Chapter 5

      The battle of Meiktila was a hard and bloody one, the enemy garrison having to be killed almost to a man. Even at Meiktila the prisoners taken were wounded … never out here have hundreds of thousands surrendered … as the Germans have done in the European campaign.

       Regimental history

      Slim was the finest general the Second World War produced.

      LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN,

       Supreme Commander, South-east Asia

      Slim was the chap … he made do with the scrapings of the barrel.

      EARL ATTLEE

      The incident of the three bunkers and my tin of fruit/carrots is engraved on my memory because it was my baptism of fire and, incidentally, the closest I came to participating in our capture of Meiktila. I say “our” inasmuch as the battalion was in the thick of the fighting for this vital strongpoint, which was vicious even by the standards of the Burma war, and won two decorations and a battle honour, but of this Nine Section saw nothing, and suffered no more than tired feet and ennui from marching around in the sun. They did not make philosophy about this, knowing that these things average out. That may seem obvious, but I had yet to learn it, and I’m not sure that I ever did altogether: it always seemed rather unjust that while one company might be eating mangoes and bathing its feet, another should be getting all hell shot out of it, or that two sections could go in together and one wouldn’t even see a Jap all day, while the other lost half its strength in clearing bunkers not far away.

      Another discovery was that the size and importance of an action is no yardstick of its personal unpleasantness. A big operation which commands headlines may be a dawdle for some of those involved, while the little forgotten patrol is a real horror. The capture of Meiktila means that gallon tin to me, while other episodes which can still enliven my nightmares receive only a passing mention in regimental accounts, if that. Mention Meiktila to any surviving pensioner of my old section and he will sip his pint, nod reflectively, and say “Aye”; but drop the name of a little unheard-of pagoda that doesn’t even get into the index of the big official history and he will let out an oath, sink the pint in one gulp, and start talking.

      (It’s an illustration of the fortunes of war, a phrase that always reminds me of a night later on, when I shared a cigarette with three men from another platoon, and we talked vaguely of having a pint in the Apple Tree on Lowther Street when we got home. Before dawn one of them was dead, another had killed a Jap and been wounded, and the third had slept through it – and he hadn’t just been keeping his head down, either; he wasn’t like that. My own contribution to the night’s activities had been to come within an ace of killing a comrade, a recollection that still makes me sweat.)

      But we knew that Jap had died hard in and around Meiktila; the rumour ran that in one hospital more than a hundred wounded had committed suicide rather than be taken; this proved to be true. It seemed incredible, after the hammering he’d had at Imphal; from listening to the older heads I gathered that they’d been hoping to hear of cases of surrender at this stage in the war, but apparently there had been none.

      From the official map I see that we came into Meiktila on foot from the west, but all I recall is volumes of smoke rising from the cluster of low white buildings between the lakes, and the distant sound of firing and explosions. It isn’t much of a place; in the six weeks we were there I never visited what was left of the town proper, but I spent three days at the airstrip on the way out after VJ Day, living on tinned salmon sandwiches and attending a camp concert which featured a bald, bespectacled, desperately dirty comedian who told the story of Flossie the Frog. (I’m sorry, I can’t help my eccentric memory.) When we marched in we knew only that it was a vital link in Jap’s communications, and that he would want it back.

Our platoon position was on the perimeter, on the crest of a gentle slope running up from one of the lakes and looking out across a hundred yards of flat ground to undergrowth which you wouldn’t dignify with the name of jungle, with a fairly thick wood to our right front. The perimeter was a deep sloping horizontal apron of barbed wire (a better protection against infantry than any upright fence or coils of Dannet), and a few yards inside this we dug our two-man rifle pits with the usual dog-leg pit for the Bren. Behind us was platoon headquarters, consisting of the pits of Lieutenant Gale, Sergeant Hutton, and Gale’s batman and runner; behind that was company H.Q., which in my memory consists of the camp stool belonging to the company commander, Long John. There were two brigades of us inside the wire^* which enclosed the two lakes in a box perhaps four miles by three, and when the third brigade came in by air that was the whole of the Black Cat Division within the “anvil”, eighty miles inside Jap territory, “surrounded”, says the history, “by numerically superior forces”, and waiting for the “hammer” of 5th Div – and, in the meantime, Jap.

      “’E’ll be at us like a rat up a fookin’ drainpipe,” said Sergeant Hutton, and the section gave pessimistic growls, and spoke with deep feeling of our prospects.

      Fortunately I’d been brought up in Cumberland, and knew that the natives would rather moan than eat; the British soldier is famous for complaint, but for sheer sour prolonged bitching in adversity commend me to the English West March. It comes out in a disgusted guttural growl rising to a full-tongued roar of discontent, and subsides into normal conversation:

      “In the shit again! Ah’ve ’ad it, me.”

      “We’ll all git killed.”

      “Fook this!”

      “Whee’s smeukin’, then?”

      “Booger off, Forster, scrounge soomw’eers else.”

      “Ahh,