by | 2 February 2026 · 8:39 pm

Indian Electrical Mechanical Engineers

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 167-169:

Ascham’s small band of brothers was one of the echelon units attached to any infantry brigade. The fighting heart of a brigade was its three 900-man-strong infantry battalions – one British, one Indian and one Gurkha – but there were also support troops, from artillery to mules to engineers and signals to Ascham’s Indian Electrical Mechanical Engineers, who were there directly in support of the brigade’s motor transport – MT – in the field. Ascham’s team were, in essence, a mobile workshop, and here in the jungle they were absolutely essential. In this treacherous fighting terrain, Slim and others had recognized that, as far as was humanly possible, fighting units had to be as self-sufficient at the front as they could be. It was no good a number of Jeeps and trucks slogging their way down Slim’s new brick roads from Bengal, across the newly hewn Ngakyedauk Pass and down into the Kalapanzin Valley only to suffer a collapsed axle or need a new gasket and discover there was no means of rectifying the problem. This, then, was where Ascham’s seventy-five Indian Electrical Mechanical Engineers came in. Their task was to maintain the fighting capacity of the brigade’s MT.

The single most important piece in their armoury was their large, 3-ton, four-wheel-drive workshop lorry. It had a powerful winch at the front and a canvas roof over a mobile workshop behind. This was kitted out with an impressive array of equipment: there was a lathe, a vertical drilling machine, a workbench with vices, racks for heavy tools, oxy-acetylene welding equipment, battery-charging gear, a vat of sulphuric acid, hydraulic jacks, hoisting equipment to lift engines, transmission blocks and other heavy items, as well as awnings, which could be slung from the sides of the truck or between trees. This meant they could, in theory, repair pretty much anything right there, in the field. They also had five further 3-ton lorries, a large-capacity water tank, three Jeeps with trailers and a BSA motorcycle, which helped them little, but to which Ascham had become quite attached. One of the Jeep trailers had been made into a generator from the engine of a wrecked Jeep they had discovered and they used this to power their welding equipment or to provide lighting. A second trailer was used to store spare parts, while the unit also had office equipment, tents, tables, benches, cooking gear, and weapons, including rifles, a machine gun and grenades.

Ascham’s engineers were a disparate bunch of young men, drawn from all corners of India’s vast reach and including Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. Although some twenty-two different languages were used throughout the country, they had all learned to speak just one, Urdu, and were bound by a different type of language: mechanical and electrical engineering. As their officer, Ascham had made sure he learned Urdu, and fluently too, which understandably gave him a closer bond with his men. They all looked much the same too, after long months working out in the heat and sun; while trousers and shirt sleeves were religiously worn during the evenings, no one bothered much about wearing shirts during the day and so all were tanned the colour of coffee and, of course, everyone wore the same uniforms of olive-drab khaki drill, black boots and – the few Sikhs excepted – black berets.

The hierarchy was easily absorbed: Ascham was the boss, but the Indian NCOs were also held in very high esteem. A jemadar was the equivalent of a warrant officer, a havildar of a sergeant and a naik the same as a corporal, and yet Indian NCOs were accorded a level of respect and status that was higher than their British Army counterparts. ‘You were taught to look up to them,’ noted Ascham. ‘In a way, they were the Indian Army. It could not possibly have functioned without them. They advised, discreetly. They handled awkward incidents, privately. Their personal loyalty to you and the unit was essential.’ It was a system that Ascham certainly believed worked brilliantly well, and he was both proud and fond of his men, who, despite their differences of background, culture, religion and language, were all bound by what he felt was a palpable sense of honour, loyalty and, almost above all, good humour. They would undoubtedly need it in the weeks to come.

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Filed under Britain, labor, language, military, nationalism, religion, South Asia, war

by | 2 February 2026 · 7:50 am

Polish Poets Explore Haiku

My latest compilation from Culture.pl includes an article by Agnieszka Warnke on Polish poets who explored Japanese haiku. Here are a couple pieces of it.

Poland, 1937, issue no. 46 of Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News) dedicated to Japanese culture. Somewhere amidst an article on the erotic life of a Japanese man, practical advice on ‘Dziudo i dziudziutsu’ (Judo and Jujitsu), and an advertisement for Mitsubishi, there are references to haiku that inform the reader that they are ‘17-syllable poems’ and that ‘from the initial stanza of renga, another variation later developed, which was called hokku or haikai’.

The Polish Haiku Association was established nearly 80 years later. In the meantime, several volumes of Japanese poems (not necessarily translated from the original) were published, as well as Antologia polskiego haiku (Anthology of the Polish Haiku), in which Ewa Tomaszewska included works inspired – sometimes unconsciously – by the poetry and aesthetics of the Far East. How did the most popular Japanese poetic form come into being, and how has it evolved?

…

Yamoto Dojū, an expert on the genre, argues that kigo [season words] is ‘the highest taste, the essence of poetry’. The most famous anthology of Japanese miniatures in Poland, translated by Żuławska-Umeda, is organised into four seasons. In 14th-century Japan, there were several indicators of the seasons, but by the 16th and 17th centuries, their number increased to 599, soon exceeding a thousand. There’s an extensive list of Polish kigo on the website of the Polish Haiku Association: spring is represented, for example, by molehills and hay fever, summer smells of chives and hay carts, the beginning of autumn is heralded by deer rutting and its end by a bent umbrella, while in winter the fur of mammals thickens and brightens, and flies become sluggish.

Numerous references to nature appear in the lyrics of Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, and the topic of Orientalism in her poems has frequently been discussed by literary scholars. The poet does not restrict herself to a careful observation of nature. She animates and personifies it: in the volume Pocałunki (Kisses), the sky can become angry, and in Surowy jedwab (Raw Silk), the firmament freezes in terror. Comparisons to the masters of the genre are inevitable when reading her works. Take, for example, the frog glorified by Bashō (in Czesław Miłosz’s translation: ‘Stara sadzawka, / Żaba – skok – / Plusk’; in R. H. Blyth’s translation: ‘The old pond / A frog jumps in – The sound of the water’).

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Filed under Japan, language, literature, Poland

by | 1 February 2026 · 9:46 am

Bengal Famine, 1943

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 112-114:

Most Bengalis lived an extremely precarious existence. Some ten million were utterly dependent on agriculture, but of these more than half held less than 2 acres of land and many none at all. There was charity and relief but no social welfare; they had to fend for themselves. Through the first half of 1943 food prices had increased dramatically. … This was due in part to the shortages in Bengal but also to increased demand for the feeding of troops in India, as well as demand from around the world. It was artisans who suffered first, because as poverty increased so the money available for goods dried up. Then the shortages hit the wider Bengali population, many of whom left the country for the cities. By the time Tom Grounds was on leave in Calcutta, the city was bursting with the influx of impoverished families searching for food.

Yet while the cost of food was certainly a factor, the biggest problem now facing the authorities was how to get food to Bengal and urgently. The state had already been an importer of food for over a decade and most of it had come from Burma, now closed to India. The loss of Burma had been disastrous for Bengal’s fragile economy and the subsequent cyclone had made it catastrophic. Where else could it be sourced? North America and South America were the obvious places, but the amount needed was enormous and would have required a major diversion of shipping at a time when the demands on such seaborne transport had never been greater.

That August, Churchill was not prepared suddenly to release shipping to take food to Bengal; however draconian that may seem, far away in Britain the problems of the Bengalis seemed less pressing than the urgent need to maintain supplies at a crucial moment in the war. Britain and America were fighting in Sicily – an island that could be supplied effectively only by ship; they were about to invade mainland Italy, which also required an amphibious operation and supply; they were preparing for the invasion of north-west Europe; and they were fighting the Japanese throughout the Pacific. Was Churchill really expected to interrupt the war effort, and current operations, with millions of lives at stake in theatres of war around the world? Who was to say what effect such a diversion of shipping would have on the eventual length of the war, with its implications for further loss of life? In any case, ships could not be diverted from the far side of the Atlantic, for example, at the drop of a hat. Churchill was not to blame.

Not all India was facing famine – only Bengal and the north-east. One problem was that in 1935 the government had ceded considerable central power to the provinces, where the regional governments were all democratically elected. The previous year, 1942, these had all agreed to introduce trade barriers between one another. The central government of India now announced there should be free trade in grain, but plans to send relief to Bengal had been obstructed by local government officers, police and other officials who feared their own provinces risked suffering a similar fate to that of Bengal. Wavell, in one of his first acts as Viceroy-Designate, had forced the issue by threatening legal and even military action, and by August substantial amounts of grain had finally begun to arrive in Bengal. It was, however, too little too late to bring a swift end to the humanitarian disaster rising horrifically throughout the region. Relief kitchens hastily set up in Calcutta and elsewhere were simply not enough. With malnutrition came disease; those not dying of starvation were just as likely to succumb to typhus, malaria or cholera, and there were not enough hospitals or medical care to cope.

The famine had certainly been exacerbated by the war and by the fact that the Indian government had prioritized combatting the Japanese above all other matters. Yet the authorities, although slow to react, were certainly not immune to the horrors unfolding and, of course, while the tragedy of human suffering was truly appalling, the famine was yet another massive problem for the Allied command to overcome. It stretched already overstretched lines of supply, pushed the limited medical services to breaking point, affected food supplies to the troops, further sapped the morale of those who witnessed the starving, dying and dead throughout Bengal, and damaged the reputation of the British even more, and all at a time when there was a new Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief.

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Filed under Bangladesh, Britain, Burma, disease, food, Italy, Japan, migration, military, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 31 January 2026 · 11:31 pm

V Force Intelligence in Burma

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 86-89:

There were code-breakers too, and radio listening, but possibly the most important of all – especially to those now heading to the front – was V Force.

This extraordinary group of native Burmese under British command operated all along the front and were purely intelligence gatherers and reconnaissance – but they were mightily effective. The commanders had detailed knowledge of the local language, culture and conditions. One of them, based further to the north-east in the Naga Hills, was indicative of the unorthodox approach taken by V Force: Ursula Graham Bower was an anthropologist who had befriended the Naga head-hunters before the war, and, as her Christian name suggested, was a woman.

Another was Captain Anthony Irwin, who was operating in the Arakan, and running his own team under the overall charge of one of the V Force originals, Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Donald.

…

V Force were the eyes and ears of the British effort in the Arakan. While Irwin was dependent on his local recruits to collect intelligence, his task was to be the brains behind the operation. An inadequate brain, it seemed to him to begin with, but he learned quickly enough. On parting, Donald had told him: ‘Trust [your] men with everything you’ve got, and they will never let you down.’ Nearly a year on, Irwin knew those had been wise words indeed.

‘These men’ were Mussulmen – local Muslims who had settled in the area some two hundred years earlier. There was now an ethnic split in the Arakan between Muslim and Maugh, who were Hindu, which had led to civil war in the area as recently as 1941; like any civil conflict, it had been brutal, with entire villages decimated by the opposing factions. The result had been that the southern half of the Arakan was now predominantly Maugh, while the north was almost entirely Muslim. This local tragedy rather played into the hands of the British, however, because the Arakan had been conveniently split into two distinct spheres of influence, something they were able to exploit. Muslims hated Maughs and, because the Maughs were helping the Japanese, they hated the Japanese too. Conversely, the Maughs were willing to work for the Japanese against the Mussulmen and, by association, the British. There were two factors, however, that made this a better deal for the British than for the Japanese. The first was that most of the fighting so far had been in the north of the Arakan, where there were fewer Maughs. The second was that because the Japanese held dear the cult of racial superiority, they treated all conquered people with violent contempt, including the Maughs. Furthermore, because Japanese forces were generally so badly supplied – especially with food – they tended to loot what they could from the Burmese without paying any kind of compensation. This was not conducive to winning trust.

Irwin very quickly became an ardent Burmese Mussulman-ophile. They were tenacious, courageous and had an uncanny knack for remembering data. Details of enemy columns were recalled with accuracy; they could tell Japanese planes from Allied long before Irwin himself could ever distinguish them. They would remember with precision exactly where enemy dispositions were and be able to mark them on a map. ‘If they see a British soldier lying wounded and lost in the jungle, they will get him in somehow,’ noted Irwin. Barney Barnett of 136 Squadron, had first-hand experience of this: ‘If they see a Jap body, they will cut off the head and proudly bring it to me, demanding baksheesh’, he noted.

Once, Irwin was sent a map, beautifully drawn and with Japanese positions clearly marked. Also written on the map was a note. ‘Many Japs are looting the publics,’ had been neatly scrawled in pidgin English. ‘Please tell the bombing mans and bomb nicely. Please tell the bombing mans that there are many good publics near and only to kill the Japanese.’

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Filed under Bangladesh, Britain, Burma, India, Japan, language, military, nationalism, religion, war

by | 30 January 2026 · 9:39 pm

Polish Realia: Imperatives

Ciągnać ‘Pull’ [cf. Pociąg ‘train’, Ger. Zug ‘train’ < ziehen ‘pull’]
Chwyć dowolne uchwyty ‘Grab any handles [on the equipment]’
Mów, pisz i czytaj [po Japońsku] ‘Speak, write and read [Japanese]’
Odkry ponad 70 smaków ‘Discover over 70 flavors’
Otwieraj i zamykaj ‘Open and close [here]’
Otwórz teraz ‘Open now’
Pal tutaj ‘Smoke here’ [in designated area]
Pchać ‘Push’
Pochyl się lekko do przodu ‘Lean slightly forward’
Poczekaj tutaj ‘Wait here’
Popłyń z nami do Szwecji ‘Sail with us to Sweden’
Trzymaj drzwi zamknięte ‘Keep door closed’
Siedź prosto ‘Sit up straight’
Skontaktuje się ‘Contact [us here]’
Skup/Sprzedaż ‘Buying/Selling’
Stań przed urządzeniem ‘Stand in front of the device’
Ustaw siedzisko ‘Adjust the seat’
Wykorzystaj kupon na zakupy ‘Take advantage of the coupon for shopping’
Zagłosuj tutaj ‘Vote here’
Zamów/Odbierz (tutaj) ‘Order/Pick up (here)’
Zeskanuj tutaj ‘Scan here’
Znajdź nas ‘Find us [here]

Negative imperatives
Nie hałasuj ‘Don’t make noise’
Nie odrywaj ‘Don’t tear off’
Nie skacz ‘Don’t jump’
Zakaz biegania ‘No running’
Zakaz palenia ‘No smoking’
Zakaz pływania ‘No swimming’
Zakaz picia ‘No drinking’
Zakaz wjazdu ‘No entry’
Zakaz wstępu ‘No entry/access’

Clickbait
Dowiedz się więcej ‘Find out more’
Kup teraz ‘Buy now’
Nowy sezon | Oglądaj teraz ‘New season | Watch now’
Pobierz aplikacje ‘Download app’
Przeglądaj ‘Browse’
Sprawdź ‘Check [it out]’
Szczegóły wydarzeń na [URL] ‘Details of events at [URL]’
Więcej na [URL] ‘More at [URL]’
Zagraj teraz ‘Play now’
Zarejestruj się ‘Register [yourself]’
Zarezerwuj ‘Reserve [here]’
Znajdź sklep ‘Find store’

Recruiting brochure
Zamieszkaj w USA na wakacje. ‘Live in the USA on vacation.’
Poznaj ludzi z całego świata, ‘Get-to-know people from the whole world,’
rozwijaj się i odkrywaj uroki Stanów ‘develop and discover the charms of States’
po zakończeniu programu wymiany. ‘after the end of the exchange program.’

Wyjedź na wakacje do USA! ‘Go-away on vacation to the USA!’
Spędź lato w Ameryce w ośrodku kolonijnym dla dzieci
‘Spend the summer in America in a [summer] camp center for kids’

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Filed under economics, education, language, Poland

by | 30 January 2026 · 5:14 am

RAF & USAAF Eastern Air Command

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 145-147:

Even before Tehran, that a restructuring of the air component was urgently needed was crystal clear to Mountbatten, and the advent of his new command helped provide the impetus for sweeping changes in December 1943. At the Chiefs of Staffs talks in Cairo at the end of November he was able to win the support of General ‘Hap’ Arnold, the Chief of the United States Air Force, for the creation of Allied Air Command. Arnold, along with General George Marshall, the US Army Chief of Staff, and General Alan Brooke, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, agreed that Mountbatten, as Supreme Commander, should be entitled to reorganize the air forces within his command as he saw fit. This support was absolutely essential, because what Mountbatten wanted was a truly integrated and coordinated new air command.

By the time the SEAC staff and wider commanders in the theatre had returned to Delhi and Chungking, the Tehran Conference was over and the plans to outflank Burma by sea and also invade the Andamans had been cancelled. General Stilwell, needless to say, was furious, believing Mountbatten’s plans would lead to a greater air focus on the British effort and away from China, still desperately in need of Allied supplies. He told Mountbatten he was lodging a formal protest. Joining with him, as an act of solidarity with his immediate superior, was General George Stratemeyer, commander of the 10th US Army Air Force.

Mountbatten responded with decisive firmness, however, safe in the knowledge that he had Arnold’s and Marshall’s support. He told Stilwell plainly that it was, as far as he was concerned, totally unacceptable to have a subordinate commander holding independent responsibilities for combat air operations. ‘I was,’ he told Stilwell, ‘overriding the objections and publishing a directive that day integrating the British and American Air Forces.’

The day in question was Saturday, 11 December, and the Supreme Commander addressed his entire staff of some 250 men at 8.45 am in the new War Room in his New Delhi HQ. As far as he was concerned, it was a historic day. From henceforth, he announced, the RAF’s Bengal Command and the 10th US Army Air Force would become integrated as one into Eastern Air Command. Overall air commander in theatre would be the British Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, but the new commander of Eastern Air Command was to be Stratemeyer, who despite his rather half-hearted protest in support of Stilwell now readily accepted the post.

Importantly for the planned coming offensive in the Arakan, in the days that followed further reorganization was completed. On 15 December, Troop Carrier Command was formed, incorporating both a USAAF transport group and an RAF transport wing under the command of Brigadier-General William D. Old, a tough and indefatigable commander who was well known for frequently flying operationally himself. Three days later, 3rd Tactical Air Force was also formed from the US 5320th Air Defense Wing and the RAF’s 221 and 224 Groups, which included the Woodpeckers and other Spitfire squadrons. Finally, into the mix were added a number of army air-supply companies, which used special signals arrangements to connect forward HQs and delivery airfields with supply and base airfields.

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Filed under Britain, China, Japan, South Asia, Southeast Asia, U.S., war

by | 29 January 2026 · 7:39 am

Fighting Malaria in Burma, 1944

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 54-55:

[A] pragmatic mindset was most definitely needed in the battle against endemic sickness. Slim recognized, just as the new Supreme Commander recognized, that prevention was better than cure. Mountbatten had made bringing new medical advances and research to the theatre a priority – something that was far beyond Slim’s own influence; but he could improve medical practice and discipline at the front and he was determined to do so as a major priority. Up until the autumn of 1943, if a soldier contracted malaria, for example, he was then transported, while his disease was at its height, hundreds of miles by road, rail and even sea to a hospital in India. This, on average, took him out of the line for around five months. All too often he might then be re-employed in India and never return to Burma. To get around this problem, new Malaria Forward Treatment Units – MFTUs – were now set up. These were, to all intents and purposes, tented hospitals just a few miles behind the front lines. A man with malaria would reach these within twenty-four hours and remain there for three weeks or so until he was cured. When fit, he was sent straight back to his unit.

Mepacrine anti-malaria tablets were also issued to the men, but their introduction was met with the rumour that they caused impotence. This was entirely without foundation, and Slim rigidly insisted that regimental officers make sure the men were taking their Mepacrine. He even introduced spot visits where every man was checked; if the result was less than 95 per cent positive, he summarily sacked the commanding officer. He only ever had to sack three; the message got around quickly and, equally swiftly, that autumn cases of malaria began to fall.

The regimental officers were also told to maintain strict medical discipline in other areas. Trousers were to be worn, not shorts; and shirts were to be worn with the sleeves down before sunset when insects were at their worst; minor abrasions were to be treated immediately and before, not after, they turned septic. The fight against sickness, Slim insisted, had to be a united effort: discipline, sound practice and common sense were key. And already, as the year drew to a close, the health of Fourteenth Army was showing signs of improving – not massively so just yet, but on the chart that hung on Slim’s wall in his office at Comilla the curve indicating hospital admissions was beginning to sink.

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Filed under Britain, Burma, disease, drugs, malaria, military, war

by | 28 January 2026 · 11:45 pm

Polish Realia: Locative Plurals

From a WARS card in a PKP train.

Spotkaj się z nami: [Meet with us:]

w czasie sprzedaży mobilnej z wózka mini-bar
[during mobile sales with the minibar trolley]

w wagonach gastronomicznych
[in dining cars]

w wagonach sypialnych i w kuszetach
[in sleeping and in couchette cars]

w restauracjach stacjonarnych WARS w Warszawie
[in WARS station restaurants in Warsaw]

podczas imprez okolicznościowych (WARS CATERING)
[during special events]

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Filed under language, Poland

by | 28 January 2026 · 9:54 pm

How to Feed British Indian Troops

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 50-52:

These 500,000 men had to be fed three meals every single day and, because of the castes, religions, tribes and nationalities involved, an added complication was the thirty different ration scales needed to feed the army. Fresh meat was difficult both to source and to transport, and refrigeration was limited to say the least, so for those who could eat meat the only solution was to provide them with tinned corned beef, or bully beef as it was called, although this was monotonous and lacked the nutrients of fresh meat. Hindus and Muslims, however, could not eat tinned meat, so they had to go without altogether. The trouble was, acceptable substitutes, milk and ghi – clarified butter – were not available in the right quantities either. Much of the tinned milk sent from Britain and America simply did not survive the long journey. The result was a severe shortage of food supplies. At the Assam front, [Gen. William] Slim discovered that instead of the 65,000 tons that should have been stored at the base depot in Dimapur, there were just 47,000 tons, a deficiency of nearly 30 per cent, and much of the shortfall worked against the Indian troops. ‘The supply situation was indeed so serious,’ wrote Slim, ‘that it threatened the possibility of any offensive.’

Part of the problem was bad management at Delhi, and Slim and Snelling were appalled to discover that the system of peacetime financial control was still in place when it came to procurement. Incredibly, if large quantities of dehydrated food were ordered from Indian contractors, demands for tinned supplies from Britain were then cancelled. On the face of it, that was fair enough, but it had been decreed that dehydrated vegetables were, in terms of scale of issue, a quarter that of tinned goods. In other words, for every 100 tons of dehydrated goods ordered in India, 400 tons of tinned veg orders from Britain were cancelled. This was bad enough, but made worse because there was always a massive discrepancy between the quantities ordered in India and those that were ever actually delivered. Consequently, shortages had been allowed to escalate quickly.

To try to solve this, Slim and Snelling had gone to see Auchinleck in person, who vowed to deal with the supply issues as a matter of urgency. By cutting red tape and tightening the administration of food supply, Auchinleck’s staff at Delhi were able steadily to increase the flow of rations. In fact, just acknowledging earlier shortcomings was a marked step in the right direction.

Despite this improvement, both Slim and Snelling realized they needed to adopt a very hands-on approach themselves; it was no good depending on Delhi to sort out their supply issues. As a result, other sources of meat, such as sheep and goats, were reared locally where possible. They also hired some Chinese to set up duck-rearing farms for both meat and eggs, while along the Imphal front 18,000 acres of vegetables were cultivated.

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Filed under Britain, food, military, nationalism, religion, South Asia, U.S., war

by | 28 January 2026 · 10:29 am

Driving Tanks into Burma, 1944

From Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned World War II in the East, by James Holland (Grove Atlantic, 2024), Kindle pp. 10-12:

Before taking over 7th Indian Division, Messervy had been Director of Armoured Fighting Vehicles in New Delhi and had been a vociferous advocate of more tanks in theatre. It had taken much beating of drums, but eventually he had managed to prove to his superiors that medium tanks such as US-built Lees and Shermans could operate in South-East Asia. The 25th Dragoons had been the first to equip with these 30-ton machines, and it had been planned some days earlier that during the night of 4/5 February the regiment would cross over the Ngakyedauk Pass and report for duty with 7th Division to the east of the Mayu Range, ready to take part in Messervy’s planned assault on Buthidaung.

Later that night, C Squadron also crossed the pass. Among them was twenty-year-old Trooper Norman Bowdler from Dunchurch in the English Midlands. Just a week before, Bowdler had been the loader in his five-man crew, but when the driver had got sick he had taken over and now was responsible for getting their mighty Lee up and over this treacherous pass – and in the dark. He found it a terrifying experience. Above them, Allied aircraft were flying over in order to disguise the sound of the tanks, which would have easily carried to the Japanese positions in the still night air. ‘It was a bit dodgy,’ Bowdler admitted. ‘I mean, getting a thirty-ton tank round these S-bends – well, some of the bends were so severe that you had to go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards to negotiate them.’ He was keenly aware that for all the feat of engineering the creation of the pass undoubtedly was, it was little more than a widened mule track and certainly a long way from being a proper road. In some places, parts of it were bridged by laid tree trunks and Bowdler was worried that at any moment stretches of it would simply crumble away and they would tumble down one of the sheer precipices to the ravine floor 200 feet below. ‘It was so narrow,’ he said, ‘and the tank so heavy – we were fully loaded with ammo, fuel and everything.’ At times, one of the tank’s tracks was actually overhanging the edge of the road as he slewed the beast around a corner. At best there was little more than a yard or so either side of the Lee, and the margins were especially tight around corners that offered very, very little room for manoeuvre.

As a result, it took them much of the night to cross. Bowdler found it more difficult going down the reverse side without the natural braking effect of the climb. Low gears helped, but he was very mindful that this huge weight, crunching over a road that would not pass muster in most people’s book, and being hurried by gravitational pull, could all too easily slip out of his control. The levels of concentration needed were immense, but at long last the road began to level out and in bright moonlight they emerged into an area of paddy, criss-crossed with bunds – the paddy walls – and then eventually leaguered up in an area of elephant grass. Not so very far to the south, Bowdler could hear small arms firing and even the occasional shout. He’d already been in battle before, but here, in the milky darkness of the 7th Division Administrative Area, there was a distinct air of menace.

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Filed under Britain, Burma, Japan, military, South Asia, U.S., war