Farthest Field

by Karnad, Raghu

  One of these was Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the new Supreme Allied Commander for SEAC (South-East Asia Command). He applied his enormous charisma to managing the Allied high command, delaying the promised campaign until the Army in India was prepared on three critical fronts: ‘malaria, monsoon and morale’. A second stalwart was General Sir William Slim, the commander of the Fourteenth Army, the largest army ever raised by the British Empire, now poised on the Burmese border. Slim had led a brigade under 5th Indian Division in Eritrea. He was badly injured there, shot up by Italian fighter aircraft, but recovered in time to lead troops into Syria and Iran later that year.

  In early 1942, Slim had stood on a muddy rampart at the border of Burma and India, watching his soldiers struggle across, and vowed to avenge them. Their condition was so pitiful that eight per cent would not survive. Back in Bengal, however, he was dismayed to find that they ‘were short of everything’: rifles, field guns, wireless kits, ambulances, and medical stores. ‘Something vigorous would have to be done to avoid disaster,’ he reflected later. ‘Luckily, General Auchinleck was the man to do it.’1

  Even in his previous position, leading the armies of six nations in the Western Desert, Auchinleck had kept an eye out for India’s security against the Japanese onslaught. ‘Two hundred thousand Indian soldiers in the Middle East is very nice for us, but hardly in keeping with her own apparently very urgent need,’ he wrote to Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. ‘I believe that we can still hold India without the Middle East, but we cannot for long hold the Middle East without India.’2 His solicitous regard for India’s safety left Churchill apoplectic. But the attitude behind it, the value placed on Indian lives, had a steadying effect on Indian officers through the dismal summer of 1942.

  Like Slim, Auchinleck realised that the hopes of the Burma campaign hinged on transforming the army in India. Returning as Commander-in-Chief in 1943, he had lost his command of the fighting army to Mountbatten, but he remained responsible for ensuring its arsenal, supplies and training regime. India’s self-defence had always been a contradiction in terms: its native soldiers had not been allowed to shoulder modern arms, and only received them in order to fight elsewhere in the Empire. Even in the 1930s, Nehru watched cadets parading at the new Indian Military Academy and secretly worried about ‘what purpose this training serves … Infantry and cavalry are about as much use today as the Roman phalanx, and the rifle is little better than the bow and arrow.’

  Rarely had any army been entrusted with so much, while being distrusted so much. Old hands continued to believe that native battalions should remain with their relic equipment, dumb troops with basic weapons, no armour and no field guns. Chief among them was Churchill, who warned India’s commanders that they were ‘creating a Frankenstein by putting modern weapons in the hands of sepoys’.3 The new commanders were not deterred. On the anvil of the Chhota Nagpur plateau, the Indian Army was being hammered into new steel.

  Jungle warfare was not too bad, if judged by the picture of the 2nd Field Company in September. Reunited in Bihar, the company trained at bridging and amphibious landings on the Ganga. There was plashing in the green acre of the tank in Monghyr Fort, where new recruits learned to swim. Those from the Punjab, land of five rivers and five thousand irrigation ditches, usually arrived knowing how, but for those who didn’t, Bobby employed the old Malabar technique, roping together hollow coconuts to make floats. All ‘were like ducks in water by the end’, the unit diary noted. In October the well-bathed company left Monghyr for Tori on the Chhota Nagpur plateau, to rejoin the 5th Division.

  To learn the tactics of jungle war was, above all, to learn from the Japanese. The British had started out with only contempt for the little yellow Oriental. Very quickly that attitude swung, as Slim admitted, into dread of ‘the superman of the jungle’, from whom the British Empire had failed to wrest a single strategic victory. The jungle was the bane of the British: they regarded it as a depressing obstacle to mobility and visibility, while the Japanese relished the possibilities for deadly stealth.

  Yet the rout in Asia had created a cadre of officers who had personally, and bitterly, accepted the lessons of Malaya and Burma. On their evidence, Slim and the Auk realised that an army long aimed at the arid North-West Frontier must be reoriented for the humid north-east – down to every last man. By 1943, a doctrine of skills and tactics had finally been designed for troops in the Burmese theatre, published as Military Training Pamphlet No. 9 (India). It focused on the Japanese soldier’s tactical superiority and his character in combat, which they would mimic: it emphasised camouflage, infiltration, encirclement and ambush. The manual was nicknamed ‘The Jungle Book’, and its intention was to make them feral, jungle-wise, and oblivious to the conventions of Western war.

  It was on board the Nevasa that Bobby had his first glimpse of what was to come. It was obvious by now that it would not include Sicilian olive groves or the Neapolitan opera. A day outside Bombay, the ship’s captain got on the tannoy to congratulate them on crossing the 70th Meridian, the line chosen by the Axis powers to separate the future spheres of interest of Germany and Japan. The same day, divisional staff handed out envelopes full of photographs. The men passed them around without overreacting. The VCOs, who knew what was expected, muttered oaths. Some stared right through the pictures, absorbing the first official signal about the kind of war for which they were bound.

  There was little in the photographs that hadn’t already reached them in words, through the rumour mills of the jawans. Prisoners had been found crucified against tree trunks, their legs gnawed off by jackals. Sikhs were trussed up with their own turbans, forced to kneel in rows and used for bayonet practice. All that was known. The Japanese officers drove their own men like slaves. Afsar sipahiyon ko bhains jaise maarte hain, the sappers heard – They thrashed their troops like bullocks. Plausible tales mixed with snatches of nightmare. Jap soldiers carried loads like ants … They were unbeatable in the jungle because they leapt through treetops: yellow-skinned monkey-sized men – apes with aircraft carriers.

  Whatever they were, the 5th Division’s training made it clear that it would not do to try and take them prisoner. ‘The JAP is a fanatic,’ one pamphlet explained, who should be regarded as ‘a menace until he is dead’. In victory they gave no quarter, and facing defeat, they never surrendered. Their deranged dedication to the Emperor drove wounded Japanese to conceal hand-grenades until they were carried into Allied field hospitals, and then to pull the pin. Two years into the war, the total number of Japanese soldiers taken into Allied captivity alive was still in two digits.

  The sappers were assembled in ‘josh groups’, informal sessions where Bobby and the other officers could stoke hostility against the invaders. The Hun could be admired as a machine; the Jap was an animal. In order to dent Japanese morale, the training instructions said, ‘It will be our fanatical aim to KILL JAPS; hunt him and kill him like any other wild beast.’ The officers conveyed the five commandments handed down to all the units of 5th Division. The first: ‘Be determined to kill every Jap you meet, and then some.’ The last: ‘Be determined – even fanatical.’4 The aim overall, Bobby concluded, was twofold: to make the men hate the Japs as much as possible, and to make them as much like the Japs as possible.

  On an evening when they returned from jungle drills in Tori, their colonel, ‘Uncle’ Arthur Napier, had attempted some encouragement. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said to Bobby and Wright at the mess, ‘You’ve got the idea. We’re no longer in the realm of modern warfare. It’s back to the concept of fascines and gabions – and shako hats, and that sort of thing …’5 Bobby wasn’t so sure. The days of parade were gone, the days of march past, chin over one shoulder, rifle stock on the other. In Roorkee, the morning glare blurred the marching ranks into stripes of pale and dark – pale turbans, dark faces, pale tunics, dark belts, pale shorts, dark shins – and braided their rows into patterns as tight as a weaver’s. That bright, liveried army which had m
arched for Victoria and Edward now seemed to Bobby like a dissolving dream.

  Here the men drilled shirtless, or slogged through bush and brush to charge bare hillocks through clouds of mosquitoes. At dusk they tucked their pant legs into their boots, rolled helmet nets into their collars, and sloped around camp in a fog of Flit. Every soldier headed east was threatened with court martial if he neglected anti-malarial drill, and before he left, each man was fed the bitter course of mepacrine,6 a new drug that turned skin a dull fluorescent yellow. Bobby watched in grim amusement as a jaundiced glow entered the pale skins of his fellow officers, and their transformation into yellow men seemed complete.

  At October’s end, they shouldered packs to head toward Calcutta and the war. The train rattled down the Chhota Nagpur plateau into Bengal, and Bobby looked out the window onto a countryside that was well worked, patched with dark green fishponds and heavy with vines of areca nut. But everything was still; no women, or water buffaloes, moved in the fields.

  He expected to see more proof of wartime profits: tea stalls, motor buses, silver on the women’s arms. Instead, the sides of the railway track grew increasingly cobwebbed with tents and sacking and dark bodies with thread-thin limbs. Outside Calcutta, a serried line of children at least a mile long held tin bowls above their heads. As the engine slowed to a considered huffing, and the company rose to shoulder packs, they began to run alongside, as children do, but repeating one phrase: ‘payter jala’ – stomach burning.

  That there was famine in Bengal had been kept out of the papers even till late August, by which time the company was preoccupied in Monghyr. They were warned, but never prepared for the sight of it. At the Alipore station, the platform was thick with imploded bodies. The squeal of the train brakes pulled the jointed skin and bone onto its feet, and dragged it alongside till the train was at a halt. Then the arms and huge eyes were at the bars, scanning the sappers’ own eyes for wayward hints of charity. The VCOs went carriage to carriage, slamming down shutters, shouting orders that the men were not to hand out rations.

  At the gates of the freight yard, while they waited for transport and Bobby checked inventories, he watched figures diving onto the road behind each departing lorry to search the ruts for fallen rice. The company were driven to their transit camp, at the old infantry battalion lines, away from town but still surrounded by canyons of thin-walled brothels. During the day, they rifle-tested new recruits. In the evenings Bobby escaped, shouldered past the pimps hustling new girls, virgins (‘her fee is the last thread of hope for her family’), and went to see Calcutta.

  In Calcutta, civilisation stood before a fun-house mirror. Part of it bulged out past recognition and the other part collapsed inwards. There was high life and piteous death, both gross and gaudy, two worlds not colliding but sliding past each other like trams on parallel tracks. Calcutta was the principal R&R centre for the China–Burma theatre, and it was flush with cash. Everyone – generals, GIs, babus and baniyas – was keen that the soldiers have a good time, and not carry too much of their pay back with them to the Arakan front or the deadly air route to China.

  Chowringhee Street was cinemas, chummeries and cabarets, hairdressers and ice-cream parlours; a khaki beau monde. The windows of the Grand Hotel advertised seven-course meals, and when its doors swung open, lobby lights skating on the glass, out burst tangled gangs of young officers and chee-chee girlfriends, billows of air scented with Old Spice and gin and buttery Chicken Kiev, and passages of hectic jazz. Inside, Teddy Weatherford was playing with Roy ‘The Reverend’ Butler and the gang of Burmese jazzmen they had intercepted as they fled the Japanese the year before. Indians sat primly, while Yankee fly-boys hung off each other’s collars, giggling into their gimlets, rifling through their pockets to pull out blood chits printed in multiple languages, including Bengali – ‘I am an American airman. If you will assist me, my government will sufficiently reward you when the Japanese are driven away …’ – to thrust at the waiters who brought the bill.

  Senior officers took their wives to shows, and sang along to Andy Gemmel’s hit song Adolf …, with lyrics that served as well for the Americans in the audience as the Brits:

  A-a-a-dolf – You’ve bitten off

  Much more than you can chew …

  Now you may get something to remi-ind you

  Of the old Red, White and Blue!7

  The non-coms preferred Firpo’s, where a thirteen-course buffet opened with three kinds of chips, and built up to full trays of steak and spare ribs. With their plates piled, they found tables on the balcony, and avoided looking down to where the gas-blue and pink marquee lights picked out sunken faces and ribs, and lent coloured flames to the invisible pyre of famine.

  Bobby too learned to walk like an actor hamming a pretty day, his face turned up, not wanting to know if a dusty shape was a fallen bough of tamarind leaves or a fallen girl. But the famine had a smell – a sour reek that leaked from stretched skin – and it had a sound, the clack of the ghotis, the tin bowls, on the hard pavement after the starving lost their voices.

  Two thousand were dying every month in Calcutta alone. The earlier they were into starvation, the more difficult it was to look, because they were still trying – searching for susceptible soldiers, for rancid army scraps, for water that had been used to boil rice. The families were still families, and were still able to share. Despite their leathery skin and boar hair, they recognised themselves. The shade of prettiness still lay over women’s features. Later they only repelled you. Then the municipal trucks came around to pick up their corpses, and carried them out of the city for mass burial.

  The transit camp was not much relief, dripping with gonorrhoea and ghoulish talk. Men returning from the countryside described ghost villages, infants trying to feed at the breasts of dead mothers, children with limbs mangled by packs of dogs which no longer waited for people to die. After four days of this, 2nd Field Company fairly fled to the docks at Garden Reach, onto the rusty tub Islami and away. But sailing to Chittagong would only move them deeper into the shadow. The famine was born in the easternmost districts, to a conspiracy of nature, war and human prejudice. It began in 1942 with the loss of Burma, and with it, the Burmese rice surplus on which Bengal’s population had long relied. In the border districts, the Army enforced a ‘policy of denial’, confiscating bicycles, motor buses and river boats, slaughtering elephants, denying the Japanese anything they could use to advance into the country. Families were left marooned, unable to reach their own plots or markets. Once transport was dealt with, authorities turned to ‘rice denial’, and emptied the granaries of tens of thousands of tons, some of which they set on fire.

  After the scorching came the flood. A cyclone hit in October, inundating the region up to forty miles in from the sea. In Chittagong, to pass the time, RAF airmen filled their pockets with incendiary rounds and walked out onto the dykes above the river. They settled down, wearing gas masks against the stench, and took turns shooting at the bloated corpses rolling in the flood. When they hit one, escaping gases popped with flame.

  The cyclone ruined harvests, and farmers ate their seed stores. By the spring of 1943, church and civil groups were warning officials about starvation deaths. Bengal’s government, embittered by the Quit India havoc, refused to listen. Following their prime minister, they took the view that Britain had endured shortages since 1940, with unity and resolve; Indians could do the same, or else pay the cost of their own venality. At a meeting of his War Cabinet, Churchill declared his view that only those Indians directly contributing to the war effort needed to be fed.

  Some army commanders disagreed, knowing the effect of the spectacle on the morale of Indian troops. They wrote to Whitehall demanding food shipments, but were denied: the ships in the Indian Ocean were being drafted to the Atlantic to service Britain’s own food imports. Meanwhile the Civil Supplies Department started to build its private stockpiles, and advised others – Army Service Corps, factory and plantation managers – to do the
same. Rice piled up in hoards and stockpiles, jealous provisions against war outcomes and price futures, and continued to be sucked out of the countryside until the very end. The famine would consume 3 million lives before it was over. The newly generous Indian Army rations only made the situation look worse. The mercenaries feasted among the starving slaves.

  In Chittagong, the famine was compounded by the seedy chaos of a low-priority war front. After three days pitching about on the Bay of Bengal, 2nd Field Company stumbled down to the docks, anxious to get some rest on dry and stable ground. A Movement Control officer assigned them a guide and shooed them off to barracks that were six miles away, and just as far again from the station from which they had to leave the next morning. There were rest camps right by the station, he admitted, filled with troops going nowhere for days. But orders were orders.

  The company marched into the slummy city. Boys drifted up astride the column, murmuring the price to bed their sisters. The dying had been rousted from the main road, but they lay half-visible in the alleys. Some were naked, genitals shrunken, men and women barely distinguishable. It was a vision straight out of the lurid cartoons that the Japanese had dropped onto the retreating 17th Indian Division in Burma – Black Indians lying starving and skeletal, while pink-cheeked John Bulls marched the dumb jawans over their bodies – only this was real and it kept coming.

  After four and a half miles, the OC asked the guide how much further remained. The guide nodded. On being pressed, he admitted he didn’t know where he was taking them. Eventually they located the lines, but their vehicles, which were to follow with bedding and food, only reached them long past midnight. ‘Although this war has been raging now for 4½ years,’ the OC wrote in the unit diary, ‘and though this campaign has been planned for months, arrangements fantastically bad.’ As the exhausted cooks set up the langar, Bobby reread the disintegrating Movement Control order. ‘Personal baggage and cooking pots will be loaded onto train by 10:00 hours.’ The order gave no hint of how that baggage would get to the station. They could not ask the sappers to wake and march six miles back encumbered. That night he barely slept, troubled by the choking cries of children, and he rose before daybreak with Wright and the OC to scour the town for a truck.