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

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СКАЧАТЬ the campaign might continue. He begged for news of his garden in western England. ‘This place is vile in October. The sun is sucking up all the vile humours out of the stinking ground, and one sweats and sweats. I have ten GSO1s under me, and five are in hospital with malaria or dysentery, some with both!’ Slim, paying a night visit to the headquarters map room, found himself almost stepping on a deadly krait. Thereafter, in that snake-ridden country, he used a torch fastidiously.

      If such things were so for red-tabbed staff officers, conditions were infinitely harsher for men living, eating and sleeping within shot of the enemy. ‘Perhaps the reason why the old soldier is reputed to dramatise his story,’ wrote Raymond Cooper, ‘is because he cannot create for those who do not know “the tiny stuffless voices of the dark”, nor can he fully explain the change in the vital values of the ordinary things of life. The contrast is too great.’ Victory at Imphal and Kohima had done much for the morale of Slim’s army, but remoteness from home was a corrosive force. Private Cecil Daniels, a twenty-three-year-old former Kent shop-worker, began his military service as an Aldershot mess waiter in 1939, became an officer’s batman, served in the Western Desert and Persia. By the winter of 1944 he had become an infantryman with the 2nd Buffs in Burma. Like so many others, this simple young man found himself bemused by the extraordinary experiences which befell him, so far from home. One night in his foxhole beside a pagoda, he lay awake gazing at the moon. ‘The thought went through my head that this same moon had been shining over the home of my family not so very many hours before, and I wondered what they were doing at this same moment, and what thoughts they were having of me.’

      Though the army’s morale was high, said a War Office report dated 31 June 1944, ‘infidelity of soldiers’ wives is still a grave problem’. A company commander of 9th Borderers described an encounter a few minutes before an attack: ‘Waiting in the dark for reports to reach me that all were ready, I was approached by a man who blurted out in a hurried whisper that by that morning’s mail his wife had asked for a divorce. “I’ll talk to you about it in the morning” seemed an inept reply to a man in his frame of mind, with five hundred Japs between him and the sunrise.’ The regular morale report on British forces overseas, compiled for the War Office by Brig. John Sparrow, asserted in November 1944: ‘Anxiety about domestic affairs is rife among the troops, particularly long-serving men. Nine times out of ten it is caused by selfish women. Few officers or men feel completely secure. In one unit both the CO and RSM asked privately for my advice about their matrimonial troubles.’

      Mountbatten told the army’s Morale Committee that the average British soldier ‘does not like India or Burma, and never will. The country, the climate and people are alike repugnant to him.’ Sparrow’s report noted continuing concern among British commanders overseas about ‘deliberate’ desertions by some of their men—as distinct from drunken leave overstays and suchlike. ‘All seemed agreed,’ wrote Sparrow to the adjutant-general, ‘that re-introduction of the death penalty would be the only satisfactory deterrent…It was generally realised, however, at any rate by staffs and senior officers, that [this] is not practical politics.’ After a few months in Burma, John Hill of the Berkshires concluded that about 25 per cent of his men were potentially brave, about 5 per cent potential cowards, and the remainder neither. This seems a fair, indeed generous, valuation of most Allied units in the Second World War.

      The strangest elements of Slim’s army—in the eyes of posterity, if not of those who grew up amid the exotic panoply of Empire—were three divisions, 17 per cent of the entire strength, recruited from Britain’s African colonies. What can have been the thought processes of such men, some from the remotest bush country, who found themselves shipped halfway across the world, albeit as volunteers, to serve in a white man’s war for less than half the pay a white man received, against an enemy with whom a Nigerian, Kenyan or Tanganyikan could have no conceivable quarrel? Non-Christians among them had sworn an oath of loyalty on cold steel, usually a bayonet, rather than upon the Bible.

      One West African divisional commander, Hugh Stockwell, circulated an angry memorandum when he heard that some white officers had spoken scornfully of the men they commanded: ‘I get reports that certain officers and British ORs…have, in idle conversation, been considerably indiscreet in their remarks about the capability of the African soldier in battle…Any who talk in such a way merely “foul their own nest”. I myself consider that it takes a great deal of moral courage to set the African the example he deserves or give him the leadership which is so necessary. I hope that you have the guts that your breeding as a Britisher should give you to overcome your difficulties.’

      Stockwell warned that he would court martial any officer deemed guilty of ‘defeatism’. In correspondence with higher commanders, however, he admitted that some of his units had performed poorly, especially when subjected to Japanese night attacks. The African, he wrote, ‘has not a fighting history, and as a rule therefore battle does not come naturally’. Some men had proved very good soldiers, ‘but others are very, very “bush”…[The African] moves stealthily when on patrol, but cannot react quickly to any sudden emergency, again due to an inherent dislike of the unknown and lack of intelligence which precludes quick thinking. He has a doglike devotion to his leaders he can trust and admire, and who respect him…The whole fighting potential of the Division is in the hands of the European officers and NCOs.’ Stockwell deplored the poor quality of many of these. Some units were officered by Polish exiles, who had been encouraged by Churchill to emigrate to West Africa. Most of these Poles spoke the same pidgin English as their men. Stockwell was obliged to report to 11 Army Group on 4 August 1944 that ‘a small outbreak of desertion or absenteeism among native West African troops has been found to be due…to a belief…that if they can get to Calcutta they will be able to join units of the USAAF as labourers or servants. Steps are being taken to refute this idea.’

      Col. Derek Horsford observed that though his Gurkhas had little regard for the unfortunate Africans as fighting soldiers—‘they would go out on patrol if you held their hands’—they were impressed by other attributes. ‘During the advance into the Kabaw valley, I found some of our chaps crouching behind a bush, watching a party of East African soldiers bathing. The Gurkhas were gazing fascinated, uttering exclamations of unwilling awe, at what they perceived as the extravagant dimensions of their black comrades’ private parts.’ There was much bitterness after the war that in Slim’s expressions of gratitude to his soldiers, he never mentioned the Africans. Some British officers evinced deep admiration for them. They cited examples such as that of Private Kewku Pong, a Gold Coaster wounded and left for dead when his unit was overrun by the Japanese. Pong found an abandoned bren gun and kept firing until overcome by loss of blood. The British discovered him next day, just alive, still clutching the butt of his gun. He was awarded the Military Medal. A British chronicler wrote of Pong: ‘On his own, in the dark of the night, quite badly wounded, with…Japanese rampaging behind him. No Britisher to tell him what to do, no African NCO, no other African; he ought to have been hopeless and helpless, and no one probably would have blamed him if he had discreetly gone to ground until all was quiet…Did Slim ever hear of Kewku Pong?’

      In November 1944, Sierra Leonean troops had to carry fifty stretcher cases over the Pidaung hill range. A British officer wrote: ‘Bamboo ladders were built to get the stretchers up the rock face…Nothing…will ever compare with the perilous descent from the 2,300-foot escarpment…The European and senior African NCOs went out with torches and guided the column in…By the light of bamboo flares the stretchers were passed hand over hand down the cliff faces, some Africans going on hands and knees to form a human bridge over the worst places. The last stretcher case was safely in the advanced dressing station by 9.30 that night, after fifteen hours on the march.’

      Radio Tokyo denounced the African divisions as ‘cannibals led by European fanatics’. Yet perhaps the most convincing and passionate testimonial to their contribution is that of one of their officers, Maj. Denis Cookson: ‘Without a murmur of complaint they defended a country whose inhabitants they despised, in a quarrel whose implications they did not understand. They had volunteered to fight for the British, and if the British brought them to a wilderness, that СКАЧАТЬ