World War II: The Autobiography (79 page)

This morning we cleaned up the tank, made ourselves more comfortable and prepared for rain, and did some washing. One fellow caught a snake about eighteen inches long, green on top and, just behind the head, a salmon pink. I have just seen what may be the smallest moth I have ever seen, white, with blue-black markings on wings, and light brown head. I must get ready for a tank commander’s lecture.

Today a VIP is turning up, so we have to be in overalls, boots and berets, instead of our usual shorts and stripped to the waist. “How long have you been in the army? Always in this regiment? How long troop sergeant? Find things all right in this country?” And in everyone’s mind is one thought, how to get on with the war, instead of being asked useless questions.

THE SKIRMISH AT ADMIN BOX, BURMA, 8 FEBRUARY 1944

Brigadier Geoffrey C. Evans, 9th Brigade, 5th Division

Britain’s steady advance into the Arakan was met on 4 February by a counter-attack by the Japanese 55th Division, which enveloped the British administrative centre at Sinzweye, a flat clearing surrounded by jungle. All the advantages lay with the attacking Japanese. Brigadier Evans was ordered to “Stay put and keep the Japanese out”.

Bursts of rifle and automatic fire broke out about three hundred yards from Box Headquarters. These were accompanied by more shouting and then screams and cries for help. I heard a voice say in the darkness: “Good God, they’ve got into the hospital.”

This was a dreadful thought, as there was very little that could be done until daylight. The defenders were a section of West Yorkshires and twenty walking wounded armed with rifles. It would be sheer folly to send in an infantry attack to drive out the enemy. Only the West Yorkshires were available and they did not know the geography of the hospital, nor would they be able to distinguish between friend and foe in the dark. To call on artillery and mortars was out of the question as our own men would be killed.

I got on the telephone to Munshi to send in a patrol to try and find out what was happening, but the carrier that was sent was driven off by grenades. Clearly the enemy were in greater strength than I had expected. We could only wait for the day to come and take what comfort we might from the fact that the wards, theatres and resuscitation installations were dug down. In the darkness the Japanese might miss them; otherwise, when they discovered that they had entered a hospital, they might take what prisoners they could and leave the remainder. . . .

The full details of what had happened we learned later from the pitifully small number of survivors of the thirty-six-hour ordeal, which was only ended when A Company of the West Yorkshires drove the enemy out. The Orderly Medical Officer, Lieutenant Basu of the Indian Army Medical Corps, was lying on a stretcher in the medical inspection room resting, when a group of men rushed in from the dispensary at about 9 pm. One man seized his arm, while another threatened him with a bayonet.
“Aiyo”,
they ordered, “Come on.”

Basu was taken to the Japanese commander, who was in the darkened officers’ ward busily scribbling notes. Through an interpreter, the questioning began. “What is your name? What is the name of this place?”

The next question made it clear that the Japanese knew they were in a hospital, and therefore what followed was done quite deliberately and in cold blood. “How many patients are in this hospital?” they asked. “How many of them are British officers? What other personnel are there?”

Basu stalled as best he could. “I am here for three days only,” he said. “I don’t know much about the organisation here.”

“What army units are posted here? How many of them are British and how many Indian?”

“I am a doctor,” said Basu. “I am interested in medicine, not military tactics.”

At this, one angry Japanese soldier brought the point of his bayonet against the doctor’s head as though to finish him off unless he answered the questions more satisfactorily. But the Japanese commander cut in brusquely: “Show us to the telephone.”

Basu thought quickly. “It would be dangerous to go near it,” he said. “There is a machine-gun post just beside it.”

“Then show my men to the operating theatre and the laboratory,” ordered the Japanese officer.

Basu could not get out of this. But he took them to the small theatre which was used only for minor operations. As bad luck would have it, while the Japanese hunted round the theatre for anything they could lay their hands on in the way of bandages and cotton wool, they came on three of the hospital officers asleep. They were awakened and made prisoners. With Basu, they were taken back to the commander for further questioning. It was quite clear that the one piece of information the enemy were particularly anxious to discover was where the supply depot was situated. Basu kept up his presence at ignorance: “I don’t know; I tell you I’m only here for a few days. I’ve been too busy looking after patients to find time to visit the supply depot.”

All the officers had their hands tied tightly behind their backs and they were taken to join the British and Indian other ranks, who had been trussed in a similar painful fashion.

The Japanese officer pulled out his sword, waved it over their heads threateningly, sheathed it and withdrew.

The purpose of this melodramatic gesture became clear almost at once. It was intended to cause the maximum alarm to the Indians as an inducement to make them desert to the Japanese to save their lives. The offer came almost immediately.

A man whose appearance suggested he was Indian was brought in.

“There is no need to worry,” he assured the Indians. “No need at all to worry. You will be taken to Rangoon to join the Indian Independence League.”

“What is your native country?” Basu asked him.

“I come from Maungdaw, in Burma,” he answered.

Later that night, the five Indian medical officers were taken to the dispensary and ordered to pack up drugs for the Japanese. They were particularly interested in quinine, morphine, anti-tetanus and anti-gas-gangrene serum. They wanted to know what was in every phial. Those they did not want they threw to one side. Sally, in 9 Brigade Headquarters, could hear the bottles breaking.

When the Japanese had taken all they wanted, they drove the medical officers back to the watercourse where the rest of the captives were seated in acute discomfort because the bindings on their wrists were cutting into the flesh. Those who asked for water were jabbed with a heavy stick by a Japanese sentry.

The following morning a carrier pushed through the bushes towards the medical inspection room and one Japanese soldier dragged the trussed British other ranks out in front so that they should receive the first burst of fire. When the automatic gun of the carrier opened up, the prisoners desperately tried to find shelter, but they were handicapped because their hands were lashed behind their backs. Some of them were killed and others were wounded. The Japanese looked on grinning. They, too, had suffered casualties. They selected six of the Indian soldiers and ordered them to help to carry seven wounded Japanese.

The stretcher-bearers struggled southwards through the jungle the whole of that day. When night came, the Japanese cooked food for themselves but gave none to the Indians. Next morning, still having had nothing to eat, the Indians were given packs to carry and it was not until the early hours of the following morning that they reached their destination. This was the Buthidaung Tunnel, where there were about a thousand Japanese living. The tunnel was used as a store for arms, ammunition, guns and transport. During the day, six Indians came to see them. “You need not worry,” they told them. “You will have trouble for a few days, but then you will be sent to Rangoon to work. Our major will fix things and you will not be tortured by the Japanese.” One of their visitors, a Madrassi, said: “There are now 400,000 followers of Subhas Bhose. In two months we shall reach Chittagong.”

Seven days later, the six Indian soldiers were taken out of the tunnel, ordered to strip off their clothes beside a sixty-foot-deep gorge, and then were shot by a Japanese officer and five men. Four were killed and their bodies were kicked down the gorge where already more than twenty bodies lay decomposing. One of the Indian soldiers, a
RIASC
ambulance driver, was shot through the right arm, left shoulder and right hand by the Japanese officer and managed to fall down the gorge without being kicked. At the bottom he discovered that the sixth member of his party, a labourer, although badly wounded, was still conscious. When the Japanese had gone, he helped the other man to move across the gorge, but after a hundred yards the labourer lost consciousness and he had to leave him. Five days later, after living on water and leaves, the ambulance driver staggered into the regimental aid post of 3/14 Punjab Regiment, one of 9 Brigade’s units.

Meanwhile, back at the hospital in the Box, the Japanese raiding party had completed their crime. Wounded prisoners received no attention. Those who cried out were shot or bayoneted. Men lying helplessly in bed were killed. In one shelter were a British lieutenant, a major of the Gurkhas and a Signals sergeant. They were being tended by a captain of the
RAMC
. Four West Yorkshires, whose defence post was overrun in the attack, joined them. When day came, they lay still so that the Japanese might not notice them. During the morning they heard a shout outside and the
RAMC
Captain asked: “What do you want?”

The shout – it sounded like “You go” – was repeated. The Captain shook his head and lay down again. “Who is it?” asked the Lieutenant.

“It’s a Jap,” said the Captain. At that moment one of the Japanese soldiers appeared and shot him through the right thigh. The Captain shouted: “I am a doctor – Red Cross – I am a medical officer.”

The Japanese shot dead the Captain, the Gurkha Major, two British soldiers and a mess servant. The Lieutenant and the three surviving British soldiers lay still. They stayed like that all day, and when darkness came they managed to leave the hospital and find the safety of the nearest West Yorkshire post.

A British private of the
RAMC
– one of a party of twenty – survived to describe his experience. He was tied by his neck to another man – as they all were – kicked, cuffed and cracked over the head by rifle butts, and used as a shield on top of a trench by the Japanese when the carrier attacked. Just before dark on February 8 a Japanese officer told the twenty men: “Come and get treatment.”

They were taken along a dried-up watercourse to a clearing with a running stream. Through the whole hot day they had been allowed only two bottles of water between them. And now they stood by the stream. But they were not allowed to drink. The Japanese opened up at them with rifles. Seventeen of them were killed. That night Lieutenant Basu and nine men who had been wounded when a mortar exploded near them lay in a watercourse, some dying, some crying for water. The Japanese shot one man and bayoneted another who cried too loudly. Just before they left, the Japanese stood in front of them, their rifles ready.

“We are Red Cross people,” said Basu – he and another doctor both had their stethoscopes slung round their necks. “We are doctors and hospital workers. We have nothing to do with actual warfare.”

Most of them wore Red Cross badges on their arms. It made no difference. The Japanese shot them all.

Lieutenant Basu was shot at twice. He was left stunned. At first he was not sure whether he was alive or dead. He felt at his ear, but there was no blood on his fingers. He could still see and his thoughts became clear once more. He realised how vulnerable he was lying there still alive. So he reached out to the body of one of his dead friends and put his hand on the wounds until it was covered with blood, and then he smeared the blood over his face and head and down his shirt front, so that the Japanese would think he, too, was mortally wounded. He slipped groaning into a trench, and there he spent the night.

On the morning of February 9 the West Yorkshires cleared the Japanese out of the hospital. Their task was made all the more difficult because the enemy had camouflaged their machine-gun posts cunningly with stretchers in the wards and theatre. Fortunately, before the attacks began, most of the wounded had been removed from the hospital to a dried-up watercourse lying to the north. As it was, we found in the hospital area the bodies of thirty-one patients and four doctors – doctors whose services were to be desperately needed in the days to come.

CLOSE-QUARTER FIGHTING, BURMA, MARCH 1944

John Masters, Long Range Penetration Unit (Chindits)

On 5 March 1944, Wingate’s Chindits began landing 100 miles behind enemy lines to cut off the Japanese divisions “Marching on Delhi”. The Japanese reacted furiously to this incursion.

The rain now fell steadily. The Deep sector looked like Passchendaele – blasted trees, feet and twisted hands sticking up out of the earth, bloody shirts, ammunition clips, holes half full of water, each containing two pale, huge-eyed men, trying to keep their rifles out of the mud, and over all the heavy, sweet stench of death, from our own bodies and entrails lying unknown in the shattered ground, from Japanese corpses on the wire, or fastened, dead and rotting, in the trees. At night the rain hissed down in total darkness, the trees ran with water and, beyond the devastation, the jungle dripped and crackled.

A Japanese light machine-gun chatters hysterically, and bullets clack and clap overhead. Two Very lights float up, burst in brilliant whiteness. Click, click, click – boom, crash, boom, three mortar bombs burst in red-yellow flashes on the wire.

The third crisis came on May 17. On that day our Lightnings (P-38s) patrolled the valley for several hours, searching for the guns which had done us so much damage. They did not find them. Towards evening the P-38s left and I went down to the water point, as I usually did, to wash, shave, and brush up for the night’s battle. While I was shaving, the enemy began to shell the block with 105s and 155s. Twelve guns or more were firing. Soap all over my face, I looked across at the ridge to the west, where the enemy had once put a mortar, and saw movement there. Mortar bombs from the ridge whistled into the block. The shelling grew more urgent and I walked quickly up to my command post – I tried never to run.