Road of Bones

by Fergal Keane

  The founder of V Force was Brigadier A. Felix Williams who, at forty-seven, had already spent fifteen years learning the art of guerrilla warfare on the North-West Frontier. As commander of the Tochi Scouts,† he had pursued the Fakir of Ipi up and down the mountains and gullies of Waziristan. To establish V Force, Williams was given £100,000 and a headquarters staff, and promised a delivery of 6,000 rifles. The guns never turned up, so the brigadier embarked on an extraordinary gun-running operation. He sent his men into the bazaars of India’s great cities to buy up what weapons they could. Then he turned to the most reliable suppliers in the entire subcontinent, the arms dealers of the North-West Frontier. Under the direction of local police, the gunsmiths of Peshawar turned out thousands of rifles which were shipped to Assam in a first-class carriage. Some of the money given to Williams was spent on enticements for the Naga Hill tribes: red blankets, beads, osprey feathers, opium and elephant tusks were among the cargo carried into the villages where men would be recruited into V Force. Many of the V Force officers were planters or policemen, whose local knowledge and years of experience with the hill tribes were thought to make them better suited to clandestine operations than regular soldiers. The truth was that it depended almost entirely on the individual: some V Force officers took to the life with gusto while others became sick and dispirited, discovering that weeks of trekking in thick jungle were a different prospect altogether from walking the hills of a tea plantation.

  In its early days V Force enjoyed considerable freedom. It was supplied by the army but operated according to the instincts of its officers, many of them characters who would never have fitted into normal military routines. Operating in the Naga Hills later in the war, Lieutenant Bowman discovered that patrolling in the tribal areas could be a source of both trial and astonishment. Like almost every other officer engaged in special operations, he was impressed by the Nagas’ loyalty to the British. This was the outer limit of empire and yet echoes of home could be found in the most unlikely places. Entering a village one evening, Bowman’s patrol was greeted heartily by the headman. ‘The Pahok headman was extremely pro-British and insisted on us having dinner in his big long hut. It was all very claustrophobic, full of smoke and very dark with just one or two primitive oil lamps. However, the chicken and rice and rice beer were extremely welcome. The headman rounded off the evening by producing a battered old HMV gramophone on which he played his only record – it was Harry Lauder singing his old music hall song “Keep right on to the end of the road”. Highly appropriate.’ In another village the headman saved the lives of Bowman and his colleagues by alerting them to the presence of Japanese in a nearby hut. Having sprinted into the jungle, Bowman then regrouped with his unit and worked back to cover near the hut. ‘I decided not to hang around any longer and we opened fire. The Japs leapt and fell back under the hut and we raked the hut for a few rounds more and then hightailed back up the hill.’

  Each of the six V Force areas was covered by at least two cells operating independently of each other, so that information could be cross-checked in case the Japanese tried to spread false intelligence. But the idea of using the V Force units as proper guerrillas gradually faded away because they could never muster enough firepower or trained men to challenge the Japanese in battle. The jungle also took a heavy toll. As one V Force commander, Colonel R. A. W. Binny, wrote, ‘Experienced officers were wounded, went sick or were relieved and their places filled by young officers from units in India. Though keen enough they could not quite keep up the patrolling standards or endure the same hardships as the earlier ones.’ The hardships were considerable, particularly for young men fresh from barracks in India. Lieutenant Colonel Ord, who commanded 5 V Ops Area, wrote that all the men under his command had to be able to march an average of thirty miles a day across the hills, unencumbered by heavy baggage. ‘A heavily loaded man is not a guerrilla.’

  There were other, more esoteric elements to their jungle education. Edward Lewis was a V Force officer operating inside Burma, where local Chin tribesmen instructed him in the traditional means of body disposal. ‘When somebody died they put the body into a tree and let the ants eat the flesh. They would then go and collect the bones and put them in a hole.’ An official document noted that the Chins operating with V Force were ‘very fond of biting each other which is considered more satisfying than a mere brawl with knives’.

  The V Force experiment was far from perfect: sectarian feuding among local tribes in the Arakan compromised its operations; and the lack of experienced officers inevitably reduced efficiency. An attempt to introduce fiercely warlike Afridi tribesmen from the arid North-West Frontier into the jungles under V Force command ended in mutiny and the disbandment of the Afridi Legion. A few senior generals viewed V Force, and all similar secret organisations, with disdain, believing they absorbed considerable resources for minimal gain. Some of this was undoubtedly based on genuine concerns, but there was also a strong element of prejudice. General Slim was more generous. ‘Later, along the whole front,’ he wrote, ‘V Force became an important and very valuable part of the whole intelligence framework.’ The Commander-in-Chief India, Sir Archibald Wavell, visited V Force headquarters at Imphal, nearly ninety miles from Kohima, where, having listened to an officer outline plans, he gave his blessing in a few brief sentences: ‘Good. Remember I back you. Make and commission your own officers. If you want help let me know. Good night.’

  At the age of twenty-four she had made her first solo journey into the jungle. ‘There was a great deal of tut-tutting and a firm belief that at the end of three days I would be borne home in a fainting fit.’ Instead, Ursula Graham Bower stayed out for several weeks and came back ‘happy as a sandboy’, clutching specimens of Naga art. Her second trip took her to the Ukhrul district, on the border with Manipur, an area where the Nagas still practised headhunting and where three unfortunate Manipuri traders had been decapitated a short time previously. Ursula Graham Bower rationalised the practice: ‘If you come home with the head then you know that the rest of the gentleman is not looking for you.’

  Within three years of that first jungle excursion, Ursula Graham Bower was commanding her own unit of V Force in the Naga Hills. The story of her conversion from Roedean debutante to commander of a tribal force is one of the most extraordinary of the war. The creation of V Force had led to a demand for officers who had lived among and were trusted by the Nagas. In the febrile atmosphere of 1942 this meant sweeping away the normal conventions of recruitment and opening the way for mavericks like Graham Bower.

  She first visited the Naga Hills in 1937 when her ambition to study archaeology at Oxford was thwarted by a slump in the family fortunes. That summer a schoolfriend, Alexa McDonald, invited Ursula to accompany her to India, to visit her brother who was a civil servant in Manipur. The two women went by ship, train, river steamer, train again, car, foot and bamboo river raft. Travelling by raft, they knitted to while away the hours drifting down long rivers. Stopping to explore a small island, they had to run for their lives after a guide spotted tiger prints in the mud. After her adventure Ursula would never feel at ease in London again. Back home she began to cultivate senior fellows of the Royal Geographical Society, impressing them with her knowledge of Naga life and her enthusiasm for research. She made a second visit to Naga country before returning home in April 1939 to join the London Ambulance Service as war approached. The boredom of the phoney war, ‘knitting interminable jumpers and waiting for a siren that never came’, and her longing for the Naga Hills got the better of her and she announced to her family that she was going back to India. They responded with shock, suspecting that she had ‘gone completely off her rocker’, but hoping that she might meet a nice young officer in India – somebody who might prove more capable than they had been of taming her adventurous spirit.

  She reached Kohima in November 1939, only to be told that a permit to travel out into the hills could not be granted yet. For reasons that were probably to do with the outb
reak of war, the Naga Hills were strictly off-limits on the orders of the political agent. Frustrated in her ambition, Ursula Graham Bower suffered a nervous breakdown. ‘I hadn’t realised that a shock of this sort could stun one physically,’ she wrote. ‘I remember almost nothing of the next twenty-four hours.’ She went to see the political agent in person at Manipur, but he would not change his decision. Afterwards Ursula wandered alone in the dusk for hours. Her nervous collapse lasted a fortnight, during which time she put away or locked up anything that might be used as a suicide weapon. ‘It was a giddy path. The holds were so small; one clung hand by hand, a finger.’

  Eventually permission was granted and she set off for the Cachar Hills, some eighty miles, as the crow flies, from Kohima. This was a district adjoining the Naga Hills, where the sixteen-year-old priestess-cum-rebel Gaidiliu had been active against the British. Gaidiliu had told her followers that even in prison the British could not kill her spirit, and that she would return in a form that her enemies would be unable to recognise.

  When Ursula Graham Bower arrived she was surrounded by adoring locals who clearly believed she was the vanished priestess. The impression was reinforced by her physical appearance: the Englishwoman was tall and statuesque. ‘She [Gaidiliu] was tall and rather strongly built and one of her more lunatic followers decided I was the reincarnation … half the population appeared to go stark staring mad … they were rushing at me clawing at me and calling me Goddess.’ Warriors who had fought under Gaidiliu came in from their villages to see the reincarnation. Privacy became impossible. At one point she was having a bath when an elderly man carrying a gift of a chicken walked into her hut. She had no towel and only a bar of soap with which to cover herself. She screamed and a bodyguard rushed in to hustle the old man out. When she reported back to the government an official told her, with the ingrained cynicism of his species, that ‘if they must have a goddess they might as well have a government one’.

  Ursula’s parents had nurtured visions of her attending glittering balls in Delhi or taking afternoon tea in Simla, but by the middle of 1942 their debutante daughter was about to become the first female guerrilla commander in the history of British arms. Although her only experience of war thus far had been taking care of refugees and wounded soldiers coming out of Burma, the fact that she lived in the hills and was respected by the local Nagas made Ursula Graham Bower a logical choice for command.

  After consulting with Charles Pawsey and other officials, the head of V Force dispatched an elderly officer to bring her the news of her appointment. The man he sent, Colonel Douglas Rawdon Wright, was an old India hand who had ridden with the Deccan Horse on the Somme in one of the last great cavalry charges of British arms. He had also spent several years as an officer with the Assam Rifles. Although badly wounded in the leg on the Western Front and forced to retire to England, he yearned to return to the India where he had soldiered as a young man. Colonel Rawdon Wright badgered the military authorities for a job. Eventually they sent him out to Assam to a desk job with V Force. Rawdon Wright soon tired of the inertia of headquarters and the nagging sense that younger men were laughing at the desk-bound old warrior with the pronounced limp. When asked to go into the Cachar Hills and give Ursula Graham Bower news of her command he seized the opportunity with enthusiasm.

  Looking out of her bungalow one August lunchtime, Graham Bower saw an elderly white man limping down the narrow path to the village. She immediately sent a man with a note to invite the visitor to lunch. A reply came a few minutes later: ‘So sorry but I’ve got a gammy leg. I’d better go straight on down to the rest-house.’ Later in the afternoon she made her way down to meet the colonel and saw that he was unable to bend his leg. But when they set out to explore the district he refused all offers of help from the Nagas: he would not be carried about ‘like a woman’ or some effete civil servant from Delhi. And so the group traversed steep inclines over several miles while Rawdon Wright struggled along, sometimes going down on all fours to force his way upwards, and all the time chatting with Graham Bower about the quality of the fishing in the hills or about people they knew in common in Kohima and Imphal. ‘He was superb,’ she wrote later. ‘We might have been sitting in a club veranda.’ On his way back down from the hills the Naga offered to provide a litter on which he could be comfortably carried. Again he refused. Graham Bower’s account of his departure can be read as an elegy not only for an old soldier, but for an ideal of imperial duty that was entering its twilight. She stood with the village headman and watched the colonel climb over the rocks and over the slippery ground, leaning on the shoulder of his guide until he reached the turn of the road that would take him out of view. He stopped and turned back to wave. ‘We waved back. Then the white shirt was gone. Nobody said anything, because there was too much to say.’ On his way down to the plains he fell over three times. The journey ruined his health and he was dead before the end of the year.

  Ursula Graham Bower lived in the Cachar Hills among terraced rice paddies whose surfaces glistened like signalling mirrors whenever the sun broke through the monsoon clouds. The area had recently experienced severe hunger, the consequence of decades of competition over land, and the destruction of the rice crop by grasshoppers. Graham Bower believed the area, which lay outside Charles Pawsey’s bailiwick, had been neglected and mismanaged by officials ‘not always of the best type’, men who regarded Cachar as merely a way station on the road to a better job. The government was not loved here; there was an awareness of neglect, and lingering bitterness over the suppression of the Gaidiliu rebellion, which would test Graham Bower’s political skills to the utmost. Colonel Rawdon Wright had told her to recruit from all the villages of the area. Recruit first, he said, and the guns and ammunition would follow. But then what? By now the stories of what the Japanese did to anybody they captured were well known. Death from a bullet would be a highly desirable outcome for a young woman caught with a weapon in the Naga Hills. A V Force patrol that had infiltrated back into Burma at the end of the previous May had been captured by the Japanese near the Chindwin river. An Indian officer had had his eyes gouged out before being killed, while two tribal scouts had been tied to a tree and executed.

  Ursula Graham Bower would never have recruited her little army, or found the confidence to lead operations, without the help of Namkiabuing, a warrior of the Zemi Naga group, who became her bodyguard and assistant. She wrote of him in terms that rose above the contemporary European discourse of the ‘good native’. ‘He had an intense, a vivid sense of right and wrong. They were to him a personal responsibility. He could no more compromise with wrong than he could stop breathing.’ From the start Namkia made it clear that he was no pliant instrument of European rule. The two argued regularly and he submitted frequent resignations before returning to work. His granddaughter, Azwala, thought Namkia regarded Ursula more as a younger sister than as his employer: ‘He was very protective to her … because … they do not have a sister. So Ursula Graham Bower was a very beloved sister of the family.’

  It was in the villages that Namkia proved his gift for debate. There were many in the area with bad memories of recruitment during the First World War, when labour battalions were raised for the Western Front. The men who returned brought back tales of horror. Graham Bower recorded a typical argument during one of her recruitment drives:

  A Hangrum man [stood] up: ‘You’ll take us away! It’s a trap!’

  Namkia [stood] up in an answer: ‘No! It’s an honest offer!’

  ‘Why should we fight for the Sahibs? We didn’t fight for the Kacharis, we didn’t fight for the Manipuris – why should we fight for the British?’

  Namkia again: ‘Why shouldn’t we? Did the Kacharis or the Manipuris stop the Angamis raiding? Haven’t the Sahibs done that? Haven’t they given us roads and salt markets? Haven’t they given us protection and peace? Don’t we owe them something for that?’

  And so it went on. Recruits were eventually offered but they were not warrior
s. Graham Bower noted that the village had offered up ‘the lame, the halt and blind’. Eventually, after she had sworn an oath that the men would not be taken away from the hills, the village relented and offered fitter specimens.

  Next, the problem was to arm the recruits from the different villages. It was government policy to keep arms out of the hands of the Nagas and other tribes in order to stop them raiding each other or turning the weapons on the British. The arrival of the Japanese on the border removed this restraint. Graham Bower’s men were issued with guns, ninety ancient muzzle-loaders, which were probably as much a danger to themselves as to the Japanese. Still, they boosted the recruits’ self-esteem and their confidence in Graham Bower. They patrolled the hills with knowledge of the terrain and of concealment that no European could have matched. V Force headquarters gave orders that they were to avoid engagement with the enemy. Intelligence gathering was the priority.

  A British soldier sent to learn jungle warfare skills with Graham Bower remembered her effect on both the Nagas and his British comrades. ‘When she spoke she had the most beautifully cultured voice and when she spoke we were captivated. Everyone of us said later that if she said “I want you to hang yourself by the neck from the nearest tree,” I am sure we would have done it. And these Nagas worshipped her.’