Chindit Affair: A Memoir of the War in Burma
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1848844484
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In March 1944, some 2,200 battle trained men of 111 Brigade flew from India into northern Burma to land on improvised airstrips cleared from the jungle, They were part of General Orde Wingate’s Chindit force sent to fight the Japanese deep behind their lines. Five months later, 111 Brigade was down to 118 fit men – eight British officers, a score of British soldiers and 90 Gurkhas. One of those eight officers was Frank Baines, and in Chindit Affair he tells, in vivid language and with shrewd insight, what happened.
Frank commanded two platoons of young Gurkhas and was attached to 111 Brigade Headquarters, serving under John Masters, where he had a close-up view for most of the time. His account throws new light on the leadership of the Chindit campaign, but above all it is a soldier’s story.
All the horrors of jungle warfare are here – bodies blood-sucked by leeches and corpses impaled by bamboo; Japanese soldiers reduced to eating human flesh; a court martial and execution; soldiers falling sick and dropping by the wayside, and being killed and wounded in action. He also captures the atmosphere of the jungle; its watercourses, trees, birds and the Kachin villagers’ simple way of life. No other account of the Chindit operations touches the same raw nerves, and none recreates so immediately the sensations of being there in the jungle and hills which devoured nearly all of them.
The Liri Valley: Canada's World War II Breakthrough to Rome
Hitler's Mountain Troops 1939-1945: The Gebirgsjager
Coastal Command's Air War Against the German U-Boats
Barbarossa Derailed: The Battle for Smolensk 10 July-10 September 1941, Volume 1
felt guilty lingering where no shells were falling and where it was safe. I sought frantically to break away. The shelling was becoming more persistent, and as the bombardment increased I set off up the slope. A shell exploded on the ground in front of me and half-a-dozen more went off to my right and my left. They seemed to burst right in my face. But it was like peering through a plate-glass window when someone throws a bucket of water at you. Nothing happened. I wasn’t wounded. I wasn’t even
lawful avocations in other parts of the camp, you might look up and observe them – these passaging bluebottles like swarms of migratory swallows – in the very act of crossing the desolate places between one protein-rich play-ground and another. Extraordinarily enough they neither inconvenienced nor disturbed us. All the same, I couldn’t help but subsequently ask the doc. ‘Isn’t it unhealthy?’ ‘Not a bit of it. No self-respecting bluebottle is going to abandon all that lovely, fresh shit in
instinct. I can remember the emotions with perfect clarity. They were precisely those with which I had tried to bag my first sparrow with the miniature 410 sporting gun given to me by my grandfather at the age of ten. The results were also similar. Nothing happened. I reloaded at shoulder as you are taught to do when firing rapid and tried again. No effect. All round me the fight was raging; people were crying: ‘Have at you!’, ‘On guard!’, and ‘Attack!’. Yet where I was, the most flawless
had a high, broad, bony cranium on which the hair grew rather sparsely and was cared for untidily, and he wore ‘bugger’s grips’ – at least they developed into ‘bugger’s grips’ during the later stages of the operation (a sign, no doubt, that his progressive disenchantment with headquarters had succeeded in alienating him from the conventions). On this occasion of our first meeting, however, they were embryonic, and his moustaches orthodox. The only indication that they would subsequently develop
Birt; Doc Whyte; Briggo, looking supercilious as ever; Smithy, black as a boot. John Hedley, I knew, was not there for he had been wounded and flown out. But where – my eyes scanned the group and penetrated into it deeply – was young Lawrence! Masters was devouring a hot, cooked chicken! His orderly was standing nearby with the savoury, grease-glistening carcase in his hands and tearing pieces off it. At the moment I came upon them he was in the act of passing Masters a leg. The scene was such a
