to do, no African NCO, no other African; he ought to have been hopeless and helpless, and no one probably would have blamed him if he had discreetly gone to ground until all was quiet…Did Slim ever hear of Kewku Pong?’
In November 1944, Sierra Leonean troops had to carry fifty stretcher cases over the Pidaung hill range. A British officer wrote: ‘Bamboo ladders were built to get the stretchers up the rock face…Nothing…will ever compare with the perilous descent from the 2,300-foot escarpment…The European and senior African NCOs went out with torches and guided the column in…By the light of bamboo flares the stretchers were passed hand over hand down the cliff faces, some Africans going on hands and knees to form a human bridge over the worst places. The last stretcher case was safely in the advanced dressing station by 9.30 that night, after fifteen hours on the march.’
Radio Tokyo denounced the African divisions as ‘cannibals led by European fanatics’. Yet perhaps the most convincing and passionate testimonial to their contribution is that of one of their officers, Maj. Denis Cookson: ‘Without a murmur of complaint they defended a country whose inhabitants they despised, in a quarrel whose implications they did not understand. They had volunteered to fight for the British, and if the British brought them to a wilderness, that was a sufficient reason. They squatted down in their trenches, polished the leather charms they wore next to the skin, prayed to Allah for his protection, and good-humouredly got on with the job.’ They deserved more gratitude from their imperial masters than they received, and perhaps contributed more to the campaign than their critics allowed.
Behind the infantry of both sides toiled one of the most extraordinary gatherings of pack animals ever mustered with a modern army. Only beasts could cover mountainous ground, especially during and after the monsoon. White bullocks were dyed green, to render them less conspicuous targets. British soldiers found themselves receiving special training as mule handlers, and many grew fond of their charges. All ranks had to be carefully instructed in packing saddles, for overloading caused girth sores, or worse. The four mules designated for an infantry rifle company headquarters, for instance, could carry 158 pounds apiece. A typical load was expressed in regulations as one signal pistol; two x two-inch mortars plus eighteen bombs; five hundred rounds of .303 ammunition and a thousand rounds of 9mm sten. The Indian Army’s mountain batteries’ light guns were dismantled for mule portage. Their British officers were also issued with chargers, which rather than riding most used to carry personal effects—blanket, mosquito net, rifle in a saddle bucket. When supplies were air-dropped, these included corn in vast quantities for the pack train.
Beyond mules, Japanese and British alike exploited elephants. The animals and their local riders—‘oozies’, as they were known—had been employed before the war in Burma’s teak forests. Slim’s tusker supremo was Lt Col. Bill Williams, a First World War Camel Corps veteran who had been handling elephants for the Burma-Bombay Trading Corporation since 1920. ‘Elephant Bill’ adored his charges, and worked devotedly not only to make them serviceable to the British cause, but also to protect the animals’ interests. In the winter of 1944 he led a force of 147 elephants across the Chindwin, reinforcing his herd with abandoned Japanese beasts as the army advanced. Although, surprisingly, each elephant could carry little more than a mule’s load, their bridge-building skills were much in demand. It was an awesome sight, to see an elephant lift in its trunk a log weighing a quarter of a ton. The great animals built 270 crossings for Fourteenth Army. Men sometimes glimpsed, for instance, a broken-down amphibious DUKW being towed by a tusker. John Randle’s unit was impressed by the elephants provided to carry its heavy mortars, but dismayed to find them eating their camouflage foliage.
The best ‘oozies’ were what Williams called ‘real Burmans, the Irishmen of the East’, inveterate gamblers who cared as much as he did for their animals. Some were careless, however, causing terrible suffering by allowing battery acid to leak from loads onto elephants’ backs. Williams established a field veterinary hospital to care for the injured, but nothing could be done on the night when a horrified sapper officer drove into his camp to report that one of their favourite beasts, Okethapyah—Pagoda Stone—had trodden on a landmine. ‘I gave Alex a good tot of rum, told him I could not amputate an elephant’s legs, and we could only do our best to prevent such accidents in future.’
Williams scoured parachute dropping zones for broken bags of salt, which his animals adored, and strove constantly to prevent the casual cruelty of soldiers. Once, an Indian Army Service Corps driver, enraged by an elephant blocking his road, simply shot it in the leg. In October 1944 Williams’s favourite elephant, Bandoola, forty-eight years old, got loose in a pineapple grove and contracted acute colic after eating nine hundred fruits. Bandoola recovered from this experience only to be found dead a few months later with one tusk removed, and a wound inflicted by a British bullet. Romantic though the elephants were, they suffered grievously for their role in a struggle of which they knew nothing. Many used by the Japanese were wounded or killed by RAF strafing. Most of those recaptured had had their tusks sawn off for ivory. Some 4,000 elephants are estimated to have died in Burma between 1942 and 1945.
It was a strange world, that of Fourteenth Army, divorced from anything its soldiers had known in past life. ‘We had entered an enchanted zone—a place of evil enchantment, if you like,’ wrote Brian Aldiss. ‘You could not buy a ticket to get where we were…No women were allowed, or hairdressers, or any kind of extraneous occupation. Lawyers, entertainers, politicians—all were forbidden…To attend this show, you had to be young and part of the British Empire.’ There was no loot to be scavenged from the battlefield, such as the armies fighting in Europe enjoyed. There were only the enemy’s swords and pathetic banners, though Aldiss was once bemused to see a man marching with an old Japanese typewriter lashed to his sixty-pound pack.
There were few illusions about the loyalties of Burmans, in whose country this bitter struggle was fought out. A 20th Division report described 10 per cent of the locals—often tribesmen from minority communities, persecuted by the Burman majority—as pro-British, 10 per cent as diehard anti-British, and 80 per cent as ‘lukewarm, assisting whichever superior forces they are forced or persuaded to’. John Randle once entered a village to find a badly wounded Japanese, obviously dying, ‘with his left leg shattered, bloated and gangrenous’. A group of Burmans surrounded him, one of whom was driving a stick up his anus. Randle shot dead both the Japanese and his Burman torturer.
Men learned to beware mist on the hills, which often persisted until mid-morning, screening enemy movements. They were respectful of Japanese 90mm mortars. At night, two green verey lights from the enemy lines usually signalled an attack. Officers found it prudent to dress indistinguishably from their men, to avoid attracting the attention of snipers. The first of 114 Field Regiment to be killed in action was John Robbins, a newly-arrived young forward observation officer who went into action alongside the infantry wearing badges of rank, binoculars, and a map case prominently slung round his neck. One burst from a Japanese light machine gun removed Robbins.
In Indian and African units some British officers grew beards, to make their white skins less conspicuous. When Captain Ronnie McAllister joined 1/3rd Gurkhas at the beginning of 1945, he was warned to avoid exposing himself unnecessarily. One Gurkha colonel was notorious for making his white officers lead from the front, with the consequence that some twenty were killed within months. There had been a legendary 1/3rd incident in 1943, when in battle the CO himself started firing at the Japanese with a bren gun. Afterwards, the subadarmajor reproved him fiercely, saying: ‘This must never happen again. It is our job to fight, sahib, and yours to command.’ McAllister said: ‘The people who lived through 1944 had no illusions. They told us not to rush about too much, to stay alive.’
Some of those who marched into Burma in the winter of 1944, including McAllister, had been waiting years to see action. Maj. John Hill was a pre-war regular soldier, now a company commander in the 2nd Berkshires, who had spent forty months on garrison duties in India: ‘The war took a long time to reach us.’ The Berkshires were shocked by their first sights of battle: ‘Jeep ambulances came slowly past us with the groaning, bloody, bandaged forms of three men. I remember saying to myself: “So this is it,” and others must have thought the same. The ambulances passed the whole battalion slowly, as if to emphasise the moment. It seemed odd that, after five years of