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

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СКАЧАТЬ Japanese thought less of British soldiers than of Indians or Gurkhas, and considered Fourteenth Army ponderous and slow-moving. They respected British tank, artillery and air support, but criticised their camouflage, fieldcraft and noisiness.

      Since 1941, however, the British and Indian armies had learned a lot about jungle fighting. First, dense cover and chronically limited views made conventional European tactics redundant: ‘All experience…has demonstrated the utter futility of a formal infantry attack supported by artillery concentrations and barrages against Jap organised jungle positions,’ wrote Frank Messervy, commanding 7th Indian Division. ‘The dominating assets are good junior leaders and skilful infantry. The right answers…are infiltration and encirclement.’ In early encounters with the Japanese, the British repeatedly allowed themselves to be outflanked, and assumed a battle lost if the enemy reached their rear. By 1944, men understood that in jungle war there were no such comfortable places as ‘rear areas’, nor such privileged people as non-combatants.

      Every man of the support arms must be trained to fight, and all-round defence was essential. Units had to be untroubled by encirclement. At night, anywhere within enemy artillery or mortar range, each man dug a ‘keyhole’, a slit thirty inches deep and six feet long, sufficient to protect him from anything but a direct hit. The British had a healthy respect for the enemy’s skills: ‘The Jap selects the most unlikely line of approach…irrespective of the steepness of the slope or difficulties of terrain,’ noted Gen. Gracey in tactical instructions to his division. ‘He hopes to overrun the forward edge of a position by surprise. To this end, he crawls up very quietly and patiently to our wire. His fieldcraft is excellent.’

      Movement was hampered by limited vision and poor maps. So much landscape looked alike. Patrols found themselves lost for hours, even days. Captain Joe Jack of 3/1st Gurkhas wandered fifteen miles at the head of his company before finding himself back where he started. In thick jungle, a mile an hour could represent good progress. Squads ‘froze’ to verify the significance of every sound. In an advancing file, the first man was trained to look forward, the second right, the third left, the fourth to the rear. Rest was a luxury. Five hours’ sleep in twenty-four, day after day, was not an unusual quota. The two commonest adjectives among British soldiers were ‘smashing’ and ‘deadly’, the latter often applied to their rations—soya sausages, baked beans, bully beef and Spam, ‘compo’ biscuits, jam, tea and porridge, heated on meths blocks. Even if men seldom suffered serious hunger, food was always short. A rum ration was sometimes parachuted in, but in that climate beer would have been more popular. South African-made boots and Australian socks proved best suited to cope with jungle conditions.

      Light artillery, often the only available fire support for Slim’s infantry, was useful for keeping the enemy’s heads down, but unlikely to kill. Short-range weapons such as tommy guns and grenades were most valued. Whereas in Europe artillery and automatic fire dominated the battlefield, in Burma marksmanship mattered. An unaimed bullet was likely to damage only vegetation. Communication was problematic, because portable radios seldom worked. It was hard to see hand signals from officers or NCOs. Intensive training was essential, to make men respond instinctively to emergencies.

      ‘It seemed a terribly old-fashioned kind of war,’ wrote one of Slim’s soldiers, ‘far closer to the campaign my great-uncle fought when he went with Roberts to Kandahar than to what was happening in Europe.’ Douglas Gracey, commanding 20th Indian Division, summarised differences between operations in Burma and Europe: lack of good road and rail communications, endless water, jungles and swamps which limited movement, ‘but NOT to such an extent as inexperienced commanders and troops think’. Visibility was drastically reduced, and vehicles wore out fast. ‘Every Japanese in a defensive position must be dealt with. He will fight to the death even when severely wounded.’ Gracey concluded, however, with a fierce homily against allowing these considerations to induce defeatism: ‘EXPLODE THE JAP BOGEY AND THE JUNGLE BOGEY. WE ARE ALL ROUND BETTER THAN THE JAP.’ By the winter of 1944 this was true, chiefly because Slim’s men had more of everything.

      Even when Fourteenth Army was winning battles, it never entirely conquered its other great enemy, disease. Many men disliked the marble-sized mepacrine tablets of which a daily dosage prevented malaria, at the cost of turning their skins yellow. In 1942-43, tablets were often discarded—not least by men who preferred malaria to combat—and perhaps also by a few who believed Japanese propaganda that they rendered a man impotent. By 1944, most units held parades to ensure that mepacrine was ingested as well as issued. Men were ordered never to expose more flesh than necessary after nightfall. In the conditions of the Burmese jungle, however, chronically inimical to human health, sickness caused more losses than gunfire. A six-month breakdown of 20th Indian Division’s losses showed 2,345 battle casualties, and a further 5,605 non-battle hospital admissions. The latter included 100 accidents, 321 minor injuries, 210 skin diseases, 205 venereal, 170 psychiatric, 1,118 malaria and typhus, 697 dysentery.

      Insects laid their curse upon man and mule. Fires were lit in bivouacs whenever security allowed, to keep mosquitoes at bay. A British surgeon described the difficulty of addressing patients: ‘One orderly was deputed to deal with the flies. He chased them off the instruments, the sterile dressing, the blood-soaked blanket, clothing and stretcher of the patient, the very wound itself, and swatted them as they tickled the defenceless, half-naked operator.’ Chronic skin and foot infections, hepatitis, water rendered distasteful by purifying tablets, clothing never dry or clean, were the lot of every infantryman. Nor were tank crews more comfortable. In a steel box, sweat poured down men’s torsos into the sodden waistbands of their shorts. Often it was impossible to clamber on the hot hull without using rags to protect skin, and especially knees. Crews were coated in dust, and breathed through handkerchiefs tied over mouths and noses. When a tank’s main armament fired, the stink of cordite lingered in the turret. There was noise, perpetual noise. John Leyin’s crew sang ‘The bells are ringing, for me and my gal’ as their Lee lumbered into action, knowing that neither friend nor foe could hear the chorus above the roar of its engine.

      Another tankman, Tom Grounds, described the aftermath of battle: ‘Back in harbour we faced the bleak task of getting the dead men out…I shall not forget the burned and wizened, half-crushed head of the loader. In shocked silence they were passed through the side-hatch and lowered to the ground. We dug two graves near the side of the hill…Padre Wallace Cox conducted a short service, and rough wooden crosses were put up. White ants would soon have eaten the crosses and the jungle grown over the graves.’

      Like every battlefield, Burma demanded instant decisions about life and death. One day Col. Derek Horsford of 4/1st Gurkhas found his medical officer bent over a casualty with half his intestines trailing out of his abdomen. In his agony, the man was clawing mud from the ground and stuffing it into the wound. ‘Has he got a chance?’ Horsford demanded. The medical officer shook his head. ‘Give him an overdose of morphine.’ A year later, the man amazed them all by writing from Nepal not only to report his survival, but to thank his officers for saving him. In attacks, junior leaders learned to be ruthless about leaving wounded where they lay, to await designated stretcher-bearers: otherwise there were far too many volunteers eager to escape carnage by carrying casualties to the rear.

      Discipline was summarily enforced. A saddler with an Indian Army mountain artillery unit asked for some grenades, to protect himself in the event of a Japanese night attack. Instead, however, he deposited one in the bunk of a sergeant-major, killing him, and threw a second which wounded a British officer. It emerged that the man had a grievance about pay. After a swift trial, he was shot by firing squad. When John Hill’s company of the Berkshires was approached by Japanese who got alarmingly close before being challenged, it emerged that two sentries had been asleep. On waking and seeing the Japanese, they simply abandoned their position and fled. Hill had one man court-martialled and sentenced to two years’ detention, because it seemed essential to drive home the message that such lapses cost lives.

      Burma offered no châteaux or champagne to senior officers. Slim’s chief of staff, Brig. John Lethbridge, described СКАЧАТЬ