Another Man's War

by Barnaby Phillips

  Writer SLA/109486 Sgt David Kargbo

  Approved by NA/46573 Pte Isaac Fadoyebo*

  The doctors and nurses at the convalescent depot were instructed to get the African soldiers back on their feet as quickly as possible, so that they could return to their units. But many of the soldiers were thinking of home, and it turned out they had an important ally on their side. Major Savage, a doctor with the Royal Army Medical Corps, was remembered as an immensely caring man. He was of mixed Scottish and Gold Coast ancestry, and was married to a woman from one of the Gold Coast’s leading families; he would live in Accra after the war. He did his best to ensure that his African patients at the depot were repatriated and not sent back to the Arakan. Not that Isaac and David were ever in any danger of such a fate. The severity of Isaac’s injuries, the length of their ordeal and the disbandment of the 29th CCS all made them high-priority cases for repatriation.

  In early 1945, Isaac and David travelled back across India, to the military hospital at Poona. David, as an ‘up patient’, was free to leave the ward and explore the town whenever he wished. Isaac, who needed crutches to move around, was put under the care of a British doctor, one Lieutenant Colonel Neil, a dedicated and compassionate man. After examining Isaac’s leg, Neil told him the news that he had long feared: he would never be able to walk properly again. However, Neil hoped that, by removing Isaac’s broken right kneecap, he would be able to straighten the crooked leg. With luck, said the doctor, this would enable Isaac to walk without crutches, or even a stick, albeit with a permanent stiffness. He urged Isaac to study the gait of one of the elderly colonels in charge of the hospital. This colonel also had a stiff right leg. He would often walk up and down the wards, looking over the patients and giving Isaac many opportunities to scrutinise his bearing.

  In the event, Isaac’s operation was only partially successful. He had his kneecap taken out. That had gone to plan. But his leg, now in plaster, assumed an awkward bow shape, and a fortnight later the doctors decided to carry out a second operation. Isaac was in such pain that he needed to be put under anaesthetic simply to have the plaster removed. He woke up after the second operation to find his leg in plaster once again, and with livid red blood stains already seeping through. But the curve had been corrected. On his many subsequent visits to Isaac’s bedside, Neil encouraged him to believe he would make a good recovery.

  Slowly, with comfortable sleep and regular meals, Isaac began to feel like his old self. His shattered body was recovering, and so too was his mind, after the months of tension and strain. He played board games, and enjoyed long, drowsy afternoons. One day, he was touched to receive a Yoruba Bible through the post – a gift from Major Moynagh, the commanding officer of the 29th CCS back in Sierra Leone. Isaac was now, for the first time since he’d signed up for the Army at the end of 1941, beginning to see beyond the end of the war. He would soon be returning to civilian life. He was not sure what career to pursue, nor whether his disability would get in the way of his plans, but, lying in that hospital in India, he felt some of his old resolve coming back. His first ambition once he got home, he decided, was to build on his few years of education and resume his studies. He would persevere, and he was ready for a struggle.

  In the middle of March, Isaac and David were on the dockside at Bombay, surrounded by other wounded West Africans, all waiting to board a hospital ship for home. Some of the men were blind. Some had lost limbs. Others seemed to be mentally incapacitated. More than a year and a half had passed since the West African contingents had disembarked on these same docks with the task of protecting the British Empire from the Japanese invaders. Each of these men had survived the Burma campaign, but some had been broken in the process.

  Isaac was carried aboard on a stretcher by four friendly Italian prisoners of war who, despite their lack of English, managed to express sympathy in their own language, and showered him with cigarettes. They took him to his cabin, shook his hand, and left, talking loudly among themselves.

  It was also in March 1945 that the 81st Division finally pulled out of Burma, to recuperate in India. During the division’s second offensive, the West Africans had advanced, once again, down the Kaladan Valley, driving the Japanese back in a series of small battles and skirmishes. And, once more, they had marched long distances for months on end, supported by the Allies’ air forces. Otherwise, they had been cut off from the rest of the British Army. In that sense, the West Africans had fought something of a private war.

  One of the strangest moments came on 9 December, a few days after Isaac and David’s rescue. On an airstrip deep in the Kaladan Valley, British officers organised a cricket match. They called it the ‘Kaladan Lords’, and arranged for bats, balls, stumps and pads to be flown in by Moth planes. The players wore jungle green and the game was played to a background of mortar and small-arms fire. There were frequent interruptions as planes flew in and out, throwing up clouds of dust that made play impossible. Some African soldiers watched the game, bemused. But Lieutenant Colonel Philip van Straubenzee, a great cricket enthusiast from a distinguished Yorkshire military family who had been assigned to the Sierra Leonean regiment, wrote, ‘despite the Jap mortar fire great enjoyment was had by all’.*

  The long-awaited prize of Akyab, the port at the mouth of the Kaladan with the important airfield, finally fell into British hands on 3 January 1945. The Japanese, surprised by the speed of the West African advance, feared they would be trapped, and had pulled out a few days earlier, which allowed British and Indian soldiers to land on the beaches unopposed. They found deserted Japanese bunkers as well as Japanese graves. The jetty at the port was damaged beyond use, the harbour silted up and full of wrecks. The soldiers looked round what was left of the town, and saw that British bombing raids had destroyed much of Akyab. One British official wrote: ‘I estimate that about 98 percent of the buildings are damaged to some extent ie considerably more than had been estimated from appreciations of air photographs….The whole town was overgrown with jungle, only a few streets being comparatively free from it, and this enhanced the impression of utter desolation.’* A small number of frightened Muslims were living in the ruins. They pleaded with the British to send more soldiers quickly, to avoid a repeat of the communal massacres of 1942. Akyab’s pre-war grace was gone for ever, but the British were relieved to have it in their hands. And the town’s capture was a victory for the West Africans, even if they had not been there to take it themselves. According to one senior British general, ‘the battle that might have been fought on Akyab’s beaches had already been won in the jungles to the north’.*

  Instead, the 81st Division was preparing for its final battle in and around the jungle- and mist-shrouded hills of the historic city of Mrauk U on the Kaladan floodplain.* Established in the fifteenth century, Mrauk U had been the capital of the old Kingdom of Arakan, where Portuguese and Dutch envoys paid tribute to a monarch who had grown wealthy through trade across the Bay of Bengal. Mrauk U’s political and economic influence had long since waned, leaving the ruins of dark stone pagodas and temples. Their steps were covered in grass and weeds, their walls thick with emerald-green moss. Inside, rows of stone Buddhas stared stoically at whoever arrived with offerings. The Japanese had used Mrauk U as an administrative centre, and turned some of the temples into brothels for weary soldiers.

  By this stage of the war, the Japanese were in no position to mount a counterattack. Their forces were depleted and many of their troops had already been transferred away from the Arakan to the central Irrawaddy Valley, where their generals were trying to stem the advance of General Slim’s army towards Rangoon. By now, a whole new contingent of West African soldiers, the 82nd Division, had also entered the Arakan, and they shared in the capture of Mrauk U. The 82nd Division would carry on fighting until the Japanese surrendered in August, and most of its men would stay in Burma until well into 1946. Hundreds of Africans would be killed in these last months of the war; the Japanese may have been retreating, but they fought te
naciously until the very end.

  The West Africans’ campaigns were barely covered by the Allied war correspondents and photographers, for whom they held no glamour. British soldiers in Burma famously dubbed themselves the ‘Forgotten Army’, but what did that make the West Africans? John Hamilton wrote with frustration that they were the ‘forgotten flank of the forgotten corps of the “Forgotten Army”’.*

  General Slim, blessed with the common touch that endeared him to his men, had made an effort to get to know the 81st Division before it advanced into Burma. But thereafter he was rather distant from the African troops, and never visited the soldiers fighting in the Kaladan Valley.

  At the end of 1945, a Nigerian soldier, Lance Corporal John Ejirika, wrote to his officer to say that he had just seen the film Burma Victory, the official documentary account of the defeat of the Japanese, commissioned by the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in South East Asia, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. Lance Corporal Ejirika was dismayed by the film; not one African made an appearance in it. ‘Only Indian, American and English troops were seen there. No record of African hard fighting in Burma even in Kaladan Valley where we lost so many African troops,’ he wrote.* The omission was all the more surprising given that British army cameramen had gone to great lengths to shoot some fascinating footage of West African soldiers in Burma in 1944–45. Yet, not a single frame was included in Burma Victory. No wonder a British officer wrote, with some bitterness, that the 81st Division ‘went in anonymously, marched out anonymously, and it seems they have left anonymous dead behind them’.*

  Where the West Africans did attract media coverage – in Indian newspapers and official Army newsletters – they were invariably portrayed in a hackneyed and paternalistic manner, much as many of their British officers treated them. They were the ‘Happy Warriors’, singing and carefree. ‘To the African, singing is almost as vital as his food or the rifle with which he fights,’ reported Victory magazine.* The Madras War Review said they were ‘High spirited, gay, fond of joking and singing…at heart a simple, kindly and immensely strong people…They enter into everything with zest – that is the secret of the Africans and why they are loved…The humour, loyalty and optimism of the African soldier is irrepressible and infectious.’*

  The truth, of course, was more complex than such hoary racial stereotypes, and there were occasions when African soldiers did not make friends on the ground. On 26 February 1944, when Isaac was in the ruined riverside town of Paletwa and about to set out on his ill-fated raft trip down the Kaladan, a British civilian affairs officer, Captain De Glanville, was also there, busy compiling a report on the behaviour of the African troops. He wrote: ‘in a day or two the last of the West Africans will have moved out of this area and there will be a sigh of relief from the coolies, villagers and myself’. The Africans had impressed the locals with their fighting qualities, and those in the infantry battalions were well disciplined, but many others, thought Captain De Glanville, seemed ‘to have a touch of kleptomania’, brazenly stealing anything they wanted, including livestock and rice. The villagers were apparently terrified of the Africans, and with good reason. De Glanville observed that ‘there have been three cases of rape true and undetected and one attempted rape of two women aged between 60 and 80’, then noted ‘this was the last straw and scandalised the locals’.*

  Similarly, Robert Mole was in the Burmese colonial service, and working in the Northern Arakan in late 1944 as a civilian liaison officer in an area recaptured from the Japanese and placed under the control of West African soldiers from the 82nd Division. He saw how the Nigerians, with their habit of bathing naked in the river, sometimes frightened the local population. (This had also been the practice of Japanese soldiers, who had likewise offended Burmese sensibilities.) More seriously, Mole said, Arakanese villagers came to him with numerous complaints about how they were treated by the West Africans. In one incident, soldiers went on a rampage through a village that had refused to supply them with women. They killed three people, he wrote, and set fire to many houses.*

  By the time Isaac and David set sail from Bombay, the outcome of the war in Asia was no longer in doubt, even if a Japanese surrender seemed some way off. In Europe, meanwhile, the Nazis were all but finished. The Mediterranean was safe for Allied shipping, and so the hospital ship took the injured men back to West Africa through the Suez Canal, instead of going round the Cape. It sailed unescorted; the convoys, the Navy protection and the zigzags through the sea that the troopships had used on the outward route were no longer necessary.

  Isaac’s journey home was blissful. He could move round the ship on crutches, and the British nurses and doctors, he recalled, were wonderfully kind. Some of the soldiers liked to play the guitar, or gather round tables for long games of cards, but Isaac was happiest sitting on the open deck. There he would enjoy the sunshine, whiling away the hours mesmerised by the white surf of the breaking waves and the dolphins that occasionally leapt out of the water around the ship’s bow.

  They travelled up the Red Sea – ‘not red at all’, one confused African soldier noted – and then through the Suez Canal, where they sailed past brightly dressed crowds of Egyptians waving from the shade of the palm trees. At Port Said, the ship was surrounded by traders in canoes, who frantically shouted up to the deck hoping to catch a soldier’s eye and sell him some fruit, a basket or a dress for a wife or girlfriend at home. Much later, they stopped at Casablanca. They were heading south now, and the air grew warmer once more.

  Isaac was resting in bed when David Kargbo came to his cabin. Overnight, the ship had arrived in Freetown harbour. There was something evocative in the breeze that morning, but it was only when Isaac looked out of the cabin window and saw the green mountains that he recognised it: the pungent scent of the West African coast, of smoked fish, rotting vegetation, human sweat and tar.*‌ Fragments of voices and laughter drifted up from the water, ‘Oh how are you, my dear friend?’ ‘Are you in good condition of life?’ ‘How de body?’ The questions were coming from dark figures in dugout canoes and launch boats bobbing on the waves beneath the ship. Many years later, Isaac would remember this moment. His writing style was always rather stiff and formal, but his account of David’s departure hints at a sudden sadness that overcame both men:

  He came to me, shook my hand, and said: ‘Isaac we have to part here. Goodbye. May God Bless You.’ He spoke in a voice touched with emotion. I was speechless for a while and later I got up, gave him a big hug, and in a depressed and reflective mood I said: ‘Cheerio Sergeant Kargbo. May God help you.’ Minus his assistance I would have died of sheer starvation. He was the one doing the begging for bread and water to keep our bodies and souls together when we were in hiding in the jungle.*

  Then David was off, boarding one of the launch boats. As it pushed away from the hospital ship towards the harbour, it turned in a gentle arc and cut through a little fleet of wooden canoes still waiting to take on passengers. Isaac watched its progress from his cabin window. Everyone on board was waving, David standing prominently in the prow. Behind it were the mountains, white clouds draped over the lion peaks. At their foot, a muddle of sun-bleached clapboard and gables reached up the slope – Freetown, just as Isaac had first seen it in 1942. A song carried from the launch boat across the water, back to the hospital ship, its sad beauty initially clear, then becoming fainter and fainter:

  Home again, home again

  When shall I see ma home?

  When shall I see ma native land?

  I shall never forget ma home,

  My farder be dere

  My mudder be dere

  When shall I see ma home?

  When shall I see ma native land?

  And never more to roam, oh, oh

  ‌

  ‌11

  ‌Great awakening

  This war has brought about a great awakening…The African…has been in the Middle East, Sicily, Arabia, Syria, Iran, Abyssinia, Madagascar, Ceylon, India and Burma. He has m
et not only the British, but also the South Africans, Americans, French, Greeks, Italians, Australians, Germans, Arabs, Egyptians, Mauritians, Sinhalese, Indians, Burmese, Chinese, Poles, Russians in Teheran, and other races like the Dutch, and he is learning from every one of them…

  Robert Kakembo,

  An African Soldier Speaks (1946)*

  24 April 1945

  Lagos

  It was on a Tuesday afternoon, at two o’clock in the afternoon, that Isaac’s ship docked at Lagos. The soldiers on board had left the city anonymously almost two years before, but they were given a warm welcome on their return. The Band of the Nigerian Police, lined up on Apapa wharf, played ‘For They Are Jolly Good Fellows’ and ‘God Save The King’, and a large and eager crowd – not deterred by what one newspaper called a ‘broiling sun’ – surged forward as the ship drew close. The great and the good of Lagosian society had turned up – colonial administrators, generals, budding local politicians, bishops, prominent businessmen and lawyers – white and black rubbing shoulders together. The most senior British official in Lagos at the time, His Excellency Sir Gerald Whiteley, had the honour of boarding the ship first and inspecting the soldiers. He was followed up the gangway by a posse of journalists, who swarmed all over the ship looking for injured men to interview.

  The journalists knew that this homecoming was front-page news. The war might have seemed like a somewhat abstract affair to many Nigerians, but here was a chance for these determined reporters to show how their fellow countrymen had paid in sweat and blood. The soldiers on that ship were some of the first to return from Burma. They were living proof that Nigerians had played their part in the great fight against the dictators of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. ‘The men were in high spirits and their faces beaming with joy as His Excellency and party went round the wards,’ wrote the Nigerian Daily Times.* Its editorial, ‘Heroes from Burma’, said Nigerians should be proud of their wounded soldiers, and ‘appreciate the grimness of the ordeals they have had to pass through in their campaign against the Japs – the little yellow savages’.* The West African Pilot, less inclined to toe the official line, noted that the men were in ‘various stages of deformity but, nevertheless, genuinely and spontaneously cheerful’.* The nursing orderlies, the Pilot’s correspondent added, were ‘men from the counties of England and charming English maidens who seemed to have stood up well to an experience which perhaps men will never know till the war ends’.