THE WAR IN IRAQ, CIRCA 1941

Long before terrorism and petrol shortages, there was war in Iraq.

70 years ago, during World War II, my grandfather was posted to the sea-port of Basra in Iraq, to join the famous 5^th Indian Division. 

The journey by sea was no luxury cruise. The British Indian army personnel sailed from the port of Bombay (now Mumbai) on the west coast of India to Basra in the height of the monsoon season, during which heavy rains lashed the ocean, making it rough and choppy. In June 1941, they travelled in the lower deck, where the maximum impact of every toss of the heaving ship could be felt by its suffering passengers. To top that, Hitler’s forces were continually bombing the sea routes, so the ship took a meandering, zigzagging route to avoid the enemy planes.

The sea-voyage to Basra in Iran, packed closely in the lowest reaches of large, heaving ship, was an ordeal. Sucking lemons to fight seasickness in cramped quarters, subsisting on wholewheat flat-breads (chapatis) that had been burnt black from being cooked on charcoal stoves, they covered the four-day journey in 14 days.

When they got to Basra, thousands of tents stood pitched in the sand, stretching for miles and miles across the desert. The lights were turned off at night, in order to stay hidden from the enemy, so getting lost on the way back to the tent was a regular thing. During meal-times, getting to the mess and back with his plate was a real problem. My grandfather recalls having to count the rows and remember how many tents down from the left or right he’d find his own tent, hidden in plain sight among thousands of identical, anonymous-looking tents. He recalls many long, exhausting searches, often in the dark at the end of the day, looking around for ages before he could manage to find his own tent. Not that the food was worth the long trek – far from it. The only vegetarian food that could be managed in a tiny, predominantly carnivorous foreign town was a horrid mess of slimy, grass-like boiled vegetation that served as rations in the desert, liberally peppered with the sand that managed to get into everything.

The camp at Basra was a nightmare, but it was a stepping-stone to better things. 

By the sort of strange miracle that seems to follow my ebullient grandfather around, the next stop was Baghdad, the capital city. His luck had finally turned, and brought with it a promotion to the rank of Jamadar Quartermaster. And so he swapped the three stripes on his uniform for his first star.

Baghdad was a large, fashionable city. As the man in charge of supplies, he presided over large stores of tinned milk, liquor and Woodbine cigarettes; and quickly became a very popular man, thanks to his generosity. In a single stroke of luck, he’d gone from slimy boiled weeds to sweet tinned milk.

But that wasn’t all either. Within six months of being posted in Iraq, the 5^th Indian Division was posted back to India. They had been brought in to fight off the successful Germans advancing from North Africa. The Panzer Tank Division had come right up to El Alamein, a small place in the desert in North Africa. They had also carefully laid landmines to blow up any Indian forces unwise enough to venture into their captured territory.

In one of history's great ironies, though, the Germans never reached Iraq. They ran out of petrol.

The Germans were forced to abandon their tanks in the desert and retreat. With their retreat, there was no further need for the 5^th Indian Division to join the fight. And so my grandfather came back home, having narrowly (if rather regretfully) missed the fight – for then.

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