The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice. John Bourne

writing these memoirs are, like Conrad’s Marlow, older men reviewing their lost illusions. Nevertheless, early in the war the illusion existed that the war in East Africa would prove to be soon ended and relatively easy, something of a boy’s lark, and a romantic adventure not unlike a chivalric quest.

      For a period of time, the chivalric, romantic delusion persisted. W. E. Wynn provides a telling incident when he recalls the pre-sailing conference held before Force B embarked for the ill-fated 1914 invasion of Tanga:

      ‘The General [Aitken] apologised for our being associated with such a simple affair as the taking of German East Africa. After that had been accomplished he promised he would do his best to have us all sent to France; all who had, in the meantime, been well behaved.

      “There is one thing, gentlemen, about which I feel very strongly,” he said, as a finale to the meeting, “that is the subject of dress. I wish officers and men to be always well turned out.” He looked sternly down the table. “I will not tolerate the appalling sloppiness allowed during the Boer War.’”⁹

      In the beginning, matters of character, demonstrated through smartness and keen romantic élan, were going to be accorded precedence over professionalism. Following the disastrous battle but prior to the British withdrawal, Richard Meinertzhagen, then an intelligence officer with Force B, negotiated with the Germans to assist British wounded with medical stores; in his 5 November 1914 diary entry, he says:

      ‘My letter to the German commander was sent through to him and I was conducted to the hospital with my medical stores… The Germans were meanwhile kindness itself and gave me a most excellent breakfast which I sorely needed. Several German officers who were present at breakfast expressed their admiration at the behaviour of the North Lancs, and we discussed the fight freely as though it had been a football match. It seemed so odd that I should be having a meal today with people whom I was trying to kill yesterday. It seemed so wrong and made me wonder whether this really was war or whether we had all made a ghastly mistake. The German officers whom I met today were all hard looking, keen and fit and clearly knew their job and realised its seriousness. They treated this war as some new form of sport.’¹⁰

      Later, in the event that one or the other might be taken prisoner, Meinertzhagen and German Captain Hammerstein exchanged names, addresses and pledges of assistance.¹¹ And still later, on 19 January 1915, W. E. Wynn was a member of the attacking force sent to relieve Jassin, and he reports yet another chivalric moment:

      ‘A little after the following day’s dawn, with troops ready for attack, two figures were seen through the morning haze. They were the two British officers who had been at Jassin post. With ammunition gone they had been forced to surrender.

      Colonel von Lettow had offered them parole in tribute to their gallant defence. As a further compliment the German commander drew up the German troops in ceremonial order. The troops presented arms and the two British officers were courteously conducted down their ranks, privileged to inspect the men they had been fighting.’¹²

      Thus we see the war’s chivalric beginnings, but eventually disease, continual hardship and the indiscriminate death derived from technological advances like the modern machine-gun would reveal the war’s hard edge. In response, chivalry would evolve into professional respect for a hard-fighting opponent, and romanticism would be cut to shreds by the killing power of modern weaponry loosed upon the unsuspecting amidst the worst of tropical environments.

      Speaking about the men who fought in Burma, one can say with relative certainty that when they went to war they knew more about it than had their First World War counterparts. This is not to suggest that they were more experienced, better trained, better motivated, or more logistically prepared than the soldiers of the Great War; rather, that they had a knowledge that their First World War counterparts could not have had: they had a knowledge of the First World War. Psychologically, writers like Graves, Owen, Sassoon, Hemingway and Remarque, a variety of realistic war films and the talk of veterans had better prepared them for the horrors of 20th-century war. Gone was the assumption that war would offer a romantic adventure; rather than setting out on a quest, the men who fought in Burma knew that before they could return home in order to recover mundane normalcy they had to do an extremely difficult and dangerous job, and about that work there was little that one could call romantic. This is not to say, however, that they were free from illusions of their own.

      At the outset, the men fighting in Burma suffered from two equally debilitating delusions. In his well-written memoir, Defeat into Victory, Field-Marshal Viscount Slim offered this personal observation:

      ‘To our men, British or Indian, the jungle was a strange, fearsome place; moving and fighting in it was a nightmare. We were too ready to classify jungle as “impenetrable”, as indeed it was to us with our motor transport, bulky supplies, and inexperience. To us it appeared only as an obstacle to movement and to vision; to the Japanese it was a welcome means of concealed manoeuvre and surprise.’¹³

      In order to win in Burma, fighting men had first to dispense with their belief that the jungle was impenetrable, then they had to disabuse themselves of the idea that the Japanese were invincible. Experience, observation and direct contact with the enemy were the keys to exploding these myths, and as a result of his first forays behind the Japanese lines in Malaya, F. Spencer Chapman concluded, ‘The Japanese troops I have seen are good second-class material, well trained but poorly equipped. Their lines of communication should prove singularly vulnerable to attack by trained guerillas.’¹⁴ Later in the war, Orde Wingate’s Chindits, the OSS, and a host of irregulars drawn from the native tribes were among the first to defy and dispel the assumptions about Japanese invincibility, and their contributions to overturning the accepted wisdom of the time proved invaluable in changing the thinking behind the entire Allied effort in Burma.

      One final illusion, widely subscribed to during the First World War in East Africa, was greatly toned down if not altogether absent during the Second World War in Burma. This delusion – no doubt derived from a colonial habit of mind, from an imperial outlook and attitude – had to do with what might be interpreted as false assumptions about racial inferiority and the potential fighting quality of native troops. Having watched a native stretcher-bearer nurse a fire in the dry centre of a mealie cobb, Francis Brett Young speculated:

      ‘With this slow-burning tinder he had nursed a smouldering fire all night, and the sight of him brought swiftly to my mind the Promethean legend and the Titan’s hollow stick of fennel, so that in this chill dawn I seemed again to be riding in the dawn of the world: and indeed this land was as unvexed by man as any Thracian wild and the people as simple as those to whom the son of Zeus brought fire.’¹⁵

      If this recalls a Victorian/Edwardian concept of the civilised West high-mindedly carrying ‘the white man’s burden’, one must also recognise the downside. Meinertzhagen, who invariably favoured expansion of the native King’s African Rifles, reported this exchange with General Aitken who commanded Force B at Tanga in 1914:

      ‘When I was in East Africa in 1906 I visited the German military station at Moshi and was shown everything by some friendly German officers. I formed a high opinion of their efficiency and reported them as better trained, disciplined and led than our own King’s African Rifles. I told this to Aitken, who said with some heat: “The Indian Army will make short work of a lot of niggers.’”¹⁶

      As history has shown, General Aitken, soundly defeated, would have cause to reconsider his judgement. Arnold Wienholt, another British officer serving with the Intelligence Corps, seems to express the general attitude when he calls the natives ‘big children’¹⁷, but at the same time – and this eventually became the general view – he speaks for the mature army when he concludes that, ‘The German East campaign proved, at any rate, that, with training and discipline, the negro can become a first-rate soldier.’¹⁸ Although slow to change, attitudes nevertheless changed, and among the men who fought in East Africa, former prejudices were humbled.

      In Burma during the Second World War racial attitudes were much changed. General Stilwell, for example, said, ‘If I can prove the Chinese soldier as good as any Allied soldier,