Jocks in the Jungle

by Gordon Thorburn

  Officers from GHQ briefed the Cams (whose CO was Lieutenant Colonel W. B. Thomas), and 2 IC Major R. M. H. Tynte. The situation was dire. All civil administration had broken down, including transport and telegraph, and there was significant anti-British sentiment among the locals in the countryside around. Japs and their Burman allies were massing by a bridge on the Sittang River, some ninety miles north-east of Rangoon, so the Battalion moved to Pegu (modern Bago), a large town on its own river, forty miles short of that point, to form up ready to march on the Sittang bridge.

  No sooner had they arrived than orders came to go back to Rangoon to quell rioters and looters. Then more orders told them to stay put and take up defensive positions around Pegu, including the villages of Payagyi and Waw, both roughly fifteen miles further on towards the enemy. The bridge by now had been blown, with most of the British and Indian forces on the wrong side, the east side, of the Sittang.

  Over the next few days the Cams watched a continuous stream of refugee soldiers who had had to swim the Sittang and walk twenty-five miles through inhospitable country to get to Waw and safety. Meanwhile, Cams patrols encountered Burman snipers and bandits, as well as regular Japanese troops, who seemed to be able to move through the jungle and appear and disappear without difficulty.

  It was becoming obvious that the Japs greatly outnumbered the Imperial forces and despite courageous counter-attacks and many skirmishes, retreat to Pegu from the outlying positions seemed inevitable. Air attacks too were increasing, with a consequent decrease in air support for the defenders. On one counter-attack, for example, support from twenty Blenheim fighter-bombers was promised but only two turned up.

  By 6 March the Japs were in Pegu, holding the railway station and setting up road blocks. Confusion reigned, with much close-quarters fighting and constant reports of detachments of Gurkhas, West Yorks, 7th Hussars, Essex Yeomanry and others, having successes and failures as they tried to stop the unstoppable. One small unit of the Cameronians, while extricating a broken-down Bofors gun, was surprise-attacked by Japs and most of its members killed; the dead Scots having their heads removed and stuck on poles.

  A determined assault by the Cams and others blasted the Japs out of Pegu station but they were soon back, with thousands of reinforcements coming up.

  A reporter for the Daily Mirror, T. E. A. Healy, was in Rangoon. Here is an extract from his dispatch:

  ‘I wanted to go up to front line headquarters ... during the battle of Pegu, which was also the battle of Rangoon. I got there in a scooter-type Ford two-seater which is known as a Jeep.

  ‘HQ were surprised that I had got along the road without being shot at, because Japanese snipers had been firing on almost every vehicle on the road for twenty-four hours ... they agreed to let me go still nearer the front towards the headquarters of a famous Scottish regiment.’

  He watched the retaking of the railway station, but that was the last little victory for a while:

  ‘With amazing speed, the fighting spread from this isolated patch of jungle to almost a half-circle (from which) came bursts of Japanese mortar and tommy-gun fire. Our troops were quickly dispatched on patrols, advancing with admirable courage straight into the undergrowth and the jungle. The air was filled with crackling duels and the situation seemed gradually worsening for us. Bullets sang and whined above.

  ‘We had to face the grim fact – we were cut off. And as the circle of battle gradually shrunk, I thought that a slit throat was my fate not many hours away.

  ‘A dispatch rider raced past the snipers to say that a brigade was on its way to relieve us. All afternoon we waited for that relief column. It never arrived. The Japanese held the road too strongly and they built formidable road blocks through which the relief could not pass.

  ‘The Hindoo temple, which had been our HQ, was now the casualty station. HQ was out in the paddy field.’

  Healy helped with the wounded, taking off tunics and boots ready for the surgeon. The Jap air force arrived and dive-bombed. Healy briefly joined up with the Hussars and their tanks forcing their way through a roadblock to escape northwards:

  ‘But whatever happened, Pegu was finally lost, and the Burma Road – along which so much aid had travelled to China – was gone. Lost, too, was Rangoon – for even as Pegu fell, our forces quitted Rangoon.’

  The British were heavily dependent on motor transport and therefore, on the few roads, while the Japanese were trained and practised in moving in the jungle, going round rather than through the defenders’ positions, and leap-frogging the retreating forces ready to block their way. Withdrawal from Pegu was ordered, counter-ordered and ordered again, with the Cams and the West Yorks forming the rearguard as the outmatched Burma Army set off north for Prome.

  Assaults on Jap roadblocks met with some success and at great cost, only for more blocks to be set up. A favourite joke of the Japs if they took a prisoner, was to tie him to the barrier, knowing that his own side would kill him in trying to burst through.

  The road was the only way, but the Japanese held the country on both sides of it and attacked anything that moved along it. One platoon of the Cameronians headed north along the railway line instead, and met a very large force of the enemy. After a fierce battle with losses on both sides, the Cams turned south and walked all the way to Rangoon which, of course, was Jap-held by this time. The officer, Captain P. V. Gray, split his men into small parties and turned back north. Most of them managed to evade the Japs, often walking through the middle of enemy formations. Some rejoined the Battalion, some found their way back to India.

  A young Second Lieutenant of the Cameronians, not named, told his part in that story:

  ‘Orders came to withdraw (from Pegu) after we were completely surrounded, and as leading platoon of the leading company, we set out. We were advancing down a railway line ... when out of the mist appeared a large force of unknown soldiers ... we challenged them, still thinking they might be some of our own native troops. Immediately, they opened up with everything they had, at point-blank range. They were screaming like demons.

  ‘You could see the tracer bullets hitting people all around you, and feel the whistle of them past your own body. Then they charged with bayonets and double-handed swords. Our fellows fought magnificently, and we gave them as good as we got.

  ‘Eventually we withdrew, as did the enemy, but the damage was done and contact was lost with our own troops.’

  They turned back towards Rangoon, hoping to meet up with friendly forces but instead, after two days and nights of marching, walked into the city to find the Japs in possession. For the next four days they wandered around without map or compass, trying to find a road out:

  ‘On the seventh day (we walked) through a Japanese HQ, but we got away without being noticed. There were only four of us by this time.’

  The four were two RAOC, the Lieutenant and a Cameronian sergeant. They joined up with another small party, dodged the Japs and the bandits for a fortnight, and hitched a ride aboard a refugee ship to India.

  For the rest, the way back to India looked a hard road indeed. Motor vehicles and tanks were becoming a liability, so often were they knocked out by the enemy and turned into yet more blocks. Communications, which relied on transport, were worsening, and by 8 March the Battalion was the advance guard, and the Second-in-Command, Richard Tynte – lately Lieutenant Colonel – was dead.

  They had fought around Pegu for three weeks. The next three were spent gradually moving north, halting and digging in for a day here, two days there, with little enemy contact, until they reached the Prome area, where there were several expensive battles, during which the British were subjected to much dive-bombing from Jap aircraft; the enemy now having total air superiority.

  William Mundy of the News Chronicle was there:

  ‘At dawn, British troops on the Irrawaddy front launched an offensive which by nightfall had captured Paungde, smashed two Japanese battalions, and was sweeping on towards Okpo ... for the first time in
Burma, the British made the decision to turn defence into offence, partly with the aid of the Chinese, who were counter-attacking strongly in the Toungoo valley.

  ‘All around me officers and men were saying, “At last we are going the right way.” And when bombs rocked the earth and bullets spluttered viciously down, they still said, “Well, anyway, we are going the right way.”

  ‘Once when I sought shelter, a Cameronian with a Bren gun, pacing impatiently up and down, his eyes glued on the Japanese fighters flashing in the sun further down the road, lamented, “They never come near me. I’ve never had a chance to use this bloody gun yet.”’

  Reporter T. E. A. Healy was there too, to see the thrust south from Prome succeed:

  ‘But behind them, events were developing fast. Defeated for the moment, the Japs threw large reinforcements of their troops and the Burmans into battle ... bombers and fighter aircraft were thrown in, and the weight of their bombs and bullets tilted the scale against us.

  ‘Thirty miles of that road was marked and numbered by the bodies of gallant soldiers who had given all ... The most incredible character, perhaps, was the Cameronian driving a Bren gun carrier, who was shot through the cheek. He spat the bullet on the floor of the carrier (saying) “That bloody bullet bounced off my teeth.”’

  Individual heroism cannot, alas, bring down aircraft nor repel hugely superior artillery bombardment, and Prome had to be abandoned in the knowledge that the Japanese, using their tactic of going round rather than through, were attempting to block the road to the north.

  On 31 March the Battalion, reduced to around 200 officers and men, harboured six miles north of Prome, but had to move on again two days later, heading for an Irrawaddy crossing point twenty-three miles north, hoping to get there before the Japs. They were bombed on the way and arrived exhausted, but were able to rest, wash, and recover for a while, before moving on to Magwe. Ten days later, on 16 April, the Japs were closing in and another withdrawal was ordered, with more roadblocks expected on route and strong enemy positions to be cleared.

  After a major battle around Twingon and Yenaungyaung, the next objective was Myingyan, mostly by forced march, and the Chindwin River. More battles and rearguard actions saw them in Yeu, sixty or so miles north-west of Mandalay, where they received the order to withdraw to India.

  By early May, the Chinese forces sent down by Chiang Kai-Shek had been driven back on the eastern flank as far as Myitkyina, and Jap advances to the west meant certain defeat for the British and Indians, who had no choice but to somehow struggle back to Assam before the enemy and the monsoon made such a thing impossible.

  The Cameronians were much reduced, like the other regiments, a major cause being an enemy that hadn’t really come in to the calculations – malaria. There had also been cases of dysentery, and lack of proper supplies for weeks had diminished many individuals as fighting men. Even so, they had also learned that the Japanese were not invincible. The campaign was a defeat – a retreat that became known as the longest in British military history, 900 miles from Rangoon to the Indian border – but reverses had been inflicted here and there. Another chance to hurt the Japs would come along soon. Now they had the roads and the railway, and needed them for supplies and communications. The leap-frogging roadblock tactic would one day be adapted by Wingate’s Chindits and turned against the enemy who invented it.

  The last gasp of this campaign was the race to Shwegyin – the ferrying place across the Chindwin – along a road that would become useless for motor transport when the monsoon rains arrived. Food was another problem; there would be supplies along the way but not enough if the men were held up. A further possibility was a move up-river by the Japs, to set up a block that would cut off the retreat entirely.

  The crossing for the Cams was a slow business on 8 May by small paddle steamer, and almost all of the vehicles had to be left behind. Still the Battalion was not done. It had escorting and guarding duties as the rest of the force made its weary way towards India. The rains came and hardly stopped. Malaria struck hard. Spirit alone could not compensate for sickness, inadequate rations and sheer exhaustion. At last, on 18 June, the remainder of the 1st Cams was ordered to move out of Burma. What had been a full-strength Battalion was scarcely a company in numbers, but they had played a major role in buying precious time, and helped prevent a total disaster.

  The Black Watch Second Battalion embarked at Southampton in August 1937, heading for Palestine, having had six months’ warning of the posting. The job would be internal security; not thought to be especially onerous. Among the Jocks was James McNeilly, piper William Lark, and a 25-year-old officer called David Rose. More of these men later. Already there in Jerusalem was Captain Orde Charles Wingate. More of him later, too.

  Although operational paths were not fated to cross just yet, it was a small force and people were aware of each other – Jim McNeilly: ‘I saw Wingate in Palestine. I met him, in 1938. He was a soldiering man. An all right man. He would never ask you to do something he couldn’t do himself.’

  The Jocks did not go to Jerusalem as notified, but to a camp about nine miles out of Jaffa. Neither did their pleasant sunshine holiday materialise because gangs of Arab rebels, increasingly active as more and more Jewish immigrants poured in from Europe, began blowing things up and assassinating officials. Pursuing these guerrillas proved to be very good training, physically, militarily, and in personal growth, maturity and decision-making among the previously untried young officers and NCOs.

  It so happened that when hostilities in Europe began, Palestine was fairly quiet and war seemed remote. By early 1940, Italy looked sure to enter, with promise of action for the Black Watch, and the excitement started with an order received on 2 May. There was no peacetime six months’ notice; they were to move to the Suez Canal on 3 May.

  They kept the canal safe for a couple of months until another order came on 30 June which put them on a troopship, HMS Liverpool, next morning. Off they went to Aden, where they waited for the expected Italian invasion of Somaliland which, at that time, was divided into three colonies, French, Italian and British. The French authorities decided they would be Vichy rather than Free French, which left the British on their own to wonder what to do about their colony and, in particular, its capital Berbera.

  The Italian invaders massively outnumbered the British in men, weapons and air support, but they had to come through mountain passes which might be defended. The Second Battalion, after some to-ing and fro-ing, was settled in a forward position near one of the passes, on a hill range called Barkasan. As more and more information came to HQ about the size and scope of the Italian army, the task switched from trying to keep the Italians out, to holding them long enough for a retreat and abandonment of the colony.

  The Jocks and the Italians met for the first time on 13 August. A-Company was to escort a supply train further forward to positions at Tug Argan – at night and along the only road. The moonlit convoy of trucks was under the command of a fearsome disciplinarian known universally as ‘Major KG’, as his real name was Major Lindsay-Orrock-Graham-Scott. Up front were two Bren carriers; in the middle was Major KG; at the back was the Second-in-Command, Captain David Rose.

  David Rose: ‘We had only gone a few miles when we suddenly came under heavy fire. Ambush. The convoy bunched up. A lot of the African drivers ran away and I had to find replacements from among the Jocks. I worked my way up the convoy seeing to this, which I could do because most of the Italian firing was high, going over us, till I came to Major KG having his head bandaged. He’d fallen out of his truck, banged his head and got himself concussed, which meant I was now OC. I thought I should be in the leading truck so I made for that, to find the driver shot through the head and the road blocked by the wreck of a Bren carrier.’

  Both obstacles were pulled out of the way and Rose got in the truck. He put his foot down and kept it down, learning as he went how to handle a type of vehicle he’d never driven before:

  ‘All of
a sudden there were lots of chaps waving their arms about. I stopped to hear what they had to say. The gist of it was that I was in the minefield. So I reversed, keeping the wheel dead straight.’

  The chaps in question were of the North Rhodesian Regiment, which had seen some hard fighting. A few days before it had had to withstand a cavalry charge and the dead horses and men were still lying around.

  David Rose: ‘There was a terrible smell but they all seemed quite used to it. Anyway, after a bit of a contretemps with a rather disagreeable colonel who had turned up from somewhere, during which I offered him command of the convoy – he refused – we set off back again. My orders were highly specific, along the lines of, “Take a spare driver for every lorry and keep going,” and so we did. A cloud came over the moon, and we drove through the same ambush place with only one machine gun having a go at us.’

  The convoy reached Barkasan scatheless, and Captain Rose reported to Brigade HQ.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked the Brigadier.

  ‘A-Company, sir,’ said Rose. The Brigadier was surprised, as the runaway drivers had already given him their own report.

  ‘Your African drivers are here,’ he said. ‘They told me. Major killed. Captain wounded. All finish, no good.’

  The Jocks were now given a very definite task: to hold the Barkasan ridge until the night of 17 August, which meant keeping the pass between the hills. Defensively, it wasn’t much of a pass, being about two miles wide with low rising ground on either side, and the Battalion was not well equipped for the job. They had no machine guns, no heavy weaponry to speak of, and no air support.

  David Rose: ‘I had four Bren carriers and a section of three-inch mortars, which is to say two mortars and a few rounds. From our trenches on the western side, my company covered the roadblock, which consisted of one platoon with the only Bofors gun and a dozen shells.’