Uncommon Misery:
“War is hell,” General
William T Sherman caustically answered when asked to comment on the “glory” of
war. The Allied soldiers who grappled with the Japanese in WWII, from the
streaming jungles of New Guinea to the razor sharp coral of Tarawa, would
quickly agree. But those who fought in Burma would quickly disagree - they were
in hell.
For the uninitiated, the
word “Burma” conjures exotic images of Buddhist shrines, intricate brass work,
water buffaloes, and exotically beautiful women. It’s an attractive image, but
the reality is the men who fought in Burma were up against one of the world’s
worst climates and some of its most forbidding terrain. They had to scale
jagged mountains, hack their way through almost impenetrable jungle, cross
swiftly flowing rivers, and pass over dusty plains where temperatures ranged as
high as 130 degrees F. Some units had to cut their way through knife-like
elephant grass. Others, using “roads”, found their way blocked by mounds of
debris pushed up by the Japanese. In the mountains the roads were sometimes so
narrow tanks had to creep along with half their tracks hanging over the
edge.
In places it rained as much
as 15 inches a day, miring soldiers up to their calves in porridge-thick mud.
Swarms of black flies drove men to frenzy. After heavy rains trees and bushes
became so heavily laden with blood-sucking leeches that one officer described
the foliage as looking like a “wheat field waving in the wind”. Vicious,
biting, stinging, rapacious insects - from mosquitoes to mites to ticks -
descended on the fleshy bounty the warring armies provided them.
Soldiers suffered from
malaria, dengue fever, cholera, scabies, yaws, scrub typhus and dysentery. At
one point casualties from tropical illness outnumbered those from combat wounds
by a ratio of 14:1, with malaria accounting for 90 per cent of the cases.
The character of the
Japanese enemy greatly compounded the problem for the Allies - those fanatical
fighters almost always preferred death to capture. One Japanese sniper, dubbed
“little Willie” by the British troops he engaged, fired from a hole in a tree
for three weeks, picking off eight officers, despite frantic efforts to get him
with mortar and small arms fire. He eventually slipped away unscathed. In
another documented incident, Japanese infantry attacked British tanks with
nothing more than swords.
Charles Ogburn Junior, a
lieutenant with Merrill’s Marauders, described his time in Burma as the “worst
experience I have ever been through. It was so incomparably the worst that I
could hardly believe in it for the rest of my life at all. In a letter to his
wife, General Joseph Stilwell described the situation as: “Rain, rain, rain.
Mud, mud, mud, typhus, malaria, dysentery, exhaustion, rotting feet, body
sores.”
Burma has its rainy season
from May to September - the Monsoon. This is rain with a vengeance; in some
places as much as 375 inches of rain falls in 12 weeks. It came down so hard at
times, that as one veteran put it: “You literally couldn’t see your hand in
front of your face? The Monsoon turned valleys into lakes; rivers rose 30 feet
in, a single night; and trails became swathes of ankle’-deep - -mud. Frequently
during a downpour the bodies of - -properly
buried fallen soldiers would rise to the surf ace .The effect of the rain
and mud on operations was profound. Flying over the northern part of Burma
during the Monsoon season, the Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia,
Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, peered out of the window of his plane and asked
what river was below. “That’s not a river”, answered the American pilot, “it’s
the Ledo Road”. Overland travel slowed
to little more than a mile an hour on foot. Units often became isolated. One
British officer found it necessary to be ferried by raft from his tent to the
camp mess hall a few yards away.
Though the monsoon certainly
presented some nightmarish problems, it was not the worst of Burma’s tortures.
The rain was cool, and the men liked to take off their shirts and let the water
run over their insect bites and sores. The really bad part came after the rain
stopped. In the sweltering jungle, the temperature climbed steadily every day
and the humidity grew to be overpowering. Fungi and bacteria multiplied,
breeding rot and disease. Even healthy soldiers found breathing difficult, and
sleep became almost impossible. Bamboo
groves were in places so thick units were dominated by elephant grass, usually
at least as tall as a man.
“You never knew from one
moment to the next when you’d run into the Japanese,” wrote Ogburn. Soldiers
lived in constant agonising anticipation of a sniper’s bullet, and were so
jittery an entire battery of artillery might be called in to eliminate a
solitary sniper.
The terrors of the jungle
left indelible marks on the men in Burma. Many came down with “jungle
happiness”. When they returned to civilian life they found themselves ill at
ease around crowds and bright lights and sometimes even their family and friends.
The men not only had to
contend with Burma’s physical obstacles, but its abundant microscopic life as
well. The jungles of Burma are host to virtually every tropical disease known
in the world. Living and fighting in the mud and water, American, Chinese and
Japanese came down with trench foot, jungle rot an ailment called Naga Sores -
painful ulcers that sometimes ate through to the bone.
By far the most common and
deadliest sickness was malaria. It is caused by a single-celled organism called
Plasmodium (there are four varieties)
and is transmitted from person to person by mosquitoes. The disease causes
fever, chills, sweats and swelling of the spleen and liver and kills up to 20
per cent of its victims. The patient is prostrated for days or weeks at a time.
Malaria swept through all the units engaged on both sides. At one point the
British were evacuating 120 men per day due to malaria, compared to ten due to
wounds.
Scrub typhus - a mite-borne
variant of louse- borne typhus was prevalent as well. Occurring in epidemic
fashion, the disease causes a pneumonia-like illness and fever of about 14 days
duration.
During the 44-45 campaign,
the British 14th Army suffered some 5,400 cases of scrub typhus, of which about
10 per cent ended in death. At the same time, US forces suffered 6,685 cases,
of which 243 were fatal. But overall Allied loses to this disease were actually
lower than had been expected because of the liberal use of DDT. The rate of
illness and death among the insecticide-less Japanese is unknown, but must have
been higher.
During the siege of
Myitkyina, 80 per cent of US forces there had dysentery. Some cases were so
acute the men cut their pant-seats open to be able to relieve themselves
instantly. Between 75-100 Marauders were evacuated out daily. Under pressure to
keep men in the line, medical officers refused to evacuate any man who had not
run a fever of 102 degrees for three consecutive days and had not passed a
review board of doctors certifying his illness.
Manpower shortages became so
acute that those still on their feet had to serve long stretches without
respite, some finally falling from sheer exhaustion. At the same time,
Stilwell’s staff began placing enormous pressure on rear area hospitals to
return all sick and wounded capable of bearing arms. Convalescents were
dragooned and shipped back to the fighting over the objections of the doctors.
On one occasion angry physicians literally chased after such a truck convoy
bound for the front, forcing it to turn back.
Another group of
convalescents shipped back to Myitkyina were found to be in such poor shape on
arrival that they had to be immediately turned round and re-evacuated.
Conditions at the hospitals,
when the men could get there, were almost as bad as those at the front. The
convalescent camp at Margherita, in Assam, was located in a pasture described
by its inmates as a “pest-hole”. The bamboo buildings were collapsing from the
ravages of insects. Wards were overcrowded and had dirt floors. In the wet months,
when the rains would stop temporarily, according to Ogburn, “It was like the
inside of a tea-kettle”.
Burma has been called the
“forgotten theatre” of World War II. However, those who fought there would
never forget the hell it was.
Edited by Alan J Taylor 2001
Original author unknown