Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings

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СКАЧАТЬ even as starving survivors of his army stumbled past. ‘You want a statement?’ Mutaguchi growled. ‘I have killed thousands of my men. I should not go back across the Chindwin alive.’ Mutaguchi did not kill himself, however, and lived to be sacked a few months later. Of all the Imperial Army’s commanders, he had become the most detested and scorned by his own officers and men.

      ‘Sometimes it is impossible to carry out very difficult orders, but even though the command recognise this, they will not admit their mistake until every man has died trying to carry them out,’ a Japanese officer prisoner told his British captors. ‘The unreasoning obedience of men in carrying out idiotic orders is pitiful to behold. It was often impossible for me to give the actual orders—sometimes I only passed on half of them. “We get all the fighting but none of the food—why?” No one dared say this, but everybody thought it.’

      In the autumn of 1944, as Fourteenth Army began its own advance towards the Chindwin river and Burma, at first the Japanese could deploy only four very weak divisions, totalling some 20,000 men, against Slim’s six, plus two independent brigades—a British ration strength of 260,000 men. In the north, Chinese divisions under Stilwell were making sluggish progress towards the clearance of the Burma Road between India and China. The only significant achievement of the second Chindit expedition was to assist the capture of Myitkyina, a vital link on the route, which finally fell on 3 August. It required the efforts of three Chinese divisions, aided by the American ‘Merrill’s Marauders’, together with several thousand Chindits, to achieve this success against the weak, poorly-equipped Japanese 18th Division. But the prospect now beckoned of opening the China passage.

      Slim’s invaders were supported by forty-eight fighter and bomber squadrons and a total of 4,600 aircraft in the theatre, many of them American transports. The Japanese had just sixty-six planes. Though they were able to reinforce their ground forces before spring, the scene was set for Fourteenth Army to commence its recapture of Burma. Mountbatten’s chief of staff, Gen. Henry Pownall, perceived an urgency about this task. Like others of his time, place and nation, he saw Britain engaged in a race between the recapture of her Asian colonies and American victory in the Pacific. If the British lost the contest, if they failed to secure physical possession before the Japanese flag came down, the Union flag might never again fly over this great region: ‘There’s not much time to lose. The Yanks are going to have Japan beat by Xmas 1945. We have got a lot of cleaning-up to do by then. The Yanks are not going to wait for us (no reason why they should) but we really don’t want our Far Eastern Empire…handed back to us entirely by American single-handed victory. So we aim at all Burma by next summer and Malaya not too long afterwards.’

      The twin battles of Imphal and Kohima had been essential, to halt the Japanese advance westwards. British victory had crippled the fighting power of the enemy on the Burman front, where Japan no longer possessed resources to frustrate any significant Allied purpose. Slim’s chief foes were now terrain, disease, weather, logistics. Mountbatten supported an important decision: to keep fighting through the monsoon, when in the past all significant operations were halted. Thereafter, Slim was called upon to move a modern Western army across hundreds of miles of the most inhospitable country in the world, devoid of road communications, to redeem the humiliations which Britain had suffered in 1941-42, and to keep alive a dream of empire which thoughtful men knew to be doomed. Churchill badly wanted to retrieve Burma and Malaya, but was determined, he told the chiefs of staff in September 1944, ‘that the minimum of effort should be employed in this disease-ridden country’. Here was a prospect rich in pathos, tragedy or absurdity according to viewpoint. As so often in wars, brave men were to do fine and hard things in pursuit of a national illusion.

      2 ‘THE FORGOTTEN ARMY’

      A British officer returning from home leave recorded gloomily: ‘In the UK…I found everywhere a dreadful ignorance about Fourteenth Army and also generally about Burma.’ But Slim’s men had learned to take a defiant pride in their status as ‘the forgotten army’. In the autumn of 1944 they advanced with spirits infinitely buoyed by victory at Imphal and Kohima. Some of the men who now began hacking a path towards the Chindwin river, sweating up the soaring hills and scrambling down the steep valleys towards its bank, had been fighting thereabouts since 1942. A young British signaller who joined 2nd Division was awed by the veterans with whom he found himself: ‘I was a pale white thing; they were tanned the colour of a mule’s backside. I knew nothing; they knew everything and could say nothing.’ The same soldier, Brian Aldiss, wrote home as the advance to the Chindwin began: ‘The grand scenery here produces a great calm, and seems to reduce war to the useless squabble it really is.’ He was as moved as many other participants by the spectacle of Fourteenth Army negotiating the hills of Assam:

      When our lorry was labouring to the top of a crest, we could see the thread of vehicles far away behind us, below clouds; conversely, when we were in a valley, we could look up through clouds and see that thread continuing far ahead of us, climbing the next series of heights…To be part of this inset of war was most thrilling after dark. Dim headlights scarcely penetrated the muck we threw up. We could scarcely see the tail lights of the vehicle ahead. Speed was almost down to walking pace. The impression of an animal bent on traversing a strange planet was at its strongest. On either side, unknowable, thrilling, fearsome, stood the jungle, pale as a ghost jungle in its layers of dust.

      The 1944-45 battle for Burma was the last great adventure of Britain’s imperial army. It brought together under Slim’s command British soldiers and Gurkhas, East and West Africans, above all Indians: Sikhs and Baluchis, Madrassis, Dogras and Rajputs, pride of the Raj. Only a fraction of those who fought for the Allied cause in Burma were British—two divisions—and just one in thirteen of all ground troops under Mountbatten’s command in South-East Asia.

      To a man, Britain’s Indian troops were volunteers, many from the north, where soldiering was a traditional career. The dramatic expansion of the Indian Army between 1939 and 1945—from 189,000 to 2.5 million men—caused a dilution of quality, and especially a shortage of suitable leaders, which significantly affected its performance. Yet the exotic traditions, the romance and prowess of great regiments, still thrilled British officers who felt privileged to serve with them, usually on a scale of around twelve per battalion. ‘Gurkhas were wonderful chaps to command,’ said Derek Horsford, who made his military career with the little Nepalese soldiers. ‘They had a lovely sense of humour. You had to prove yourself, but once they liked you they would do anything for you.’ Gurkha riflemen ate goat and rice, their British officers sardines and bully beef. Slim enjoyed telling a story of encountering 17th Indian Division’s famously feisty and colourful little commander, Pete Rees, leading a group of Assamese soldiers in the singing of a Welsh missionary hymn. ‘The fact that he sung in Welsh and they in Khasi only added to the harmony.’

      British officers were often much moved by the loyalty and courage of soldiers who were, to put the matter bluntly, mercenaries. A man of the 1/3rd Gurkhas said to his company commander one morning: ‘Today I shall win the Victoria Cross, or die.’ That Nepalese died sure enough, but his shade had to be content with the Indian Order of Merit. Such was the rivalry between two Indian officers of John Cameron-Hayes’s gun battery that each declined to take cover on the battlefield within sight of the other. Personal honour—‘izzat’—meant much. Captain John Randle was moved when his subadar Moghal Baz suddenly said as they ate one night: ‘I would like you to know, sahib, that with you I have served with great “izzat”.’ Every man in Slim’s army heard stories such as that of a Dogra jemadar badly wounded and taken to a dressing station. The NCO insisted on crawling back to his position, and fighting on until wounded three times more. As he lay dying, he repeated again and again the war cry ‘Mai kali ki Jai!’ His British captain crawled to where he lay. The jemadar said: ‘Go back and command the company, sahib, don’t worry about me.’

      Slim’s chief of staff wrote to his wife: ‘One can’t help feeling very humble when one deals with men like that. This army СКАЧАТЬ