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John’s deadly missions deep behind enemy lines Disease and sta left him just skin a
When Army captain John Riggs was sent to join a new Special Force in Burma, his commanding officers assured him it would be a walk in the park.
At 23 he’d already had an actionpacked Second World War in Palestine, Greece and North Africa helping defend Tobruk against Hitler’s Afrika Korps.
But, after battling seas of mud in monsoon-hit East Bengal, getting bitten by a rabid dog, going down with malaria and narrowly missing a dose of bubonic plague, John knew it was anything but easy.
“It all seemed quite exciting, and it was sold to us like that,” he recalls.
“It was ‘a piece of cake’ we were told by commanders and we’d have ‘great fun trekking with mules’.”
But John soon discovered they meant trekking like a mule – carrying half his bodyweight in a backpack across mosquito-infested rivers and through steamy jungle, with scant water and rations.
For he had become one of the Chindits, the Far East heroes who endured some of the worst conditions of the war, as they penetrated deep behind enemy lines to destroy Japanese army supplies, transport and communications.
The Chindits suffered terrible casualties from savage hand-tohand combat as well as sickness and slow starvation.
But their epic efforts in two expeditions, Operation Longcloth and Operation Thursday, helped turned the tide in the Far East and ensured a place in military history.
John, now 100, is one of the few remaining Chindits who will, tomorrow, be commemorating the 75th anniversary of VJ Day.
And, like most who served in the “Forgotten War”, he modestly plays down his suffering and sacrifice.
“Our job was to tear up the railway lines and cause every possible trouble to the Japanese who were trying to invade India,” he says.
“I did about 900 miles in five months on my flat feet and half the time the monsoon belted down.
“We never had enough to eat and once the rain started every insect possible came out. We all got malaria and dysentery and even worse things like typhus.”
John, suffered a stroke in 2018 and now lives in a care home, run by the Royal British Legion Industries charity in Aylesford, Kent.
But his wartime memories are still vivid. He signed up with the Territorial Army in 1938 and when war was declared joined 1st Battalion Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment.
In February 1940, he was deployed to the Middle East then Greece and then Libya, where the 1941 Siege of Tobruk lasted 242 days. Then it was back to Cairo where he was involved in the British operation that forced King Farouk to abdicate. In East Bengal, John, now a Captain, found a dog bite had gone septic. He was simply bandaged up so maggots could clean his wound. “None of my friends wanted to know me because I started to smell,” he says. Then his brigade was hit by bubonic plague – which John only avoided by being hospitalised with a malarial relapse. But his greatest challenge was to come. In September 1943, he and his men were put under Brigadier Orde Wingate who had established a Long Range Penetration Group to attack Japanese Army infrastructure from deep behind its lines. Originally members of the 77th Indian Infantry Brigade they took the name “Chindits”, after a Burmese mythical beast. In the first expedition a third of men were lost and 600 of the survivors were too ill ever to fight again.
But Wingate had caught Churchill’s eye and his elite units received official backing and support.
So the Second Chindit Expedition involved a force of six brigades, including John and his men.
“We received intensive training,” he says. “We learned how to look after mules, make bamboo leaf coracles to float kit across rivers and how to handle a flamethrower.
“We didn’t believe in carrying anything that wasn’t edible or really needed. So a razor or comb was dispensable – and there was no spare water to wash in anyway.”
But the hardest thing was carrying their packs in dense jungle, high humidity and temperatures of 110F-112F. A Rifleman’s load was 57lbs, a Bren gunner’s over 68lbs. Five days’ rations, when they could find and retrieve air drops, weighed even more, meaning Bren gunners bore a back-breaking 84lbs, even heavier when wet.
“Those gunners were the great heroes,” says John, “carrying all that uphill and down dale. It was the only time I never heard soldiers talk about sex! All they talked about was what they’d eat when they got out.”
In March 1944 John’s unit was flown into central Burma by Dakota aircraft...along with their mules.
Then tragedy struck
In 2006 & meeting Queen aged 99 when Brigadier Wing plane crash. US Ge Stilwell took over.
John was sent to d stores of petrol and am “We were able to call Force to have a go,” before we finally mo managed to destroy ourselves.” They then tearing up the ra hampered progress them rescuing a
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