by Fergal Keane
Ray Street’s job was to run messages between the C company position and Laverty’s headquarters. Among the most important lessons was the art of crossing open spaces. Street soon learned to study the earth banks and trees for any sign of bullet marks. A pockmarked bank or shredded leaves was a sure sign that a sniper had the ground covered. ‘You would run across wherever you saw a pockmarked bank. You would pretend you didn’t see it and then you run across. He had an automatic but he kept firing a burst and missed me. They got him in the end.’ Street did this several times each day for a month. Sheer exhaustion stopped him ruminating on the danger. ‘You were always too tired to think about it. You just put your head down and you were asleep. Then they wake yer and say the two hours is up and you’re up again.’
In D company John Harman had been promoted to lance corporal after showing courage under fire. His comrades could be less enamoured of his fearlessness. On patrol with his friend Wally Evans, Harman came under machine-gun fire while crossing a dried-out stream. Evans and the other members of the patrol hit the ground while the tracer flew over their heads. ‘I discerned the figure of someone still standing up on the edge of the chaung. My first thought was “who is that bloody fool up there!” Not surprisingly it was John. He was trying to pinpoint where the rifle fire was coming from – the man knew no fear.’
On another occasion Harman had run out under fire with a Bren gun to help relieve Evans and some others who were pinned down by the Japanese. Or at least Evans thought that was his purpose. Harman had something different in mind. ‘Soon, I imagined what was going through his mind and realised that our minds were not thinking along the same lines! He was trying to qualify me for a posthumous award by attacking the hill, whilst I was wondering how the hell we were going to get out of our present predicament. There did not seem to be any chance and John, on reflection, must have accepted that the task he was contemplating was too great. Only Errol Flynn, with the help of Burt Lancaster, could have silenced that Jap position.’ As he grew into the role of warrior, John Harman might have been a little surprised at himself, but certainly gratified.
One of his skills was in supplementing the men’s diet of bully beef, soya-link sausages and biscuits. Wally Evans witnessed him vanish into the jungle and return with a wild pig for the section cook to fry up. On another occasion Harman asked Easten if he could shoot one of the local cattle. Easten asked Lieutenant Colonel Laverty at headquarters but was given an earful and warned not to precipitate trouble with the locals. ‘It was as if they thought India would come into the war against us if we shot a cow,’ he recalled. Easten duly reported the bad news to Harman, but then added a caveat: ‘I said to him that if one broke its leg or something like that you would have to put it out of its misery.’ An hour later he heard a burst of Tommy-gun fire. A smiling Harman appeared. ‘It’s a most extraordinary coincidence, Sir,’ he said. ‘A cow broke its leg right in the cookhouse!’ D company lived on fresh meat for the next week.
At around the same time, Harman told Easten that he believed he was destined to survive the war. D company was being shelled and Easten and Harman were cowering next to a mud bank. Harman shouted into Easten’s ear. ‘Don’t worry, Sir, you are safe with me.’ He then proceeded to tell his commander that while he was travelling in Spain he had met a fortune-teller who assured him he would live to a very old age. There had been another fortune-teller, too, in Durban, who had read his palm and predicted he would live until the age of seventy-two. ‘That means anybody who is with me will be safe too,’ said Harman. Easten thanked him for this information and continued to hug the ground very tightly.
John Harman wrote to his Aunt Beryl on 20 January 1944, reflecting on his post-war plans. ‘I am satisfied with the way I shape up under difficulties … the whole country grows on one in time … India and neighbouring countries abound in opportunities for the industrious Britisher … if I settled out here I think I could earn two or three thousand sterling without much trying (per annum).’
Further battles loomed. But the West Kents’ anxieties eased as they watched British and American planes relentlessly bomb the Japanese positions. On one occasion, Dennis Wykes remembered, ‘they blew the top of a hill straight off’. By 12 February the Japanese outer defences had fallen and Major John Winstanley was leading B company tentatively forwards towards Razabil itself. ‘To our amazement the closer we got there wasn’t a shot fired, and we actually captured the fortress. The Japs had pulled out just before we attacked, so that was a happy success without any casualties. That put our tails up thoroughly.’
When the troops entered Razabil they found a large cavern where the Japanese had treated their wounded, and, abandoned all over the position, the detritus of war – boots and uniforms and ammunition boxes and strands of barbed wire, shreds of clothing and piles of human excrement, the malodorous signature of any besieged position. Captain Antony Brett James, Indian Corps of Signals, entered the bunkers and saw ‘horror mixed with ingenuity, ruin with triumph, carnage with new tenantry, in this objective named Razabil, upon which we had gazed since Christmas and hitherto failed to conquer. Now it was finished.’ Except that Razabil was not the end of the matter.
While the struggle for Razabil was reaching its conclusion a decisive battle had been unfolding to the east on the other side of the Mayu hills. There the Japanese had sprung a surprise and launched a major offensive against 7th Indian Division which occupied what would become known as the Admin Box, a defensive stronghold of approximately 1,200 yards in diameter. This was the Japanese blow intended to draw Slim’s attention away from Mutaguchi’s army on the north-eastern frontier. There was a thick mist in the Kalapanzin valley when the Japanese troops moved out on 3 February and began to cross the rice fields. The sentries heard the sound of troops and animals moving through the gloom but assumed they were friendly forces. The falling of the morning dew from the trees was also so loud at this time of year that it helped camouflage the sound of footsteps. Such was the suddenness of the assault that the 7th Division commander, General Frank Messervy, was nearly captured. In the pre-dawn dark he heard loudly chattering voices near his tent. Summoning his Gurkha orderly, Messervy told the man to go and tell the troops to shut up. The orderly duly went and shouted at the men. As Christison recalled: ‘They took no notice and so he advanced and took a rifle from the nearest man so that he could be punished in the daylight. He returned to the General and showed him the rifle: “Good Lord that’s Japanese.” At that moment the Japs rushed the H.Q. and after a struggle the General and his staff and a few signallers managed to escape into darkness and confusion.’ So great was the rush that General Messervy had to escape in his pyjamas and without his hat. Resupply aircraft soon dropped a replacement.*
The Japanese reputation for brutality to prisoners was reinforced when infiltrators overran the main dressing station for 7th Indian Division near Sinzweya. Doctors were executed and the wounded butchered where they lay. One doctor was placed in a chair and a revolver twice fired into his ear. On each occasion the bullet exploded in the chamber. He collapsed from shock and loss of blood, but lived to tell the tale.†
Sepoy Gian Singh, an infantryman with the 7th Indian Division, recalled that from that moment onwards, ‘we were determined not to show these small yellow men mercy. We often saw on patrols what they did to captured men … We saw our men who, when captured, had been tied to trees with their turbans and used for bayonet practice.’ It surprised Gian Singh when he found how easy it was to push a bayonet into the body of another human being and how it made him feel ‘somehow good’. Every patrol was told that it would be given special leave for any prisoners captured. But Gian Singh could not remember a single instance of the men bringing in a Japanese alive. The enemy was determined never to surrender. Gian Singh learned from the Gurkhas how to fight the Japanese in hand-to-hand combat. ‘Firstly, you get in close to your enemy and stab him in the lower body. When the kukri goes in, the enemy always doubles up. You then swiftly withdr
aw your kukri and take his head off. With a sharp blade that’s easy.’ Major John Shipster became accustomed to ignoring the cries of the Japanese wounded. ‘In any civilised war we would have sent a stretcher bearer out,’ he recalled. But this was the least civilised of wars. A wounded Japanese could still pull out a grenade or stab with a bayonet.
Yet there were occasional moments of compassion. One of John Shipster’s Indian comrades, Lieutenant M. A. Gilani, found a letter on the body of one of the dead Japanese. His wife had written it on their son’s first birthday. Gilani had it translated by a Japanese interpreter at the end of the war. Tears came into the man’s eyes as he read the letter. ‘I show your photograph to our son and he has started recognising you. I am sending you a few leaves of your favourite flower. All are fine here. I get your letters very late. When are you coming on leave? I miss you a lot … Look after yourself.’
The Corps commander, General Christison, admitted later that the battle of the Admin Box put him under the greatest stress he had known since the battle of Passchendaele in 1917.* After a week of fighting one of his senior staff suffered a nervous breakdown. The general wrestled with two imponderables: would the men in the Admin Box hold out, and would Slim’s strategy of resupplying besieged forces from the air succeed? The former depended entirely on the latter. At first the air drop faced stiff resistance from the Japanese; not only were pilots having to evade Japanese fighters but flying as low as two hundred feet over the drop zone made them vulnerable to ground fire. Over five weeks Troop Carrier Command, responsible for air resupply, delivered almost 2,300 tons of supplies in a total of 714 sorties.
Major Michael Lowry, 1st battalion, Queen’s Royal Regiment, watched the red tracer fire of the Japanese zipping past the tails of the Dakotas. ‘This morning the ground is littered again with thousands of many coloured parachutes. Half closing the eye they look like confetti … Private Wiseman, my dedicated, quick-witted cockney company clerk, leant over from his slit trench and said to me during the drop: “Sir, ’ere come our reinforcements; they’re dehydrated Americans!”’
A British officer wrote: ‘Later their hearts thrilled to watch, with eyes weary from lack of sleep and a night’s work by the light of a flickering hurricane lamp, the first supply-dropping planes roaring over the hills, led by the American Brigadier-General Old. The Japanese might curse the spectacle, but there was not a Briton or Indian who did not heave a sigh of relief and take new courage and hope at seeing the Dakotas circling above the narrow valley … Day after day those who defended the box turned their bloodshot eyes northwards when their ears caught the drone of approaching aircraft above the noise of tanks and bullets.’ The operation worked so well it drove one exasperated Japanese commander to exclaim, ‘How can one fight an enemy that not only drops food and ammunition but gin, soap, socks and even razor blades to his troops!’
The material superiority of the allies was beginning to tell. The re-equipping of the RAF and the Indian Air Force with Spitfires to augment the slower Hurricanes radically changed the battle in the skies over the Arakan. By the end of December 1943 the allies would claim twenty-two Japanese aircraft had been shot down for the loss of thirteen fighters. The Japanese later admitted they had lost 142 aircraft in the area in five months. It was a heavy loss for a country that could never hope to match the industrial capacity of the allies. The cost in men to the Japanese was also great: they lost 5,000 of the 8,000 troops who attacked the Admin Box, and the eventual victory of 14th Army had, in Slim’s words, ‘the greatest moral effect on our troops’.
On the other side of the Mayu Hills the 4th West Kents had pushed on, with the 1/1 Punjab and 4/7 Rajput on either side of them, towards their next objective: the Japanese positions at the old railway tunnels on the Maungdow-Buthidaung road. They moved through hot and hilly country, fighting their way past Japanese delaying positions, grabbing an hour or two’s sleep when they could, always short of water and too often dependent on cold rations. It was too risky to light fires which could give away a position to the Japanese. The war diary for 11 March 1944 noted: ‘Two cups of tea in the middle of an operation becomes equivalent to a meal, and in any case experience showed that normal replenishment was nigh impossible, movement with mules at night in jungle country being most undesirable.’
After a contact the troops would search the track for bloodstains or listen for the sound of moans coming from the jungle. This was how they captured their first prisoner, who was ‘so well treated that he divulged valuable information without the least inhibition’. A day later the Japanese sprang an ambush, killing one West Kent and capturing some equipment. This was the war of grinding advance against an enemy who could seem like ghosts flitting through the forest. Captain Donald Easten remembered the tension of probing through thick vegetation. ‘It’s very difficult to see the enemy in jungle conditions. One did occasionally get a fleeting glimpse of a Japanese soldier, and sometimes when they fired at fairly close quarters you could pinpoint the position. They were probably amongst the bravest soldiers in the world … they never gave up. The only way you could beat them was to kill them.’ Easten lost three men killed and several wounded in the advance. They may have cursed every footstep forwards in that march through jungle and up on to and across razor-backed hills, but for the newer men like Dennis Wykes and Ray Street it was a journey that earned them the respect of their experienced comrades.
Because so much of the fighting was done when patrols bumped up against small groups of Japanese, the more junior officers found the brunt of immediate decision-making devolving to them. A general or colonel at headquarters was in no position to direct a close-quarter engagement in the bush. So the jungle became a place where a young man with guts and initiative could prove himself. The commanders of B and D companies, John Winstanley and Donald Easten, were making their names as brave and resourceful leaders of men.
On 15 March the West Kents were close to the western tunnel. If they could drive the Japanese out and link up with the 7th Division troops on the other side of the Mayu then the offensive would be close to success. The battalion was desperately short of water, with each man having to survive on his water bottle for more than thirty hours in the severe heat. By 16 March, Colonel Laverty had deployed the entire battalion forward, with companies sent to probe the high ground on either side of the tunnel and the main approach. The men of C company were climbing to the north of the tunnel. ‘We advanced quite a way,’ recalled Private Ivan Daunt. ‘It was all hilly and jungle, real jungle … It was all very dense. You found a gap and went through the gap. You had to keep probing all the time to find room.’ One of their officers spotted a Japanese sentry and immediately opened fire. There was a storm of return fire and the troops fell back, unable to advance through a narrow gully to the Japanese position. A soldier from Dublin, Paddy Fanning, who had tried to work his way behind the Japanese, was killed by a sniper. ‘We walked into a trap,’ said Private Ivan Daunt.
Major John Winstanley came up with a plan to outflank the enemy which they put to Colonel Laverty. Tom Hogg of B company said that Laverty ‘was intent on winning a DSO’ for capturing the tunnel and accepted the plan, ‘giving us the privilege of carrying it out’. It involved B company fighting its way on to the higher ground and getting behind the Japanese forward positions. On the morning of 18 March Winstanley led his men off towards a ridge to the north of the tunnel. They marched all morning without encountering any significant opposition from the Japanese. The route was similar to that undertaken by C company two days previously. But it led them through thick undergrowth and the climb through the bamboo forest was slow and hard going.
By the middle of the day the men were in position and very tired. They had evaded detection by the Japanese. Orders were given to stop and rest. Men flopped gratefully to the ground. They drank carefully from their water bottles. Some chewed on rations while others slept.
Down at the foot of the hills, at battalion headquarters, the medical orderly Lance Cor
poral Frank Infanti was waiting for the sound of shelling. Whenever an attack was due to start he could feel his stomach tighten and he checked and rechecked his kit of dressings, bandages and the all-important injections of morphine, in the sure knowledge that very soon he would be trying to patch up wounded men under enemy fire.
Up on the hill Major Winstanley got on the wireless to call in the artillery which would precede his attack. As he was doing so, Tom Hogg noticed a large gash in a nearby tree trunk. It looked very like shell damage, as if a lump of shrapnel had gouged away part of the tree. Immediately Hogg thought to himself that the artillery had been firing on the point earlier to find its range and had decided that this was a Japanese position. Somebody had misread a map. Before he could warn Winstanley he heard the rumble of the guns, followed by the high scream of shells coming into B company’s position. The explosions tore through the ranks, spraying the hillside with flesh and blood, a terrifying eruption of fire and steel which killed the company’s signallers with the first salvo, so that the survivors were reduced to shouting down the hillside for the firing to stop. The stretcher bearers were killed too. Forty-eight rounds struck B company, a devastating concentration in a small space. Back at the starting point, Company Sergeant Major Bert Harwood and the rest of C company could hear the shells going over. ‘All of a sudden I heard somebody shout “stop them bloody guns, they’re only shelling B company.”’
The Japanese quickly realised what was going on and added to the nightmare by firing smoke shells from their mortars and setting alight the dry jungle around B company. As the fire crept closer to the bodies of the dead and wounded, the flames ignited ammunition and grenades in the men’s webbing pouches. Men wounded in the initial shelling now saw the flames sweeping towards them. Bodies exploded as grenades went up in the inferno. The screams of the dying and wounded mingled with the bangs and the static crackle of the fire.