Sunset in the East: Fighting Against the Japanese through the Siege of Imphal and alongside them in Java 1943-1946

Chapter 1

CURTAIN UP

When first under fire an’ you’re wishful to duck

Don’t look nor take ‘eed at the man that is struck.

The pink dust below the roadside was as fine as face powder. I snuggled my body down into it and caressed the walnut stock of my Lee Enfield rifle. The drill we had been taught so long ago on the firing ranges echoed in my mind:-

"Legs spread-eagled – heels touching the ground – take aim – sque-ee-eze (don’t pull, lad!) – rapid fire!"

A Japanese officer brandished his naked sword and swaggered about the paddy fields to goad his crouching men forward. I knew that it was my bullet that threw him down, and the words of the recruiting sergeant in a freezing school hall in Derby came back to me:

There are three things you never forget, Laddie!

He leered like a Rottweiler at my goose-pimpled nakedness.

Your army number, your first woman, and your first ’Un! Little did I know at that time that my first would be a Jap and not a ’Un

My havildar (sergeant) Surajbahn Singh eased himself down beside me and spoke into my ear above the percussive noise of gunfire:-

"Teja Singh zakhmi hogaya, Sahib." (Teja Singh’s wounded, Sir!)

This was the first casualty in my platoon, and I crawled along behind the bund (mud bank) that edged the paddy field to where the wounded man lay.

Teja Singh had stiff-waxed mustachios that gave him the nickname ‘Moochoo’. Sikhs all carry the same last name Singh, meaning lion, and they have less than a hundred available forenames so they are adept at inventing sobriquets.

He lay in the dust with blood oozing across his ebony hide, and as I stooped over him he received me with a look of unquestioning trust. A mortar splinter had torn into his left thigh and the injury yawned crimson, like a cut on a butcher’s slab. The horror of it dismayed me. My lads always believed that I was much cleverer than I am and their belief in my powers was humbling. He was relaxed in his fatalistic conviction that Sahib Bahadur (complimentary title ‘the brave’) would quickly put things right, but I approached the injury with trepidation. I knew too little about First Aid, and I had nothing with which to treat him, apart from his own First Field Dressing which was useless to staunch such a flow of blood. The pugri (headdress) that all Sikhs wear upon their head supplied me with enough material to contrive a tourniquet, which I tightened about his groin using his own bayonet.

A Sikh on parade, with his crisply wound pugri, rolled beard and coiled hair, is as smart a soldier as you will ever see, but this dishevelled warrior with his waist-length tresses cascading over the dirt looked absurdly like a ravished woman. His spaniel eyes gazed up at me like those of a faithful pet, but I had no medical resources and could only give him the solace of spiritual healing. I held him close and concentrated on the awfulness of his situation, and allowed my own energy to seep into him. I could do no more and the noise of battle racketed about us as enemy bullets kicked up dust spurts on every side. Two Gurkha stretcher-bearers took him to a more sheltered place and I returned to the fight. A month or so later he was back with the platoon, cockily displaying his wound stripe, an inverted chevron on the lower sleeve.

It was mid-March 1944 and the battle of the Tiddim Road on the Manipur front was at its height. I was twenty-three years old, a subaltern commanding an engineer platoon of sixty Sikhs, and we were working in support of an all-Gurkha infantry brigade. We were sandwiched between two fierce Japanese attacks.

As they carried Moochoo away the infantry commander called me over and said, Sapper! Have you got any explosives with you? I think we’ll have to get out of here before we’re overrun!

What a question! You would be more likely to find a Gurkha without his kukri (knife) than a sapper without explosives! I had a 3-ton truck full.

He asked me to destroy a bridge over a deep nullah and demolish all the vehicles incarcerated on our short stretch of road by the encircling enemy. This was my sort of thing; I loved to blow things up. I was determined that the Japanese were not going to win any of our stores or vehicles. I drove my lorry off the road, manoeuvred it under the bridge and laid the charge. The crude log structure could easily have been demolished with a box of gelignite and my three tons was enough to blow Sydney Harbour Bridge, but I did not intend to leave any for them.

I organized my men into parties to destroy the line of stationary vehicles. The first team removed all the sump plugs and drained the black engine oil out into the dust; the second party started each motor and jammed open the throttles until the engines screamed to a seizeup; the rotor arm man followed; the carburettor man with a sledge hammer; the tyre slasher, and finally an arsonist to fire the fuel tanks. No resourceful Jap was going to cannibalize one single roadworthy vehicle out of this lot!

I reported to the colonel that the trucks were completely destroyed and that I was ready to demolish the bridge on his command. When he gave the order my lorry load of Ammonal and Gelignite made such a bang that it was heard 85 miles away in Imphal, and the vast conical crater would have held a temple.

General Mutaguchi commanded the Japanese Fifteenth Army in Burma, a force of about 100,000 men. His name still trickles like ice water down my spine and he was reputed to have such an ugly temper that his subordinates were afraid to give him bad news. This was often to our advantage because he was not always aware of the real situation. The Japanese had rolled up country after country in a few months and, to his way of thinking, too much time and face was being lost in the delay over getting into India. Unable to force the swampy southern coastal belt in Arakan or drive past Stilwell’s Chinese army round the mountainous frontier up north, he saw the central front as the only way ahead. In his determination to be first to seize the next parcel of our commonwealth he threw a three-pronged attack into Manipur. He hit us first with his crack 33rd Division. Through dense jungle and over precipitous mountain slopes they swarmed across the Imphal Plain, taking us unawares and cutting off one-third of our defence force at a stroke.

Our 17th (Black Cat) Division was in position 150 miles south of Imphal at Tiddim in the Chin Hills and totally dependent upon a road that was little more than a cart track. The Japanese seized the Manipur River bridge at Tonzang on the first day of their assault and set up a road block at milestone 130 on the Tiddim Road. Road builders from pre-war days had marked each hard-won mile with whitewashed milestones, which were often the only reference points in that wild country. I was with the 23rd (Fighting Cock) Division and we pelted helter-skelter across the plain and roared down the road to tackle the threat.

The battle that ensued was unlike anything seen before or since. The enemy forces ranged freely across country, coming out of the mountains and across the paddy fields from every direction. We were strung out in single file with our vehicles and could not alter the order of march we had adopted when we first took to the narrow road. We were at that time very committed to our lines of communication and the road had to be held open long enough for our boys to come back from Tiddim. The enemy strategy was to chop up our column, like garden worm segments beneath the spade, and eradicate us piece by piece.

This was the first time they encountered the aggressive spirit of our Gurkhas, fresh and lusting for action, and neither had they seen our ability to regroup into defensive boxes. Our Fourteenth Army Commander, Lieutenant-General Sir William (Bill) Slim, had imbued his forces with a new mental and tactical attitude. No longer did we surrender or panic when surrounded but faced outwards from our boxes and fired back. Our column was like a thread of mercury and as they fragmented it so we fought back and forced the globules to coalesce together again into longer beads. At times it was impossible to say who was surrounding whom.

In the savage fighting our small box had shrunk under pressure from all sides. The enemy took no heed of danger and their officers bravely led them on. The sight of my one wounded soldier had been deeply disturbing to me and yet the enemy appeared to welcome death. How could we conquer such fanaticism?

I snuggled down beside my Sikhs and pumped my rifle bolt for dear life. I had come to my first real battle like an actor on opening night, with butterflies in the stomach and the dread of not being up to the part. The adrenalin kicked in as soon as the show started and all the previous months of rehearsal and training took over and I began to glory in it. I looked around me during a lull and took stock of my bearded sepoys. They too were in their element, flaunting a brighteyed excitement to match my own. They bantered coarse remarks about, boastfully swapping stories and openly including me in their allusions. I need worry no longer about being accepted by them and knew that I had arrived. Another attack came in.

Before this first encounter we had been in awe of Japanese soldiers, not only because of the speed of their advances but also their indomitable courage and resourcefulness. Unlike us they did not rely upon supply lines because each soldier carried a looted bag of rice at his waist, that was replenished as they took new villages and left a starving population in their wake. They were indoctrinated with a religious fervour to die honourably for Emperor and country, never to surrender and to keep advancing at all costs. Not a bad set of rules for winning a war and it made them a cruel and remorseless enemy. Their men crossed terrain that we had thought impenetrable and they had no regard for personal safety or losses as their hordes swept relentlessly on.

I always carried a rifle or sub-machine gun in place of the officer’s puny revolver. The Short Lee Enfield rifle was fast, accurate and lethal, and the practised drill of our well-oiled bolts snicking rhythmically had a devastating effect upon the advancing knots of ochre-clad men. By late afternoon we were almost back-to-back and the fierce little Gurkhas were reaching for their kukri knives and whooping their battle cry "Ayo Gurkhali!

We fought our way out and circled around our attackers to join the next box back. The Japs were left facing each other across a few burntout trucks and a very large crater and we now surrounded them. A few days later the ebb and flow of battle brought us back to the same place and we recaptured a much longer section of the road. The finality of my extensive demolitions was laid bare, and one or two wits asked me when they could have their trucks back? None of those vehicles ever moved again and they eventually rusted away in the rains. When the withdrawing troops of 17 Div reached the place their sappers cut a new road around my crater and filled in the dry bed of the stream.

We advanced and withdrew with the rhythm of a dance formation. We lost a lot, regained a lot and even captured some of their stuff. They had very little and what they had was rubbish, but souvenirs like badges, documents and photos of Japanese girls gave us our first thrill of looting. One day perhaps we would display our trophies back at home – if we ever got home.

I entered a Japanese position for the first time. It was deserted and a fire smouldered in a pit with a tin of rice bubbling over it. For the first time I inhaled the pungent odour of our enemy, a stench that I grew to detest and can still smell to this day. Their dead sprawled in grotesque poses about the rim. War had now come very close to me and its actuality hit me hard. I wondered if next time we made a fire to heat some chow our enemies would storm in, kick our mess tins about and rob our corpses.

We were fighting against elite troops, in the peak of condition, who were inspired by their own invincibility and brooked no impediment to their advance. The Gurkhas were not impressed and fought back stolidly. The withdrawing troops from Tiddim came up from the south, attacking along the road at full divisional strength, and as their progress absorbed our boxes the whole road was reopened. We let them pass through our positions and fell back ourselves to the strong points in front of Imphal. We had lost our southern fortress but had become a much tighter ring of defence.

Chapter 2

OVERTURE AND BEGINNERS

I did no more than others did,

I don’t know where the change began.

I started as a average kid,

I finished as a thinkin’ man.

I wore nothing but a trilby hat as I queued among the flaccid forms of embarrassed strangers in a hall that smelled of disinfectant and a thousand unwashed bodies. I was enlisting in the Royal Engineers and that is where it all began.

The veterans of the Great War came home and spawned the generation that would fight the Second World War. We were that generation. Our fathers, uncles and schoolmasters were scarred men; they were grim, gassed and afraid of laughter; they had lost limbs, eyes and their sense of fun in the trenches. My boyhood was coloured with their stories. In bitter tones they chanted monotonously:

Little do you know, Son! Little do you know!

My childish fantasies were pre-packaged, oven-ready, and it was not long before I was enlisted as a sapper in the Royal Engineers in the stiff woolly khaki that stank of chloride of lime (believed to be a protection against mustard gas) and became a pongo, a ‘brown job’ with big boots and a rifle.

I invented a senior officer called Colonel Strongbottom, S.O.C.C. (Staff Officer for Cock-ups and Confusion). He was very real and never far away from soldiers at war and throughout my military career his bungling bureaucracy dominated my life. It was through his influence that this innocent middle class boy from a good Christian home ended up in the battle dust of the Tiddim road.

After two years in the ranks I was commissioned and almost immediately sent home on embarkation leave. It was as though I was doing everything for the last time. I had never seen Mount’s Bay in Cornwall looking lovelier as spring burgeoned in the countryside. The hedges around the tiny fields were dressed red, white and blue with pink campion, lady’s bedstraw and bluebells. I waved the last goodbye to my parents through the steam of the departing train and joined my embarkation draft in Halifax.

The folk of this northern town were accustomed to seeing soldiers leave for foreign battlefields and they regarded us with pitying eyes. We had been cut out of the herd to be shooed towards the slaughterhouse door, whilst others stayed behind knee-deep in English daisies.

ATS girls issued our tropical kit. They had seen the men of the Eighth and Fourteenth Armies file before them. Had the retinas of their eyes been film they might have collected likenesses of Corporal Green M.M. (Tobruk), Private White V.C. (posthumous), Lieutenant Brown (died of wounds, Toungoo). Now their pretty eyes flashed my image on the screen. They gave us an outfit that should have been in a museum. It was the stuff of earlier wars – solar topees, puttees, spine pads and bleached khaki uniforms that a Fuzzy-Wuzzy would have recognized. Local shopkeepers cajoled us into buying a lot of trash. They produced small copies of The Holy Bible with a steel plate in the cover (Could save your life, Chum!) and similar gadgets that had been on their back shelves since 1918.

We stared out through the grimy windows of our billet, across the sad Yorkshire landscape to where the white plumes of smoke from trains presaged that final journey to the port. On a dark morning we assembled in a thin drizzle and watched our train pull in. Troop trains are not like other trains. They are stark, uncomfortable and overcrowded. They do not stop at stations, but wait for hours in gritty sidings whilst regular trains roar through. We gazed longingly through the sooty windows, absorbing our last glimpses of England; trees, valleys, sheep, buses, shoppers, women, canal barges, cinemas and little railside houses. Our lives were on the line, but these people were busy with their daily routines and never gave us a glance or a goodbye wave. We felt very sad.

The train steamed right inside the cathedral of a freight shed on Liverpool’s Gladstone Dock. Doors flew open, Movement Control officials harried and shouted at the troops as they fell out of the carriages on to the dirt below. A ray of sunshine shafted through the smoky air from a roof-light and illuminated the silent ranks. We humped our kit and shuffled out on to the wharf.

Suddenly it was all bustle and light. Sunshine sparkled across the waters of the Mersey, boats fussed about the river, horns tooted, dockworkers shouted and there, towering above us, reared the sheer sides of our ship RMS Highland Brigade.

Tense occasions inspire bonhomie. High above us the ship’s rails were lined with troops. They were ensconced aboard, quarters allocated, kit stowed and beyond harassment and they were free to enjoy the sport of taunting the heavily burdened new arrivals that were filing towards the gangplank below. Petty officials herded us along whilst coarse comments and nicknames of accurate cruelty rained down upon the heads of the scrawny, the stout, the lanky and the sad.

They’ve caught up with you at last, Lofty!

At least someone was noting our passing.

My feet left English soil and began to climb the ribbed gangway.

A last taunt from above as I ducked into the shadow of the promenade deck:

If yer muvver could see yer now, Shortarse!!

Tugs drew the troopship out into the Mersey, darkness fell and the city slipped into total blackout. The nightly blitz, the firebombs and the Luftwaffe had turned this happy city into a grim fortress.

I stayed aloft. I looked wistfully back at the silhouette of the skyline. Would I ever see those old Liver Birds again and did they really look down when a virgin walked underneath? Homesickness washed over me.

We crossed the boom and the first lift of the bows lifted my spirits, almost to the point of exhilaration. This had to be the experience of a lifetime. I gloried in the throbbing power of the diesels roaring defiance to all U-boats from the funnel above me and we headed out into the black waters.

It took three months and two ships to sail right around Africa and across the Indian Ocean. Bombay smote us with the impact of a fireworks display. After weeks of monotonous sea and sky it was like stepping out of a Sunday morning Church service into a mad fairground. The extravagant colours and the cacophony of sound bludgeoned our senses and shafts of hot sunshine pierced the pungent air.

Thankfully we threw the spine pads, shin-length shorts and solar topees into Bombay harbour and obediently bought outfits that the native shopkeepers vowed were correct for ‘English Officer Sahibs’.

I was sent to join The Royal Bombay Sappers and Miners (RBS&M). I realized that I was now Indian Army and that Poona was a real place and not a music hall joke.

The monsoon swept the deserted platforms of Poona station in the small hours, there was nobody to greet us and we spoke no word of the language. Eventually a wild, bearded Sikh in a crooked pugree rushed into the station and began to carry our mountain of steel trunks and other kit outside to a Chevrolet truck. He wore a uniform of sorts and obviously knew what he was doing. His friendly grin shone like a mouthful of piano keys and his beard glistened with raindrops.

He drove out of town on to a rutted muddy track and kept the accelerator hard to the floor, wrestling with the steering wheel and bottoming the springs through each enormous pothole. We were flung about in the back as he ploughed through tropical lightning and driving rain until he lost control and the Chevvie plunged her long nose into a flooded yellow ditch. Half-cursing and half-weeping, we slurped about in the liquid mud as the first watery light of dawn lit our misery. The driver had disappeared and we felt helplessly lost in the vastness of India.

We had reached the depot and soon a pack of half-naked longhaired savages splashed up to us through the rain. They were shouting and laughing and led by our man. For the first time I met the noisy exuberance, the wild night appearance and the cheerful strength of Sikh soldiers and our truck was soon back on the road.

The RBS&M depot at Kirki was a place of great charm and antiquity. The red stone buildings were draped with Virginia creeper, wisteria and ivy, and there were gardens, tennis courts, squash courts, polo pitches, swimming baths and every possible recreational facility. We had stepped out of wartime Britain, out of danger, out of blackouts and deprivation straight into an opulent and cloistered peacetime retreat. I had to buy another new outfit, to conform to the Poona cut, and gave my Bombay purchases to the sweeper.

The palatial officer’s mess was bedecked with tiger skins, silver plate and trophies, and inhabited by a hard core of pre-war regular staff officers who looked down on us. We had upset their tranquil lives and they called us ‘Bloody ECOs’ (Emergency Commissioned Officers). If they found us intrusive we found them incomprehensible. We had moved a long way east and a long way back in time and, although we were highly trained in Western warfare, we did not know what a chota-peg was. (a short drink) The old boys glared balefully at us as they chanted repetitively "Koi hai?" (Anybody there?) to the silent mess waiters and downed another Long John Collins (gin and lime). We had to weather their contempt as the conveyor belt carried us past them to distant battlefields.

Only the best people were allowed into Poona Race Course, where events such as gymkhana, polo tournaments and dog shows also took place.

At the annual dog show Madame Olga, the doyenne of the most famous Officer’s brothel in the world and one of the wealthiest and best known ladies in India, was showing her prize Pekingese. A newly arrived second lieutenant, who was also an Honourable, went over to her and praised her dogs. Delighted by his shared interest she asked if he would walk them round the judging ring for her. Her dogs won handsomely and she was so delighted that she told him to come and see her at Number 6, Grant Road, next time he was in Bombay. What an offer – a hand-picked girl and free drinks all night! A few weeks later he was in Bombay with his fiancée, an English nurse and decided to take her along to meet his new friend. A very surprised chowkidar opened the heavy door, but announced them formally to Madame. She behaved impeccably, gave them biscuits and tea from bone china in her private salon and saw them away in a taxi. Neither knew that they had spent the afternoon in a whorehouse.

We came under instruction from the new generation of Indian Army Officers, real veterans, men who had been in the retreat from Burma. They taught us to love the dark-skinned jawans (young recruits) as they made us into real Indian Army officers. I learned respect for these splendid mercenaries and I never felt worthy of their inherent deference.

The Viceroy’s Commissioned Officers (VCOs), were unique to the Indian Army. They stood between the men and us and acted as confidants, advisors and trouble-shooters. It would have been easy for us to commit a ghastly solecism in speech, or over a religious scruple, or a caste problem, or any other deep-rooted Indian tradition. These mature warriors with their campaign medals had worked their way up from village youth to an impressive seniority. They were