Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [65]
Some of those who marched into Burma in the winter of 1944, including McAllister, had been waiting years to see action. Maj. John Hill was a pre-war regular soldier, now a company commander in the 2nd Berkshires, who had spent forty months on garrison duties in India: “The war took a long time171 to reach us.” The Berkshires were shocked by their first sights of battle: “Jeep ambulances came slowly past us with the groaning, bloody, bandaged forms of three men. I remember saying to myself: ‘So this is it,’ and others must have thought the same. The ambulances passed the whole battalion slowly, as if to emphasise the moment. It seemed odd that, after five years of war, this was our first sight of casualties…To most of us, the next few short months would seem as long as years. To a few, they would be positive enjoyment; to most, a time when a job had to be done; to others, positive purgatory.”
Men’s battle careers were often brutally abbreviated. Charles Besly of the Berkshires was a twenty-six-year-old BSc, who before the war had worked in a circus and as assistant stage manager of a London theatre company. In Denmark when war broke out, he hitchhiked home to join the army. By January 1945 he had served for a year with his battalion as a platoon commander, without seeing action. Within days of his first contact with the enemy he won a Military Cross in a clash with the Japanese. He was severely wounded, however, almost losing a leg. Besly disappeared from the regiment, never to fight again.
Thousands of soldiers followed behind Slim’s infantry, performing the myriad support functions of an army. Some maintained themselves in tiny cocoons of Britishness, upon which the war and foreign places scarcely impinged. Joe Welch was a south London joiner’s son, working in a power station, who joined the army in 1939 and became a linesman in a signals company. He and a little cluster of comrades served successively in Iraq, Greece, Libya, India and Burma, without any of these campaigns leaving much mark upon them. They were awed by the scale of India, but Burma was simply “lots of trees…I once saw an elephant…There were all these monkeys and spiders that came up when we were eating. I never saw a Burman.” The campaign, to chirpy little Joe Welch, was simply “rain, rain, rain and bully, bully, bully.” He and his mates—a fellow Londoner named Joy, Garner from Manchester, Vince from Sheffield—carried their own little British world across the Chindwin in their Chevrolet truck with its wooden Indian-made body as composedly as they had rattled through Greece and the Western Desert. They laid their telephone lines from division to corps to army in the hills of Assam, then on the path to the Irrawaddy. What did the war mean to Joe Welch? “I didn’t worry about it172—just one of those things, innit?” That is how the 1939–45 experience was for millions of uniformed men, no poets they, yet all warriors of a kind.
Every man, whatever his rank or specialisation, was expected to turn a hand to anything. At the end of November 1944, the Berkshires found themselves road building just inside the Burma border. “Even the miners among us173 found it tough going,” wrote Maj. John Hill, who wielded a pick with his men, “but it was all part of Fourteenth Army’s philosophy of self-help and DIY, in modern jargon…blasting trees, bamboo roots, rocks and eternally digging and shovelling, digging and shovelling until we longed for