The
long drive through Burma led the 5th Indian Division, my grandfather's formation, deep into the interior of the country, and to
better quarters and better living conditions. Luck has a way of changing
suddenly, when you least expect it, and in my grandfather’s case, he caught a
break.
In
a small town in interior Burma, next to a famous pagoda (a Buddhist temple),
the company settled down to something very like comfort. Among the local people
were Indian-origin settlers. With the enterprise of the true Malayalee when
he’s out of Kerala
(there’s something about the southern state of Kerala in India which makes its
expat inhabitants hugely proactive when it comes to the food and beverage
business), the ladies would come around on Sunday mornings with traditional
South Indian steamed rice dumplings (idlis)
and savoury rice-flour pancakes (dosas)
to sell to the home-sick Indian
men.
My grandfather was promoted to Chief
Quartermaster. He and his friend Subedar Bali, being two of the senior-most men
around, had the luxury of getting a thatched hut by way of accommodation, a
definite upgrade from the tents which had served as living quarters so far. And
sharing a boundary wall with an
anti-aircraft unit meant that they could relax and stop worrying about the constant,
ever-present threat of the German bomber planes that hovered over the Great War.
For
my grandfather, who possessed the happy knack of ignoring unpleasant things and
enjoying life to the hilt whenever possible, this was living the high
life.
For a while.
It was a beautiful Sunday
morning. My grandfather and Subedar Bali sat outside their hut in the peaceful
tropical surroundings and enjoying a breakfast of masala dosas, crispy
golden brown pancakes filled with a spicy, savoury potato filling. There was
nothing to do but eat and bask in the sunshine. They looked up lazily as seven
planes painted with the Indian insignia flew overhead. The planes swooped down,
raining bombs on the unit. At the first, explosive sounds of the deadly shower
from the sky peppered the camp, my grandfather and Bali abandoned their masala dosas and dived into trenches.
Ironically, the anti-aircraft
unit’s artillery guns were just outside the unit, but they, too, thought the,
as my grandfather put it, that “the planes were ours”. It wasn’t until much
later that everyone figured out that the planes were enemy bombers, cleverly
disguised with the Indian insignia and flying under false colours. By the time
the anti-aircraft unit realized what was going on, the planes had disappeared.
The ruse had caught
everyone unawares. The camp was levelled and as many as 30 vehicles were reduced
to smoking wrecks in a matter of a minutes. 22 people died that day. My grandfather
came out of the trench to find that friends and colleagues who hadn’t been so
lucky were gone forever. Also gone was the prized thatched hut (which had take
a direct hit) and all his worldly possessions, which had been in the hut. But
things, unlike people, can be replaced; and as the Quartermaster, retrieving a
fresh set of clothing and other supplies from the stores was a simple matter.
Far simpler, in fact, than dealing with the sudden deaths of twenty-two people
with whom he’d lived, worked and travelled for so long - a loss that cut so
deeply that 75 years later, he still couldn’t talk about it.
In fact, he had been lucky again.
He could have been inside his hut when a bomb from the enemy planes had
landed on it, but instead, he’d been outside.
That was how my grandfather
survived bombing by enemy aeroplanes in the Second World War.
Vous pourriez lire la version française de ce blogue à : https://waranenguerre.blogspot.com/2013/10/lair-de-la-guerre.html
Vous pourriez lire la version française de ce blogue à : https://waranenguerre.blogspot.com/2013/10/lair-de-la-guerre.html
Merci de visiter mon blogue !
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