JAPAN IN DEFEAT
By CAPTAIN GERALD HANLEY
nESPITE continuous and savage attacks, the Japanese were if unable to take Kohima and Imphal. They got half of Kohima, but could get no further. The savagery in their attacks was due partly to their realisation that the, campaign was doomed to fail. Their food and ammunition was running low, the monsoon rains were almost due to start, and they wanted to break the resist- ance of Imphal and Kohima and use them is monsoon quarters before the advance into India. Each of their attacks was broken. Thousands were killed before they could get out of the fighting, but thousands more died of hunger and disease on the road to the Chindwin. They litter the Imphal-Palel-Tamu road in hundreds. When we followed them, the air was filled with the smell of their dead. The sick and wounded were left behind in hundreds and told to pass south as best they could. We wok- dead Japs all along the road, some in their stockinged feet, and where the hills were highest and most exhausting, they lay huddled in groups. They carried only a mess-tin, steel helmet and rifle. Some lay as though asleep, while others were twisted and broken by the bombs which had rained down on them.
Tamu was a scene of nightmare, like something from a Holly- wood war-film. Five hundred Japs lay dead and dying amidst the wreckage of buildings. Some buildings had been blasted and burnt, and only charred posts stood in the long grass. The stench was unbearable,- and in this scene of horror the Jap wounded, starved into a dazed condition and many delirious from malaria, were waiting to die. The pagoda was choked with them, and they lay among heaps of steel helmets, respirators and equipment of all kinds." They had crawled here, in front of the four tall and golden images, to die. Hand grenades littered the altar. In the centre of the temple was a dais, and carved into this was a perfectly sym- metrical pattern of the foot of Buddha. It was littered with blood- soaked bandages and Japanese field-postcards.
Some of the Japs were what the troops called " dehydrated." When they were given water, it passed straight through their bodies; the cells were quite unable to absorb water any longer, and those in this condition died where they lay. No men in this war can have been reduced to such a terrible condition. Prisoners were taken in batches of twelve and thirty. Half of them died before they could be moved. Those that survived were unable to walk and had to be loaded into trucks where they lay on their_ faces, oblivious of everything.
I saw two prisoners who were revived with hot tea. They were dilY men with mattedhair which stood up like a golliwog's, and as tbeY lay in the morning sun they moved about under the stimulus the tea, like kittens, weak and. blinking. They had to wait before they could eat the biscuits and bully-beef which they plucked at wealdY, breathing hard and- exhausted with effort. One of them put his head in his hands and cried like a child. He should have committed suicide, and had failed'; it was a disgrace for him to be alive. One could only guess what he had been- through. These Japs had lived through storms of shells and bombs, and had tottered nearly a hundred miles before they collapsed. They were alive in this valley that stank of death, where their friends lay littered through the jungle and along the road. In the jungle I saw them dead in huge grass huts, wrapped in their blankets, surrounded by heaps of equipment, ammunition, rifles, curled boots with the sepa- rate compartment for the big toe, and rain-sodden documents. Down the tracks in the deep jungle remnants of the Jap forces wandered, lost, starving and utterly without hope. Some killed themselves with their own grenades—a different hara-kiri to that of the silk cushions and the blandishments of admiring friends. Here they killed themselves where they stood, lousy, their hair matted, half mad from hunger and explosions, and deserted by their officers. The rain poured down on them for days, and then the sun came out and bunted them into collapse. This is the picture of a shattered army—an army that had never known defeat, and had never been trained for the day when the machine of supply broke down. They had fought with almost maniacal ferocity to crack the British defences, and their high morale broke, not only under a rain of steel, but under their own surprise and disappointment.
The wake of their retreat has to be seen to be understood. The chaos is indescribable, not the usual chaos of smashed tanks and abandoned guns—these are all here—but the chaos of utter defeat, for their dead cannot be buried fast enough, they are so numerous. The hygiene squads, whose hideous task is endless, search them out in the jungles and in the bunkers. The road, churned into a river of red and black mud, shows the signs of what the R.A.F. has done in the past months. Trucks lie wrecked and burned out every- where, with dead Japs lying round them, and others have gone rolling down the steep mountain-side into the ravines. The Japs, when they exulted and went frantic with victory in 1942, laughed at the British retreat through Burma. They have said nothing of their own retreat back from India. There is not much to say. But the survivors will never forget it.
Overhead, as I write, the R.A.F. bombers are flying south. The nightmare for the Japs is not ended. It grows. The bombers will fly back, load up again, and return, while fighters go boring in, spraying cannon-fire into the groups of Japs who move along the Chindwin. These small men with the savage hearts and the hands that can paint exquisite water-colours in the diaries which they leave lying in the red mud have worked havoc for seven years through the East. The quality of their fanaticism cannot be appreciated by those who have not seen them in war. But it is of the kind that breaks into tears when the body can no longer support the weird power that drives it. Their reactions cannot be measured as can those of any other enemy soldier, for where one breaks under shells the Jap will still fight, and where one is arrogant in defeat, the Jap cries like a child. When the Americans put fifteen thousand tons of bombs and shells on to Kwajalein in the Pacific, it was with the experience of Tarawa, where after three thousand tons of explosives the Japs still fought. They have to be blasted into a coma, and then rooted out of their holes. This is being done now all over the East, and will continue until Japan is crushed. The Jap soldier who kills himself with a grenade can go on doing so as far as the Allied soldier is concerned. But this practice is likely to grow less frequent as the war closes in on Japan. There must come a time when a man asks himself if it is worth it, especially when he finds out that he will be treated well as a prisoner.
Some writers have said that Japan will commit mass-suicide, while others have said the country will have no young men left if this state of exaltation reached by the Japanese in defeat is a permanent part of their mental make-up. But nobody is quite sure, and after Japan's treachery and the frenzy of her victory it is doubtful if anybody cares. No Archbishop is likely to cry out against the bombing of Japan when it comes, for it will be difficult to ask mercy for an enemy that shoots airmen unfortunate enough to bale out over its sacred soil, and perpetrates atrocities of revolting per- versity in China. It is not so much hate as absolute necessity that demands the breaking of Japan's military machine.
The legend that Japanese troops are supermen has been exploded long ago, and soldiers who have fought them for two years in the deep jungles of Burma will tell you that the Japs have little or no jungle-craft, but make as much noise as a family of foraging monkeys as they move. The Allied troops in Burma have a very high morale, for they have measured the Japanese and beaten them into a state that can only be appreciated by a look at their line of retreat from India. Fighting in the climate of the Burmese jungle requires tenacity and physical toughness. The heat is intense, and the mosquitoes are voracious and armed with malaria. The trcops march in rain, mud and glaring heat, and still must be fit for battle. The strain is the same for the Japanese as for our troops, and as the gun and plane-power increases in the Eastern war, the Jap will find the strain too much.
So as our troops hump their loads and march into Burma after the fleeing Japs, they do so with a high spirit. These men, muddy, their green battle-dress torn and sun-stained, fighting under possibly the worst conditions in the world, have waited a long time for this day. It is not pleasant to march through litters of corpses, but the scene holds a certain message for the soldier, and he understands it.
Previous page
