Chindit Affair

by Brian Mooney

  I needn’t, however, have worried about these men. Their morale proved excellent. I was the one who had lost his confidence, as you shall presently hear when I describe the ensuing battle.

  ‘What is it? What’s this I hear?’ I clucked officiously, very much expecting that I should have to handle a hysterical patient.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Tej Bahadur, quite unconcernedly and evidently rather surprised that I should take an interest in it. ‘Yes – it’s perfectly true. I do feel that I’m going to get killed. But please don’t worry about it. I promise I won’t give any trouble.’

  ‘But what on earth do you mean? How can you say such a thing?’

  ‘Oh, it’s quite simple. I am just certain I’m going to get killed!’

  ‘But Tej Bahadur, it’s pure imagination. How long have you thought this? When do you think it’s going to happen?’

  ‘I’ve known about it for some time. I only mentioned it by accident. We were talking about the fighting and I told Man Bahadur quite casually that I think it’s going to happen in three days.’

  Man Bahadur and Gopal Bahadur, meanwhile, were trying to conceal their giggles behind their hands. All the others were hanging breathlessly on the exchange – not because they thought it serious, but simply because I had chosen to make an issue of it.

  I felt completely nonplussed by the admission and hardly knew what conclusions to draw. I did not for a moment think that his premonition could be correct, but it was perfectly obvious that he took it seriously. The attitude of the rest of the defence platoon was hard to define.

  While I was thus cogitating, searching in my mind for some phrase or comment with which to clinch proceedings, the order to shoulder into our packs came to my rescue. The incident achieved no more than a passing notoriety. In the flurry of activity consequent upon our contacting the enemy a few hours later, it got completely knocked out of my head.

  Shudderingly, somewhere up ahead, somebody suddenly encountered a Jap outpost suddenly, and put in a probing attack. I did not at the time attach a great deal of importance to it. It happened spontaneously, and a good half a mile forward of the sector where I was marching, and according to my time-and-motion calculations this was far enough away from me for it to be quite safe. For want of positive evidence to the contrary and a proper liaison between rear-of-the-column, middle-of-the-column and forward, I mistakenly assumed that all the firing which I heard going on would be drill-book stuff – something of the order of second-nature reaction, performed perfunctorily, and certainly nothing significant.

  The situation, however, deteriorated so quickly that circumstances themselves disabused me. What had originally suggested itself to me simply as a series of straightforward outflanking movements deployed against the enemy’s francs tireurs and scouts, now revealed itself as a classic rearguard action in which the Japs retreated into prepared positions. They very cleverly drew us after them.

  Such was the position when our advanced guard bumped the enemy on that afternoon of 20 June. Far from being the casual affair which I had mistakenly imagined it to be, the situation grew so swiftly worse during the days that followed that we had difficulty in keeping up with events. Soon we found ourselves involved in a desperate fight on all fronts. It quickly engulfed even Brigade Headquarters. We were called upon to put forth our maximum efforts. We had allowed ourselves to become committed to that most difficult of all engagements, a running battle.

  On account of the actions continually going on ahead of us where our advance elements were in almost hourly contact with the enemy, it became necessary to expend all our resources. Jack Masters was compelled to throw in his reserves. He began utilising me seriously.

  As I pushed out farther and farther on patrol into unexplored territory, I awoke to the chilling realities of our position. Not only were the Japs alarmingly thick on the ground; they appeared to have completely surrounded us. They buzzed like a swarm of wasps. Even my irrepressible Gurkhas seemed temporarily quelled by this discovery.

  Plodding along in their company – but all of us uncharacteristically subdued, even if attempting to conceal it – I could not but notice how my senses reacted due to the nearness of the enemy, automatically peeling off and shedding their coverings like sheaths, until my hackles prickled and every nerve-end tingled. The whole place smelt of Jap like the reek from a cat’s urine.

  We edged through forest clearings whose atmosphere was heavy with menace … along jungle tracks where we faced the threat of ambush at every bend … past lonely houses whose burnt-out rafters resembled the blackened bones of gigantic skeletons . across the ruins of ravaged villages, derelict and untenanted even by dogs or pigs, where the bare boards of abandoned huts, choked with undergrowth, stood out against the bruised sky like broken boxes.

  Such evidence of wreck and ruin were everyday experiences for those in reckless pursuit of the fugitive Jap. Thank God we didn’t find him. I was in no mood for it; neither, I think, were my men.Yet strangely enough, there were indications of enemy occupation all round us. I managed to avoid contact with them so persistently, however, that I was forced to formulate a theory of divine partiality to explain it. That – or admit a much worse possibility, namely that I was being reserved for something really sinister in the future!

  I remember an incident that happened one afternoon with particular clarity.

  It was rather late. A thick mist had been covering the tops of the mountains since early morning, reducing visibility to near zero; the cloud-base was so low as to rest on our heads. The leaden atmosphere thus generated was debilitating.

  We were following along a narrow path in thick jungle with great caution. There was a heavy sense of undefined hazard. Suddenly we debouched into an open field. I found myself on the perimeter of one of those inexplicable, tiny clearings that are rudely cultivated by the local peasants.

  Behind me I could sense my men edging up uneasily to get a closer look at it, and, as I turned anxiously to tell them not to bunch together, I could feel their mass horripilation rippling across my skin. The apprehension of their physical presence was, however, undeniably comforting. The place radiated such an aura of power combined with hostility that I needed all the moral support I could get in order not to surrender to a belief in it, for there was a strong urge to collapse in the face of the irrational.

  Instead, however, I summoned up my reserves of courage and began to observe the place closely. The plot of ground had been laid down earlier in the year to some species of primitive grain like sago or millet. Now the corn had been harvested but the stalks had been left. The coarse straw was collected into a pile and neatly stacked in the middle. Here a diminutive hut had been constructed. It was doubtless intended to shelter the bird-scarers while the grain was in the ear. It looked like a secondary stack.

  It was this temporary shelter or refuge that concentrated all our attention. I became persuaded by a sort of instinctual extension of vision – almost second sight – that it contained something unpleasant. Nonetheless

  I felt constrained to go and investigate it. It was getting dark; a cold, draughty wind had arisen and it had started to drizzle.

  I was giving this hut a last-minute casing before venturing out into the open, when I chanced to look down at my feet. There on the ground right in front of me, perfectly preserved in mud and almost between my legs, was a Japanese footprint. It was one of those cloven-toed ones which are unmistakeable. It was not the sort of sign calculated to increase anyone’s self-confidence under such conditions. As I marched out on my own into the middle of the field, my skin prickled all over into a shudder of heat. I felt I was being observed by a thousand eyes.

  The place seemed haunted. I became aware of a strange atmosphere of superstitious dread which pervaded the place. I have since been able to identify this as a characteristically Japanese phenomenon from study of the literature, drama, art and films of that extraordinary people – but at the time I was unable to put a name to my fears.

 
; As I approached the hut, the miasmic clouds lifted a little and I was able to examine my discovery by the aid of the increased light. There were two large slices of meat. They had been freshly cut from the buttocks of a recently dismembered corpse in the form of several rump steaks. The corpse, of markedly Japanese ethnic origin – probably a boy who had been killed in action rather than one who had died prematurely of disease – was naked except for the split-toed socks on its feet. It lay, prominently displayed yet painfully ungainly, across the small bamboo platform of the hut intended for sleeping on, which had been liberally scattered with bundles of straw. The body’s posture – the pearl-white skin, its mangled quarters sprawled unceremoniously upon the improvised bed where its butchers had laid it – was so pathetic that I was for the moment quite incapable of comprehending the scene, either to condone or condemn. I had supped too full of horrors.

  At a short distance a small fire was smouldering and there was evidence of an abandoned meal. There could be no doubt that a Japanese party had camped here, nor that they had hastily interrupted their horrible collation at the moment of my platoon’s approaching them. It came as a surprise to realize that the Japanese were starving just as we were.

  By the time I returned to the main sections, it was quite dark. I had been ordered to be back before twilight. Taking into consideration the difficulties on the way, it was a wonder I arrived at all. Attack and counterattack by one side or the other were going in on every quarter, making confusion doubly confounded, and it was more by luck than good management that I avoided getting caught up in them.

  I found Jack Masters and made my report to him. He was too preoccupied to pay any attention to it. An account of Japanese cannibalism was the last thing he wanted to talk about. He looked at me in such a way as precluded any communication between us on the subject.

  Up forward, apparently, our advance guard had not yet succeeded in disengaging itself from the enemy, although it was long past nightfall. It was still locked in a combat which looked like going on for another couple of hours. Elsewhere, along our whole flank, all our other components were equally being subjected to pressures, and it was not until nearly dawn that the enemy relaxed. Meanwhile, the popping, without intermission, of grenades, and the chatter, without intermission, of light machine guns within twenty or thirty yards of where we were in conference, were so disturbing that I was hardly able to concentrate.

  Masters, however, did not lose his nerve. He seemed, indeed, even colder and more remote from human emotions than ever. Having arrived within striking distance of Point 2171 – this was our objective – he briefly sketched out for me the plan and prospects for our attack.

  When I heard them, God knows, I realized that the position was desperate. Perched half way up the slope from the dry bed of the deep chaung where the majority of our soft belly was accommodated (mules, admin, the medics and all that), and without any firm base or real fortress around which to rally, there was no alternative to conquering the summit. We had to take it. Our survival admitted no other choice. If we did not succeed in scaling the mountain the next day, we would be annihilated.

  Under such conditions it doesn’t do to say too much. I just nodded without comment.

  Our initial attack had got bogged down while I was away on patrol, so I was unfamiliar with the details. The situation amounted to this: our forward patrol had encountered the enemy earlier in the day in a forest clearing halfway up the mountain slope. It was in the dense jungle immediately beyond this clearing, still about a mile from the top of the ridge and perhaps a thousand feet below it, that our advance had been halted. Our forces were now tied down at the edge of this clearing, their aggressive spirits temporarily chastened. The enemy, it is true, were still retreating gradually up the slope towards Point 2171 at the top, but so slowly that they were obviously prepared to contest every inch.

  Possession of the clearing, meanwhile, was of paramount importance to us. It was the only open space for miles which was available for receiving supply drops. Indeed, the demand for a heavy drop of arms and ammunition had already been despatched and the drop was scheduled for noon on the following day. Unless we could rapidly extend our influence so that this clearing would not be exposed to enemy machine-gun fire or mortar bombardment, we would not be able to collect the supplies vital to us, and on which the success of any drive to the summit depended.

  Masters aimed to attack across the clearing at first light. He would then consolidate the ground immediately beyond it. Our troops would thereafter have to push forward up the steep declivity and seize the crest. My role in these proceedings, strangely enough, was to be pointed in exactly the opposite direction. I had to issue forth at dawn and lead a fighting patrol rearward along the track we had come by, to the place where one of our own reconnaissance units had reported a party of Japs attempting to shoot us up the back. My orders were to destroy them.

  It was the sort of unspectacular assignment that had previously cost us the lives of some of our best officers.

  I returned to the bed of the chaung in the deep valley where the defence platoons were holed-up with the remainder of the administrative section and, together with Thaman Bahadur, concocted some sort of plan for the morrow. Then I attempted to go to sleep. In the series of small actions which had led to the present engagement, the Brigade had incurred a certain number of casualties. Now, to my exasperated nerves and tormented sensibilities, the chaung-bed seemed full of screaming madmen and moaning wounded. One man in particular, a Rajputana Kshatriya belonging to Bombay Sappers and Miners and attached to Geoffrey Birt’s engineer section, never ceased calling for his mother (ma – ma – ma) throughout the entire night. Round about midnight, unable to stand it any longer and thinking that a member of the warrior caste ought to be able to control himself rather better, I got up to expostulate with him.

  A sleepy medical orderly was seated at the foot of the temporary bamboo platform constructed to keep the injured out of the mud. He was rocking himself backwards and forwards ferociously as if he too were in intense anguish. He gazed at me with lacklustre incomprehension. Beneath the roughly thatched roof hastily improvised that evening as shelter from the pelting rain, a dim dipak (native lamp) was burning. It was no more than a mere twist of cotton wool dipped as a wick into some sort of oil swimming about in the lid of a cigarette tin, but it was enough to see by.

  By its feeble illumination I was able to make out Doc Whyte. He was administrating to the moaning Rajput some sort of medicament – probably morphia – and had in his hand a poised syringe. The rest of the wounded were laid out side by side, covered by torn blankets and with their feet sticking up out of the bottom as if they were already dead.

  ‘Hullo,’ Doc Whyte said. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I can’t sleep.’

  The moaning man was now making awful grunting noises and a bloody spume was issuing forth from his nostrils. He was unconscious.

  Doc Whyte followed my gaze and said, not without sympathy, ‘Is he disturbing you? He’ll soon be dead.’

  A cry of anguish extracted from a tortured individual by oppressive nightmares broke from a group of soldiers kipping near us. One of them started thrashing about in his sleep. It was such a disturbing demonstration that the medical orderly actually interrupted his rocking movements and got up to quieten him. In the generally debilitated state of all ranks, one hardly knew whether the man would be officially categorized as sick or officially categorized as ‘fit for duty’. It did not matter. Either way, our soldiers were on their last legs.

  Just beyond the radius of the light, sitting around like a rabble of jackals waiting for a carcase, I noticed a row of Gurkhas. Their eyes glittered rabidly in the soft glow of the lamp. Every now and then one of them cackled. They were part of that body of our troops, among whom were some British soldiers, who had gone mad. They were accommodated near the medical tent so that Doc Whyte could keep an eye on them and provide deep sedation, but every so often they would arouse thems
elves and sit around making caustic comments.

  I retired, greatly troubled, to my bed. This was the last place on earth I should have chosen to pass the night prior to an engagement.

  I lay down beside Dal Bahadur. He was awake.

  The following morning, my men were stirring long before daylight. Thaman Bahadur and I ordered the placing of the men as we had agreed the previous night.

  We set out. I felt sick to my stomach.

  It was the third day after Tej Bahadur’s premonition – which, of course, we had already forgotten about – when he had foretold his death.

  The composition of the patrol was somewhat unusual. I put the two Bren-gunners, Tej Bahadur and Bhim Bahadur, right up in front. The boys had instructions, as soon as they encountered anything, to fire straight from the hip.

  There were reported to be in the vicinity other bodies of our troops – Chinese from Stilwell’s armies, a few predatory gangs of Burmans preying on Japanese stragglers, some Gurkhas from 14 Brigade supposed to be on long-distance reconnaissance. All or any of these were perfectly likely accidentally to shoot each other up.

  It was an impossible situation. To an untrained eye, the Japanese and all these other people were indistinguishable, not least because friend and enemy had got into the habit of adopting each other’s uniforms.

  I received, however, no complaint, and in the event this patrol proved to be abortive. We encountered nothing; and, when we returned to the main body, I found the situation there considerably improved.

  Masters had moved his command-post – together with the administrative section, radio sets, and ciphers – up forward. I accordingly proceeded up a steep incline still littered with the spoils of war: some captured rifles and an example of the curious ‘woodpecker’ machine-gun (the first I had seen). There was a certain amount of blood spilled in the mud, and one or two corpses. Masters had established himself on the edge of the clearing. The attack had gone in at dawn and it had been successful. The site was in our hands.