On 4 February 1944, Mutaguchi launched Operation Ha Go and, although HQ 7th Indian Division was overrun, Slim insisted that his men would not retreat. XV Corps rallied as intense fighting focused on the Divisional ‘Admin Box’ in a jungle clearing that measured 1,200yds in diameter at the eastern end of Ngakyedauk Pass. Corporal Richard Kerr and the Section VCO of 565 (5 and 14 Indian Divisions) FSS, both attached to 9 Indian Infantry Brigade, were cut off inside. The defence was strengthened by the novelty of Dakotas dropping supplies and anger when the Main Dressing Station was overrun, with the attendant slaughter of patients and medical staff, as the Japanese had done in Hong Kong and Singapore. Three times, ‘dud’ mortar bombs landed very near Kerr. After three weeks of savage fighting, the battered Japanese withdrew. For the first time, Allied troops, mostly logistic units, had defeated the Japanese; 115 Special Wireless Group/54 Wireless Intelligence Section was crucial in providing intelligence to XV Corps Headquarters. When Kerr rejoined 565 FSS, all the British, except for the FSO, Captain Reginald Isaacs, had returned to England to train for D-Day.
Intelligence indications identified that the Japanese were preparing to cross the Chindwin and predicted the offensive would begin on 18 March. On 1 October 1943, 5 Special Wireless Section/25 Wireless Intelligence Section of four officers and twenty other ranks took over from 201 Special Wireless Section in IV Corps at Imphal. The Intelligence Section had previously been in Barrackpore in West Bengal where Lieutenant D.L. Snellgrove had become expert on the Japanese Air Force. Prisoners of war became important. A Human Intelligence screen had been developed to monitor the 800-mile mountain and jungle border, in particular preparations to cross the River Chindwin. The greatest danger was the Kempei Tei, which had been formed in 1881 as military police and had evolved into an organization encompassing internal security, counter intelligence and Special Branch. Japanese-sponsored organizations, such as the Chin and Arakan Defence Forces, were also a problem. In 1942 V Force was formed from European former planters and policemen, and jungle clans inhabiting the borders. Valuable intelligence was gained from Nagas infiltrating towns occupied by the Japanese. Divided into six independent sectors, their information was cross-checked to prevent the Japanese spreading disinformation. One leader was Ursula Graham-Bower, a statuesque former Roedean School debutante, who had been so enthralled by a pre-war trip to the Naga Hills that she became an anthropologist. She had formed the North Cachar Watch and Ward to collect intelligence. In addition, Burma Intelligence Corps and shallow Field Security patrols slipped into Burma to contact V and Z Forces and identify collaborators. The MI6-controlled Inter-Services Liaison Department and Z Force were raised from ex-Burmese Army and forestry officials also to provide intelligence. To strengthen counter-intelligence operations, 574 (Chittagong Port) FSS was transferred from Arakan with 576, 584 (20th Indian Division) and 612 (Calcutta) FSS formed a FS Group based in Silchar to prevent infiltration by Indian National Army and other subversives entering India. Several were captured and sent to No. 1 Field Interrogation Centre at Gauhati.
Meanwhile, Brigadier Wingate had launched his second Chindit operation, Operation Thursday. Successfully lobbying Prime Minister Churchill to form HQ Special Force for a second operation, he was given the 70th Division, which had recently arrived from the Middle East. Operational security responsibility fell on 298 (70th Division) FSS commanded by Captain Stewart-Parker, one measure being to rename Special Force the 3rd Indian Division. Other counter-intelligence operations included checking local contractors near training and concentration areas, giving security awareness lectures and searching the men for incriminating documents immediately before deployment. On 5 March, three brigades were waiting to be flown by glider to establish strongholds in Burma when a US Army Air Force Air aircraft landed at Lalaghat airfield and the group of senior Chindit commanders was shown an air photograph depicting that the ‘Piccadilly’ landing zone stronghold had recently been blocked by trees. Although Wingate had ordered no flights over the objectives, the US Army Air Force commander, Colonel Cochrane, had ignored him and saved 77 Brigade from a potentially disastrous fly-in. A fourth column marched. When ‘Aberdeen’ was occupied, Stewart-Parker and Sergeants Andrews and Standlake arrived to supervise counter-intelligence operations. Although no Intelligence Corps were attached to the columns, former Sergeant Michael MacGillicuddy, who had been awarded the Military Medal in 1940 while serving with 1 (2nd Division) FSS for blowing up the oil refineries at Willems, was the 3/4 Gurkha Rifles officer with responsibility for the 30 Column mules in 111 Brigade. Sadly, he was killed shortly after winning the Military Cross during a supply drop. Captain Guy Turrell initially served as second-in-command of ‘Bladet’ of Royal Engineers trained in demolition before being transferred as an Operations Officer, Headquarters Special Force. The Burma Intelligence Corps played a crucial role in both Chindit operations by supplying the four brigade headquarters with a third intelligence officer, who doubled as the Column Intelligence Officer, and an Intelligence Section, which also ran psychological warfare of distributing propaganda, hiring guides and running agents. In the 4/9 Gurkha Rifles Intelligence Section was former Gunner Maximo Cheng of Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps. Released by the Japanese from Sham Shui Po prison camp, he escaped from the Colony with the help of the British Army Aid Group and enlisted into 1 Glosters in India and volunteered to take in Operation Thursday. He was later commissioned into the Intelligence Corps and was an instructor at the Chinese Wing at the School of Military Intelligence (India).
On 8 March, Mutaguchi launched Operation U Go, a week earlier than expected. The Japanese Fifteenth Army, reinforced by the Indian National Army Division, crossed the River Chindwin, an advance reported from intercepts and observations from the intelligence screen; however, operating procedures in HQ IV Corps meant that some information was lost. During the four day Battle at Sangshak, roughly midway between Kohima and Imphal, that started on 22 March, the 50th Indian Parachute Brigade recovered a dispatch case containing current maps, orders of battle and plans from a dead Japanese officer after a night attack. It was priceless Document Intelligence. The Brigade Intelligence Officer, Captain Lester Allen, and a member of the Intelligence Section took it through enemy lines to HQ IV Corps where the documents were translated by Lieutenants Stanley Charles and George Kay, both pushed forward from the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (South-East Asia Command) as interrogator and translator. Their interpretations confirmed the assessment by the Parachute Brigade HQ that two Japanese divisions seemed most likely to attack Imphal and Kohima respectively, as opposed to the projected one division and a regiment believed by HQ Fourteenth Army. But, it does seem that the satchel did not reach Army HQ. Allen made two further visits to Corps Headquarters with captured documents, both of which were recorded, but not the first.
During an urgent search for the enemy regiment believed to be making for Kohima, on 28 March Sergeant Fred Garrod, one of two FS sergeants sent to collect information from Ursula Graham-Bower, learned that one of her patrols had seen a Japanese column marching west through the Naga Hills. A week later the Japanese 31st Division attacked Kohima Garrison, which held out for the next fortnight in grim fighting, the defence of India hinging on the defence of the District Commissioner’s tennis court. Throughout the savage fighting around Imphal and Kohima, 5 Special Wireless Section/25 Wireless Intelligence supported 20th Indian Division but were withdrawn when rations ran short. D Force was an intelligence deception unit formed into two British and six Indian companies of about sixty men commanded by Major Patrick Turnbull. Adapting fireworks, fire crackers, flares and explosives jammed into bamboo sleeves and sometimes supported by artillery and mortar fire, it could simulate attacks on a 600yd frontage for about thirty minutes, often to relieve the pressure of units under attack or to cover a withdrawal.
On 20 April, the 2nd British Division relieved the exhausted Kohima Garrison. When 579 FSS had joined IV Corps from XV Corps in March, Sergeant Arthur Smith was
attached to 4 Infantry Brigade, which was part of the Division, and was on Hospital Ridge during the second battle for Kohima. In April, a patrol led by Sergeant R.F. Warren of 601 (Lines of Communication) FSS, to recover an important notebook detailing the 5th Indian Division ration strength from an ambushed vehicle was unsuccessful; however, he reported that an important bridge had been prepared for demolition. This was important because the monsoon was unloading torrential rain. During the fighting, 1st Battalion, 1st Guerrilla Regiment, Indian National Army clashed with the understrength 81st West African Division and briefly crossed the Burma-India border near Chittagong. Part of the Allied policy to subvert their loyalty was to deploy Indian Field Broadcasting Units under the control of Major Steer, who used his Ethiopian psychological warfare experiences and distributed leaflets using 2in mortars, for instance.
On 6 June, as the shattered Japanese 31st Division withdrew from Kohima and precipitated the collapse of Operation U Go, General Slim ordered Fourteenth Army to fight through the monsoon, its exposed left flank protected by 23 (Chindit) Infantry Brigade and Force 136. The Japanese retreat to the River Chindwin became known as the Road of Bones, as soldiers died from starvation, disease and exhaustion and numbers of prisoners increased. Sergeant Smith accompanied Gurkha patrols distributing blocks of salt to villagers who had supplied information and searching for stray Japanese. Meanwhile, 5th Division cleared the Tiddim Road south from Imphal. One routine task of its 565 FSS was to interview village headmen for intelligence. On one occasion, Corporal Kerr drove into a village believed to be free of the Japanese, only to see a patrol sent to contact him attack a platoon concealed in some houses. Captain Isaacs was awarded the Military Cross for personally accounting for nine Japanese, including shooting one in an encounter in a dry stream bed. Meanwhile, 603 FSS accompanied the 19th Indian Division on its long jungle march over the Chin Hills and, crossing the Chindwin and mighty Irrawaddy, covered 140 miles in a month. But little intelligence was gathered from the frequent skirmishes. An Indian Field Security naik recovered a set of maps dropped by a British brigade major. On reaching Mandalay in March 1945, Sergeant Michael Wood was among the first to enter the Japanese-occupied Fort and returned to Divisional Headquarters with a detailed sketch of its defences. Commanded by Captain R.W.R. Ogden, 604 FSS was supporting 20th Indian Division when, in early February 1945, after several months of investigation, it seized U Nandiya, a slippery Burmese agent employed by the Japanese. Operating on a freelance basis with the Division, 589 FSS ran agents and line-crossers into Japanese-held territory, which included an elderly woman reliant upon opium who regularly returned with detailed observations of Japanese morale and activities. A successful source handler was Sergeant Nick Roberts, who had once held a commission in the Nizam of Hyderbad’s Light Horse until he was cashiered after being found in bed with the wife of one of its senior officers. Sergeant Reg Denny was escorting a suspect when he flagged down a jeep, which contained Major General Douglas Gracey, commanding the Division. He took Denny and the suspect to the interrogation centre.
Meanwhile XV Corps was advancing south through Arakan. Attached to HQ 81st West African Division on its march through the malaria-ridden Kaladan Valley was Captain ‘Hank’ Roy followed by three porters, one carrying his Photographic Interpretation equipment and the other two taking his material for sketching. On the Corps right flank, commandos annoyed the Japanese.
Thomas Frost was born in Poona and after being commissioned in England, he joined the Royal Garwhal Rifles guarding the Kyhber Pass in April 1942 and a year later, after transferring to the Intelligence Corps, had joined 574 FSS in Karachi, which was attached to the Royal Indian Army Service Corps on lines of communications security. The all-volunteer 3 Special Service Brigade arrived from England in 1943 and when four FS sections were earmarked to support it, Lieutenant Colonel de Vine gave the NCOs the option of not volunteering. No-one stepped forward. This is thought to be the first time that the Intelligence Corps provided a detachment to Commando Forces. During one night landing exercise on an island near Bombay in mid-November 1943, 574 FSS was in a landing craft some distance from the shore when Sergeant Eddie Redding asked who the ‘enemy’ were and was silenced by a whispered snarl from an officer. The section practised using a dhow to collect agents and raiding parties, slept on its deck under canvas sails, messed on tinned bacon heated over a charcoal fire on a slab of rock, tolerated cockroaches, used a precarious ‘head’ (toilet) of a rope and two planks thrust over the sea, and moaned about missing the fighting in Italy. On 29 December, when the section was sent to the large transit camp at Kedgodan in southern India, Sergeants Redding and Lawrence were riding their motor cycles when Lawrence collided with a bullock that wrote off his machine and badly injured his knee, to the extent he was nearly medically discharged. On 7 February 1944, the Section rejoined 3 Special Service Brigade on the auxiliary cruiser, HMS Keren, and ten days later joined an assault convoy heading east across the Bay of Bengal towards Arakan. At a planning meeting, Captain Frost gave his NCOs Arrest Lists of collaborators living in ‘Millionaires’ Square’ on Akyab Island supplied by Lieutenant Colonel Mains at Army HQ. In the event, the landings never took place because air photography of Akyab showed the Japanese strength to be greater than expected. A few weeks earlier Frost’s brother had been killed during Operation U Go.
On 4 March, 574 FSS landed with 3 Special Service Brigade at Cox’s Bazaar and reached the village of Nihila on the Teknaf Peninsula in a landing craft. Going ashore meant a crawl on stomachs across mud flats at low tide. Frost once tested swimming ashore during a rip tide and dived fully clothed into the maelstrom and vanished. The NCOs were less convinced and made a brew until, an hour later, a bedraggled, muddy Frost hauled himself into the landing craft. While the commandos attacked the Japanese, the section cultivated informers and sources. Redding infiltrated occupied Maungdaw and Buthidaung. Boatmen poled Lawrence and Redding along watercourses to villages and hamlets where they formally met headmen at a table under the village mango tree and were offered a powerful alcoholic brew of uncertain origin. Following up a report that a member of V Force was suspected of being a double agent, Frost and Lawrence entered Maungdaw, where they met Sergeant Johnny Harrison, a Latin-speaking classmate of Lawrence, and then tracked the agent down and told him that he was required for a special briefing at HQ XV Corps. However, he managed to escape after they had delivered him.
As Fourteenth Army advanced in the early dry months of 1945 intending to reach Rangoon before the monsoon broke, 573 and 589 FSS, both attached to HQ IV Corps, distinguished themselves in the Pegu area by clearing the lines of communications of subversives but at the cost of Sergeant Ronnie Caldecott, of 589 FSS, killed in an accidental discharge on 16 April 1945 when a headman handed him a loaded Mauser. Shortly before the landings on Akyab Island on 3 January 1945, when a report was received suggesting the Japanese had left, a FS NCO and his agents landed from a sampan on the north-west corner of the island. He spent several hours hiding in a mosquito-ridden mangrove swamp until the agents returned with the news that the Japanese had indeed left. In spite of an enthusiastic welcome from a village, he was quickly involved in communal violence generated by the Japanese policy of divide and rule and was forced to shoot an escaping murderer. He then rounded up known security suspects and organized reliable contractors to help the Army and RAF when they landed.
A factor during the advance was the increasing number of prisoners, many sick and exhausted. Although the Japanese martial culture of bushido rejected their status, those that were captured were automatically conditioned for interrogation, which had allowed the IV Corps Detailed Interrogation Centre, commanded by Major Richard Storry, a Japanologist, for instance, to disseminate a constant flow of prisoner information. Nisei interrogators proved useful. Indian and Burmese prisoners were usually interrogated at Forward Interrogation Units by Indian officers and the Burma Intelligence Corps respectively. Important ones were sent to Corps Interrogation Centres
where further selection saw some flown to the Headquarters South East Asia Command Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre at the formidable Red Fort in Delhi. This was staffed by expatriates with experience of Japan and several Intelligence Corps officers who had completed a crash language course at the University of London, such as Major Peter Parker (later Sir Peter, Chairman of British Rail). Linked to the Centre was the South East Asia Translation and Interrogation Centre, which ran two types of courses, one for students with an aptitude for languages, who were taught how to handle documents and overlays and low level tactical questioning, while the second course taught Japanese. One document gave the complete breakdown of the Japanese Fifteenth Army.
Photographic Intelligence had improved immeasurably with the formation of an Army Photographic Interpretation Section commanded by Major John Reid-Dick supporting IV Corps, but the field conditions under which the interpreters worked was often basic. When the war in Europe ended on 8 May, photographic interpreters arrived in India and the Far East and found the conditions very different. Major Neil Simon discovered that Lieutenant General Geoffrey Scoones, commanding XXXIII Corps, was fanatical about imagery. In India, intelligence was being collected for the proposed combined land and amphibious assault on Rangoon of Operation Dracula, and then, on 30 April, pilots flying over the city reported ‘Extract digit. Japs gone’ scrawled in white on the Jail roof. In the belief that it might be a hoax, Wing Commander Saunders, of 110 Squadron, carried out a low level air photo reconnaissance sortie on 2 May, from which Major F. Roope confirmed the message. Saunders then landed his Mosquito on a bomb crater-strewn airfield and he and his co-pilot walked to the Jail to find it crowded with Allied prisoners.
Sharing the Secret Page 16
