December 7, 2006
Been There, Done That Posted by Richard F. Snow at 05:00 PM EST In 1956 John Masters published a wonderful memoir called Bugles and a Tiger. By then he had been living in America for years pursuing a highly successful career as a novelist, but this book told of a very different life indeed, that of an officer in the old Indian Army commanding Gurkha troops on the Northwest Frontier. It followed him from his days in Sandhurst, the British West Point, in the mid-1930s up to 1939 and the outbreak of World War II. I just recently learned he had written a sequel, The Road Past Mandalay, that takes him through the war, and I found a copy. It’s every bit as good as its predecessor—which is to say, about as good as a memoir can be—but at the beginning it gave me a feeling of dislocation. That’s because Lieutenant Masters and his Gurkha battalion are sent to Iraq, and here are names—Basra, Fallujah, Baghdad—very familiar to twenty-first-century Americans, along with the narrow old streets, the parched landscapes, the unpredictability of allies, the logistical miscalculations and all the rest. To someone who doesn’t know a great deal about the opening phases of World War II in the Middle East, it’s surprising and slightly eerie. Here’s Masters: “We were going to Basra in fulfillment of a treaty pledge to protect Iraq should its recent independence be threatened by anyone; and it was certainly being threatened by Germany; or shortly would. It was strictly a standard trooping movement. Nothing had been loaded or packed for an assault landing . . .” Then, having steamed into the Persian Gulf, Masters is called by his colonel, Willy Weallens (who in the face of incessant calamity has a favorite, all-purpose phrase that I think could offer comfort to any of us: “Oh, well, worse things happen at sea”). “’We’re going to make an assault landing,” he said... “Jesus Christ. No assault landing craft, only the ship’s lifeboats. No covering fire. . . . Where in hell was the reserve ammunition packed? The mortar bombs? Who was responsible for this bloody mess anyway? . . . “The company commanders arrived and Willy explained what had happened. Some weeks earlier an Iraqi politician, Rashid Ali, had, with three others, formed a cabal and overthrown the government. The Golden Square, as the cabal called itself, was pro-Hitler. They had just informed England that Iraq did not need to be helped, since she was not threatened by anyone, except indeed the force now steaming from India to her assistance. She would resist the landing of that force, and would get help wherever she could . . .” In the event, they were able to land unopposed. But soon Masters finds himself lying in a sweltering marsh listening to another unit “fighting their way into the old city to give us all more elbow room. They had located a strong post held by a few Iraqi regulars, and the brigadier ordered us to support them in an attack. Willy and I drove into the narrow, stinking alleys to co-ordinate details with their colonel. We found him in a battered police station his battalion had captured during the night. He looked tired but cheerful and he had a peculiar gleam in his eye. “’Morning, Willy,’ he said as we arrived, and then at once, ‘Do you know where our two-inch and three-inch mortars are? The ones that were N.A. [army notation for “not available”] all over India? . . . The Iraqi Army has them.’ “This turned out to be true. The British government had been supplying Iraq and other ‘allies’ with modern arms, leaving none for the regular battalions of the Indian Army, a force which even Mr. Churchill came to learn was of more value to our cause than the Arab conscripts now busily supporting the Golden Square’s Nazi-inspired revolution. “We put in a brisk attack, alongside the 2/7th Gurkhas, more to get at our mortars than out of any pique at the enemy, who fired a few shots and fled. We settled down to hold Basra until more troops came, to release us for operations further upcountry.” In time they were upcountry: We “captured the Euphrates crossing at Falluja in a smart, fierce fight. The road to Baghdad lay open. . . . We got orders to fly to Mosul, three hundred miles farther north. The Golden Square had fled, and the Iraqi army . . . signed an instrument of surrender in Baghdad; but there was no knowing whether the garrison commanders in the rest of the country would adhere to it. Mosul we had to have at once, to prevent the German bombers using it; but the very presence of the bombers would stiffen any resolve the local commander might have to fight on . . .” Then British history diverges from ours (so far), for it’s on to Syria and, after that, Iran. “We were to continue our advance at 1400 hours. But we did not, for a signal came that the Persians had surrendered. The lunch turned into a party. We found some of our beer and whisky ration and, joined by anybody who happened to be traveling on the road, sang and ate and drank till late at night. “We settled down to make a camp near Karind, and train for whatever might befall us next. We had started the great war for democracy by invading three neutral countries against the wishes of their inhabitants or, at least, of their governments. The supply of opponents was now running out. Surely our next move must be to the big one—to the Western Desert, to fight Rommel.” Masters went on to become a brigadier and receive high decorations for gallantry. He did not return to Iraq, but he leaves us with an arresting observation made by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s far-sighted lieutenant Harry Hopkins, who visited there not long after Masters had moved out: “The Persian Gulf is the a--hole of the world, and Basra is eighty miles up it.”
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