Twenty-One: Coming of Age in World War II. James Holland

Broadmayne, I had been to the New Inn in West Knighton and had sent Tom and Dee a photograph of the pub, and so now, on this visit, they naturally wanted to see the place again for themselves. They called in at my house, then together we all drove down towards Dorchester. It was a warm and sunny May day, just as it had been when the twins had taken their picture at the pub, a couple of weeks before D-Day. The roads narrowed as we drew closer, the hedgerows rising and bursting with green. Then there we were, pulling into the courtyard, opposite the front of the pub. It’s remarkably unchanged on the outside, still instantly recognizable from the black and white picture taken all those years before. The twins got themselves a beer then posed outside for a new set of photographs. Watching it was a profoundly moving experience. It seemed incredible to me that sixty years before, two young men had stood there – unknowing – on the eve of one of the most significant moments in world history and yet now, with the world such a different place, here they were again. It was very humbling.

VILLAGE PEOPLE

       Dr Chris Brown

      Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I was certainly very conscious of ‘The War’, and like many boys at that time, I made model Spitfires and Tiger tanks and read Commando comics. Grown-ups rarely talked about it, but they did often refer to it, although usually as a means of implying that we younger generation did not know how lucky we were – which I suppose was true. My mother, for example, would mention the war in the context of food. If I ever took too much butter for my bread, she would say, ‘That’s enough to have lasted a week in the war!’

      What I never bothered to consider, however, was that most men I knew who were then in their fifties and sixties had probably served during the war, and that everyone I knew of that age had lived through it. The only person I knew who was happy to talk about it at length was the Classics master at school, who used to regale us with tales of the war in Burma. ‘Did you kill any Japs, sir?’ we would repeatedly ask him, then rush off to re-enact our own version of jungle warfare in the trees and bushes at the bottom of the playing fields.

      One person who certainly kept his war record pretty quiet was the village GP, Dr Brown. Like most young children, I was forever coming down with stomach bugs, chest infections or needing stitches, so I knew him better than most other adults in the village, and was as familiar with the inside of his surgery, with its green waiting-room chairs and smell of antiseptic, as any place outside my own home.

      Dr Brown was truly a pillar of the community. Kind, with a gentle, soothing voice and a warm smile, he did so much more for the village than tend the sick, whether it be helping with the various village sports clubs, writing a musical (revived every ten years), or allowing the villagers to use his swimming pool. Just a short walk down the road from my childhood home, his pool was where I learnt to swim.

      But I never thought of Dr Brown in any other light. I liked him enormously, but to me he was simply the village GP and that was that. Only many years later, however, did I discover that he had served with the Chindits in Burma. His wife lent me his wartime diary, and for a moment I was quite taken aback as she handed me the thick exercise book, with its homemade brown wrapping paper dust jacket. Within its pages, neatly written up in blue ink, were his remarkably detailed – and human – wartime jottings, as well as a number of newspaper cuttings and photographs. The Chindits were the stuff of wartime legend; it seemed strange that the man I remembered had been part of that special force of jungle warriors.

      Many myths have grown about the Chindits. The romance and derring-do of these soldiers are often all most people know about the war in Burma, and to many they are still seen as the SAS of the jungle war, the ‘green ghosts that haunted the Jap’. Like the SAS, they operated deep behind enemy lines, but there the similarity ends. The SAS were a small band of men, but the Chindits, although also special forces, were made up from ordinary infantry brigades; nearly 10,000 troops took part in the Second Chindit Expedition in 1944.

      They were the brainchild of Major-General Orde Wingate, a charismatic and unorthodox soldier who had been brought to the Far East in 1942 by General (and soon to be Field Marshal) Wavell, then Commander-in-Chief of India. The war against Japan was not going well: Singapore and Malaya had been lost and so had much of Burma. With the Japanese knocking on the door of India itself, Wavell decided he needed someone with fresh ideas, unconstrained by notions of military orthodoxy, to help plan the reconquest of Burma and at the very least inflict serious damage on the Japanese lines of communication. He had first met Wingate in 1938, during his time as C-in-C Middle East, and found him to be a mercurial officer with plenty of energy and determination. Wavell’s early impressions were not misconceived. In 1941, and with only a few hundred men, Wingate famously bluffed 12,000 Italians into surrender during the Abyssinian campaign.

      Wingate arrived in India having recovered from a recent suicide attempt. A manic depressive, he nonetheless found himself re-energized by the task Wavell had given him, and after reconnoitring northern Burma, began developing his ideas for ‘Long-Range Penetration’ (LRP). Mistrustful of paratroopers, he nonetheless believed that with the help of supply drops from the air directed by radio on the ground, it should be possible to maintain a force that could operate within the ‘heart of the enemy’s military machine’. His theory was that by keeping constantly mobile, his forces could avoid facing any concentration of enemy forces.

      Wavell gave the go-ahead for an expedition using the 77th Indian Infantry Brigade. Split into seven different columns, they set off in February 1943, managing to penetrate 150 miles behind enemy lines. They blew up sections of railway, gathered some helpful intelligence and to a certain degree distracted the Japanese, but as one battalion history put it, ‘Never have so many marched for so little.’¹ Strategically, the expedition was certainly of small value, while the many who became sick or were wounded along the way had to be left where they were – a horrible fate considering the brutality with which the Japanese treated such men.

      The First Chindit Expedition was, however, a propaganda dream, and Wingate and ‘The British Ghost Army’ were fêted around the world in the Allied press. Crucially, Wingate had also come to the attention of the prime minister, Winston Churchill – so much so that he was called to Canada to outline his ideas on Long-Range Penetration at the Quebec Conference in August 1943, a gathering that was attended by Churchill, President Roosevelt and the British and American Chiefs of Staff. An impressive orator, Wingate persuaded the Combined Chiefs of the value of launching another expedition. Even the Americans agreed to it, for although they had no interest in Britain’s colonial empire, they were keen to help the Chinese, who they believed could make a difference in the war against Japan. They had already sent troops under General Joe Stilwell to lead the Chinese Nationalists operating on the border of northern Burma. With this in mind, Wingate was given the task of cutting the lines of communication to those Japanese forces opposing Stilwell’s men. Wingate agreed, although privately he also hoped to reconquer the whole of the north of Burma.

      Wingate also achieved another coup when the American Chief of the Air Staff, General ‘Hap’ Arnold, offered to lend him an air force of transport planes, gliders, fighters and bombers, to support the expedition. This was to be called No 1 Air Commando, or ‘Cochran’s Flying Circus’ after its commander, Colonel Phil Cochran. This generosity from Arnold enabled Wingate to think on an even bigger scale. With comprehensive air support, his men would not be left to fend for themselves; furthermore, they could be flown deep behind enemy lines to start with rather than tramping hundreds of miles through thick jungle. With air support, it would be possible to maintain many more men, and with many more men, the effectiveness of the Chindits would be even greater. That was the theory, at any rate.

      Like many others, Captain Dr Chris Brown had been impressed by the accounts and coverage of the Chindits’ exploits, so when he saw a request for volunteers for a further expedition, he decided to put his name forward. ‘I could never face my conscience again,’ he wrote in a letter to his parents, ‘if I