Authors: Fergal Keane
His diaries of life on Lundy reveal a boy who was a careful observer of weather, wildlife and landscapes, but not remotely sentimental about the harsher aspects of the natural world. Entries for February 1932 describe shooting a cock sparrow with his catapult at twenty yards and witnessing a staged fight between a ferret and a rat. ‘The ferret killed the rat in about 30 seconds.’ Yet a week later he was
describing how he heard a thrush and a lark singing in the morning and was nursing a chaffinch with a broken leg given to him by Felix Gade. ‘Thurs. 31st … Heard Chaffinch singing in Millcombe. My chaffinch is still all right and ought to be singing soon.’
But to understand John Harman and the exceptional figure he later became at Kohima, it is necessary to examine what happened to his world at the beginning of the 1930s. His mother, Amy Ruth Harman, was a beautiful and vivacious woman who enjoyed the social whirl of London far more than the countryside but who, by the close of the 1920s, had become seriously ill with kidney failure. She was given morphine to ease the excruciating pain but died in 1931 at the age of forty-seven. John Harman was deeply distressed by the early death of his mother, in the same year that he was due to leave school. And the family’s troubles were set to deepen.
Martin Coles Harman had made his fortune in corporate finance, quitting school at sixteen to join Lazard’s as a clerk on £48 per year and eventually accumulating a portfolio of companies worth an estimated £12 million – a vast sum in the 1930s. The
Daily Sketch
described him as the ‘pre-war City’s wonder man’. ‘Bushy-browed Martin Harman always did things the big way … Veteran financiers clucked their tongues as Harman zoomed from a bank clerk’s high chair to the chairman’s swivel chair in a dozen different board rooms – all this between 1923 and 1933.’ Yet a year after the death of his wife he was declared bankrupt, with liabilities of £550,000 and assets of just £10,000. The precise source of Harman’s financial catastrophe is hard to ascertain; family members suggest he got into difficulty during the Great Depression. Worse was to follow. In 1933 Harman senior was convicted of embezzlement and sent to Wormwood Scrubs prison for eighteen months. According to Diana Keast, her brother was devastated. ‘He so looked up to his father. They really were very close. I know that it hurt him a great deal to see that happen to his father. Of course he never doubted his father, never.’ Throughout this grim period Lundy Island remained the beacon of stability. Martin Coles Harman had placed the island in trust so that it could not be seized by his creditors.
It was at this time, when he would have been about eighteen years of age, that John set off on his travels. His journey would take him the best part of four years, from Spain to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. He worked on sheep farms, cut timber in forests and tried his hand at gold prospecting, always eventually moving on. The only note of any romantic involvement was with a woman in New Zealand who shared with him an interest in the paranormal. Throughout his life John Harman would seek out clairvoyants and soothsayers. After returning from his travels he went to Lundy and worked again with Felix Gade and the bees. But in November 1941, with the tide of war still running against Britain, John decided to enlist in the Household Cavalry, believing he would be working with animals. Almost immediately, and predictably, he found that military life was not to his taste. Writing to his father – now free from jail and discharged from bankruptcy – he cursed the life of the barracks. ‘Life is just bloody hell, dirty, noisy, crude and inefficient. I heartily wish I had never joined up. There is no time to do anything after the set tasks are done … how I would like to be stalking deer in NZ a free man … I learn almost nothing each day.’ In April 1942 he was thinking of running away ‘to a life of solitude … I can hardly constrain a desire to desert and damn the consequences.’
One can imagine how strange this well-spoken son of a millionaire must have appeared to his fellow soldiers, a great many of them tough working-class lads from the inner cities. There are several references in John Harman’s letters to the ‘crudeness’ of barracks life, the boredom of being a soldier and the pain caused to his feet by marching. What is perplexing is Harman’s refusal to take the commission that would have offered him a more comfortable existence. With his education and background, even allowing for the disgrace of his father’s imprisonment, Jack Harman would have been a likely candidate for officer training. In a letter to his father he explained his reluctance, in spite of the fact that he considered himself to be a ‘gentleman’. Self-doubt was at the root of his decision: ‘I have given the matter of taking a commission a lot of thought and there is no doubt that if I was an officer I would be able to resume
the life I was used to, to some extent. On the other hand I am constitutionally so unsoldierly that I am filled with doubts about the whole thing … Does the status of Gentleman entitle a man to be an officer with the King’s Commission though he is not the soldier-type? I think not … well!’
By September, John was with the Worcester Regiment and having second thoughts about his status in the ranks, writing to his father that he was going to apply for a commission as soon as he could. He never did. ‘I am still a private soldier after a year in the army,’ he wrote to a friend. He was still interested in divining and considered putting up a proposal to the War Office to use his ‘special knowledge’ to help detect submarines. Nothing seems to have come of that. By the end of January 1943 he had changed regiments once more and was soldiering with 20th battalion, The Royal Fusiliers, and on his way to India. A friend, Wally Evans, who was with him on the troopship to the East saw Jack frequently gathering up ‘empty beer bottles that were laying around the ship in order to recover the deposits paid on them’. He would use the money to buy equipment that was lighter and less bulky than his own. When a call went out for volunteers to join depleted regiments, John Harman and several others put their hands up to join a draft going to 4th battalion, Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment. ‘The biggest blunder of our lives,’ remembered Evans, ‘for what we had to go through in Burma.’ But Harman was looking forward to the possibility of fighting in Burma, or at least getting himself to the jungles of South-East Asia. In August 1943, just over a month before the 4th battalion shipped out to the front line, he wrote to his father with a romanticised view of jungle warfare: ‘Four years in NZ stand me in good stead and if we ever have to fight in the Burmese Jungles it will be right down my street. Frankly, I would rather hear the noises of the jungle than the ceaseless clattering and yapping of the barrack rooms; and eating food almost entirely out of tins gets me down. In the jungle a man may “spit” a snake over a fire and eat it all himself and make a decent cup of tea.’
Harman was sent to D company, under the command of Captain Donald Easten, an assignment that was providential: he was placed
under the authority of a man who wore his rank lightly but with great effect. Easten had the wisdom to look the other way at the minor indiscretions of his men, and he had the gift of showing them that he cared for their welfare. He was swift to sense the potential in John Harman. ‘He was a great countryman who found his way everywhere day or night, he understood ground as well as obviously being a very solid citizen who wasn’t going to bolt if something nasty happened. He was brave and of course in the end it was proved.’
In early October 1943 John Laverty was given orders to move out for Burma. The 4th battalion was to be shipped across the Bay of Bengal for General William Slim’s coming offensive. What Slim did not appreciate was that the Japanese were also planning an attack in the Arakan. The operation, code-named Ha-Go (literally Operation Z), was designed to draw away British resources and attention from the frontier with India, where the commander of the Japanese 15th Army was planning an audacious surprise. Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi sweeps through the story of the Burma war like a force of nature, and in late 1943 he was offering his superiors a tantalising vision of victory.
Even in the middle of war the town preserved an atmosphere of grace. Forty miles east of Mandalay in central Burma, Maymyo had been the summer capital of the British administration where civil servants and soldiers escaped the enervating humidity of Rangoon among broad avenues of towering eucalyptus and pine. They enjoyed the cool air of a hill town and the fresh victuals of its abundant gardens, where around ‘the spacious houses of red brick the cannas flaunted gay flags of pink and orange; trailing masses of crimson bougainvillea topped the bamboo hedges’. For a period in early 1942 it was the headquarters of the retreating Burma Corps, until the Japanese signalled their advance by bombing the poorer district, forcing its inhabitants to flee in panic towards Mandalay. Colonel Emile Foucar passed lines of retreating Chinese troops and ‘several yellow-robed corpses, Buddhist monks shot by the Chinese’.
Now, where British civil servants had played polo and sipped gin in the twilight, there were new masters. Where the British other ranks might have slipped out at night to the seamier fringes of town while their officers drank in the mess, these latest occupiers brought with them their own entertainment. The geisha house of the 15th Army command was called ‘The Inn of Brightness’ and it was run by established brothel-keepers from Osaka. It served pure sake and tuna sushi imported from Japan, and the girls played music, recited poetry and had sex with the officers of the Imperial Army – all part of that curious blend of the aesthetic and the priapic which prevailed among the army’s officer corps. These were men who could weep at the
elegance of a haiku, or sit down to practise exquisite calligraphy, on the same day that they presided over the beheading of prisoners. Arguments over girls could result in unpleasant scenes. The British intelligence officer Louis Allen, who interviewed many Japanese prisoners, described how a major general had found a colonel making a pass at ‘his’ girl. The colonel was dragged outside and, in front of the sentry, slapped across the face for his temerity.
In this particular instance, the senior officer would have felt more than the usual degree of impunity. After all, Major General Todai Kunomura was chief of staff to the most powerful Japanese officer in northern Burma, a man with the best of political connections, a track record of success, and upon whom the destiny of the entire imperial project in Burma now rested. Kunomura was the most devoted of servants – a lickspittle if you believed his enemies – to Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi, commander of the Japanese 15th Army. Mutaguchi, aged fifty-five, was at the height of his powers when he set up his headquarters at Maymyo. During the invasion of Malaya in 1942 he led the 18th Division with panache and had been wounded in the shoulder by an enemy grenade at Johore on the approach to Singapore, his leadership earning him a congratulatory letter and bottle of wine from General Yamashita, the so-called ‘Tiger of Malaya’. Tall and powerfully built, Renya Mutaguchi was physically brave and, like most Japanese officers of his time, a disciple of the warrior code of bushido,
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though what this actually meant in practice could vary significantly between individuals.
In Renya Mutaguchi’s case it meant being an exemplar of the bushido ethic of physical courage, but he was also a man whose bombast and egotism were at variance with the principles of humility and caution that informed the true spirit of bushido. That said, those virtues were hardly valued in the Japanese military hierarchy of the 1930s, and Mutaguchi was a true creature of that rash decade. Born in Saga prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu, he was the
son of the once prominent Fukuchi family, which had fallen on hard times. His father had died when Renya was young, leaving the boy and his brother to be brought up ‘almost like orphans’. He was eventually adopted by the Mutaguchi family and made their heir; this was a common practice, dating from the Samurai era, when families who did not have a male heir could adopt in order to preserve the family line and name. A few years after Mutaguchi’s death in the 1960s, his son Morikuni told a biographer that his father had gained his driving energy to succeed from the difficulties of his childhood. ‘Where his father had drifted, he was determined to forge ahead resolutely. Where his father had faltered before opposition, he would blast it aside.’ In later life Mutaguchi never spoke willingly of his father. It was as if he felt shame or anger towards him, or perhaps a mixture of both. More than anything, it seems, he was determined not to be weak. The military offered the strength and resoluteness that he craved.
The Japan in which Mutaguchi grew up regarded the military as a higher caste, in whose ranks lay the great hope of national unity. Wars had been fought and won against the Chinese and Koreans, but also against Tsarist Russia, the first European power to be defeated by Asians in the modern age. The distinguished historian of Japan, John Dower, quotes a song from the 1880s that presages the intentions of this new power:
There is a law of the nations it is true
but when the moment comes remember
the strong eat up the weak.
The lives of young Japanese males were circumscribed by two core imperial rescripts. The first was a code of ethics for all the military, which was the most important document in preparing for a militarised society. ‘Loyalty [is] their essential duty,’ it declared, ‘death is lighter than a feather.’ Soldiers were told that orders should always be regarded as coming from the emperor himself.
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Military training
was brutal and designed to instil an attitude of mercilessness towards their opponents.
Takahide Kuwaki was born in 1918, the son of a lieutenant general who had fought in China and served as a military attaché in Turkey and France. Kuwaki graduated as a doctor before being sent for military training where, to his shock, social class and educational qualifications made no difference to the way he was treated. ‘I was surprised by that! They slapped me if I said something wrong.’ Hiroshi Yamagami left home for an army college at the age of fourteen. At school he remembered feeling sorry for people who were not Japanese. The Chinese were referred to with contempt. ‘We called them “Chankoro”, which means Chinks,’ he said. His parents rowed incessantly and the military life offered him an escape. There was fun sometimes but what he remembers most is a great deal of suffering. The day began with a three- or four-hour run to build up physical stamina. The slightest infraction was severely punished. ‘The teacher beat you with his fist and the reason for the punishment would be something like not saluting properly, or if you were not standing properly to attention. Sometimes the whole group would be slapped because of what an individual had done. The punishment to the soldiers would be worse; we would instruct the NCOs to hit our soldiers. They would slap harder and more often. They would stick their stick into them or beat them with them. Or they would keep the man standing in the same posture for an hour. The Japanese army trained soldiers very strictly in order to make a strong army.’ Violence was a matter of policy, not occasional excess.