Quartered Safe Out Here. George Fraser MacDonald
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you had the feeling that it came from another planet. That’s not a complaint, or an attempt to suggest special hardship; our campaign, or at least what I saw of it (Imphal and the northern khuds being something else) was probably no harder than any other. But you did feel the isolation, the sense of back of beyond. Perhaps that came, in part, from being called “the Forgotten Army” – a colourful newspaper phrase which we bandied about with derision;* we were not forgotten by those who mattered, our families and our county. But we knew only too well that we were a distant side-show, that our war was small in the public mind beside the great events of France and Germany.
Oh, God, I’ll never forget the morning when we were sent out to lay ambushes, which entailed first an attack on a village believed to be Jap-held. We were lined up for a company advance, and were waiting in the sunlight, dumping our small packs and fixing bayonets, and Hutton and Long John were moving among us reminding us quietly to see that our magazines were charged and that everyone was right and ready, and Nixon was no doubt observing that we’d all get killed, and someone, I know, was muttering the old nonsense “Sister Anna will carry the banner, Sister Kate will carry the plate, Sister Maria right marker, Salvation Army, by the left – charge!” when a solitary Spitfire came roaring out of nowhere and Victory-rolled above us. We didn’t get it; on the rare occasions when we had air support the Victory roll came after the fight, not before. While we were wondering, an officer – he must have been a new arrival, and a right clown – ran out in front of the company and shouted, with enthusiasm: “Men! The war in Europe is over!”
There was a long silence, while we digested this, and looked through the heat haze to the village where Jap might be waiting, and I’m not sure that the officer wasn’t waving his hat and shouting hip, hooray. The silence continued, and then someone laughed, and it ran down the extended line in a great torrent of mirth, punctuated by cries of “Git the boogers oot ’ere!” and “Ev ye told Tojo, like?” and “Hey, son, is it awreet if we a’ gan yam?”* Well, he must have been new, and yet to get his priorities right, but it was an interesting pointer.
But if we resented, and took perverse pleasure in moaning (as only Cumbrians can) about our relative unimportance, there was a hidden satisfaction in it, too. Set a man apart and he will start to feel special. We did; we knew we were different, and that there were no soldiers quite like us anywhere. Partly it sprang from the nature of our war. How can I put it? We were freer, and our own masters in a way which is commonly denied to infantry; we were a long way from the world of battle-dress serge and tin hats and the huge mechanised war juggernauts and the waves of bombers and artillery. When Slim stood under the trees at Meiktila and told us: “Rangoon is where the big boats sail from”, the idea that we might one day get on one of those boats and sail halfway round the world to home might seem unreal, but it was a reminder that we were unique (and I don’t give a dam who knows it). We were Fourteenth Army, the final echo of Kipling’s world, the very last British soldiers in the old imperial tradition. I don’t say we were happy to be in Burma, because we weren’t, but we knew that Slim was right when he said: “Some day, you’ll be proud to say, ‘I was there’.”
Mind you, as Grandarse remarked, we’d have to get out of the bloody place first.
* There were six brigades of Special Force (Chindits) in Fourteenth Army, operating behind enemy lines in 1943–4, under the celebrated Orde Wingate. They took heavy casualties, and by the last year of the war few specialist units of this kind were being employed: there was certainly a strong feeling, said to be shared by Slim himself, that well-trained infantry could do anything that so-called elite or special troops could do, and that it was a waste of time and manpower to train units for particular tasks.
It was said of the Chindits at the time that, whatever the strategic value of their operations, they had performed a valuable service by proving that the Japanese were not invincible. With all respect to Special Force, whose contribution was second to none in Burma, this is not true. So far as the Japanese did have a reputation as military supermen, especially in jungle, this was exploded in the Imphal-Kohima campaign where they suffered the worst defeat in Japan’s history.
I am in no position to say how the Japanese were viewed before that decisive battle, but I do know that after it Fourteenth Army had no illusions about Japanese superiority, either en masse or as individuals; their heroism was acknowledged, but no one regarded them as better or more skilful soldiers.
* river gully
* native cheroot
* According to my regimental magazine, the phrase “Forgotten Army” may have originated in an article by Stuart Emery of the News Chronicle who visited Fourteenth Army as a war correspondent in 1943; indeed, he seems to have applied the term ‘forgotten men’ to the very battalion of which I am writing, for although he could not identify it by name, for security reasons, he did give its nickname: the “White Gurkhas”. He, in turn, may have been inspired by the song “My Forgotten Man”, sung by Joan Blondell in the film Gold Diggers of 1933, which refers to American ex-servicemen of the Great War.
* “Gan yam” is Carlisle dialect for “Go home”; elsewhere in Cumberland it is “Ga yem”.
“Aye-aye, Jock lad, w’at fettle?”
“Not bad, sergeant, thank you.”
“Champion! They tell us yer a good cross-coontry rooner?”
“Oh … well, I’ve done a bit …”
“Girraway! Ah seen ye winnin’ at Ranchi – travellin’ like a bloody trail ’oond w’en the whistles gan on. ’Ere, ’ev a fag.”
“Ta very much, sarn’t. M-mm, Senior Service …”
“Sarn’t’s mess issue, lad. Tek anoother fer after. Aye, ye can roon … woon a few prizes in Blighty, did ye?”
“Well, now and then … seven and six in savings certificates, that sort of thing …”
“Ah’ll bet yer the fastest man in’t battalion, ower a mile or two. Aye, in the brigade, likely – mebbe the division –”
“Oh, I dunno about that. There must be some good runners –”
“Give ower, Jock! A fit yoong feller like you? Honnist, noo – wadn’t ye back yersel agin anybuddy in 17th Indian? Well aye, ye wad! Ootroon the bloody lot on them, eh?”
“Well, I’d be ready to have a go …”
“Good for you, son. An’ yer a furst-class shot an’ a’, aren’t ye? Good … yer joost the man tae be sniper-scout for the section.”
“Eh? Sniper-scout? What’s that?”
“Weel, ye knaw w’at a scout does. W’en the section cooms till a village, the scout ga’s in foorst, t’see if Jap’s theer.”
“To … er, draw their fire?”
“Use yer loaf, man, Jap’s nut that bloody stupid! Usually, ’e let’s the scout ga through, or waits till ’e’s reet inside the position an’ then lays ’im