The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [152]
Much the same would have gone for the Germans, Russians, Americans or Japanese. War is war and its personal, human element has changed remarkably little over the centuries.
One problem that the Chindits had, as well as the enemy and the terrible conditions, was the fact that the US commander in China, General Stilwell, considered them to be merely ‘shadow-boxing’ and a waste of time and effort. Yet on 27 June, Mike Calvert, by then a brigadier, took Mogaung with his Chindit 77th Special Force Brigade supported by two Chinese battalions. After fighting for Mogaung for an entire month, Calvert’s force, once 800 strong, was down to 230 Gurkhas, 110 1st Lancashire Fusiliers and 1st Battalion the King’s Liverpool Regiment and 180 1st Battalion South Staffordshire men. They nonetheless took the key railway bridge, and thus cut off the Japanese 18th Division fighting against Stilwell.
Acts of individual bravery were commonplace. One case was that of Captain Jim Blaker of the 3rd Battalion 9th Gurkha Rifles who had taken more than five hours to climb up to the summit of Point 2171 outside Kamaing, only to find it ringed with mortars and machine guns, which scattered his small force back into the thick jungle. ‘Come on C Company!’ cried Blaker, who charged forward until hit in the stomach by machine-gun bullets. ‘I’m going to die,’ he called out as he expired. ‘Take the position!’32 The Gurkhas rose as one with fixed bayonets and kukri knives and captured the hillside. (They did not have the strength afterwards to bury him and his dead comrades, however, and three months later a Graves Registration Unit found tall bamboo growing through their skeletons, by which time Blaker had been awarded the Victoria Cross.)
The human cost of the Chindit operations was very high, but after the war Lieutenant-General Renya Mutaguchi, commander of the Japanese Fifteenth Army in northern Burma in 1943, stated that: ‘The Chindit invasions did not stop our plans to attack [India], but they did have a decisive effect on these operations and they drew off the whole of 53rd Division and parts of 15th Division, one regiment of which would have turned the tables at [the coming battle of] Kohima.’ Disgracefully, the Official History, written by Major-General S. W. Kirby, who shared the High Command’s distaste for Wingate, published only the part of that sentence up to the first comma.
The last Chindits left Burma on 27 August 1944. Half were admitted to hospital on their return, but after rest and special diets the formation – once reinforced – began training for its third operation before it was officially disbanded in February 1945. The Chindits left an example of human endurance extraordinary even for a conflict such as the Second World War.
Western accounts of the war often minimize, to the point of sometimes ignoring it altogether, the experience of China, despite the fact that fifteen million of those who died in the conflict – a full 30 per cent – were Chinese. It was the Chinese who held down half of Japan’s fighting strength throughout the war, and around 70 per cent of the effort was undertaken by the Kuomintang (Nationalist) forces under their generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek, based at Chunking. By contrast the Communists under Mao Zedong were, as Max Hastings has put it, at best merely ‘an irritant’ to Japan.33 The Chinese experience of war was terrible: in the great starvation caused by the Japanese, Chinese people ‘hunted ants, devoured tree roots, ate mud’. In December 1937 the Japanese Army massacred 200,000 civilians and raped a further 20,000 women after the fall of Nanking. Yet the Chinese somehow stayed in the war, with the result that Japan had to divert vast forces to fighting in the interior of China, which she could otherwise have dedicated to the invasion of India, or Australia, or both.
China had been at war with Japan since 1937, and in the two years after the fall of Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek’s capital, that December the