We were incredibly badly prepared to fight them,
We were so ignorant, we didn't know what to do,
It was all hand-to-hand fighting,
Boot, butt and bayonet,
The Japanese, they were first-class soldiers,
and very brave, and very brutal,
I confess, I absolutely loathed them,
We all had a deep loathing for them,
Lord Mountbatten, He said,
"You think you are the forgotten army,
You're not the forgotten army,
Nobody's ever heard of you,
On December 7th 1941, Japan launched a series of surprise attacks
against the Americans and British in the pacific,
They bombed the American fleet at pearl Harbor,
destroying or damaging 18 warships and 349 aircraft,
On the same day, they struck at Britain's colonies
in Hong Kong and Malaya,
By attacking while Britain was fighting for survival in Europe,
Japan hoped to wipe out British influence in the pacific,
By February 1942, the Japanese had swept through the Malay peninsula
and had captured Singapore,
together with 125,000 British and Allied troops,
Japan was now advancing westwards through Thailand,
towards Burma and its capital Rangoon,
Of all the British campaigns in World War II,
Burma was the worst.
Not because it was the longest
though it was, nearly four years
but because in Burma there was so much more to fear and to endure:
A fanatical enemy, the jungle,
hunger, thirst, disease,
dying of wounds hundreds of miles from anywhere,
and being taken prisoner by the Japanese.
Soldiers who fought in other places knew of these things
and were grateful not to be here.
And so it seems sad that for 50 years
the men who did fight here, the 14th Army,
thought of themselves as forgotten.
Few of the men of the 14th Army have ever returned to Burma,
but last May three went back with us to visit some of the places
they fought in as young soldiers half a century ago,
John Hill, of the 2nd Battalion of the Berkshire Regiment,
commanded a company of infantry,
Richard Rhodes James was a Chindit,
the long-range penetration force
that fought behind Japanese lines,
Bruce Kinloch - like the others, in his early 20s
was in the 1st 3rd Gurkhas,
He was the first of the three to encounter the Japanese,
only 10 weeks after pearl Harbor,
To reach Rangoon, the Japanese had to cross a bridge spanning the River Sittang,
The British 17th Division had prepared the bridge for demolition,
but only one brigade of three had reached the safety of the west bank,
Bruce Kinloch and his Gurkha riflemen were defending the eastern end of the bridge,
trying to fight off the Japanese
until the remaining two thirds of the division could cross,
The problem for the British commander
was to choose the right moment to blow up the bridge,
At half past five in the morning there were three enormous explosions.
And after that there was absolute silence.
For at least, I think, two or three minutes.
Complete silence.
And then the Japs realised first,
and started chattering like a whole wagon-load of monkeys.
And then our hearts fell down into our boots.
We realised that our route across the river had been cut.
So your own side had blown the bridge
Leaving you on the other side of the river
Were you angry? Bloody angry.
We were doing the job we were meant to do,
then some bugger goes and blows the bloody bridge before we could get over it.
Kinloch decided to swim the river and look for boats,
So where did you swim across? Roughly, you see just over that boat there
It's a long swim, about a thousand yards.
And what did you find when you got there? Well, no troops.
And all the boats we inspected had been smashed in by the sappers
to prevent the Japs getting them.
We launched one and it sank,
so we went and found another one.
Eventually, we did find one which was usable,
quite a big sanpan, and brought it across.
Who were the first you took over? The wounded?
That's right. The wounded had been left Behind because they were too far gone.
Some of them were literally dying,
but we felt we couldn't leave them in the hands of the Japs.
Thousands of British and Indian troops were taken prisoner,
Of nearly 5,000 men cut off,
fewer than 2,000 eventually got away,
It was the decisive battle of the campaign,
for the bridge was the last obstacle between the Japanese and Rangoon,
70 miles away,
We were incredibly badly prepared to fight them.
We had no barbed wire.
We had no guns to support us.
All our trenches were badly sited.
We were so ignorant, we didn't know what to do.
All the time I was in the Burma Rifles,
we never went in the jungle.
We had absolutely tiptop jungle fighting troops,
but we trained them for mounting guard
in St James's palace.
The army had little air support,
In Britain, after the retreat from Dunkirk,
the RAF had beaten off the threat of a German invasion,
In Burma, with only 37 fighters,
the air force was outnumbered and outclassed by Japanese planes,
The Japanese had got Zeros as fighters, which far outflew anything
that the British or the Americans could put together,
especially out there.
I think there was about 12 Hurricanes,
ex-Battle of Britain, ex-Middle East,
shunted out to Burma.
There was No.5 Squadron Mohawks,
and there was a squadron of Brewster Buffalos.
Now, the Brewster Buffalos, nobody'd fly 'em,
not even the Yanks who made 'em.
The Yanks reckoned that when you got in a Brewster Buffalo and took off,
you were lucky if you touched ground again
without any fighters or meeting anybody.
Rangoon still has the look of a faded imperial capital,
Until 1937, Burma was governed as a province of India,
At the outbreak of war,
it was still a relatively quiet outpost of empire,
one the British never expected to have to defend,
The Japanese bombers had first attacked Rangoon in December,
There was a major raid on Christmas Day,
Indian traders and labourers made up half the population of the capital,
and the Indians were the first to flee,
abandoning their shops and businesses
and work on Rangoon's defences,
The Indian population, which had been considerable,
was fleeing out en masse,
Men, women and children.
There was virtually no support for them at all.
The further we got out, it was quite appalling
to see children, particularly, begging for water,
and you simply couldn't give it
because you hadn't got enough yourself.
Added to this, there was a large cholera epidemic amongst them
because they had been drinking any water they could get,
most of which was polluted.
This added an extra horror onto it.
At one stage I rememberjust down the road there were piles of Indian corpses
being flung on flames and burnt with paraffin.
We walked out of this small Burmese town
on the main road going to Rangoon, and we looked,
and it's dead straight, on a kind of bund.
As far as the eye could see there was one complete chain of bullock-carts...
travelling at bullock-cart rate,
which is just under one mile to the hour,
All the Indians escaping,
And General Scott, Bruce Scott, he looked at it and he said,
"Good God. How am I going to get my division through here?"
Of course, he couldn't.
The British army was now engaged in a long and painful fighting withdrawal
1,000 miles north-eastward to India,
lts dependence on wheeled vehicles was a huge disadvantage
in a country that had hardly any roads,
The Japanese used bicycles and walked,
and when they met a roadblock simply made a detour
through the jungle using animal tracks,
For the British, the problem was reaching the Indian frontier
before the monsoon flooded the rivers,
Just in time, they reached the River Chindwin,
where Bruce Kinloch's Gurkhas were once again defending a bridgehead,
The Japanese 33rd Division came racing up the Chindwin
and caught Slim rather by surprise.
They got to this place, Shwegin,
which was his chosen crossing point,
and by the time he got there, the basin at Shwegin,
which has got 200-foot cliffs,
the whole basin was packed full of refugees,
lorries, tanks and so on and so forth.
Sounds rather like Dunkirk two years earlier.
Yes, I suppose so,
but in a slightly smaller version than Dunkirk.
We had masses of equipment left, of course.
There must have been something like 2,000 lorries, eventually,
in the basin and at Galeba just upstream.
And there was something like, I think, 100 tanks,
and I don't know how many guns, about 40 guns.
So, from that point of view, it was a major disaster.
- Did you get the men out? - Yes, that's the main point.
That the men got out was really almost a major, not a minor, miracle.
In only four months, the British had been forced to retreat into India,
abandoning Burma to the Japanese,
Many Burmese initially welcomed the Japanese as liberators,
but some of the northern hill tribes stayed loyal to the British
and fought the Japanese as guerrillas,
A handful of British officers stayed behind to train and equip them,
Dennis Rosler, an Anglo-Burmese who still lives in Burma,
helped set up a private army called the Kachin Levies,
Kachins, of course, they knew about ambushes,
from the old, old days.
They used to ambush their own tribal enemies, one tribe fighting another,
and they knew all the tactics.
But we didn't know about these bamboo spikes.
They told us, "To make your ambush 100o/o successful, you must use bamboo spikes."
They showed us,
and they said, "We'll do it all for you."
So the most likely places where the enemy
would take cover as soon as the firing started,
they stuck these bamboo spikes into the ground,
into the undergrowth there, the grass,
and, of course, we knew at once that it's natural for the enemy,
as soon as the firing started, to take cover,
get off the road into the bushes and take cover.
And the first ambush was really very successful.
The Japanese never suspected bamboo spikes.
Oh, they lost, I think, most of them.
Only, I should say, about 10o/o escaped.
The rest all died. Yes, yes.
How did you pay the troops and the villagers?
We paid the troops 30 kyats a month,
and the villagers, we gave them presents of cash
whenever they'd bring in Japanese ears.
The villagers used to go and ambush on their own,
without telling us a thing.
They'd go and wait on the motor road,
and they'd see a few Japs coming along,
they'd shoot them and cut off their right ear
and put a bamboo through the ear,
and when they had enough ears,
they'd come to our headquarters,
we'd count the ears and give them the money.
Unlike British and Indian troops,
the Japanese had been trained to fight in the jungle,
They travelled light,
Unencumbered by lorries and heavy equipment,
and apart from a ration of rice and cigarettes,
they virtually lived off the land,
Japanese society was geared to war,
lts young men entered military service already trained to obey,
In defeat as well as victory, the Japanese soldier was tough,
brave to the point of fanaticism
and imbued with the spirit of bushido,
the code of honour that described death as a duty
and surrender as the ultimate disgrace,
When the Great Asian War began,
then we were forcefully told
that it was extremely shameful to be taken prisoner.
Army headquarters sent out the field-service code
to every unit in the army.
In it there was something that I now consider to be particularly cruel.
It said that it was better to die than to be taken prisoner.
Even if you have to die, you shouldn't become a prisoner.
The Japanese soldier was capable of astonishing brutality,
There were many cases of wounded British and Indian prisoners being tied to trees
and used for bayonet practice,
None of the hundreds of thousands of Allied troops who
became prisoners of war of the Japanese will ever forget those years,
Mostly it was bashing round the face and head,
and, of course, slapping.
When you say a slap is nothing,
you give a person a good slap, it's as good as any punch.
Wham! Wham! Wham! And you're supposed to stand there.
And if you fell down, they still did it.
Of course, they start kicking you.
You just had to curl up and hope they didn't do any permanent damage.
In early days, a couple of Australians retaliated
immediately taken outside and executed.
One of my English company did the same thing
and I told the others, "You've got to take it."
You'd have this geezer of five foot three knocking the hell out of you,
but you daren't retaliate.
Of the 50,000 British prisoners captured by the Japanese in 1941,
nearly one in three died in the camps,
The retreat from Burma,
the longest in British army history,
had shattered morale,
What the soldiers now needed most was a success to lift their spirit,
The man of the hour was the unorthodox, quarrelsome Colonel Orde Wingate,
who'd made his name as a guerrilla commander
against the Italians in Ethiopia,
He believed that to fight in the jungle,
the troops must use mules instead of lorries
and could live in the jungle for months
if they could be supplied by air,
Wingate's force of eight columns set off from lmphal in India in February 1943,
Their task was to ambush Japanese outposts
and blow up bridges and railway lines,
Wingate called his force the Chindits,
taking the name from the mythical beast the Chinthe,
part-lion, part-eagle, that stands guard outside thousands of Burmese pagodas,
Richard Rhodes James was a 22-year-old Chindit officer
in one of the Gurkha columns,
I suppose this is relatively thin, is it? Yes, it is, really.
If the jungle was really thick, you had big problems.
How do you point your compass to the next stage for yourjourney?
But in many cases, the jungle was, in a sense, our friend.
We were behind the enemy lines for five months,
and if you wanted safety, we made for the jungle.
So the jungle was quite a friend to us.
The funny thing is that if you went into very thick jungle,
the Japanese did not follow.
They were as afraid of a really thick jungle as we were.
General Wingate really showed the world
that the Japanese was not a greatjungle demon as we thought he was before.
What did you do about food?
The food we had entirely from the air,
Every four or five days, a Dakota, we hoped,
would send us food,
Every four or five days, along they came.
We lit an L-shaped flare-path,
and the aircraft dropped its food.
The sky was our salvation,
If the sky failed, there was nowhere else to go to,
Everything that the army had down below,
apart from the rain and the sunshine,
we supplied.
You'd run through it...
You could name 100 items the army had down below,
and we supplied it.
We didn't supply the mud that they struggled in.
A signal was generally just a cross,
That was what we called a DZ, a dropping zone,
And if they'd got their wits about 'em, they lit a fire,
so we knew which way the wind was blowing,
Sometimes the weather closed in and the sky failed us,
and for days on end men would go without any food of any kind.
One column was ten days without food.
When that happened, what did we do?
We turned to the mules, poor things, and we had started to eat them.
I do not recommend mule steak. It is impenetrable.
You were in temperatures of what? 100 degrees?
Well into the 90s, and this did pose considerable problems of dehydration.
We seemed almost to flow with our perspiration.
Everyone was supposed to take salt water every day to make up for it.
We longed for water.
A sight like this would be manna from heaven.
Once, when we were desperately short of water,
we came to a dry river bed, and in that bed we dug.
About after a foot or two of mouldy mud came the precious substance,
this filthy liquid,
which we sterilised and drank as if it was pure nectar.
And every moment of bliss was a moment of drink,
until the scene changed very dramatically,
and after two or three months
the stuff poured down unwanted and unwelcome.
During the monsoon everything was nearly at a standstill,
You could fill a bucket of water in about four minutes,
just holding it out in the rain,
This is an idea of what the monsoon was like,
Everything was bogged down,
Burma is a land of charms or ravines,
and for much of the year they're dry and they represent no problem,
But come the monsoon,
they become raging torrents,
and getting about becomes incredibly difficult,
You can't drive a jeep or anything across,
The whole country becomes a kind of lake,
In 1943, for every man evacuated with wounds,
the British evacuated 120 sick,
The malaria rate alone was 84o/o for the army as a whole,
and higher still among forward troops,
Dysentery came next,
followed by skin diseases and typhus,
I shall never forget my first case of scrub typhus,
and that was in an African soldier who came in with a fever one day.
And I didn't know what the disease was,
They thought at first it was dropped by the Japanese,
but it wasn't - it was a little mite that was in a bush.
The bush had a blue flower,
I believe. I've never seen it.
These men came down
and we had more of those than we ever had wounded.
They were just so ill.
First, we thought they had double pneumonia
or dysentery or malaria,
but we identified this particular disease with a little mark on their skin,
somewhere on their body, with a bite,
just like a flea bite.
Out of that one night, I had 150 cases of scrub typhus,
of which 75 died.
It was a terrible disease.
On my ward, we lost seven in the first week,
which was really quite frightening to me,
having come out thinking I was going to be Florence Nightingale,
running around on the ward quite comfortably.
That was terribly traumatic in my life.
I've never forgotten it.
They were so far away from home.
The Chindits in Wingate's first expedition
suffered more than any other unit in Burma
A thousand men, a third of the force, were killed
or died or were taken prisoner,
Many of the wounded had to be left behind,
But the army had fought back
and had proved that it could fight in the jungle on equal terms with the enemy,
and that was a powerful boost to its morale,
There were twice as many Indian and Gurkha troops
in Burma as British soldiers,
In India, the independence movement was flourishing,
but the Indian regiments were not only loyal
but proved to be among the bravest fighting on the Allied side anywhere,
I didn'tjoin out of patriotism.
I joined because I wanted to be a soldier,
I wanted to join the army, and I applied for the army and
I was lucky, I got straight in.
The Indian soldiers did it as a job.
It was a good profession.
Most of them, their fathers, grandfathers,
great-great-grandfathers had been in the army,
and they applied.
And they fought in the army with British officers.
Some regiments had a bad time,
where the Indian officer and the British officer did not get on,
but I don't think that was a common thing.
It's probably true, when you're back in a garrison town in India,
where, for instance, there were some clubs which would still not have Indian officers
officers of Indian birth.
When you get up at the sharp end,
those sort of things disappear.
What matters is what sort of chap he is.
It doesn't honestly matter.
It didn't matter to me what the colour of his skin was.
If he was a good, loyal comrade in battle,
that's all that mattered.
In March 1944, two years into the Burma campaign,
Japan launched what it hoped would be the decisive battle
an invasion over land of north-east India,
Japanese commanders had persuaded each other that a successful offensive
would touch off a revolt against British rule,
and that this might eventually deliver the whole of India into Japanese hands,
Without roads or air support,
the Japanese soldiers had to carry everything they needed
weapons, ammunition and rice - on their backs,
They only had food for 21 days,
So their immediate objective had to be
the main British supply bases in Assam, at Dimapur and lmphal,
First, they would cut the road between the two bases at a hill-station called Kohima,
The British knew they were coming,
The 14th Army commander, the legendary General Slim,
withdrew his divisions from their forward positions,
He concentrated them in the plains around lmphal
and laid a trap for the enemy,
But Slim underestimated the speed of the Japanese advance,
Even frequent Allied air attacks failed to stop them,
And before Slim could deploy his divisions,
the enemy was on his doorstep,
A series of extremely bloody engagements raged for the next four months,
The most desperate battle was at Kohima,
The Japanese surrounded Kohima very rapidly
and assaulted it from all directions.
It became a very, very close-fought battle.
We had no room for manoeuvre.
We were penned in our perimeter, which started...
I suppose the original perimeter of the Kohima garrison
was half a mile, something of that...
a third of a mile, perhaps,
each defended position being a hummock,
a hillock within the hill complex.
The wounded were put in trenches.
The trenches were dug, long communication trenches.
They were put in the trenches and they were lying on stretchers.
By that time, the stretchers were finished also.
They were lying in the trenches.
Some of them were wounded a second time,
some a third time, by the shelling.
We lost enormous casualties from people being shot by snipers,
I think everybody who survived that campaign remembers
I certainly remember being missed many times by snipers' shots,
You sometimes had to move and you had to take the risk,
But it made life extremely difficult
in getting water, ammunition, food, in the hours of daylight,
The defenders, outnumbered by 30 to 1,
were bombarded by day and night,
The entire day the shelling went on.
All of us were in our trenches. We couldn't get out.
And it was very heavy shelling.
It went on right through the whole day
and then it suddenly stopped in the evening.
So when it stopped, I got out immediately,
and I found the entire place on fire,
All the troops had either been killed or they had left,
I saw a long line of Japs with bayonets advancing.
Behind them I saw a second line of Japs advancing,
behind that a third line of Japs advancing,
I got the hell out of there
Under the impact of the assault,
the garrison had to retreat to a tiny perimeter,
That made air drops, its only source of supplies,
become increasingly difficult and hazardous,
It had got to land one side of a tennis court.
If it landed the other side,
the Japs had it.
If you missed the target and it rolled down the hill,
the Japs had it.
The British did have their air drops,
but the Japanese were already on starvation rations,
In the morning when the British troops got their food rations,
we could hear the sound of their tins rattling.
We were really envious.
We had virtually nothing.
For us, or for the front-line soldiers,
there were ten days or two weeks
when we didn't get even one grain of rice.
Instead, we ate jungle plants,
root ginger, leaves or bamboo shoots.
Sometimes we'd live on those plants for two weeks.
Outside the perimeter, the Japanese were starving,
Inside it, the British and Indian troops were exhausted,
14 days, this went on.
The level of fatigue was one of the great enemies.
It was extremely diff...
You could not afford to relax,
certainly during the hours of darkness,
because attacks were repeatedly being made.
You had to be absolutely ready with the radio to call the guns,
The British garrison did have support from artillery two miles away,
Several Japanese attacks were broken up before they could properly begin,
Enemy fire and grenades would come flying down onto the water tank.
They would hit it and roll off.
British grenades took longer to go off than ours.
Those that rolled in our direction,
we managed to pick up and threw back before they exploded.
We did that sort of thing.
It was just like playing a tennis game.
At one point, the Japanese broke through
and captured the garrison's bakery,
Most were quickly killed,
The remaining Japs who were left
had crawled into the huge concrete ovens which were in there,
and they were lobbing grenades out of the mouth of the oven.
So we then had to blow in the walls of the oven.
And one man got out of it,
and he ran out towards the perimeter, the edge,
everybody shooting at him, he fell on the ground,
it couldn't have been more than 20 yards from where I was.
And five BORs ran to take him prisoner.
I shouted out to them to stay back.
The man was wounded. He couldn't run from there.
They didn't pay any attention.
He pulled out two grenades.
Now, the Japanese grenade has a nipple. It doesn't have a...
It's set off by banging the nipple against your thigh or the ground.
He held the two grenades, having banged them,
held them against his chest.
As the five BORs reached him,
the grenades went up, went off.
I think out of the five, three were killed
and two were wounded, and the man died.
Bodies, both Japanese outside the perimeter
and our own within the perimeter,
lay everywhere rotting,
and there was little that could be done about it.
The ground was not very soft. A lot of it was rather rocky ground.
It wasn't easy to dig graves.
And at the end,
the entire garrison was absolutely littered with heaps of rotting bodies,
which made it extremely grim and unpleasant.
It took two weeks
for a British relief force to fight its way through the Japanese lines,
The garrison survivors were evacuated,
The Japanese fought on for another eight weeks
but failed to capture any British bases,
and without supplies their offensive petered out,
Their retreat was a nightmare,
The soldiers we saw withdrawing had no food.
They had dysentery and malaria.
They fell down, piled up on each other and died.
Strangely, they never fell in the middle of the road.
They always went to the side of the road,
on a slight mound where it was less wet.
Those who had died earlier had already turned to skeletons.
The skeletons were wearing torn uniforms.
More soldiers, using the skeletons as their pillows,
had laid down and died themselves.
On top of them a third layer of dying soldiers were piling up.
Behind them on the battlefield at Kohima and lmphal,
the Japanese left 35,000 dead,
It was their last offensive in Burma,
I confess, I absolutely loathed them,
We all had a deep loathing for them,
I felt they were just vermin and needed to be exterminated,
I think that actually helped us to fight a good battle,
Japan had been waging war on two Burmese fronts
against the British and Indians in the north-west,
and the Chinese, under American command,
in the north-east,
To supply the Chinese divisions,
the Americans wanted to drive a road from India across Burma to China,
and to clear the way for the road, Chinese forces were pushing southwards,
To support the Chinese,
a large force of British, West African and Gurkha Chindits
would be flown in gliders to central Burma
to cut the Japanese supply lines,
Their main target was the single-track railway
running north-south through Burma,
As bases, the Chindits would build their own temporary strongholds,
Their code-names were White City and Blackpool,
Richard Rhodes James fought with the 2nd Chindit Expedition,
50 years on, he went back with us to the site at Blackpool,
travelling along the railway line his expedition had tried to block,
The Chindits had to build their own stronghold,
starting with an airstrip.
Without one, they'd have none of the guns,
the heavy weapons they'd need,
to build a fortress.
The first four gliders to come in all crashed.
The Chindits extended the airstrip,
some Dakotas did get in,
they did get some guns anti-aircraft and 25-pounders.
But all this time the Chindits were being attacked by the Japanese,
shelled during the day, frontal attacks at night.
They lost many men,
and the whole thing was a recipe for disaster.
Today, the stronghold the Chindits called Blackpool
is lost in these densely wooded foothills,
By siting it on rising ground, the Chindit commander could protect his airstrip
and dominate the railway line,
But the forest gave cover to the Japanese,
who easily surrounded the position,
And then they attacked one by one,
firstly in small doses and then more and more,
until the last day, May 25th 1944,
when the attack came from that least expected side,
across the strip, no more Dakotas landing,
and into the line of Gurkhas defending that strip.
We had a shrinking perimeter,
we had enemy penetration,
we had no food, we had very little ammunition
and we were surrounded on three sides.
And we did not know, quite frankly, what to do.
We started pulling out,
And there followed the most horrific struggle,
Three days it took to get to the top of that mountain.
- Taking your wounded? - Taking our sick and wounded.
Some wounded were on horses,
some staggered up by themselves and some on bamboo stretchers.
Three days we struggled up that path
before we could get out of the gaps.
They didn't follow.
I still don't know why.
Did you get the wounded out, all of them? No, we didn't.
And here the story takes a very sad turn.
Some were grievously wounded,
so grievously that they could not be allowed to continue in their agony,
and so we put their agony to an end
it was the only thing to do.
60 miles further south, a second column of Chindits
placed a block directly across the railway track,
They called it White City,
They arrived at night,
and next morning the Japanese attacked,
The Japanese were about 200 or 300 yards away.
And they were based on a hillock on which there was a pagoda.
And they were causing a great deal of casualties.
Brigadier Calvert decided to do something about it
and lined everybody up for a bayonet charge.
He joined in himself.
And they got up and attacked us with bayonets and with swords.
A lot of grenades flying around,
It was a hell of a fight.
The Japs took everybody on.
It was all hand-to-hand fighting.
Boot, butt and bayonet.
And in the end, they had enough and they broke and ran.
After the fighting,
I found Lieutenant Cairns propped up against a bank.
I knew him very well. He's...
He taught me even to swim.
His wounds were dressed...
and I sat down beside him.
During the fighting a Japanese officer had cut off his arm,
but he shot the officer
and went on killing and wounding many more.
He looked up at me and said, "What chance have I got?"
And I said, "Every chance in the world, sir."
I wasn't being very truthful.
He asked for a cigarette.
I gave him one and he took a couple of puffs,
and then he closed his eyes and he died.
I got up and walked away. I felt terribly sad.
He was awarded the Victoria Cross.
The Chindits now dug themselves in for a long siege,
The battle normally began at dusk
with Japanese creeping up to the wire
and putting explosives into the wire
to try and blow a hole in the gap.
They were usually extremely noisy.
They came shouting and screaming and blowing bugles.
The Japanese, when they started to attack,
they had about 30 yards of wire,
First World War wire,
booby-trapped, mines and everything,
and with about...
up to about 12 three-inch mortars mortaring them
and about the same number of Vickers machine-guns.
And the Japanese were just being mowed down on this barbed wire until...
They left their bodies there.
They stank to high heaven.
And they just repeated the formula which had failed, night after night,
for a very long period of time,
and exposed themselves to, really, pretty heavy casualties.
But they didn't stop. They really were most aggressive.
They tried running at us with Bangalore Torpedoes.
These are an awful...
A long tube filled with explosive.
The men strip naked, hang on to it, take a run,
throwing themselves at the wire,
blowing themselves to pieces,
to make a gap.
But they were never successful.
While the Chindits held their stronghold at White City,
their leader, Orde Wingate, was killed in an air crash,
The Chindits fell under the command of the American General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell,
a ruthless character whose own troops detested him,
Stilwell now ordered the exhausted Chindits to march north
and capture the heavily defended railway town of Mogaung,
When we got nearer Mogaung and the monsoon had broken,
we were getting very wet.
We were patrolling down into the valley.
It was very difficult to cross the river running through the valley,
and the paddy-fields, the rice fields, were all flooded,
and everything was very hard-going and very muddy,
And when we reached Mogaung, it really was very bad,
It was marshy and wet,
and we, by then, were not in such good physical shape,
The Americans were complaining about us,
said we were all cowards and we wouldn't fight.
And Mountbatten entered into it and said,
"We want you to take Mogaung at all costs. I repeat, at all costs."
Something hit me, I think it was in the right leg, the boot.
I remember myself falling.
And even as I was falling,
I knew there were no more rounds in the rifle.
And I tried desperately to put some in, some bullets in.
The Jap came from a few yards,
I think he was hit.
He was staggering rather than running.
He came towards me. He had a small grenade.
You throw them on the ground and they burst on impact.
He threw it down. Most of it went up into his own face.
He staggered back and went round and round and round,
and then suddenly he collapsed.
He could not have survived.
But I'd got it too. I was bleeding from the head
and my right leg was in an awful mess.
I remember being evacuated out by an L-5 plane
and waking up in hospital.
There was an orderly there,
and I said to him, "Is it off?"
And he said, "Yes."
And I put my hand down under the bedclothes
and I felt the short stump and the bandages,
and I felt really good.
I was elated.
I thought, "I can lie here
day after day in perfect peace."
For me it was all over.
I said we couldn't go on,
and Mountbatten and Vinegar Joe and other people,
I suppose, didn't believe us.
They sent in a number of... a surgical team to come in
and decide what we were at.
They reported back saying that everybody's had malaria a number of times,
there are large numbers of wounded,
and these people should be evacuated as soon as possible,
otherwise, and Mountbatten used the phrase
"otherwise history will blame us."
We had been literally... fought till we were on our knees.
The role we were expected to carry out at Mogaung
was really one for which we were not suited or trained.
Frontal attack across open ground with no artillery
and against Japanese positions that were well dug in
was not really what we were intended for.
It was a waste of our expertise, really.
By late 1944, the British were ready to invade Burma from India,
John Hill and his company of the 2nd Royal Berkshires
were part of the invading force
General Slim intended to exploit the 14th Army's superiority in tanks,
and for that the flat country of central Burma was ideal,
What made the reconquest of Burma so difficult
was that the Allies had no access to a seaport.
All their supply bases were hundreds of miles away across the mountains in India.
What the Allies did have was virtual control of the air,
and that was crucial.
Without the air force,
the British and Indian divisions would have come to a standstill,
would have been without water or food or petrol,
or replacement supplies of ammunition, weapons and men.
The Japanese had concentrated defences on the far side of the River Irrawaddy,
which runs for 1300 miles through Burma
and is one of the widest rivers in Asia,
It's a formidable obstacle.
You should have been massacred if the Japanese had been defending it properly.
Absolutely, but it was so wide and so big,
they didn't have the chance to defend everywhere.
They must have seen where you were coming from.
Yes. Night attacks, night advances,
surprise concentration of force,
were the things we tried to use.
General Slim had a deception plan,
He wanted the Japanese to think
that his main crossing of the Irrawaddy would be in the north,
The Japanese didn't expect further crossings in the south,
and of those there were several,
In January 1945, several divisions from five Allied nations crossed the Irrawaddy,
Mainly they used boats built from local materials on the river-bank,
And the Japanese were taken by surprise, were they?
Initially, yes. They had minimum strengths on the other bank at this point,
so we were able to fight our way through on the first night.
Very quickly afterwards, there was major activity
which created real problems for this initial assault.
The 14th Army's successful crossings of the Irrawaddy
directly threatened Japan's hold on two Burmese cities,
both of them major military bases
Mandalay, the old royal capital, and Meiktila,
The Japanese had expected the attack on Mandalay,
but the assault on Meiktila was a complete surprise,
The garrison, composed mainly of second-rank troops, was overwhelmed,
The British captured the main supply base
for five Japanese divisions,
Repeated attempts to retake Meiktila failed
and the Japanese army in Burma began to run out of supplies,
On March 7th, tanks of the British Indian 19th Division
were in the approaches to Mandalay,
Ahead of them was Mandalay Hill, encrusted with pagodas
and Burma's principal place of pilgrimage,
The hill was held by elements of Japan's formidable 15th Division,
whose commander had ordered his men to defend Mandalay to the last man,
It was the Gurkhas who captured Mandalay Hill,
They climbed it at night and attacked the summit next morning,
John Hill's Royal Berkshires helped to eject the Japanese defenders,
The last stage of the attack on the hill by our battalion
was to take 20 Japanese out of this tunnel that we're walking in now.
They were barricaded in.
There were stores in here and a good deal of guns and equipment,
and typical Jap fashion,
they weren't going to surrender quickly.
So we decided to get some petrol drums,
roll them down at one end of the tunnel
and then set alight to them with pistols and with tracer.
Some 20 were killed and set on fire,
and the other few escaped through the north end of the tunnel
and died because that tunnel end was covered by some more of our chaps.
So the enemy in the tunnel was burnt alive Absolutely.
Burnt alive as far as the ones in the tunnel were concerned.
Two actually got out and threw themselves over this cliff,
flaming as they went.
As you can see, it's some cliff.
Their bodies were found afterwards.
I think our ethos we had,
certainly all my people knew that they had to kill
every single Jap by whatever means possible,
because the Jap would not surrender
and only did so in a minimum number of occasions throughout Burma.
I was certainly tempted to give up
when I saw a leaflet which said, "I surrender."
It was about five centimetres by fifteen centimetres in size,
and it said, "Come to us with this leaflet as soon as you can,
and you will be well treated by us."
We'd been told that this was British propaganda.
I couldn't make up my mind.
I couldn'tjudge whether we would be killed
or whether we would be well treated.
In the end, the fear of being killed was stronger.
Mandalay Hill had fallen to the British,
but down below another bastion, Fort Dufferin,
was still firmly in Japanese hands,
protected by its moat, thick walls and 50-foot ramparts of earth,
the Japanese resisted attacks by tanks, bombers
and infantry equipped with assault boats,
scaling ladders and flame-throwers,
And then, on March 20th, the attackers
discovered that the enemy had fled,
escaping through a sewer under the moat,
The Allies now had to clear the city,
John Hill remembers street fighting in the market-place
and the difficulty of winkling the Japanese out of the houses and alleys,
My company had the task of clearing the west of Mandalay.
We argued this was a good task for a brigade,
let alone one company.
- It's a big town. - It's a big town.
But we were fully engaged elsewhere
and the need was to push on at all costs
and get round the Japanese as fast as we could.
Were the Japanese organised at this point?
There was no major Japanese resistance.
It was independent, individual fighting bodies left behind in little pockets.
Each pocket had to be dealt with separately.
- Just hiding in these houses? - Absolutely.
In the edge of the houses, the edge of the trees, tucked into the bushes and hedges,
anywhere they could get a place.
It was inevitably 100 yards, 100 yards, 100 yards,
each 100 yards being a separate little action.
What about the Burmese? What were they doing?
We never saw any Burmese at all.
The whole of the town had been evacuated.
The Japanese were finally cleared out of Mandalay by the end of March,
The city was left in ruins,
like many of the Burmese towns and villages in the war zone,
Mandalay was the last major battle of the campaign,
Throughout April and May,
the British continued their push towards Rangoon in the south,
Organised Japanese resistance was almost at an end,
although remnants were trying to escape from Burma into Thailand,
For the first time in the campaign,
large numbers of Japanese troops began to surrender,
I remember seeing the first Japanese that we did take,
and there was a dejected figure.
British soldiers being what they are, a wave of sympathy.
Chaps were going up, giving this chap cups of tea and fags.
So, an astonishing sort of volte-face between hating the guy and killing him,
and the next moment the sort of pity for a fellow soldier in a tough spot.
Many Japanese fought on,
but without food, ammunition or heavy weapons,
they were overwhelmed by the 14th Army's superior fire-power,
The Japanese left 185,000 dead in Burma,
three out of every five soldiers who fought there,
It was Japan's greatest defeat on land during the war,
We showed them no mercy as long as they were fighting.
I don't think, perhaps, we did as much to help their wounded as we might have done.
I'm not saying that we were callous,
but there wasn't the same chivalry as fighting the Germans,
where you brought their wounded in.
In May 1945, the 14th Army re-entered Rangoon,
Burma was to have been a springboard for the reconquest of Malaya,
Singapore and Hong Kong,
but in August of 1945
America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan,
and that ended World War II,
Among the survivors who fought in Burma
are many who never speak of their war,
Among those who do, many have bitter memories of the Japanese,
They were pretty savage, they were very fierce,
and I suppose if you've been as frightened by them certainly as I was,
you don't hold very happy memories of them.
I just do not like them.
Just outside Rangoon at Htauk Kyant is the principal memorial
to the 37,000 British, Indian, Nepalese and African soldiers
who lost their lives in Burma,
Etched into the stonework of these pillars
are the names of 26,000 men who have no known graves
because they were never recovered from the hills and the jungles of Burma,
They vastly outnumber
the cemetery's 6,300 named graves