Our food was Australian dehydrated mince, carrots and vegetables; this came in very large tins and was dropped by air;it was then reconstituted in boiling water, We were also given small purple pineapples, these were inedible.
(For my Dad to say something was inedible, it must have been inedible!)
At night we used to light a brazier and open tins of Heinz soups, which we would warm up and eat with biscuits. Whenever I open a tin of Heinz soup now, the memories come back to me.
Breakfast was porridge, bread and marmalade, with oleo margarine, almost liquid because of the heat. We were frequently issued with a large mug of rum and a tin of 50 Players cigarettes.
We used to wash and bathe in the stream that we had dammed up. Judging by the large footprints that were left overnight, we knew that a very large cat also used it; we thought it was probably a jaguar.
When we washed there we got covered with leeches. They would stick onto the skin and swell up as they sucked your blood. They were removed by holding a burning cigarette near to them, they would then fall off without leaving their little tube in the skin.
Nevertheless, where that did happen, they quickly became infected ulcers and when they healed they left scar tissue on the ankles. One of our party would rub metal polish into his ulcers, so that when they were bad, he would try for medical repatriation.
I have subsequently suffered with ulcerated ankles all my life. (Both Dad's were covered with scar tissue up to the knee. His ankles, as he says, were ulcerated and gave him particular trouble until the day he died. He only complained very rarely.))
One airman was repatriated, it was the result of a distressing accident that I actually witnessed. That afternoon, I was working on a Spitfire, replacing a rocker-box cover. There was another Spitfire, about twenty feet away, that had had work done on it, but the engine would not start.
A group of people gathered round it. Suddenly it did start and it immediately went straight up to take-off power. The throttle-control had a pin left out and it could not be shut down. The aircraft was on its chocks, the tail went up and the nose dipped down.
As the wooden propellor hit the ground, the blades started to break up and the engine went even faster. The fitter jumped out of the cockpit and slid down the wing. A large splinter of broken propellor went into his leg. He should have flicked the switches down to cut the engine, but it was all over in about twenty seconds. The shock upset him mentally and he was repatriated.
The R&R unit and the anti-aircraft guns had already been moved forward to Kalewa. We repaired the aircraft that were left and dumped any wreckage in a clearing that we called 'the graveyard'. Dacoits (bandits) set fire to the remains of the fuel dump.
While I was at Tamu, I always had my Sten gun at the ready. It had a clip on magazine with about 30, 9mm. bullets in it. It could be fired from the hip or shoulder, as a machine-gun or on single shot. I used to go into the jungle, to practise firing it; it was a more useful weapon than a rifle in those conditions.
About the second week of March 1945, we returned to Imphal. We spent a few days at Imphal and because I was an engine fitter, I had to spend the evenings minding the 'Meadows'. This was a lorry that had a car engine driving a generator in the back. It supplied a rather dim electric light to each of the tents.
A week later we were sent as a small detatchment to Thazi. This was an abandoned airstrip past Tamu.
Off we went again with the lorries loaded with tents and tools, down the dangerous road and up over the mountain ranges. When we arrived there, there were four aircraft parked near the end of the runway, I can only remember the Mosquito and a Beaufighter because I worked on them.
I changed the oil-cooler on the port engine of the Beaufighter. The Mosquito had a damaged elevator and after a replacement had been fitted, I used to 'run up' the engines. The thermometer in the cockpit read 140°F, inside temperature and 120°F outside, that was hot!
You could feel the hot air in your lungs as you breathed, that was a few weeks before the onset of the monsoon. Because it was so hot, we used to work from six o'clock in morning to 2 p.m.. We would then rest on our beds for the afternoon.
I kept the felt around my water bottle damp, so that the evaporation would cool the water inside. We always had to put sterilising tablets in the water before we drank it. We also had to take Mepacrine tablets to prevent
malaria. One day a small scorpion was behind my case lid, when I
shut the case, it stung my hand, but it was not serious.
Thazi was a more open area, there was no thick jungle and there was a village nearby, with houses built on stilts to avoid the monsoon flooding. There were several temples and the Burmese walked about quite freely.
One day a badly burned airman was brought in from Kalewa, there was a nursing orderly with him and they stayed overnight until a plane took him out the next morning.
What had happened was that he had to drain the water condensation from the bottom of the fuel tanks on a Warwick. It was a transport aircraft and there were little taps under the wings. It was dark, so he took a hurricane lamp to see what he was doing.
It was a disaster, he opened a tap and the whole aircraft caught fire. I have recently read of another Warwick being burnt out. Did the same thing happen? It is very rare for aircraft to catch fire on the ground.
A pilot came to fly out the Beaufighter. He did one circuit and landed again. The propellor constant-speed unit needed adjustment, then while it was standing at the end of the runway, the heat of the sun caused the inflatable raft to burst out of the wing and it had to be repacked. It eventually got away.
We went down to the Meiktila area on the 18th. of May 1945. There were two, three-ton lorries and a wrecker; that was a lorry on which there was a crane and winch. Unfortunately we only had one qualified driver, so two people had to learn pretty quickly.
We went south, down the road to Kalewa. That section of road was covered in bitumen and we moved along at a good speed. We stopped to look at the burnt out Warwick and then crossed the River Chindwin on the Bailey bridge.