BANTU IN BURMA
By CAPTAIN GERALD HANLEY
SOME have pierced ear-lobes that hang halfway down their necks. These are generally slim and handsome, of the Nandi tribes of Kenya. There are some hawk-faced Masai here, effeminate of fea- ture and lean with strength. Others have tribal scars cut into their faces, radiating from under their eyes, and with chains of blisters made years ago on their chests and backs. There are Africans from Rhodesia, Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda and Nyasaland, and black, French-speaking troops of a Belgian Congo Medical Unit. Here, all tribesmen of Eastern and Central Africa have mingled and become a unit, with Ki-Swahili as their common language. Five years ago they had handled nothing more lethal than a spear. Now, they have killed Japanese with rifles, Bren-guns, mortars and grenades. One wonders if their strange and attractive tribal legends and customs have survived amidst the high-explosive and steel, or if the life of machine-made violence has killed their sense of wonder. They have fought as the ttth East African Division right through the monsoon, down the pestilential Khabaw Valley. They are still simple of heart, though hardened in many ways that are not yet even apparent. They have fought well, and have proved that the courage which sustained them in other days of drought, tribal raids and tropic catastrophe, is still with them, and can face all that the Japanese war-machine can produce.
The regular Askari of the old King's African Rifles was one of the finest products of the British Army ; shaven-headed, lean, and efficient. He was an example to the young Africans who wandered into the recruiting depots of the East African territories in the early days of the war. They came wearing blankets and sandals, or reddish earth-coloured cloths. They wanted to join " Kingi Georgi's" army and be soldiers. Just what has been done with all that young and unsophisticated material that joined the East African Forces has probably not been realised by the people at home. The great proportion of the recruits were completely un- educated. They counted up to ten on their fingers and then started again. Reading and writing were mysteries, and machinery was miraculous. When they were sick they wanted to be burned with hot irons in the tribal manner. Sickness was a devil. They did not know what speed was. They jumped out of moving trucks to retrieve their hats, not realising that they would crash on their faces. They could not understand the tremendous power con- tained in the small, shining cylinder of the rifle cartridge. They were given strange clothing, and lined up in a new world.
When the Army starts to mould a thousand British recruits at home, it has many obstacles and prejudices to overcome before
it can produce the soldier. In East Africa the task was greater.
The Army had to give the recruits a modicum of education, and teach them simple hygiene, before it could even start putting them into the machine that files down the corners, and extracts the mass mental and physical effort that makes the company, the battalion, and the division. Only then could it start looking for the sharper mind of the future corporals and sergeants. The officers and N.C.O.s who trained them worked hard and untiringly. They had patience, humour, and, most of all, belief—belief that the great masses of raw human material, uncivilised and credulous, could be turned into efficient soldiers as good as the regulars of the King's African Rifles, who bawled the orders on the square and gave advice. Infantry, gunners, engineer troops, drivers, signallers, car- penters, military police, and medical orderlies, were turned out, and have fought in Italian East Africa, Madagascar, and are now in Burma. They were the result of endless patience and they have more than repaid the effort that was spent on them..
The feeling for "Kingi Georgi " among the askaris is not just a " bwana's" sundowner story, but a real thing, and though to most of the askaris "Kingi Georgi" is a picture in a frame in the• mess-hall, they regard him as the King of all the British, and serve him accordingly. At heart, the askari is still a child, and replies with all his strength to example and leadership.. Leadership with Africans is a personal business, and goes deeper than rank and regulations. He is a shrewd judge of character. He needs to be able to tell it all to someone who will understand. He finds this in his officers and British N.C.O.s who lead him in Fattle. He appreciates justice and firmness, for buried deep in him is the ancient feeling for the word and law of chiefs.
These simple men had gradually been tempered by campaigning in Africa and Madagascar, before they went into the green, dripping gloom of the Burma jungles to fight the Japanese. They trained for over a year in the damp heat of Ceylon before they left for Burma, and had begun to think they would never fight, so wearying had Ceylon become. They entered the Burma fighting at a time when the grey monsoon clouds filled the sky, and the jungles of the Khabaw valley were deluged with rain. For the first fifty-five days of their campaign it rained without a break. The Japanese army had collapsed before Imphal, and then General Slim struck them with everything he had. Disease and explosives had killed over 60,00o of them before their retreat became a rout, and they were still dying as the monsoon reached its peak, and the East Africans went in pursuit.
The askaris stared wide-eyed at the sights they saw in those days of August, 1944. The crack Japanese troops of legend were totter- ing about in the mud, broken and demoralised, and the East Africans advanced rapidly through a valley of chaos and death. They realised that this was not the real Japanese army they had come up against, but during the first battles for bunkers and hills defended by the fitter Japs the Africans fought with great ferocity. As September ran out, the opposition became stiffer, and the rout turned into a well-fought rearguard action. The remnants of the shattered Japanese army faded into the jungle, and were replaced by new troops. Soon the askaris found the well-fed, fanatical Jap troops they had been trained to fight. Through two and a-half months they had marched, fought and slept in mud and rain. When the sun came out at last they were hardened and jungle-wise, and had, in fact, completed their training. They had begun to under- stand the sinister and diabolical view of death peculiar to Japanese troops. The courage of Jap troops is maniacal and sub-human. Only the animal-minded can survive the stunning bombardments hurled on the Japanese, and still come up out of the fox-holes, hysterical and dazed, to fire the machine-guns at the advancing infantry. The Japanese obey orders with a courage that is animal, and their terror is condensed into hysteria when the breaking-point is reached. • Japs surrounded and trapped, approached askaris and begged to be
killed, pointing at their throats. Others produced hidden grenades after capture, and tried to make the last stupid and sickening act for the God-Emperor. Like malicious dwarfs, they showed the askaris what Japan could produce—a herd of machine-turned, mur- derous and pathetic human beings. The Africans realised that they were fighting strange people, unlike any other people on earth. They fought them at close quarters with matchets, and hunted them out of trenches that ran through the jungle like rabbit-warrens. They learned the jungle technique as the British, Indian, Gurkha and West African troops had learned it before them, the hard, bloody way.
The Japanese have not recovered from the terrific beating given them by the Fourteenth Army. The East Africans, now part of that great army, have advanced to the Chindwin river. They are a long way from home, and most of them had never traveled beyond the confines of their villages in Africa before the war. .They had once been puzzled by the tinned sardine, and could not understand how the Europeans got the fish into the small tins. In Burma they have seen all the machinery of war. They have been shelled and machine-gunned, mortared and ambushed. They met civilisa- tion through the medium of destructive weapons, and, like all other soldiers, have developed a philosophy for high explosives. They are still simple-hearted, and when they graze their cattle again in the thorn country of Africa, the war in Burma will fade like an old dream.
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