Chindit Affair

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by Brian Mooney


  Brian Mooney – Coggeshall, March 2011

  CHAPTER ONE

  111 Brigade

  My love affair with the Chindits began in a prosaic fashion. I was seconded from my duties as an instructor in field camouflage at the Army School near Poona to 111 Brigade, and posted to Brigade Headquarters as Staff Officer, Grade III (Camouflage) with the rank of Staff Captain. It was June 1943.

  During the rail journey to take up my new appointment, I had plenty of time to meditate on its nature. 111 Brigade’s role had been presented to me by the Commandment of Camouflage School as, in effect, a suicide mission. The object of training was to have us ready for action by November 1943. We were then to march unobtrusively through the Japanese front lines and, by avoiding engagements, penetrate into the heart of enemy-occupied Burma. There we were to blow up bridges, demolish railway stations, liquidate ammunition trains, ambush commissariat columns, in such a way that we would create maximum confusion. It was inevitable that I spend some part of that journey reviewing my chances of survival.

  I was already acquainted with some of 111 Brigade’s more general aims and objectives. In the light of this information I could not but accept the fact that my chances seemed pretty slim.

  111 Brigade were a comparatively new outfit hastily put together by General Wavell in one of his last administrative acts as Commander-in-Chief before becoming Viceroy. Their formation was undoubtedly intended as an expression of Wavell’s confidence in the Wingate concept. They were what was known as a long-range penetration group and were modelled on General Orde Wingate’s original 77 Brigade, with which he had effected the first penetration into Japanese occupied Burma.

  The Brigade was constituted of four battalions under the command of Joe Lentaigne, the Brigadier. Each battalion was divided into two independent columns under separate management. The lieutenant colonel in command of the battalion invariably took charge of one column; a senior major the other.

  Our battalions, and the columns into which they were divided, were as follows:

  2nd Battalion King’s Own Royal Regiment – 41 Column, 46 Column 1st Battalion Cameronians – 26 Column, 90 Column 3rd Battalion 4th Prince of Wales Own Gurkha Rifles – 30 Column, 40 Column

  4th Battalion 9th Gurkha Rifles – 49 Column, 94 Column

  The Brigade thus constituted was designed to operate on its own, under Lentaigne’s independent leadership. The object of our training was to have us ready by November. We were then to march unobtrusively through the Japanese front lines and, by avoiding engagements, penetrate the heart of enemy-occupied Burma. There we were to blow up bridges, demolish railway stations, liquidate ammunition trains and ambush commissariat columns, in such a way as would create maximum confusion. It was hoped that this would impair Japanese efficiency as well as tie down in the centre of Burma forces which would otherwise have been better deployed along the frontier with India.

  Just before my train pulled into Lalitpur in the Central Provinces, which was the railhead for all 111 Brigade’s training operations, it ran through a monsoon rain-squall. Lalitpur station appeared sacked and ravaged. It was scattered with broken branches and bruised leaves as if abandoned after an enemy onslaught. In contrast, its carefully tended flower-beds still looked as if laid out for kit inspection. The rows of rigid zinnias regimented as for a CO’s parade were magnificent in their scarlet tunics. I took it as a good omen – and I could not but feel reassured by this augury.

  I was not, however, anticipating being received with enthusiasm. In those days a Camouflage Officer was still a rare bird and was regarded with coolness. It was difficult for infantry officers to take to one. I had to be prepared to be rebuffed, if not refused permission to land at all. To add to my anxieties, I was having a much trouble coping with an aspect of my own personality. I was anticipating taking up my duties with the Gurkhas, memories of whose endearing young charms had stayed with me since I first saw them go into action on the North-West Frontier. These memories had far too ardent a relish not to presage dangers in the future.

  This was a difficult situation. Yet I was determined to get away with it. I was much less prepared than formerly to surrender to social conformity. I judged that success in getting accepted by 111 Brigade would depend on luck and on there being some sympathetic officer on hand to appreciate my less evident qualities.

  My plan was to suggest that I was an officer with a little more to his credit than just the boring background of an Army School of Instruction – possessing talents in other directions than being able to display dried flower arrangements in tin hats. My aim would be to convince whoever interviewed me that here, in my person, was a spare officer they had not expected, and were not indeed entitled to, whom it would be folly to reject when they could, with my wholly willing co-operation, utilize me for dozens of other purposes having nothing to do with camouflage.

  I had been the sole passenger to alight. A relaxed young sergeant came swinging briskly towards me, his boots crunching crisply over the finely granulated stone chips spread across the platform. The smile of welcome which illuminated his innocent English face was homely with pleasure. He was obviously delighted at being able to exercise a bit of authority. He was displaying, at the same time, a splendid indifference to the approving glances darted in his direction by a group of crudely brazen hussies draped provocatively at the windows of the third-class wagon. He could not but have been aware of them and I calculated, on that account, that he would display equal sang-froid on the field of battle.

  They, for their part, were in the process of giving his physique an appraisal which was chillingly meticulous. They were speculating pleasurably about the size and shape of his small-arms equipment. He smelt characteristically of sunburnt sweat and soaped flesh. Both his forearms were magnificently tattooed.

  I threw these vile creatures on the train some filthy remarks about their fathers, their husbands and their lovers, and they vanished behind the shutters with lewd giggles.

  A heavy scent of tuberoses pervaded the air. The scent and the scene were so far removed from sober Camouflage School Mess and Poona Officers’ Club that they made me feel even more insecure than usual. They conjured up images of Benarsi courtesans panting with exhaustion from carrying the over-ripe fruit of insupportable bosoms, or temple dancing girls with scarlet palms and hennaed feet, loaded with gold ornaments and smothered in suffocatingly scented garlands.

  These thoughts tempted me to surrender to more personal sensual images. Again I visualized what might await me in the persons of the young Gurkhas.

  Until then, I had managed during my career in India to insulate myself fairly successfully from the debilitating gales of libido. Now I felt exposed to them, just as I knew that the preoccupation of soldiers with such bodily things as sweat and salt and sex and shit and toil and blood would fall inevitably within the ambience of operations to be undertaken by 111 Brigade. The scent of the tuberoses, somehow reminiscent of the sickly-sweet stench of death, the sinister banter of the women, the smell from the sergeant’s armpits – these were the first intimations I received of the sore spots to be laid bare.

  I was dressed up as if for going into Poona. My uniform was one of which I was excessively proud. It emphasized subtle distinctions by its inconspicuous departure from standard patterns. It was embellished here and there with those insinuating little refinements which gave an air of added elegance to the appearance of every young officer. In the crook of my arm I carried, like a knight his helm, the prized possession of my exaggeratedly pretentious solar topee. It was doubly precious to me on account of the fact that, in the Bombay Presidency, all the Governor’s aides carried one. It was unlike the missionary model, Mark III, associated with the late Dr Livingstone and the Emperor Haile Selassie, as immortalized by General Wingate, and it exemplified, instead, the whole Army School of Instruction approach to war, with its emphasis on gracious living. In front of this young sergeant, with his utilitarian excellence, it made me appear perfectly ridicu
lous.

  The engine puffed spasmodically and the train pulled out. I had been up at the front. Coach after massive coach rolled past me, giving their passengers the opportunity of getting a really good look at me. I felt myself caressed, crushed, cauterized – even controlled – by the hundreds of eyes which observed me with intense, cautious and yet evasive curiosity. It disappeared in the direction of Jhansi, steaming down the long tunnel of over-arching greenery with a slight wobble, like a self-conscious drunk placing each foot before him over-confidently yet insecurely.

  The young sergeant and I had been watching it as if hypnotized. I felt as if it were bearing away the whole burden of my past experiences. He smiled and saluted me. We shook hands like blood brothers.

  ‘111 Brigade, sir?’ he enquired brightly.

  ‘Yes. But how did you know I was going to be on the train? I might just as easily have taken the next one.’

  He laughed good-humouredly. ‘We meet every train, sir. Nothing personal. Rear headquarters are always sending down an extra bit of equipment or some technical officer. What is your particular line, sir – if I may be so bold as to ask the question?’

  ‘It’s camouflage,’ I said, feeling dreadfully inadequate.

  ‘Very interesting,’ he commented without a hint of patronage. ‘I shall look forward to attending some of your lectures, sir!’

  We jumped into a 15 hundredweight truck and bowled down the clean, red, rain-washed roadways. After a minimal suggestion of shanty-town bazaar, the jungle closed in.

  Flocks of green parakeets, as iridescent as humming birds, swarmed about sour smelling fruits rotting on the trees of an orchard. Groups of naughty monkeys, like rude little boys, made obscene signs at us from the side of the road as we flashed past. Occasionally we glimpsed an expanse of lake. The waters lay as polished as pewter, placidly reflecting a sky that alternatively looked luridly threatening or as lifeless as lead, according to the density of the cloud-cover.

  Sometimes a deer – one of the great, red Indian sambhur – bounced out of a thicket and bounded along the grass verge of the road beside us. The countryside swarmed with game. The only thing it appeared conspicuously short of was humans.

  Presently we arrived where 111 Brigade Headquarters was encamped. A large, muddy pond extended for a quarter of a mile along the side of the road, in the middle of which some water buffaloes were enjoying a wallow. From over the tops of a tangle of various shrubs, conspicuous among which was the prickly, ubiquitous lantana with its characteristic smell of cat’s piss, there could be seen the pitch of several mud-coloured tents. Their prevailing tone, I noted professionally, blended so well with the surrounding terrain that it did not look as if a camouflage officer was needed.

  ‘Will you be staying with us permanently, sir?’ enquired my sergeant.

  ‘Honestly, sergeant, I don’t know. It rather depends on the Brigadier.’

  ‘Well, in any case, sir, I don’t doubt you’ll be wanting to ditch that solar topee. The stores tent is over there. The quartermaster will fix you up with a battledress, a pair of boots, and a bush hat. Also he will see to the storage of your personal possessions.’

  ‘All the officers’ gear is stored to Rear Headquarters at Gwalior,’ he added, casting a dubious eye over my magnificent Asprey suitcases embellished interiorly with cut crystal bottles, ivory brush-backs, and solid silver fittings (relics of my father), so soon to become food for the white ants.

  ‘For the time being then, sir, I’ll wish you the very best of luck and leave you. I hope we shall renew our acquaintance shortly. The officers’ mess is over there. You report your arrival to the Brigade Major. His tent is behind that baobab.’

  He gave me another perfect salute and left me quivering with trepidation. I made my way along a filthy footpath churned up by hoof prints and fouled with mule-droppings towards my first confrontation with Jack Masters.

  I had no idea what to expect. My conception of staff-officers was extraordinarily hazy, composed principally of images of dandified subalterns from old copies of Punch. I half imagined that Jack Masters might be a chinless wonder like Bertie Wooster.

  I approached the tent. A trestle table had been placed like a barrier across one end of it, just behind the tent-pole where the flaps folded back. From beyond it glared out the somewhat caustic countenance of a man prematurely aged (for he could not have been much older than I was) by responsibilities, and pale from years of perspiration and heat exhaustion.

  It turned out that he was about twenty-eight. He was so pared to the bone by overwork, however – almost humming with the strain of too much tension and as tight as a bowstring – that I appeared mentally and physically quite flabby by comparison, and as inexperienced as a babe. The cast of his features was predominantly intellectual. His whole personality was ablaze with the flame of striking intelligence.

  Already, for so young a man, it seemed that deep speculation and profound thought (for it never occurred to me at the time that his haggard look might have something to do with unhappiness) had furrowed his brow and gouged out the eye-holes. From their sockets, a pair of opaque sepia brown eyes gave little away. Currents of placidity and ferocity alternated. Emotive yet innocent, his expression evoked the patient ox rather than the volatile satyr – and yet there was something too of the centaur (I am thinking of Cheiron). Masters looked at the world with a satirical eye, and yet saw it also as his oyster.

  He had a high, broad, bony cranium on which the hair grew rather sparsely and was cared for untidily, and he wore ‘bugger’s grips’ – at least they developed into ‘bugger’s grips’ during the later stages of the operation (a sign, no doubt, that his progressive disenchantment with headquarters had succeeded in alienating him from the conventions). On this occasion of our first meeting, however, they were embryonic, and his moustaches orthodox. The only indication that they would subsequently develop into ‘handlebars’ were the tufts of unshorn hair which grew, quite isolated, high on his prominent cheek bones, like hardy alpines. They made him look deliberately and inflexibly unhandsome.

  He was, with the solitary exception of General Wingate, the most uncompromisingly inelegant regular officer I have ever met.

  As we confronted each other across his office table and I performed the ritual gesture of saluting authority, he gazed at my face so fixedly, but with such a cool, level look of appraisal, yet without hostility, that I half imagined something fearful must have happened to it, like feathers sprouting instead of whiskers. We looked at each other in complete silence, with wary circumspection.

  I decided to break the silence, and introduced myself: ‘Baines, sir. Reporting for duty from the Camouflage School for …’ – and came to an abrupt halt. I had no idea, as a matter of fact, what I had been posted to 111 Brigade for, except to be a nuisance and importune GHQ with pet schemes for clandestine operations – something which I did not feel at liberty to disclose to Jack Masters in case it gave him an unfavourable insight into my ungovernable independence.

  In the ensuing pause, made quite painful by my lack of self-confidence, my incapacity to handle the situation became so patent that Jack Masters was impelled to sum it up by saying ‘Precisely’ in a bleakly amused tone, and with a weary facial expression.

  This galvanized me into a sort of desperate fluency. It seemed a good idea to begin again. I cleared my throat, and determining not to be put off by the deliberately discouraging pantomime across the table, I repeated firmly, ‘Reporting for duty, sir,’ adding forthrightly, ‘Any duty! And please don’t let the fact of my being a Camouflage Officer turn you against me!’ My tone was abrupt, and indeed the remark had been intended as a challenge.

  ‘Whatever gives you that idea!’ said Masters, looking taken aback. ‘You mustn’t go around expressing such a preconception. I have absolutely no bias against a Camouflage Officer. Has something I’ve said given you any indication that I might be partial?’

  ‘No, sir. Certainly not, sir. Only some people are inclined
to resent it.’

  ‘In that case, disabuse your mind that I might be one of them. And don’t credit me with other people’s thoughts without proper evidence.’

  ‘Very well then, sir. Certainly, sir. And please forgive me for the unworthy suspicion.’

  The glance he gave me in response to this pert reply showed a certain surprise. No doubt he was unused to being treated quite so cavalierly. Suddenly he looked quite young – almost human – and I realised with a surge of relief that I would be able to identify with him. He was searching for the notification of my posting. He found it, read it, and then asked me how I proposed to handle my assignment, giving me a fair opportunity to fire off a personal statement.

  ‘That sounds perfectly reasonable,’ he said. ‘You shall have all the encouragement to do as much instructing as you want. I shan’t put any obstacles in your way. But, of course you understand, I hope, that I can’t take you in with me. If I killed one of their Camouflage Officers, GHQ would never forgive me.’

  My face fell. That gave him an indication of how to proceed and he pursued his advantage relentlessly. ‘I never asked for you in the first place,’ he continued. ‘GHQ just sent you down on their own initiative. Not that I’m ungrateful for small mercies.’ He looked at me with the contempt a miser would reserve for a Salvation Army collecting box. ‘I’m happy to have all the help I can get. But you see, this brigade is a newly formed organisation. There are positively dozens of officers besides a Camouflage Officer who are absolutely indispensable to me, but whom I’m without, whereas I can get along without a Camouflage Officer quite easily.’

 

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