The Last Campaign by Andrew Wareham

Author:Andrew Wareham [Wareham, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublishNation
Published: 2024-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

“Join your squadron in the morning, Jim. Go across in the Dragon Dominie. The pilot will take you the long route – up the valley to Kohima and then down to Imphal. It will give you an idea of what we’re facing. Get your people together and I will come across with the following dawn and we can take a shufti down south. I want to have a look at the river crossings especially and take a look for any advanced strips the Japs have put together.”

“Bombed up, Thomas?”

“No. Until we have an idea of what they have in the air, better we should keep mobile. The official briefing says they have fifty assorted bombers and seventy or eighty Oscars in the theatre. They differ on the number of Oscars and a few will have been lost in any case. But it don’t say how new the Oscars are, or what sort of pilots they have. If they are second raters - newly trained, over the top, that sort of thing – they’ll be a different matter to red hot killers anxious to build their scores even higher.”

“The word we were given in the Indian Air Force is that the Japs are pulling their best back to the islands, to face the Americans. They’ve lost some of their best carrier pilots in the last few months and have tried to replace them in a hurry from the Army. According to the briefings we were given last month, the result has been to weaken the Army without strengthening the Navy to any great extent. Shortsighted policy, it seems.”

“No expectation of defeat, Jim. The Japs did not plan for being pushed back. Their admirals and generals were, might be they still are, convinced of their racial superiority. The Americans particularly are a mongrel breed – so they believe – and as such must go down to defeat. Placed face to face with the noble sons of the samurai with blood lines extending over a thousand years, they must be brushed aside, condemned to the gutter they crawled out of. Much the same as this Aryan bullshit you get from Hitler’s mob. The Americans are producing better planes and using them well, and their Marines especially are outfighting the Japs on the ground, for having the weaponry and the guts to use it. In the end, it’s a matter of the machines, Jim. People are much the same, except that the Japs won’t surrender. Given better planes and tanks and guns, and more of them, and you know who the winners are. We’ve got crap planes at the moment!”

“The Hurricane was good, Thomas, and the bloody fools in London cannot get their heads round the idea that it’s old now. Many of them have still got ‘little yellow men’ syndrome as well. As bad as the Japs for that.”

“Bloody hopeless! Wait for the cover-up after the war, Jim. The loss of Singapore will be everybody else’s fault, you can bet. What sort

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