by Brian Mooney
The manuscript of Chindit Affair was re-discovered by the author and journalist Brian Mooney, and he and Antony Edmonds edited it for publication
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Pen & Sword Military
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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South Yorkshire
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Copyright © Frank Baines, 2011
ISBN 978 1 84884 448 3
ePub ISBN: 9781844683680
PRC ISBN: 9781844683697
The right of Frank Baines to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted
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Contents
Maps
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1 – 111 Brigade
Chapter 2 – Mule Problems
Chapter 3 – Ready for War
Chapter 4 – Into the War Zone
Chapter 5 – Lift-Off
Chapter 6 – Burma
Chapter 7 – Across the Irrawaddy
Chapter 8 – The Gangaw Hills
Chapter 9 – A Change of Plan
Chapter 10 – The March North
Chapter 11 – The Build-Up to Blackpool
Chapter 12 – Blackpool
Chapter 13 – On the March Again
Chapter 14 – A Court Martial
Chapter 15 – A New Objective
Chapter 16 – Taking Point 2171
Chapter 17 – Holding On
Chapter 18 – Getting Out
Chapter 19 – Postscript – Farewell to Dal Bahadur
Maps
Burma, 1944
The area in Northern Burma where the Chindits 111 Brigade operated behind enemy lines from March to July 1944.
Operations of III Brigade, Burma, 1944
The route 111 Brigade marched through enemy-occupied Burma, and the main points of engagement with the Japanese. Out of 2,200 men who started the campaign, only 119 were fit to fight at the end.
Foreword
It was summer in 1943 in the middle of India. We were training for the extraordinary operation that Frank describes in this book. At Brigade Headquarters we were a small band of officers and we came to know each other very well. When Frank arrived I realized I would not easily forget him. He had come to us by an unusual route, and indeed had little right to be with us. ‘I have come,’ he said, ‘from the Camouflage Pool where the sedge has withered and no birds sing.’ His words, quoting a poem by John Keats, had a ring of their own and defined him.
Whatever the circumstances – and they varied fearfully – there was always a zest and a spilling of words with Frank, in which he emptied his feelings; his heart was – it seems – always on display.
Read his story. It is like no other account of war. He hides nothing.
He shocks, and says things that I was afraid to say in my account of the campaign.
But he also moves. His description of the dire situation at the end of the operation reflects everything that we felt with a force that I have not seen matched – exhaustion and despair and the fearful conditions, and a despising of our commanders. And he gives a picture of the land in which we moved which brings it all back. In his relations with his Gurkha troops his frankness – a happy word – shows him at his most unafraid. I saw how close he was to them, and saw his grief when one of them seemed to have received a fatal wound.
How deeply he felt – with heart and head contending.
At the end of the operation his life took uncertain ways. What he has described as his love affair with the Chindits had fulfilled so much of him. It is all here.
I will remember Frank when other more ordinary folk have disappeared down the sink of a failing memory.
Share my delight that war has so many faces.
Richard Rhodes James – Cambridge, January 2011
Introduction
Frank Baines was in many ways an improbable Chindit. At the outset of the Second World War he was a sailor, not a professional soldier, and he was homosexual. But he had a winning way with people – he could care for and lead men – and he was adventurous and courageous and had boundless energy. Although the Chindits faced almost insurmountable challenges and were tested to their very limits, they were not all hewn from hard rock. Many of them were simply men who were called upon to do extraordinary things; Frank was one of these.
Frank Baines’s entire life was an adventure. It is not surprising that one moonlit night in early March 1944 he found himself flying in an American Dakota from India into Japanese-held Burma with a bunch of Gurkhas armed to the teeth. In this book, which he left unpublished, and which has only recently been rediscovered, Frank describes graphically how he got there, and what happened to him and the men with him. But before reading it you should know a bit about who he was, and how he came to be there, and what became of him afterwards. It won’t spoil the story; it adds important background.
Born in London in 1915, Frank was the son of a prominent architect, Sir Frank Baines KCVO, who designed what is now the Headquarters of MI5 and saved the medieval roof of Westminster Hall. He also bequeathed Frank a visual eye and taste for controversy. Frank’s mother was the daughter of a yeoman farmer from Staffordshire. Frank himself had a blissful childhood, much of it spent in the southernmost Cornish parish of St Keverne, and some of at Oundle, a typical harsh boarding school of its time – from which he fled. After school, Frank went to sea, sailing to Australia and back on one of Gustav Erikson’s Finnish four masted grain ships, the Lawhill, and then working his passage to South America. At the outbreak of war, Frank enlisted as a gunner in an anti-aircraft battery in East Anglia, but was later transferred to India for officer training. He saw action as a junior artillery officer on the North-West Frontier and was then assigned to Kirkee Camouflage School, near Pune, where he became a camouflage instructor in Urdu.
Frank thirsted for action, and in June 1943 he wangled a transfer to 111 Brigade, which was to become part of General Orde Wingate’s crack force of Chindits. He was seconded to Brigade Headquarters as Staff Officer, Grade III (Camouflage) with the rank of Staff Captain, and thus embarked on one of the defining experiences of his life.
By that time, General Wingate had achieved fame leading a long-range penetration expedition behind Japanese lines deep inside Burma and demonstrating that the British – reeling from a string of humiliating defeats across Asia, and with the enemy at the gates of India – could indeed fight the Japanese in the jungle. The Chindit operations have always
sparked controversy. There is even disagreement about how they acquired their nomme de guerre. Some believe it is from a corruption of the name for the mythical Burmese lion, the chinthe, which guards Buddhist temples; others that it was after a figure of Hindu mythology; others, after the Burmese word for Griffin.
If the military achievements of the Chindits in their first sally into Burma remain questionable – Wingate lost one third of his men – the propaganda effect was nevertheless electrifying. Winston Churchill, an ardent proponent of commando operations, recognized this and was all the more prepared to overlook Wingate’s very evident eccentricities. The Chindit leader often wore an alarm clock around his wrist, which would go off at times, and a raw onion on a string around his neck, which he would occasionally bite into as a snack. He liked eating boiled python. He would also go about without clothing. Lord Moran, Churchill’s personal physician, wrote in his diaries that ‘he seemed to me hardly sane – in medical jargon a borderline case’. Notwithstanding this sometimes bizarre behaviour, Churchill took Wingate with him to the Quebec Conference with America’s wartime leader Franklin Roosevelt in August 1943, where Wingate persuaded them to equip him with a far bigger force for a second Chindit operation. It was in this operation that Frank took part.
Frank talked of his ‘love affair with the Chindits’, and for rest of his life he was obsessed and traumatized by his experiences fighting in this unorthodox force behind enemy lines. He saw himself essentially as an amateur among hardened professionals, but he acquitted himself bravely and shared all the ghastliness of the five-month campaign. He also behaved in an unorthodox way: he fell in love with one of his Gurkha riflemen. Frank tells his Chindit story in this book, which he started 25 years after the war, and on which he was still working until shortly before he died in 1987. Frank’s account of his service with 111 Brigade is factual and brutally honest – but it has been only in the accounts of others that his courage, his cheerfulness and his readiness to face the enemy have fully come across.
Frank joined 111 Brigade at its jungle training camp near Lalitpur in Central India in June 1943, an area which provided ample scope for jungle warfare training. The Brigade had little use for him as a camouflage expert, but they took him on initially as the Animal Transport Officer and then permanently as Orderly Officer commanding Brigade Headquarters defence platoons. He was given command of two platoons, each of fifty Gurkha riflemen, and it was leading them that Frank went to war in Burma. They were mostly little more than boys, but they were brave soldiers. One of them, Dal Bahadur, who was probably only 16 at the time, became Frank’s orderly; and Frank fell in love with him.
Frank served under Major Jack Masters, an extraordinarily able and aggressive officer with a brilliant but chequered career and a searing intellect, who was to be in the thick of some of the bloodiest fighting and, after the war, as John Masters, to go on to be a best-selling author. Masters would write more than 20 novels, including Bhowani Junction, which was made into a film, as well as a number of autobiographical works of which one of the most celebrated is The Road Past Mandalay – which includes his own account of leading 111 Brigade.
Born in Calcutta in 1914 and trained at Sandhurst, Masters came from a long line of Indian Army officers and public servants; and, although he did not know this until much later in his life, he was part Indian. He saw action as a young adjutant with his Gurkha regiment, the 4th Prince of Wales, in three countries in the early stages of the Second World War – in Syria, Iraq and Iran – and he was then posted to Staff College at Quetta, where he fell in love with Barbara Rose, the wife of one of his fellow officers. To have become involved in a divorce in the socially uptight British Raj would have meant Masters’s resigning his commission; the couple took furtive holidays together, and finally Barbara left her husband and bore Masters a child out of wedlock, all stirring minor scandal. It was when she was pregnant with the child that Masters was posted as Major to 111 Brigade.
Frank was the junior officer in charge of the Brigade Headquarters, and thus his experiences with the Chindits were centred on Masters, the Brigade Major, who was ultimately to be set an impossible mission. At Brigade Headquarters Frank had a ring-side overview of the campaign. He also saw action in the field.
Wingate’s original plan was to insert his specially trained Brigades into Burma, and harass Japanese communications and threaten the rear of their army in Upper Burma by waging guerrilla war. The bulk of his Chindit forces were flown into Burma in early March 1944, an air armada that was code-named Operation Thursday. But Wingate was killed in a plane crash on 24 March shortly after the start of operations – some continue to believe that it was not an accident – and his original plan was abandoned for something far more ambitious. The American second-in-command in South-East Asia, General Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, who now effectively took overall command of the Chindits, wanted more fighting on the ground to support his thrust into Burma from neighbouring China. Stilwell sought above all to open up a supply route from India through Northern Burma into China. The new objective was the capture of the strategic town of Mogaung. But this meant redeploying lightly armed troops, who were trained and equipped for mobile hit-and-run operations, to dig in and engage with the enemy – far from the front, without big guns, and relying entirely on air support.
Masters, promoted in the field to command the Brigade in place of Brigadier Joe Lentaigne, who was flown out to replace Wingate but was no match for Stilwell, was ordered to occupy and hold a strategic area, perversely code-named Blackpool, a low spur rising above the paddies and jungle close to the main north-south rail and road supply routes to Mogaung. At various stages during the campaign, other Chindit Brigades occupied similar strongholds – code-named Aberdeen and White City. Despite its name, Blackpool was no holiday – it was perilously too close to the main Japanese forces and to their big guns. For 17 days and nights, and during the onset of heavy monsoon rains, the Japanese repeatedly attacked and shelled the block, killing two hundred of the defenders and slowly reducing the redoubt to a sea of bloody mud. Reinforcements promised from 14 Brigade never arrived and the airstrip vital for their survival was finally overrun. Masters’s men were literally pounded into defeat. When he finally gave the dazed order to withdraw on 24 May, Masters had also to instruct orderlies to shoot 19 stretcher-cases too badly wounded to be moved.
The defeated Brigade got away from Blackpool into the jungle hills because, miraculously and inexplicably, the Japanese did not pursue them – why, has never been properly explained. But that was not the end of the campaign. Stilwell, who privately despised the British, demanded more. Masters regrouped his battle-shocked and by now mostly sick soldiers, and was ordered to attack from the west and take a hill known as Point 2171 overlooking the valley and railway line to Mogaung – an action in which more of his men were killed and wounded. This engagement lasted from 20 June to 5 July.
By the time 111 Brigade quit Burma at the end of July 1944, Masters’s original force of 2,200 had been depleted by death, wounding, capture, malnutrition, malaria, dysentery, general sickness, desertion and madness to just 119 fit men – eight British officers, a score of British soldiers and 90 Gurkhas. They had endured and survived five months of the utmost hardship, each losing between thirty and forty pounds. Frank was one of those eight officers – one of the last men standing in 111 Brigade.
Three of the officers have published accounts of the Brigade’s campaign – The Road Past Mandalay by John Masters, Chindit by Richard Rhodes James, and now Chindit Affair by Frank Baines. Frank’s account throws new light on the leaders of the operation and tells a soldier’s story from a highly charged and unusual perspective of an officer on the battlefield in love with one of his men. There are several more accounts of the Chindit campaigns which record the fate of the other Brigades – including Brigadier Mike Calvert’s vivid account of his 77 Brigade – but no other story so closely connects with the raw nerves of the men who fought there and recreates so wel
l the sensations of being in the jungles and hills that devoured nearly all of them.
Frank was a rebel and a non-conformist. After the war, and partly as a result of his harrowing experiences with the Chindits, he spent three years as a Hindu monk in a Himalayan monastery. He then moved to Calcutta, where he set up a successful business repairing tea chests and became a journalist on the Calcutta Statesman. He returned to England in the mid 1950s and transformed himself into a successful author – publishing four books, including Look Towa rds the Sea, an acclaimed account of his Cornish childhood; In Deep, the story of his sailing voyage to Australia; and Officer Boy, a chronicle of his early days in the army in India. Late in life, when he was aged 62, he cycled back to India from his home town of Coggeshall in Essex, and on his final return to England in 1984 he set about the redrafting of his Chindit story. It still mattered so much to him. He died in 1987, and the typed manuscript of this book was one of his few remaining possessions.
The draft lay forgotten, stored in a cupboard by Frank’s literary executor Dan Samson, until l read it when I began to research Frank’s life. I realised at once that this was a remarkable account of one of the most extraordinary campaigns of the Second World War. I set about preparing it for publication, together with Antony Edmonds, who brought an indispensable rigour, deftness and sensitivity to an editing project that was quite challenging.
So here it is, Frank’s story, and the story of the men he served with – above all his beloved Gurkhas, and, among the others, Jack Masters; Briggs, ‘Briggo’, the Signals Officer who returned to work as a customs inspector; Major John Hedley, the Intelligence Officer, who became a housemaster at Bromsgrove School; ‘Chesty’ Jennings, the RAF Squadron Leader, who co-ordinated incoming airdrops and supervised the building of airstrips; Lieutenant Lawrence Alexander Wilson, ‘young Lawrence’, killed in action at Blackpool, aged 21; Brigadier Joe Lentaigne, who ended his days as one of the only serving British officers in the post-independence Indian army; Mike MacGillicuddy of the Irish Reeks, also killed in action; Richard Rhodes James, the Cipher Officer, who became a housemaster at Haileybury College; Major Frank Turner, the Transport Officer; and Doc Desmond Whyte, the Battalion Medical Officer, who was nominated by Masters for a VC, and returned after the war to medical practice in Northern Ireland. At the time of writing, Rhodes James is the only one of these officers still alive; and I owe him a particular debt of gratitude for his assistance and advice during the preparation of the book for publication.
