Читать книгу Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 – The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire - Fergal Keane - Страница 14

By the middle of 1943 General Slim knew his enemy well and was certain that the fight to retake Burma would be hard and bloody. Of the Japanese soldier he wrote: ‘He fought and marched till he died. If five hundred Japanese were ordered to hold a position we had to kill four hundred and ninety-five before it was ours – and then the last five killed themselves. It was this combination of obedience and ferocity that made that Japanese Army, whatever its condition, so formidable, and which would make any army formidable.’ The previous November, British and Indian forces had stumbled to disaster in the Burmese province of Arakan in a vain attempt to drive the Japanese back and begin the recapture of Burma. After an initial advance, the Japanese had driven the British and Indian forces back. No ground had been gained despite a casualty toll of 5,057 killed, wounded or missing.^*

The Japanese used the tactics of outflanking and encirclement that had caused Slim’s troops such anguish on the retreat from Burma. The terrain on which they fought was ribboned by rivers and streams, harboured numerous swamps, and was bordered to the west by the sea and to the east by the Mayu range of hills. These rose to 2,000 feet at their highest and were covered in dense forest. It was, recalled one British officer, ‘the sort of jungle country in which there could be no front line’, covered in thick primary forest, full of exotic plants and animals, and providing awe-inspiring views, and one of the very last places on earth you would choose to fight a war. When the south-west monsoon arrived, rainfall could reach as much as two hundred inches. The tracks became impassable and the waterways were the only practical means of movement. Even these, swollen with new rain, became, in the words of a senior British commander, ‘very formidable obstacles, all of which have to be bridged to allow passage of troops and transport … Indeed campaigning in the monsoon in Burma may be said to be one of the most arduous operations anywhere in the world today.’ A staff officer sent to investigate wrote: ‘our troops were either exhausted, browned off or both, and both Indian and British troops did not have their hearts in the campaign. The former were obviously scared of the Jap and demoralised by the nature of the campaign i.e. the thick jungle and the subsequent blindness of movement, the multiple noises of the jungle at night, the terror stories of Jap brutality … the undermining influence of fever, and the mounting list of failures.’ Just as had happened on the retreat the previous year, Slim found himself dispatched to lead the ground operations when it was already too late to effect change. Yet it was here in the Arakan that Slim was now planning his first offensive against the Japanese.

The failure of the first Arakan campaign was rooted in practical and political problems. The battle readiness of the troops was paramount. Over the previous eighteen months the Indian Army had recruited massively. At one point recruits were being dispatched to training centres at a rate of 50,000 per month. There had been too little time to turn these raw recruits into soldiers ready for the challenge of the Arakan, or to prepare the British troops fighting alongside them for jungle warfare. The cream of the Indian Army was fighting overseas, where resources were being devoted overwhelmingly towards the fighting in North Africa.

Looming over it all were the politics of the Grand Alliance. Since the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the loss of the Philippines the following April, American ships and planes had routed Japan’s carrier fleet at the Battle of Midway on 4 and 5 June 1942. Four carriers, several battleships, around 275 planes, and nearly 5,000 men were lost. Yet the British were still sitting in the positions to which they had retreated after the fall of Burma. There were many in Washington only too keen to accuse London of lassitude. A song doing the rounds of senior American military figures after the fall of Malaya and Singapore that gave an indication of American attitudes to the officer class of the British empire:

To lunch they go at half past one –

Blast me, old chap, the day’s half done.

They lunch and talk and fight Jap,

And now it’s time to take a nap.

The British in Asia were widely caricatured as blimps and buffoons, selfish and self-satisfied, borne aloft on the suffering of millions of brown and yellow subjects. Roosevelt himself was determined that victory in the Far East would not lead to a reimposition of the colonial status quo. The Atlantic Charter, which was signed at the Arcadia conference held by Churchill and Roosevelt in December 1941–January 1942, committed the allies to ensuring ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’. The Americans believed this included India and the rest of the British empire, as well as the French and Dutch colonial possessions occupied by the Japanese. Churchill emphatically did not.^*

An aggravated Churchill wired his deputy, Clement Attlee, in London about ‘the danger of raising the constitutional issue in India at a moment when the enemy is on the frontier’. But he was a shrewd enough politician to realise that preserving the Raj in the face of American opposition demanded a serious military effort in South-East Asia. Limited resources would always make Europe the priority and would ensure that Britain was the junior partner in the Far East. But if the British possessions in South-East Asia were still in enemy hands by the time the Americans defeated Japan, as they surely would be, how could Churchill make any claims for the recovery of territory in the post-war negotiations?^* Fighting and defeating the Japanese in Burma would not alter the outcome of the world war, but it would give Churchill valuable political capital.

The British and Americans also had very different strategic aims. Churchill believed British and Indian forces should aim at driving the Japanese out of Rangoon as an initial step towards the recovery of British territory in Singapore and Malaya. The Americans saw the campaign in markedly different terms. China was the priority and British resources should be used to drive the Japanese out of northern Burma in order to secure the supply route to Chiang Kai-shek.^† Defeat the Japanese in China, the Americans reasoned, and they would gain a ‘back door’ to Tokyo, airfields from which to launch bombing raids against the home islands of Japan. For a man of ruthless political calculation in so many other regards, Roosevelt was obstinately myopic when it came to China. The China he imagined bore no relation to the corrupt and chaotic world of reality. In November 1943 he wrote of the ‘triumph of having got the four hundred and twenty million Chinese in on the Allied side. This will be very useful twenty-five or fifty years hence, even though China cannot contribute much military or naval support at the moment.’

General Slim would wrestle with the pressures caused by high-level disagreements as he planned his campaign to retake Burma and throughout the battles to come. But his task would be made infinitely easier by the creation of a new command structure, and notably by his new superior, a charismatic and controversial aristocrat. The initial omens were not good. Lord Louis Mountbatten had planned only one military operation of note, two years before, and it had ended in disaster. As Chief of Combined Operations, he had directed the disastrous Dieppe raid of 1942 in which 3,623 Canadian troops were killed, wounded or captured. In August 1943 he was appointed to head the new South-East Asia Command (SEAC). Mountbatten was only forty-three years old, a Navy captain with the acting rank of admiral, and first cousin to the king. He was regarded by many senior military figures as a self-promoting dilettante who had won his position through Churchill’s weakness for those who promised dashing victories, and through his royal connections. The CIGS, General Alan Brooke, wrote of being driven ‘completely to desperation’ by Mountbatten, who was ‘quite irresponsible, suffers from the most desperate illogical brain, always producing red herrings’.

But as supreme commander Mountbatten would prove a success. He brought the glamour of royalty to the forlorn front lines of South-East Asia, even if that meant shipping in a barber from London to take care of his tonsorial needs, and he infused the troops with a sense that their battles mattered. His skill in negotiating the often fractious relationship with the Americans helped Slim beyond measure. The American president addressed Mountbatten with the familiar ‘Dickie’, a habit formed when Mountbatten and Edwina stayed with the Roosevelts a few months before Pearl Harbor. After Mountbatten’s accession to SEAC, Roosevelt had gushed to him, ‘for the first time in two years I have confidence in the personality problems in the China and Burma fields – and you personally are largely responsible for this’. He added affectionately, and perhaps with a wary sense of Dickie’s fondness for the limelight, ‘Be a good boy.’

What emerged in South-East Asia was one of the most important partnerships of the war: in Mountbatten, an aristocratic supreme commander who navigated Anglo-American rivalry with skill; and in Slim, the down-to-earth son of a Birmingham shopkeeper, who made war according to a gospel of patience, shrewdness and relentless attention to detail.

A massive reorganisation of the supply, training and medical systems was set in motion. With half a million men under arms in the subcontinent the demands for food and equipment – everything from fresh vegetables to .303 bullets for rifles – had placed an impossible strain on the pre-war colonial infrastructure. Ports, roads and airfields were all upgraded. More than 50,000 labourers were sent to improve the main road to Burma, which passed through Kohima to Imphal.^* The tea-planters of Assam provided half of the labour force. By 1943 Indian factories and farmers were producing more goods for the war effort than Australia, New Zealand and Canada put together.

Rations had been a constant source of complaint from the men, with the ‘staple meal … a bar of dehydrated goat meat looking like a bar of tobacco and when boiled up smelling like an ancient billy-goat’. Now Slim’s head of administration, the aptly nicknamed Major General Alf ‘The Grocer’ Snelling, set out to revolutionise the quality and delivery of the food. He flew in some Chinese to start a duck farm which would produce eggs and he sent his men to India to procure live goats and sheep. Later Snelling would establish a jungle farm to keep up a steady supply of fresh food to the front-line forces, and he would perfect the art of dropping supplies to surrounded troops, painstakingly calculating and packing the supply needs of an entire division. When Slim was told that he could not get adequate supplies of parachutes in India he decided it was ‘useless to hope for supplies from home. We were bottom of the priority list there, for parachutes as for everything else.’ So he called in the ever-dependable Snelling and a few of his officers and told them that if proper silk parachutes were not available they should find a substitute. They began a search of the paper mills and jute factories of Calcutta, which ended with the development of a ‘parajute’, made entirely of jute, which was 85 per cent as effective as the normal parachutes. They were not about to drop men or fragile equipment from the air with them, but for food and ammunition they would be invaluable. Slim picked Colonel ‘Atte’ Persse, a man with a reputation for ‘making himself a nuisance to all and sundry until he got what he wanted’, to make sure tanks reached the Arakan in time for his offensive. Stone was shipped in from Madras to turn some of the jungle tracks into routes along which tanks could operate.

The most important change took place in the air. At the height of the retreat in 1942 the army could call on only four airfields with all-weather runways and up-to-date facilities. By the following November, thanks to a massive programme of American-sponsored construction, that number had increased tenfold.^* The existing fleet of Mohawk fighters was reinforced with Hurricanes, Beaufighters and Spitfires. From the point of view of the fighting man on the ground, one of the fighters’ most important roles was to protect the transport planes that brought him food and ammunition.

The health of 14th Army was one of Slim’s gravest preoccupations. In the retreat of 1942 around 80 per cent of the British and Indian troops fell ill because of disease. British 6 Brigade lost half its strength in the Arakan, a staggering dissolution of fighting capacity. The official account stated that the ‘incidence of malaria during this campaign reached unimagined proportions’.

It struck British and Indian troops with equal force. Major David Atkins commanded a transport unit travelling the road between Dimapur and Imphal and watched his Madrassi drivers falter with fever, one by one. ‘The Havildar clerks and the senior NCOs were changing so frequently because of fever, that orders given to one man were not passed on before the man you had given them to went sick. If you spoke to the new man, he would be replaced the next day by the former one.’

Strict discipline on the taking of medication was enforced in 14th Army: if men started to come down with malaria their officers could be cashiered. It took the sacking of three commanders to drive the point home. Hospital admissions for disease dropped from 185 per thousand troops in 1942 to 100 per thousand in 1944.

There were also changes in surgical practice. Treating wounds sustained in jungle fighting was a different prospect from treatment in Europe or the desert. The humidity, the frequently filthy conditions, the difficulty in finding clean water supplies, all presented an immense challenge to the many young and inexperienced surgeons of 14th Army. Wounds had to be cleaned out thoroughly and quickly, the medical chiefs warned. ‘The Japanese missiles have a habit of carrying not only clothing and equipment, but also jungle debris, leaves and dirt into the deeper parts of the wound.’ In such conditions a man with a minor wound could die from blood poisoning within twenty-four hours. Men were drilled in the importance of field hygiene. As one West Kent put it, ‘You learned to bury your crap and above all keep it away from the water source.’

Slim also recognised that the battle for men’s minds would be central in the fighting to come. In 1943 the C-in-C India, Sir Archibald Wavell, agreed to appoint a psychiatrist to every division in India. Captain Paul Davis was sent to 2nd Division, which would fight at Kohima the following year. He set about weeding out unsuitable men. ‘As a result of this large numbers of dullards, psychoneurotics, and a few psychopaths and psychotics were unearthed. Combatant officers proved to be extremely enthusiastic at the idea of getting rid of these men.’ Davis found most of the commanders he encountered helpful. There had been a shift in military attitudes since the First World War, when shell-shock victims could be regarded as cowards, although there was one battalion commander who asked him, ‘Why should I send these men to you so that they will survive the war and go home and breed like rabbits, whilst all my finest men are going to risk being killed?’ During the battle of Kohima Davis set up a small psychiatric clinic just sixteen miles behind the front.

Slim was aware that neither Churchill nor the CIGS, General Sir Alan Brooke, had much faith in the British and Indian soldier ever being able to meet the Japanese on equal terms in the jungle. Churchill believed that going into the jungle to fight the Japanese was ‘like going into the water to fight a shark’. But the Japanese did not come from a land of jungles and swamps. The jungle was no more a natural environment for them than it was for the British. The Japanese had trained and adapted. Slim’s 14th Army would do the same. An Infantry Committee set up after the Arakan debacle reported that troops needed to be fit and to be led by officers experienced in the jungle; they needed to avoid roads and learn how to use jungle tracks, and to be trained in concealment and jungle hygiene. One of the most prescient recommendations related to leadership: ‘command must be decentralised so that junior leaders will be confronted with situations in which they must make decisions and act without delay on their own responsibility’. To this, Slim added his own developing philosophy of jungle warfare. If encircled, stand fast and hold your ground, rely on air support for resupply and trust in the reserves to come up and hit the Japanese. They would outflank the enemy and cut their line of communication. Tens of thousands of men passed through the jungle training courses, where they were drilled in the basic dogma of encircle and outflank. Above all they learned to live with the strangeness of the jungle.

As he planned his reconquest of Burma, Slim recognised that ultimate victory would depend on the soldiers of the Indian Army. More than two thirds of his 14th Army were drawn from the immense hinterlands of the empire, the majority from India itself. In the British mythology of the Raj few figures were more warmly drawn than that of the faithful native. In novels like Talbot Mundy’s For the Salt He Had Eaten, the Indian soldier risking, and often giving, his life for the white sahib is eulogised: ‘Proud as a Royal Rajput – and there is nothing else on God’s green earth that is even half as proud – true to his salt and stout of heart.’

By the end of 1943 the Indian Army had experienced surrender in Singapore, retreat in Burma, defeat in the Arakan, and the convulsions caused by the Quit India movement.^* Yet it had not risen as a body in mutiny or experienced mass desertions. There were more than two million men serving the allied cause in North Africa and India, the largest volunteer army in history. In spite of this, Churchill frequently expressed his mistrust. Wavell noted in his journal in 1943 that the prime minister feared the army could rise at any moment, ‘and he accused me of creating a Frankenstein by putting modern weapons in the hands of sepoys, spoke of 1857, and was really childish about it. I tried to reassure him, both verbally and by a written note, but he has a curious complex about India and is always loath to hear good of it and apt to believe the worst.’

The events that followed the fall of Singapore had done much to stoke the prime minister’s paranoia. On their surrender, between 40,000 and 60,000 Indian prisoners of war had joined the new pro-Japanese Indian National Army (INA).^* The INA, under the leadership of the charismatic former Congress politician Subhas Chandra Bose, would play only a minor role in the fighting to come. But Bose’s promise that India would rise once his men had crossed the border encouraged the Japanese and worried the British.

One of Slim’s most able commanders, General Sir Philip Christison, found himself being teased about army loyalty at the birthday party of the Maharajah of Mysore, Jayachamaraja Bahadur, in Krishnarajasagara. The general’s host was one of the most sophisticated men in the East, a philosopher and musicologist who once sponsored a concert for Richard Strauss at the Royal Albert Hall. He was also regarded as a friend of the British. ‘This was a great occasion,’ recalled Christison, ‘and not affected by any wartime restrictions.’ On the night of the party the palace was lit with 30,000 light bulbs and fireworks banged and whizzed across the sky. At the top of the palace steps Christison was greeted by the genial figure of the maharajah, who was standing between two huge stuffed bison. There was a grand procession into the dining hall and after a lavish banquet the ruler decided to take the general into his confidence. ‘He told me he had two sons. When Japan entered the war he sent one to Japan … the other to serve in the British Army. “Who knows who will win?” he said.’

The Japanese intelligence officer Lt.-Colonel Iwaichi Fujiwara, who worked closely with Bose, learned to be circumspect about the INA’s military capabilities, writing of Bose that ‘the standard of his operational tactics was, it must be said with regret, low. He was inclined to be idealistic and not realistic.’ However, the British were certainly alert to the political and intelligence danger posed by the INA. During the Bengal famine of 1942–43, when between one and a half and three million people died, Bose had announced that he would send Burmese rice to feed the starving, and INA broadcasts placed the blame for the catastrophe on British indifference and incompetence.^* The Japanese war leader, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, fanned the flames assiduously, declaring in the Diet on 16 June 1943: ‘We are indignant about the fact that India is still under the ruthless suppression of Britain … we are determined to extend every possible assistance to the cause of India’s independence.’

Between 1942 and 1943 there had been several failed INA probes into British territory.^† As 1943 drew to a close Mountbatten asked for an intelligence assessment of the INA. It was delivered to him on 13 November, with the instruction that henceforth the INA should, for ‘counter propaganda purposes’, be called JIFS – for ‘Japanese Inspired Fifth Columnists’ – an acronym designed to strip away the nationalist image of Bose’s army. The British also set up ‘josh’, or ‘enthusiasm or verve’, units to boost troop morale. The 750 josh groups were intended to ‘inculcate the doctrine that India must destroy the Japanese or be destroyed by them and to prepare Indian units for possible encounter with armed JIFS in the field’.

Propaganda broadcasts and leaflet drops were also stepped up, urging INA men to return to British lines where they would be treated fairly. But troops were told that if they encountered former comrades in the field they were to be shot if they did not surrender. General Slim would later say that some Indian units had to be restrained from shooting surrendering INA troops. Sepoy Gian Singh of 7th Indian Division heard Bose’s passionate calls for an uprising but was unmoved. ‘He promised to liberate India and said the Japanese were the friends of India. Not many truly believed him. Least of all us who saw the Japanese in their true colours. Much as we felt sorry for our brothers who had taken the salt but turned traitor even though they had an excuse. We often gave them no mercy.’

But the question of loyalty was nuanced. Soldiers of the 1st battalion, Assam Regiment were reminded of their duty of loyalty at josh sessions. Sohevu Angami, from the Naga village of Phek, listened to the propaganda about the INA and resolved to kill any of Bose’s men he came across. ‘We did what our officers told us to do and followed them. The Japanese and the INA were against the British and that made them our enemies. Did I really know what I was fighting for? No.’ Yet he had a sneaking regard for the INA leader. ‘I think his ideas were good. Even though we were opponents I came to respect him and what he was fighting for.’

In the case of many – perhaps most – soldiers, their loyalty was to their unit and not to the Viceroy or King Emperor. Indian officers did not as a rule feel that they were defending British overlordship, or that serving the Raj meant rejecting the ideals of Gandhi or Bose. A senior British civil servant at the War Department in Delhi wrote that ‘even those who were most convinced they had been right to go to Sandhurst and enter the King’s service saw it as a way to serve the independent India of the future … at the end of the war when the whole truth was known, many of the loyal Indian officers who would be the backbone of India’s new army felt some sympathy with those who had followed Bose.’ The growing realisation among officers and men that independence must come after the war tended to act as a brake on discontent. Major Ian Lyall Grant of King George V’s Own Bengal Sappers and Miners had fought alongside Indian officers since the retreat from Burma and was confident of their loyalty. ‘I remember saying that Independence was inevitably coming … I think it was generally known that we were on the way out … which made it much more difficult for them to hazard their lives on our behalf but they gave absolutely no sign of that to me.’

The Indian Army had also embarked on a transformation of its officer corps.^* Discrimination in pay between Indian and British officers had been ended and, having started the war with only a thousand Indian officers, there were more than 6,566 by 1944. Although senior command positions were still overwhelmingly the domain of British officers, there were now Indian battalion and company commanders who gave orders to white subordinates.

Slim was an influential advocate of reform. ‘The fair deal meant’, he wrote, ‘no distinction between races or castes in treatment. The wants and needs of the Indian, African, and Gurkha soldier had to be looked after as keenly as those of his British comrade.’ However, Slim acknowledged that some of the newer British officers thought that all an Indian or African required was a ‘bush to lie under and a handful of rice to eat’. If paternalism had dominated the Indian Army of old, ignorance of culture and environment could be a hallmark of the younger officer class. Sepoy Gian Singh was crouching behind a small bush during a training exercise when he heard a hiss. A snake was lurking somewhere very close. Singh carefully backed away, only to see a deadly krait sitting where his head had just been. The training officer came up and began to harangue Singh:

‘What the hell are you up to,’ shouted the Captain coming up to me.

‘What’s all the fuss about such a small snake!’

‘That, Sir, is a krait,’ I replied.

He had to be told by a Subhadar that it was just as deadly as a .303 bullet. He shook his head in disbelief. That man had a lot to learn and little time to do so.

To many young British officers arriving in India the daily routines of Indian Army barracks life could seem little changed from a century before. On his first morning with 7/2 Punjab Regiment, Lieutenant John Shipster was woken by his bearer with a mug of sweet tea and a banana, and the salutation ‘Sahib, bahadur ji jagao’ – ‘Mighty Warrior, arise’. ‘Servants were plentiful and one could live like a king on a pittance … For those in the army it was a sportsman’s paradise,’ he recalled. Shipster had arrived in India aged nineteen and fresh from Marlborough College. He was based at Meerut, headquarters of India’s most prestigious pig-stickers, the Meerut Tent Club, although Lieutenant Shipster’s forays on horseback were confined to the Ootacamund Foxhounds, chasing the indigenous jackal. The young officers wore tweed jackets and jodhpurs while the master and whips besported themselves in hunting pink. But Shipster was far from the stereotype of the ‘pukka’ young sahib. He walked the lanes of the poorer districts to practise his Urdu and on his first leave he went with his orderly, Khaddam Hussein, to stay at the man’s home. The two men hired a camel to carry their bags and walked to the village. ‘I wanted to see how they lived, and I liked my orderly, and I knew that there were some distinguished Indian Army officers living in the area, and I called on them and they all, without hesitation, invited us to a meal, usually a curried chicken or this or that, and I enjoyed the friendship.’

In late 1943 Shipster’s 7/2 Punjab were ordered to the Arakan as part of General Sir Philip Christison’s 15 Corps. By now Shipster was a captain with the temporary rank of major. Before they left, the officers were gathered together in an old cinema in Ranchi and given a rousing talk by their divisional commander. ‘It was nothing short of a call to war. It was brief, with flashes of humour and full of confidence … exciting and uplifting, but … it left me feeling apprehensive about the future.’

The Commander of 15 Corps was an old colleague of Slim’s, with whom he had taught at the Army Staff College between the wars. During the First World War Christison had been badly wounded at Loos and awarded the Military Cross. A keen shooting and fishing man, with a countryman’s eye for landscape and fauna, Christison revelled in the fecundity of the natural world in the Arakan. ‘Monkeys, gibbons, hornbills, woodpeckers and Scops owls were common and their eerie cries frightened many a Madrasi soldier and were extensively used by the Japs to communicate with each other. There were few snakes but one day a large python was brought into my headquarters. Inside was a barking deer which, contrary to belief, had been swallowed head-first.’ On occasion, clouds of butterflies appeared so that the ground seemed ‘as if it was shimmering’. Christison was particularly taken with the sight of wild orchids growing on rotting tree stumps. The general had a dangerous encounter with an elephant that pushed his jeep into a ravine when they met along a jungle track. Other soldiers could retell the cautionary tale of the young RAF officer who set off with a machine gun ‘to bag a “Tusker”’ but was found trampled to death.

Christison’s immediate priority was to restore the morale of the men under his command. He decided that worms might be a factor contributing to poor morale. He set about removing men from the line, giving them a de-worming treatment and a fortnight’s rest at the coast playing games on the sand. At the end of this, he reported, ‘they were raring to have a go at the Japs’.

As the end of 1943 approached, Slim and Christison made final plans for an offensive in the Arakan. The main target was the island port of Akyab, 120 miles south of the Indian frontier on the Bay of Bengal. Akyab offered strategic airfields and access to the main waterways of the Arakan. Whether the allies ultimately decided to try and retake Burma by land or by sea, or a combination of both, they were going to need air cover all the way to Rangoon. Akyab offered the best facilities. The operation would also pre-empt any Japanese attempt to use Akyab as a base to encroach into India.

There was also another, more directly political, reason for an assault towards Akyab. The airfields had been used to launch Japanese raids on Calcutta at the end of the previous year, a strike that had little military importance but had sent thousands of refugees flooding into the countryside where there had already been massive displacement due to the famine of the previous year. There were five hundred civilian casualties and only a tenth of the normal workforce remained at work on the docks. The 5 December raid also saw fear-stricken merchants close down their grain shops, forcing the government to requisition stocks in order to avoid civil unrest. ‘A false alert the following day did nothing to improve morale in the city,’ the official history noted. Any suggestion of Japanese strength undermined attempts to project to the Indian population the image of an unruffled Raj.

The original plan was to mount a joint sea and land operation but at the last moment the landing craft were taken away for use in Europe. General Christison’s 15 Corps would have to do it the hard way, advancing overland in a three-pronged attack on Japanese positions on both sides of the Mayu range. To blast them out, Slim’s artillerymen would use their 5.5 inch guns, although the armchair generals in Delhi feared they would never succeed in hauling them into the mountains. ‘Stroking their “Poona” moustaches,’ a young officer wrote, ‘they remarked that these pieces would never get over the trails and through the jungle of Burma.’ As in so much else, Slim’s soldiers would prove the doubters wrong.

* The official breakdown of these figures is 916 killed, 2,889 wounded, and 1,252 missing, including prisoners of war. S. Woodburn Kirby, The War Against Japan, vol. 2: India’s Most Dangerous Hour (HMSO, 1958).

* What American opinion tended to ignore was the human cost of the USA’s own expansion. The conquest of the West had been achieved only at the expense of the native tribes. The inhabitants of Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, where America had fought a savage war of conquest, had been given no say over the annexation of their lands. The racist segregation within the American army, to say nothing of the discrimination practised in the Southern states of the USA, suggest a convenient myopia on the part of those who condemned Churchill for his imperial revanchism. Roosevelt could himself adopt a tone of condescension towards Asians which would have resonated with the most reactionary of British imperialists. Writing to Churchill on 16th April, 1942 he declared: ‘I have never liked Burma or the Burmese and you people must have had a terrible time with them for the last fifty years. Thank the Lord you have HE-SAW, WE-SAW, YOU-SAW under lock and key. I wish you could out the whole bunch of them into a frying pan with a wall around it and let them stew in their own juice.’ (PSF/BOX37/A333EE01, Franklin D.Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.)

* In such circumstances, Churchill wrote, ‘the United States Government would after the victory feel greatly strengthened in its view that all possessions in the East Indian Archipelago should be placed under some international body upon which the United States would exercise decisive control.’ (Winston Churchill memo, 29 February 1944, cited p. 412, Allies of A Kind, Christopher Thorne, Oxford University Press, 1978.)

† With this aim in mind work began in late 1942 to build a 400-mile-long road across mountains and through jungles to connect the railhead at Ledo in Assam with the 717-mile road that ran from Lashio in Burma to Kunming in China. The new road would bypass the part of the old ‘Burma Road’ now in Japanese hands. This immense project was driven forward by the American general Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. It involved 17,000 American engineers and around 50,000 Indian labourers and huge numbers of Chinese troops. From the outset Slim was sceptical, writing that ‘if it were left to me I would have used the immense resources required for this road, not to build a highway to China, but to bring forward the largest possible combat forces to destroy the Japanese army in Burma.’ (p. 249, Defeat Into Victory, Field Marshal Sir William Slim, Cassell, and Company Ltd, 1956.) Completed in January 1945, the ‘Ledo Road’ contributed little to the defeat of Japan. The airlift on the ‘Hump’ route across the Himalayas delivered more than four times the amount of war materiel to the Chinese Nationalists than the ‘Ledo Road’. The plan to use bases in China to attack Japan proved a failure. When American raids were launched from bases in Eastern China in May 1944 the Japanese counter-attacked furiously and by January 1945 forced the removal of the bombers to India and thence to the Mariana Islands where the major bombing effort against Japan was based. A US Army historical analysis concluded that ‘the air effort in China without the protection of an efficient Chinese Army fulfilled few of the goals proclaimed for it.’ (‘World War II: The War Against Japan’, Robert W. Coakley, American Military History, Army Historical Series, Office of the Chief of Military History, United States Army, Washington, 1989.)

* Eight million Indians were employed on war-related work during this period.

* The Official History, vol. 111, p. 317, gives a total of 41 for Assam, Manipur, Eastern Bengal and Calcutta.

* Even before war broke out there had been problems. As early as August 1939 a Sikh platoon in the Punjab Regiment deserted after a religious leader ‘so lowered their spirit that they deserted rather than face the dangers of war’. Later that year a group of Sikhs in Egypt rebelled when asked to load lorries, believing such coolie work was beneath them. A year after the first outbreak in the Punjab a squadron of the Central India Horse refused to board ship in Bombay. A mutiny and hunger strike among Sikhs of the Hong Kong and Singapore Royal Artillery in 1940 was provoked by orders that the men should wear solar topis. The investigators sent from India blamed the ‘faulty administration’ and told the regiment to back down on the helmet order. The troubles prompted one far-seeing intelligence officer, Colonel Wren, to write in 1940: ‘We have by our policies towards India, bred a new class of [Indian] officer who may be loyal to India and perhaps to Congress but is not necessarily loyal to us … The army would be helped by a more positive policy on the part of His Majesty’s Government … which will transform our promises of independence for India into reality in the minds of the politically minded younger generations.’

* The desire to escape the hellish conditions of Japanese prisoner of war camps was a decisive factor for many. Among the officers there were undoubtedly substantial numbers who had been alienated by the racist treatment they received at the hands of colonial officials in pre-war Malaya. This could range from being forced to sit in separate compartments from Europeans on trains and excluded from clubs where a colour bar operated. The INA also drew thousands of recruits from Indian communities in South-East Asia, many of them from the rubber plantations of Malaya and drawn by Bose’s promise of a new India in which the restrictions of caste would be overturned.

* The famine was caused by a complex interplay of factors: a cyclone that devastated huge areas of rice cultivation; the loss of Burmese rice imports after the Japanese occupation; rumours about shortages and subsequent hoarding of food; incompetence and corruption in the regional government; and the failure of the British and Indian governments to act speedily. Food was being shipped out of Bengal to support the war effort while the population starved. As the historian of the famine, Richard Stevenson, writes: ‘The famine in Bengal was caused by a lack of money, not by a lack of food. A hyperinflation was created in Bengal in 1942 as a result of the war and as a result of government policies. A part of the population, British and Indians connected with the war industries, was protected … the other part, the cultivators and the fishermen, was not protected … The economy of rural Bengal was too simple and impoverished to withstand the profound and prolonged disruptions applied to it by the government, a British government, in pursuit of its war goals.’ Richard Stevenson, Bengal Tiger and British Lion (iUniverse, 2005), p. viii.

† Twenty out of twenty-four INA soldiers trained in espionage and parachuted behind allied lines were captured; two raiding parties landed by submarine were also arrested.

* The transformation was directed by General Sir Claude Auchinleck who replaced Wavell as C-in-C India in 1943. Auchinleck began his career in the Punjab Regiment before rising to become one of the most senior British generals. He was immensely popular with the Indian troops.