Burmese Connection. Ashish Basu

      Aung’s scout team with its intimate knowledge of the hills and the trails was very effective with these special forces teams. For the first time, Aung thought his scouts were making a difference. By the end of 1943, the British were disrupting Japanese communication lines on a regular basis. These attacks were not lethal blows to the Japanese yet but these were causes of constant irritation. The attacks were draining valuable resources; some resources took a long time to replenish in wartime. By this time, Allied air forces and navies were threatening Japanese supply lines on air and water all over Asia Pacific. Life was getting harder for the Japanese; it was not easy to sustain supply lines.

      If the British destroyed a bridge, the Japanese could repair it in a week or two. But for those two weeks, local logistics were badly stretched. In time, that became the norm, and the Japanese were worried. In some cases, the guerrilla warfare would cause continuous strain in the Japanese supplies and pin them down. The Japanese were faced with a dilemma. If they stayed in the safety of their base, their infrastructure was attacked. If they came out of the base, the casualties went up dramatically. These were very difficult choices for an army that was used to easy victories against the relatively unprepared armies of South Asia in the early days of the war. They had to adapt to the new ground realities.

      The Kachin scouts earned a good reputation as fearless fighters and for their assistance to the British special forces. After the British, the American special forces detachments started working with the Kachin scouts, and they reported good experience too. Aung had heard one story in which Kachin scouts found a parachute drop with hundreds of thousands of Indian Rupees in sacks. They had returned the entire lot to the Allied forces. The British and the Americans talked about their honesty, integrity, and commitment. That was how the world came to know about the highly effective Kachin scouts in the Burma campaign. No story of the WWII Burma campaign can be considered complete without mentioning the contribution of these honest, simple, hardworking, fierce fighters from the high hills of Northern Burma.

      Kachins were very simple, straightforward people—they were also fiercely loyal. One British commander had written in his diary that what he liked most about the Kachins was their simplicity. They were not manipulative like the Burmar and Mon people of the river valleys. The Kachin tribal leaders had to prove a point to the Japanese Imperial Army. They were determined to teach a hard lesson to the Japanese. When the Japanese Army attacked innocent Kachin villagers and burned their homes, they did not anticipate any retaliation. They had grossly underestimated the ability and the resolve of the proud Kachins.

      One morning in early 1944, Aung was asleep in his base camp in the Kachin Hills. It was February, so mornings were chilly in the hills. He had also returned pretty late the previous night after scouting work on the Japanese base. He suddenly woke up with a jolt in his hammock because of a noise. It was like a couple of people shouting in the local Shan and Kachin dialect. Aung’s scouts knew making noise could expose them to the wandering Japanese patrols—that is why they were trained to operate quietly. Noise in the hills can be very dangerous.

      That was what had surprised Aung. His scouts were forgetting their basic training and shouting; their actions could endanger the whole scout camp! Aung was on his feet in a flash with his gun to investigate what was happening. When he got closer through the dense bushes, Aung found a Japanese person in an American type of uniform being held captive by two of his scouts at gunpoint. The captive was being interrogated by two of Aung’s new scouts, and they were not understanding a single word of his rapid-fire responses. Aung’s scouts were getting frustrated and threatening him by raising their voices in Shan and Kachin. They thought their raised voices would do the trick.

      The two scouts were trying to scare the captive by telling him that he would be hung from a tree branch, and then certain parts of his body would be fed to the animals slowly. That graphic description did not have the desired effect on the captive because he did not understand Shan or Kachin. The two scouts were getting agitated. Aung listened to the exchange for a few minutes and realized that the captive was responding in fluent Japanese; he looked like a person of Japanese origin too. But because of his American style uniform, Aung looked at him and asked him in English very slowly, “Who are you?”

      What followed was something completely unexpected! The man answered, “I am a Japanese American member of the American special forces who just entered Burma from India. After we entered Burmese territory, we were told by the British special forces that you were camping on these hills. I came looking for you when your people captured me.”

      Just to make sure that he was not dreaming, Aung pinched himself and asked, “Why were you constantly responding to my people in Japanese? They are local Kachins with no Japanese language skills. They do not look like Japanese soldiers, do they?”

      The American responded, “No, they certainly do not. I thought I might have run into locals working with the Japanese Army, so it felt safer to respond in Japanese. At least initially till I knew who they were. In the worst-case scenario, I could pretend to be a Japanese soldier who got separated from another unit. There are many divisions of the Japanese Army fighting in Burma, so they might not know one another. I was hoping they would not.”

      Aung asked, “What about your uniform? Japanese soldiers do not wear that uniform.”

      The captive answered, “I could say that on my way to the hills, I found a dead American soldier and stole his full uniform, so that I can blend in.”

      Aung told him, “Good story, but you could not have sold that story to the Japanese. They are smart. If they found you, they would have killed you after interrogation. You are Japanese, so as a favor, they might not have used their own blades on you—they would have ordered you to do hara-kiri instead. You don’t know how the Japanese treat their prisoners; I have seen it myself.” The man shook. Aung’s next question was, “Why are you alone? Where is the team?”

      He responded, “I am the advance lookout. I am ethnic Japanese—that was why I was selected.”

      He informed Aung that the other members of the team were hiding near the nearby stream. Aung said, “First tip, never hide near a stream; that is the first place the animals and the Japanese would check. Anyway, take me to them immediately and walk ahead of me. Please be as quiet as you can; you should not be noisy in the hills; trackers can hear your footfall and plan an ambush from a long distance. Noise draws the wrong kind of attention from the Japanese in these hills.”

      While walking down to the stream with the American soldier, Aung learned that this special forces unit under General Merrill was new. It was called the Galahad. This unit also had a Chinese detachment with it a mile down the stream. The Chinese and the Americans planned to take on the Japanese together. Aung thought that might work well tactically. The combined forces planned to attack the Japanese lines very hard in parallel, at multiple strategic points.

      Once they reached the stream, Aung found nine other Americans in similar jungle uniform waiting. After the introductions, they went further downstream and met with the Chinese. There, only the commander, a twenty-year-old like Aung, spoke or understood English. That day, Aung spent the whole day briefing the Americans and the Chinese commanders in detail. He briefed them on enemy formations, transportation infrastructure, supply lines, and positions of heavy artillery. Aung returned to his mountain camp late in the evening.

      The role for his scouts was clearly defined by the Galahad high command; Aung thought it would make them more effective. It seemed the Galahad had taken the scouts into account after talking to the British and then made its own tactical plan. Aung explained to the Americans how the Kachin scouts carefully planned an ambush, using their hand-made pungyi sticks. Pungyi was a smoke-hardened bamboo stake that the Kachins used in combat. The Kachins were sons of that soil—they could use the foliage to camouflage themselves very well. Being natural trackers, they could spot a Japanese patrol many miles ahead of the place of ambush. Those types of actions were not as easy for outsiders, more so for the Japanese soldiers. They could not do it.

      In preparing an ambush, the Kachins would select a good site and camouflage the site to appear as natural as possible to casual observers. They would then position their automatic weapons, ready to rake the trail with bullets. After that, they would plant the pungyis in the