Authors: Fergal Keane
The West Kents began to use the rivers as a source of food. Lieutenant Tom Hogg of B company took his men on ‘fishing’ expeditions using home-made bombs. ‘I used gun-cotton primers on short fuses which were dropped in the water and all nearby fish leapt out of the water half-stunned. They were easy to pick up from the surface, as the native Burmese also realised, until one of our lads dropped a primer into one of their dugout canoes to discourage their theft of “our fish”.’ As a rule British troops did not mistreat the local Burmese, but there could be rough handling of anybody suspected of refusing to divulge important information. General Sir Philip Christison, who would lead the Arakan offensive, recalled an incident in which two men were taken from a village and questioned about what they knew of Japanese movements. They were too scared to talk. The Japanese troops might return at any time. The British interrogators told them they could either talk or be shot. Still there was no cooperation. One of the men was hauled off into the jungle. A shot rang out. The remaining man talked and gave the British vital intelligence about three Japanese battalions in the area. His friend was then produced unharmed. General Christison later wrote: ‘This information was vital, and the means of getting it justifiable.’ It did not tend to win Burmese hearts and minds, however.
On 5 December 1943 the 4th West Kents’ war diary records that the artillery opened fire on a sampan, believing it to be a party of
infiltrating Japanese. The boat was filled with Burmese. The diary does not record how many were killed or wounded. The last few days of December were spent celebrating Christmas with extra rations of beer, rum and Christmas cake, and a delivery of mail from home. Ray Street ate his Christmas lunch of roast duck and vegetables, washed down with a bottle of beer, sitting on the wall of a rice paddy. He felt lucky. The men out on patrol had to content themselves with bully beef and biscuits.
The padre, the Reverend Roy Randolph, led a Christmas Day service and was available to any men troubled by news from home, or who simply wanted to try and talk away their fears. Randolph was tall and thin, with melancholy eyes and a gentleness of manner that seemed out of place on the battlefield. He had an abiding hatred of any kind of physical violence, but he believed that men’s souls were all the more needful of salvation in the places of death. The men would come to regard him as one of the bravest among them.
The new supreme commander, Lord Louis Mountbatten, came to visit. Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes was amazed at how a man who was related to the king, and ‘looked like a movie star’ in his spotless uniform, could be so down-to-earth, calling the lads from the battalion to gather round him in a semicircle. On the morning he set off for his visit Mountbatten had recorded the ‘terrible tragedy’ of the death of his pet mongoose Rikki Tikki, who had been accidentally stepped on by his steward, Moore. ‘Poor Moore was quite white from the shock of having been the cause of her death.’ But Mountbatten did not let his grief over the dead mongoose deter him from cheering up the men of 4th battalion. After shaking hands with the officers, Admiral Mountbatten announced that Germany would collapse by the end of 1944 and all the allied war effort would be directed towards defeating Japan. He was well aware of the resentment felt in 14th Army over the priority given to European operations. The subtext of his speech was important for the men: they would be going home sooner once Hitler was defeated. Giving Europe priority made sense when you looked at it like that. He made a joke. ‘Optimism is not allowed in England because the people would stop
working.’ There was loud laughter. Then he told them a story from his days as a naval commander about a ‘fat old Admiral coming on board my destroyer and saying “Gad, go in and fight ’em” when they knew the old b—would be back in his bed’. The battalion war diary recorded that the supreme commander ‘had an enormous reception … Morale was raised as if by magic’.
On the night of 30 December, under the code name Operation Jericho, 4th battalion and their Indian comrades in 161 Brigade – the 1/1 Punjab and 4/7 Rajput – set out to attack the bunkers that covered the road in front of the major Japanese position at Razabil. This fortress blocked the only road along which troops and supplies could be moved across the Mayu range. Without securing the road, Christison’s forces would be divided on either side of the mountains and vulnerable to being cut off and encircled. In the darkness men bumped each other. There were whispered curses, but no voices were raised. Laverty had drilled into them the necessity of silence. ‘Success on this op is dependent … on surprise … [there will be] no imprudent talk or movement.’ To make the point, the NCOs moved up and down the line of men preparing to march off. They glared at the more loquacious characters in the ranks. But the usual suspects were quiet. All knew by now that within a day or less they would face the Japanese for the first time. The men had left behind all traces of their old lives. Laverty had ordered that no pay books, letters or regimental cap badges were to be taken, nothing that could identify a man or his unit if he were killed or captured. The mules were all loaded and were fresh from their own bout of training; the handlers had been warned to make sure every animal had been made accustomed to crossing water. There would be plenty of streams and rivers ahead of them in the jungle and they could not risk the heavily laden animals delaying the column’s advance.
Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes was scared of what lay ahead. In training he had been ‘horrified’ at the noise the rifle made when he first fired it. Hours on the range had cured him of that. Now he was waiting to march off to battle and wondering if he would be a competent
killer. ‘How do you know what it is to kill another man? You have never done it before. You never thought you would. I thought oh Christ this is the sharp point. This is it. We either perform or not.’
John Winstanley, now promoted to major after the depletions in North Africa, had spent several nights on reconnaissance with his company behind Japanese lines, filtering back and forth in the darkness until he and his men had an intimate feel for the ground they were to occupy once the attack started. The plan was that the West Kents would infiltrate and blockade the Japanese lines of communication, while the 4/7 Rajput launched the frontal assault and 1/1 Punjab joined the attack from the east.
The 4th West Kents marched through the night and before dawn they were in position astride the Japanese line of communications. Dennis Wykes lay crouched in the darkness waiting for first light. All around him the sounds of the jungle morning began to rise, a chorus of birds and insects. The waiting was torture. He wanted the fight to be on and then done with, but he wished he was anywhere but lying in this rice paddy with the battle-hardened Japanese a few hundred yards away. He heard the first shell come in and hugged the ground. Ray Street saw a man’s face torn off by the explosion. He would always remember the look of horror on the face of another soldier as a fragment of steel sliced into his chest, killing him where he stood. Wykes looked fearfully upwards and saw one of the battalion veterans standing coolly smoking a cigarette, apparently unmoved by the thunderous explosion. It felt reassuring to the young soldier – until he thought about it later, about what the man must have already seen and heard. Three men were killed in that first shelling, among them a popular company sergeant major.
On 6 January 1944 Wykes joined a night attack on the Japanese positions. As they waited to move off he couldn’t get out of his head the thought that he might be about to die. He walked at a steady pace with fixed bayonet and listened for anything that might alert him to where the machine guns were sited. The West Kents were nearly on top of the Japanese positions when they were hit by withering fire. A friend of Wykes’s from Birmingham, Billy Danks, aged twenty-three,
‘was shot to pieces’. Wykes kept moving forward. Afterwards he would ask himself was it his training, or not wanting to let the rest of the lads down, or some kind of trance, that kept him going forwards in spite of the bangs and screams. He couldn’t remember whether he had opened fire or not. The wounded called out for stretcher-bearers, but they were shot too. The West Kents lost twenty men but kept advancing until the Japanese pulled out of the forward defences. Dennis Wykes felt the relief of all soldiers who survive. ‘We knew we was all in the same boat and it could easily be one of us. You were just thankful it wasn’t you. We knew somebody was going to get it.’ When the battalion entered the Japanese positions they found one dugout ‘literally soaked in blood’, but with no bodies. Nearby they found the freshly dug grave of a Japanese corporal. His left hand had been amputated. In this way the West Kents learned how the Japanese kept their promise to their dead comrades: some part of them, be it as small as a nail clipping or a lock of hair, would be brought back to be buried in the homeland, so that the soul could enjoy eternal rest.
Much of the killing around the Razabil positions was carried out by snipers. The NCOs had warned the men not to remove their jungle kit for fear their white skin would show through the vegetation and offer a target. There was a lad named Heath – they called him ‘Happy’ Heath because of his easy-going nature – who made the mistake of showing too much skin. ‘There was a shot from somewhere far off and this chap Heath went down.’ Private T. J. Heath, aged twenty-nine, died on 1 February 1944.
Patrolling by night was hindered by the bright moonlight. It lit the rice fields and threw shadows across the jungle. Wild animals wandered into the lines, including a bear attracted by the scent of the empty bully-beef tins. Wild fowl frequently set the sentries’ nerves on edge as they moved back and forth through the undergrowth. Men staring out into the night found their eyes playing tricks: a distant tree became a Japanese soldier and started a rush of adrenalin, until the sentry realised he was mistaken; what looked like the shadow of a palm tree turned out to be a Japanese, and the sentry opened fire in the nick of time. Three Japanese were killed and three wounded just
ten yards from C company’s position on a hilltop. They were led by a big NCO who had hacked his way steadily through the jungle until a grenade exploded on his chest. It blew off part of his head and ended the incursion. Dennis Wykes remembered the shock of his first encounter with a Japanese corpse, not so much because of the sight of a dead body but because of the size of the man: ‘Before we went into Burma they had always portrayed these Japanese as little men, like monkeys climbing through the trees … I thought it would be a piece of cake. We would knock this lot over in no time. We saw this dead Jap and he was six foot!’
Ray Street’s job was to run messages between the C company position and Laverty’s headquarters. Among the most important lessons was the art of crossing open spaces. Street soon learned to study the earth banks and trees for any sign of bullet marks. A pockmarked bank or shredded leaves was a sure sign that a sniper had the ground covered. ‘You would run across wherever you saw a pockmarked bank. You would pretend you didn’t see it and then you run across. He had an automatic but he kept firing a burst and missed me. They got him in the end.’ Street did this several times each day for a month. Sheer exhaustion stopped him ruminating on the danger. ‘You were always too tired to think about it. You just put your head down and you were asleep. Then they wake yer and say the two hours is up and you’re up again.’
In D company John Harman had been promoted to lance corporal after showing courage under fire. His comrades could be less enamoured of his fearlessness. On patrol with his friend Wally Evans, Harman came under machine-gun fire while crossing a dried-out stream. Evans and the other members of the patrol hit the ground while the tracer flew over their heads. ‘I discerned the figure of someone still standing up on the edge of the chaung. My first thought was “who is that bloody fool up there!” Not surprisingly it was John. He was trying to pinpoint where the rifle fire was coming from – the man knew no fear.’
On another occasion Harman had run out under fire with a Bren gun to help relieve Evans and some others who were pinned down
by the Japanese. Or at least Evans thought that was his purpose. Harman had something different in mind. ‘Soon, I imagined what was going through his mind and realised that our minds were not thinking along the same lines! He was trying to qualify me for a posthumous award by attacking the hill, whilst I was wondering how the hell we were going to get out of our present predicament. There did not seem to be any chance and John, on reflection, must have accepted that the task he was contemplating was too great. Only Errol Flynn, with the help of Burt Lancaster, could have silenced that Jap position.’ As he grew into the role of warrior, John Harman might have been a little surprised at himself, but certainly gratified.
One of his skills was in supplementing the men’s diet of bully beef, soya-link sausages and biscuits. Wally Evans witnessed him vanish into the jungle and return with a wild pig for the section cook to fry up. On another occasion Harman asked Easten if he could shoot one of the local cattle. Easten asked Lieutenant Colonel Laverty at headquarters but was given an earful and warned not to precipitate trouble with the locals. ‘It was as if they thought India would come into the war against us if we shot a cow,’ he recalled. Easten duly reported the bad news to Harman, but then added a caveat: ‘I said to him that if one broke its leg or something like that you would have to put it out of its misery.’ An hour later he heard a burst of Tommy-gun fire. A smiling Harman appeared. ‘It’s a most extraordinary coincidence, Sir,’ he said. ‘A cow broke its leg right in the cookhouse!’ D company lived on fresh meat for the next week.
At around the same time, Harman told Easten that he believed he was destined to survive the war. D company was being shelled and Easten and Harman were cowering next to a mud bank. Harman shouted into Easten’s ear. ‘Don’t worry, Sir, you are safe with me.’ He then proceeded to tell his commander that while he was travelling in Spain he had met a fortune-teller who assured him he would live to a very old age. There had been another fortune-teller, too, in Durban, who had read his palm and predicted he would live until the age of seventy-two. ‘That means anybody who is with me will be safe too,’
said Harman. Easten thanked him for this information and continued to hug the ground very tightly.