Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [60]
Even when Fourteenth Army was winning battles, it never entirely conquered its other great enemy, disease. Many men disliked the marble-sized mepacrine tablets of which a daily dosage prevented malaria, at the cost of turning their skin yellow. In 1942–43, tablets were often discarded—not least by men who preferred malaria to combat—and perhaps also by a few who believed Japanese propaganda that they rendered a man impotent. By 1944, most units held parades to ensure that mepacrine was ingested as well as issued. Men were ordered never to expose more flesh than necessary after nightfall. In the conditions of the Burmese jungle, however, chronically inimical to human health, sickness caused more losses than gunfire. A six-month breakdown of148 20th Indian Division’s losses showed 2,345 battle casualties, and a further 5,605 non-battle hospital admissions. The latter included 100 accidents, 321 minor injuries, 210 skin diseases, 205 venereal, 170 psychiatric, 1,118 malaria and typhus, 697 dysentery.
Insects laid their curse upon man and mule. Fires were lit in bivouacs whenever security allowed, to keep mosquitoes at bay. A British surgeon described the difficulty of addressing patients: “One orderly was deputed149 to deal with the flies. He chased them off the instruments, the sterile dressing, the blood-soaked blanket, clothing and stretcher of the patient, the very wound itself, and swatted them as they tickled the defenceless, half-naked operator.” Chronic skin and foot infections, hepatitis, water rendered distasteful by purifying tablets, clothing never dry or clean were the lot of every infantryman. Nor were tank crews more comfortable. In a steel box, sweat poured down men’s torsos into the sodden waistbands of their shorts. Often it was impossible to clamber on the hot hull without using rags to protect skin, and especially knees. Crews were coated in dust, and breathed through handkerchiefs tied over mouths and noses. When a tank’s main armament fired, the stink of cordite lingered in the turret. There was noise, perpetual noise. John Leyin’s crew sang150 “The bells are ringing, for me and my gal” as their Lee lumbered into action, knowing that neither friend nor foe could hear the chorus above the roar of its engine.
Another tankman, Tom Grounds, described the aftermath of battle: “Back in harbour we faced151 the bleak task of getting the dead men out…I shall not forget the burned and wizened, half-crushed head of the loader. In shocked silence they were passed through the side-hatch and lowered to the ground. We dug two graves near the side of the hill…Padre Wallace Cox conducted a short service, and rough wooden crosses were put up. White ants would soon have eaten the crosses and the jungle grown over the graves.”
Like every battlefield, Burma demanded instant decisions about life and death. One day Col. Derek Horsford of 4/1st Gurkhas found his medical officer bent over a casualty with half his intestines trailing out of his abdomen. In his agony, the man was clawing mud from the ground and stuffing it into the wound. “Has he got a chance?152” Horsford demanded. The medical officer shook his head. “Give him an overdose of morphine.” A year later, the man amazed them all by writing from Nepal not only to report his survival, but to thank his officers for saving him. In attacks, junior leaders learned to be ruthless about leaving wounded where they lay, to await designated stretcher-bearers: otherwise there were far too many volunteers eager to escape carnage by carrying casualties to the rear.
Discipline was summarily enforced. A saddler with an Indian Army153 mountain artillery unit asked for some grenades, to protect himself in the event of a Japanese night attack. Instead, however, he deposited one in the bunk of a sergeant-major, killing him, and threw a second which wounded a British officer. It emerged that the