Make Me A Soldier, A Burma Soldier (Part Three)

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Bill Ross of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of D. Howard Woodcock, and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr. Woodcock fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
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Continued from Part Two:

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Now, the last big battle I was in was the assault over the Irrawaddy, and we did a three battalion assault, the Worcesters, the Camerons and the Royal Works Fusiliers. I was sent over with the Worcesters. They were going across during the night, and they got out into the river which was about a mile wide, and some of the boats sank because they were old boats, weren’t properly waterproofed and others that got out in the middle were badly shot up and they never got across; the Worcesters never got anybody over. I was immediately switched over to the Camerons. I got across in daylight with the Camerons. One company went across in front. They had casualties in every boat, their company commander was killed, their medical officer was killed and I came across in the second wave and we didn’t have anybody hit in our boat, we were very lucky. In front of us and behind us, people were hit.

We got over onto the other bank and the War Diary, our official diary says, “Captain Woodcock sent a report in, that the Camerons were being attacked on three sides.” It was all a bit unpleasant to start with, but we dug in, we dug deep trenches and I thought we would be alright for the night. I fired the artillery, the defensive fire tasks and that sort of thing, but I got a message during the night. The Japs had some machine guns which the artillery had been trying to knock out and they’d been the machine guns that had caused all the casualties. I got orders that I had to go out with a platoon that night, crawl along the river bank along the top, get close to the enemy position to identify it, but not too close, so that I could shell it the next morning without any problems to myself. So we did just that; we heard the Japanese talking and they didn’t know we were there. The next morning when it became dawn, I registered the guns on this Japanese position and all morning, I fired a mixture of smoke and high explosive, and not one machine gun fired. The rest of the division came across in swarms, in boats that day. The attack swung left towards Mandalay and the Camerons held the bridgehead and by this time of course, there was no problem at all.

Just before lunch, this young Cameron platoon commander said to me, “That tree, do you think if you went up there, you would see something?” Well I knew it was a foolish thing to do, but I wasn’t going to look chicken in front of a young Cameron — he was only a young fella, at least two years younger than I. Of course, once a Cameron, always a Cameron. I climbed this tree to about twelve feet, up branches. Anyway, that was serving no purpose, I’d kept the guns quiet and why keep risking my own life? The tea was ready — corned beef. It was always corned beef or sardines. I slid down the tree into the trench, and suddenly the tree was raked with machine gun fire; leaves and branches were falling off it. I said to this guy, “It’s your turn after lunch.” He didn’t do that but what he did do was to send a patrol out and found that the enemy had withdrawn; after they’d fired some grenades, they’d withdrawn from the position, leaving chaos and carnage behind, but we’d done our job. Then the colonel sent me back across the river.

I came over with the regiment three days later, and went out with the fusiliers for the next few days, but then there was a big attack going round the south and the other troop commander went out with his party to support the Welsh Fusiliers. The attack had just started when a shell landed right among his party, they were all hit and Signaller Bill Gomme, a wonderful signaller, had a leg blown off and it took him too long to die. He died screaming for his mother. This is war — horrible. I was immediately told to go and replace him, which I did, then we got shelled. I took my carrier up a hill because I didn’t want to take it over the top to join the Royal Welsh. You never go over a crest. I stopped the carrier and I walked up, I had gone about ten yards when in the middle of the track we were going up, was a mine. If we’d gone another ten yards, we’d have gone up with the mine.

I joined the Royal Welsh and that night, I was sent out with a platoon to cut a Jap line of communication. I was sent out on a course and I was flown back into India. On the way back into Burma, I heard that the regiment had been withdrawn and we were going to be taken to India — my war had finished, but two days before they were withdrawn, my Battery Commander, Wilfred Foster was killed, and that really shook me, and when I flew back in, I really felt rotten. I remember putting my head in my hands and saying to myself what I always said, I used to repeat those words time and time again through the battle, "I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, ’Give me a light, that I can walk safely into the unknown.’ He replied, ‘Walk out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God, that should be to you better than a light and safer than a known way.’” I always used to close my eyes and say this when I got a moment and all sorts of things were happening. It was all that I could do, all I could do was pray. And of course, I was going back to my troop, I was going back to my gunners, I knew I wouldn’t let them down.

Eventually, because the time was getting on, we found we were going to come home, and I was offered the job of Battery Commander on a regular commission, to stay with the regiment, which was still in the Far East, of the Second Division after the end of the war.

In 1991, when I went back to the cemetery at Kohima Ridge, where our regiment had twenty five people buried, we had a chap with us, aged forty five, and he was totally inconsolable as he knelt at the grave of the father he’d never seen.

Of the six Forward Observation Officers we’d had in the regiment, we had three killed and three wounded. The odds weren’t all that good were they?

In York, we have a replica of our memorial in the Cloister Gardens. As you face the Minster, as you go in the gardens on the left, you can see all these cloisters with all the battle honours of the Second Division, Waterloo, Balaclava, all these things, and of course, proudly in the middle, Kohima. The Queen Mother unveiled that, and when we had the silence, all we could hear was a blackbird singing. There were about six or seven hundred veterans there, and a lone piper walking up behind the Memorial, playing ‘Lament Of The Heroes Of Kohima’, and the Camerons, in their full kits and rigout, were sobbing their hearts out; very very moving. It’s worth going to have a look at next time you’re in York. And so, we go back to our war memorial at Kohima. You have to remember, this is in India, where the big battles were fought. It wasn’t until we got over the Chindwin that we were in Burma, and the battles were nowhere near as tough. Kohima was the big battle, and Imphal. I’m sure most have heard those words before, translated from the Greek into English verse: “When you go home, tell them of us and say, ‘For your tomorrow, we gave our today.’” One and a quarter thousand of our division are lying buried behind in the cemetery, and that’s the thought I want to leave you with. We have to look after our tomorrows and we’ve got to pass all the knowledge of remembrance down to our children and our children’s children. It’s vital to remember these people who gave us freedom by sacrificing their own lives; a priceless legacy of freedom. It’s not just a thousand of the Second Division there, in two world wars, it’s actually two and a half million British and Commonwealth men and women. It makes one very humble and it makes one wonder what we’ve done with all the tomorrows we’ve had, particularly since the last war.

Pr-BR

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