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By Root 1110 0

met tough resistance, they also found evidence that the Japanese lacked the skills and determination of earlier times. Their patrolling seemed halfhearted, and they sometimes exposed themselves carelessly. The familiar Japanese savagery towards prisoners was undiminished, however. After a battle on 21 January, the Berkshires found dead British soldiers beaten, stripped of their boots and suspended by electric flex upside down from trees. This encounter sharpened the battalion’s sentiment against their enemy. “Very few of us596, whether professional soldier or conscript or volunteer, felt any twinges of remorse when one either saw a dead Japanese or killed a live one,” wrote John Hill. “We had, after all, spent the whole war learning how to kill the enemy—and he us. No one expected any mercy.” At Kabwet, on the Irrawaddy north of Mandalay, Hill’s battalion lost nine officers and ninety other ranks, twenty-five of these in his own company, during operations to destroy a Japanese bridgehead. Gazing upon the enemy’s dead after the battle, one of his men said with a twinkle in his eye: “None of them surrendered597 then, sir?”

Slim’s feint in northern Burma has been hailed by posterity as a brilliant stroke, but for those at the sharp end, the price was hardship and fear. When the British 2nd Buffs began to cross the Shweli River near Myitson with 36th Division on 1 February, they were cruelly punished. Private Cecil Daniels reached the Japanese bank unhurt, and lay under its lee with other men, watching the sufferings of those caught by fire in midstream. “One of our chaps598 was calling, ‘Please help…I’ve got it in the guts.’ I felt so sorry for him…to be all alone and dying on a sandbar miles away from home tugged at my heartstrings but common sense got the better of me, I thought of my parents at home who had already lost one son. I was still cogitating whether to put one’s life at risk when his cries got fainter and he slowly slipped beneath the water and floated away.”

That night in the precarious British bridgehead, Daniels was eating his rations in a foxhole when the darkness was rent open by gunfire and the cries of his platoon sergeant: “They’ve broken through, get out, every man for himself!” The soldier wrote: “Then came the pounding of boots and silhouettes of men in flight, rushing past me kicking sand and dirt in my face as they ran down the bank, jumping into the swirling water. I sat in my hole quite bewildered by the rush of events, still eating my K ration.” Daniels was reluctant to quit his hole for the river, but in the chaos he saw no choice save to abandon helmet and pack, and join the panic-stricken throng wading back to the British bank of the Shweli. At dawn “a scene of absolute misery met our eyes—the rest of the company (what remained of it) were morosely sitting or wandering about in a daze, very downhearted. Each one seemed to be asking others: ‘Have you seen so-and-so?’” A lavish rum ration was issued.

Most men had lost their watches. Daniels had given his to a mate to mend. Now, he discovered that the mate was dead. Gazing at the brown water of the river, he saw the body of another company’s sergeant-major lying bloated in the current: “Although he wasn’t much liked in the battalion, it was a shame to see him like that.” Though Daniels’s company commander received a Military Cross for the action, it had cost the Buffs 114 dead and wounded. During the fortnight which followed, the river was successfully bridged elsewhere. It was fortunate for the spirits of Daniels and his comrades that they remained oblivious that they suffered in pursuit of a mere diversion.

The Shweli was a modest obstacle, beside the Irrawaddy. Slim staged Fourteenth Army’s crossings of one of the biggest rivers in Asia with a ramshackle armada of assault craft, pontoons and rafts which Eisenhower’s armies in Europe would have viewed with disbelief. There were no amtracs here. Slim himself observed ruefully: “I do not think any modern army has ever attempted the opposed crossing of a great river with so little.” The “big