Men’s battle careers were often brutally abbreviated. Charles Besly of the Berkshires was a twenty-six-year-old BSc, who before the war had worked in a circus and as assistant stage manager of a London theatre company. In Denmark when war broke out, he hitch-hiked home to join the army. By January 1945 he had served for a year with his battalion as a platoon commander, without seeing action. Within days of his first contact with the enemy he won a Military Cross in a clash with the Japanese. He was severely wounded, however, almost losing a leg. Besly disappeared from the regiment, never to fight again.
Thousands of soldiers followed behind Slim’s infantry, performing the myriad support functions of an army. Some maintained themselves in tiny cocoons of Britishness, upon which the war and foreign places scarcely impinged. Joe Welch was a south London joiner’s son, working in a power station, who joined the army in 1939 and became a linesman in a signals company. He and a little cluster of comrades served successively in Iraq, Greece, Libya, India and Burma, without any of these campaigns leaving much mark upon them. They were awed by the scale of India, but Burma was simply ‘lots of trees…I once saw an elephant…There were all these monkeys and spiders that came up when we were eating. I never saw a Burman.’ The campaign, to chirpy little Joe Welch, was simply ‘rain, rain, rain and bully, bully, bully’. He and his mates—a fellow Londoner named Joy, Garner from Manchester, Vince from Sheffield—carried their own little British world across the Chindwin in their Chevrolet truck with its wooden Indian-made body as composedly as they had rattled through Greece and the Western Desert. They laid their telephone lines from division to corps to army in the hills of Assam, then on the path to the Irrawaddy. What did the war mean to Joe Welch? ‘I didn’t worry about it—just one of those things, innit?’ That is how the 1939-45 experience was for millions of uniformed men, no poets they, yet all warriors of a kind.
Every man, whatever his rank or specialisation, was expected to turn a hand to anything. At the end of November 1944, the Berkshires found themselves roadbuilding just inside the Burma border. ‘Even the miners among us found it tough going,’ wrote Maj. John Hill, who wielded a pick with his men, ‘but it was all part of Fourteenth Army’s philosophy of self-help and DIY, in modern jargon…blasting trees, bamboo roots, rocks and eternally digging and shovelling, digging and shovelling until we longed for knocking-off time at 1600.’
During the advance from Imphal to the Chindwin, Slim’s men met only sporadic Japanese resistance, for the enemy was in no condition to fight a serious battle. In consequence, beyond the strains of the march, among many units there was almost a holiday atmosphere. The long files marched each night for eight or nine hours, each man following a wooden tag dipped in phosphorus tied to his predecessor’s backpack. Then, when morning came, they bivouacked. ‘Very soon companies would have settled down in their allotted areas on perimeters,’ recorded the History of the 3/1st Gurkhas. ‘Cookhouses and latrines would be built; the men, after consuming quantities of sweet tea, would make “sun shades” for themselves and the sahibs, and everyone would settle down for a very pleasant day, which everyone could spend pretty much how he liked.’ When they reached the Chindwin one officer, John Murray, spent hours fishing vainly with rod and line. He was chagrined to hear a loud explosion, then to meet a triumphant party of his men clutching a large fish, secured by judicious use of a grenade. The Gurkhas enjoyed the spectacle of African soldiers potting monkeys with rifles, until stray bullets started to fly about their own heads.
Yet even when organised Japanese resistance was slight, almost every yard of the Burma war provided unwelcome surprises. John Cameron-Hayes was disturbed in the night by a weight descending on his mosquito net, which proved to be a cobra. When one of his men shot a boa constrictor, its falling corpse knocked him into a stream. During the hours of darkness, both sides employed ‘jitter parties’, patrols whose function was to disrupt their opponents’ repose. Beyond these, there were plenty of unscheduled encounters. One night a Gurkha NCO awoke from sleep to see seven figures standing together on the road just beside him, huddled over a map. He rose, challenged them, and was met by startled Japanese grunts. He smote one enemy soldier with a spade, while the others scattered and ran. A British officer, awakened by the racket, found two figures struggling hand-to-hand in the darkness beside him. Joining the fray, it was some seconds before he realised that he was fighting a fellow officer. There was a desultory exchange of fire, then silence fell. The camp returned to sleep, only to be wakened once more by a thunderous explosion. A Japanese officer had blown himself up on an anti-tank mine. The Gurkhas slept again. At dawn, but for the presence of four dead Japanese in their positions, they would have been tempted to dismiss the alarums of the night as mere fantasies.
Beyond casualties inflicted by the enemy, there was a steady trickle of accidents, inseparable from all military operations. The air-dropping of supplies became a dominant feature of Fourteenth Army’s advance, and soldiers and pack animals were sometimes killed by loads falling upon them from the sky. As columns threaded up precipitous mountain tracks, at intervals a mule slipped, plunging into the valley below. A report noted wearily that the animal lost was invariably carrying a vital radio set—it was essential to ensure that some wirelesses were manpacked. A private of the Buffs performed a notable little feat of heroism, wiping out a Japanese machine-gun post with his bren gun. Yet as he ran on forward, he tripped and fell. The spade protruding from his pack caught and broke his neck. In action shortly afterwards, a Buffs sergeant called to his runner, Cecil Daniels, for a bag of grenades. The NCO was infuriated when Daniels told him they were not primed. ‘I’m not carrying a haversack full of primed grenades,’ said Daniels firmly. He had been rendered cautious by seeing so many comrades fall victim to accidents with munitions.
‘We seem condemned to wallow at half-speed through these jungles,’ Winston Churchill complained bitterly in October 1944, describing the progress of Fourteenth Army. Yet for those at the sharp end, every yard of movement meant pain and difficulty. Conventional fieldcraft demanded that men should avoid the few tracks, which were likely to be covered by enemy fire. Yet movement through thick cover was so desperately slow that only tracks and chaungs—riverbeds—offered any prospect of advancing at tolerable speed. Distances measured on the map were meaningless—what mattered was how far men had to march. They learned not to smoke or talk at night anywhere within reach of the enemy, for scent and sound alike carried far. They cursed the relentless damp, which misted the optics of gunsights and binoculars, rusted weapons overnight. Newly-joined replacements often buckled under the weight of their packs. Training had not prepared them for the burdens men must carry in a country where vehicles were few and mules precious. Air-dropped artillery had to be manhandled into firing positions by sweating gunners.
If a man was lucky, every few months he was granted a brief leave in India. Soldiers resting from Burma were entitled to ‘convalescent scale’ rations. A transport aircraft carried them to rear base, from which an Indian soldier still needed days of travel to reach his home. Wartime trains in the subcontinent were notoriously congested and slow. When a Tokyo propaganda broadcast on Christmas Eve 1943 asserted that Japanese forces would reach Delhi in ten days, a chorus of listening Punjabi soldiers, just returned from an irksome leave journey, chorused: ‘Not if they go by train, they won’t!’ Yet many of Slim’s soldiers had no homes in India. On leave, they sought what pleasures they could discover. Sgt Kofi Genfi of the Gold Coast Regiment described a touching experience: ‘Oh, the Indians were very kind to me. In Madras I went to dance—I am a ballroom champion dancer. I sat down, but I couldn’t get a partner. I was shy. I didn’t know how to engage a lady. A man came and said: “Do you want to dance?”…He said “Come, come.” He gave me his wife…We started to dance, and they all stopped and looked at me as if I was giving a demonstration. At the end, there was applause. Then every lady wants to dance with me!’
For the white as well as black soldiers of Fourteenth Army, there was a shameful divide between the luxuries offered to officers on leave in clubs and messes, and the pitiful delights available to other ranks. These focused upon bars and brothels of notable squalor. When John Leyin’s tank gunner heard that he was to be repatriated to England, his joy was tempered by the misery of finding himself impotent, after repeated treatments for venereal disease. The British class system shaped the lives of