Bill Lark: ‘Nobody told us anything about feeding off our surroundings, what we could eat and what we couldn’t, or if there was anything there to eat at all. There was no training on how to live off the jungle. I mean, who was there to train us? We only had our own officers and they were as daft as we were.’
The matter was still to be resolved of how to get so many thousands of men into the Burmese jungle, behind enemy lines, quickly, in secret. Some would march in, some would fly in, and the idea of gliders came up for discussion. It looked good; a Dakota could pull two gliders, one on a short rope and one on a long.
David Rose: ‘We were in the Indian jungle, on a training march, when I had a signal from HQ to expect a VIP visit at such-and-such a map reference, noon tomorrow. It was General Wingate, brought to us by truck. Strange man. The troops worshipped him, but I didn’t. He was a brilliant strategist but thought everyone was like himself, without limits of performance, and he would take no advice from anyone on anything. When he was making his plans, he forgot that the pins on his maps were human beings. Anyway, he stood there in his sola topee, leaning on a long stick, and told me some American air force gliders had turned up and we needed to find out how to use them. We needed to learn about loading unwilling animals, and bulldozers and whatnot for building airstrips. There was no mention of the actual flying part, which in fact would prove to be the real problem as far as I was concerned.’
Wingate wanted volunteers, so Major Rose was one, and a group of his Jocks would be the others. Volunteering would mean an interlude in the forced marches, so gliding it would be.
The glider was the Waco CG-4A, which the British called ‘Hadrian’, just short of 50ft long with wingspan over 80ft. It could carry fifteen men including the pilot. Other common loads were: small truck or jeep with radio equipment and driver; two men with loaded trailer; light artillery piece, ammunition and crew; small earth-mover and driver; or anything that weighed about 4,000lb which, in our case, would include livestock.
It had a blunt nose section which swung upwards, so cargo could be loaded straight in to the body, and quickly out. Fully loaded, gross weight was around 7,500lb, with maximum tow speed 150mph, although slower was better and more usual.
To say that gliders turned up was somewhat lacking in detail. They came in crates, and took a while to put together, then they had to be tested for airworthiness. Such delays were not always built in to army schedules.
We must not forget the pilots. They were crash-landing on purpose, often behind enemy lines, often knowing that their first mission would be their only mission. Usually there was a plan for getting back, requiring their gliders to be picked up from the ground, but otherwise the pilots might become infantry soldiers whose knowledge of flying was suddenly irrelevant.
General William Westmoreland put it thus: ‘Every landing was a genuine do-or-die situation for the glider pilots. It was their awesome responsibility to repeatedly risk their lives by landing heavily laden aircraft containing combat soldiers and equipment in unfamiliar fields deep within enemy-held territory, often in total darkness. They were the only aviators during World War II who had no motors, no parachutes, and no second chances.’
Besides the well known saying about stubbornness, mules are also proverbial for their kicks, and first-hand acquaintance with the truth of that soon came as the soldiers tried to persuade these beasts into the gliders. Kicking holes in the fuselage didn’t even need full power, and the ponies and bullocks also joined in the excitement and showed it in the usual tail-lifting way. Slipping and sliding about in piles of manure plus holes in the aircraft would lead to the use of crates in future. The earth-moving machinery, on the other hand, was simple to dismantle into manageable sizes.
David Rose: ‘The first trial was to be in daylight, and that went all right, and so did the night-time one except – I thought at the time – for my glider. We took off from a little airstrip called Sorga, heading for a flare path in the jungle that had been cleared of trees by blowing them up. My glider didn’t come down according to the book. Apparently – we were learning fast – the moment to free the glider from its towline, called pulling the plug, is highly critical in its timing. The Dakota just chugs along and the glider pilot decides. Our pilot missed it and so couldn’t get down in the proper place.
‘The first we knew about it was him shouting “Lift your feet, lift your feet”, as he aimed us between two trees so the wings could take some of the force of the crash, which they did. We were all a bit shaken but not hurt, and we clambered out to find that we were only a couple of hundred yards or so from where Mountbatten and his staff were standing, watching the fun. We made our way over and I was presented to the great man and he said “Everything all right, Rose?” and I said “Not quite, sir, but we’ve no casualties.” Which was the best I could think of at the time.’
Rose soon learned the ‘not quite’ applied to one other glider, not among those which had made successful landings:
‘We’d been in a pair with Captain Dalrymple, Hew Dalrymple, my second in command, and they hadn’t arrived. Mountbatten said he’d been told everyone else was here, so what was I going to do about it. I said I’d get a Dakota to hook us up in one of the good gliders and I’d go back to Sorga by the same route and look for fires on the way, which Dalrymple would have lit to attract our attention if he’d crashed somewhere. “Good idea, good idea,” said Mountbatten, “do that,” and off he went.
‘The technique was that a Dakota flew over with a hook on the end of a nylon rope, and tried to catch the glider which had a construction on it like a set of rugby posts where the hook was supposed to attach on the crossbar, as it were, which was a cable. I collected whoever was unlucky enough to be near me, which was the RSM, the MO, the padre and one or two others, and we sat in the glider in great expectation. ’
The Dakota flew over the glider but nothing happened. It flew over again; still nothing.
‘I asked our pilot if this happened often. He said no, it had never happened as far as he knew, but then it was the first time they’d tried it with men on board. They’d only ever done it with sacks of sand before. The third time it caught us and we shot up at the most extraordinary rate.’
The pick-up rope, just under an inch in diameter, was only about 200ft long, as opposed to the standard tow rope length of 350ft, so they were in a kind of express lift.
‘We then settled into calm flight and everybody kept a lookout, but we could see no sign of Dalrymple’s fires in the black jungle below. We reached our little airstrip at Sorga and cut, and circled and landed, and I went over to the hut in quite a state, already composing letters to next of kin, and there were Hew and his chaps playing cards.
‘I should have been delighted but I was furious, and asked him what the hell he was doing there, and it turned out that our first glider had had another narrow escape that we didn’t even know about. As we’d left Sorga, his tow rope had become crossed with ours, and Dalrymple’s glider pilot had seen this and cut them free, otherwise all three of us would have gone down. They’d landed and, well, that was our rehearsal to prove to Mountbatten that we could do it.’
Training was coming to an end and it was almost time to put it to the test.
Bill Lark: ‘We had very good boots, green leather from South Africa, and when they were new I tied mine together and left them in a stream overnight. Next day we were off on a route march so I put them on wet, and when we got back they fitted me. We had a second pair which had to go in the store, so they could be flown in when we needed them, and I decided I’d put my pipes in the store as well. I wrapped them up in anything I could find, towels and cardigans the lads were throwing away because they couldn’t be taken into the jungle, and fitted my parcel into a kitbag and gave it to the Quartermaster Sergeant, Jackson. I’d been denied playing my pipes at Tobruk, so I said to Jackson, when we need pipes in this jungle, they’re here.’
Meanwhile, Orde Wingate had been having a great deal of both
er. A conference called Sextant (the Quebec one had been Quadrant) was held in Cairo in November 1943, concluding on 26 November. Churchill, Roosevelt, Chiang Kai-Shek and Mountbatten discussed the war in the east with their military leaders and a seven-point plan was agreed, of which one point was Wingate’s LRPGs. The other six were all orthodox operations to capture places and advance on different fronts, resulting in the liberation of upper Burma before the 1944 monsoon, and the retaking of the whole country after that.
Churchill and Roosevelt went on to another meeting, with Stalin in Tehran. Stalin pressed for the opening of the second front, that is, the invasion of France that would become D-Day, ‘Operation Overlord’, in June 1944. Roosevelt was keen to support the Russians. The British, with limited resources, could not do everything and be everywhere, so for Churchill it became a rather invidious choice: China or Russia, Chiang Kai-Shek or Stalin. He had to go with Stalin. Forces, particularly amphibious forces, would have to be withdrawn from the seven-point eastern plan and be reallocated in the west, to Overlord.
Chiang Kai-Shek felt betrayed – as he had been – and reacted by withdrawing his promises too. The seven-point plan was down to its last three: the LRPGs and two modified, conservative advances meant only to shore things up rather than conquer Burma.
Wingate came to know about most of this but not all, and so did his detractors at GHQ. It seemed to the chief Chindit that history had repeated itself. Just as his first expedition had been left high and dry by cancellations and reallocations, so the same was happening now. Without the concerted efforts elsewhere, what would be the purpose of LRPG 1944?
In any case, as the year turned and with time pressing hard, Wingate was still without mules and aircraft, and none of the equipment he had ordered months before had arrived. He still had Mountbatten and Churchill on his side, so he took a gamble. He wrote to Mountbatten, basically telling him that it was no good anyone, not even him, the Supreme Commander, issuing orders for Chindit support. The opponents, the senior officers of the Indian Army, would do nothing, as they had been all along.
Wingate also wrote to GHQ, accusing them of deliberately not implementing policy, and offering his resignation.
Mountbatten’s reaction was positive, to say the least. ‘Wingate has been promised certain things and while I am here I will see that he gets them. I want no more arguments on the subject.’
The resignation offer was forgotten but there were still many enemies, as Wingate saw them, whose opinions ranged from ‘Wingate is a jumped-up nobody who must be taught a lesson’ (that was everyone, according to Wingate), to those who genuinely believed the Chindit operation to be doomed, and doomed on a massive scale.
Wingate also saw the dangers of an operation meant to support other, bigger incursions when those incursions were not going to happen, so he amended his plan. The Japanese were, he was sure, planning an invasion of Assam. He would redefine the objective as one of attack and disruption. He would establish strongholds behind Jap lines, which would then be garrisoned by non-Chindit battalions. Thus secured and supplied, the Chindits could mount offensives of their own.
At a meeting in Ranchi with General Slim, the modified plan was agreed. Slim then went back on it, removing the proposed garrisons. Wingate offered his resignation again. Then a compromise was reached with a much-reduced commitment to garrison the strongholds, but with more forces promised conditional on Chindit success. As Wingate could not imagine anything other than success, he found this acceptable, with the overall strategic requirement as before; cutting the supply lines going north to the Japanese facing Stilwell, creating confusion and wreaking havoc generally, and thus making Chinese and American victory more likely.
Chapter Five
Orders To Proceed
Operation Thursday was due to begin in early March. A full month before that, the first Chindit incursion set out from Ledo in north-east Assam, starting point of the great Ledo Road being built by the Americans and Chinese, under General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell. This road, such a complex and difficult project that Churchill believed the need for it would have disappeared by the time it was finished, was meant to replace the airlift to Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces over the Himalayas (called the Hump), made necessary by the Jap occupation of Burma’s roads and railways.
Under the command of Bernard Fergusson, 16 Brigade was to march from Ledo over the Patkai Hills (Patkai Bum), across the Chindwin and on down to Indaw, where the airfields would be siezed. Wingate would then have fully-functioning, ready-made landing grounds for other troops. Progress was slower than expected, beginning with seventy miles of mud and rain, leading them to the Patkai range, an outpost of the eastern Himalayas – not as high as Everest and K2 but still presenting a tremendous obstacle to foot soldiers with much of the highlands over 4,000ft and peaks reaching 12,000ft.
Extract from Fergusson’s report:
‘The march was the heaviest imaginable. The rain was torrential and almost continuous. No single stretch of level going existed between Tagap and Hkalak, and few thereafter.’
Fergusson on the BBC Home Service: ‘None of the tracks were wide enough to allow two men to walk side by side, so we had the ludicrous business of four thousand men, and seven hundred animals, strung out 65 miles from end to end.’
It was 35 miles to Hkalak, with bivouacs at 5,000ft, leeches, flies and lost supply drops. At one point, the going became impossible for the mules, so the men carried their loads for them. Those 35 miles took nine days.
Meanwhile, 77 and 111 Brigades were completing their training and preparing for their launch into country north-east of Indaw. They would be flown in to a location as yet unspecified. The three divisions of 15 Corps, attempting by conventional army methods to take the port of Maungdaw in the Arakan, had been surrounded and were fighting for their lives, relying on air support to sustain them, which of course meant that resources were spread ever more thinly.
Fergusson and 16 Brigade were scheduled by Wingate to cross the river Chindwin on 16 February. They didn’t reach it until the 28th. Wingate flew to see them on 1 March, as the crossing was about to begin, taking with him four journalists. Presumably, with a newly awakened sense of the value of PR, this was with future copy in mind as the operation was top secret. Extract from CBI (China-Burma-India) Roundup, an American forces newspaper printed in India, dated March 9 1944:
‘BURMA – Several columns of 14th Army troops, organized on the lines of Wingate’s expedition a year ago, have crossed the upper reaches of the Chindwin River and have taken the Jap by surprise. Secrecy of the movement prohibits the publication of details so far.’
The British press was limited to a fairly non-committal release, to be published on 16 March. The Times and the rest had to keep to generalities:
‘Today’s announcement by the South East Asia Command shows that the Burma front is in a lively state of eruption from one end to the other, but news from the northern sector, where columns of the Fourteenth Army have crossed the River Chindwin in support of General Stilwell’s Chinese and American forces, is scanty.’
The American papers at the time were criticising the British, in the person of their supreme commander, Lord Mountbatten. The United Press Agency declared that high American military authorities were ‘displeased and concerned’ over Mountbatten’s failure to launch a significant Burma offensive, especially as the monsoon season was near, which would mean a halt to all activity for six months. Mountbatten was described as a ‘good man’ hampered by his having to depend on ‘the British-Indian military system for his requirements’. Merrill’s Marauders had had their first success much trumpeted, but that wasn’t a conquest of Burma.
Training at the Dukhwan dam on the river Betwa, like the Ken a tributary of the Yamuna, the Cameronians were surprised by a visit from Wingate a few days before they were due to move to Assam. There was a parade of the men with no officers present, and Wingate spoke. Captain Geoffrey Straight is quoted by Philip Chinnery: ‘... whatever he s
aid, the men subsequently appeared to be both inspired and impressed.’
To put this in context, the men in question had just completed a solid month’s real-life exercise on nothing but K rations. Wingate must have been an inspirational speaker indeed, and perhaps the incident accounts for the very high esteem in which Wingate was held by my father. On the other hand, we have the recollection of Fred Patterson:
‘We had a pep talk from Lord Louis Mountbatten, followed by a talk of a different nature from General Wingate. “You are soon going into Burma to do what you have been trained for and if any of you come back out, you haven’t done your job.” That was how his message came over to us. He looked like a madman, bearded, thin-faced, sunken eyes. He looked down at my mate and me and said to an officer, “What are these?” as if we had crawled out of the ground.
‘Various punishments were outlined, thirty-six lashes with a rope for stealing rations, and so on, and we were not allowed henceforth to write home. A card would be sent to our nearest and dearest, saying that due to the nature of operations, we were unable to write. By the time I could write home again, more than six months later, my parents had had two cards.’
The next men to go in under Operation Thursday were the reconstituted 77th Indian Infantry Brigade, commanded by Brigadier ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert DSO, and 111th Indian Infantry Brigade, commanded by Brigadier ‘Joe’ Lentaigne. Initially they were nineteen columns plus support, including the three of 111 under the separate command of Colonel ‘Jumbo’ Morris, called Morris Force. They were to go in by glider, landing on two forest clearings codenamed Broadway and Piccadilly.
Colonel Cochran, an airman ignoring a landsman’s orders, had secretly taken reconnaissance photos of the landing grounds. There had been a slight possibility that the Japs would notice such unusual activity, which was why Wingate had forbidden it. Against that were the photos for all to see, showing Piccadilly covered in neatly arranged tree trunks. This revelation came in the afternoon of 5 March, on the airfield at Lalaghat; they were supposed to fly that night. Nobody had any real idea of why these logs should have appeared – it was later discovered to be normal Burmese forestry practice, laying them out to dry in the open – but there were no logs on Broadway so it was decided to take everyone there, necessarily more slowly.
Jocks in the Jungle Page 8
