More eastern travels, June/July 1945
Following a laborious passage across India interspersed by several refuelling stops on sundry lakes, our C-class boat alighted in the late afternoon on the Hoogly river adjacent to a large girder bridge, to be followed by an inevitable 3-ton truck ride for the final part of our journey.
Nothing on earth could have prepared us for the chaotic Calcutta experience - its sheer, endless overwhelming press of humanity, the cacophony of honking horns and shouting voices, a pervasive aroma of cheap tobacco, traffic stink, animal dung, bad drains and decay. Most of the buildings were covered with dirty, peeling mould-covered stucco often hidden behind a plethora of the most garish advertisement hoardings imaginable, and from the windows of which protruded bamboo poles carrying vast quantities of laundry hung out to 'dry' in the steaming, foetid atmosphere. The traffic especially was unbelievable, a highly compressed, slow-moving and disorganised mixture of modern military vehicles, ancient taxis, horse-drawn gharries, bullock carts, smoke-belching and grossly overloaded buses, cyclists, rickshaws and of course pedestrians by the tens of thousands, the whole thrown into even greater confusion by occasional wandering cows - which, being holy, had priority over everything else. By all accounts things are not much different sixty years later, but fortunately I am not there to see it.
We found ourselves once more in tents, in the grounds of what had been a large girl’s school. The climate was very warm and humid, for the SW Monsoon was in full season and heavy downpours frequent; luckily our tent was waterproof, a luxury we were not always to enjoy during the following months. We were given to understand that we would be there for around two weeks, during which time we were once again left to our own devices.
Nevertheless there were some compensations, one of which was Chowringhee, the main street. With the Maidan, a large park-like area of grass on one side, it was more open and thus less noisome than most of the rest of the city, and had a fair selection of shops, restaurants and tea-houses in which to pass time or perhaps spend some of our slender funds. Two essential items were a “tin” trunk and a cigarette container (virtually everyone smoked in those days, tobacco products being duty-free anyway). The trunk was supposedly tolerably thief-proof, the fallibility of Indian-made locks notwithstanding, but more important was its resistance to damp or entry by undesirables (scorpions etc) as opposed to a kit bag; while the fag box, its rounded shape conveniently holding the contents of a 50-cigarette tin, had a silica-gel capsule in the lid that kept the contents reasonably dry - a most desirable feature in that appallingly humid climate. Spirits were also cheap and freely available, if not always of very high quality; given the prevailing heat, beer would have been preferable but was difficult to locate in any quantity and if found was liable to disappear fast.
After a week or so at the school, for some reason we were shifted further from the town centre to a collection of tents on a sports field. Although in some ways a better location, it was too far to walk comfortably to Chowringhee and so we made use of rickshaw travel. Provided one did not think too hard about the moral aspect of one human acting as draft animal for another, it was quite a pleasant way to go; slow yes, but given the traffic conditions only marginally less so than by taxi, and dirt cheap. Of course one had to be not too fussy about the route one’s puller might choose to take, short cuts through highly insalubrious alleys and back streets being a favoured option; while as for the morals of it, well if you walked you were then depriving some wretchedly poor citizen of earning a fare, for lack of which he (and his family) would most certainly go hungry that day.
In early July we started to move further eastwards, destined for yet another holding unit in eastern Bengal but this time the delights of overland travel were to be our lot; so, armed with the necessary travel documents and our kit (which included real arms, viz. a .38 revolver each plus 6 rounds of ammo per man issued prior to leaving UK), we found ourselves dumped outside Calcutta’s Sealdah station early one evening, to be immediately surrounded by hordes of ragged porters. Somehow I acquired the oldest and most decrepit-looking of the lot, which given the size of my trunk was unfortunate; but, somehow or other, the bandy-legged old fellow hoisted it onto his (padded) head unaided and set off down the platform, his legs seemingly bowing even further under the load. Having deposited his burden in the train there followed an inevitable dispute over the size of my proffered tip, dealt with in the approved pukka sahib manner by turning my back; however, he continued to whine and wheedle in a most persistent way, while repeatedly pointing to the top of his supposedly maltreated head. I began to suffer pangs of guilt - maybe the equivalent of sixpence or so was rather on the stingy side? At last conscience got the better of me, but as I reached into my pocket I realised the noise had ceased; distantly, I spied the old fellow melting into the crowd so probably he had not really been underpaid – by contemporary local standards, anyway. Nevertheless after all these years I still feel guilty on this point, for I myself would not have attempted to carry that load on my head for £60, never mind 6d!
The train shuffled off into a hot, sticky night, but sleep was not to be our lot. True, we had a reserved compartment but an Indian 3rd Class carriage was never designed for comfort, being rather an exercise in accommodating the maximum number of people in a small space; and as upholstery used up space there was none, only bare slatted wooden benches apparently designed for midgets. Dawn revealed a flat, well-watered green landscape and soon after we arrived on the banks of a mighty river, transferring to an ancient steamer that took most of the day to convey us to landfall somewhere downstream. Here there was more hanging about, but eventually we boarded a narrow gauge train that trundled us through a second night to the dingy town of Comilla. Well described by the author H.E Bates as a “squalid air junction”, this was a scruffy little place in East Bengal where another inevitable transit camp awaited us, though mercifully of well-constructed bamboo bashas rather than tents; but at least we knew that this was the final stop before our eventual destination of Akyab, where we would at last join an operational squadron – the end of a long road that for me had started almost three years before.
After a week or so of boredom, we were taken to the airfield and literally packed into a Dakota belonging to our new unit, no. 194 Squadron or The Friendly Firm as it was known in the Burma theatre of operations. The aircraft was filled to the roof, us few passengers lying on top of the cargo with barely enough space for the crew to squeeze past to the flight deck – as I recall, the cabin roof was inches from my face as I sprawled uncomfortably on top of a tin trunk. The wet season was in full flow, so we flew down the Arakan coast in blinding rain a few hundred feet above the sea – an accepted technique at that time for avoiding the mighty monsoon storm clouds and their feared turbulence, and thus for most of the flight only wave tops were visible through the torrents of rainwater streaming back across the windows.
Arrival at Akyab was heralded by a loud clang as we touched down on the steel plank (PSP) runway, succeeded by a metallic rattle of diminishing intensity as the aircraft gradually lost speed - we would become very familiar with this sound over the coming months. There followed a short and extremely bumpy ride in the inevitable Dodge 3-tonner, at the end of which we duly arrived at the squadron domestic area, a large tented encampment in a coconut plantation. Here we were told there was no accommodation for us and that we would have to pitch our own tent when a suitable site was located; meanwhile, we could set up our camp beds in the Sergeant’s Mess (a large bamboo basha) between the hours of 11 pm and 7 am. Since this building was more weatherproof than an average tent we were in no hurry to start ‘camping out’, but after a couple of days were told that space had now been found for our tent and to ‘get ourselves sorted’.
Erecting a heavy, double-skinned two-pole tent was not a task for the inexperienced, but somehow we got it up with guy ropes secure and the very necessary drainage ditch all around. With adequate space for five people, but stuffy when the side curtains were lowered (very necessary when the rain came – which it did, often copiously and sometimes horizontally), it nevertheless proved remarkably waterproof but less resistant to nuisances such as ants, mosquitoes, and the occasional scorpion. Short of soaping oneself en plein air during one of the frequent deluges, washing facilities were courtesy of personal ingenuity, so fairly soon we constructed a primitive shower consisting of a metal drum atop a rickety bamboo frame, its supply collected in an old drop tank supplied via a crude system of guttering round the tent’s eaves. True the drum had first to be filled manually before the shower would work, but ours was only one of many similar Heath Robinson contraptions and at least we could now keep clean!
Rangoon having been captured a few months earlier, the war in Burma was by this time virtually over; some Japs remained trapped on the wrong side of the Sittang river, but they were little more than a nuisance so the next big thing had to be an air and sea-borne assault on the Malay peninsula several hundred miles to the south. Our part in this (Operation Zipper) would obviously be mounted from Rangoon, but until that time came much of our army remained in the land-locked central Burma plain and required constant re-supply; the major proportion of which was delivered by the three or four Dakota squadrons at Akyab (plus others down the coast at Ramree) dispatching all available aircraft at first light, and in rapid succession, to a variety of airfields mainly located in the central Burmese plain. The payload could be virtually anything, though mostly seeming to consist of petrol in 40-gallon drums - which did not deter us from smoking (unless one of the drums was actually leaking, a not infrequent occurrence) - plus food rations, occasional passengers and almost any odd item that might be required by an army of occupation. It was only a short hop, usually about an hour & a quarter each way, unloading took little time and we were usually ‘home’ by lunchtime - so it might seem that we had an easy life.
I suppose that in some ways we did; living conditions, while fairly Spartan, were luxurious compared to those endured by our troops in the field (or jungle) - food adequate if dull, alcohol (other than beer) plentiful, reliable mail deliveries almost daily, and superb surf bathing off the island’s beach of fine black sand - all of which helped to balance the many discomforts. The daily flying task was hardly onerous either (more of this anon), and my crew & I were just becoming accustomed to this not unpleasant existence when our equanimity was shattered by being suddenly told “….you’re on an escape and evasion course - leave on tomorrow’s flight to Comilla”. Protest was useless, for it was obvious why we had been chosen - as the most newly arrived and therefore least experienced crew on the squadron, by definition we were the most dispensable - so back to Comilla we went, beyond which lay a 36-hour rail journey further north (plus several hours more by road) to our ultimate destination. However by great good fortune a rare special flight to Dimapur was leaving the next day, sparing us that tedious and uncomfortable train ride; so, following a short flight we found ourselves dumped at yet another transit camp that had no apparent reason to exist. Yet barely 12 months before, the whole area would have been frantic with activity - for this was where the long and tortuous Manipur road commenced its often vertiginous ascent from the Dimapur railhead, up through the jungle-clad Naga hills to Kohima and on to Imphal. Both places had seen much fierce fighting the year before, indeed it was at Kohima that the 14th Army had made their gallant stand against the Japanese forces attempting a desperate invasion of India; and, since this road was the only feasible land route into Burma, it had been an absolutely vital supply line.
Although disgruntled at being suddenly removed from operational flying, and especially so after having just commenced it following what had seemed interminable years of training, in retrospect I suppose we should have been grateful for an experience for which many tourists would now pay good money - if indeed they were able to anyway, for access to that area has been severely restricted by the Indian government. A long drive in the dubious comfort of a 15-cwt truck along an initially more or less straight and level road, then an endless succession of sharp bends climbing steadily upwards through the jungle-clad hills with a cliff face on one side and a near-vertical drop on the other, saw us eventually deposited at a small encampment that was to be our home for the next ten days.
It was in fact a not unattractive situation, on a spur overlooking the road and giving a fine view of forested mountains across a deep valley beneath; it was also notably cooler than we were accustomed to, a distinct bonus. The instructional staff consisted of two middle-aged army officers who knew the country well - one a peace-time forestry officer and the other a tobacco planter from Thailand - plus a handful of Indian army personnel, and the inevitable local civilians fulfilling (more or less incompetently) the necessary domestic duties; the most incompetent of all, of course, being allocated to us as our personal servant.
At this distance of almost seventy years memory grows rather dim, my main recollection being of long walks in the surrounding jungle. Initially we were led by one or other of the staff, who would instruct us in making best use of terrain, the many uses to which one could put bamboo, crude navigation, and point out any edible fruits (not many, as I recall). Moving about was easier than we had expected, for the area consisted mainly of primary jungle where an over-arching canopy of tall trees shut out much of the light and thus discouraged the more impenetrable surface vegetation; however there was little level ground, so most progress was either sweatily uphill or precipitously down, at the end of which there was usually a boulder-strewn, fast-flowing torrent to be crossed. Such streams came as welcome relief, for they were never deep enough to impede us but instead allowed for a pleasantly cooling dip. Leeches? – well they certainly existed but I don’t remember them being much of a problem, probably because being a mountainous area there was little in the way of excessively wet, swampy ground.
As the course progressed we were sent out on our own, nominally to undertake certain ‘tasks’ such as following a laid down route but in practice doing pretty much what we pleased. Observing the large variety of insect life, in particular an extraordinary number of large and beautiful butterflies, some of our number started catching and collecting the choicer specimens; meanwhile, the rest of us were quite content to pass time keeping cool in the many stream-fed pools. Evenings were spent drinking gin on our primitive ‘veranda’, watching the setting sun playing on the often cloud-capped mountains, or later reading or playing cards by the light of a hurricane lamp. The inevitable mosquitoes were a constant nuisance, but by now we were accustomed to them and trusted in our daily mepacrin tablets to keep the dreaded malaria at bay.
Mid-course there was one free day when we were taken a further twenty or so miles up the road to Kohima, there to view the scene of the memorable battle fifteen months before. In such a beautiful setting it was hard to imagine such recent misery and bloodshed, even though that famous epitaph ‘When you go home, tell them of us and say – for your tomorrow, we gave our today’ was even then carved on the main memorial in the war cemetery.
The final end-of-course event was for us to pass a night in the boondocks, when we would be able to put to use our various survival skills hopefully learned during the previous ten days. Fortunately we were not expected to live off the land, however would have to erect our own shelter if we wanted any and then find our way to a rendezvous for pick up the next day. I recall passing a very uncomfortable night in a crude, bamboo-framed shelter that leaked most of a passing shower, and the following day wondering why we had not had the good sense of the other crew who had fled surreptitiously to a nearby NAAFI canteen and shacked up there instead!
So we were not sorry to head off back down the road to Dimapur, although this time there was no friendly Dakota to waft us ‘home’; instead we enjoyed the Spartan delight of a third class, metre-gauge train that took us laboriously back to Comilla overnight through the Shillong hills. For the cognoscenti, our motive power on the hilly part was one or more of the capable, lend-lease ‘MacArthur’ 2-8-2s’, while the level section on the southern part of the run saw us hauled by a handsome, royal blue British-built pacific that shifted along at a surprisingly brisk pace. Such unaccustomed velocity improved ventilation no end, this being augmented by our carriage having inward-opening doors enabling me to pass much of the time sitting in an open doorway, a most delightful way of viewing the passing scene. Arriving at Comilla, we wasted no time in securing passage on the first available flight back to Akyab - which makes this a convenient point to break the narrative, to resume later with some scribblings about various flying tasks undertaken during the following year & a bit.