I have had the pleasure of re-reading this week, in the aftermath of the Hamas terrorism in Israel, Sydney Jary’s fabulous 18 Platoon, a book I first read when I was a young soldier over 35 years ago. I was prompted to read it again after meeting his son, Christopher, at a recent Kohima Educational Trust webinar on the subject of the 2nd Battalion, The Dorset Regiment at Kohima.
18 Platoon is a brilliant account of the fighting in North West Europe between July 1944 and the end of the war in Europe from the perspective of a 20-year infantry platoon commander. Jary was lucky to survive. His battalion – 4th Battalion, The Somerset Light Infantry – lost 47 officers and 1,266 NCOs and private soldiers killed or wounded over a period of 9-months. Of the original thirty-six men of 18 Platoon who had landed in Normandy, only one remained at the end of the war. This organisational chart demonstrates beautifully the place that 18 Platoon sat in 4 SLI as part of Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. Its a reminder that armies are made up of a vast array of platoons, comprised of by those whom Sergeant Ken Cooper described as ‘The Little Men.’ Wars are fought, lost and won by the ‘little men’ every bit as much as they are fought, lost and won by the great generals.
There is much to learn in this book, both for practitioners of the military art and historians. It’s also a good book for those who have been fed a diet of war-movies and Commando-type comics and who have little or no idea of the reality of soldiering. Jary brilliantly demolishes the ridiculous stereotype that the best soldiers needs to be brutal to be successful. He records that those whom he described as the ‘aristocracy of the battlefield’ – the infantryman – was invariably the most compassionate and resistant to unnecessary killing. Remember that when you see photographs of the results of Hamas terrorism in Israel. Real soldiering seeks to achieve its ends by as little violence as possible, not by indiscriminate murder. For the professional soldier violence is an almost regrettable necessity, rather than being the purpose of war. Terrorism is the use of violence for the purposes of creating fear and alarm, and is antithetical to the purpose of war; it follows that terrorists by their very nature lack the humanity that sits, or should sit, at the heart of real soldiering.
This passage describes what actually happens to real men when confronted with the brutality of combat.
Jary’s observations reminded me of discussing this subject in a previous book of mine, an account of the Japanese invasion of India in 1944:
Outside the frantic, stabbing, chaotic frenzy of close combat, and for all their hatred of the unnatural barbarity often demonstrated by the Japanese, many British troops came to feel sorry for the ragged specimens of humanity they now came across, helped perhaps by the rarity factor of these occasions. Lieutenant Peter Toole on the Tiddim Road with 20 Field Company heard the excited buzz that a Japanese soldier had been taken prisoner, and watched the event with interest. ‘One day word came that a prisoner had been taken. This capture was rare and we had not until now seen a live Jap. The soldier was a sorry sight, small, in tatters, emaciated, scared stiff and bowing left, right and centre, being escorted to the rear.’ Antony Brett-James recounts a story about the attitude of British soldiers to their defeated foe. Troops were clearing the Japanese from the villages leading north from Kohima in June 1944. A Japanese soldier ‘was seen skulking in a bush near Jessami, by the side of the track. Out leapt the soldiers and seized him,
“Shall we kill the little bastard? It’s what he and his like deserve …”
“Oh, no, we can’t. We’ll take him back with us.”
After a few hundred yards – “Ere, Tojo, you look pretty miserable, ‘ave a fag.”
A mile farther on they had a puncture, and it was “Come on, Tojo, give us a hand.”
By the time Kohima was reached, Tojo was a mascot, if not a friend.’
Not all Japanese prisoners received such treatment. Mike Ball of the American Field Service despatched a wounded Japanese prisoner in a truck from Kohima to the Field Hospital in Dimapur, accompanied by an armed guard. A couple of hours later he was chastised over the radio ‘for sending in a dead Jap, shot through the head … the prisoner had been killed either by the guard or the driver or both’. On subsequent shipments a reliable Gurkha guard was appointed for the task, and only one severely-wounded Japanese prisoner was lost, succumbing to his injuries.
Sergeant Graham Colbeck of 3 Para in the Falklands War described it as thus:
‘Battle is a delicate balance between extremes of human behaviour - selfish cowardice and selfless sacrifice, brutality and humanity, callousness and pity - and the virtuous must be made to outweigh the dishonourable, both in the individual and the unit, if either is to survive with any pride.’
Sydney Jary describes an event towards the end of the war, at Sinderen, a small village about five miles to the east of the Rhine, which captures Colbeck’s observations perfectly. I can’t think of any soldier I know who would disagree with his conclusions.
You can see Sydney Jary being interviewed here at Sandhurst:in 1993.
I read this book in the 80s when the myth of the German soldier as the highly skilled practitioner of war was at its height. Jary refuted this pointing out that they didn't like patrolling at night for example. He was a regular contributor to the British Army Review and a big fan of the Universal Carrier arguing for a similar requirement in the modern force. A great read.
Thanks for sharing. One for the list I think.