British officers were often much moved by the loyalty and courage of soldiers who were, to put the matter bluntly, mercenaries. A man of the 1/3rd Gurkhas said to his company commander one morning: ‘Today I shall win the Victoria Cross, or die.’ That Nepalese died sure enough, but his shade had to be content with the Indian Order of Merit. Such was the rivalry between two Indian officers of John Cameron-Hayes’s gun battery that each declined to take cover on the battlefield within sight of the other. Personal honour—‘izzat’—meant much. Captain John Randle was moved when his subadar Moghal Baz suddenly said as they ate one night: ‘I would like you to know, sahib, that with you I have served with great “izzat”.’ Every man in Slim’s army heard stories such as that of a Dogra jemadar badly wounded and taken to a dressing station. The NCO insisted on crawling back to his position, and fighting on until wounded three times more. As he lay dying, he repeated again and again the war cry ‘Mai kali ki Jai!’ His British captain crawled to where he lay. The jemadar said: ‘Go back and command the company, sahib, don’t worry about me.’
Slim’s chief of staff wrote to his wife: ‘One can’t help feeling very humble when one deals with men like that. This army is truly invincible given a fair chance.’ Of twenty Victoria Crosses won in Burma, fourteen went to men of the Indian Army, three to a single unit, 2/5th Gurkhas. When a British officer met a Sikh colonel whose battalion he was relieving, he noted his immaculate turban, beard glistening in the monsoon rain: ‘I saw something in him that was new to me: relish for war. The Sikhs gave every impression of enjoying themselves.’
It never occurred to the British government to consult Indian political leaders about the conduct of the war, any more than they sought the views of Burman exiles. Reports of dissension among the Allies about Asian policy, freely aired in the British and American media, were shamelessly censored from the Indian press. The subcontinent was treated merely as a huge reservoir of manpower. An army psychiatrist’s report on Indian troops asserted that on the battlefield, most were ‘welladjusted’, as long as they were able to serve alongside men of their own racial group. ‘The sepoy,’ observed the report with imperialistic condescension, ‘accepts the army, its discipline, its customs and leaders uncritically. He is not greatly interested in the ideologies of the war, because he has a job which gives him a higher standard of living than before, an interest is taken in his welfare, and he gets leave fairly regularly. He does not ask a great deal more.’ Few British officers in Indian regiments perceived that the day of the Raj was done, or heeded the alienation of most Indian civilians from Britain’s war. ‘We took it for granted that Burma and Malaya would remain parts of the British Empire. We never thought India might go,’ said Captain Ronnie McAllister of 1/3rd Gurkhas, whose stepfather was a senior officer of the Indian Police. ‘I remember dinner parties at my stepfather’s house where there were police, Indian Civil Service people, Indians. Nobody even mentioned the possibility. We were cocooned against reality, you see, because the Indian Army was so staunch.’
That army’s cultural complexities aroused some bewilderment among newcomers. Pathans in John Cameron-Hayes’s gunner unit not infrequently used their leaves to pursue tribal vendettas at home, before returning to the British war. John Randle, a company commander in the Baluchis at the age of twenty-two, was informed by his colonel of two taboos essential to maintaining respect for sahibs: an officer must never let himself be seen naked before his men, and should ensure that excretion was carried out in privacy on a ‘thunderbox’, even in action. The officers’ mess sweeper, a little man named Kantu whose broad grin never failed, thus sometimes found himself excusing the colonel’s temporary absence from a battle, saying as he saluted: ‘Command officer sahib, pot par hai’—‘The CO’s on the pot.’ Randle was so impressed by the spectacle of Kantu crawling out under fire to deposit the hallowed contents of the thunderbox in a latrine pit that he successfully submitted the sweeper’s name for a Mention in Dispatches. Less happily, Randle was informed that a homosexual British officer had been making advances to sepoys. His soldiers, mostly Pathans, were plotting to kill him. Randle saved the man’s life by having him removed for court martial.
Once, an attached platoon of British troops arrived triumphant in the Baluchis’ lines with the carcass of a wild pig they had trapped. Randle’s subadar-major said firmly: ‘Sir, that thing is not coming into our position to defile us.’ The British sergeant said: ‘Sir, you know what the rations are like—we’re all hungry and browned off to hell with bully and biscuits.’ Randle told the sergeant to remove the pig, dismember it and come back with the meat discreetly concealed in the men’s haversacks, for transfer to their own cookhouse. The subadar-major acquiesced. Likewise when tins of mutton were delivered to the 4/1st Gurkhas, bearing labels which showed images of female sheep. The men declined to eat them. The battalion CO instructed his quartermaster to find a crayon and draw testicles on the beasts. The amended mutton was found acceptable.
There was rivalry between British and Indian units, with some disdain on both sides. Derek Horsford of the Gurkhas said: ‘We thought nothing of the British Army. They seemed to us terribly inefficient.’ War in Burma produced wild incongruities, such as the spectacle of the gunners of 119 Field Regiment singing ‘Sussex by the Sea’ in honour of their native county as they heaved twenty-five-pounders across a jungle clearing. The culture and language of the Raj seeped into the veins of every man who served under Slim. Whether you were a Borderer or a Dragoon, tea was ‘char’, the washerman a ‘dhobi-wallah’, a mug a ‘piyala’, food ‘khana’, and so on. They smoked Indian ‘Victory V’ cigarettes, packed in brown paper packets for European consumption, green for Indian and African. Soldiers found both ‘unspeakably vile’.
The foremost tactical reality for both British and Americans fighting the Japanese was that when the enemy moved, he became vulnerable to their firepower, but while dug into his brilliantly concealed and meticulously protected bunkers, he was hard to see and harder still to kill. One of the more ridiculous documents produced by the wartime British Army, marked ‘Most Secret’, was an August 1944 report from the Directorate of Tactical Investigation, summarising tests on bombarding simulated Japanese bunkers with infantry weapons. Researchers garrisoned a position with two cockerels, two goats and two white rabbits, ‘one somewhat dull in behaviour and suffering from mange’. After a two-inch mortar barrage, reported the study, the animals were covered in dust, but otherwise little affected. ‘They appeared mildly surprised but in other respects were apparently normal. The goat was coughing slightly.’ PIAT anti-tank bombs caused the goat’s pulse to slow and blood pressure to fall. On the battlefield, no doubt with scant help from the above study, ‘beehive’ charges, tank gunfire, or an infantryman tossing a grenade into a bunker with one hand while firing a tommy gun through the slit with the other, were found most efficacious.
But first it was necessary to find the enemy. A British officer noted that when his soldiers dug a foxhole, a pile of earth rose around it: ‘With the Japanese, you could never see that soil had been moved.’ A Borderer in Raymond Cooper’s company was astonished to hear a ‘woodpecker’—a slow-firing Japanese light machine gun—chattering under his feet. Without noticing, he had stepped onto an enemy bunker. Cecil Daniels’s platoon of the Buffs, advancing warily through the jungle, received their first intimation of the enemy ‘when there was a sudden bang and the sergeant who had been walking by the side of and slightly in front of me went down like a log. Firing seemed to break out all around. A shout of “Stretcher-bearer” went out, but I shouted “No need” as I could see that he was already dead, twitching in the throes of involuntary muscle convulsion. He wasn’t breathing.’ The company runner, ‘Deuce’ Adams, shouted: ‘Look out, there’s a bloody Jap.’ Somebody shouted ‘Take him prisoner.’ Someone else shouted: