stretcher. He lay there, watching the tracer fire pass over his head, feeling strangely unperturbed. He had been through so much, what could possibly hurt him now?

  The shooting stopped, and the shelling began. The Japanese gunners had got their range, and they were giving it everything they’d got. Again the soldiers jumped into the trenches, and, once more, Isaac lay there, listening to the shells, starting with a distant, soft bump, like the sound of someone kicking a football far away, then a second or two of silence, followed by a shrieking sound that got louder and louder, and finally a crashing, grinding explosion in the jungle nearby. Sometimes the shells landed in a chaung beneath their camp, and the shriek would be capped by an almighty splash and spray. There’d be a short pause, and then the whole thing would start up again, with the distant, soft bump of the football being kicked. It was too much. Isaac hauled himself off the stretcher and looked for a place to hide. There, he saw it: a hollow at the base of a big tree, as far away from where the shells were coming as he could manage on his own. He huddled down in it. And that was how he spent his last nigh
t in the Arakan, his last night in Burma itself.

  At midday the following day, they arrived at an open paddy field. There were hundreds of West African soldiers there, working hard to level out the ridges of the field and fashion a rudimentary airstrip. At one side of the field, from the cover of some trees, artillery and mortar teams were firing in the direction from which the Japanese had been shelling during the night. Isaac and David may have been rescued, but the war was carrying on at full tilt. Out of the clear blue sky a little Moth plane suddenly appeared, intent on making its bumpy landing on the hastily cleared land. Isaac and David were to be evacuated by air, but the Moth could only take one passenger at a time. Another soldier had been severely wounded during the shelling, his head bandaged, and he was the first to go. It was an hour before the plane was back.

  Isaac was loaded on board, lying on his back with his feet jammed into the tail of the tiny compartment. As the plane took off, Isaac craned his neck to see the jungle beneath him. It was the first time he’d flown in an aeroplane. The pilot stayed low, so as to make it harder for the Japanese to shoot them down. He lit a cigarette, and then passed one back to Isaac. Soon, though, the dark-green jungle gave way to lighter-green paddy fields, and then a golden band of sand. Tears were streaming down Isaac’s face. ‘Am I free? Am I free?’ he said, again and again. He had to pinch himself to believe it was real. Before he knew it, they were on the ground and he was being pulled from the plane and onto another stretcher. He raised his neck and could see palm trees, and beyond them the sea. As he was carried away, he turned to look back at the plane. The pilot, still smoking, was grinning and giving him the thumbs up through the cockpit’s open window. The propeller never stopped. The pilot was already turning the Moth around so that he could take off and fly straight back to the jungle strip to pick up David and bring him here too.

  They were in India, where they would spend the next three months, moving from one hospital to another, always heading in a westerly direction. On that first evening, near Cox’s Bazaar, a Sikh nurse disdainfully removed Isaac’s jacket and threw it in a dustbin. He bathed Isaac with warm water, soap and a sponge. Later that night, lying on a clean bed, under clean sheets, with a mug of tea and plate of warm food, Isaac found that he was crying again. ‘Am I free? Am I free?’ he was still asking the nurses who passed by his bed. They must have taken him for a fool, he realised. Their smiles were weary but sympathetic.

  A few days later, Isaac and David were on a Royal Navy ship headed up the Bengali coast with other wounded soldiers. On board, Isaac shared his story with one of the sailors. ‘Eh! One of our African boys speaks good English and has a hell of a tale,’ said the sailor. In no time, officers and men were crowding round Isaac’s bedside and begging him to relate his adventure once more. He didn’t need too much persuasion. He was the centre of attention, and he loved it.

  They spent Christmas near Calcutta, at what was known as a convalescent depot, with hundreds of other injured African soldiers. The Army laid on entertainment, with singers, dancers, conjurors and magicians, even a concert party all the way from Ceylon, attending to the soldiers’ spirits, if not their wounds. During the screenings in the cinema, a British officer noted that, whenever the Africans saw a scene in which a man and woman were alone in the same room, they cried in amazement, shouted ribald comments and sometimes shrieked with laughter.* The war in the jungle seemed far away.

  The Emir of Katsina, one of the traditional leaders of Northern Nigeria, was sent by the British to bolster the morale of African troops in India and Burma. He arrived at the convalescent depot with an entourage of handsome dark men in long white robes and turbans, and presented magnificent leopard skins to the drummers in the depot’s marching band. The British and Indian nurses admired them, and the Nigerians felt proud of their distinguished visitors. When the emir returned home to Nigeria, he faithfully conveyed the wishes of the soldiers whom he’d met, telling the newspapers that the men wanted ‘more letters from their friends and relations and particularly from their wives they left behind’.*

  Isaac and David wrote long letters home, letting friends and family know that they were alive. In fact, the good news had already reached Nigeria. An eager and attentive reader of the official newsletter for the colony, the Nigeria Gazette, might have noticed the following announcement in small print on 1 February 1945: ‘The undermentioned, who was previously reported missing has been located with our Forces. NA/46573 Pte. Isaac Fadoyebo.’ Unlike some of his counterparts in other parts of Nigeria, the district officer in Owo did not have many military recruits coming from his area, so, as soon as he was alerted by Lagos as to this unexpected development in the case of Private Fadoyebo, NA/46573, he dispatched the messenger boy back to Emure-Ile. Again, the boy cycled as fast as he could up the hill from Owo, with another brown envelope stamped with the red crown. This time, the telegram said, or so the villagers would remember, that the British ‘had seen’ Isaac Fadoyebo once more. He was very sick, but recuperating, in a hospital in India. The traditional ruler, the Olowo of Owo, Oba Olateru-Olagbogi, also sent a message to Emure-Ile after he had spoken to the district officer and felt assured of this happy news. But Joshua and Ogunmuyonwa could not shake off their doubts. Joshua had long ago decided that official announcements were one thing; seeing was quite another. The Nigerian soldiers had set out for Burma such a long time ago, and he had not yet heard of a single one that had returned home. Why should he hold out any hope for his son?

  Maybe somebody also tried to alert David Kargbo’s parents in Rogbin. In the Sierra Leone Gazette of 8 February 1945, one Sgt Kargbo SL/109486 had mysteriously slipped across from the ‘Wounded and Missing’ column to the merely ‘Wounded’ column, but had anyone noticed this? David’s family had hardened their hearts. They too had come to believe their son was dead, and, anyway, newspapers rarely found their way as far as Rogbin.

  Isaac and David were pleased to receive a visit from a group of their friends from the 29th CCS. This delegation brought a gift of money, raised from within the unit, to give thanks for the two heroes’ survival. Everyone wanted to congratulate Isaac and David and hear their story first-hand. The 29th CCS had been evacuated from the jungle shortly after the attack, and had spent a quiet war, treating sick and injured soldiers in hospitals in India, far from the battlefront. In fact, the disaster that befell the 29th CCS had taught the British a lesson: jungle warfare called for more mobile and better-defended medical units than a casualty clearing station could provide. For the remainder of the war, troops in Burma were supported by smaller field ambulance units, which performed necessary surgery and provided other emergency care in the jungle until an injured patient could be carried to an airstrip for evacuation.

  The excitement of the reunion was tinged with sadness. Isaac and David confirmed what their colleagues had long feared: that Archibong Bassey Duke had died, and so had others, including David Essien, Moses Lamina and Major Murphy. As for Captain Brown, nobody had any news at all, and there was every reason to fear the worst. The same too of the hot-headed Tommy Sherman, who had disagreed with the captain from the Gambian regiment and taken his fate into his own hands when he walked off alone into the jungle. The Sierra Leonean men also brought bad news for David: they had heard his parents had claimed back the dowry from the family of his fiancée; he did not have a young bride waiting for him at home after all. Isaac tried to comfort David, pointing out that they were lucky to be alive, and that he would surely marry another woman when he got back to Sierra Leone. But David was inconsolable, and bitter. ‘They should have waited,’ he insisted, ‘they were not told I had died, they were told I was missing!’

  David and Isaac had other visitors, who came with official demands. A British intelligence officer ordered them to compile a report on their experiences. ‘History of Our Nine Months Hiding Under Japanese Quarters’ was written by David, with Isaac’s approval. Just over two pages in length, it was broadly consistent with Isaac’s own memories, which he
would write down many years later, although, as an official document, it does not focus on their private hopes and fears. David spent a good portion of the report in describing the Japanese attack on the 29th CCS and the capture of Captain Brown and in listing the names of the dead.

  David wrote that, after he and Isaac were shot, they were interrogated on the banks of the Kaladan by the Japanese, but they resolutely refused to give away any information. ‘They all came to us asking, “Where are our English officers?” We answered “We have no English officers and we do not want you to ask us any questions for we prefer to die than to speak with you”.’

  But, if the tone is sometimes suspiciously self-serving, there is also generous praise for the man who rescued them. David emphasised the debt that he and Isaac owed to Shuyiman. ‘This Indian Mohammedan sacrificed his life to feed us until the time comes when we shall be able to see our own people.’ He even included a crude version of their friend’s address – Shuyiman, Gulasha Bap, M Village, Burma – in the optimistic hope that this would be enough information for any British official who might want to find Shuyiman and give him some sort of reward. The report ended with a flourish, and a tribute to their Muslim saviours in the Arakan:

  Oh my African brother, do not forget the Indian Mohammedans for they are not enemies, but friends. We are afraid of the Japs for we have seen them and studied them. The land of Burma shall be Britain’s and not Japanese possessions. We have experienced Japs tricks but they are all in vain.