Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 – The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire. Fergal Keane

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СКАЧАТЬ skill; and in Slim, the down-to-earth son of a Birmingham shopkeeper, who made war according to a gospel of patience, shrewdness and relentless attention to detail.

A massive reorganisation of the supply, training and medical systems was set in motion. With half a million men under arms in the subcontinent the demands for food and equipment – everything from fresh vegetables to .303 bullets for rifles – had placed an impossible strain on the pre-war colonial infrastructure. Ports, roads and airfields were all upgraded. More than 50,000 labourers were sent to improve the main road to Burma, which passed through Kohima to Imphal.^* The tea-planters of Assam provided half of the labour force. By 1943 Indian factories and farmers were producing more goods for the war effort than Australia, New Zealand and Canada put together.

      Rations had been a constant source of complaint from the men, with the ‘staple meal … a bar of dehydrated goat meat looking like a bar of tobacco and when boiled up smelling like an ancient billy-goat’. Now Slim’s head of administration, the aptly nicknamed Major General Alf ‘The Grocer’ Snelling, set out to revolutionise the quality and delivery of the food. He flew in some Chinese to start a duck farm which would produce eggs and he sent his men to India to procure live goats and sheep. Later Snelling would establish a jungle farm to keep up a steady supply of fresh food to the front-line forces, and he would perfect the art of dropping supplies to surrounded troops, painstakingly calculating and packing the supply needs of an entire division. When Slim was told that he could not get adequate supplies of parachutes in India he decided it was ‘useless to hope for supplies from home. We were bottom of the priority list there, for parachutes as for everything else.’ So he called in the ever-dependable Snelling and a few of his officers and told them that if proper silk parachutes were not available they should find a substitute. They began a search of the paper mills and jute factories of Calcutta, which ended with the development of a ‘parajute’, made entirely of jute, which was 85 per cent as effective as the normal parachutes. They were not about to drop men or fragile equipment from the air with them, but for food and ammunition they would be invaluable. Slim picked Colonel ‘Atte’ Persse, a man with a reputation for ‘making himself a nuisance to all and sundry until he got what he wanted’, to make sure tanks reached the Arakan in time for his offensive. Stone was shipped in from Madras to turn some of the jungle tracks into routes along which tanks could operate.

The most important change took place in the air. At the height of the retreat in 1942 the army could call on only four airfields with all-weather runways and up-to-date facilities. By the following November, thanks to a massive programme of American-sponsored construction, that number had increased tenfold.^* The existing fleet of Mohawk fighters was reinforced with Hurricanes, Beaufighters and Spitfires. From the point of view of the fighting man on the ground, one of the fighters’ most important roles was to protect the transport planes that brought him food and ammunition.

      The health of 14th Army was one of Slim’s gravest preoccupations. In the retreat of 1942 around 80 per cent of the British and Indian troops fell ill because of disease. British 6 Brigade lost half its strength in the Arakan, a staggering dissolution of fighting capacity. The official account stated that the ‘incidence of malaria during this campaign reached unimagined proportions’.

      It struck British and Indian troops with equal force. Major David Atkins commanded a transport unit travelling the road between Dimapur and Imphal and watched his Madrassi drivers falter with fever, one by one. ‘The Havildar clerks and the senior NCOs were changing so frequently because of fever, that orders given to one man were not passed on before the man you had given them to went sick. If you spoke to the new man, he would be replaced the next day by the former one.’

      Strict discipline on the taking of medication was enforced in 14th Army: if men started to come down with malaria their officers could be cashiered. It took the sacking of three commanders to drive the point home. Hospital admissions for disease dropped from 185 per thousand troops in 1942 to 100 per thousand in 1944.

      There were also changes in surgical practice. Treating wounds sustained in jungle fighting was a different prospect from treatment in Europe or the desert. The humidity, the frequently filthy conditions, the difficulty in finding clean water supplies, all presented an immense challenge to the many young and inexperienced surgeons of 14th Army. Wounds had to be cleaned out thoroughly and quickly, the medical chiefs warned. ‘The Japanese missiles have a habit of carrying not only clothing and equipment, but also jungle debris, leaves and dirt into the deeper parts of the wound.’ In such conditions a man with a minor wound could die from blood poisoning within twenty-four hours. Men were drilled in the importance of field hygiene. As one West Kent put it, ‘You learned to bury your crap and above all keep it away from the water source.’

      Slim also recognised that the battle for men’s minds would be central in the fighting to come. In 1943 the C-in-C India, Sir Archibald Wavell, agreed to appoint a psychiatrist to every division in India. Captain Paul Davis was sent to 2nd Division, which would fight at Kohima the following year. He set about weeding out unsuitable men. ‘As a result of this large numbers of dullards, psychoneurotics, and a few psychopaths and psychotics were unearthed. Combatant officers proved to be extremely enthusiastic at the idea of getting rid of these men.’ Davis found most of the commanders he encountered helpful. There had been a shift in military attitudes since the First World War, when shell-shock victims could be regarded as cowards, although there was one battalion commander who asked him, ‘Why should I send these men to you so that they will survive the war and go home and breed like rabbits, whilst all my finest men are going to risk being killed?’ During the battle of Kohima Davis set up a small psychiatric clinic just sixteen miles behind the front.

      Slim was aware that neither Churchill nor the CIGS, General Sir Alan Brooke, had much faith in the British and Indian soldier ever being able to meet the Japanese on equal terms in the jungle. Churchill believed that going into the jungle to fight the Japanese was ‘like going into the water to fight a shark’. But the Japanese did not come from a land of jungles and swamps. The jungle was no more a natural environment for them than it was for the British. The Japanese had trained and adapted. Slim’s 14th Army would do the same. An Infantry Committee set up after the Arakan debacle reported that troops needed to be fit and to be led by officers experienced in the jungle; they needed to avoid roads and learn how to use jungle tracks, and to be trained in concealment and jungle hygiene. One of the most prescient recommendations related to leadership: ‘command must be decentralised so that junior leaders will be confronted with situations in which they must make decisions and act without delay on their own responsibility’. To this, Slim added his own developing philosophy of jungle warfare. If encircled, stand fast and hold your ground, rely on air support for resupply and trust in the reserves to come up and hit the Japanese. They would outflank the enemy and cut their line of communication. Tens of thousands of men passed through the jungle training courses, where they were drilled in the basic dogma of encircle and outflank. Above all they learned to live with the strangeness of the jungle.

      As he planned his reconquest of Burma, Slim recognised that ultimate victory would depend on the soldiers of the Indian Army. More than two thirds of his 14th Army were drawn from the immense hinterlands of the empire, the majority from India itself. In the British mythology of the Raj few figures were more warmly drawn than that of the faithful native. In novels like Talbot Mundy’s For the Salt He Had Eaten, the Indian soldier risking, and often giving, his life for the white sahib is eulogised: ‘Proud as a Royal Rajput – and there is nothing else on God’s green earth that is even half as proud – true to his salt and stout of heart.’

By the end of 1943 the Indian Army had experienced surrender in Singapore, retreat in Burma, defeat in the Arakan, and the convulsions caused by the Quit India movement.^* Yet it had not risen as a body in mutiny or experienced mass desertions. There were more than two million men serving the allied cause in СКАЧАТЬ