| My grandfather served as a medic in Burma during WW11. He and many other young people were forcibly conscripted and herded from their villages to training camps in northern Nigeria,and after a short period were shipped overseas."They made us work hard and served a lot of meat at the camp" he said. He told of the terror among illiterate young men who had never been anyplace outside their village suddenly being transported to war and distant lands. One of the young conscripts tried to resist the train leg of the journey, and when the NCO (a British Officer) was alerted, he hit him so hard on the back of the head with his baton that his left eye fell out.
Some conscripts on the sea voyage jumped overboard into the waters of the Atlantic. Apparently, a rumor was going around that the British meant to feed them to an ogre named 'Hitler'. Despite this, he retained a deep admiration for the British colonial masters and their ways of doing things. My mother recalls that he would tell them as children "always wash and starch your clothes. Walk erect like a DO!"[1] In Burma he was assigned to a medical post to the rear of the fighting.
He never said much about the actual fighting except to mention that "many died",I recall he would say also "there were snakes and mosquitoes". His recollection of the Japanese enemy was that they were regular soldiers out to do their job just like the chaps on his side. Grandpa had a photographic memory and was a compulsive note-taker. He recited from memory the name of the ship that conveyed him from Nigeria to the war, its captain and the date of departure. He knew the names of his colleagues and officers 6 decades after. Sadly, a younger me never took notes and I regret it now. When he returned from the war, he got a job with the local authorities at a rural hospital (Nigeria was still under colonial rule). He got a high school diploma by correspondence at 52(54?) as he was an orphan and had never had the chance to go to school as a child. When he retired, he became a full-time farmer and later a clan chief. He died aged 91 two years ago. [1] DO- District officer was a British government functionary in colonial Nigeria roughly equivalent to a mayor today. |