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 inside from the breathless slump of the afternoon, Captain Thomas Pardoe found the grand lobby of the Strand Hotel a sanctuary of unimagined proportions. Gone, suddenly, the noise of the Burmese street, the call of the shoeshine boys and the rickshaw wallahs, and the air heavy with the smell of damp and river water. Rangoon in those days was a city aspiring to stature, made prosperous as the port through which Burma’s vast rice crop was exported, but still only a minor eminence on the fringes of the eastern empire. Visitors from India found Rangoon lush with gardens that ‘bloomed with tropical profusion – bougainvillea, poinsettas, laburnum and tall delphiniums of piercing blue. The Golden Mohur trees flamed like candles against the green foliage …’ They might stop to admire the great pagodas of Sule and Shwedagon whose golden domes rose above the city, or enjoy a night at an English-language theatre and dinner at the Strand, before moving on to Singapore and Malaya or westward to India. With its high ceilings, roomy corridors and floors of teak, the Strand was built for an age before air conditioning. Its founders, the four Sarkies brothers, were Armenians who had emigrated to the Far East from Persia and established a chain of luxury hotels which included the Strand’s more famous relation, Raffles Hotel in Singapore. The white-jacketed porters at the Strand would have taken Captain Pardoe’s bags without fuss while he signed his name in the guests’ register, a book that had in times past recorded the signatures of Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling and the future king of England, Edward VIII, who had stopped there in 1922 while on a royal tour with his cousin, ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten. On that occasion a sumptuous barge, decorated with the Burmese symbol of royalty, four golden peacocks’ heads, and topped by three model pagodas, was provided for the prince. Oarsmen in long, flowing robes steered the royal barge while the future king relaxed in the pavilion, sheltered from prying eyes by shimmering white curtains which billowed gently as the boat moved across the royal lake near the centre of the city. Later on his journey the prince played polo at Mandalay, the former home of the Burmese kings, and ‘was entertained by dancing girls at a lavish reception’.

The city encountered by Captain Pardoe nearly twenty years later had grown outwards to accommodate the Indian migrant labourers working in the city’s docks and factories. Daily they unloaded tons of supplies destined for the Chinese Nationalist armies fighting the Japanese across the border far to the north. A correspondent for the Manchester Guardian reported on 2 February 1942 that 5,000 lorries carrying 30,000 tons were using the 712 mile route every day.^* As Pardoe settled into his airy room at the Strand he must have relished the prospect of some time, no matter how brief, in Rangoon, an altogether different prospect from the central Chinese city of Chungking to which he was normally confined. That overcrowded, filthy city served as the temporary capital of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. As a liaison officer to the Chinese military headquarters, Pardoe was obliged to live there among hundreds of thousands of refugees, soldiers and a vast assortment of carpetbaggers and chancers. The American newspaper correspondent Theodore White described the streets as ‘full of squealing pigs, bawling babies, yelling men and the singsong chant of coolies carrying loads from up the river’. The generalissimo’s court was riven by relentless intrigue, spurred by the insatiable ambition of Chiang’s relatives to enrich themselves and by regional warlords who pleaded and menaced for favour.

      Pardoe arrived in Rangoon on 8 February 1941, but was given just a day to refresh himself before embarking on a mission to tour the country’s borders with Thailand and China. It was to be a journey by road, rail, boat and air, to investigate the local defences and to coordinate possible future action with the Chinese. Pardoe met up with a Chinese military delegation a week into his tour at the town of Kyukok on the border of the Chinese province of Yunnan. With an air suggesting a weary familiarity with the ways of his allies, he noted that while the visit was ‘supposed to have been strictly confidential, I am told its formation and proposed tour had already been announced over the TOKYO wireless’. Chiang’s court was riddled with informers.

      At this time, February 1941, the Japanese had not yet occupied Thailand, although there were numerous reports of fifth-column activities. Pardoe recorded the activities of suspected spies and Japanese attempts to subvert the local population in Burma.

      At Lilem, on the border with Thailand, he reported a rumour that eight hundred Japanese wearing Thai uniforms had been spotted just across the frontier; while a postmaster at Tachilek, who was being paid ten rupees a month to spy for the British, gave news that as many as 5,000 Japanese had arrived in Bangkok. The information seems to have been exaggerated, possibly by a spy anxious to please his paymasters. Further north, Pardoe worried over the role of Italian priests in the Shan states bordering China, whose influence ‘over some of their Asiatic converts is so strong, fifth column activities would be a possibility’. At Maungmagan on the Tenasserim coast he heard suspicions about a Mrs Leal, the Austrian wife of an Irish tin-mine owner. ‘She also owns a mine in the Thai frontier area. She set off to visit this mine in early April, taking with her a portable wireless set. Up till the war she was admittedly strongly pro-Nazi. I saw a copy of her dossier … She is being watched. Mr Ruddy [Burma Auxiliary Force], who has known her a long time, considers she is either extremely clever or else entirely innocent.’ Some official reader of this document in Rangoon has scribbled the words ‘A remarkable statement!’ next to this assessment of the curious Mrs Leal.

Another foreigner to arouse suspicion was a Mr G. R. Powell of the Watchtower Society of Australia. This representative of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was placed under surveillance by the Burma police in a classic case of mistaken priorities. Mr Powell represented a religious faith that customarily excited the suspicion of colonial officials, yet the Jehovah’s Witnesses were among the groups enthusiastically persecuted by Hitler’s Reich and would have offered little threat to the security of Burma.^*

      The captain made detailed notes on roads and beaches that would make suitable invasion points. But for all the impressive detail on local military dispositions and possible enemy spies, Pardoe’s report did not contain a single line about possible evacuation routes for a retreating army or for tens of thousands of refugees. In those becalmed days before Japan entered the war, he could hardly have foreseen such a necessity. At the end of the report an unnamed intelligence officer wrote, ‘A very good report – may be very useful if fighting breaks out in Burma’. If – the conditional that masked a vast failure of intelligence, planning and, perhaps above all, imagination. The defence of Burma was left to a small garrison consisting of two British battalions and the eight battalions of local troops and military police that comprised the Burma Rifles and the Burma Frontier Force, as well as the part-timers of the Burma Auxiliary Force, all dispersed throughout the country’s three military regions – upper, middle and lower Burma. It was a force useful for colonial missions of chastisement but utterly unfit for defending a country larger than France against invasion by a modern army supported by armour and aircraft.

      From Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff in London to the GOC Burma, Major General D. K. McLeod, and the Governor, Sir Reginald Dorman Smith, nobody had allocated the resources needed to defend Burma against an invasion from Thailand. They simply had not visualised Japan occupying Thailand and then sweeping Britain aside. Forget the evidence of Japan’s victory over the Russians four decades before, the abundant intelligence on Tokyo’s new ships, aircraft and artillery, or the defeats inflicted on the Chinese over the past decade. The Japanese were still little yellow men, myopic and bandy-legged, and could never pose a mortal threat to the greatest empire the world had ever seen. As Corporal Fred Millem of the Burma Auxiliary Force, the local equivalent of the Territorial Army, ruefully put it after the disaster: ‘China had exhausted Japan – she could not last more than three months. Japan’s air force was no good, her pilots all had bad eyesight and could not fly by night … Etc, etc, etc, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah!’ When war came, the Japanese 15th Army would deploy four divisions against one and a half divisions of British, Burmese and Indians.

      The overall responsibility for the defence of Burma was given to the Commander-in-Chief Far East, Air Chief Marshal СКАЧАТЬ