The simple truth about war is that if you are on the attack, you can't do a damned thing until you find your enemy, and the only way to do that is to push on, at whatever speed seems prudent, until you see or hear him, or he makes his presence known by letting fly at you—as witness our first advance over the bank. Now it was the same thing over again, the difference being that the left flanking movement had brought us inside his position, and it was a question of who saw whom first and shot the straighter.
Life closes in; I had no idea of what was happening elsewhere, no thought or use of the senses to spare for anything but what I saw as I knelt behind the bushes—across the clearing, maybe ten yards away, was the bunker. It was a big one, three-man at least, a mound of hard red earth about four feet high, and probably the same depth underneath. There was a wide firing-slit at ground level, but what lay behind the slit was darkness. No movement, and nothing in the trees beyond the bunker.
I looked at Stanley, a yard behind me, his Bren at the ready, and then I was going like a bat out of hell for a palm on the other side of the clearing. There was a crack from the firing-slit, but it was threepence (or three yen) wasted, and as I fetched up at the tree, its trunk between me and the bunker, Stanley ran forward, firing from the hip at the firing-slit. Dust flew from the bunker as the Bren burst hit it—and then the bloody gun jammed, Stanley yelled and tugged at the magazine, I thought I saw movement inside the firing slit, and as Stanley jumped aside I found myself running forward, firing into the slit—three shots, I think, and I believe there was a return shot, and then I was diving down beside the bunker wall, about a yard to the side of the firing-slit, fumbling for a grenade.
I was facing back the way we'd come, and there were dark bush-hatted figures running through the trees, and the wood was suddenly alive with small-arms fire, rifle and automatic. I yanked out the grenade pin, let the plunger go, forced myself to count one-thousand-two-thousand and stretched sideways, back flat on the bunker, to whip the bomb through the firing-slit. One thousand-two-thousand-three—an ear-ringing crump, and I was snatching for a second grenade when Gale came running past, gesturing, and I followed him round the bunker side. There was the bunker entrance, a low narrow doorway, and Gale had a green 77 phosphorus grenade in his hand.
He threw aside the black safety cap as he reached the doorway, and was in the act of tossing the grenade inside when he suddenly stood straight up, his bush-hat fell off, and the side of his face was covered with blood. He fell full length, landing almost at my feet, and someone grabbed him and pulled him away. I was at one side of the doorway, and a small sharp-faced sergeant whom I didn't know was at the other, with a tommy-gun. Gale's phosphorus bomb hadn't exploded—they're dicey things with a tape which unwinds in flight and a ball and spring mechanism—but I had my second 36 grenade in one hand and my rifle in the other. The little sergeant also had a 36; he nodded, we pulled our pins together, he waited three seconds that seemed like hours, and we tossed them in, flattening against the bunker. On the heels of the double explosion he darted in, Thompson stuttering; two quick bursts and he was out again.
“Three on ’em!” he shouted, and his jaw dropped as he stared past me. I turned to see a Jap racing across in front of the bunker, a sword flourished above his head. He was going like Jesse Owens, screaming his head off, right across my front; I just had sense enough to take a split second, traversing my aim with him before I fired; he gave a convulsive leap, and I felt that jolt of delight—I'd hit the bastard!—and as he fell on all fours the Highland officer with whom I'd played football dived on him from behind, slashing at his head with a kukri. Someone rounded the bunker, almost barging into me; it was Stanley, shouting: “Where? Where?”—in that kind of mad scramble all that matters is seeing the enemy. He had a Bren magazine in one hand, and was trying to change it for the one on the gun; I grabbed the barrel to steady it, burned myself, yelped, and seized the folded legs while he pushed the full magazine home—one of his puttees was coming loose, a yard away Gale was lying dead with two men bending over him, the whole wood was echoing with shots and explosions and yelling voices. Stanley ran past me, dropping the empty magazine—and as some Presbyterian devil made me pick it up I noticed Gale's hat lying in the bunker doorway, and the little sergeant was shouting and running towards a second bunker.
The sixty seconds I have just described, being among the most eventful of my life, I have been able to relate almost step by step; after that it was more disconnected. There were half a dozen men at the second bunker, feeding in grenades and firing through the slit, a Jap was shot and bayonetted in the entrance, and then we were past it, making for the far verge of the wood. Shots came from an earthwork to our left, a man had his bush-hat shot from his head—usually when a hat is hit it stays in place, but this one spun off like a plate, landing several feet away—and a Jap appeared between the trees and I shot him and he fell against a trunk, and the little sergeant dropped his tommy-gun and swore and picked it up again—the sequence of these things I can't be certain of because it all happened so quickly—or seemed to. I've spoken at the start of this paragraph of “sixty seconds” because I can't believe it took any longer, and probably the rush from the first bunker to the second and on to the wood's edge took about the same—but if that little sergeant were to appear and tell me it took twenty minutes, I couldn't contradict him. We were in that wood four hours, according to the regimental history, killed 136 Japanese, and lost seven dead and 43 wounded ourselves in the whole operation, but I wasn't conscious of time, only of the highlights of action. The fight at the first bunker is crystal clear, but the rest is a series of unrelated incidents.
It was a hectic murderous confusion: the whole section was in the wood, but Stanley is the only one I remember—indeed, Gale is the only other I can positively identify from the entire platoon. The little sergeant was there most of the time—when we were lying on the edge of the wood, covering the open ground beyond, I heard him asking for a field dressing—but which platoon he belonged to I never knew. When we opened fire at Japs moving on the open ground, the men on either side of me were strangers; one of them kept seeing Japs in the trees beyond the open space, and blazed away, cursing, but I believe it was wishful thinking.
Then we were withdrawing. Behind us the company were leaving the wood by the way we'd come in, and when we on the far side were ordered to fall back we went quite slowly, with the little sergeant shouting hoarsely to take our time. He knew his business, that one, for as we retreated past the cleared bunkers to the front of the wood he kept up an incessant patter of orders and encouragement (I have an idea he was a Welshman) keeping us in a rough line, well spaced out, firing as we went, for Japs were filtering into the trees we had just left. He was next to me, firing short bursts; I had a shot at one running figure among the trees, and he went down, but I think it was a dive for cover.
There was a film called Honky Tonk, in which Clark Gable had to back out of a saloon, covering the occupants with his gun and remarking: “This reminds me of the days when we used to do all our walking backwards.” The words came back to me in the temple wood, as such things will, and at some point the man on my left dropped to his knees shouting: “Look what I've got!” I didn't identify the object, but what he did get a second later was a bullet in the leg from an unseen Jap, and he rolled over shouting: “They got me! The dirty rats, they got me!” It wasn't a bad wound, a furrow just above the knee, and he hobbled out of the wood under his own steam, blaspheming painfully.
That was the battle in the temple wood, an insignificant moment in the war; its importance is personal. It was typical of the kind of action that was going on all around Meiktila, and if figures mean anything, we won it, although I am still puzzled about its conclusion. Japs were re-entering the wood as we left it, but they cannot have reoccupied it, for the battalion history's tally of Japanese killed is exact, not an estimate, and must have been made on the ground afterwards, with ourselves in possession. So I conclude that the wi
thdrawal in which I took part was not the end of the action, as I thought at the time.
This is the trouble with eye-witness: it sees only part of the whole, and is incomplete. If mine is patchy, I can only excuse it on the ground that I had never been in a fight to the death before, with the enemy at close quarters, which is, to say the least, confusing. I have tried to describe in plain terms what I saw, and can be sure of; what I thought at the time is less clear, but some strong impressions remain.
At the moment of fixing bayonets I had that hollow feeling which most writers locate in the stomach but in my case manifests itself in the throat; after we were fired on I didn't notice it. To say I was shocked at seeing Parker and Steele hit is correct in the sense that one is shocked by running into a brick wall; astonishment and fascination came into it, too. You read of such things, now you see the reality, and think: “So that's what it looks like!” The thought of being hit myself occurred only in the moment before I started crawling towards the Bren, to be submerged in relief when Stanley took possession. Going into the wood I was scared stiff but not witless; given Aladdin's lamp I would have been in Bermuda. No, that's not true; if it were, I'd have kept out of the Army in the first place. Being there, with the choice made, you go ahead—and if anyone says you could always change your mind, and run away, he's wrong; you can't. It sounds pompous to say it's a matter of honour, but that's what it comes down to, and Falstaff knew it. He was quite right, though, that honour hath no skill in surgery—which is why you are perfectly entitled to be scared.
There is the consolation that once the shooting starts, the higher thought takes a back seat. Putting a grenade into a bunker had the satisfaction of doing grievous bodily harm to an enemy for whom I felt real hatred, and still do. Seeing Gale killed shocked me as our first casualties had done, and I think enraged me. I wanted a Jap then, mostly for my own animal pride, no doubt, but seeing Gale go down sparked something which I felt in the instant when I hung on my aim at the Jap with the sword, because I wanted to be sure. The joy of hitting him was the strongest emotion I felt that day; I notice I've mentioned it twice.*
Perhaps I'm too self-analytical, but I'm trying to be honest. It's hard to say where fear and excitement meet, or which predominates. The best way I can sum up my emotions in that wood is to say that a continuous nervous excitement was shot through with occasional flashes of rage, terror, elation, relief, and amazement. So far as I have seen, most men are like that, by and large, although there are exceptions. A few really enjoy it; I've seen them (and I won't say they're deranged, because even the most balanced man has moments of satisfaction in battle which are indistinguishable from enjoyment, short-lived though they may be). Some are blessed with the quick reflexes which, combined with experience, enable them to keep cool, like the little sergeant. Others seem to be on a “high”, like the man who cried “Look what I've got!”
I was glad to come out of it, but even then I felt what I feel now, and what every old soldier feels: a gratitude for having been there, and an abiding admiration amounting to awe for the sheer ability of my comrades. Nowadays the highest praise a soldier can get is the word “professional”. Fourteenth Army weren't professionals. They were experts.
The aftermath was as interesting as the battle. Fiction and the cinema have led us to expect certain reactions from men in war, and the conventions of both demand displays of emotion, or a restraint which is itself highly emotional. I don't know what Nine Section felt, but whatever it was didn't show. They expressed no grief, or anger, or obvious relief, or indeed any emotion at all; they betrayed no symptoms of shock or disturbance, nor were they nervous or short-tempered. If they were quieter than usual that evening, well, they were dog-tired. Discussion of the day's events was limited to a brief reference to Gale's death, and to the prospects of the wounded: Steele had been flown out on a “flying taxi”, one of the tiny fragile monoplanes to which stretchers were strapped; it was thought his wound was serious.* Parker was said to be in dock in Meiktila (and a few weeks later there were to be ironic congratulations when he returned to the section with a romantic star-shaped scar high on his chest; penicillin was a new marvel then).
Not a word was said about Tich Little, but a most remarkable thing happened (and I saw it repeated later in the campaign) which I have never heard of elsewhere, in fact or fiction, although I suspect it is as old as war.
Tich's military effects and equipment—not, of course, his private possessions, or any of his clothing—were placed on a groundsheet, and it was understood that anyone in the section could take what he wished. Grandarse took one of his mess-tins; Forster, his housewife, making sure it contained only Army issue and nothing personal; Nixon, after long deliberation, took his rifle, an old Lee Enfield shod in very pale wood (which surprised me, for it seemed it might make its bearer uncomfortably conspicuous); I took his pialla, which was of superior enamel, unlike the usual chipped mugs. Each article was substituted on the groundsheet with our own possessions—my old pialla, Forster's housewife, and so on—and it was bundled up for delivery to the quartermaster. I think everyone from the original section took something.
It was done without formality, and at first I was rather shocked, supposing that it was a coldly practical, almost ghoulish proceeding—people exchanging an inferior article for a better one, nothing more, and indeed that was the pretext. Nick worked the bolt, squinted along the sights, hefted the rifle, and even looked in its butt-trap before nodding approval; Grandarse tossed his old mess-tin on to the groundsheet with a mutter about the booger's ’andle being loose. But of course it had another purpose: without a word said, everyone was taking a memento of Tich.
An outsider might have thought, mistakenly, that the section was unmoved by the deaths of Gale and Little. There was no outward show of sorrow, no reminiscences or eulogies, no Hollywood heart-searchings or phony philosophy. Forster asked “W'ee's on foorst stag?”; Grandarse said “Not me, any roads; Ah's aboot knackered”, and rolled up in his blanket; Nick cleaned Tich's rifle; I washed and dried his pialla; the new section commander—that young corporal who earlier in the day had earned the Military Medal—told off the stag roster; we went to sleep. And that was that. It was not callousness or indifference or lack of feeling for two comrades who had been alive that morning and were now names for the war memorial; it was just that there was nothing to be said.
It was part of war; men died, more would die, that was past, and what mattered now was the business in hand; those who lived would get on with it. Whatever sorrow was felt, there was no point in talking or brooding about it, much less in making, for form's sake, a parade of it. Better and healthier to forget it, and look to tomorrow.
The celebrated British stiff upper lip, the resolve to conceal emotion which is not only embarrassing and useless, but harmful, is just plain common sense.
But that was half a century ago. Things are different now, when the media seem to feel they have a duty to dwell on emotion, the more harrowing the better, and to encourage its indulgence. The cameras close on stricken families at funerals, interviewers probe relentlessly to uncover grief, pain, fear, and shock, know no reticence or even decency in their eagerness to make the viewers' flesh creep, and wallow in the sentimental cliché (victims are always “innocent”, relatives must be “loved ones”). And the obscene intrusion is justified as “caring” and “compassionate” when it is the exact opposite.
The pity is that the public shapes its behaviour to the media's demands. The bereaved feel obliged to weep and lament for the cameras (and feel a flattering importance at their attention). Even young soldiers, on the eve of action in the Gulf, confessed, under a nauseating inquisition designed to uncover their fears, to being frightened—of course they were frightened, just as we were, but no interviewer in our time was so shameless, cruel, or unpatriotic as to badger us into admitting our human weakness for public consumption, and thereby undermining public morale, and our own. In such a climate, it is not to be wondered at that
a general should agonise publicly about the fears and soul-searchings of command—Slim and Montgomery and MacArthur had them, too, but they would rather have been shot than admit it. They knew the value of the stiff upper lip.
The damage that fashionable attitudes, reflected (and created) by television, have done to the public spirit, is incalculable. It has been weakened to the point where it is taken for granted that anyone who has suffered loss and hardship must be in need of “counselling”; that soldiers will suffer from “post-battle traumatic stress” and need psychiatric help. One wonders how Londoners survived the Blitz without the interference of unqualified, jargon-mumbling “counsellors”, or how an overwhelming number of 1940s servicemen returned successfully to civilian life without benefit of brain-washing. Certainly, a small minority needed help; war can leave terrible mental scars—but the numbers will increase, and the scars enlarge, in proportion to society's insistence on raising spectres which would be better left alone. Tell people they should feel something, and they'll not only feel it, they'll regard themselves as entitled and obliged to feel it.
It is a long way from the temple wood to Sheffield—and not only in miles. I knew a young Liverpudlian who, following the Hillsborough disaster, stayed away from work because, he said, of the grief he felt for those supporters of his team who had died on the terraces. He didn't know them, he hadn't been there, but he was too distressed to work. (Suppose Grandarse or the Battle of Britain pilots, with infinitely greater cause, had been too distressed to fight?) One shouldn't be too hard on the young man; he had been conditioned to believe that it was right, even proper, to indulge his emotions; he probably felt virtuous for having done so.
Quartered Safe Out There: A Harrowing Tale of World War II Page 11