The Daring Dozen (40 page)

Lieutenant-General William Slim, commander of the British Fourteenth Army, under whose auspices the Chindits operated, appointed Brigadier William Lentaigne as Wingate’s successor, a decision that was as inimical to the Chindits as the appointment of Alan Shapley as Evans Carlson’s successor was to the 2nd Raider Battalion.

Lentaigne had never approved of Wingate’s methods and was little respected by the likes of Calvert and Fergusson. But there were other factors at work, too, that contributed to the demise of the Chindits. Slim assigned them to Stilwell’s operational command and the American general moved the Chindits north to help him in his offensive against Myitkyina, deploying them not as a Long Range Penetration force but as infantrymen. In June they were ordered to take the town of Mogaung, occupied by approximately 4,000 Japanese. It took the Chindits three weeks and nearly 1,000 casualties before the town was taken. ‘In many ways it was the worst three weeks of the war as far as I was concerned,’ reflected Calvert. ‘The Chindits had not been trained or equipped for this type of fighting … we were the Chindits, the guerrillas, the mobile marauders who were at the enemy’s throat one minute and away the next looking for another target … and here we were, exhausted after three months behind the enemy lines, depleted in numbers by wounds, sickness and death, and with orders from a bitchy American general to take Mogaung.’
³⁵

When Operation
Thursday
ended at the close of August 1944, the Chindits were withdrawn to India, after five months in the field. In that time they had lost 1,034 men, with a further 2,752 wounded and many more suffering from malaria or dysentery or trench foot. Yet they had killed nearly 6,000 Japanese and sabotaged many of their railway lines and supply dumps.

This was all conveniently ignored, however, by South-East Asia Command. With Wingate dead, his detractors began doing all they could to belittle his reputation and that of his men, pointing out that as in Operation
Longcloth
in 1943 little had been achieved during Operation
Thursday
other than a high casualty rate. Calvert received no decoration for his command of the Chindits during the capture of Mogaung, even though General Stilwell recognized his gallantry with an American Silver Star. Calvert later attributed this snub to ‘spite and envy’
³⁶
on the part of Lentaigne.
^*

What Wingate’s enemies deliberately ignored was the confusion caused in the Japanese ranks by the Chindits’ guerrilla warfare, leading General Renya Mutaguchi, commander of the Fifteenth Army, to divert several precious battalions needed for the attack on Imphal into hunting Wingate’s marauders.

One of those most responsible for the official disparaging of Wingate was Slim, who finished his life as Field Marshal the 1st Viscount Slim, 13th Governor-General of Australia. Though in the wake of Wingate’s death he lauded him – ‘added to the tactical daring of the guerrilla leader were a wealth of vision and a depth of imaginations that placed him far above his comrades’
³⁷
– after the war he was openly critical, describing Special Forces units in his memoirs
Defeat Into Victory
as ‘expensive, wasteful and unnecessary’. Then in 1959, having read the assessment of Wingate in the draft of
The Official History, The War Against Japan
, Slim wrote to the author to congratulate him on his work, saying: ‘We are always inclined in the British Army to devise private armies and scratch forces for jobs which our ordinary formations with proper training could do and do better.’

Two years later John Masters, the Chindits’ brigade major after Wingate’s death and a best-selling post-war novelist, published his Burma memoirs entitled
The Road Past Mandalay
, in which he passed perhaps the most insightful judgement of all those that have been written: ‘The tragedy of Wingate lies not in his early death but in the unknown and unknowable quality of what he might have achieved if he had loved instead of despising the generality of his fellow humans.’
³⁸

In 1962
The Official History
was published, much to the fury of the Chindits. Derek Tulloch, who had served as Wingate’s chief of staff in 1943 and 1944, was incensed and began compiling evidence to rebut the claims, though many of the official War Office files were sealed until 1978. Nonetheless Tulloch travelled to Japan where he met General Renya Mutaguchi, erstwhile commander of the Fifteenth Army in Burma. The two former adversaries talked about the campaign and Mutaguchi recalled his reaction when he had learned of Wingate’s death in the spring of 1944: ‘I realized what a loss this was to the British Army and said a prayer for the soul of this man in whom I had found my match.’
³⁹

*
As well as wearing a beard for much of his time in command of the Chindits, Wingate also wore a pith helmet, or topee, that he had first acquired in Africa.

*
Calvert became brigadier of the SAS in 1945 and later served with the SAS in Malaya. He died aged 85 in 1998.

On 3 August 1944, a little over a month after Mike Calvert’s Chindits had captured Mogaung, the American 5307th Composite Unit seized the nearby town of Myitkyina. ‘This was most cheering news,’ wrote John Masters, the Chindits’ brigade major, ‘and the brigade burst into a collective smile of joy and appreciation.’
¹

The victory at Myitkyina, however, had come at a fearful price for the 5307th Composite Unit. Nicknamed ‘Merrill’s Marauders’ by the press after their commander, General Frank Merrill, the unit began operations the previous February with a fighting strength of approximately 2,750 men; six months later only 200 of that number were present to celebrate the capture of Myitkyina. That the ‘Marauders’ had still been able to take Myitkyina was in large part due to the leadership and example of Colonel Charles Hunter, the officer who had been with the unit since their inception a year earlier and who had assumed command after Merrill’s heart attack.

Yet on the same day that Myitkyina fell, Hunter – described by Calvert as an ‘admirable’ soldier – was relieved of his command by General Joseph Stilwell and sent home to the United States. The Marauders were enraged by the decision, one saying of Stilwell: ‘I had him in my rifle sights … no one would have known it wasn’t a Jap that got the son-of-a-bitch.’
²

Hunter was ordered to return to the United States by ship, not aircraft, so that Stilwell would have time to blacken his name, and that of the Marauders, before Hunter could reveal the truth as to why the 5307th Composite Unit had all but ceased to exist. Hunter had paid the price for his courage, not just in fighting the Japanese, but in standing up to Stilwell and holding him responsible for the failure of the Marauders. He left Burma for the long journey home carrying a letter from Merrill which ran:

Dear Chuck

I feel like hell about what you have been up against and want you to know that I have greatly appreciated and recognize all that you have done. I’m sorry that our ending is bound to be rather unpleasant for most of us. I have talked with the boss [Stilwell] and have done all I could to get many things squared away but am afraid not much except getting him to recognize that we weren’t so far wrong in many things, resulted. Sincerely, Frank
³

The origins of the 5307th Composite Unit had begun a year earlier, at the Quebec Conference of August 1943, to which Winston Churchill had brought Orde Wingate to impress the Americans. Wingate’s presentation on his Long Range Penetration Patrols, along with his burning desire to beat the Japanese, did indeed electrify the Americans. General H.H. Arnold, commander of the US Army Air Force, wrote of Wingate: ‘You took one look at that face, like the face of a pale Indian chieftain, topping the uniform still smelling of jungle and sweat and war and you thought “Hell, this man is serious”. When he began to talk, you found out just how serious.’
⁴

One upshot of the conference was a lengthy telegram issued from Washington’s Operations Division (OPD) of the War Department, General Staff on 31 August 1943. It was addressed to General Joseph Stilwell, commander of the US Army Forces in South-East Asia and it was titled ‘Information Pertaining to Three American Long Range-Penetration Groups’. The telegram explained to Stilwell that a

total of 2,830 officers and men organized into casual detachments will arrive in India in early November. They will all be volunteers. 950 will be battle-tested troops in jungle fighting from the South and Southwest Pacific. 1,900 will be from jungle-trained troops from the Caribbean Defense Command and the Continental United States. All will be of a high state of physical ruggedness. Above volunteers have been called for with requisite qualifications and commensurate grades and ratings to form three Independent Battalions after their arrival in the theater. They must be intensively trained in jungle warfare, animal transportation and air supply in a suitable jungle area in preparation for combat in February [1944].
⁵

Stilwell was delighted with the news, even if the proposed force was a tiny fraction of the manpower he needed to recapture Burma from the Japanese and thus reopen the supply route between British-held India and China, a task that would allow the Allies to utilize the 300 Chinese divisions against Japan. On receiving the telegram outlining the arrival of the 2,830-strong American force, Stilwell wrote in his diary on 2 September: ‘Only 3,000 [sic], but the entering wedge. Can we use them! And how!’
⁶

Since arriving in China in March 1942 as commander of US forces in China, India and Burma, Stilwell had worked closely in ‘supporting China’ in the war against Japan, forming a solid working relationship with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (though Stilwell referred to the Chinese commander as ‘Peanut’ in his diary). It was Stilwell’s ultimate objective to train the mighty Chinese Army using American instructors before unleashing them against the Japanese – but that could only be done once Burma had been retaken from the Japanese.

Stilwell’s nickname was ‘Vinegar Joe’ on account of his acidic personality and though he disliked most of humanity, he reserved a particular loathing for the British. ‘The more I see of Limeys the worse I hate them,’ he once said, and it was his view that the average British soldier was weak, cowardly and incapable of pushing the Japanese out of Burma.
⁷
So the news that 3,000 well-trained American Special Forces troops were on their way to Burma managed to raise a smile even on the lips of ‘Vinegar Joe’s’ hard-boiled face.

Once the decision had been taken by the US War Department to raise a Special Forces unit similar to the British Chindits, moves were put rapidly in place to recruit suitable soldiers. The man tasked with overseeing the organization of the force was Colonel Charles Newton Hunter.

Hunter was born in Oneida, New York, in January 1906, into a family with deep Scottish roots. From an early age Hunter wanted to be a soldier and he graduated from West Point Military Academy in 1929, where he was nicknamed ‘Newt’. His West Point yearbook described him thus:

Newt has worn the gray of the Corps with distinction, yet, we hope sometime to see him in wee kilts, and to hear him dreamily squeeze the bagpipe for our benefit. His ruddy countenance, slightly tilted nose, sandy hair, and twinkling blue eyes carry an appeal that can pass unnoticed by no mortal lass. Fortunately for us, Newt’s forefathers failed to transmit to him their most famous trait. His helpful generosity would do credit to even the Good Samaritan. Newt is a precious bundle of wit and humor, with more than his share of common sense and good fellowship. He is the type that one enjoys to have around and whom you daily learn to appreciate more and more. These characteristics are certain to gain him the best in life wherever he goes.
⁸

Following his graduation from West Point, Hunter joined an infantry regiment and served three years in the Philippines and two and a half in the Canal Zone, the ribbon of United States territory in Panama including the Canal. Here he had taught soldiers the art of jungle warfare and Hunter had been marked out as a young officer with exceptional ‘ability, efficiency and precision’. When America entered the war in December 1941 Hunter was recalled to the States and appointed an instructor at the infantry school at Fort Benning, Georgia.