Twenty-One: Coming of Age in World War II. James Holland

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СКАЧАТЬ are often all most people know about the war in Burma, and to many they are still seen as the SAS of the jungle war, the ‘green ghosts that haunted the Jap’. Like the SAS, they operated deep behind enemy lines, but there the similarity ends. The SAS were a small band of men, but the Chindits, although also special forces, were made up from ordinary infantry brigades; nearly 10,000 troops took part in the Second Chindit Expedition in 1944.

      They were the brainchild of Major-General Orde Wingate, a charismatic and unorthodox soldier who had been brought to the Far East in 1942 by General (and soon to be Field Marshal) Wavell, then Commander-in-Chief of India. The war against Japan was not going well: Singapore and Malaya had been lost and so had much of Burma. With the Japanese knocking on the door of India itself, Wavell decided he needed someone with fresh ideas, unconstrained by notions of military orthodoxy, to help plan the reconquest of Burma and at the very least inflict serious damage on the Japanese lines of communication. He had first met Wingate in 1938, during his time as C-in-C Middle East, and found him to be a mercurial officer with plenty of energy and determination. Wavell’s early impressions were not misconceived. In 1941, and with only a few hundred men, Wingate famously bluffed 12,000 Italians into surrender during the Abyssinian campaign.

      Wingate arrived in India having recovered from a recent suicide attempt. A manic depressive, he nonetheless found himself re-energized by the task Wavell had given him, and after reconnoitring northern Burma, began developing his ideas for ‘Long-Range Penetration’ (LRP). Mistrustful of paratroopers, he nonetheless believed that with the help of supply drops from the air directed by radio on the ground, it should be possible to maintain a force that could operate within the ‘heart of the enemy’s military machine’. His theory was that by keeping constantly mobile, his forces could avoid facing any concentration of enemy forces.

      Wavell gave the go-ahead for an expedition using the 77th Indian Infantry Brigade. Split into seven different columns, they set off in February 1943, managing to penetrate 150 miles behind enemy lines. They blew up sections of railway, gathered some helpful intelligence and to a certain degree distracted the Japanese, but as one battalion history put it, ‘Never have so many marched for so little.’¹ Strategically, the expedition was certainly of small value, while the many who became sick or were wounded along the way had to be left where they were – a horrible fate considering the brutality with which the Japanese treated such men.

      The First Chindit Expedition was, however, a propaganda dream, and Wingate and ‘The British Ghost Army’ were fêted around the world in the Allied press. Crucially, Wingate had also come to the attention of the prime minister, Winston Churchill – so much so that he was called to Canada to outline his ideas on Long-Range Penetration at the Quebec Conference in August 1943, a gathering that was attended by Churchill, President Roosevelt and the British and American Chiefs of Staff. An impressive orator, Wingate persuaded the Combined Chiefs of the value of launching another expedition. Even the Americans agreed to it, for although they had no interest in Britain’s colonial empire, they were keen to help the Chinese, who they believed could make a difference in the war against Japan. They had already sent troops under General Joe Stilwell to lead the Chinese Nationalists operating on the border of northern Burma. With this in mind, Wingate was given the task of cutting the lines of communication to those Japanese forces opposing Stilwell’s men. Wingate agreed, although privately he also hoped to reconquer the whole of the north of Burma.

      Wingate also achieved another coup when the American Chief of the Air Staff, General ‘Hap’ Arnold, offered to lend him an air force of transport planes, gliders, fighters and bombers, to support the expedition. This was to be called No 1 Air Commando, or ‘Cochran’s Flying Circus’ after its commander, Colonel Phil Cochran. This generosity from Arnold enabled Wingate to think on an even bigger scale. With comprehensive air support, his men would not be left to fend for themselves; furthermore, they could be flown deep behind enemy lines to start with rather than tramping hundreds of miles through thick jungle. With air support, it would be possible to maintain many more men, and with many more men, the effectiveness of the Chindits would be even greater. That was the theory, at any rate.

      Like many others, Captain Dr Chris Brown had been impressed by the accounts and coverage of the Chindits’ exploits, so when he saw a request for volunteers for a further expedition, he decided to put his name forward. ‘I could never face my conscience again,’ he wrote in a letter to his parents, ‘if I didn’t do something about it.’ A young doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), he spent a fortnight assigned to the 4/9 Gurkhas, before joining the 2nd Battalion, the King’s Own Royal Rifles, at Dukwan Dam, near Jhansi in India, on 1 December, 1943.

      Part of the 111th Indian Infantry Brigade, the battalion left Dukwan by special train on 15 January 1944, crossing into Assam six days later. From the railhead at Silchar, they had to march across country to Imphal on the India – Burma border where they were to begin training. A taste of things to come, it was tough going, but Chris was fit and young, and as a boy growing up in Scotland, had always loved mountains and the outdoor life. On a morning of rain and mist – ‘Scottish weather’ – his first view of Imphal Plain reminded him of Rannoch Moor. Imphal itself, he noted, was ‘no more than a glorified village, tho’ at present it is the main military base, and there is a constant and staggering flow of trucks.’

      Amidst this hive of activity, they began their preparations. As with the first expedition, the main fighting unit was to be the ‘column’, which was formed by splitting a battalion of roughly 800 men, such as the 2nd King’s Own Royal Regiment, into two, and then adding a number of mules, ponies and bullocks. Each column had its share of rifle platoons, mortars, engineers, reconnaissance, and, of course, medical staff, albeit just one doctor and four medical orderlies. The 2nd King’s Own was divided into 41 and 46 Columns; Chris was assigned to the latter.

      Training principally involved getting fit and practising marching through thick and often precipitous jungle, and crossing rivers. Getting men across water was not usually too much of a problem – it was persuading the mules that was tricky, and ensuring that none of the equipment became wet and damaged in the process.

      General Wingate himself visited the brigade and inspected their progress in February, just a few weeks before the expedition was due to be launched. ‘We watched his arrival in a light plane with some awe,’ noted Chris. ‘[He was] a small figure in a pale khaki suit and an enormous old-fashioned topee.’ That evening, Wingate held a conference for all the brigade officers – Chris included – in which he outlined his plans. Nearly 9000 men would be used for the Second Chindit Expedition, he explained, initially made up from five infantry brigades of which 111th Brigade was one. As a deception, they were to be called the fictitious ‘3rd Indian Division’. Formally, they were ‘Special Force’; informally, they were simply Chindits, a name derived from Chinthé, the name of the mythical griffins that were supposed to guard Burmese temples.

      ‘His main principle was age-old,’ noted Chris, ‘to outflank the enemy.’ This Wingate was going to do by inserting these brigades by glider or plane far behind the enemy lines. Once there, each brigade would make a base – a ‘stronghold’ – that would be inaccessible to wheeled vehicles but which would include a hastily constructed airstrip and drop-zone (DZ) for resupplying the brigade and for evacuating the wounded. The enemy was to be encouraged to attack the stronghold while ‘floater columns’, operating like guerrillas in the jungle, would assault the Japanese in turn.

      Wingate’s abilities and character have been the subject of fevered discussion ever since the war – some claim he was a genius, others that he was militarily myopic and too eccentric for his own good. This is not the place to join the debate, but Chris Brown, for one, was deeply impressed by him. ‘His speech was magnificent and enthralling … He made everything appear so straightforward and easy,’ wrote Chris, who was won over despite Wingate’s ‘very anti-doctor’ comments. ‘The presence of doctors, he thought, made the men soft, illness-conscious and apt to “give up the ghost,”’ СКАЧАТЬ