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

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СКАЧАТЬ colonel whose battalion he was relieving, he noted his immaculate turban, beard glistening in the monsoon rain: ‘I saw something in him that was new to me: relish for war. The Sikhs gave every impression of enjoying themselves.’

      It never occurred to the British government to consult Indian political leaders about the conduct of the war, any more than they sought the views of Burman exiles. Reports of dissension among the Allies about Asian policy, freely aired in the British and American media, were shamelessly censored from the Indian press. The subcontinent was treated merely as a huge reservoir of manpower. An army psychiatrist’s report on Indian troops asserted that on the battlefield, most were ‘welladjusted’, as long as they were able to serve alongside men of their own racial group. ‘The sepoy,’ observed the report with imperialistic condescension, ‘accepts the army, its discipline, its customs and leaders uncritically. He is not greatly interested in the ideologies of the war, because he has a job which gives him a higher standard of living than before, an interest is taken in his welfare, and he gets leave fairly regularly. He does not ask a great deal more.’ Few British officers in Indian regiments perceived that the day of the Raj was done, or heeded the alienation of most Indian civilians from Britain’s war. ‘We took it for granted that Burma and Malaya would remain parts of the British Empire. We never thought India might go,’ said Captain Ronnie McAllister of 1/3rd Gurkhas, whose stepfather was a senior officer of the Indian Police. ‘I remember dinner parties at my stepfather’s house where there were police, Indian Civil Service people, Indians. Nobody even mentioned the possibility. We were cocooned against reality, you see, because the Indian Army was so staunch.’

      That army’s cultural complexities aroused some bewilderment among newcomers. Pathans in John Cameron-Hayes’s gunner unit not infrequently used their leaves to pursue tribal vendettas at home, before returning to the British war. John Randle, a company commander in the Baluchis at the age of twenty-two, was informed by his colonel of two taboos essential to maintaining respect for sahibs: an officer must never let himself be seen naked before his men, and should ensure that excretion was carried out in privacy on a ‘thunderbox’, even in action. The officers’ mess sweeper, a little man named Kantu whose broad grin never failed, thus sometimes found himself excusing the colonel’s temporary absence from a battle, saying as he saluted: ‘Command officer sahib, pot par hai’—‘The CO’s on the pot.’ Randle was so impressed by the spectacle of Kantu crawling out under fire to deposit the hallowed contents of the thunderbox in a latrine pit that he successfully submitted the sweeper’s name for a Mention in Dispatches. Less happily, Randle was informed that a homosexual British officer had been making advances to sepoys. His soldiers, mostly Pathans, were plotting to kill him. Randle saved the man’s life by having him removed for court martial.

      Once, an attached platoon of British troops arrived triumphant in the Baluchis’ lines with the carcass of a wild pig they had trapped. Randle’s subadar-major said firmly: ‘Sir, that thing is not coming into our position to defile us.’ The British sergeant said: ‘Sir, you know what the rations are like—we’re all hungry and browned off to hell with bully and biscuits.’ Randle told the sergeant to remove the pig, dismember it and come back with the meat discreetly concealed in the men’s haversacks, for transfer to their own cookhouse. The subadar-major acquiesced. Likewise when tins of mutton were delivered to the 4/1st Gurkhas, bearing labels which showed images of female sheep. The men declined to eat them. The battalion CO instructed his quartermaster to find a crayon and draw testicles on the beasts. The amended mutton was found acceptable.

      There was rivalry between British and Indian units, with some disdain on both sides. Derek Horsford of the Gurkhas said: ‘We thought nothing of the British Army. They seemed to us terribly inefficient.’ War in Burma produced wild incongruities, such as the spectacle of the gunners of 119 Field Regiment singing ‘Sussex by the Sea’ in honour of their native county as they heaved twenty-five-pounders across a jungle clearing. The culture and language of the Raj seeped into the veins of every man who served under Slim. Whether you were a Borderer or a Dragoon, tea was ‘char’, the washerman a ‘dhobi-wallah’, a mug a ‘piyala’, food ‘khana’, and so on. They smoked Indian ‘Victory V’ cigarettes, packed in brown paper packets for European consumption, green for Indian and African. Soldiers found both ‘unspeakably vile’.

      The foremost tactical reality for both British and Americans fighting the Japanese was that when the enemy moved, he became vulnerable to their firepower, but while dug into his brilliantly concealed and meticulously protected bunkers, he was hard to see and harder still to kill. One of the more ridiculous documents produced by the wartime British Army, marked ‘Most Secret’, was an August 1944 report from the Directorate of Tactical Investigation, summarising tests on bombarding simulated Japanese bunkers with infantry weapons. Researchers garrisoned a position with two cockerels, two goats and two white rabbits, ‘one somewhat dull in behaviour and suffering from mange’. After a two-inch mortar barrage, reported the study, the animals were covered in dust, but otherwise little affected. ‘They appeared mildly surprised but in other respects were apparently normal. The goat was coughing slightly.’ PIAT anti-tank bombs caused the goat’s pulse to slow and blood pressure to fall. On the battlefield, no doubt with scant help from the above study, ‘beehive’ charges, tank gunfire, or an infantryman tossing a grenade into a bunker with one hand while firing a tommy gun through the slit with the other, were found most efficacious.

      But first it was necessary to find the enemy. A British officer noted that when his soldiers dug a foxhole, a pile of earth rose around it: ‘With the Japanese, you could never see that soil had been moved.’ A Borderer in Raymond Cooper’s company was astonished to hear a ‘woodpecker’—a slow-firing Japanese light machine gun—chattering under his feet. Without noticing, he had stepped onto an enemy bunker. Cecil Daniels’s platoon of the Buffs, advancing warily through the jungle, received their first intimation of the enemy ‘when there was a sudden bang and the sergeant who had been walking by the side of and slightly in front of me went down like a log. Firing seemed to break out all around. A shout of “Stretcher-bearer” went out, but I shouted “No need” as I could see that he was already dead, twitching in the throes of involuntary muscle convulsion. He wasn’t breathing.’ The company runner, ‘Deuce’ Adams, shouted: ‘Look out, there’s a bloody Jap.’ Somebody shouted ‘Take him prisoner.’ Someone else shouted: ‘Balls.’ Adams emptied a tommy-gun magazine apparently into empty ground, at point-blank range. The other men could see nothing. When they closed in on Adams, they found him peering into a foxhole containing a dead Japanese soldier. ‘He smelt pretty much, a sickly spicy smell such as all Japs seemed to have.’

      The suddenness and savagery of such encounters made a profound impression on every man who experienced them, especially at night. The 25th Dragoons, an armoured unit, never forgot a moonless moment in the Arakan when the Japanese broke into their main dressing station: ‘The screams of the patients, doctors and medical staff as they were shot and bayoneted, the blood-curdling yells of the attacking Japs through the night, was for all of us a nightmarish experience…This brutality and inhuman behaviour…affected us profoundly.’ Some British commanders favoured fighting whenever possible in daylight, because they acknowledged Japanese mastery of darkness. Maj. John Hill’s men of the Berkshires were disgusted to find human body parts in the haversacks of dead enemy soldiers. They knew nothing of the cultural importance to every Japanese of returning some portion of a dead comrade’s body to his homeland. ‘The war in Burma was fought with a savagery that did not happen in the Western desert, Italy or north-west Europe,’ wrote John Randle of the Baluchis. ‘I never once recall burying Jap dead. If there were sappers about, they were simply bulldozed into pits. Otherwise we shoved them into nullahs for the jackals and vultures to dispose of.’

      By the autumn of 1944, courage, ruthlessness and fieldcraft were the principal assets remaining to the forces of Nippon. The Allies were overwhelmingly superior by every other measure of strength. Yet a War Office report based on prisoner interrogation noted that ‘The Japanese still considers himself a better soldier than his opposite number on the British side…because [we] avoid СКАЧАТЬ