Wartime Courage by Gordon Brown

Transcription

1 Wartime Courage by Gordon Brown For two years, Major Hugh Seagrim trained and led an army of Burmese tribesmen to resist the Japanese occupation. But, as Gordon Brown reveals in the fourth of our exclusive extracts from his new book, Seagrim s love for his men was so great that he could see only one way to save them Near St Mary s church in the little village of Whissonsett in Norfolk stands a memorial to two brothers, one with the Victoria Cross, one with the George Cross. The only two brothers ever to be so honoured, they were sons of a local clergyman, the Rev. Charles Seagrim, rector of Whissonsett-with-Horningtoft. Neither survived the war, and both awards were posthumous. The older brother, Lt. Col. Derek Seagrim, earned a VC for his heroic leadership of a battalion of the Green Howards in an assault on the Mareth Line in North Africa on 21 and 22 March 1943, but died on 6 April of wounds sustained in another battle. Major Hugh Seagrim, GC DSO MBE, Lt. Col. Seagrim s youngest brother, served for two years behind enemy lines in Burma, in circumstances of appalling hardship, uncertainty and danger; and died in Rangoon on 2 September in the same year. Hugh Seagrim s story, set in the darkest times of the war in the Far East, is one of the highest courage and leadership. Always short of weapons, ammunition and supplies, and only rarely in touch with command, he raised and led a local force, the Karen Levies; and with them remained in Eastern Burma during the Japanese occupation, threatening and harassing their lines of communication and maintaining, however precariously, a British presence there for much of the time between the invasion of Burma and the arrival of Slim s ultimately victorious Fourteenth Army. Hugh Seagrim was born in 1909, the youngest of a family of five sons all of whom saw Army service in the Second World War. He attended the King Edward VI School in Norwich, where many years before Horatio Nelson, also the son of a Norfolk clergyman, had been a pupil. In 1927, when Hugh was in his last year in school, his father died. Plans for university and a career in medicine were now unaffordable. An application for Dartmouth and the Navy failed he was partially colour-blind but one for Sandhurst succeeded, and he followed his brothers into the Army. Like many a young officer of limited means, he opted for service with the Indian Army and, after a one-year attachment to the

2 Highland Light Infantry in Cawnpore, applied to join the Burma Rifles and was posted to Taiping in Malaya, joining the regiment as a 22-year old subaltern. A good linguist, a sportsman, and at 6ft 4in a talented goalkeeper, he did well as a junior officer. His quirky sense of humour made him popular with his peers, though his love of classical music, his restless intelligence and a wide reading that ran to philosophers such as Nietzsche, Bergson and Schopenhauer marked him out from them too. He was not conventionally ambitious, often telling colleagues he would sooner be a postman in Norfolk than a general in India. His troops were Karens, members of a group of minority tribes in Burma. His quick mastery of languages he spoke fluent Burmese and some Karen too impressed them, as did his goalkeeping and his height (most Karens are stocky). He turned out to be a natural regimental soldier: a gifted trainer and leader of men. He got to know his Karens, and they him, and for the rest of his life he was to serve with them. In his last letter to his mother he wrote that there was a chance he wouldn t get through, and that if he didn t, he wanted to leave a memory with the Karens. The status of the Karens in Burma in the 1930s and 40s is relevant to this story. An ethnic and religious minority, they had long been subjugated by the dominant Buddhist Burmese, and distrusted by them too. In the ninetheenth century they had welcomed the British, whom they saw as advancing their rights in Burma; and a proportion, particularly the leadership, had embraced Christianity as a result of US missionary work from 1813 on. Indeed it was said that the Karens called the American missionaries their mother, and the British authorities their father. Most Karens lived a village life, agrarian and simple, and were led by tribal elders. Those from the mountains of Salween province in the east of Burma, the hill Karens, were strongly represented in the Burma Rifles and valued as tough and trustworthy soldiers, and it was from them that Seagrim was eventually to raise his irregular force. In the later 1930s, when war threatened, he recognised their potential for guerrilla warfare against the likely enemy, and considered the Indian Army s traditional drill-based approach to training pointless, even irrelevant, for the battles ahead. Japan s declaration of war in 1941 was followed by a series of invasions across south-east Asia, and in Burma preparations were made for resistance against an enemy with overwhelming advantages both in numbers and air superiority. Plans for Operation Oriental Mission, which would impose maximum delay upon the enemy by using forces other than regular forces, began to form. Very soon its leader commandeered Seagrim, who had long argued for the raising, training and use of an army of Karen irregulars. He was formally seconded to the new force, and was delighted to join it. Gradually its role was defined; in stay-behind units, it would attack likely main Japanese supply routes such as the Moulmein-Rangoon road and railway. What was sound in theory proved very difficult in practice. The main problem was a desperate shortage of arms and

3 ammunition, and already time was running out. The Japanese were advancing from Siam into Burma. In late January 1942 Seagrim set out for Papun, in the mountains of Salween province, with a collection of miscellaneous firearms, a few tommy guns and some grenades. A little supply convoy, bringing 200 Italian rifles and a few thousand rounds of ammunition, arrived a few days later, and on its return to Rangoon was almost cut off by the advancing enemy. In Papun Seagrim recruited 200 levies and trained them his way. Barefoot, and encouraged to shoot accurately from any position they found comfortable no Indian Army firing-range drills now they practiced concealment and ambush techniques in the kind of hill country they knew well. An Army colleague, Ronald Heath, later a highly successful jungle training officer with the Chindits, was impressed by the results. And of Seagrim he said: Any of those Karen boys would have done anything for him. He had a terrific sway over those lads. The stay-behind role, and the fact that the Japanese had over-run Burma, meant Seagrim was now in continuous danger. He moved north, and the last British official he spoke to for many months found him cheerful, but not betting on his chances. In the northern hills he trained and organised several hundred more recruits, but the shortage of weapons and ammunition with which to train was a constant hindrance. In desperation, the Karen crossbow, fatal at up to seventy-five yards, became a weapon of modern war. Worse even than lack of stores and firepower was the lack of communication with the outside world, and in April, Seagrim, who had served once as a signals officer, set out to obtain a wireless set from forces in a town far to the north, only to discover when he got there that the Japanese were in control. On the way back he was wounded in a bandit ambush, and spent the next four months hidden in the jungle and recuperating in the care of two Karen pastors. Recovered, though still lacking arms, ammunition and communications, he continued to sustain the morale and loyalty of his levies across his vast territory, travelling and maintaining contact through messengers, and endlessly at risk to any breach of security. Dressed like a Karen, and sustained and concealed by the Karens, who said of him He has learned to live like us, Seagrim moved from village to village, from camp to camp, seeking out veterans of the Burma Rifles, registering their names, and making plans to support British troops once they returned to Burma. Operation Oriental Mission was now barely even a holding operation, but Seagrim never gave up. In late 1942 British and Indian forces were once more on the offensive in the Arakan, and GHQ in Delhi looked again at the possibility of irregular operations in the Karen hill country. Early in 1943, three officers, two British and one Karen, were to be parachuted in with communication equipment and instructions to make contact with Seagrim, who was assumed somewhat against the odds to be still alive.

4 Many attempts resulted in eventual success: in October 1943 Major Nimmo, Lt Ba Gyaw and Seagrim established wireless communication with India. At last useful intelligence traffic began to flow in to Delhi. But word of parachute drops and the presence of British officers in the Karen hills had reached the Japanese, and early in 1944 a 17-man military Goods Distribution Unit arrived in Papun and sold matches and cloth at suspiciously low rates. Casual enquiries about foreign soldiers and parachutes drops confirmed suspicions, which loyal Karens passed to Seagrim, who moved camp further into the mountains. Shortly afterwards, the Japanese, who had learned of the activities of Po Hla, a Karen friend and supporter of Seagrim s who had family in Rangoon, advised him through a distant relative that if he did not hand himself in for questioning his family would suffer. The net was closing. Again Seagrim was informed. Soon Japanese infantry and military police units appeared in force in the Karen hills and began arresting and torturing various suspects, including an old Burma Rifles veteran who was one of Seagrim s levy commanders. Maung Wah endured three days of beating, said nothing, was released, and went into the hills to tell Seagrim what was happening. Seeing his wounds, Seagrim wept, but the old soldier simply entreated him to signal for aid and arms from India and start a Karen revolt. Seagrim tried, but GHQ in Delhi refused. The time was not ripe. Others under torture told more, and soon the Japanese knew all they needed to: about the levies, the arms dumps and Seagrim s whereabouts. Though loyal Karens still kept Seagrim informed, and though he continued to move camp, nothing could be done to prevent what happened next. The Japanese located him and attacked. But Seagrim and most of his companions, warned by their noisy approach, escaped. In the following search of the mountainous jungle site, Captain Inoue, leader of the Kempeitai (military police) unit, found Seagrim s bible. Seagrim himself was to remain at large for another month. The Japanese were determined to find him, and their actions in the Karen hills degenerated into a reign of terror. The loyalty and silence of the Karens resulted in reprisals both savage and brutally systematic. Their villages were burned and their elders tortured, sometimes to death. Innocent people suffered dreadfully for what was, in the eyes of their oppressors, treachery. Meanwhile Seagrim, with Pa Ah, a young Karen who had been parachuted in from India, made his way through twenty-five miles of jungle to Mewado, a village where his companion s brother-in-law would feed and protect them. In the event they stayed in the hills, with food brought to them every few days, but the Japanese again closed in, looking for Pa Ah, whom they knew had family in the area. Under threat, the villagers persuaded him to give himself up, and while he was in Japanese custody word of Seagrim s whereabouts leaked out via a young Karen, who told Captain Inoue. When Inoue arrived with his Kempeitai at Mewado and threatened to burn down the village and arrest its inhabitants, the headman, by now a friend of Seagrim, offered to go and talk to him the

5 next day. They discussed suicide, which Seagrim rejected as unchristian. Instead he decided to give himself up, as the only way to end the suffering now being inflicted on the Karen by the Japanese. As they walked to the village Seagrim gave the headman his watch, asking that he send it to his mother in England after the war. In Mewado Seagrim and Inoue shook hands. Then Seagrim asked Inoue to treat the Karens generously: They are not to blame. I alone am responsible for what has happened in the hills. Captor and captive then spent several days together, sharing meals and accommodation and talking at length through an interpreter, with Seagrim repeating his pleas for clemency towards the Karens. Inoue returned Seagrim s bible, and heard of his plans to be a missionary among the Karens if he survived the war. He did not. On 16 March 1944 he was taken from Papun, first in an oxcart, then in a train to Rangoon, and held prisoner at the Kempeitai headquarters there. In a grim jail, in which torture was common and many died, he stood out, not simply because of his great height. A fellow-prisoner, Arthur Sharpe, a young RAF officer shot down over Burma, found in him a profound philosophy and a strong religious faith. He believed him to be the finest gentleman I have ever met. He had a complete disregard for his own life and the same time the greatest concern for the Karen NCO s and men under him. Seagrim conducted a short service for another RAF officer, including an impromptu prayer. Sharpe later wrote Nothing could reveal better this man s wonderful character than those words which are now lost. A tribute to the dead, a prayer for the living, and, greatest of all, a word for his cruel captors, for of the Japs he said, in the words of Christ, Lord, forgive them, or they know not what they do. In early July Seagrim and surviving hill Karens were transferred to another jail at Insein near Rangoon. On 2 September he and fifteen Karens were summoned to a court martial. Again Seagrim pleaded for the lives of his Karens, saying that he alone was responsible for their actions, and that he alone should suffer. He and seven of the Karens were sentenced to death, the remaining eight receiving long jail sentences. As the condemned were driven away, with Seagrim in the Karen attire he had worn since March 1942, one Karen witness noted that he was smiley-faced as he shouted goodbye to those destined only to jail. As the citation for his posthumous GC records: There can hardly be a finer example of self-sacrifice and bravery than that exhibited by this officer who in cold blood deliberately gave himself up to save others, knowing well what his fate was likely to be at the hands of the enemy. The Japanese had prevailed over Seagrim and his Karen Levies. But within a year of his death it was clear that his courage, leadership and ultimate sacrifice with and for the Karens had made possible a vast and successful new venture that owed much to him and his work in the hills.

6 Operation Character, which began in April 1945, was the largest and most successful example of irregular warfare in all South-East Asia Command. More than 12,000 Karens, now well-armed and properly supported, wrought havoc on Japanese forces in Burma until their defeat, killing thousands and tying down many thousands more in a classic irregular conflict. Seagrim, I think, would not have been surprised; and, in the words used in his last letter to his mother, he had succeeded in his aim of leaving a memory with the Karens. When I read that letter more than sixty years after his death, I thought immediately of the inscription I first saw many years ago at the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle: The whole earth is the tomb of heroes and their story is not graven in stone over their clay, but abides everywhere, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men s lives. Copyright Gordon Brown Taken from Wartime Courage by Gordon Brown to be published by Bloomsbury in 2008 Extract taken from the Telegraph.