The World at War (32 page)

MAJOR W S BOLLER

British Army in Burma

When we made our last retreat from Rangoon we had travelled about twenty miles before we were held up by a small Japanese platoon. We had the 7th Brigade and other regiments trying to break through but it took several concerted attacks before we did. Anyway, we got through there and when we arrived at a hill station in Burma, we stayed there about ten or fifteen days, then we had to embark into various vehicles and make our way into India. Then we had to abandon the vehicles and we walked day after day for miles and miles and sometimes without food, water or anything of the sort.

MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH

It was a crushing disadvantage to me in the 1942 campaign that I hadn't got a wireless set which could contact my air support in Rangoon and therefore, believe it or not, the only thing I could do was to tap into the railway telephone line, get the babu [clerk] in the post office in Rangoon and try to persuade him that it was vitally important for me to be put on to the Air Force headquarters. That was really the reason why, in our withdrawal to the Sittang, we were terribly bombed, badly bombed by the RAF as well as by the Japanese Air Force, simply because they had not been properly briefed as to exactly where we were.

MAJOR BOLLER

The overall impression I had of that horrible trek out of
Burma was that it seemed to bring the best and the worst out of people. Some people who I'd looked up to and respected, I found I couldn't respect any more because they became entirely different on that march. In fact they felt – I felt – that it was a question of survival of the fittest and in actual fact it was. If you didn't look after number one you just didn't get out, you just didn't get anywhere. I found that many people wanted to fight and quarrel and look for the best thing they could find for themselves and they couldn't care less for anybody else, and this went on all through the march and it left a very bitter taste in my mouth.

MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH

The great advantage the Japanese had over the British and Indian troops, in this campaign, was that they were trained and equipped for the job, whereas our forces had no pack rations, no pack wireless and no pack transport, and therefore we were entirely supplied by lorries and were very much road-bound. The Japanese were trained to get through the jungle, they were lightly equipped and lightly armed and they specialised in wide enveloping movement through the jungle where if necessary they could live on the villages, being rice eaters. Later on in the operations I was sent the Yorkshire Light Infantry, a very fine battalion, which I was very glad to have, but a note arrived with them that I was to use them in wide encircling movements in the jungle. I cable back to Army Headquarters: 'Presume Yorkshire Light Infantry can live on rice,' and a very indignant cable came back, 'On no account must the Yorkshire Light Infantry be given rice.' Well, there you have it in a nutshell – they could move through the jungle and live on the villages and we couldn't.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL JAMES

Coming out of Burma in 1942 we were falling back behind our retiring Army and there was nothing one could do with one's casualties except hold on to them and do what one could with them. It was tragic because we had severe burn cases, in excruciating pain and if we'd been able to evacuate those casualties by plane into India, in a matter of hours, the majority of those cases would have been saved. As it was the majority were lost. It was not until the Wingate operation that casualty evacuation by air came into its own thanks to the Americans. They had light planes, the [Stinson] L-l and L-5, and they were evacuated right from the very front lines to the larger airstrips where they were taken by larger planes, the [C-47] Dakotas, and flown back to hospitals in India. In a matter of two or three hours a chap who was badly wounded or extremely ill was lying between sheets in a base hospital and I don't think the British Army had ever known that kind of evacuation before that time and from then onward in the Fourteenth Army it became pretty well routine and it was life-saving. If it hadn't been for that, our mortality rate would have been much higher than it was.

MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH

What is not generally known, and most people would be astonished if they knew, is that we hadn't any Mepacrin [
malaria tablets] at all, and one of my battalions had four hundred cases of malaria and therefore they couldn't move at all because they'd not got sufficient men to carry the sick.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL SUGITA

According to the Geneva Convention we treat
prisoners of war fairly, but after the war is going on we faced very difficult conditions concerning the food, and the war itself became severe. I don't think so much about treatment of the prisoners of war as you told us. They said Japanese Army treat them badly but ask a soldier and he say no. There are a jungle zone and very short of food, which were not prepared beforehand, and lot of the soldiers very short of food and they had to face difficult fighting. At the end of the war they unable to fight as soldiers in peacetime. A lot of officers and men were dead not only because of Japanese treatment but also because short of food and hardworking. After war it is good propaganda that Japan made bad treatment of prisoners of war.

CAPTAIN LEWIS BUSH

Pre-war English teacher in Japan, captured at Hong Kong

You must remember that to the Japanese in those days a prisoner of war was regarded as worse than a criminal, because first of all no Japanese could conceive of being taken prisoner of war. If he were, he would be robbed of his civil rights for the rest of his life. Every Japanese soldier in Burma or any other theatre of war nearly always had a hand grenade or something to polish off his own life if he were in danger of being taken prisoner, or to bite off his tongue. They were even taught how to take their own lives by their superiors. And so this fact alone meant that we, who had surrendered honourably by order of the Governor of Hong Kong, we were completely at the mercy of people who had no conception of human rights, let alone the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. Of course there were exceptions; after the war many of my comrades and I have said that if it hadn't been for the good ones we would not be alive.

CAPTAIN OKADA

The Chinese, we understand them because they're much more simple. It's hard to explain, but you see if they caught you they cut off your head and you caught them you cut off their heads. Also in the meantime we could exchange information through our scouts and there are cases when they sent us bags of peanuts saying, 'To the Imperial Japanese Army let us have good fighting next year as last year'. So there was a certain understanding. But fighting the Allies was a different matter – the ground rules you may say are not so simple. I never could understand why certain regiments would die for their beliefs or for their country under a foreign officer. You had Indian regiments with British officers and this we could not understand. We felt the British officer was a good fighter although the ones we captured they always said to me, 'We will win the war,' when I interrogated them. Now this I could not understand because here is a man who has surrendered and he still says, 'We will win the war'. We could not understand because if we are fighting to win the war we will fight until we die.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL SUGITA

In the Western countries it is not shame to surrender their responsibilities; it is quite different from those in Japan. I don't know exactly but most of the soldiers that were told that we should not surrender, they despised surrenders of those officers and men.

PRIVATE RONALD FRY

Prisoner of the Japanese on the Death Railway, Burma

At one time we said to a Japanese officer what you could do with here is an elephant, you know to move the trees, and he said, 'I've got all the elephants I need – you are my little white elephants.'

PRIVATE H R OAKLEY

Prisoner of the Japanese on the Death Railway, Burma

They hated us for what we were, because we were white or British. They considered that they were above everybody, that they were the better people, and they would reduce you to lower than an animal if they could, any time. After we left Singapore we were transported to Siam – Thailand – and then we arrived at these sites where we had to put up bamboo huts and so forth, and then we were immediately put to work laying this railway line, which started at Kanchanburi and ran for three hundred miles. We was marshalled out every day on various working parties and we had to build a bridge at Tamarkan. We had to do pile driving, which consists of a huge weight with about fifty men pulling ropes and dropping this thing down on the pile, which drove it into the bed of the river, which you were doing from the time you started till the time you left off. That was one task – the other would be forming chains by passing baskets of soil from one man to another all day, shoring up embankments and so forth.
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PRIVATE CRUICKSHANK

They'd pick on someone who'd done a stupid little thing, didn't bow to one of the guards for instance, and they'd stand him outside the guardroom in the blazing sun and take great delight in pricking him with a bayonet point to make him stand upright to attention if he started to droop, that type of thing. They'd always laugh about it – oh, they could laugh – and yet they couldn't understand when they found us laughing under the conditions we were in. That's one thing we beat them at: they just couldn't understand how an Englishman after, say, a year of hell with them could still laugh and joke, and this was where we always had them beat.

PRIVATE FRY

The latrines were concrete foundation and so everything that was in there turned to liquid. In no time the top was just an absolute sea of maggots, and when it rained they overflowed and everywhere you trod was maggots. One chap was in such a bad way, I think it was cerebral malaria, that they found him with his head down there – he'd committed suicide.

PRIVATE CRUICKSHANK

We did hit back in our own ways. The Japs would make us build their huts whenever we moved to another place and we were all covered with lice, bugs, everything under the sun. We'd spend maybe one hour of our three hours' rest picking these bugs and lice, put them in tin cans or anything we could find, and when we finished their huts we used to scatter the damned things in their huts. This is one of the ways that we could hit back at them and we used to love it. It used to give us some form of entertainment: we'd talk about it afterwards and this is what would make us laugh, this type of thing.

CAPTAIN BUSH

One of our men, I think he was a private in the Middlesex Regiment, he managed to make a tunnel from his hut in our camp to the Japanese Army canteen and over a period got away with thousands of cigarettes, chocolate bars and all kinds of luxuries in the way of soaps, which he was selling around the camp to fellow prisoners. Now he was caught and we expected of course that he would be beheaded in public, because if you blinked your eyes on morning parades you would get a bashing. But this chap was taken up before the Japanese military court and he was ordered to be kept in camp for six weeks – he wasn't allowed to go out on working parties with his comrades. And this chap appeared with a placard on his front and another on his back which simply said, 'I am a thief,' in English and Japanese. A Japanese guard came to me and said, 'Oh, Bush-san' – that means Bush captain – 'this is a terrible punishment for this poor man, how terribly humiliating.' This astonished me but the fellow stayed in camp for six weeks, the guards gave him portions of their own food, they gave him cigarettes. He'd never had such a wonderful time in all his life as a prisoner of war.

CAPTAIN OKADA

After the final surrender we were a working party and the British officer in charge of the guard caught some of our men peeing against a wall and he called us and said these men must be punished. The punishment was to put stones in their knapsacks and make them run around the courtyard many times. After this happened two or three times we complained to the British officer and said we would like to punish our men ourselves, so he said that would be all right on condition it was done in front of him. So next time we had our people to be punished we lined them up and the colonel in charge beat them up, in fact out of the five two fell down because they were beaten so badly. The British officer then said that our mode of punishment was very cruel, but we said, no, our men prefer this because it's much quicker, it does not waste time, the man does not miss his meals, he's back on duty right after he recovers and he'll recover quicker.

MAJOR GENERAL SMYTH

I feel, and I think my troops will always feel, bitter that all the blame was put on them. I think that the bad thing about both those campaigns is that – although defeat was inevitable in those circumstances – the blame should have been put in both Malaya and Burma on the unfortunate troops who had to carry the can.

CHAPTER 13
BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC 1942–43

The figures for merchant-ship and U-boat losses tell the story of how the Battle of the Atlantic was so nearly lost, thanks in part to the US Navy's obstinate refusal to adopt convoys in 1942, granting the U-boats their second 'happy time' off the American coast, and then won by Allied technological advances, tactical refinements and sheer numbers as the massive US ship-building programme gathered pace. In 1942 the U-boats sank 1,859 ships (8.3 million tons) for the loss of 86 of their own; in 1943 they sank 812 ships (3.6 million tons) but lost 242. The turning point of the campaign was the battle for Convoy ONS-5 in late April and early May 1943, so well covered by
The World at War
interviewers, in which twelve merchant ships were sunk but eight U-boats were lost and a further seven were forced to withdraw because of battle damage. On 23 May Admiral Dönitz, who lost his youngest son, Peter, on
U-954
in the ONS-5 battle, recalled all his U-boats from the North Atlantic. The closing of the air gap in the mid-Atlantic by long-range bombers, allied to the new airborne centimetric radar, was probably the most significant tactical contribution to the Allied victory, but strategically the greatest German reversal came in June 1943, when the Royal Navy introduced a new system of encypherment that defeated German attempts to break it, although Merchant Navy cyphers remained an open book to them. Meanwhile, from July 1943 British cryptographers at Bletchley Park were consistently able to read signals sent by the Kriegsmarine's four-wheel Enigma cypher machine, which had totally defeated them from February to December 1942. During the Battle of the Atlantic approximately 3,500
merchant ships (14.5 million tons) and 765 U-boats were sunk with the loss of seventy-five per cent of all operational U-boat crews, the highest loss-rate of any of the armed forces engaged in the Second World War. It is a curious fact that of the ten top-scoring U-boat commanders only Günther Prien, who sank
Royal Oak
in Scapa Flow in 1939, was killed in action.