Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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up to expect little. And received little.’ Few men returned content from leave. But the experience granted at least a brief reprieve from toil, sweat and fear.
Throughout the Burma campaign, American transport aircraft, fighters and bombers provided vital support to Slim’s operations. Chuck Linamen, a twenty-year-old steelworker’s son from Ohio, flew fifty-two B-24 Liberator missions from India to targets in Burma and Siam. The first that he and his crew knew of their posting to the Far East was when they opened sealed orders over the Atlantic, en route to the Azores in August 1944: ‘I couldn’t even pronounce the names of the places we were going.’ But from the moment he joined the 436th Squadron at Madagan, 130 miles north-east of Calcutta, he found himself one of the relatively small number of men who relished the task which war had imposed upon him: ‘I enjoyed every minute of it.’ He loved his crew, a characteristic all-American mix: Ray Hanson, ‘the best navigator in the world’, from Minneapolis; Will Henderson, the co-pilot, from Montana; a Texan bombardier; Kentuckian radio-operator; gunners from New York, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Ohio. They mined Bangkok harbour, dropped bombs on railyards, bridges, Japanese positions. By the standards of Europe, all their missions were long-haul, cruising at 165 knots for a minimum of ten hours, a maximum of eighteen. By way of compensation, however, opposition from flak and fighters was slight. On some low-level missions they strafed Japanese positions like excited schoolboys from three hundred feet, gunners whose turrets would not bear shouting over the intercom: ‘Give me a shot! Give me a shot!’
This did not, however, make the assignment risk-free. Beyond the hazards of mechanical failure, the Japanese could spring unwelcome surprises. Over Bangkok, Allied aircraft weaved to avoid barrage balloons. At 6,000 feet above Karneburi on 3 April 1945, Linamen’s Liberator was hit by enemy anti-aircraft fire which inflicted punishing damage on its systems, severed an aileron cable and removed the starboard wingtip. They fell 4,000 feet before the pilot regained control, and then he had to nurse the plane every mile of the way back, for seven and a half hours, to the RAF emergency strip at Cox’s Bazaar. Over the base, he invited the crew to jump. A gunner asked: ‘What you doing, Curly?’ ‘I’m going to ride her down,’ responded the pilot. The gunner said: ‘What are we waiting for, then?’ The other nine men took up crash positions. Unable to slow the plane for landing without losing control, Linamen settled for a high-speed skid onto the beach, touching at 150mph, frantically shutting down fuel, power, systems until they shuddered to a halt. The crew, terrified of fire, bolted out of the hatches. One man found himself lying on the sand inches from a propeller that was still windmilling, and could have removed his head. ‘You laugh about these things afterwards, but any of them can cost a life.’
Another day, over a target, the co-pilot suddenly shouted ‘Yowie!’ Linamen turned in bewilderment, demanding: ‘What’s your problem?’ A 20mm cannon shell had clipped off part of the man’s leg, mercifully without damaging the aircraft systems. They hastened home, to deliver their casualty to the medics. If Linamen loved to fly, others did not: ‘A hell of a lot of people were pretty despondent. They didn’t like India, they didn’t like the job.’ One day, ‘The colonel leading the mission screwed up. The wing found the target fogged in, but farted around waiting for visibility to clear, and got a few shot down.’ Among the pilots lost was a Californian named J.C. Osborne, one of Linamen’s closest friends.
During the monsoon, when the weather was unfit for bombing, the Liberators were transferred to transport duty, carting fuel over the Hump into China. One night on the ground at a Chinese airstrip, they found themselves in the midst of a Japanese air raid. The airmen crowded onto the roof of a revetment to watch the fireworks, until a stick of bombs landed a few yards away, driving the Americans hastily into cover. Linamen exclaimed: ‘My daddy always taught me that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and he sure was right!’ Yet he felt no great animosity towards the Japanese: ‘They were just there, they were the enemy. I had volunteered to fly, I was doing a job.’ Linamen achieved some fame, as one of the airmen who attacked the bridge over the river Kwai, built by prisoners on the ghastly Burma-Siam railway. Yet they felt little emotion even about this mission. They knew that Allied prisoners were on the ground, but had heard nothing of their unspeakable sufferings. Bombing the bridge was just another mission.
Tactical air support was a critical force in the British advance, rendered even more formidable by the fact that Japanese fighters had almost disappeared from the sky. Day after day, Fourteenth Army situation reports—‘sitreps’—recorded: ‘Enemy air activity: NIL.’ Hurribombers—Hurricanes adapted for ground attack—mounted over 150 sorties a day, aided by American Thunderbolts. Strafing was always hazardous. Even when enemy resistance was slight, the perils of the jungle and mechanical failure persisted. A Beaufighter crew of 211 Squadron once jumped from a damaged aircraft over their base in the Arakan, rather than risk a landing. Their parachutes drifted into a rainforest of 150-foot trees. Though within a mile of their airfield, the airmen were never seen again.
Beaufighters—big, tough, twin-engined aircraft which weighed ten tons and carried a two-man crew—flew long ‘intruder missions’ of up to seven hours, usually against Japanese rear areas. They tried to time their attacks for dawn or dusk, racing in at fifty to a hundred feet, weaving to confuse the ground gunners. They carried a formidable armament—aimed by a reflector sight on the canopy, a red ring with a blade to direct rockets, a dot for the guns. The whole aircraft shook violently when the 20mm nose battery fired. Exploding cannon shells raised a dustcloud around a target, or sometimes prompted more dramatic effects when they hit river sampans loaded with fuel. ‘For an instant,’ twenty-one-year-old Anthony Montague Browne of 211 Squadron wrote lyrically of such a moment, ‘the flight of shells caught the sunlight, shimmering like a swarm of silver bees.’ His unit’s ‘Beaus’ usually attacked in flights of three or four, preferring to do so without their squadron commander, a devout Catholic who could be seen crossing himself before making a dive. Other pilots begged him to desist from this practice: ‘It looked doom-laden and distinctly disconcerting.’ Once, over the Irrawaddy, Montague Brown saw a string of boats carrying a brilliantly-clad wedding party. Hapless guests sprang into the water as soon as they glimpsed the Beaufighter.
On the ground, at their airstrip, there were few comforts or diversions. Food was poor, the chief consolations a monthly ration of one bottle of whisky and four cans of Australian beer. When these were exhausted the pilots—a typical RAF mix of British, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand—had recourse to a local palm toddy arak, known as Rum, Bum and Broken Glass. Between operations every two or three days, they played a lot of poker. One squadron commander, with an implausible past as a ballet instructor, sought to raise the cultural tone by playing Les Sylphides on the mess gramophone before take-off. Beyond the airstrip, there was nowhere even to go for walks, amid unbroken swamps and jungle. The fliers had no contact with local people, except once when some aviation spirit was stolen. The British drove around the area in Jeeps, pleading with rice farmers not to use the high-octane fuel as a substitute for paraffin in their lamps. The Burmans took no heed. ‘That night, the sky was red with flames from burning huts, and pathetic little queues formed outside the medical units for treatment,’ wrote Montague Brown.
The area was notorious for extremes of weather. Once, a tornado blew down all their huts. In the air, they met violent thermal currents and thunderstorms. A hailstorm could strip the camouflage paint from wing leading edges, leaving the aluminium shining like silver. When a crew was lost, the squadron usually had no notion of its fate. An aircraft literally went missing. It was an unglamorous existence, detached from the rest of mankind and the war, though by a quirk of communications they received airmail editions of the London Times only five days after publication. Montague Brown—who became Winston Churchill’s private secretary a decade afterwards—wondered if the campaign would ever end. ‘Our progress to the liberation of Burma was extraordinarily lengthy,’ he wrote. ‘We had superiority in every arm, and after the early toe-to-toe slogging at Imphal…the terrain progressively improved for armour and transport…Why were we so dilatory?…Surely, we could have moved faster. I was later intrigued to find that Churchill shared this view.’ Hall Romney, a British PoW on Japan’s infamous Burma railway, wrote in his diary on 19 November 1944: ‘When one considers what the Americans have done in the Pacific, one cannot help thinking people have moved slowly in Western Asia.’