OPINION:The grave of a relative lost to war in Burma is testimony to a sacrifice made for us, writes TONY ALLWRIGHT
PHILIP FRANCIS Brennan was born in 1916 in tiny Kilsheelan in south Tipperary, one of six children of his mother Ethel. Her husband, also Philip, had another three teenage daughters by his deceased first wife.
With a small farm and some merchant interests, Philip père supported his large brood to a reasonable standard until disaster struck. He succumbed to the Spanish flu carnage which swept the world in 1918/19.
Ethel was widowed with six children under eight plus three step-daughters, but little in the way of assets or income. Life became immeasurably harder and Ethel herself expired still a youthful woman in 1930 of, essentially, exhaustion. Her children were all teenagers.
After his father died, little Phil had been sent to live much of the time with his aunt Rachel in England, where he spent many formative years.
So as a young adult in England he became an apprentice brewer with the (still existing) Shepherd Neame Brewery. These were the peaceful mid-1930s and before long he joined the volunteer reservists of the British territorial army. Many young guys did likewise because, simply, it was good fun. You did some marching, went on camping trips, got to shoot guns, enjoyed great camaraderie drinking beer together and chasing girls, and even got paid a little money. What’s not to like?
However as a reservist Phil discovered in 1939 that when war breaks out you can quickly find yourself in combat zones, because you are already a trained volunteer soldier.
That’s how Phil found himself as a Second Lieutenant gunner with the Royal Artillery in France in 1940, as part of the British expeditionary force sent to keep the Nazis at bay. It ended in calamity with the BEF chased ignominiously back to the Dunkirk beaches. Phil was among the 340,000 soldiers rescued by the plucky armada sailing from Dover. But his travels, travails and war were just beginning.
He was just one of 70,000 southern Irish who joined the British military to fight the rising fascism, imperialism and global aspirations of Germany and Japan. With Ireland staying out, some signed up from altruism, others for adventure, some were conscripted while many, like Phil, were yoked in by accident. All were honourable and courageous young people who for the decades that followed should have been revered not disdained by their home country.
Within two months of Dunkirk, Phil sailed to India, seconded to the 23rd Mountain Battery within 25 Mountain Regiment. This formed part of the Royal Indian Artillery, a unit to which he remained attached for the remainder of his service. An avid equestrian, he was delighted to take responsibility for the battery’s horses and mules.
My nonagenarian father remembers him as a handsome, jovial, chatty fellow with a great turn of phrase. This is evident in his letter to a sister shortly after his arrival. Though he doesn’t say much about the fighting, he laments he has never ridden an elephant or killed a tiger. However, there are lots of wild animals right there inside his tent doing a highland fling round his hurricane lamp – beetles, grasshoppers, assorted bugs.
He was then transferred to Burma but by late 1941 was back westward again, in Quetta in today’s Pakistan, and thence to the Waziristan town of Razmak, better known, as his letters home reveal, as “the hole of the Empire”. I doubt if contemporary soldiers fighting today’s Taliban and al-Qaeda would much dispute such an epithet. Phil writes to his aunt Rachel that Ramzak is but a cantonment completely surrounded by barbed wire and “no woman has ever been let within 40 miles of it”.
He observes that the local Pathan (the Pashtun people of Afghanistan and the northwest of modern Pakistan) “has a great sporting instinct and considers careless British officers fair game”. One such local, “Buckshee Bill” with his “prehistoric” rifle, gains notoriety when he “shoots up six columns all on his own and then comes and sits on a hill slap outside the wire, taking further pot shots at officers, just for fun”. But he melts into nothingness whenever soldiers are sent to stop him.
Being Irish, Phil admires these men “because they’re all agin the government” and wishes he could recruit such able fighters.
While bemoaning the lack of real fighting, he’s suddenly whisked back to Burma, as adjutant to his regiment as a major. As no one knows where the invaders will appear, he travels all over the country, which reminds him of Ireland, except for the bamboo and banana plants and “funny looking houses on stilts”.
But the fun stops when the army moves south to meet the Japanese invaders and some mighty battles ensue with plenty of casualties, though unfortunately the censors don’t allow Phil to relate details. In his last letter, in June 1942, he is relieved to have survived what he called “Round One” unlike many of his pals.
Further clashes with the Japanese follow over the next five months but details are sketchy. On November 23rd, 1943, while engaged in guerrilla operations behind Japanese lines in the Arakan region in the northwest of the country, he sets off early on his horse to spy on Japanese positions with a colleague, Anthony Irwin. This requires crossing the Kalapazin river which is deep and flowing deceptively fast.
A strong swimmer, he rides his horse into the water but they quickly get into difficulty. He sends his horse back and Irwin swims out to help him but Phil, weighed down with his trousers, boots, pistols and explosives, sinks from the grasp of his friend.
Phil’s last, dying look is one of sadness rather than fear.
Today Phil, who was my uncle, lies in the majestic Taukkyan War Graves Cemetery, 35km north of Rangoon in Burma. He is but one of the cemetery’s 6,465 fallen warriors who heroically gave their vibrant lives for an honourable cause, each with his own story.
They came from Ireland, from all parts of Britain, from the Indian subcontinent, from west Africa; Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims; of every rank from high to low; each grave adorned with the same simple gravestone; all equal in death. The majority of them were, like Phil, in their 20s, but one was only 16.
Another monument names 1,074 fallen Indian soldiers who were cremated as their faiths required. Twenty-eight monumental pillars are inscribed with the names of a further 27,000 men and women whose bodies were never recovered – hailing from Burma, India, Nepal, Africa and numerous other parts, many of them slave-labour victims of the brutal Japanese project to build a railway line to bring military supplies from Bangkok to Rangoon. And Taukkyan is just one of three such cemeteries in Burma, which was itself just one small corner of a vicious global conflict.
We in the free world truly owe an extraordinary debt to these brave young people who fought and died so valiantly to preserve it for us. We can repay it only by doing whatever we can to continue to safeguard human freedom. Sadly, Burma itself is one country where it has been extinguished by its totalitarian junta.
Tony Allwright is an engineering and industrial safety consultant, and blogs on international and national issues at tallrite.com/blog