Another Man's War Page 10

  On the ground, the West Africans had nothing more basic to rely on than their own strength and stamina. Dropping zones had to be cleared and marked, and the heavy loads that fell from the sky had to be collected and frequently carried through the jungle for several miles. This exhausting work was done by thousands of dedicated carriers, called auxiliary groups, who accompanied 81st Division’s fighting men. These were the ‘horde of unarmed porters’ that General Slim had worried about. In practice, however, many were armed and did their share of fighting. But it was their sweat and toil that proved invaluable. Of all the different nationalities from which the British Army in Burma was drawn, only the West African, said John Hamilton, was ‘capable of operating for months on end in the worst country in the world, without vehicles and without mules, and was alone able to carry all his warlike stores with him’.*

  One evening, Isaac was startled by a gunshot near the camp. It was Sergeant Archibong Bassey Duke, who had tracked down and killed a large monkey. Most of the Nigerians considered monkey meat a delicacy, and there was excitement in the camp. In a rare indulgence, the officers gave them permission to light a fire to cook it, using dry bamboo that burnt with a minimum of smoke. Isaac and the others swiftly skinned and roasted the animal, and greedily ate its pungent meat. The officers declined a portion, and several of the Sierra Leoneans also pushed their mess tins away in disgust. ‘Men dey eat monkey all same man dey eat person,’ they said, to guffaws of scorn from the Nigerians.

  Later that same evening, the men received another treat. An officer distributed letters that had arrived in the latest airdrop. The soldiers crouched around the smouldering embers of the fire and read messages from loved ones at home. They learnt of births, bereavements, exams passed and promotions secured, and they were reminded that they were representing the honour of a village, a church or a town. ‘I was so much happy to hear your tidings,’ read one. ‘My only advice that I can give you is that be humble and merciful to any one and more so to your senior officers…Be watchful and remember your prayers, let the Bible be your food that you eat…Let your conduct be good so that everybody may love you, high or low…Reply me as soon as possible, and give my best compliments to all your friends there…’ Although he didn’t know it, these were the last letters Isaac would receive for a long time. He would often berate himself for not having written replies while he had still had the chance.

  Isaac was on lookout duty that night. Through the cold and lonely hours, he listened intently to the sounds of the jungle: the strange bark of the tuk-tu lizard, the rustle of rats in the undergrowth, the goodness-knew-what creature that sounded like a whistling kettle. Was it a bird? As the moon rose, he stared and stared at the strange shapes and shadows that were taking form around him. Sometimes they moved, for no obvious reason. He tried not to let his imagination run away with him. He prayed for dawn to arrive. His mind wandered back to Emure-Ile and Owo, to his father Joshua and his aunts and uncles. If he tried to write down in a letter everything that he had seen over these past few weeks, would he be able to bring it to life to those who were so impossibly far away?

  Deeper in the Arakan, the combat units of the 81st Division were receiving their harrowing introduction to war. On 18 January 1944, the first West Africans had begun their descent into the Kaladan Valley itself. They soon ran into small groups of Japanese soldiers. For many, this was almost a relief. In his heart of hearts, General Woolner felt that his men were ‘lamentably untrained and inexperienced…absolute beginners’, but after so many months of travelling and anticipation, they were at last facing the moment of truth. The West Africans were ordered to move forward only on moonless nights. When a deer snorted from across a valley, or the tree frogs abruptly stopped their chorus, every soldier would halt dead. They tried to control their breathing and strained to hear something, anything, in the darkness. Then they blundered onwards, using a compass or following a waterway and resisting the temptation to take the more obvious option of an inviting track through felled bamboo, lest it should lead straight into an ambush.

  There were two sounds the West Africans quickly learnt to dread. The first was the sudden cough-cough of the enemy machine gun, the one they called ‘the woodpecker’. The other was the sharp whistle from the hillside above them, which meant an explosion of mortars would come seconds later, raining jagged pieces of metal shrapnel that shredded trees and flesh alike. There was no frontline in the Arakan jungle, and nowhere was safe. They never knew when they were being watched, and so they came to fear that the enemy was always there, his eyes following them, his finger tightening on the trigger. Usually, their fears were unfounded, but just occasionally they were not, and the Japanese were indeed waiting for them. ‘He was an enemy you never saw, unless you managed to shoot him,’ said Hugh Lawrence. The West Africans felt most vulnerable when they were forced to wade across a waist-deep chaung, their own rifles carried high above their heads as they waited for the cough-cough of the woodpecker. It was nerve-racking, pushing forward in a single file on slippery, narrow tracks, measuring the visibility ahead in yards. ‘When we were lucky we ambushed them, when they were lucky they ambushed us,’ said a Nigerian veteran, as he looked back on the war many decades later.

  Soon after they arrived in the Kaladan Valley, Gambian soldiers were startled to see their officer, delirious from stomach wounds, being rushed past on a stretcher, crying for death to relieve him of his agony. A mortar landed in a chaung where an Army doctor was trying to treat the African wounded. Shrapnel cut the poor doctor to pieces. ‘Can’t somebody help me? I’m bleeding to death’ were his last words.* On another path a few days later, Nigerians came across the corpse of one their countrymen. ‘He good man. He die, him body no smell,’ said the gruff sergeant, as he walked on.*

  As the 81st Division passed through a series of abandoned villages, where many of the bashas were burnt to the ground, they realised that the enemy was retreating, but without significant losses. Rather, the Japanese were looking to stage attacks where it suited them best. ‘They would let us move forward into a difficult position,’ recalled a British officer at the front of the Kaladan advance, ‘and then let us have it.’* As soon as a firefight was over, the Japanese would disappear into the jungle, only to stage another attack a few miles further on. The soldiers at the front of a column could never let their guard down, but the Japanese would often allow them to pass by and then hit the middle or the rear of the group with all their force.

  The British officers noticed something else. They were being shot at more than their men. The Japanese were targeting them, aiming to kill or wound a commander so as to throw whole units into confusion. The officers’ whiteness, which brought automatic privilege over their men, was also a curse. They removed their badges, tried to grow thick beards, even covered their faces in black cream, in the hope it made them indistinguishable from the Africans. And each officer was provided with a vial of morphine, for instant pain relief should he need it.

  The West Africans of the 81st Division were learning the hard lessons that thousands of British and Indian soldiers had learnt before them. The Japanese were bold and brave, and seemed to be able to march great distances through the jungle, even on a minimum of supplies. They were skilful at digging deep, camouflaged bunkers – ‘turning the hills into caves’ was how the Africans put it when they later saw these positions. The Japanese built their bunkers with roofs of logs and tightly packed soil, which protected them from incoming artillery. They cleverly sited each one so as to give support to at least one other bunker. From inside, eight or ten men could fire machine guns. The Japanese air force was rarely seen over the Kaladan Valley these days, but the men on the ground fought on. British officers could, and often did, call in British or American planes to bomb and strafe the Japanese bunkers, but only the most accurate of fire would do serious damage. The Japanese were dug in. Besides, from the air, the jungle all looked the same. As the planes approached, nervous British officers and African soldiers
would pray that their commanders had supplied the right co-ordinates, and that the pilots would not hit their own positions by mistake.

  The Africans came to think of their enemies as masters of deception. A single Japanese soldier, tying ropes to the triggers of multiple guns, would create the illusion that he was part of a much larger force. The Japanese scattered cheap cameras and watches on the jungle paths, and then attached these to lethal explosives – booby traps for the unsuspecting. They put poison in tins of sardines and corned beef. They left the bodies of Africans in exposed places, waiting to fire on those who came to retrieve them.

  Days of unrelenting tension were followed by nights of fear. Each evening, the Africans protected the perimeter of their makeshift camps with panjis, razor-sharp stakes of bamboo that jutted out of the ground at a 45-degree angle. They also dug trenches, narrow and two or three feet deep. They slept right by these trenches, guns by their sides, ready to roll straight in should they be woken by the sudden scream of a shell, or the gun-fire and shouts of rage as Japanese soldiers tried to storm their way into the camp.

  Japanese ‘jitter parties’ would move through the night-time jungle screeching, barking and catcalling, in the hope that the African soldiers’ nerves would crack and they would give away their positions by shooting into the darkness. They had long loved to mock the British, calling out in English, ‘Hallo, Johnny, come out, Johnny!’ If this didn’t get a reply, they’d try, ‘Come out, you white bastard!’ Now they played the same games with the Africans. Nigerian soldiers were astonished to hear thickly accented but unmistakable Hausa being shouted in their direction. ‘Bakin mutum…koma baya’ came voices through the darkness. ‘Black men…go back!’

  If forty-nine Japanese soldiers are killed, wrote a Nigerian who fought in Burma, the fiftieth will not surrender, even if he’s injured. The last survivor in a Japanese bunker had a disconcerting habit of playing dead, only to spring to life once everyone had assumed the attack was over, shooting the off-guard British and Africans from close range. The ethos in the Japanese army was that to surrender was a disgrace and that anyone who was captured could never return to his homeland and his loved ones. To die for the Emperor was glorious. As the fighting wore on, it became apparent to the West Africans that those first two unimpressive Japanese captives, who had handed themselves over so willingly, were the exception. Many months would pass before British intelligence officers would have the opportunity to question another prisoner in the Arakan.

  It was also in the nature of jungle warfare that very few captives were brought back to headquarters, by either side. The British and Africans were fighting with the Japanese at close quarters, on foot and sometimes several days’ walk away from a safe base. There were few ‘battles’; rather, there was a series of short, haphazard and often unanticipated skirmishes between small groups of infantrymen. After days of sweat and fear, the fighting might last for only a few frenzied seconds, each side lashing out at an enemy that could barely be seen through the undergrowth. The men hurled grenades at each other, and lunged with bayonets. Explosions and cries of pain and anger shattered the heavy silence of the jungle, if only for a few seconds.

  In these circumstances, enemy prisoners, especially injured ones, were an unwelcome burden. What could be done with them? Reports of Japanese atrocities against wounded prisoners only increased the inclination of British and Africa soldiers to show no mercy. Captain Charles Carfrae struggled to convince his Nigerian soldiers not to kill three injured Japanese prisoners whom he hoped to send back for questioning. The Nigerians, he wrote, were ‘at a loss to understand their commander’s paradoxical wish to preserve the lives of foes’.*

  African veterans of the Burma campaign remembered a cruel enemy, but also their own terrible deeds. Marshall Kebby, a Nigerian soldier, said that, if he and his colleagues ever captured a Japanese soldier, they promptly executed him, as ‘they didn’t spare our people, we didn’t spare them’.* A former private with the Gold Coast regiment, Aziz Brimah, said that he heard horrific details of how the Japanese tortured their own prisoners. ‘When we found the sort of thing they were doing, we don’t spare them any longer. We shot them – we chopped their heads off. We don’t allow our officers to see. We just eliminate them,’ he said, adding that the Japanese prisoners often killed themselves anyway.*

  Victor Nunoo, from the Gold Coast, remembered fighting off his fear as he tried to identify bodies of fellow soldiers who were smashed or decomposed beyond recognition. ‘Only way you can identify them is to pick their Army discs and their papers…you are trying to pick a disc from a dear friend, you can’t bear to touch him. You can’t but you have to,’ he said.* Others recalled rifling through the clothes of the bloated corpses of Japanese soldiers, looking for maps or letters that might help the intelligence officers.

  Burma would leave its indelible mark on the Africans who served there, just as it did on the British, Indian and Japanese soldiers who were there. In this ‘green hell’, superstition and myths flourished. Many of the Africans who came back from Burma would tell a strange story of a female Japanese soldier who sat high in a palm tree for days on end, firing at anyone who approached her. She seemed to be invincible.

  Victor Nunoo spoke of how some West Africans carried talismans or amulets that made them disappear when shot at. He said that two African sergeant majors, members of secret societies back home, even had the ability to lift twenty or thirty people up, and move them to a different place altogether. ‘The soldiers knew who had these powers and they liked to be in their company,’ he said.* British officers knew which of their African soldiers claimed special powers, and which ones carried small leather bags containing bones and mysterious powders and potions. They invariably felt it best not to interfere, so long as it made the men feel more confident.

  Many of the men had brought these bags from Africa, and wore them round their wrists or ankles. They contained scraps of the Holy Koran, or powders purchased from a traditional healer in their home village. Victor Nunoo bought his talisman from an old man on his way through India. He didn’t dare open it, and when he returned home to Africa he threw it away. Others made the mistake of keeping theirs, he said, and eventually they went mad.

  All wars are dehumanising, and the Africans could no less escape the degrading power of this one than could their British officers or their Japanese foes. A Tanganyikan soldier, Musa Kiwhelo, fighting further north in Burma with the King’s African Rifles said that his colleagues murdered Japanese captives in front of other prisoners, and would pretend to eat them. They would then allow some prisoners to escape, so as to spread the terrifying rumour that ‘they were fighting against cannibals who particularly enjoyed eating Japanese flesh’.* It was, Kiwhelo admitted, ‘an inhuman trick’, carried out without the knowledge of his officers.

  By 1944, the British Army was at last getting the measure of the Japanese, and was more confident about fighting in the jungle. British officers started to recognise that, for all their courage, Japanese soldiers had shortcomings. The enemy’s equipment was older and the Japanese supply lines were starting to fray beyond repair. Japanese officers, the British began to notice, lost their sense of initiative when things went wrong, persisting with an unsuccessful plan even when it was demonstrably failing.

  The British forces were also strengthened and united by a fierce hatred of ‘the Jap’. The writer George MacDonald Fraser, who fought in Burma as a young man, said he had the feeling ‘that the Jap was farther down the human scale than the European’.* Likewise, a British intelligence officer who served in the Arakan wrote about a successful ambush on a Japanese patrol, in which dozens were killed in just a few seconds of machine-gun fire and bomb blasts: ‘This may seem quick work, but it’s not quick enough. Assuming that no Japanese were born for the next ninety years and the present population were killed off at the rate of one a second, it would take all of that ninety years to see the end of the last Yellow Man.’* This same man often dispensed with ca
rrying extra ammunition in order to bring his most treasured volumes of poetry and literature with him into the jungle.

  The West Africans fought for an army whose propaganda demonised the enemy as a kind of ruthless animal. They took their cue from the very top. General Slim described the Japanese as ‘part of an insect horde with all its power and horror’.* An officer with West African soldiers in the Kaladan Valley said that the hardships he and his men suffered were ‘minute compared to the misery that would overwhelm the civilised world if the yellow scourge were allowed to spread its filthy tentacles’.* General Slim would write after the war that, in Burma, ‘quarter was neither asked, nor given’.*

  Occasionally, the propaganda would be challenged by a glimmer of humanity. One day, Charles Carfrae came across the body of a dead Japanese soldier. As usual, he went through the documents on the corpse, to see if there was anything of interest. He flicked through some photographs: a smiling girl with flowers in her hair; an old couple sitting stiffly on a bench; a young officer posing in a brand-new uniform, a sword hanging at his side. He had always thought of the Japanese as nothing but ‘dangerous vermin whom it was our job to destroy…Now, faced with this pathetic evidence of our common humanity, forced to acknowledge that the gulf between us could not after all be fundamental, I felt as much cheated as moved.’*

  The Japanese had used propaganda to dehumanise their enemy, too. But the West Africans who arrived in the Arakan in early 1944 were a new foe, and they made quite an impression. A Tokyo radio broadcast talked of ‘African cannibals led by European fanatics’. A Japanese diary found by the British in the Arakan had this assessment of the West African soldiers: ‘Because of their beliefs they are not afraid to die, so even if their comrades have fallen they keep on advancing as if nothing had happened. They have an excellent physique and are very brave, so fighting against these soldiers is somewhat troublesome.’