Defeat Into Victory
Page 22
The line had been built mainly to serve the Assam tea gardens, and in peace its daily capacity had been only 600 tons. By the time the Fourteenth Army was formed, this had risen to 2,800, but even this was quite inadequate to supply both British forces at Imphal and the Chinese at Ledo, and the ever-rising tonnage required on the American airfields for the traffic to China. Plans for increasing capacity were in hand, but it was obvious that India could produce little more in the way of railwaymen, and there was no possibility of getting British. The American Army came to the rescue with the offer of six battalions of Railway troops, some 4,700 fully trained railwaymen. Early in 1944 these troops took over the operation of the line, and by October they had raised capacity to 4,400 tons and by 1st January 1946 to 7,300 tons a day. This was possible owing to the large additional American staffs—on the lengths of line normally in charge of two British or Indian officers, the Americans were able to put twenty-seven officers, all professional railwaymen—because of the arrival of more powerful locomotives from America and Canada, and because of the drive and energy put into the task. Thus to treble the capacity was a great achievement without which the vast and mounting air supply to China could not have been undertaken. But this is anticipating. We had in the summer of 1943 to work on 2,800 tons capacity, and this would not nearly meet demands for stocking the bases at Dimapur and Ledo, the construction of the American airfields and the Ledo road, the lift for China, and the move of reinforcing formations, all added to normal maintenance. This railway, until we took Rangoon, remained our chief transportation link, and for the next year at least was a terribly limiting factor, indeed something of a nightmare. I remember once saying, ‘Well, that railway’s been washed away by floods, put out by bombing, swept away by landslides, closed by train wrecks; there’s not much more that can happen to it.’ But there was. We had an earthquake that buckled rails and shifted bridges over a hundred miles of it.
It was also possible to reach almost to the Northern front by river. Leaving Calcutta by a winding route through the Sunderbans, the main stream of the Brahmaputra was reached and followed to Dibrugarh, a distance of 1,136 miles by water. For the Central Assam front, the river-head was Gauhati, near Pandu, but the capacity of this route was limited by the bottle-neck of the metre-gauge railway, already overloaded, between Gauhati and Dimapur. The Southern front in Arakan was reached by a tortuous combination of broad-gauge, river-steamer, and metre-gauge, which ended at Dohazari railhead, thirty miles south of Chittagong.
To bridge the gaps between the railheads and the fighting lines, main all-weather roads were under construction in the autumn of 1943—from Ledo to the Chinese front, from Dimapur to the Central front and from Dohazari, south of Chittagong, for Arakan. The most important of these was that serving the main front, which climbed through the hills from Dimapur to Imphal and then wound down again almost to the Burmese frontier. This road, a truly magnificent engineering achievement, was of a quality and permanence beyond any other on the Burma front. There was something splendid in its sweep through jungle, along mountain flanks, and over torrents. Day and night without break thousands of lorries swung round its curves, and ground in low gear up its gradients. Then from this main artery, at Imphal, branched off that crazy road to Tiddim, 180 miles away in the Chin Hills, zigzagging up cliffs, meandering through deep valleys, soaring again literally into the clouds. The making of this road was hardly a more wonderful feat than keeping it open against the spates, subsidences and the great landslides of the monsoon. The Arakan road had its own difficulties to overcome. It did not cross the great mountains of the others, but it encountered innumerable chaungs, tidal creeks running up inland from the sea. It went through a country that produced no stone for road metal, and it was impossible to bring in the thousands and thousands of tons that would be required. My engineers proved equal to the need. They built the road with bricks, millions and millions of them. Every twenty miles or so was a great brick kiln, looking in the distance rather like a two-funnelled ship. We imported skilled brickmakers from India, brought the necessary coal by rail, boat, and lorry, and baked our bricks. A brick road is terribly apt in rain to sink into the earth, but, constantly having fresh bricks relaid, it held, a monument to ingenuity and determination.
These three roads were pick, shovel, and basket roads, made by human labour, with an almost laughable lack of machinery. The men who built them worked under the most arduous conditions of climate and with the most elementary scale of accommodation, often with the enemy within striking distance. The whole of the labour, many thousands, was Indian, and much of it came from the Indian Tea Association, which organized, officered, and controlled some forty thousand of its own workers. Without this contribution we should never have built either the roads or the airfields that were vital for the Burma campaign and for the supply of China.
Pushing forward also at this time, under the vigorous direction of American engineers, was the Ledo road, intended eventually to link up with the old China–Burma road via Myitkyina. This road was, in its standards, even more ambitious than the Imphal one. For its construction the Americans had available a quantity of road-making machinery that made our mouths water—and they knew how to use it. With Indian labour and American machinery, the road, covered by the Chinese divisions, was at this time, the winter of 1943, beginning to nose its way south.
Inadequate railways, shortage of motor transport, few roads and those at the mercy of climate, to say nothing of enemy action, made the movement of men and supplies a constant anxiety. Our immediate worry, however, was not only inadequate transportation but an actual lack of supplies, especially of certain items. Our ration strength was well over half a million, mainly, of course, Indian. Only a fraction of the total were fighting men, the larger proportion were the labour, administrative, technical, and non-combatant units, unavoidable in a country where every road, airfield, and camp had to be made from virgin jungle or rice-field. We were a very mixed party, and Snelling’s problems were not simplified by there being some thirty different ration scales in the Fourteenth Army. Among the Indians, these were based partly on religion, partly on district of origin, and partly, in such cases as the Indian Tea Association labour, on the special contract of their service. These scales were all reasonably adequate—the question was, ‘Were the men, especially in the forward areas, getting them?’ The answer was, as I had suspected, ‘No.’
Meat is one of the main items on which a soldier fights. The British soldier without it cannot fight. Even the Indian, who in his village is often almost a vegetarian for economic reasons, as a soldier needs a regular ration of meat twice a week if he is to reach his full physical and intellectual vigour. Meat was one of our greatest difficulties. On the Assam front, owing to the complete lack of cold storage facilities and of insulated wagons, the British troops in Imphal were receiving only half an issue a week of fresh meat; those forward of Imphal, that is, almost the whole of the fighting troops, got none. Instead they received bully beef, a good enough food in itself, but terribly monotonous and very unattractive in hot weather when it flows half molten from the tin. There were no stocks of alternatives to bully beef, no tinned or dehydrated meat, and no combined meat and vegetable rations, such as were available in other theatres. To make matters worse, except for a rare issue of tinned herrings or bacon, there were no ‘breakfast meats’ at all. No animals could be purchased locally, there were no sheep or goats, and the only cattle were needed for the plough. To have slaughtered those would have given only a momentary relief and would have left us with another starving population on our hands. As a result, the average British soldier on the Assam front went month after month without tasting fresh meat. In Arakan, where the transport difficulties for live goats were not so impossible and where there were some local slaughter cattle, the British soldier was better off and received one or two fresh meat issues a week. For the rest, like his comrade in the north, he had to be content with bully beef.
The Indian soldier fa
red much worse. Near railheads and in Arakan he got up to two issues of meat a week, but forward of that he got none. The sepoy, whether Hindu or Mohammedan, does not eat tinned meat and, therefore, when fresh was not obtainable he went without meat altogether. This would not have been so serious were the authorized substitutes, additional issues of milk, and ghi (clarified butter), available. They were not. In Assam the total stock of ghi allowed for only thirteen days of normal issue, the arrival of further supplies was uncertain, and obviously no extra issues could be made. For milk it was much the same. Our stocks of tinned milk were very low. One reason for this is interesting. To guard against disruption of milk supplies by bombing in the United Kingdom, the Government had wisely laid in large stores of tinned milk in various parts of the country. The tins were sent from America in cardboard cartons. When demands for large quantities of milk for India were received the crisis in England was not so acute, and the Food Controller very sensibly decided to take the opportunity of turning over his store. So the milk was shipped to India. The cartons, already weakened by long storage and handling, rapidly deteriorated during the tropical voyage round the Cape, the tins rusted, and the cartons turned into pulp, making it impossible to pack them safely for the long rail journey across India with its interminable bumping and shunting. The wagons when opened on their final arrival at advanced railheads contained often a heap of battered, rusted tins and disintegrated cardboard. The unhappy Supply Officer was lucky if he rescued half in a still usable state, but, even so, gone was his chance of issuing a substitute for the non-existent meat.
Vegetables ranked with meat as an almost insoluble problem. Fresh vegetables could be grown in great quantity in Bengal and around Shillong in Assam, but the week or more’s journey in lorries and steel railway wagons in great heat resulted usually in a putrid mass on arrival that could not be thrown away quickly enough. It was of course a little better in die cold weather, and again the troops in Arakan fared better, being nearer the sources of supply, but the almost complete lack of fresh vegetables in so many men’s diets had a serious effect on health. The substitutes should have been tinned vegetables, tinned fruit, dried fruit, or dehydrated vegetables, but there were practically none of these in the forward supply depots. Stocks even of such basic commodities as rice and atta (Indian wholemeal flour) were a cause for anxiety. On the main front at Dimapur, we should have had 65,000 tons of supplies for the troops already based on that depot, even without regard to the increased numbers expected. The actual stock, I found, was only 47,000 tons, a deficiency of twenty-seven per cent. This was bad enough, but made much worse by the unbalanced state of the reserves with their almost complete lack of certain essential commodities. The supply situation was indeed so serious that it threatened the possibility of any offensive.
Although General Giffard had already set up his 11th Army Group Headquarters in Delhi, he had not yet had time nor had he the staff to take over administration from India. I, therefore, seized the opportunity of a visit by General Auchinleck to my headquarters to represent the dangers of the supply situation to him. He had only recently taken over in India and its seriousness was new to him. He summoned me to a conference with him and his principal supply officers in Delhi. On the 3rd November 1943, this meeting took place. Snelling was with me, armed as usual with all the facts and figures.
It appeared that to a large extent the Indian peacetime system of financial control still operated in the procurement of supplies. For example, when large quantities of dehydrated vegetables were ordered from Indian contractors, demands placed on the United Kingdom for tinned vegetables were, in accordance with peacetime rules, cancelled. The scale of issue of dehydrated vegetables is one-quarter that of tinned, so, for every hundred tons of dried ordered in India, four hundred tons of tinned ordered in England were cancelled. The quantities ordered in India, and the deliveries promised, were hopelessly optimistic so when the dehydrated failed to appear we were left without any vegetables at all. Again, it had been ruled that supplies for formations either being raised or coming into India could not even be ordered until the troops had actually been raised or arrived. Not all our troubles, however, were due to a financial control intended for peace. The alarming shortages in such staples as rice and flour were caused by the failure of the Food Department to deliver as promised, which in turn rose largely because some provincial governments could not supply their quotas.
Whatever the causes, it was clear that the supply situation was critical, and equally obvious that something vigorous would have to be done to avoid disaster. Luckily, General Auchinleck was the man to do it. There was a considerable and prompt injection of ginger into the Indian administrative machine, military and civil. Even at the beginning of 1944 the results of Auchinleck’s drive began to show. Gradually, with now and then a temporary setback, our rations and our reserves climbed up and up. It was a good day for us when he took command of India, our main base, recruiting area, and training ground. The Fourteenth Army, from its birth to its final victory, owed much to his unselfish support and never-failing understanding. Without him and what he and the Army in India did for us we could not have existed, let alone conquered.
Our shortages were, unfortunately, not limited to supplies. In ammunition, for instance, we fell seriously below even the modest reserves calculated for jungle warfare, and they were much below those of any other theatre. Some typical shortages were:
Rifle
26 per cent
Sten- and tommy-gun
75 per cent
2- and 3-inch mortar
25 per cent
25-pounder H.E.
42 per cent
5.5-inch H.E.
86 per cent
Generally speaking, the ammunition we needed was in India, but that was a thousand miles from where we wanted it, and to bring it forward was a slow and laborious business. It was rather irritating, too, to find that some people had the habit of reckoning ammunition as on our charge the moment an order for its issue from an arsenal in India left Delhi, irrespective of the fact that it would be several months before it reached the Fourteenth Army depots. We were not only deficient of the ammunition but also of the guns to fire it. We were below our needs in most forms of equipment, notably vehicles, wireless sets, ambulances, and medical stores. In fact, we were short of everything.
Snelling’s task was an immense one, and, having discussed it fully with him and selected the key men to work under him, I gave him a very free hand to carry it out. Soon, under his energetic direction, there were signs of improvement, and, while my anxieties on the supply side remained, I could see for myself wherever I went that our difficulties were being grappled with throughout the army and that we were getting increasing understanding and help from India.
My second great problem was health. In 1943, for every man evacuated with wounds we had one hundred and twenty evacuated sick. The annual malaria rate alone was eighty-four per cent per annum of the total strength of the army and still higher among the forward troops. Next to malaria came a high incidence of dysentery, followed in this gruesome order of precedence by skin diseases and a mounting tale of mite or jungle typhus, a peculiarly fatal disease. At this time, the sick rate of men evacuated from their units rose to over twelve per thousand per day. A simple calculation showed me that in a matter of months at this rate my army would have melted away. Indeed, it was doing so under my eyes.
In anxious consultation with Snelling and my senior medical officers I reviewed our resources. To start with, I discovered that for some reason the medical establishments of the Fourteenth Army were lower than those of other British armies in Africa or Europe, and that actual strengths were gravely below even this reduced establishment. We were short of units, doctors, nurses, and equipment. Our hospitals had been of necessity expanded to take twenty-five per cent more patients than they were designed to hold. We now had twenty-one thousand hospital beds, all occupied. To nurse these seriously sick or wounded men we had a total of f
our hundred and fourteen nursing sisters, less then one nurse to fifty beds throughout the twenty-four hours, or in practice one to one hundred beds by day or night.
Demands for more nurses from home met with the answer that there were none to spare from other fronts and that, anyway, India should provide the nurses for Indian troops who formed the bulk of my army. We might just as well have been told that India must provide the aircraft for the air force. Aircraft were not made in India; nor were nurses. The Indian Military Nursing Service, struggling heroically against prejudice and every kind of handicap, was in its infancy and could only grow very slowly. In spite of all our efforts, and although General Auchinleck milked the hospitals of India to danger-point to help us, it was clear that any increase in our medical strength would be grievously slow.
I knew we had to beat Germany first. I was even ready to accept the fact that the Fourteenth Army was the Cinderella of all British armies, and would get only what her richer sisters in Africa and Europe could spare. I would not grumble too much if we came last for men, tanks, guns, and the rest, but I would protest, and never cease from protesting, that we should be at the bottom of the list for medical aid. That was not fair, nor, I believe, wise.
However, as we had long ago discovered, it was no use waiting for other people to come to our help. Nor was it much use trying to increase our hospital accommodation; prevention was better than cure. We had to stop men going sick, or, if they went sick, from staying sick. We tackled this problem on four main lines:
(i) The practical application of the latest medical research.
(ii) The treatment of the sick in forward areas instead of evacuation to India.