Authors: Fergal Keane
One day he was walking in Spond Street in the city centre and the loneliness was unbearable. He just wanted to sit down with an old army mate and have a drink and talk about what it had been like. For the first time in his life he went into a pub and drank himself senseless. There was another army man in there drinking who had been home for a long time and they swapped stories. ‘I realised I was drunk. I said, “I can’t go home and disgrace myself in front of my parents.”’ There was a circus on nearby and he decided to go there and try to sober up. But getting off the bus, he stumbled and was knocked out. When he came to there was a Frenchwoman sitting over him and mopping up the blood from the cut on his head. Drunk and concussed, he started pouring out his story to this foreigner, ‘but I don’t think she ever understood … I was still in a foreign land really.’
The men of 4th battalion came home from the Far East to a country leached of colour by war. Winston Churchill, the leader who had sent them to India, was gone, voted from office by a nation haggard from sacrifice and eager for change. Britain had taken the first steps towards becoming a welfare state. In 1944 the Cabinet accepted the recommendation that there should be a National Health Service and
by the time the men returned from India the new Labour government had introduced acts to cover pensions, national insurance and family allowances, much of this the brainchild of a man born in Bengal under the Raj, Sir William Beveridge, the most influential social reformer of modern Britain.
The war had left Britain beggared. The US$31 billion owed to the Americans in war-time loans underlined the true shift of international power. Britain could no longer afford a global empire and her imperial horizons retracted by the month, nowhere more swiftly than in the East. Burma became independent in 1947 and refused to join the Commonwealth, eventually, in 1962, becoming a military dictatorship which lasts to this day. When India left the empire the following year she was sundered into two bitterly opposed nations whose enmity threatens the stability of the sub-continent still.
Yet if Churchill’s hope of imperial redemption was forlorn, then Roosevelt’s ambitions for China would prove equally misplaced. All the supplies shipped across the Hump, and up the Burma Road, all the thousands of lives lost and the millions spent could not save Chiang Kai-shek’s regime from the armies of Mao Tse Tung.
Yet the returning soldiers did not tend to look backwards, or to torment themselves with questions about what the fight had been for. Very few had gone into battle imbued with a spirit of imperial glory. They had fought not for a vanishing dream but for each other and, most importantly, for their own lives. They were imbued with righteous anger by the appalling brutality of the Japanese, an anger that Slim had carefully channelled to become the great moral purpose of 14th Army. But there was a larger achievement. A Japanese victory at Kohima and Imphal might easily have propelled British India into an era of grave political instability. Remember that the battle was fought at a time when the leaders of Congress were languishing in jail, cut off from the Indian masses and watching the Japanese advance with mounting unease, as uncertain as the British about how the people would react. We are of course in the realms of speculation but a triumph for Mutaguchi in Assam could have sparked widespread unrest in the north-east and in Bengal, bringing
with it communal violence and a familiar response of British repression leading to unknown consequences. Japan might only have enjoyed a short triumph; American power would ultimately have seen to that. But the humiliation of defeat would have gravely weakened the British in the post-war moves to settle the question of India. The victory over Mutaguchi did not save the Raj as Churchill had hoped. But after the humiliations of Malaya, Singapore and Burma it restored to the British the prestige needed to be able to negotiate the end of empire.
The 14th Army was made up of men of all political persuasions and it is wise to avoid generalisations about how they viewed Britain or the empire. Yet, having spoken with large numbers of veterans, the overwhelming impression is of men who returned home anxious to build, to forge ahead, and not to waste time mourning what was gone. The grief would come later and would be stirred by the memories of friends, not the loss of the eastern lands.
Dennis Wykes set up a thriving building firm and when he took his summer holidays in a caravan at Newquay he thought himself one of the luckiest men alive. He lived to get married, to have children, to see them inherit his business and go to university. When I last met him, three months before he died, he told me about a family Christmas party he had attended. He was asked to sing a song. All he could think of was one from the war. ‘I got to the second verse and I just couldn’t go on any more. I didn’t burst into tears, I just couldn’t go on any more. I was really upset. And I said afterwards: “I made a fool of myself trying to do that.” But my daughter said, “No you didn’t. It was a fitting thing to do.”’ For Dennis Wykes, there was always the voice of the Welsh boy, Williams, hit by the bomb that should have killed him, begging, ‘Don’t let me die,’ and Dennis thinking, ‘I can’t stop you dying, mate.’
When the C company runner Ray Street arrived back in Birmingham he found himself missing his army friends more than he could have thought possible. His father, a veteran of Gallipoli, took him aside and told him to take his return slowly, ease himself back into English life gradually. ‘Don’t worry about anything,’ he
said. The advice was kind and was backed up by the older man’s knowledge of war and its bonds. Ray married a ‘very maternal’ Irish girl called Anne and set up his own furniture business, working until ten o’clock every night, telling himself, ‘if I can do the army I can do this. People wanted their furniture delivered and I did it every night.’ The business thrived and he moved to a bigger house. When his wife died, Ray took over caring for their two children, as well as running the business. His son Bob thought him ‘a kind dad, considerate and unassuming’, who told stories of Kohima that ‘were better than any bedtime stories, a real adventure’. Ray Street told me that Kohima had not affected him mentally, apart from one thing. ‘I hate people touching me on the shoulder when I am asleep … the shells feel like they are coming straight at you. Boom. And it might be over there.’ His second wife, Valerie, learned a long time ago never to try to shake him awake. He would sit bolt upright as if somebody were attacking him.
The image of the shell-shocked soldier has become one of the stock clichés of our time. Yet war, even the horror of Kohima, does not turn every man into a shaking wreck for the remainder of his life. Many of the men, probably the majority, understandably felt emotional pain, but were not disabled by their experiences. Private Tom Greatly of C company had lied his way into the army at the age of sixteen. He was twenty-one when he came home from Burma. Several lifetimes of horror had passed before his eyes in that time. He went home to Worcestershire, married and lived a contented life; his great pleasure was to go ballroom dancing with his wife three times a week. Yet there was a shadow of the war’s impact. Tom got a job working in a children’s hospital, and part of his duties were in the morgue. ‘It never affected me like it did some people. Maybe that had something to do with Kohima.’ He was one of the men who had helped Padre Randolph collect the possessions of the dead and mark their graves so that they could be found later on.
Towards the end of his life, John Shipster of the Punjab Regiment experienced nightmares about fighting the Japanese. ‘I would wake up screaming in the middle of the night, waking my wife up, and never be able to give a clear explanation of what it was. I knew it was
about the war, but I never actually came to the end of it.’ After the War he transferred to the British Army and went to fight in the Korean War where he again narrowly escaped death facing the Chinese on the Yalu River. Although a professional soldier for more than thirty-five years, looking back he felt that war had been a fruitless endeavour. ‘Here we were bashing each other around in a very small area, and then spending some weeks afterwards clearing up all the mess and putting people into graves, merely to move on, say, fifty to a hundred miles and do it all over again on some other plot of ground … What did I think I was fighting for? I wasn’t some crusader or anything of that sort. My country was at war and I joined up and fought in it, I never queried the individual battles, or said I’ll fight in this battle but not in that. I went along with the tide. I had faith in the aims of one’s particular country.’
The commander of B company, Royal West Kents, John Winstanley, survived his leg wound and typhoid and went to medical school. ‘I felt I couldn’t waste any more time and worked like a slave for the exams.’ When his leg wound flared up, the hospital authorities told him he would have to give up his dream of being a general surgeon. So he became one of the country’s most successful eye-surgeons. In peacetime he missed the intensity of friendship that war had created. There was a world of shared experience to which others, not even those closest to him, could ever be admitted. The regimental associations and the Burma Star Association became for many a kind of parallel family. ‘It is just fragments, but when we get together, those who are still alive, all the old friendships and associations come out.’
Donald Easten stayed in the army and retired with the rank of colonel. On retirement he lived with Billie in the village of Wormingford where he immersed himself in the parish council, and continued to fish and shoot as he had since he was a young man. Their daughters and grandchildren were regular visitors. The residents named a street in his honour. Easten Green. When Billie died he faced the choice of moving to a smaller place but he loved the landscape and the home they had made. The River Stour is nearby, running alongside the border with Suffolk, and, now in his nineties,
Donald Easten continues to walk the fields accompanied by an excitable terrier. On Remembrance Sunday he walks the couple of hundred yards to the old parish church at Wormingford to remember the boys of D company he left behind in Kohima.
I listened to the stories of the veterans over many years and was always struck by their modesty, by the way in which they resisted any temptation to exaggerate their experiences or their role in the battle. The majority had never spoken with their children about Kohima. In part, this was generational. Men of the post-war era lived by a standard of emotional restraint uncommon in modern Britain. They were the quiet fathers who made their way in a new country where interest in the Far Eastern war was always limited and where, in any case, their energies were absorbed by the imperatives of work and family. That is very different, however, from saying that the war was not present in houses across Britain.
Margery Willis, the daughter of Lieutenant John Faulkner, remembered never being allowed to drink Rose’s lime juice because it reminded her father of his time in the jungle when there was no water and only the tart lime juice to slake his thirst. ‘The War was generally not to be mentioned at home at any time,’ she recalled. Later, her mother told her that John had ‘terrible nightmares’ after he came home. To his daughter he was a controlling man, a rigid disciplinarian with a bad temper, ‘a difficult man to live with’. The only glimpse she was given of what the war meant to her father was on Remembrance Sunday. The family would be told sit down and watch the service. John Faulkner would sit with them and cry. Once the service was over the war was put away again. After he died, Janet opened his diary of the siege and began to understand the man whose memory she was struggling with. Written in Dimapur a few weeks after the battle, it speaks with the voice of a young soldier astonished by his own survival. His daughter believed that settling into a normal existence after Kohima was very difficult for John Faulkner. The three years in Burma were the most important of his life. As more than one veteran put it to me: ‘You can never explain it to someone who wasn’t there.’
For the families whose sons and fathers never came home, the sight of demobbed soldiers could be agonising. In most cases, all they were told was that their loved one had died or was missing in action. In a war in which hundreds of thousands of British troops had died, only the extraordinary death merited more than a couple of lines. Nor did the families have graves where they could go to grieve. The dead were lying in Asian war cemeteries which the majority could never afford to visit.
The father of Victoria Cross winner Lance Corporal John Harman built a stone memorial to his son on Lundy Island where John had roamed in his childhood summers. The day of the unveiling was strikingly beautiful with a blue sky and a calm sea for the large group travelling to Lundy on the ferry MV
Lerina.
Among the party were John Laverty and several other West Kents, including Sergeant Tacon, the machine-gunner who had slaughtered the Japanese as they ran from Detail Hill. By the time they had walked from the ferry pier to the quarry, many of the group were perspiring and anxious to find shade. They clustered around the huge slab of granite on which John Harman’s name and date of death were inscribed. They sang ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ and the Reverend H. C. A. S. Muller, vicar of Appledore, read from the 24th Psalm. This was followed by another hymn, ‘Fight the Good Fight’, and the playing of the Last Post. Martin Coles Harman told his guests that the quarry where his son had played as a child was thought to be nearly two million years old, and in 20,000 years the rocks would still look the same. Only this, he seemed to be saying, is imperishable. The island’s caretaker, Felix Gade, who had taught John so much of what he knew about the natural world, told the visitors about the extraordinary thing that had happened after John had died. It was the custom in that part of the country when a beekeeper died for another to go to his hives and ‘tell’ the news to the inhabitants. But when Gade arrived he found all the bees had flown away.