The Desert War by Alan Moorehead

Author:Alan Moorehead [Moorehead, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781311066
Publisher: MBI

Not very practical for men campaigning through the jungle perhaps; but a good regimen for camp. I heard no one suggest that the Japanese soldier looked unfit.

For a few days we pottered around Colombo picking up what information we could and waiting for the arrival of a car to take us round the island. It was at this time that the monsoon began to break. The monsoon was not a crucial factor for Ceylon, since, curiously, it did not affect the northern half of the island. But it was vital for the operations in Burma, India and the Indian Ocean. It meant that roads and fields would go under mud, that flying conditions would be bad, that aircraft taking off carriers might have difficulty in finding their ships once they had left them. Already in flying to Ceylon we had come through sharp rainbursts and seen the faded tired colours of the land turn overnight to fresh greens. And still the Andaman Islands were eight hundred miles from Ceylon and the Japanese had no nearer base. They had now begun to bomb Chittagong, which is Indian soil on the Burmese border, but most of the British army appeared to be coming out intact. The defences of Calcutta, especially in the air, were being rushed ahead.

I was convinced now that immediate Japanese invasion either of Ceylon or India was not likely, and I sent a cable to my office suggesting that I should return at once to the Middle East where a new German offensive threatened at any time. I need not have bothered. A message arrived for me from Charles Foley, my foreign editor in London: ‘Any dog’s chance getting to Madagascar quickly?’ A British force had landed at Diego Suarez in the north of the island that morning. It was too far by air. At Colombo docks they could not help me—a ship had left for Mombasa on the Kenya coast a few hours before and there was nothing else. I got aboard the next plane for Bombay, hoping to pick up a destroyer or some warship from there. I might eventually have succeeded in that, but by then the first flush of the Madagascar action was done, and London cabled me: ‘Don’t bother now.’

Event then I might have stayed in India. I had become engrossed in the politics of the country and would have liked to have remained and seen the results of the Allahabad meeting of Congress. But it was now obvious that the Middle East was the place in which to be. For the time being the Japanese dynamic had exploded itself. India had been saved by a very narrow margin, and not by its own defence but by the fact that the Japanese had to pause and consolidate the vast territories they had already gained. India would never again be so utterly exposed. On my way out of the country, I saw scores of American bombers arriving and met the vanguard of the new American army that was beginning to trickle into this central sector of the war.

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