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JOHN RIGGS ON HIS MEMORIES OF BURMA
Gurkha regiment under heavy fire: “The going was very slow - it was sheer murder.
Eventually they arrived at Indawygi Lake, a key position where John was sent to liaise with Chinese forces. En route he encountered a village hit by smallpox, meaning the whole battalion had to be vaccinated.
John says: “Heading down a track one day I thought I heard a shot, so we dived into the jungle. Then this Royal Engineer Officer said ‘It’s me I’ve trodden on a booby trap.’
“It was one of those things that shot a bullet up into your foot. We got him out.”
John’s service came to an abrupt end when a huge abscess was found in his back.
Chindits on a forest march
WAR Fighters cross a jungle river
He was evacuated and eventually flown to Assam. He was just sevenand-a-half stone. “Otherwise I was all right,” he says.
The Chindits endured so much. Most could no longer take solid food and had two or three conditions like malaria, dysentery and septic sores. John, repatriated in 1944, went on to teach at the School of Infantry in Warminster, Wilts.
He understood the US decision to drop atom bombs months later on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saying: “Otherwise the war would have gone on for years.”
■ John supports the RBLI’s VJ Day Tommy in the Window campaign . For more information go to www. rbli.co.uk/vjday
All the soldiers talked about was food