Introduction
“Sappers made a track” these four words on a page in Slim’s book… proved the inspiration for this book/blog.
These four words, written almost in passing, I knew must hide a tale. It transpires it was, after previous failures, of the winched / bulldozed delivery of Sgt Waterhouse and his Lee Grant tank up the vertiginous Summerhouse/Garrison Hill onto the tennis court, involving a then freefall drop for the tank onto a Japanese bunker, which proved pivotal in the famous battle for Kohima.
Who are ‘Sappers’? We are the engineer soldiers on the ground in war making sure our Army gets to where it needs to be and stopping the enemy doing the same. As well, of course, as water supply, fuel supply, docks, airfields and…!
Anyway, as I was saying, when I started investigating General Slims other mention of our endeavour, it helped this book/blog take shape. Finding the 14th Army’s Chief Engineer, General Hasted’s lecture in the Churchill Archives in Cambridge, Lieut.-Colonel Sandes seminal book ‘The Indian Engineers 1939 -1947’, Barker’s book on ‘The March on Delhi’ giving the Japanese perspective and access to the Royal Engineer Journal library has allowed, in key areas of the battle, the full strata of planning: from ‘Uncle Bill’ down to ‘Billy’ Hasted to first-hand accounts of ‘the sappers on the ground’. I shall be using first-hand accounts wherever possible, unless an overview of the action would be more helpful to the reader.
In this amazing story, we have sappers and miners from Burma, East Africa, India, Nepal, United Kingdom and West Africa: Plus thirty five thousand tea plantation association workers recruited to build a brick road; 3 miles (5 kilometres) – long ropeways up mountain passes; platoons of elephant ‘sappers’; Nawabs and Maharajahs; teak ‘arks’ carrying tanks; The Irrawaddy Flotilla and Burmese Steam Navigation Co Ltd; a Bailey bridge built round a cliff; a sapper built DIY Navy; rubber ‘dreadnoughts; ‘Jeep railways’; the heroic maintenance of a ‘chocolate staircase’ ; the build of the longest floating Bailey bridge of its time at Chindwin and the rebuild of the Bombay Docks following a 2.9 Kiloton explosion.
In my posts I shall be using these dramatic events to best illustrate “Royal engineering”. Real engineering, but with a bottle of panache and a bucket of improvisation.
Maj (Retd) Philip Rowe. RE