Another Man's War Read online

  Unlike many of the British commanders, Slim also managed to build a working relationship with Joe Stilwell, the American general who was leading a Chinese nationalist army in north-eastern Burma. Allies in the war against Japan, the awkward truth was that the British and Americans had fundamentally different objectives in the region. The British wanted to take back the colonial possessions that they had lost; the Americans wanted to reopen the supply route to the Chinese through northern Burma. Indeed, the Americans’ main concern was to keep China in the war, so that it could provide air bases for the fighting in the Pacific and for an eventual attack on Japan itself. They had no interest in putting the British Empire back on its feet. And yet the British had become reliant on American logistical support, and especially American aircraft. Slim believed that Allied superiority in the air could prove of huge significance, even in the apparently unpromising terrain of the Burmese jungle. ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell was an abrasive character, but Slim handled him with skill and tact.

  Slim knew that 1944 would be decisive. The Japanese feared that the tide of war had turned in favour of the Americans in the Pacific, and saw the British Army as the weak link of the forces opposing them. Some Japanese generals argued that a successful attack on India could swing momentum back their way. India, after all, was in ferment, with Gandhi in jail and Britain struggling to contain the nationalist ‘Quit India’ Movement. The Japanese included in their ranks the ‘Indian National Army’, men who dreamt of overthrowing the Raj and achieving independence by force of arms, many of whom were defectors from the British Army. The Japanese hoped an invasion of India would spark off a popular anti-British uprising, just as it had done in Burma.

  Slim spent four days at Deolali with the 81st Division. He wanted to take a good look at the West African soldiers whom he knew would play a crucial part in the fighting in the months to come. He was an aggressive and bold commander, and had no intention of sitting back and waiting for the Japanese to strike first. He had his own plans, for an offensive into Burma in the first weeks of 1944, and the 81st Division was to play an important role.

  As he addressed the officers, he took off his battered slouch Gurkha hat and said, ‘I want you to take a good look at this ugly mug, because it’s the one that is going to be buggering you all about before long.’ The burly, grey-haired man with the broad nose, jutting jaw and twinkling eyes – the man that a British Army magazine said looked like a ‘well-to-do West Country farmer’* – won the officers’ support. Perhaps he would be able to lead them where General Irwin had failed.

  Slim also watched the Africans in training, and was impressed by them. He liked their discipline and smart appearance, and thought that they were ‘more obviously at home in the jungle than any troops I had yet seen’.* But he was concerned that the African units relied on large numbers of porters to carry supplies. These long lines of men, he thought, could prove vulnerable to Japanese ambush in the jungle. He also worried about the British officers; that there were too many in the West African units, and that some of them had been drafted willy-nilly, without any real enthusiasm or understanding of their men. This could stifle the initiative of the Africans themselves.

  The waiting was nearly over. In mid-November, when the last units of the 81st Division arrived in India, Isaac and the others at Deolali began packing up in preparation for the long journey to the Burmese frontier. They travelled by train across the sub-continent. It took them five days and nights to reach Calcutta. Isaac slept on board, enduring uncomfortable nights on the train’s hard wooden benches. When the British officers wanted tea, which was frequently, they’d pull the emergency cord, and the driver would bring the train to a grudging, grinding stop. Then the charwallahs would trudge down the tracks to the front of the train, and pour steaming hot water from the engine boiler’s relief valve into great metal urns of tea and sugar. The officers dunked their hard ration biscuits in the tea, and the train moved on.

  Beggars thronged them at every station, thrusting their sores and deformities towards the carriage windows in hope of some pity. Their thin brown fingers reached up pleadingly, and strong black fists passed down cigarettes and coins. Through the window, Isaac watched Indian women, bent over the brown river where they washed their clothes and scrubbed their pots with sand, look up at him as the train rolled by. Their naked children splashed happily around them. Then the train sped up. A glimpse of a village, of a cow standing in the shade and a man pulling a handcart, and it was gone.

  Maybe the Africans wondered if this war meant anything to the people in these villages, trapped in their land of poverty. But their fate, just like that of the poor villagers, was being shaped by forces beyond their control. For they were part of the war machine, rushing towards an unknown destination.

  J.O. Ariyo was one of the Nigerian soldiers who made that train journey across India. Amid all that was new and different, he was also struck by the similarities with his own country.* He saw great diversity in India and Nigeria – a multitude of languages and tribes – but also distrust and divisions between the different groups. In both India and Nigeria, he observed, there are taller and fairer people in the North, and shorter, darker people in the South. And the British had conquered the respective territories in a similar fashion. The process was begun by trading companies, interested in profit, and only later did Imperial administrators and soldiers arrive. They created vast new countries where none had existed. Nigerians and Indians might resist the British, he said, but thus far internal divisions had undermined their struggles.

  In Calcutta, the Africans would see the greatest wonders and darkest horrors of colonial rule. The officers organised excursions through the city for their men, and the West Africans feasted their eyes – Calcutta, where ‘seeing is believing’, wrote Lance Corporal Israel Agwu.* It was Agwu’s first time in a real city, and the ‘buses, cars and personal traffics was too much complicating to me’. He rode a lift to the top of a ‘conspicuous and lofty building’. He saw the ‘dim, solemn and terrible’ interiors of the British Raj, and the statues on the Maidan of ‘great men on horses backs standing in memory of their braveries’. At Alipore Zoo, he marvelled at the giraffes, lions and parrots. With characteristic Nigerian pragmatism, he thought it would be no exaggeration to say, ‘a rhinoceros can last the whole of five GTC [general transport companies] a fortnight meal’. Then there were the cinemas. ‘Oh!…how I drew my breath’. It was, as Lance Corporal Sunday Waame wrote, a real ‘European cinema, where people of all nationalities seemed to mix’, and the seating, lights, decoration and comfort were ‘beyond description’. They watched a newsreel, about Britain’s 8th Army, which was now advancing up the Italian mainland. Calcutta’s shops were stocked with the finest linens and fashionable ladies’ hats. People thronged to the racecourse with its elegant grandstand. The West Africans had their heads turned by restaurants that were ‘spick and span’. The most glamorous of these was Firpo’s, where British officers danced waltzes on the famous sprung floor and drank iced coffee while being fanned by punkawallahs.

  The Africans admired the ‘many Chinese ladys and Black Americans and also another descendents people’, their eyes opened to a more cosmopolitan world than they had ever seen before. Fierce-looking Sikhs manoeuvred their taxis round bicycle rickshaws and tongas. On the pavements, Bengalis in their white shirts and dhotis jostled past the British, Indian, African and American soldiers. Some of the Africans set off to look for their own entertainment. A British woman working at the Red Cross Welfare Office was surprised when five smartly dressed West African soldiers walked in and said, ‘Please Miss, this be welfare? We want some fine women please.’*

  Isaac, too, was given a Calcutta tour, along with several colleagues. They were led by a dental surgeon, Captain Harrison, and they enjoyed the cinema, and what the men judged to be ‘a first-class meal’ in an expensive restaurant. They took their first ride in an electric tram – ‘you can imagine my pleasure and delight’, one wrote – and were dazzl
ed by the noise and energy on the streets and the speed with which the cars hurtled by. Calcutta was not just the largest city in India, but also one of the great ports of the British Empire, perhaps twenty times the size of Lagos.* Isaac had come for adventure, and he felt he had found it.

  However, it was another Nigerian soldier, Corporal Agbaje, who made the most telling observation. For all Calcutta’s wealth, he wrote, ‘the most important thing that I saw, its that the Beggars are too much than the richest men in the town’. The West African soldiers had arrived in Calcutta in the midst of the Bengal famine of 1943, a catastrophe created by the combination of natural disasters, military defeats and administrative incompetence. At least one and a half million people died in Bengal, perhaps many more, before the British authorities, callous but also distracted by the challenges of the war, began to respond. In the weeks before Isaac got there, thousands of starving people had made their way from the countryside into Calcutta in the hope of finding help in the city. By then, Archibald Wavell, newly promoted to Viceroy of India, had appreciated the seriousness of the situation. At the end of October, he visited Calcutta and wrote in his private journal that he’d seen ‘widespread distress and suffering…obviously we have to get an immediate grip or it may get out of hand altogether’.*

  From the moment they had disembarked in Bombay, the Africans had been both horrified and intrigued by India’s poverty. Now, death was staring them in the face. In the gutters of Chowringhee, on the traffic islands and in the shadow of the Victoria Monument, mothers held dead babies in their arms, or babies tried to suckle from the breasts of dead mothers. On street corners, human scavengers emptied rubbish bins, searching for anything they could eat. If they discovered a dead cat, they celebrated their luck. ‘The feelings of our Africans were not easy to judge,’ said Trevor Clark, who’d also arrived in Calcutta at the end of November, with the Gambia battalion.

  In fact, the sight of people starving to death on a busy street made a vivid impression on Isaac. He was confused and frightened. He’d never seen anything like it in Nigeria, where anybody, no matter how poor and hungry, could always go back to the village to farm. Yet here people were dying in plain view, their dull eyes staring upwards, the outline of their ribs obvious against their taut, thin skin. And all this on the streets of a great city, as the crowds rushed past, everyone absorbed in their own urgent business. British officers with the West Africans confessed that, during their stay in Calcutta in those last weeks of 1943, they became hardened to the sight of emaciated children, and to stepping over recumbent figures on pavements and gutters, who might, or might not be, alive.* Some of the Nigerian soldiers came up with their own name for this city where wealth and suffering rubbed shoulders: Ka-iku-ta, which in Yoruba means ‘count all the dead and sell them’. They gave their tins of bully beef to the beggars, but the gesture was usually in vain. The Hindus would not touch the forbidden meat.

  Viceroy Wavell had decided the starving needed to be moved out of Calcutta and into camps, and that the Army should give whatever assistance it could in the effort. Some West African soldiers were kept busy loading corpses on trucks and taking them to mass lime pits. But the British had brought the Africans to India to fight the Japanese, and the war was getting closer by the day. Calcutta was within range of the Japanese air force, a fact brought abruptly home to Isaac on 5 December, the day he was taken sightseeing by Captain Harrison. He and some fellow soldiers were in the city centre when the air-raid siren went off. They were confused, but they took their cue from the Indians who were running for cover all around them. Calcutta had been bombed before, and the locals at least seemed to know what to do. Traffic came to a standstill. Isaac dived into a ditch by a restaurant, his face pressed into the stinking mud, as the Japanese bombs fell far away, at the docks. It was, he suddenly realised, his eighteenth birthday. For the first time, he felt he had an idea of what war might be.

  In the hot and sunny days of December 1943, thousands of West African soldiers were loaded onto troopships on the banks of the Hooghly. They were moving on from Calcutta. They sailed past fleets of dhows, into the mangrove swamps of the Ganges Delta, and then across the top of the Bay of Bengal, before docking at Chittagong, a vital port for the British as they brought in reinforcements for the frontier with Burma, some sixty miles to the south. There, as Isaac relaxed outside new billets, he saw British fighter-planes pursuing Japanese planes in the clear evening sky above them. Two of the Japanese planes seemed to be glinting in the sun, but they were in fact on fire, and soon tumbled to the ground in flames. A third plane was trailing thick black smoke from its wing. Then it too started to spiral downwards. Like a leaf falling from a tree, thought Isaac. It crashed only a mile away from where he stood. Without thinking, he and his colleagues ran towards the spot where it had come down, laughing and breathless with excitement. But, when they found the wreckage, they froze to a halt. There was twisted metal and ammunition scattered around. A tree was in flames. Just beyond, they could see the partially burnt bodies of two Japanese airmen. Roasted human flesh, Isaac could not help notice, smelled just like goat meat.

  At Chittagong, the West Africans exchanged their khaki uniforms for olive-green battle dress, green jumpers and long rubber capes. And it was here that the commanding officer, Major Robert Murphy, called together all the men of the 29th CCS – the British officers, the Sierra Leoneans and the Nigerians. Major Murphy was a handsome man, with a neatly trimmed moustache; his sisters liked to tease him by saying that he looked like the film star Robert Taylor. He came from Greenock, a grey shipbuilding town on the banks of the River Clyde. His parents, who called him Bobby, were devout Catholics. They had prayed that their only son would go into the priesthood, so were disappointed when he dropped out of the seminary. Instead, he’d gone to Glasgow University, where he graduated in 1936, but he had put his promising medical career on hold at the beginning of the war. Robert Murphy had known little about Africa when he’d sailed out to the west coast in 1942, just as he knew little about Burma now. Still, he did his best to prepare his men for what to expect.

  The 29th CCS would soon be crossing the frontier, said Major Murphy, in support of the frontline troops who would be fighting the Japanese. They would provide medical and surgical facilities for some two hundred casualties at a time. He told them they would be close to the fighting, but slightly behind the advance. They would be marching through jungle, at risk of ambush from a fanatical enemy who would prefer to die on the battlefield than be taken prisoner. There was a place in Japanese heaven, Major Murphy explained, that was specifically reserved for those gallant soldiers killed defending the land of their ancestors. No wonder the Japanese were such dogged fighters. Later, Isaac and the other Nigerians would refer to them as Ajapani. It was a pun from Yoruba, meaning ‘the ones who fight to kill’.

  If anyone in the unit was captured, warned Murphy, he should only provide the Japanese with his name, rank and service number. Under no circumstances should he reveal any information about troop movements, or even the identity of his unit. British officers, meanwhile, were asked to hand over all their personal diaries, letters and photographs, so that they would have nothing on them that might provide intelligence to the enemy. Murphy’s language was direct and clear, and the men listened in hushed silence.

  They wrote letters home, and then packed up and marched through the swampy Bengali countryside, dotted with villages, until they came to a railway. They clambered on board a train once more, and rode the thirty miles to the end of the line, to a place called Dohazari. On the horizon, they could see blue mountains covered in a thin film of mist. They marked the border between India and Burma, the direction they were heading in.

  The mountains stretched away to the north, much further than the men could see. The British and Japanese armies were facing each other along this range, some six hundred miles in length, not in continuous lines, as one officer wrote, ‘but in many small outposts and advanced bases that had been established i
n an immense expanse of tangled no-mans-land, where patrols of both sides wandered at will, emerging from the jungle to kill and destroy, and departing as silently as they had come’.*

  From Dohazari, the 29th CCS and other West African units were ferried on buses southwards, to the little town of Chiringa. The road was congested with other trucks carrying troops in the same direction, and cargo planes roared overhead. Isaac spent Christmas Day 1943 in Chiringa, where the 81st Division was setting up its headquarters. It was a rapidly growing bamboo town carved out of the forest. Dinner was corned beef and potato stew, followed by a pudding made from army biscuits and raisins. ‘Happy Christmas!’ bellowed one of the officers. His men grumbled back, ‘Dis not a better Kismuss, no better chop, no better coppah; and we famble no dey sen we letters.’ – ‘This is not a good Christmas. No good food, no good money, and our families have not sent us letters.’*

  What was to come hung over everything. Ahead lay Burma, the jungle and the Japanese.

  ‌

  ‌5

  ‌Black men held the gate

  All Hail, you Africans, so often harried

  By various commanders and their staffs:

  What useless loads and heavy weights you carried