Rivers in war and peace
Rivers in war and peace
Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Graham MC*
Some time before he died in 2015, Gordon sent me this note. He’d drafted it on a whim, thinking about the vast rivers he’d encountered in battle, suggesting that I used it as the basis for a book. I found it in a pile of my notes today and, with the agreement of his daughter, Sylvia, I offer it here as a reflection of Gordon’s war.
“It is not possible to step twice into the same river” (Heraclitus 540-480 bc)
“For men may come and men may go. But I go on forever” (Tennyson 1809-92)
On a February night in 1945 I stood on the bank of one of the great rivers of the world trying, and failing, to relate it to the rivers of my youth, which run musically through the hills of the Scottish Borders. Beloved by fishermen and poets, they have mellifluous names like Teviot, Ettrick, Yarrow and Tweed. Leaping from the hills and meandering through the valleys, they please eye and ear alike. In their upper reaches you can leap across them. As they widen, they are spanned here and there by arched stone bridges on whose walls you can sit and contemplate sun-flecked ripples or sometimes the rushing torrent of a spate or sometimes a fish, flashing upstream or motionless in a crystalline pool.
The river of my 1945 contemplation could not have been more different. A mile wide, deep, fast flowing, it was an inexorable flux. Even its name was dysphonic. Irrawaddy! Who could write a poem about a name like that? Not that my thoughts were on poetry at that moment. They were on the occupants of the opposite bank, who were Japanese. The following night I was to lead a reconnaissance patrol to seek a landing place for our battalion (the 1st Cameron Highlanders), which was to spearhead a divisional assault a few nights later.
Rivers have played parts in many battles. They have lent respite to retreating armies. They have challenged, halted and sometimes deterred advancing armies. Alexander the Great decided not to cross the Indus. Caesar did cross the Rubicon and made it an historic metaphor for an irrevocable decision. General Wolfe assaulted the Heights of Abraham from the St Lawrence to defeat the French. The retreat from the Somme was a devastating British defeat in World War I. Even as I ruminated on the edge of the Irrawaddy, allied armies were storming across the Rhine to bring war to the German heartland.
The secret of a successful cross-river assault is to land undetected. There was a good chance that we could do this because the Japanese were retreating and were already engaged by other divisions upstream and downstream of us.
Burma, an elongated country, is split by the Irrawaddy throughout its 1,000-mile course from the Chinese border to the Bay of Bengal. We were thirty miles west of Mandalay, downstream from the Ava Bridge, its span broken by the British in their 1942 retreat. Another Burmese river, the Sittang, which flows parallel to the country’s eastern border, had been the site of a disaster in 1942, when a bridge was blown prematurely, leaving thousands of British and Indian troops trapped on the wrong side.
Near the western border, the Chindwin, which is the Irrawaddy’s largest tributary, is Burma’s Rubicon. Across it in 1942 defeated British and Indian troops and civilians had struggled to reach refuge in India. Across it in their fabled but strategically questionable 1943 and 1944 adventures, the Chindits had paddled themselves into enemy territory. Across it, in March 1944, General Mutaguchi’s three divisions had surreptitiously launched their bold and ill-fated invasion of India. Their starving remnants had struggled across it again in the months after their defeat. We had crossed it in December 1944, driving comfortably over a long floating bridge, and in January one night at 3 am we had waded waist-high across the Mu at 3 am to surprise the Japanese. The Mu marks the end of the jungle and the beginning of the open plains.
A river is often a border, economic, cultural or political. I remember once taking the five-minute car ferry between Vermont and New York State at Ticonderoga. I asked the ferryman how far it was to the main highway. “I don’t know” he said, “I’m from Vermont”. My native city Glasgow was once divided socially by the River Clyde, an apartheid created by the industrial revolution.
The cultural gap across the Irrawaddy in 1945 between the Japanese, mostly peasants from Honshu and Hokkaido, fighting for a fated empire and us British, mainly city dwellers, defending a fading empire, was profound. Two nights earlier a boatload of Japanese had made a night raid on the next village downstream from us, killing twenty of our troops. They must have started opposite us and floated downstream. Making landfall in moving waters is tricky. Whoever devised the maxim that the best defence is attack should have added “provided you can surprise your enemy”.
Our patrol was strictly a reconnaissance, to find a hole in the Japanese defences. Our boat, a canvas-sided collapsible with six cross benches, was visibly the worse for wear, having been used in the Italian campaign. There were eight of us. We had practised silent paddling in the dark on the night of my reverie. Opposite us was the island of Ngazun, close to the far bank, with a sand spit at its downstream end. Our plan was to round the spit, calculating that the Japanese would be defending the front of the island, but not the rear. The Irrawaddy bank behind the island was twenty feet high and topped by six-foot-high elephant grass, an unpromising bridgehead, but one where there was a good chance we would not be expected.
A few nights later we set out to repeat this silent voyage, with sixteen boats, twelve men in each. This time we were crossing in moonlight, the current was faster and the water higher. We were spotted by Japanese machine gunners. The first shots ploughed into the laden boats when we were about 100 yards from the shore, bullets which missed their targets pinging off the water with alarming whines. This fire did not come from the bank for which we were heading, but from a promontory downstream from which the Japanese had calculated, rightly, they could enfilade any assault.
We had outboard motors in each boat, the starting cords in the hands of soldiers seated astern, with instructions to start up the motors if we came under fire. This saved many lives. Once we hit the bank, the enfilading machine gunfire could no longer reach us. However, some of the boats on our right had been carried further downstream than we had planned and were either sunk or turned back. We lost eight men killed, twenty-five were wounded and eight were never found. An exception was Private Grimshaw who was wounded before his boat sank, but who managed to float (we had no lifebelts) twenty miles downstream, where he was rescued. For him, at least, the river had been a friend. A psychiatrist dealing with battle trauma reported that Grimshaw, apart from his shattered femur, was “in perfect physical condition, quite unperturbed and very cheerful”.
There were more casualties on the river the next day when large motorized landing craft fought their way into our slender bridgehead. The battle lasted two days and made us hate the innocent river. Yet we were the intruders. The river, as Wordsworth wrote about the Thames when he stood upon Westminster Bridge in 1802, “glideth at its own sweet will”.
I have lived in the Thames Valley for many years. In woods nearby is a forgotten Roman fort; its ramparts and moats overgrown. One can guess that the trees were not there when the Romans built it on a steep hill which afforded views upstream and downstream. Two millennia later the Thames, tamed by locks into a gently flowing waterway, welcomed and inspired such peaceful citizens as Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, and Jerome K Jerome, author of Three Men in a Boat, as placidly as it had the invading Romans.
I drove over the Thames daily by the 19th Century Marlow suspension bridge for many years before I was tempted to sail upon its waters. Last year my family and I finally made a river voyage, in a motorboat to take us from The Compleat Angler in Marlow to the bridge which links Eton and Windsor, a four-hour journey by river which takes twenty minutes by road.
Rivers teach us lessons about time, not only by their leisurely wending, but by their urgent rapids. I experienced the latter rather bracingly in 1942 when, on a bet, I plunged into the glacially green torrent of the River Teesta where it emerges from the Himalayan foothills and was flung breathless minutes later on its bank half a mile downstream.
Some of my most precious river-loving moments have been with waterfalls. Bringing to rivers what the ballet brings to the theatre, their flumes tumbling and twisting down crannied rock-faces, waterfalls delight all the senses. The joy of scrambling to a spot where the airborne spray brushes your face is both physically refreshing and philosophically inspiring: the water of life caresses the rock of truth with you the witness of both the turbulence and the stillness.
One cannot be intimate with massive waterfalls. The Grey Mare’s Tail, a flume falling sheer from a mountain loch and visible from the road between Moffat and St Mary’s Loch in Scotland, is an individual experience, while a Victoria Falls or a Niagara are spectacles. As Oscar Hammerstein observed of the Mississippi it “just keeps rolling along”. The cotton packers’ bodies “all aching and racked with pain” were like those of the soldiers fighting and dying on the banks of a heedless Irrawaddy. Large rivers like the Irrawaddy, the Brahmaputra, the Ganges, the Yangtse-Kiang or the Amazon are notoriously destructive when they flood and an engineering challenge to contain.
Large or short, rivers are symbols of life. They start small, as humans do; they carve their ways; they grow, mature, and, at their ends, are absorbed in the oceans from which they come and which return them to their sources. Rain is the original recycling agent.
My candidate for an ideal river is the Ausable (“aw-say-bill”) in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State. Its secret is simple. Through most of its course it runs through mountains and forests reaching down to its banks. The trees hold the soil and prevent it from being silted up. The Adirondacks are a protected wilderness, guaranteed to be forever wild. Men intruded in the 19th century with logging and ironworks, but industry has been long forbidden. The Ausable, as a result, is a clear-water river with rapids rippling over pebbles, tranquil stretches, waterfalls, a gorge and, near its end, a chasm through pure rock. No war was ever fought over it. With its varying speeds, its calm and rough passages, it patterns human life, and inspires thoughts of immortality as the water it debouches into Lake Champlain may return as trickles from melting snow, gurgling springs or a dewdrop on the rose.
Sadly, I still haven’t got around to taking Gordon’s idea any further.
Who was Gordon Graham? He was a friend and inspiration to me for many years. For those who never knew him an obituary in the Telegraph in 2015 is a good introduction.
GORDON GRAHAM, who has died aged 94, was one of the most influential publishers of his time and was also awarded two Military Crosses in the Second World War.
On the night of February 24 1945, Graham was commanding a company of the 1st Battalion The Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders (1 QOCH) in a forced crossing of the Irrawaddy River about 25 miles west of Mandalay. He led the assault in a light rubber boat which was paddled by hand in an attempt to achieve complete surprise but as they reached the bank they came under heavy machine gun fire from the Japanese.
Despite the casualties around him, Graham brought the craft through the fire without wavering and as soon as it grounded he led his company in an assault up the steep 50-feet high bank. They established a solid bridgehead on the south bank and held it until they were reinforced.
Other landings, however, did not succeed and Graham was ordered to deploy half a mile to the west where the battalion’s flank was dangerously exposed. Moving by night through elephant grass 15-feet high, he set up a new position and held it despite the enemy’s determined efforts to surround him and dislodge him. For his “magnificent contempt of danger and superb handling of a critical situation” he was awarded a Bar to his MC.
William Gordon Graham was born in Glasgow on July 17 1920 and educated at Hutcheson’s Grammar School, Glasgow, and Glasgow University where he read Law. He was commissioned into the QOCH in 1941 and served with the 1st Battalion in India and Burma.
In the fighting around Kohima in May and June 1944, he carried out long and hazardous patrols deep into enemy occupied territory. The citation for the awarded of his first MC paid tribute to the magnificent example that he set by his courage, initiative and inspiring leadership.
Towards the end of the war he became a Press Relations Officer on the staff of General Auchinleck and wrote feature stories, news despatches and book reviews as well as working unpaid on the Times of India. In 1946, he was demobilized but London held few attractions for him and he returned to India and worked as a freelance newspaper correspondent in Bombay.
In 1949, he augmented his income as a journalist with part-time work for the McGraw-Hill Book Company. It was a job which enabled him to meet and interview the country’s leading statesmen and his responsibilities were gradually extended to Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma and the rest of south-east Asia.
Late in 1955, he was offered the job of international sales manager of the McGraw Hill Book Company and moved to New York. In 1963, he was made managing director of McGraw-Hill for the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In Graham’s own words, this was “a task, in those days, akin to setting up a Japanese watch factory in Switzerland.”
He worked for International Publishing Corporation from 1975 to 1982 and was then headhunted by Reed International. He was appointed chief executive of Butterworths, the legal publishers, and transformed a rather uninspiring company into one of the jewels in Reed’s crown.
In 1986, Graham was elected president of the Publishers Association. He dedicated himself to improving relations with booksellers and librarians, and strenuously supported and upheld the rights of authors and publishers in the negotiations which led to the Copyright Act of 1988.
In retirement, he and his wife founded the academic journal, Logos, devoted to matters of publishing and book-selling. He was also the guiding spirit behind the creation of the Kohima Educational Trust, founded by veterans of the Battle of Kohima, in gratitude to the Naga people of north-east India who had supported the Allies during the battles with the Japanese in 1944.
Throughout his career in the book world, Graham was an innovator, an inspirational manager who used charm and leadership to achieve his aims, and a talented wordsmith, both in his writing and in his public speaking.
Among his many interests he listed writing, landscape gardening, fostering transatlantic understanding and singing sentimental songs. He published books, essays and articles. These included As I was Saying (1994), Butterworths: history of a publishing house (1997), The Trees are all Young on Garrison Hill (2005).
Gordon Graham died on April 24. He married, first, in 1943, Margaret Milne and, secondly, in 1948, Friedel Gramm, both of whom predeceased him. He married, thirdly, in 1992, Betty Cottrell who survives him with a daughter of his first marriage and of his second.