Another Man's War Page 7
When Isaac’s ship entered the warm, calmer waters of the Indian Ocean, a British officer noted that the sea was ‘like a huge sheet of glass, across which our convoy chugged like stately swans’.* The days began to merge into one another. Every morning after breakfast, a Catholic priest held a well-attended prayer session on the deck, always starting with a rendition of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. Never mind that many of the soldiers were Muslims; they joined the hymn-singing with gusto. The officers arranged boxing tournaments on the deck. In the heat of the afternoon, some of the African soldiers who had been to school gave literacy lessons to their colleagues, using primary school books that one of the British officers had bought in Cape Town. ‘One would see them huddled in small groups here and there, studies in concentration as they painstakingly wrote down three letter words with a grimy stub of pencil,’ he wrote.*
Otherwise, the men had nothing more to do than sit and talk and talk. The Gambians on the Staffordshire spoke in Mandingo and Wolof. The Sierra Leoneans spoke in Krio. And the Nigerians spoke in Hausa, Igbo and Tiv, although a handful, including Isaac, spoke in Yoruba. Everyone found those who shared their tongue, and did their best to communicate with the rest. They talked about where they’d come from, and they tried to imagine where they were going. Sometimes they would sing. These great ships, said a Yoruba man from Ekiti, were gliding across the endless sea like the vulture glides through the sky.
E i lo dee E i lo dee
Ogongo baba eiye
E i lo dee *
It’s gliding away, it’s gliding away
The vulture, the king of birds
Is gliding away.
The Sierra Leoneans answered with a song of their own:
When shall I see ma home?
When shall I see ma native land?
I shall never forget ma home,
Home again, home again.
When shall I see ma home?
When shall I see ma native land?
I shall never forget ma home.
Sometimes the Africans would talk about death and the possibility that they would not come home, or the changes that would take place while they were away. One Igbo man put it bluntly: ‘No be say all people where de for house na him go de when we come back o. Whe our fathers, whe our fathers father De no die?’ – ‘Don’t think everyone we left at home will be there when we come back. Where are our fathers, and our father’s father? Did they not die?’*
According to a British officer on Isaac’s convoy, ‘as the weather grew warmer, the drums beat, and the Africans danced’.* It was a way to break up the tedium. The officers arranged their own evening entertainment. They gathered in the crowded, hot lounge, its windows blacked out for safety reasons, and cheered on amateur dramatics and cabarets gamely performed by their peers and the ship’s crew.
Richard Terrell was a lieutenant who travelled in the same convoy as Isaac, an LSE graduate who’d already noticed that some of his fellow officers disapproved of his leftish views. He gave lectures to the Africans, not only about the war, but also about geography, different civilisations, and the relationship between the earth, the moon and the solar system. Terrell had plenty of experience of lecturing bored British soldiers who, he said, invariably ‘sat glumly waiting to be dismissed’. The Africans, in contrast, saw any chance of self-improvement as ‘a real treat’. Terrell found himself trying to answer innumerable questions, as the men thrust their hands in the air, eager to catch his attention and learn more.* When Charles Carfrae made the same crossing two months later, he too gave lectures, although these were more narrowly focused on the battles that he feared were to come. The Japanese he said ‘are the King of England’s enemies, and yours too. If they are not defeated, they will enslave many – perhaps even yourselves.’ He found the Nigerians scornful of this possibility, and confident that the Japanese in Burma would prove no more dangerous a foe than the Italians in Abyssinia had been at the beginning of the war. ‘This unclouded confidence disturbed me,’ confessed Carfrae.*
There was a daily boat parade on the Staffordshire, not only to keep the men busy, but also to remind them of the very real dangers that lurked beneath the waves. The convoy steered a zigzagging movement through the ocean, led by a Navy destroyer at the front. This was intended to throw enemy submarines off course, although it also caused confusion among some of the Africans, especially after many days without any sight of land. An officer on Isaac’s ship recalled one of the Gambians saying to him, ‘One thing doubt me, sah. I watch the small scout boat yonder for a long time. Now he go look this side, now he go look that side, but he never able for find proper road. I think we all lost.’*
The threat from the Japanese may have felt improbable on those calm days and balmy nights in the Indian Ocean, but the lookouts were on twenty-four-hour alert for the dreaded sight of a periscope poking out of the water. One night, the men were woken abruptly by the wail of the siren. In wordless fear, they hurriedly put on their lifejackets, stumbled onto the deck and got to their stations. This was the scenario they had trained for, again and again. The destroyers were scanning the surrounding ocean with powerful lights, trying to find the suspected submarine, occasionally firing into the blackness. Amid the melee and the noise, Isaac could see the tension on the faces of the British officers. He tried to imagine what the explosion of a torpedo would feel like; the violent rocking of the ship that would follow, the panic on the decks and the cold water gushing up from the hold until it enveloped him. Then the shooting stopped and the siren fell silent. The men waited on deck for another half-hour, before someone shouted, ‘Stand down!’ and they all went back to the hold.
A few months later, disaster did strike another British troopship in the Indian Ocean, this one carrying East African soldiers to Ceylon. On 12 February 1944, the Khedive Ismail, with 1,511 people on board, was sailing in bright sunshine through placid waters near the Maldives, when it was hit by torpedoes fired from a Japanese submarine. There were two enormous explosions. The Khedive Ismail went down in just two minutes. Its passengers made frantic efforts to escape, but the vast majority were trapped inside; 1,297 people drowned. Of the 996 East African soldiers and British officers on board, only 143 survived. It was one of the worst sea disasters of the Second World War. A sailor on board a Royal Navy destroyer who helped pull survivors out of the water remembered that the Africans ‘were utterly bewildered by the whole episode. Many were experiencing their first trip at sea and most of them had probably never even heard of submarines.’* The sailor offered the exhausted Africans milk and sugar with their tea. A junior officer intervened, arguing that they should not get used to such comforts, given the hardships that lay ahead.
As a medical orderly, Isaac assisted in the running of the clinic on the Staffordshire. In the damp and crowded conditions of the troopship, especially in the colder seas off the Cape, the British were worried that disease could spread quickly. They were especially concerned about meningitis, pneumonia and other chest infections. On Charles Carfrae’s ship, there were several fatalities, ‘the sufferers became frightened, abandoned hope, closed their eyes and quietly died’.* Another British officer on the same convoy as Carfrae said Nigerian soldiers were ‘dying almost like flies’, apparently convinced they were the victims of witchcraft, as a result of being cursed by enemies back home. During the port call at Durban, they ‘took them all off and put them in a transit camp and medicated them – what medication there is for witchcraft I don’t know – but at any rate they were alright after that’.*
The Staffordshire, for its part, recorded only a single fatality during the journey to India. It was announced one morning at boat parade, and that afternoon, at two o’clock, Isaac and all the other soldiers and sailors on board lined the decks and stood at attention. The body of the young African soldier had been sewn in canvas with lead weights, and then wrapped in the Union Jack. It was placed on a platform slide amidships. As the Staffordshire’s engines came to a halt, the ship’s captain led
the men in prayers, and everyone doffed their hats. Then the captain pulled a rope that released the body down the slide and off the side of the ship. It landed in the ocean with a dull splash before sinking out of view in the deep water. A full ten minutes passed before the engines of the Staffordshire hummed back into life, and the ship moved gently forward once more.
As the convoy approached its destination, the air grew clammy and humid, the skies greyer. The monsoon rains were still falling, not with the violent intensity and thunderstorms and wind gusts of previous weeks, but with a dismal constancy. On 14 August, a soggy day of low skies, they reached Bombay. Thousands of West African soldiers in khaki uniforms filed off the ships, onto the quayside next to the Gateway to India. They made for an exotic sight, and Indians gathered to stare. The Africans stared back. Isaac absorbed it all: the rickshaw pullers forcing their way through the crowd, the officers waving papers above their heads, shouting to make themselves heard, and the rows of women crouched over little charcoal stoves, offering up fried snacks. He was only seventeen, but he had come far from the red dusts and thatched huts of his village. He might have been a mere ara-oko, but he had travelled across the world, and arrived in a strange new land.
4
The generals are met
The Generals are met. The scene is Delhi
Upon the wall a map of Arakan
And thus the C in C; ‘Oh Woolner, rehelly
Where shall I put your soldiers African?’
And Woolner spoke; ‘I’ve heard it’s hot and smelly
Unfit for Sepoys in the Kaladan’
‘Then that’s the place, I will not keep you longer:
Oh, Colonel! Send a sweeper for my tonga’
Captain David M. Cookson,
De Bello Kaladano: An Unfinished Epic*
August 1943
Bombay
Throughout the weeks at sea, the West Africans had tried to imagine this famous city of Bombay, but now that they had finally arrived they were not impressed by what they saw. The labourers in dhotis who unloaded the ships on the docks were thin and lethargic, and the emaciated beggars who gathered round the West Africans imploring, ‘Baksheesh, sahib, baksheesh,’ had desperation in their eyes. Beggars were almost unheard of in West Africa. Even the Lagos boys, the ones who came from the tough and crowded backstreets of Olowogbowo and Isale Eko, had never seen anything like this. They wondered what sort of place it was, this India, which they were supposed to defend. ‘Are these people India people? Then we fine past them’ – ‘Are these really Indians? Then we are better than them,’ they said.
The Africans marched through the cleared streets, from the docks to the Gothic glory of the Victoria Terminus, while the crowds watched on in silence. At the station, the soldiers boarded the trains waiting to take them past the bleak housing estates on the edge of Bombay into the interior, then up a forested escarpment, before coming to a stop at Nasik, on the Godavari River, where a single conical basalt hill rose from the plateau. It was a holy place, they learnt, with a temple two-thirds of the way up, which could be reached by climbing five hundred steps. The divinities of Shiva and Parvati, Rama and Sita, Ganesh, Vishnu and Krishna were carved into the local canyon walls. They were escorted to their camp, three miles away at Deolali, by a unit of horse-mounted Indian Engineers who played the bagpipes and wore magnificent uniforms of scarlet, blue and white. But the camp itself was only half built. Ragged labourers were still working on the roads, latrines and cookhouses. There was mud everywhere. The Africans saw women and children scavenging for food scraps from dustbins on the edge of the camp, and boys trying to sell tea through the fence, shouting, ‘Garam cha, garam cha!’ Kites and crows circled above. The soldiers were assigned to bell-tents, each one housing six men, and on that first night they slept long and hard, despite the heavy rain that fell outside.
Isaac would spend over four months in India, before crossing into Burma. It took that long for the 81st Division to assemble its forces; the last convoy did not dock in Bombay until November 1943. General Woolner, who had flown to India with a handful of senior colleagues, wanted his men to use this prolonged pause to build up their fitness and do more jungle training, in conditions he hoped would replicate those they would encounter during the fighting to come. The 81st Division went for long marches in the Western Ghats, through deep gorges, and up and down hills and valleys of thick forest. The monsoons carried on late that year, and the soldiers spent their days toiling up steep slopes on muddy paths, carrying heavy loads, often in torrential rain. The Africans also went for long runs before breakfast, cleared fields of rocks so they could play football, and shooed away the donkeys that wandered around camp with a proprietary air, defecating and urinating everywhere.
Isaac spent much of his time working in the military hospital at Deolali camp, with his colleagues from the 29th CCS. The doctors had named the various wards after their hometowns in Scotland: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen. They treated the soldiers for skin diseases, malaria, food poisoning and hookworm.
When the days ended, the British officers and the African men gathered round their respective log fires, exhausted but relaxed, and talked. In the flickering light, black and white faces alike grew softer, more child-like. The sunsets at Deolali were magnificent, and, as the giant red ball of fire sunk below the hills, one officer was known to bring out his wind-up portable gramophone. The men crowded round to listen to Deanna Durbin or their favourite, Paul Robeson singing ‘Ol’ Man River’. On one heavenly night, a band from an Indian village far below emerged out of the growing darkness, played their strange instruments under the countless stars, then disappeared.
Some evenings, officers and men would wander into Nasik town. The officers gravitated to the gold- and silversmiths, where they bargained for jewellery. The Africans preferred to spend their few pennies at the tailors, commissioning jackets, trousers and new shoes. John Hamilton remembered that they asked for their new clothes to be ‘starched and pressed, to the highest degree of smartness, with razor edged creases’.* Richard Terrell enjoyed going to the cinema in Nasik, and would often see African soldiers there. Neither they, nor he, could understand the Hindi and Marathi movies, but they liked the music, and would recite the songs in camp later.
Not long after they settled into camp, a clerk from the Gold Coast offered to write letters on behalf of his illiterate colleagues. Although Burma and the Japanese were still a thousand miles to the north-east, a confused censor discovered that every letter composed by this clerk began with the words, ‘With my rifle hot in my hands…’* There were other recurring themes in the Africans’ letters: they were struck by how small Indian men were; how beautiful their women (‘India woman like angel’); and how odd it was, to their eyes at least, that men and women dressed alike.* The Indians seemed so frail, and the Africans wondered what ailment it was they suffered from, that made them spit what looked like blood onto the ground.
The West Africans arrived shortly before the local townspeople celebrated a Hindu festival. A swaying procession made its way gently up the steps to the temple near the top of the conical hill. There were bullocks with their horns painted red, the tips covered in brass, and gilded rings threaded through their noses; some donkeys were decorated in bright colours and draped with baubles and bells. The Africans watched, torn between awe and a feeling of superiority. They laughed at the way the Indians allowed their cows and bulls to wander at will through the towns and villages and sit in the middle of roads as if they owned them. Surely, they asked, ‘Is it not madness to worship what is good to chop?’* Yet the Africans could not help but feel the allure of this rich and novel culture. They were intrigued by this mysterious religion called Hinduism, which so few of them had heard of before landing in India. Caste, religion, diet and sacred animals – they had already seen and absorbed so much in their first weeks.
On 17 September 1943, an important visitor came to the camp. General William Slim, a veteran o
f the trenches and Gallipoli, was about to take command of Britain’s 14th Army, which was ranged along India’s frontier with Burma. He had a daunting double task: preventing a Japanese invasion of India and re-conquering Burma.
A charismatic, tough man who had risen through the ranks, General Slim inspired loyalty from the troops because of his obvious concern for their welfare, but he was taking over at a desperate time. The much-heralded Arakan offensive of early 1943 had ended in an ignominious retreat, and the commander of the British forces in Eastern India, General Noel Irwin, had been relieved of his command. He was departing under a cloud. At a meeting in Delhi, a few days after General Slim had visited Deolali, General Irwin painted a scathing picture of the British soldiers on the India–Burma border. Disease, he said, had ravaged them; for each battle casualty in hospital, there were 120 men suffering from tropical diseases. Unless this problem could be addressed, he warned, it would be ‘useless to try and stage an offensive into Burma’. Moreover, General Irwin doubted that he could count on any of his frontline units to hold firm in the event of a Japanese advance into India.*
General Slim was taking over an army of many races and backgrounds. Most of the men in the ‘British’ forces that would fight for him in Burma were, in fact, Indian, some three-fifths of a total force of more than 500,000 men. The British and African contingents each amounted to about 100,000 soldiers.* Slim set out to restore morale among this diverse force. He attacked each of the challenges with thoroughness, putting as much emphasis on better hygiene, food and logistics as he did on ammunition supplies. Officers who failed to look after the health of their men were sacked. He made them more flexible in their tactics and better prepared for jungle fighting. He understood that Burma was often an after-thought for his political masters in London, and that he would not get all the resources and men he wanted. He would have to just get on, in Clement Atlee’s words, ‘with the scrapings of the barrel’.