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By Root 904 0

avoid the few tracks, which were likely to be covered by enemy fire. Yet movement through thick cover was so desperately slow that only tracks and chaungs—riverbeds—offered any prospect of advancing at tolerable speed. Distances measured on the map were meaningless—what mattered was how far men had to march. They learned not to smoke or talk at night anywhere within reach of the enemy, for scent and sound alike carried far. They cursed the relentless damp, which misted the optics of gunsights and binoculars, rusted weapons overnight. Newly joined replacements often buckled under the weight of their packs. Training had not prepared them for the burdens men must carry in a country where vehicles were few and mules precious. Air-dropped artillery had to be manhandled into firing positions by sweating gunners.

If a man was lucky, every few months he was granted a brief leave in India. Soldiers resting from Burma were entitled to “convalescent scale” rations. A transport aircraft carried them to rear base, from which an Indian soldier still needed days of travel to reach his home. Wartime trains in the subcontinent were notoriously congested and slow. When a Tokyo propaganda broadcast on Christmas Eve 1943 asserted that Japanese forces would reach Delhi in ten days, a chorus of listening Punjabi soldiers, just returned from an irksome leave journey, chorused: “Not if they go by train176, they won’t!” Yet many of Slim’s soldiers had no homes in India. On leave, they sought what pleasures they could discover. Sgt. Kofi Genfi of the Gold Coast Regiment described a touching experience: “Oh, the Indians were very kind177 to me. In Madras I went to dance—I am a ballroom champion dancer. I sat down, but I couldn’t get a partner. I was shy. I didn’t know how to engage a lady. A man came and said: ‘Do you want to dance?’…He said ‘Come, come.’ He gave me his wife…We started to dance, and they all stopped and looked at me as if I was giving a demonstration. At the end, there was applause. Then every lady wants to dance with me!”

For the white as well as black soldiers of Fourteenth Army, there was a shameful divide between the luxuries offered to officers on leave in clubs and messes, and the pitiful delights available to other ranks. These focused upon bars and brothels of notable squalor. When John Leyin’s tank gunner heard that he was to be repatriated to England, his joy was tempered by the misery of finding himself impotent, after repeated treatments for venereal disease. The British class system shaped the lives of the nation’s soldiers overseas, even more in Asia than in Europe. Signaller Brian Aldiss wrote cynically: “Most rankers expected little178 from life, had been brought up to expect little. And received little.” Few men returned content from leave. But the experience granted at least a brief reprieve from toil, sweat and fear.

THROUGHOUT THE BURMA CAMPAIGN, American transport aircraft, fighters and bombers provided vital support to Slim’s operations. Chuck Linamen, a twenty-year-old steelworker’s son from Ohio, flew fifty-two B-24 Liberator missions from India to targets in Burma and Siam. The first that he and his crew knew of their posting to the Far East was when they opened sealed orders over the Atlantic, en route to the Azores in August 1944: “I couldn’t even pronounce the names of the places we were going.” But from the moment he joined the 436th Squadron at Madagan, 130 miles north-east of Calcutta, he found himself one of the relatively small number of men who relished the task which war had imposed upon him: “I enjoyed every minute of it.” He loved his crew, a characteristic all-American mix: Ray Hanson, “the best navigator in the world,” from Minneapolis; Will Henderson, the co-pilot, from Montana; a Texan bombardier; Kentuckian radio operator; gunners from New York, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Ohio. They mined Bangkok harbour, dropped bombs on railyards, bridges, Japanese positions. By the standards of Europe, all their missions were long-haul, cruising at 165 knots for a minimum of ten hours, a maximum