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

time in departing at an equally high rate of speed.’³⁵

      After waking up one morning to find that a few of his ‘friends’ had put a baby tiger into his bed, Neil H. Barrett goes on to report a far less innocuous event:

      ‘Three men from the quartermaster outfit driving along the Burma Road in a jeep saw a tiger jump from the brush on the side of the road and lope slowly towards the opposite side. At this point, one of them did a very foolish thing. He fired at the tiger with a .30-calibre carbine, hitting him just hard enough to wound him. It takes a much heavier weapon than this to kill a tiger. The tiger turned in a blind rage and attacked the jeep. Of the three occupants, only one lived to reach the hospital. The jeep was a complete wreck – the hood, radiator, and windshield were completely torn off by the terrific power of the tiger’s paws.’³⁶

      If tigers were the most powerful animals that men had to contend with during the Burma campaign, snakes were, perhaps, the most unnerving. In Back to Mandalay, Lowell Thomas records a story told to him by Dick Boebel, one of Col Phil Cochran’s Air Commandos, whose glider broke loose and crash-landed beyond the Chindwin but before reaching the ‘Broadway’ jump zone where it was supposed to have landed. In his party were four Americans, five Burmese, and eight ‘Britishers’, and after they had escaped from the crash site, they stopped to rest:

      ‘When we thought we were safe from Jap pursuit we crouched in a thicket to rest. We were worn out. I was lying exhausted when in the darkness a noise started crackling. I saw the shadow of a snake coming down the side of the gully to my right. There was enough light to see that the thing was about five inches in diameter, a huge python… Luckily, I remained still. He came down. It all took about ten seconds. It seemed eternity. The python crossed over my right foot, straight across my left, and up the other side of the gully. He never hesitated a second, never slowed down. He must have been twelve feet long.’³⁷

      On 8 February 1945 Slim moved his Tactical Headquarters to Monywa:

      ‘The Japanese had left behind a number of booby traps which were disconcerting, but my chief frights came from snakes which abounded in the piles of rubble. They seemed specially partial to the vicinity of my War Room which lacked a roof but had a good concrete floor. It was my practice to visit the War Room every night before going to bed, to see the latest situation map. I had once when doing so nearly trodden on a krait, the most deadly of all small snakes. Thereafter I moved with great circumspection, using my electric torch, I am afraid, more freely than my security officers would have approved. It seemed to me that the risk of snake bite was more imminent than that of a Japanese bomb.’³⁸

      Having set up a target range upon which to teach Shan tribesmen marksmanship, OSS man Neil Barrett found his first training exercise suddenly and swiftly broken up by the appearance of a king cobra not more than 20 feet behind him. ‘His head was puffed out at the sides as it is when he is attacking. I was running in a zigzag fashion, because this is supposed to be the only way to keep one of them from running you down. They practically have to stop to turn.’³⁹ Eventually the snake gave up the chase, but the curious Barrett turned and followed from a distance, attempting to shoot the cobra with his .45-calibre pistol. When the snake turned on him a second time, Barrett gave up both his interest in the cobra and his target range.

      Setting aside the threats of immediate death posed by tigers and snakes, the armies fighting in Burma had daily to deal with a wide variety of other annoying creatures. Duncan Guthrie, dropped into the Karen Hills in order to raise native levies, reported waking one morning to find his clothes, rucksack, and all of its organic contents eaten by big brown and white ants.⁴⁰ David Halley wrote of clouds of disease-bearing flies gathering around wounds and the difficulty of sleeping in the bush when covered by thousands of ants.⁴¹ Leeches were among the worst of these annoyances, and throughout Burma, they were ubiquitous. Brigadier John Masters has written:

      ‘Our short puttees, tied tightly round the join of boot and trouser, kept out most of the leeches, but a halt seldom passed without an oozing of blood through the boot eyelets telling us that some particularly determined beast had found its way in. Hair-fine when they passed through the eyelet holes, they fed on our blood, and when we had taken off puttee, boot, and sock it was a bloated, squashy, red monster the size of our little finger to which we applied the end of a lighted cigarette.’⁴²

      Fred O. Lyons, one of Merrill’s Marauders, even reported leeches crawling into men’s ears and noses, ‘so the medics would hold a cupful of water under the leech-sufferer’s nose or ear. As the leech reached down, the medic would tie a loop of string to the tail and pull tight.’⁴³ A lighted cigarette would then be applied and the leech removed so that the head would not break off beneath the skin and start an infection. ‘All of us were more or less bloody all the time,’⁴⁴ Charlton Ogburn Jr judged. But still, nature had not finished with the tropical combatant.

      In both East Africa and Burma, flies, mosquitos, airborne and waterborne micro-organisms, and general fighting conditions visited so many and such debilitating diseases on the troops that it is difficult to keep track of them. Slim, writing about 26 days of combat during the 1944 monsoon, reported that 9 Brigade ‘had only 9 killed and 85 wounded, but lost 507 from sickness.’⁴⁵

      In East Africa, the profile was much the same: ‘By 1916 the ratio of non-battle casualties to battle casualties was 31.4 to 1.’⁴⁶ Malaria, typhus, jaundice, blackwater fever, dengue fever, spotted fever, dysentery… the list was endless, and sooner or later almost every man who fought in a tropical theatre of war was struck down by something. Indeed, many British officers who later wrote compelling personal accounts of the war in East Africa – Meinertzhagen, Wynn, Young, Buchanan, Thornhill, and others – were eventually knocked straight out of the theatre, not by the enemy but by fever and ill health. Returning to Burma, on 25 May 1944, Col Charles Newton Hunter reported that before Myitkyina where the American Galahad Force was fighting, ‘Almost every member of the unit was suffering from either malaria, dysentery, diarrhoea, exhaustion, or fever.’⁴⁷ Weeks later, conditions were worse: ‘The rains continued to fall heavily as the June days dragged inexorably on. Three or four days of steady rain would be followed by a day or two of searing humid heat. Men sitting endlessly in wet foxholes began to develop trench foot. Malaria, fungus, and fever were afflictions common to most everyone.’⁴⁸ Writing of approximately the same time, Mike Calvert reported the same problem in 77 Brigade: ‘We fought and lived most of the time in mud and water and everything and everywhere was at best damp and at worst soaking.’⁴⁹

      Alongside the men, animals and, consequently, transport were powerfully afflicted. Throughout East Africa men and animals continually passed through belts of tsetse fly; as a rule the men managed to avoid infection with sleeping sickness, but mules and horses did not, and they died by the thousands, delaying transport and clogging the roads with their rotting bodies.⁵⁰ Eventually, animal sickness became so widespread and so problematic that it seriously disrupted supply, particularly the supply of food and medicine, and this in turn caused the general health of the army to deteriorate further. By war’s end, animals were being replaced by porters, and there was fairly general agreement that trying to use beasts for tropical transport had been a mistake.⁵¹ In Burma both Wingate and Merrill placed heavy emphasis on animal transport, and while the animals were prized and even loved, the rigours of the tropical climate exacted a staggering toll. Injury, the enemy, and finally disease felled the mules right and left. Charles Ogburn Jr, for example, recalled that leeches plagued Galahad’s mules more consistently than Galahad’s men: ‘Their fetlocks were generally red and slimy with blood. In addition, eggs deposited in their lesions by a kind of fly hatched out into screw worms.’⁵² As Wingate and Merrill’s campaigns wore on, more and more animals went down, and with each animal’s death the fighting efficiency of its parent unit was reduced.

      Too frequently, the impact of raw nature manifesting itself through disease was brought on by, or compounded through, serious problems with the food supply. And even when sickness was not an immediate result, obtaining food adequate to keep up one’s strength remained a consistent difficulty through both campaigns. Owing to breakdowns and slowdowns in motor and animal transport, Francis Brett