Читать книгу The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice - John Bourne - Страница 41

Phillip Parotti

If war is complicated, war conducted in the tropics seems doubly so; this is a fact to which even cursory studies of the First World War in East Africa and the Second World War in Burma abundantly attest. Physically distant from the main venues in which the ultimate defeats of Germany in the First World War and Japan in the Second were being decided, East Africa and Burma seemed to lodge in contemporary Western consciousness as military backwaters, so much so that combatants in those out-of-the-way theatres of war often came to think ironically of themselves as fighting on or as having fought on ‘secret’¹ or ‘forgotten’² fronts. Invalided home after two years of combat in the East African bush, W. E. Wynn recalls this incident:

‘The majority of people in England knew nothing about the war in East Africa, and even if they did have a vague idea that something might have been happening down there, they were not in the least interested. There was plenty to think about nearer home. Of course, the average man, or woman, in the street had never even heard of East Africa.

A very stern and leathery faced female once stopped and seized me by the arm. With an accusing ring in her harsh voice she began to ask me searching questions. First, she demanded to know why I was loafing about England, instead of fighting for my country.

I feebly remarked I had just come home from East Africa.

“Young man,” she angrily declared, “you’ve no right to be here. You should be at the front.’”³

To the men fighting in these distant geographical regions, their fronts, of course, were really neither secret nor forgotten. Rather, they were vicious fields where life was played out against death in never-ending battles with an elusive and implacable enemy. To make matters worse, nearly every element of climate, geography, health, diet, logistics, and the unexpected, seemed to conspire in multiplying the degree of difficulty with which tropical campaigns were conducted while compounding the stress and intensity with which they were fought. If war is trial, war in the tropics has proved twice so.

Given the particular nastiness of bush and jungle warfare, one might well ask why men would ever fight in such environments. Obviously, men fight where wars find them or send them, and not on the fields that they might choose. More to the point – and this was as true of Burma as it was of East Africa – motives of duty, honour, country, and comradeship defined the dominant considerations in each man’s commitment right down to moments of final sacrifice. Placing these important issues aside, one notices at once an outlook, an illusion, held by men going to war in East Africa that was greatly toned down or utterly missing among the men who fought in Burma. Recalling his departure for East Africa in February 1916, Deneys Reitz says:

‘Before Smith-Dorrien could take over he fell ill, whereupon General Smuts assumed command of the campaign, and he left South Africa in December 1915. I decided to go too. I had no animus against the German people, but I thought then, as I think now, that a victorious Germany would have been a disaster to human liberty. Also, my chief was going and, further, I could not hang back while so many of my countrymen were moving forward to an adventure in the wilds of Africa.’⁴

Reitz’s sense of duty and his loyalty to Smuts are indeed the primary motives here, but the romantic drive to adventure that Reitz expresses appears again and again in the recorded memoirs of veterans from the East African campaign. W. T. Shorthose, writing in Sport & Adventure in Africa, recalls, ‘Needless to state, we were all agog with excitement… The common opinion was that the war would end very soon, and our only anxiety was lest we should miss a chance to fight!’⁵ Christopher J. Thornhill, who was 18 when the war began, remembered, ‘I felt I could hardly breathe until I joined something,’⁶ so at the first opportunity he joined the ‘Rag-time’⁷ soldiers of the East African Mounted Rifles, who, without any training whatsoever, had joined the war straight off their farms. Although he was in northern Canada near the Arctic Circle when the war commenced, Angus Buchanan hastened to return to England, where he joined the 25th Royal Fusiliers. As his unit began its voyage from Plymouth to East Africa, Buchanan speculated, ‘Were they not, after all, starting out on the greatest adventure of all – the stern pursuit of a perilous quest?’⁸ One does well to remember that the men writing these memoirs are, like Conrad’s Marlow, older men reviewing their lost illusions. Nevertheless, early in the war the illusion existed that the war in East Africa would prove to be soon ended and relatively easy, something of a boy’s lark, and a romantic adventure not unlike a chivalric quest.

For a period of time, the chivalric, romantic delusion persisted. W. E. Wynn provides a telling incident when he recalls the pre-sailing conference held before Force B embarked for the ill-fated 1914 invasion of Tanga:

‘The General [Aitken] apologised for our being associated with such a simple affair as the taking of German East Africa. After that had been accomplished he promised he would do his best to have us all sent to France; all who had, in the meantime, been well behaved.

“There is one thing, gentlemen, about which I feel very strongly,” he said, as a finale to the meeting, “that is the subject of dress. I wish officers and men to be always well turned out.” He looked sternly down the table. “I will not tolerate the appalling sloppiness allowed during the Boer War.’”⁹

In the beginning, matters of character, demonstrated through smartness and keen romantic élan, were going to be accorded precedence over professionalism. Following the disastrous battle but prior to the British withdrawal, Richard Meinertzhagen, then an intelligence officer with Force B, negotiated with the Germans to assist British wounded with medical stores; in his 5 November 1914 diary entry, he says:

‘My letter to the German commander was sent through to him and I was conducted to the hospital with my medical stores… The Germans were meanwhile kindness itself and gave me a most excellent breakfast which I sorely needed. Several German officers who were present at breakfast expressed their admiration at the behaviour of the North Lancs, and we discussed the fight freely as though it had been a football match. It seemed so odd that I should be having a meal today with people whom I was trying to kill yesterday. It seemed so wrong and made me wonder whether this really was war or whether we had all made a ghastly mistake. The German officers whom I met today were all hard looking, keen and fit and clearly knew their job and realised its seriousness. They treated this war as some new form of sport.’¹⁰

Later, in the event that one or the other might be taken prisoner, Meinertzhagen and German Captain Hammerstein exchanged names, addresses and pledges of assistance.¹¹ And still later, on 19 January 1915, W. E. Wynn was a member of the attacking force sent to relieve Jassin, and he reports yet another chivalric moment:

‘A little after the following day’s dawn, with troops ready for attack, two figures were seen through the morning haze. They were the two British officers who had been at Jassin post. With ammunition gone they had been forced to surrender.

Colonel von Lettow had offered them parole in tribute to their gallant defence. As a further compliment the German commander drew up the German troops in ceremonial order. The troops presented arms and the two British officers were courteously conducted down their ranks, privileged to inspect the men they had been fighting.’¹²

Thus we see the war’s chivalric beginnings, but eventually disease, continual hardship and the indiscriminate death derived from technological advances like the modern machine-gun would reveal the war’s hard edge. In response, chivalry would evolve into professional respect for a hard-fighting opponent, and romanticism would be cut to shreds by the killing power of modern weaponry loosed upon the unsuspecting amidst the worst of tropical environments.

Speaking about the men who fought in Burma, one can say with relative certainty that when they went to war they knew more about it than had their First World War counterparts. This is not to suggest that they were more experienced, better trained, better motivated, or more logistically prepared than the soldiers of the Great War; rather, that they had a knowledge that their First World War counterparts could not have had: they had a knowledge of the First World War. Psychologically, writers like Graves, Owen, Sassoon, Hemingway and Remarque, a variety of realistic war films and the talk of veterans had better prepared them for the horrors of 20th-century war. Gone was the assumption that war would offer a romantic adventure; rather than setting out on a quest, the men who fought in Burma knew that before they could return home in order to recover mundane normalcy they had to do an extremely difficult and dangerous job, and about that work there was little that one could call romantic. This is not to say, however, that they were free from illusions of their own.

At the outset, the men fighting in Burma suffered from two equally debilitating delusions. In his well-written memoir, Defeat into Victory, Field-Marshal Viscount Slim offered this personal observation:

‘To our men, British or Indian, the jungle was a strange, fearsome place; moving and fighting in it was a nightmare. We were too ready to classify jungle as “impenetrable”, as indeed it was to us with our motor transport, bulky supplies, and inexperience. To us it appeared only as an obstacle to movement and to vision; to the Japanese it was a welcome means of concealed manoeuvre and surprise.’¹³

In order to win in Burma, fighting men had first to dispense with their belief that the jungle was impenetrable, then they had to disabuse themselves of the idea that the Japanese were invincible. Experience, observation and direct contact with the enemy were the keys to exploding these myths, and as a result of his first forays behind the Japanese lines in Malaya, F. Spencer Chapman concluded, ‘The Japanese troops I have seen are good second-class material, well trained but poorly equipped. Their lines of communication should prove singularly vulnerable to attack by trained guerillas.’¹⁴ Later in the war, Orde Wingate’s Chindits, the OSS, and a host of irregulars drawn from the native tribes were among the first to defy and dispel the assumptions about Japanese invincibility, and their contributions to overturning the accepted wisdom of the time proved invaluable in changing the thinking behind the entire Allied effort in Burma.

One final illusion, widely subscribed to during the First World War in East Africa, was greatly toned down if not altogether absent during the Second World War in Burma. This delusion – no doubt derived from a colonial habit of mind, from an imperial outlook and attitude – had to do with what might be interpreted as false assumptions about racial inferiority and the potential fighting quality of native troops. Having watched a native stretcher-bearer nurse a fire in the dry centre of a mealie cobb, Francis Brett Young speculated:

‘With this slow-burning tinder he had nursed a smouldering fire all night, and the sight of him brought swiftly to my mind the Promethean legend and the Titan’s hollow stick of fennel, so that in this chill dawn I seemed again to be riding in the dawn of the world: and indeed this land was as unvexed by man as any Thracian wild and the people as simple as those to whom the son of Zeus brought fire.’¹⁵

If this recalls a Victorian/Edwardian concept of the civilised West high-mindedly carrying ‘the white man’s burden’, one must also recognise the downside. Meinertzhagen, who invariably favoured expansion of the native King’s African Rifles, reported this exchange with General Aitken who commanded Force B at Tanga in 1914:

‘When I was in East Africa in 1906 I visited the German military station at Moshi and was shown everything by some friendly German officers. I formed a high opinion of their efficiency and reported them as better trained, disciplined and led than our own King’s African Rifles. I told this to Aitken, who said with some heat: “The Indian Army will make short work of a lot of niggers.’”¹⁶

As history has shown, General Aitken, soundly defeated, would have cause to reconsider his judgement. Arnold Wienholt, another British officer serving with the Intelligence Corps, seems to express the general attitude when he calls the natives ‘big children’¹⁷, but at the same time – and this eventually became the general view – he speaks for the mature army when he concludes that, ‘The German East campaign proved, at any rate, that, with training and discipline, the negro can become a first-rate soldier.’¹⁸ Although slow to change, attitudes nevertheless changed, and among the men who fought in East Africa, former prejudices were humbled.

In Burma during the Second World War racial attitudes were much changed. General Stilwell, for example, said, ‘If I can prove the Chinese soldier as good as any Allied soldier, I’ll die happy.’¹⁹ This is not to say that Stilwell was without prejudice – his ludicrous references to the English as ‘limeys’ were legion – but such nonsense was always professionally and politically competitive.²⁰ British and Americans who served with the Karens and Kachins invariably spoke highly of them. Brigadier Bernard Fergusson has paid continual tribute to the Karen scouts of the Burma Rifles who were assigned to serve under his command²¹, and about the Kachins, OSS man Neil H. Barrett said this: ‘Any time a movement was started to fight the Japs the Kachins were the first to respond and, I might add, they were fearless, ruthless fighters, and the Japs feared them.’²² Vague notions that Wingate harboured a prejudice against the Indian Army were put to rest by Brigadier Michael Calvert who described the multi-ethnic character of the Special Force in these words:

‘In all there were seventeen British battalions, five Gurkha battalions and three West African battalions in the Special Force. No Indian battalions were used, owing to the difficulty, at that time, of special feeding, cooking, camp followers, etc, insisted upon by the Indian army, whereas all the battalions in Special Force could, and did, eat any type of food, although certain special provisions were sometimes made for the Gurkhas.’²³

With admiration, Calvert later wrote, ‘At one time my brigade major, Francis Stewart, had to compete with seven different races in Brigade HQ, comprising British, Indian, Burmese, Karens, Chinese, West African, and Gurkhas.’²⁴ Finally, on the basis of his personal experience, Slim offers this appreciation, an appreciation that puts some of the racial delusions entertained early in the East African campaign fully and finally to rest:

‘In Burma we not only fought against an Asian enemy, but we fought him with an army that was mainly Asian. In both respects not a few of us with little experience of Asians had to re-adjust many ideas, among them that of the inherent superiority of the white man as a soldier. The Asian fighting man is at least equally brave, usually more careless of death, less encumbered by mental doubts, little troubled by humanitarian sentiment, and not so moved by slaughter and mutilation about him. He is, by background and living standards, better fitted to endure hardship uncomplainingly, to demand less in the way of subsistence or comfort, and to look after himself when thrown on his own resources.’²⁵

One subject about which no man fighting for any side, either in East Africa or Burma, harboured a single delusion was the difficulty to be faced in contending with raw nature. And raw nature in the tropics was a matter far divorced from raw nature as it was experienced in Europe. With the vagaries of weather everyone had to contend, but there all similarities between the fronts ended. To the lasting misfortune of the men who fought in the tropics, the threats and dangers imposed by nature arrived in a multiplicity of forms.

Occasionally, one supposes, soldiers fighting in Europe were bitten by dogs, scratched by cats, or bedevilled by lice and insects; if so, their problems with the animal kingdom were minuscule when compared with those of the tropical fighting man. Writing about East Africa, Christopher J. Thornhill recalled:

‘Charging rhino were to be a feature of this campaign – we had to get used to them and more or less dodge their cyclonic onslaught; for nothing but death will stop a rhino once he takes it into his head to charge, and it is not always prudent to let off firearms when enemy patrols are about. That day I counted no less than eight full-grown rhino disturbed by our advance, three of which charged, two of them being shot.’²⁶

At Maktan on 3 September 1915, Angus Buchanan recorded this diary entry:

‘Out on reconnaissance, to position enemy holding about eight miles west of our camp. Moving quietly through bush – our party two whites and two porters. On outward journey ran across a rhinoceros, who charged on hearing stick break underfoot; but he stopped about ten yards short, when he then got our wind, and cleared off rapidly with a quick turn and snort, apparently afraid of us. Self and companions, at the sound of the rushing crash of the charge, had backed behind stoutish trees, with rifles ready, but the natives, in an incredibly short moment, had squirmed frantically into the bushes overhead.’²⁷

As W. E. Wynn wrote, ‘In peace we laughed at the rhino, behind his back… In war the rhino was no longer funny. He was a nuisance. To my own knowledge eight men were killed by charging rhinos.’²⁸ W. T. Shorthose, after reporting a number of men killed or wounded by buffaloes, went on to state: ‘Not only from German rifles did our men suffer in the East African campaign. I am correct in stating that numbers of carriers were taken by lions, also sentries, others crushed to death by elephants or tossed by buffaloes and rhinos, and many poisoned by the bite of snakes.’²⁹ Given the incredible abundance of East African wildlife and the utterly uncertain nature of its reactions to man, the threat it posed was ever-present. Francis Brett Young describes a fine bull oryx several times charging his column before a thin line of machine-gun porters finally parted from before its straight horns, which allowed the cornered beast to escape into the bush.³⁰ The aggressive African honey bee – today called ‘the killer bee’ in the United States – several times disrupted entire military columns on the march.³¹ And at least once, at Tanga, the viciousness of the bees played a significant role in a British defeat:

‘As a matter of fact, wild bees worried the Lancs a good deal. It sounds ridiculous, but I saw it myself. Apparently wild bees were in abundance in some of the palms, and bullets happened to break up their nests. They all came out angry and stung anything in their way. I myself got stung twice by angry bees, and some of the Lancs were stung all over by hosts of these little pests. Of course, they said the Germans had let bees lose on them, but this must be nonsense.’³²

When a predator was involved, a sudden attack could be far more threatening:

‘The enemy soon got to hear that we were in their neighborhood, especially as we were getting in the Government tax food from the various villages, to prevent it falling into the enemy’s hands. However, we had our own troubles close at hand, for a few days after making our temporary camp and erecting shelters, a leopard, coming into the camp at night (we had, of course, no fires), seized and terribly mauled my white companion. The horrible beast, sneaking in, had seized his victim by the head, and, dragging him off his stretcher, had actually taken him away some fifteen yards before we were able to help him. Being asleep at the time, I was rather muddled for a few seconds when his shrieks started, and I fear was all too slow in coming to his assistance. It was not till he had cried out “chui” (leopard) that the situation was made plain to me, and meanwhile the man-eater was worrying him.’³³

Minutes later, at the opposite end of the camp, the same leopard attacked and attempted to drag away an askari. Throughout the East African campaign, raw nature could be as dangerous as the enemy.

In Burma, the threat – if slightly different – proved no less ubiquitous and appeared again in a variety of forms. When the 7th Armoured Brigade arrived in Burma straight from combat in the North African desert, Rangoon was already under attack and in a state of chaos. Captain the Rev N. S. Metcalfe, Chaplain to the 7th Hussars, went with the transport officer to the zoo in order to recover some RAF vehicles thought to have been abandoned there: ‘Fortified by the report that all the animals of a dangerous nature had been destroyed, we made our entry only to discover that some were very much alive, and outside their cages! There was a tense moment when it was discovered that a “tree trunk” was really a crocodile, and a “rope”… a full-size boa constrictor!’³⁴

Training in eastern India before Wingate’s 1943 penetration into Burma, David Halley relates a narrow escape:

‘One dark and starless night, a Gurkha sentry was standing to his post, alert and keen as Gurkhas always are. The jungle here seemed to us thick enough by day, as the visibility was never more than about fifteen feet, but at night it was impenetrable. The Gurkha strained his eyes this way and that. It was coming near the hour of dawn, when the enemy is most likely to make his attack. The slightest unnatural movement would herald his arrival. At last came the sound for which he had been tensely listening, a stealthy crackle in the undergrowth… He crouched, ready to spring. A slinking shape materialised, blacker against the surrounding blackness. The Gurkha leaped and clutched, then, with a startled cry, let go his hold and departed at speed into the night.

It was a tiger he had grabbed. And the tiger, equally startled, lost no time in departing at an equally high rate of speed.’³⁵

After waking up one morning to find that a few of his ‘friends’ had put a baby tiger into his bed, Neil H. Barrett goes on to report a far less innocuous event:

‘Three men from the quartermaster outfit driving along the Burma Road in a jeep saw a tiger jump from the brush on the side of the road and lope slowly towards the opposite side. At this point, one of them did a very foolish thing. He fired at the tiger with a .30-calibre carbine, hitting him just hard enough to wound him. It takes a much heavier weapon than this to kill a tiger. The tiger turned in a blind rage and attacked the jeep. Of the three occupants, only one lived to reach the hospital. The jeep was a complete wreck – the hood, radiator, and windshield were completely torn off by the terrific power of the tiger’s paws.’³⁶

If tigers were the most powerful animals that men had to contend with during the Burma campaign, snakes were, perhaps, the most unnerving. In Back to Mandalay, Lowell Thomas records a story told to him by Dick Boebel, one of Col Phil Cochran’s Air Commandos, whose glider broke loose and crash-landed beyond the Chindwin but before reaching the ‘Broadway’ jump zone where it was supposed to have landed. In his party were four Americans, five Burmese, and eight ‘Britishers’, and after they had escaped from the crash site, they stopped to rest:

‘When we thought we were safe from Jap pursuit we crouched in a thicket to rest. We were worn out. I was lying exhausted when in the darkness a noise started crackling. I saw the shadow of a snake coming down the side of the gully to my right. There was enough light to see that the thing was about five inches in diameter, a huge python… Luckily, I remained still. He came down. It all took about ten seconds. It seemed eternity. The python crossed over my right foot, straight across my left, and up the other side of the gully. He never hesitated a second, never slowed down. He must have been twelve feet long.’³⁷

On 8 February 1945 Slim moved his Tactical Headquarters to Monywa:

‘The Japanese had left behind a number of booby traps which were disconcerting, but my chief frights came from snakes which abounded in the piles of rubble. They seemed specially partial to the vicinity of my War Room which lacked a roof but had a good concrete floor. It was my practice to visit the War Room every night before going to bed, to see the latest situation map. I had once when doing so nearly trodden on a krait, the most deadly of all small snakes. Thereafter I moved with great circumspection, using my electric torch, I am afraid, more freely than my security officers would have approved. It seemed to me that the risk of snake bite was more imminent than that of a Japanese bomb.’³⁸

Having set up a target range upon which to teach Shan tribesmen marksmanship, OSS man Neil Barrett found his first training exercise suddenly and swiftly broken up by the appearance of a king cobra not more than 20 feet behind him. ‘His head was puffed out at the sides as it is when he is attacking. I was running in a zigzag fashion, because this is supposed to be the only way to keep one of them from running you down. They practically have to stop to turn.’³⁹ Eventually the snake gave up the chase, but the curious Barrett turned and followed from a distance, attempting to shoot the cobra with his .45-calibre pistol. When the snake turned on him a second time, Barrett gave up both his interest in the cobra and his target range.

Setting aside the threats of immediate death posed by tigers and snakes, the armies fighting in Burma had daily to deal with a wide variety of other annoying creatures. Duncan Guthrie, dropped into the Karen Hills in order to raise native levies, reported waking one morning to find his clothes, rucksack, and all of its organic contents eaten by big brown and white ants.⁴⁰ David Halley wrote of clouds of disease-bearing flies gathering around wounds and the difficulty of sleeping in the bush when covered by thousands of ants.⁴¹ Leeches were among the worst of these annoyances, and throughout Burma, they were ubiquitous. Brigadier John Masters has written:

‘Our short puttees, tied tightly round the join of boot and trouser, kept out most of the leeches, but a halt seldom passed without an oozing of blood through the boot eyelets telling us that some particularly determined beast had found its way in. Hair-fine when they passed through the eyelet holes, they fed on our blood, and when we had taken off puttee, boot, and sock it was a bloated, squashy, red monster the size of our little finger to which we applied the end of a lighted cigarette.’⁴²

Fred O. Lyons, one of Merrill’s Marauders, even reported leeches crawling into men’s ears and noses, ‘so the medics would hold a cupful of water under the leech-sufferer’s nose or ear. As the leech reached down, the medic would tie a loop of string to the tail and pull tight.’⁴³ A lighted cigarette would then be applied and the leech removed so that the head would not break off beneath the skin and start an infection. ‘All of us were more or less bloody all the time,’⁴⁴ Charlton Ogburn Jr judged. But still, nature had not finished with the tropical combatant.

In both East Africa and Burma, flies, mosquitos, airborne and waterborne micro-organisms, and general fighting conditions visited so many and such debilitating diseases on the troops that it is difficult to keep track of them. Slim, writing about 26 days of combat during the 1944 monsoon, reported that 9 Brigade ‘had only 9 killed and 85 wounded, but lost 507 from sickness.’⁴⁵

In East Africa, the profile was much the same: ‘By 1916 the ratio of non-battle casualties to battle casualties was 31.4 to 1.’⁴⁶ Malaria, typhus, jaundice, blackwater fever, dengue fever, spotted fever, dysentery… the list was endless, and sooner or later almost every man who fought in a tropical theatre of war was struck down by something. Indeed, many British officers who later wrote compelling personal accounts of the war in East Africa – Meinertzhagen, Wynn, Young, Buchanan, Thornhill, and others – were eventually knocked straight out of the theatre, not by the enemy but by fever and ill health. Returning to Burma, on 25 May 1944, Col Charles Newton Hunter reported that before Myitkyina where the American Galahad Force was fighting, ‘Almost every member of the unit was suffering from either malaria, dysentery, diarrhoea, exhaustion, or fever.’⁴⁷ Weeks later, conditions were worse: ‘The rains continued to fall heavily as the June days dragged inexorably on. Three or four days of steady rain would be followed by a day or two of searing humid heat. Men sitting endlessly in wet foxholes began to develop trench foot. Malaria, fungus, and fever were afflictions common to most everyone.’⁴⁸ Writing of approximately the same time, Mike Calvert reported the same problem in 77 Brigade: ‘We fought and lived most of the time in mud and water and everything and everywhere was at best damp and at worst soaking.’⁴⁹

Alongside the men, animals and, consequently, transport were powerfully afflicted. Throughout East Africa men and animals continually passed through belts of tsetse fly; as a rule the men managed to avoid infection with sleeping sickness, but mules and horses did not, and they died by the thousands, delaying transport and clogging the roads with their rotting bodies.⁵⁰ Eventually, animal sickness became so widespread and so problematic that it seriously disrupted supply, particularly the supply of food and medicine, and this in turn caused the general health of the army to deteriorate further. By war’s end, animals were being replaced by porters, and there was fairly general agreement that trying to use beasts for tropical transport had been a mistake.⁵¹ In Burma both Wingate and Merrill placed heavy emphasis on animal transport, and while the animals were prized and even loved, the rigours of the tropical climate exacted a staggering toll. Injury, the enemy, and finally disease felled the mules right and left. Charles Ogburn Jr, for example, recalled that leeches plagued Galahad’s mules more consistently than Galahad’s men: ‘Their fetlocks were generally red and slimy with blood. In addition, eggs deposited in their lesions by a kind of fly hatched out into screw worms.’⁵² As Wingate and Merrill’s campaigns wore on, more and more animals went down, and with each animal’s death the fighting efficiency of its parent unit was reduced.

Too frequently, the impact of raw nature manifesting itself through disease was brought on by, or compounded through, serious problems with the food supply. And even when sickness was not an immediate result, obtaining food adequate to keep up one’s strength remained a consistent difficulty through both campaigns. Owing to breakdowns and slowdowns in motor and animal transport, Francis Brett Young’s narrative of the march down the Pangani is the record of a march made continually on half rations.⁵³ Frank J. Magee RNVR, helping in 1915 to drag the gunboats Mimi and Tou-Tou north from South Africa so as to sweep the Germans from Lake Tanganyika, reports having to hunt frequently in order to keep up the meat supply and having to shoot crocodiles in order to provide food for the expedition’s porters.⁵⁴ Captain Shorthose often had to live off the country, and some of the most difficult fighting that he saw came in 1917 when he was hard pressed for food and fighting the Germans for the possession of native grain fields.⁵⁵ In 1916 Deneys Reitz reports several times being hungry: ‘Meanwhile we were living under famine conditions. There was little or no game in the forest, nor any cattle in this tsetse-haunted region [near Kissaki], and the millet fields lay mostly reaped… and for the next few weeks we lived on very spare diet.’⁵⁶ Buchanan, who fought against food shortages daily, eventually purchased a hen so as to guarantee himself a steady supply of eggs; the system worked well for several months until the hen ‘was stolen by someone whose hunger overcame his scruples’.⁵⁷ Arnold Weinholt recalled some of his porters going so far as to eat some ‘awful-looking red and yellow toadstools’ to satisfy their hunger; the result was not fatal, but it came close.⁵⁸

For the Germans in East Africa, conditions were not much better, but resourceful improvisation often came to their aid. Of necessity, General von Lettow-Vorbeck had to rely on carriers for his transport, so in most cases this kept his food supplies abreast of his army. Invariably, von Lettow reports that he foraged, the supreme guerrilla tactician living off the land. Mtama, a kind of millet, was pounded into a native flour, which, when mixed with stocks of European flour, made excellent bread, the staple of the askari’s diet.⁵⁹ Watching flocks of birds gave von Lettow the idea that maize crops could be harvested and used before they were ripe, experiment soon showing him that the grain could be artificially dried before being made into very good meal.⁶⁰ Fruits were collected by primitive gathering techniques in the bush, water was often collected from inside coconuts and bamboo, and meat was derived from both hunting and native herds. Finally, hippos were used as a source of fat: ‘The quantity varies: a well-fed beast provides two bucketfuls,’⁶¹ providing that an expert was present who knew where to find it. These measures notwithstanding, food remained a persistent problem for the Germans, and on 27 November 1917, while Smuts’s famous scout, Major P. J. Pretorius, watched from the top of a gorge, Captain Tafel marched to within one mile of von Lettow’s approaching column before turning away and altogether missing their intended rendezvous. On the following day, ignorant of the fact that he had come so close, near starvation but unable to replenish his stocks of food, Tafel surrendered ‘3,400 askaris, nineteen officers, a hundred Europeans, and a thousand porters.’⁶²

In Burma, for the men engaged, food often proved as much of a problem as it had been in East Africa, and the lack of it proved equally debilitating. During Wingate’s first raid, David Halley recalled how the Burma Riflemen of his intelligence section helped the regulars to supplement their diet by catching small sprat-like fish with their mosquito nets: ‘Then they impaled five or six of them on a bamboo splinter, stuck their splinters into the ground beside a fire, turned it round once or twice, and they were ready for eating,’ bones and all.⁶³ Later, during the walkout, when his own party faced starvation, Halley attempted to quell his hunger by swallowing a small piece of soap, while, ‘Our two Burmese plucked little bamboo shoots and the tenderest and greenest pieces of grass they could find and made themselves a sort of stew.’⁶⁴