Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [61]
Burma offered no châteaux or champagne to senior officers. Slim’s chief of staff, Brig. John Lethbridge, described to his wife rats eating the soap in his “basha” and running over his bed at night; his sense of loneliness and remoteness; gnawing uncertainty about how long the campaign might continue. He begged for news of his garden in western England. “This place is vile in October. The sun is sucking up all the vile humours out of the stinking ground, and one sweats and sweats. I have ten GSO1s under me, and five are in hospital with malaria or dysentery, some with both!” Slim, paying a night visit to the headquarters map room, found himself almost stepping on a deadly krait. Thereafter, in that snake-ridden country, he used a torch fastidiously.
If such things were so for red-tabbed staff officers, conditions were infinitely harsher for men living, eating and sleeping within shot of the enemy. “Perhaps the reason why the old soldier154 is reputed to dramatise his story,” wrote Raymond Cooper, “is because he cannot create for those who do not know ‘the tiny stuffless voices of the dark,’ nor can he fully explain the change in the vital values of the ordinary things of life. The contrast is too great.” Victory at Imphal and Kohima had done much for the morale of Slim’s army, but remoteness from home was a corrosive force. Private Cecil Daniels, a twenty-three-year-old former Kent shop-worker, began his military service as an Aldershot mess waiter in 1939, became an officer’s batman, served in the Western Desert and Persia. By the winter of 1944 he had become an infantryman with the 2nd Buffs in Burma. Like so many others, this simple young man found himself bemused by the extraordinary experiences which befell him, so far from home. One night in his foxhole beside a pagoda, he lay awake gazing at the moon. “The thought went through my head155 that this same moon had been shining over the home of my family not so very many hours before, and I wondered what they were doing at this same moment, and what thoughts they were having of me.”
Though the army’s morale was high, said a War Office report dated 31 June 1944, “infidelity of soldiers’ wives156 is still a grave problem.” A company commander of 9th Borderers described an encounter a few minutes before an attack: “Waiting in the dark157 for reports to reach me that all were ready, I was approached by a man who blurted out in a hurried whisper that by that morning’s mail his wife had asked for a divorce. ‘I’ll talk to you about it in the morning’ seemed an inept reply to a man in his frame of mind, with five hundred Japs between him and the sunrise.” The regular morale report on British forces overseas, compiled for the War Office by Brig. John Sparrow, asserted in November 1944: “Anxiety about domestic affairs158 is rife among the troops, particularly long-serving men. Nine times out of ten it is caused by selfish women. Few officers or men feel completely secure. In one unit both the CO and RSM asked privately for my advice about their matrimonial troubles.”
Mountbatten told the army’s Morale Committee that the average British soldier “does not like India or Burma159, and never will. The country, the climate and people are alike repugnant to him.” Sparrow’s report noted continuing concern among British commanders overseas about “deliberate” desertions by some of their men—as distinct from drunken leave overstays and suchlike. “All seemed agreed,” wrote Sparrow to the adjutant-general, “that re-introduction of the death penalty would be the only satisfactory deterrent…It was generally realised,