Road of Bones (74 page)

Every effort has been made to obtain copyright clearance for material quoted in this book. Any omissions brought to the attention of the publisher will be gratefully received and corrected in any future editions.

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader’s search tools.

p. xiv ‘The dreams of Empire’
Corporal G. W. G. Driscol, ‘To a Dead Jap’,
Muse in Exile
, p. 14, Burma 1944.

p. xvi ‘I had the impression that’
Interviewed for this book.

p. xvi ‘That is in Java’
Interviewed for this book.

p. xvii ‘We were being shot at’
Interviewed for this book.

p. xviii ‘They had murdered people’
Interviewed for this book.

p. xviii ‘I find Kohima appalling’
Interview by Kohima Educational Trust, Kohima.

p. xviii ‘In the jungle, covered with green’
Lieutenant Shosaku Kameyama, translated by Keiko Itoh,
The Burma Campaign Society Newsletter
(March 2005).

p. xviii ‘Most were too weak’
Interviewed for this book.

p. xix ‘The Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow’
Cited in Gerald H. Corr,
The War of the Springing Tigers
(Osprey Publishing, 1975), p. 68.

p. xix ‘there is a strong feeling’
Walter Lippman to John Maynard Keynes, April 1942, cited in Christopher Thorne,
Allies of a Kind
(Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 149.

p. 1 ‘bloomed with tropical profusion’
James Lunt,
A Hell of A Licking
(Collins, 1986), p. 23.

p. 2 ‘was entertained by dancing’
Andreas Augustin,
The Strand, Yangon
(The Most Famous Hotels in the World, 2007).

p. 2 ‘full of squealing pigs’
Cited in Max Hastings,
Nemesis: The Battle for
Japan, 1944–45
(HarperPress, 2007), p. 220.

p. 3 ‘supposed to have been’
NA, WO 106/3655, Report by Captain T. M. H. Pardoe, 8 February to 8 April 1941.

p. 3 ‘over some of their Asiatic’
Ibid.

p. 3 ‘She also owns a mine’
Ibid.

p. 4 ‘A very good report’
Ibid.

p. 5 ‘China had exhausted Japan’
BBC People’s War, Fred Millem.

p. 5 ‘remote contingency’
NA, CAB 69/2.

p. 5 ‘a semi-surrender to Japan’
George Orwell,
Orwell Diaries
(Harville and Secker, 2009 edition), p 268.

p. 6 ‘Should Burma be visited’
A Handbook for Visitors to India, Burma and Ceylon
(John Murray, 1903) .

p. 7 ‘ablaze with flowers’
E. C. V. Foucar,
I Lived in Burma
(Dennis Dobson, 1956), p. 11.

p. 7 ‘insisted to the stationmaster’
Foucar,
I Lived in Burma
, p. 209.

p. 7 ‘Things aren’t what they were’
Ibid., p. 23.

p. 8 ‘a tendency among Englishmen’
Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, ‘Notes on Burma Operations’, cited in Louis Allen,
Burma: The Longest War
(J. M. Dent, 1984), p. 90.

p. 8 ‘driven the more apathetic’
Annual Report on the Administration of Burma
(Rangoon: Government of Burma, 1884–85), p. 84, cited in Subir Bhaumik, ‘The Returnees and the Refugees’, in
Refugees and the State
, ed. by Ranabira Samaddara (SAGE, 2003), p. 187.

p. 8 ‘birds of passage who’
Cited in Sugata Bose,
A Hundred Horizons
(Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 120.

p. 8 ‘The indications were plain’
Foucar,
I Lived in Burma
, p. 85.

p. 8 ‘in the 1930s’
U On Pe, ‘Modern Burmese Literature’,
Atlantic Monthly
, February 1958.

p. 9 ‘stout lady, popular with’
Foucar,
I Lived in Burma
, p. 111.

p. 10 ‘The suspense had been snapped’
BBC People’s War, Fred Millem.

p. 11 ‘The bodies were mangled’
Donald Mellican, private memoir.

p. 11 ‘We made makeshift’
Ibid.

p. 12 ‘wild and half-baked’
Cited in Arthur Bryant,
The Turn of the Tide
(Reprint Society/Collins, 1957), p. 295.

p. 12 ‘much has been done to strengthen’
‘New Leader Appointed for Burma’,
Melbourne Argus
, 29 December 1941.

p. 13 ‘taken the responsibility’
Hans J. Van de Ven,
War and Nationalism in China, 1922–45
(Routledge, 2003), p. 29.

p. 13 ‘The effect that the loss’
S. Woodburn Kirby,
The War Against Japan
, vol. 2:
India’s Most Dangerous Hour
(HMSO, 1958), pp. 100–101.

p. 13 ‘In the streets of this’
W. H. Prendergast,
A Galway Engineer in
Assam
(Galway Library, private memoir).

p. 13 ‘Others, both soldiers and civilians’
Bisheshwar Prasad,
Official
History of the Indian Armed Forces in the Second World War
(Combined Inter-Services Historical Section, India and Pakistan, 1966), p. 208.

p. 13 ‘the deserted city and oil’
Ibid.
, p. 213.

p. 13 ‘behind it pathetically followed’
Prendergast,
A Galway Engineer in Assam.

p. 13 ‘It was to me a smell’
Clare Boothe, ‘Burma Mission’,
Life
, 27 April 1942.

p. 14 ‘distended bellies supported on’
Pat Carmichael,
Mountain Battery: Burma 1942
(Devin, 1983), pp. 212–13, cited in Jon Latimer,
Burma: The Forgotten War
(John Murray, 2004), p. 105.

p. 15 ‘I found the bodies of’
Geoffrey Tyson,
The Forgotten Frontier
(W.H.Targett, Calcutta, 1945), p. 80.

p. 15 ‘the incongruity of the items’
Ibid., p. 19.

p. 15 ‘striding along like a Rajput’
Lunt,
A Hell of a Licking
, p. 173.

p. 15 ‘A bright red skirt’
Ibid.

p. 15 ‘which made him go’
Ibid.

p. 16 ‘Before the next bend’
Donald Mellican, private memoir.

p. 16 ‘No sooner had we finished lunch’
Gordon S. Seagrave,
Burma
Surgeon
(W. W. Norton, New York, 1943), pp. 202–203.

p. 17 According to one official estimate
NA, WO 106/2677, Branch Memorandum No 6921, VCIGS to the India Office, Withdrawal of Forces from Burma to Assam.

p. 17 ‘They had heard evacuees’
.

p. 17 ‘One man, a civilian whom I had known’
Lunt,
A Hell of A Licking
, p. 273.

p. 17 Emboldened by the Japanese
Cited in David Horsfield,
From
Semaphore to Satellite
(Privately published).

p. 18 ‘The hitherto axiomatic acceptance’
British Library: L/PO/6/106b.
Privy Seal, Clement Attlee, for the War Cabinet on ‘The Indian political situation’
, February 2 1942.

p. 18 ‘We will never be able to’
M. Collis,
Last and First in Burma
(Faber, 1956), pp. 181–2.

p. XXX ‘worn army leather’
Private W. Norman, personal account .

p. 19 ‘I shouted at’
Ibid.

p. 19 ‘Get on your feet’
Ibid.

p. 20 ‘using coloured tracer’
NA, WO 203/5733, Narrative of First Burma Campaign, p. 161.

p. 20 ‘As we crossed’
Private W. Norman, personal account.

p. 21 ‘The houses in the town’
Kazuo Tamayama and John Nunneley,
Tales by Japanese Soldiers
(Cassell, 2000), p. 38.

p. 21 ‘There were many fish’
Ibid.
, p. 40.

p. 21 ‘I asked him in my’
Ibid
, p. 64.

p. 22 ‘he told us to go and get’
NA, WO 361/206, Statement re Missing Soldiers, Ref. your MB/M/326, 22 November 1944.

p. 22 ‘the sound of the machine’
NA, WO 361/206, Statement of No. 4690408 Pte Toplis J.

p. 22 ‘flatly refused to attempt’
NA, WO 361/206, Resume of the Fighting by the 2/KOYLI from 20–23 Feb 42 by Capt. J. F. Laverick.

p. 22 ‘our troops have fought well’
NA, CAB/68/9/17.

p. 24 ‘the sodden ground’
Field Marshal Lord Slim,
Defeat into Victory
(Cassell, 1956), p. 109.

p. 24 ‘We carried on marching’
NA, WO 361/206, Statement by no./690787 L/Cpl W. Long in respect of No.4689410 Pte W. Powell 2/KOYLI.

p. 25 ‘I tied him to a tree’
NA, WO 361/206, Statement by 4687544 Sgt Butcher W. 2/KOYLI.

p. 25 ‘At 1930 hrs signalling’
Lieutenant Colonel C. E. K. Bagot, MC, ‘The 28th in the Concluding Phase of the Burma Campaign 1942’,
Back
Badge Regimental Magazine.

p. 25 ‘The impact of witnessing’
Gerald Fitzpatrick,
No Mandalay, No
Maymyo (79 Survive)
(Book Guild, 2001), p. 255.

p. 26 ‘swallow tail butterflies’
R. E. S. Tanner and D. A. Tanner,
Burma
1942: Memories of a Retreat
(History Press, 2009), p. 112.

p. 26 ‘During these days we saw’
A. Tegla Davies,
Friends Ambulance Unit – the Story of the F.A.U. in the Second World War 1939–1946
(George Allen and Unwin, 1947).

p. 26 ‘a less flashy’
Fitzpatrick,
No Mandalay, No Maymo
, p. 256.

p. 26 ‘They might look like’
Slim,
Defeat into Victory
, p. 110.

p. 27 ‘This let the pus’
Tanner and Tanner,
Burma 1942
, p.112.

p. 27 ‘infinitely moving – and humbling’
Slim,
Defeat into Victory
, p. 114.

p. 27 ‘faithful Cameronian bodyguard’
Ibid.

p. 28 ‘In a dark hour’
Ibid., p. 121.

p. 29 ‘out of control’
RMAA, Pawsey Papers, Part 2: The Year 1942.

p. 29 ‘hungry, thirsty, exhausted’
Ursula Graham Bower,
Naga Path
(John Murray, 1952), p. 155.

p. 30 ‘Binns reports [the Chinese] Army’
NA, WO 208/799, From Viceroy to Secretary of State for India, New Delhi, 15 May 1942.

p. 30 ‘There was no equipment’
Pawsey Papers, Part 2: The Year 1942.

p. 30 ‘the onset of monsoon’
Bisheshwar Prasad,
Official History of the
Indian Armed Forces in the Second World War
(Combined Inter-Services Historical Section, India and Pakistan, 1952), p. 34.

p. 31 ‘those trenches remained’
H. Fitzmaurice Stacke,
The Worcestershire
Regiment in the Great War
(Cheshire, 1926).

p. 31 Then he and a few
Firm and Forester: Journal of the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Regiment
(November 1972).

p. 33 ‘shaggy village’
Graham Bower,
Naga Path
, p. 4.

p. 33 ‘One behind the other’
Ibid.

p. 34 ‘He was always calm’
Interviewed for this book.

p. 34 ‘I remember him calling’
IWM, Oral History Project, file no. 23088/6, interview with Pat Whyte.

p. 34 ‘sort of sickly sweet’
Ibid.

p. 35 ‘fiendish shriek’
W. H. Prendergast,
A Galway Engineer in Assam
(Galway library, privately published).

p. 35 ‘The going was appallingly’
Henry Balfour, Diary of a tour in the Naga Hills, Assam, 1922–23. Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Balfour Papers, Box 3/1, entry for 19 September 1922. Reproduced courtesy Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.