The Might of the Tiger

by FIELD MARSHAL VISCOUNT WAVELL

1

“FOR a period of eight or nine months, from December 1940 to July 1941, from the great victory of Sidi Barrani to the capture of Damascus, the 4th and 5th Indian Divisions were engaged almost continuously. They fought in the dusty wastes of the western desert, in the bush of the Abyssinian border, on the dry scorching plains of the Sudan, in the towering rocky mountains of Eritrea and Abyssinia, and amid the softer and greener hills of Syria.

“With their comrades from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and many other parts of the British Empire, the Indians utterly defeated two great Italian armies; they helped to hold Tobruk and to stem the German counter offensive in Cyrenaica; and to save Iraq and Syria from enemy domination.

“At Keren and Amba Alagi they stormed two positions which their enemies had with some reason deemed impregnable; at Mechili an Indian Motor Brigade fought with impressive gallantry to cover a retreat; a brigade of an Indian division led what seemed a forlorn hope against the defences of Damascus and by their courage made the capture of that city possible.

“India may well be proud of her troops which performed such feats. In all these battles British and Indian soldiers fought side by side in mutual comradeship and esteem.

“Off the field, their discipline and soldierly bearing, their good humour and kindliness have everywhere aroused admiration.”

These remarks came from a foreword I wrote two years ago to a little book called The Tiger Strikes; it deserves to be better known because it contains the record of the troops from India, British and Indian, fighting side by side, in the Middle East during the first two years of the war. Since then the 4th Indian Division has consolidated its fame as the formation which has seen more fighting and won more successes than any other on the Allied side. At Sidi Barrani, it made the surprise assault which began the collapse of the Italian Empire in Africa, and at Keren helped to storm its strongest bulwark. So it was fitting that it should play a leading part in the final act at Tunis, and that the German Commander-in-Chief should surrender to British and Indian representatives of the 4th Indian Division.

Few formations in the history of warfare can have had a more stirring record of two and one-half years of almost daily fighting. Meanwhile Indian troops elsewhere have been campaigning with varying success in Persia, Malaya, Singapore, Burma. The glories won by the Indian Army in the Western Desert and Eastern Africa have to some extent been dimmed by the disasters in Malaya and Burma and by the much misunderstood operations in Arakan. The opening phases of Japan’s long-prepared assault would have been a stern test for any troops; and India’s efforts in the Middle East had already absorbed the cream of her armies and resources.

It is not my purpose to give any summary of these operations or of the record of the Indian Army in this war, but merely to write some personal impressions of the Indian soldier and so to express my gratitude to him for service rendered to me in active operations, as a young subaltern, as staff officer, and as Commander-in-Chief. There are very many better qualified to write of the Indian Army than I am. I do not belong to that army and have spent only some seven years’ service in India, but I owe the Indian warrior a debt which I should like to repay with some tribute to his prowess.

A soldier is never likely to forget his first independent command on active service, and mine consisted of Indian troops. More than thirty-five years ago I obtained, by somewhat unorthodox initiative, the command of an ammunition column to be formed as part of a small expeditionary force being assembled on the northwest frontier of India for operations against tribesmen in the Tirah. I had no idea of what an ammunition column consisted, nor of its functions; on arrival at the base I found that the staff were equally vague and too busy to worry much. In fact they were even inclined, to my dismay, to question the need for such a unit. In the end I was given practically a free hand to form my own column.

The first requirement seemed to me to be an armed escort, and I applied to a friend who was adjutant of a famous frontier force regiment which to its disgust had not been selected for the expeditionary force. He at once provided me with a detachment of an Indian officer and thirty-two men — eight Sikhs, eight Dogras, eight Pathans, and eight Punjabi Musulmans, an epitome of some of India’s most famous fighting men. Having collected camels and drivers from a friendly transport officer, and such ammunition as I could persuade the Ordnance to entrust to me on my somewhat sketchy credentials,

I announced my ammunition column as ready to join the force.

In due course we reached the front and distributed our ammunition; later, I spent months explaining to the scandalized Ordnance Branch why I had not accounted for it all on the proper forms (there is, I believe, a matter of ten rounds of small-arm ammunition allegedly mislaid in the Tirah still outstanding between myself and the Indian Ordnance). It was a short campaign, called by the irreverent “Willcocks’s Week-end War,” and we had no great adventures; but I had opportunity enough to appreciate at first hand and at close quarters the quality of India’s soldiers, of which I had already had some experience as acting transport officer to an Indian mountain battery in a march to Chitral and back.

2

I LEFT India shortly after the frontier expedition, and never returned till thirty-three years later, as Commander-in-Chief. In the last Great War, however, I saw a good deal of the Indian Army. My old British battalion served in an Indian formation throughout the war — in France, in Mesopotamia, and in Palestine. I was never with the battalion during the war, except as a visitor from the staff, but heard from friends in it much of India’s soldiers at war.

For the last eighteen months of the war, as a staff officer in Allenby’s army, I was once again in direct contact with Indian troops. The force which accomplished the final downfall of the Turk in Palestine and Syria in September, 1918, was, except for the Australian Mounted Division, mainly an Indian force. I remember well the transformation of the army from a British to an Indian basis in the summer of 1918, when the greater part of Allenby’s seasoned British troops had been sent back to France to meet the crisis caused by the March retreat. These troops were replaced by fresh units from India, mainly unseasoned and untried, and by Indian cavalry from France.

The complete reorganization of the force in a few months and its preparation for the final campaign were only made possible by the keenness of the Indians themselves, who were prepared to work round the clock to fit themselves for battle. I remember that some officers of the Indian Army told us that the new units could have no signalers, since it took at least one year to train an Indian as signaler. We formed a school and told the students that they must pass in three months if they wanted to take part in the battle. There were no failures.

That army of Allenby’s in September, 1918, achieved one of the most complete and spectacular successes in all military history. In six weeks it advanced more than 500 miles, destroyed a Turkish army, and ended the war with Turkey. Once again India’s fighting men had helped us to a great victory.

I therefore started this war with some knowledge of the Indian soldier and a favorable impression of his prowess. This was well, since an incomplete armored division and an Indian division were the only fighting formations I had in the Middle Fast for the first year of the war. The Indian division was the now famous 4th Division. It was not a specially impressive formation at first, for it was sadly short of equipment and transport and was untrained as a division, though its units were well trained. The men of the fighting units, British and Indian, were of the best — regular professional soldiers with years of service. Each infantry brigade had one British and two Indian battalions. One of the British units was a Highland battalion, one a battalion of a county regiment from the south of England, and the third was recruited mainly from Londoners, than whom there are few better soldiers. The Indian battalions included representatives of most of India’s famous warriors —Sikhs, Punjabi Musalmans, Rajputs, Dogras, Jats, Pathans.

A few words on the qualities and characteristics of each of these soldier classes may be of interest. The Sikhs contribute more soldiers to the Army in proportion to their numbers than any other class in India. They are Hindu by origin, but of a special sect, warriors by tradition. Their home is in the Punjab, where they now form a compact island in an otherwise predominantly Moslem province. They have fine physique, quick intelligence, and a good conceit of themselves, and have never forgotten that they once ruled all Northwest India, including Kashmir — first-class soldiers in every way, but not always easy to handle.

The Punjabi Musulman forms the backbone of many units; he is a countryman of good physique, somewhat slow-thinking but staunch. Rajputs represent the romantic warrior tradition of old Rajasthan or Rajputana and are fine fighting men. Dogras are also Rajputs, hillmen from the foothills of the Himalayas, magnificent material of whom any commanding officer would take all he could get; they are unfortunately not too numerous. Jats are countrymen from the Southern Punjab and Delhi area, also first-class material. The Pathan from British India makes a good soldier and is usually a cheerful and attractive person; he gets into trouble sometimes from sheer lightheartedness or boredom. Pathans from the semi-independent tribes across the frontier, who once supplied a picturesque and picaresque element in the Indian Army, are not now so often enlisted; because of their background and their life outside normal administration, they do not always take kindly to discipline.

There were no Gurkha units in the original 4th Division, though some joined it later. The Gurkha is not an Indian, but comes from Nepal, which has been our old and faithful ally ever since the Gurkha war of some 120 years ago ended, after much hard fighting, with mutual respect and honors easy. Our first attempt to storm a Gurkha fort ended with a disastrous repulse and the death of one of the bravest men who ever rose to high rank in the British Army, General Sir Rollo Gillespie. Another fighting race unrepresented in the original division was the Mahrattas; hard, wiry soldiers from the west center of India, who gave us many a hard fight in the wars of the early nineteenth century. But generally the division was typical of the pre-war Indian Army.

The gunners of the division were British. The division was very under-gunned at first, with only two regiments of 18-pounders and no anti-tank guns. The engineers were Indian. The Indian equivalent of a Field Engineer company is the Sapper and Miner company, retaining the name given in days of frequent siege; they have a great tradition for efficiency, smartness, and, when necessary, for fighting. They are named from the three Presidencies—Madras, Bengal, Bombay—in which they were originally raised. The Madras companies are still formed of Madrassis, and the Bombay companies have a proportion of Mahrattas and others from Bombay Province, but the Bengal companies are now recruited almost entirely from the North.

Gradually the division took shape; it was fortunate to have nearly a year’s hard training under good masters before it was called on for the test of battle. The Divisional Commander was a gunner, Beresford-Peirse, a leader of personality and dash; the Corps Commander was Dick O’Connor, a determined little terrier of a soldier, quick and tough; his unlucky capture later on by a German patrol was a serious loss to our war effort. Above them was the solid, wise personality of the Army Commander, “Jumbo” Wilson, who directed the training for desert warfare from a great reservoir of experience and common sense. When the hour to strike came, in December, 1940, the 4th Indian Division had been forged into a weapon as keen and balanced as a Commander-in-Chief could desire. The first blow struck with it, at Sidi Barrani, showed how clearly and sharply it could cut.

Meanwhile another Indian division, the 5th, under Major General Heath (later captured in Singapore as a Corps Commander), had been made available. I sent it to the Sudan, where for nearly six months after Italy came into the war three British battalions and a few thousand Sudanese troops, without a single gun — field, anti-aircraft, or anti-tank — and with only a few out-of-date aircraft, held 500 miles of frontier against an Italian East Africa which contained nearly a quarter of a million troops. (I am wrong about our artillery: I remember there was one single gun, an old 4.5-inch howitzer used in Khartoum for firing salutes; someone found that there were a few rounds of H.E. in the arsenal, so the gun was manned and sent to the front.) There seemed nothing to stop the Italians’ marching on Khartoum; yet I somehow felt that they never would, and ordered the 5th Division to take the offensive as soon as they arrived. A portion of it re-established our frontier post at Gallabat in a hard-fought little action in November, 1940; but to retake the important station of Kassala and to invade the Italian colony of Eritrea my Army Commander in the Sudan required another division.

3

IT WAS a very nice calculation of time and space and transportation that my staff made for me that December of 1940. An Australian division completed its equipment and became ready for action just as the battle of Sidi Barrani was fought and won; at the same time a convoy came into Suez, the ships of which could move part of a division to the Sudan on its return voyage; if the opportunity were missed, shipping would not be available again for a month or more and the reinforcement of the Sudan would be too late. I decided that if all went well at Sidi Barrani I would relieve the 4th Indian Division with the Australian division, — I could maintain only one infantry division in the desert, — send the 4th to join the 5th in the Sudan, and launch the two Indian divisions against Italian East Africa as early as possible in 1941. So, to its bewilderment and anger, the 4th Indian Division was turned round on the barely won battlefield of Sidi Barrani and dispatched by train and ship to the Sudan.

There is no room here to tell the story of how the two divisions chased strong Italian forces through hilly passes up to the great mountain wall of Keren which the Italians with some reason deemed impregnable; how after several repulses they stormed that fortress against a more numerous enemy, conquered Eritrea, and, turning south, made short work of a position at Amba Alagi even more impressive than Keren in appearance. This practically ended the Italian East African Empire.

There was, however, no rest for these troops; we were fighting three other campaigns in the Middle East: in the Western Desert, in Crete, and in Iraq where a rebellion had just broken out; we might at any moment have to take action against a German occupation of Syria; and our resources were small. Early in June a brigade of the 4th Indian Division, but newly returned from the triumphs in Eritrea, had to be employed in Syria. The story of the part played by this brigade in the fighting for Damascus is indeed a stirring one; its gallantry turned the scale and won the city when a stalemate, or worse, seemed inevitable.

I left the Middle East shortly afterwards and became responsible, as Commander-in-Chief, for all India’s soldiers — and her sailors and airmen as well. In less than six months we were faced with the sudden treacherous assault of the Japanese, and had to fight for the next six months a losing battle in Malaya and Burma up to the very borders of India herself. The full story of those disasters has yet to be told. Ail I propose to do here is to say a few words of the Indian soldier as I saw him in those six months.

I visited Burma, Malaya, and Singapore just over a month before Japan’s entry into the war. I had at that time no responsibility for the defense of those countries, and went only to see how the Indian troops there were getting on. All the units I saw, and I saw many, were smart and well turned-out — the Indian soldier always takes a proper pride in his appearance; but the depressing surroundings of rubber plantations and jungle seemed to have had some effect on their spirits. There was a sense of unreality in all the preparations for war with Japan at that time; no one seemed to believe in the possibility of Japanese attack, and most keen soldiers I met asked me about transfer to an “active” theater.

4

Two months later, a month after Japan entered the war, I landed in Singapore again. This time I was responsible for the operations, as head of the shortlived ABDA Command. During the next month, in Malaya and Singapore, till the latter fell, and for three months afterwards in Burma, I saw the Indian soldier in disaster and retreat. My impression of him was this: he was often bewildered and at a loss in strange and alarming conditions for which his training provided no solution — the reinforcements hurried to Malaya and Burma that were to stem the Japanese advance had been prepared for fighting in the open plains of Africa and had not even completed that preparation — and so was sometimes intimidated or bluffed into premature surrender; but he did not lose his discipline or soldierly bearing and seldom broke into panic. On many occasions he put up a magnificent fight against heavy odds — at the first Japanese landing at Kota Bharu, on the banks of the Sittang River in Burma, in a rearguard action south of Mandalay which cost the Japanese very dearly, to name only a few instances. I saw practically every man of the force which withdrew out of Burma into India in the middle of May almost at once after they had reached India; they did not look or feel beaten men, and were conscious of having done a good job in trying circumstances.

It is unfortunate that my final association with the Indian soldier as a Commander should have been in the Arakan campaign, since the results of those operations have been used in some quarters to question the value and fighting qualities of India’s troops. The operations of the winter of 1942-1943 in India were governed by lack of shipping and landing craft; had these been available, both strategy and tactics would have been different. Circumstances compelled me to commit troops with little or no training in jungle craft to some of the most difficult country that could be imagined and to a long and tenuous line of communications, in the hope that, if all went well, we might catch the enemy off his guard and gain by land a strategical objective which would have been much more easily reached had shipping resources been available.

At one moment we were probably not far from success. That these inexperienced troops were eventually outmaneuvered by a seasoned Japanese division with the advantage of better communications, and that they became somewhat disheartened in the process, cannot be held to discredit the Indian Army. I set a small part of it a task beyond their training and capacity; the main responsibility for the failure is mine. But when the effect on the other side becomes known, it will certainly not be found wholly to our disadvantage; and the lessons learned and experience gained have been invaluable.

In any event, what occurred in Arakan has not shaken my belief in the Indian soldier, nor that of leaders who know him better than I do. Naturally one cannot expand an army of under 200,000 to nearly 2,000,000, under the hasty conditions of war, and hope to have the same quality of training or of leadership as in peacetime, especially in view of the difficulty of language. But I am certain that when the time comes for the real, sustained counter-offensive against Japan, the Indian soldier will not be found wanting.

The reception given in Great Britain to the representatives of the 4th Indian Division has shown the appreciation of the part that the Indian Army has played in this war and of its comradeship with the other fighting men of the Empire. I add this small, but sincere, personal tribute.