Jocks in the Jungle Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

  Pen & Sword Military

  an imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

  South Yorkshire

  S70 2AS

  Copyright © Gordon Thorburn 2012

  9781783030910

  The right of Gordon Thorburn to be identified as Author of this Work

  has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One - Religious Freedom and Watching the Highlands

  Chapter Two - The Road to India

  Chapter Three - Why They Were There

  Chapter Four - Never Seen Anything Like It

  Chapter Five - Orders To Proceed

  Chapter Six - The Beginning of the End

  Chapter Seven - Monsoon

  Chapter Eight - The Last Few

  Chapter Nine - Post Mortem

  Sources

  Index

  Foreword

  Families spend holidays where the rivers flow in Madhya Pradesh, north-central India. They have elephant rides and jungle drives, hoping to see a tiger.

  In 1943, there was no thought of such good times for two battalions of Scottish soldiers. For them, that country meant a new and unimaginably arduous kind of training.

  Some of the Black Watch boys had seen action in Somaliland, Crete and Tobruk. Some of the Cameronians had fought the Japs in the Burma retreat. Even for these, such training was trial by ordeal. Many more of the Jocks were new, just shipped out from Scotland, but all of them were ordinary men; men from the towns and villages who’d taken the King’s shilling in their country’s peril.

  These were first-class British infantry, but not the super-selected Special Forces types that we know today. Nevertheless, it was a special-forces job they were supposed to do and that is what they were called, Special Force.

  The challenge in Madhya Pradesh was to turn themselves into jungle fighters as good as the Japanese. They had a few short months to become Chindits.

  They joined two brigades of 7,677 officers and men going into the jungle, of whom 531 were killed, captured or missing, and around 1,600 were wounded. By the end, some 3,800 were too sick to fight. Only 1,754 could be classified as ‘effective’ when they came out and, in truth, half of those were fit for no more than a hospital bed. It was a miracle anybody survived at all.

  And that was just two of the five brigades that went in. Was this the greatest medical disaster of World War Two? Who caused it?

  Author’s Note

  General Orde Wingate’s 3rd Indian Infantry Division, called Special Force, as originally constituted and in training, was seven brigades plus various specialist units; the equivalent of thirty battalions and other forces, with most battalions divided into two columns. So, for example, 14 Brigade was four battalions from different regiments, in eight columns. Each column was about 400 hundred men.

  One brigade in Chindit training was American and deployed elsewhere as the famous Merrill’s Marauders, and one of the British brigades was also reassigned, so the 1944 Chindits went in as five brigades. The Cameronians’ two columns in Number 111, and the Black Watch’s two columns in Number 14 were, obviously, small parts of a greater whole, and concentrating on their stories is not meant to put them above or beyond anyone else. They were typically special, not especially special.

  You may talk about your Lancers, and your Irish Fusiliers,

  Your Aberdeen Militia and the Queen’s Own Volunteers.

  Of all the other regiments that’s going far awa’,

  Just give to me the tartan of the gallant Forty Twa.

  Strolling through the green fields on a summer’s day,

  Watching all the country girls working at the hay,

  I really was delighted and he stole my heart awa’

  When I saw him in the tartan of the gallant Forty Twa.

  (Traditional, probably nineteenth century)

  On the eighteenth day of April, in the year of forty four,

  When the boys of the Cameronians went marching to the fore,

  It was early in the morning as the Cams were standing to,

  That they met and fought the enemy on the road to Pinlebu.

  Now think of the fourteenth army, the boys who fought so well,

  Of the hardships they had suffered, no-one but them can tell.

  Far from their homes in Blighty and the folks they loved so true,

  They fought and died forgotten, on the road to Pinlebu.

  (Anonymous)

  Dedication

  Of course this book is dedicated to all the men who fought the Japanese in the Burmese jungle, but in particular to the ones I met and to whom I was privileged to listen: Pipe Corporal Bill Lark, Corporal Jim McNeilly and Colonel David Rose DSO. I only wish that their words to me could have been amplified and reinforced by words from my own father, Private/Rifleman 14254229 Andrew Douglas Thorburn, sometime Lance Corporal, who was there but never said a thing about it.

  He joined the Black Watch at No 8 Infantry Training Centre, Queen’s Barracks, Perth, on 16 September, 1942, where he was classified as a signaller and sent on to the Training Battalion, the 10th, on 30 December, stationed at Thurso, and then at Alnwick in Northumberland. He ‘proceeded overseas’ on 12 March, 1943, as part of a draft of 120 officers and men, and was in Bombay on 11 June.

  The first Chindit expedition had begun in January 1943 and ended in April, and its initial success had resulted in a new Chindit Brigade being formed; the 111th Indian Infantry, made up of 1st Battalion Cameronians, 2nd Battalion King’s Own, and 3rd Battalion of the 4th Gurkha Rifles.

  The 120 Black Watch, sent to India for the purpose although not told so, were transferred to the Cameronians on 31 July to begin training in the jungle and eventually to fly in to Burma, 200 miles behind Japanese lines, with 111 Brigade, Special Force.

  I am fortunate in having the personal account of an exact contemporary of my father, Frederick C. Patterson, Black Watch and Cameronians, on which to draw for this part of the history.

  I say my father never spoke of it. Well, hardly ever. I can remember one occasion driving along in his car with the radio on, when the death of a man was announced. ‘Good God
above,’ said my father. ‘Last time I saw him was on Hill (whatever it was).’

  He was six feet tall, my father, and 154lb (11st) when he joined the army. He came home from the jungle, after contracting amoebic dysentery, weighing a little over six stone. This was the only fact to become part of family history; that my father was six stone when he was ‘invalided out’, and is the reason why the medical disaster of the Chindits, usually neglected in telling the story, is such an important part of this book.

  He recovered at a hospital in Southport, and went back into the police force he had volunteered to leave. For many, many, years afterwards, until eventually persuaded by my mother, he never would go abroad for holidays. Abroad, you see, was an awful place.

  Gordon Thorburn, Autumn, 2011

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Mrs Terry Patterson for her help and permission to quote from her husband’s memoirs, to Thomas B. Smyth, Black Watch Archivist, Barrie Duncan of the Cameronians Museum, Hamilton, and to Ken Stewart for information.

  Chapter One

  Religious Freedom and Watching the Highlands

  All famous regiments of the line can list great battles and brave deeds, but few can claim such unorthodox births as the Cameronians and the Black Watch. Both began with fierce loyalty to the Crown, but with a unique second reason for being.

  The origins of the Cameronians are in the Scottish religious struggles of the (mainly) seventeenth century, and in the Presbyterian faith as practised in south west Scotland. The regiment arose out of the Covenanters, those who had signed or agreed with the three Covenants, which were also signed by the several kings, and which demanded freedom of worship and freedom from bishops. Charles II, although a signatory, declared the Covenants void and imposed bishops on the Scots, ejecting the local ministers if they would not submit. Covenanters followed their ministers who held services wherever they could, with armed guards to prevent interference from government forces.

  Persecution was severe; its natural consequence, rebellion. Armed uprisings included one led by a most radical Covenanter called Richard Cameron. His death in battle at Airds Moss made him a folk hero and a particularly strict element of the Presbyterians began to call themselves Cameronians.

  When the Catholic King James II of England and VII of Scotland was kicked out, to be replaced by the firmly Protestant William of Orange, one of the many results was the establishment of non-episcopal Presbyterianism as the official religion of Scotland. The formation of a Puritan regiment of foot swiftly followed in 1689, mustering beside the Douglas Water in Lanarkshire, and named the Cameronians for the Covenanter martyr, and professing certain religious leanings, with the young James Douglas, fourteenth Earl of Angus, as Colonel.

  Every man had a bible, went to the kirk armed, and swore allegiance to the king, ‘in defence of the nation’ and ‘in opposition to Popery’.

  Earlier in that same year, John Graham, Viscount of Dundee (Bonny Dundee) had raised an army to fight the Stewart cause. He defeated loyalist forces at Killiekrankie, himself being slain just as victory was his. Without him as leader, the Jacobites moved on Dunkeld but failed to take it, even though it was a town without natural defensive assets, and the garrison – the Cameronian Regiment – was small. Well organised, the novitiates thus won their first action, withstanding the shock of the highland charge and gradually wearing down the Jacobites with disciplined firing.

  The rebels retreated to the north and that was the end of the Jacobite threat for the moment. The Cameronians were soon posted abroad, to the Low Countries to oppose the French in the Nine Years War, and on to great honours in all the major wars thereafter.

  Having had the same monarchs for a century, the Scottish parliament voted for complete union with England in 1707 – largely for economic reasons – during the reign of Queen Anne. When she died in 1714, her successor was the Hanoverian George I, who couldn’t speak English and hardly knew where Scotland was.

  The Earl of Mar, without bothering to check first with the exiled James Stuart (the Old Pretender, son of James II), raised another Jacobite banner in 1715. As with Bonny Dundee’s efforts, the rebellion might well have succeeded had it been better organised and directed after initial success, but it rather fizzled out at the battle of Sheriffmuir, fought between Mar’s highlanders and the Duke of Argyle’s loyalist army. Mar had much greater numbers but little experience as a military commander. Argyle had the professional soldiers, and the result was a fairly chaotic draw. For a description, we need go no further than the poetry of William McGonagall:

  ’Twas in the year 1715, and on the 10th of November,

  Which the people of Scotland have cause to remember;

  On that day the Earl of Mar left Perth bound for Sheriffmuir,

  At the same time leaving behind a garrison under Colonel

  Balfour.

  Besides leaving a force of about three thousand men

  quartered in different parts of Fife,

  To protect the people’s property, and quell party strife,

  The army along with him amounted to three thousand foot

  and twelve hundred cavalry, (actually six thousand and eight hundred respectively)

  All in the best of order, a most pleasant sight to see.

  (To cut a long story short –

  The battle swayed to and fro,

  With the poet giving us lots of information, in line after line of piffle, that we don’t need to know.)

  Then the Highlanders chased them and poured in a volley,

  Besides they hewed them down with their broadswords

  mercilessly;

  But somehow both armies got mixed together, and a general

  rout ensued,

  While the Highlanders eagerly the English (actually Scottish)

  army hotly pursued.

  The success on either side is doubtful to this day,

  And all that can be said is, both armies ran away;

  And on whichsoever side success lay it was toward the

  Government,

  And to allay all doubts about which party won, we must

  feel content.

  By no means all the highland clans were Jacobite inclined. For example, the Campbells, Grants, Frasers and Munros were loyal to the crown and, when the dust had had time to settle after Sheriffmuir, from among these families six companies of militia were formed, three of Campbells and one each of the others. They were really a kind of armed police, placed in small units at key points across the highlands, there to keep the peace between the clans, maintain order and, as far as was possible, enforce the laws of parliament which prohibited men from carrying weapons.

  Although run on clan lines, they did have a uniform of sorts, plaids in sombre colours which from a distance looked almost black, and which had nothing in common with the red coats of the king’s regulars. Their job was to watch for trouble and so they acquired a nickname, the ‘Black Watchers’.

  Sheltering in France, the Stuarts remained a threat and a focal point for unrest. Perhaps with this in mind, the six companies, plus another four, were amalgamated and formalised into a regiment of the army, with the restriction that all recruits were to be Scots, ‘and none other to be taken’.

  George II’s decree for this to happen was given in 1739. The regiment held its initial parade at the River Tay, near Aberfeldy, the following year, under the command of Colonel John Lindsay, twentieth Earl of Crawford. They now wore the red coat for the first time, with red waistcoat too, and a blue bonnet, above twelve yards of blue, green and red plaid wound about and held by an ox-leather belt four inches wide. They carried a musket, bayonet and broadsword, with a small shield and a choice of a pistol or dirk. Probably noting that you only had one shot with a pistol but could do more mischief quickly with the dagger, that’s what most of them chose.

  The Scots-only recruitment policy was interpreted by many of the men as Scotland-only in terms of duty, so when the regiment marched to London for a royal inspection,
which didn’t happen, and the rumour went about that they were for a West Indies posting, at least a hundred of them decided to go home. They were caught in Northamptonshire and, after courts martial, three of the ringleaders were shot.

  Their role as a regular army regiment having been thus fully explained, several more things had to occur before they could become the Black Watch of legend. They had their first battle – against the French at Fontenoy in 1745 – and soon after that were allocated the 42nd rank of seniority in the British army and thus became, in Scots, the Gallant Forty-Twa.

  The red hackle became part of the Black Watch uniform in 1795, and so the Forty Twa had all its identity and was ready to march into glorious history.

  In 1779, another battalion was raised which shortly became the 73rd Regiment, which rejoined the 42nd in the reorganisation of 1881 as the Second Battalion of The Black Watch Royal Highland Regiment.

  In 1794, a regiment of Perthshire Volunteers was raised to fight revolutionary France, which later became the Perthshire Light Infantry and 90th in seniority. In 1881 the Perthshires became the Second Battalion of the much older Cameronians, the 26th Regiment, and together were named The Cameronians (Scottish Rifles).

  These numbers – 42, 73, 26 and 90 – were to prove significant in 1944.

  Chapter Two

  The Road to India

  The 1st Battalion Cameronians were on police and training duties in Secunderabad, central Hyderabad province, when the urgent call came in early February 1942 to stop the Japanese taking the whole of Burma. They mobilized rapidly despite various equipment shortages, travelled to Madras and sailed into Rangoon harbour on 21 February. They found the city already deserted and moved to barracks at Mingladon, six miles outside.