Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [58]
But first it was necessary to find the enemy. A British officer noted that when his soldiers dug a foxhole, a pile of earth rose around it: “With the Japanese, you could never see138 that soil had been moved.” A Borderer in Raymond Cooper’s company139 was astonished to hear a “woodpecker”—a slow-firing Japanese light machine gun—chattering under his feet. Without noticing, he had stepped onto an enemy bunker. Cecil Daniels’s platoon of the Buffs, advancing warily through the jungle, received their first intimation of the enemy “when there was a sudden bang and the sergeant who had been walking by the side of and slightly in front of me went down like a log. Firing seemed to break out all around. A shout of ‘Stretcher-bearer’ went out, but I shouted ‘No need’ as I could see that he was already dead, twitching in the throes of involuntary muscle convulsion. He wasn’t breathing.” The company runner, “Deuce” Adams, shouted: “Look out, there’s a bloody Jap.” Somebody shouted: “Take him prisoner.” Someone else shouted: “Balls.” Adams emptied a tommy-gun magazine apparently into empty ground, at point-blank range. The other men could see nothing. When they closed in on Adams, they found him peering into a foxhole containing a dead Japanese soldier. “He smelt pretty much140, a sickly spicy smell such as all Japs seemed to have.”
The suddenness and savagery of such encounters made a profound impression on every man who experienced them, especially at night. The 25th Dragoons, an armoured unit, never forgot a moonless moment in the Arakan when the Japanese broke into their main dressing station: “The screams of the patients141, doctors and medical staff as they were shot and bayoneted, the blood-curdling yells of the attacking Japs through the night, was for all of us a nightmarish experience…This brutality and inhuman behaviour…affected us profoundly.” Some British commanders favoured fighting whenever possible in daylight, because they acknowledged Japanese mastery of darkness. Maj. John Hill’s men of the Berkshires were disgusted to find human body parts in the haversacks of dead enemy soldiers. They knew nothing of the cultural importance to every Japanese of returning some portion of a dead comrade’s body to his homeland. “The war in Burma was fought142 with a savagery that did not happen in the Western desert, Italy or north-west Europe,” wrote John Randle of the Baluchis. “I never once recall burying Jap dead. If there were sappers about, they were simply bulldozed into pits. Otherwise we shoved them into nullahs for the jackals and vultures to dispose of.”
By the autumn of 1944, courage, ruthlessness and fieldcraft were the principal assets remaining to the forces of Nippon. The Allies were overwhelmingly superior by every other measure of strength. Yet a War Office report based on prisoner interrogation noted that “the Japanese still considers himself143 a better soldier than his opposite number on the British side…because [we] avoid close combat, never attack by night and are ‘afraid to die.’” The author of this document recorded with some dismay that the Japanese thought less of British soldiers than of Indians or Gurkhas, and considered Fourteenth Army ponderous and slow-moving. They respected British tank, artillery and air