BURMA BRIDGE BUSTER PART I
Veteran Dr Robert Callow describes his dangerous jungle missions behind enemy lines
It is dawn over a Burmese river in late 1943. Above the misty water an aircraft flies overhead containing six British commandos. Among their number is a young lieutenant who is about to go on his first mission to wreak destruction behind enemy lines. Although he is still in his teens, the officer is already a skilled professional, and he is strapped up with various demolition bombs. Nevertheless, when he jumps from the plane, events spiral out of control. The commandos have been spotted and enemy machine guns fire into the sky, creating deadly tracers that resemble hosepipe jets. The majority of the commandos are either killed or captured and the officer lands in the river. His only objective now is to survive.
The officer in question is Second Lieutenant Robert Callow, an expert in explosives and languages who would subsequently survive to become a prolific saboteur against the Japanese in Burma. As a commando in Force 136, Inter-services Liaison Department, Callow spent almost a year fighting behind enemy lines destroying bridges, transport columns and communication lines, but his military career took him far beyond the jungles of Burma. Callow also fought in China and Malaya and witnessed the brutal partition of India, among other dramatic events. He would go on to be awarded a doctorate in neurophysics and is still, in his 90s, a consultant for the British government. The following two instalments tell his extraordinary story.
Languages and explosives
Born in 1925, Callow volunteered to join the British Army aged only 17 in 1942. “My father served in the Boer War and was at the Battle of Spion Kop, but he had been gassed twice in World War I and died in 1938. Before he died he told me, ‘When you get in [the armed forces] don’t join the PBI [‘Poor Bloody Infantry’], get into your own regiment.’ Therefore, when I was ‘18’ – I was actually 17 and three-quarters – I volunteered for the Royal Engineers where I started out as a sapper.”
Before he volunteered, Callow had been a bright pupil at King Henry VIII Grammar School in Coventry where he excelled at languages. “There were two streams there – languages and science – but they put me into languages without asking me. I consequently learnt French, German, Spanish and Old Greek and that dictated my future.”
Callow’s military career would largely be based around his linguistic skills, but his training as a sapper was literally both constructive and destructive as he discovered another skill. “The Royal Engineers are the
“THE MAJORITY OF THE COMMANDOS ARE EITHER KILLED OR CAPTURED AND THE OFFICER LANDS IN THE RIVER. HIS ONLY OBJECTIVE NOW IS TO SURVIVE”
ones that build bridges and blow them up again! I did six months in basic training, which included building Bailey bridges and carrying heavy loads. I was six-feet [1.83-metres] tall then and very well built. The Bailey bridge had two panels, with each one weighing 660 pounds [300 kilograms] and six men had to put it up. We also trained in a place called ‘Hungry Hill’ where they taught us how to use explosives, which is my speciality.”
Working with explosives came naturally. “I found I had a talent for it. There are cutting and expanding explosives. We learned how to use each one of these. Mercury fulminate is the fastest explosive. Nitro-glycerine is fast but Mercury fulminate is the one that starts off all the other explosives. Amatol is a slow explosive that expands whereas nitro-glycerine cuts through steel and it could cut you in half.”
Callow was made a lance corporal and he was posted to Scotland, where he became an explosives instructor at a Command Operation School. He then returned to England for assault and pre-airborne exercises. Callow remembered his airborne training as hair-raising. “We first learned how to drop off the back of moving lorries and rolling over. Then we went out of a barrage balloon, and that was the worst drop, from about 900 feet (275 metres), because you could see the dogs on the ground. Normally, we would drop from about 2,000 feet (600 metres) but that’s the thing: when you jump from about 2,000 feet you’ve got time to sort yourself out!”
Callow became a qualified paratrooper, and his unique skills led to him being sent for officer
“YOU HAD TO LEARN ALL THESE THINGS BECAUSE THAT WAS WHAT SPECIAL FORCES WAS ALL ABOUT. IT TOOK THEM TWO YEARS TO TEACH ME ALL THAT I HAD TO KNOW BEFORE I STARTED FIGHTING”
training and a distant deployment. “When I had finished they wondered what to do with me, so they sent me to the War Office selection board. They sent me to a cadet training unit and I finished as a second lieutenant. By that time I already knew languages and explosives so they said, ‘All right: languages, explosives, bridges… out to India!’ They sent me to India by sea, and while we were on the ship (it took six weeks to get to Bombay) we had to learn Urdu. With languages it’s all about having a musical ear and I’m good at picking up accents.”
Urdu was the first of many Asian languages that Callow would eventually learn for the army. In what was still colonial India at the time, “There are about 12 main Indian dialects and one odd one, which is Tamil. Tamil is 14,000 years old and related to bushman languages such as the Australian aborigines, so it is a difficult one.”
Callow discovered that many Indian languages had their roots in a legendary warrior from antiquity. “The languages in northern India are based on Sanskrit and ultimately Farsi.
That was taken into India by the Greeks under Alexander the Great. He started the languages in northern India and all of them are related to it. There are about seven of those, and although I’m not fluent in them I know enough to get by.”
In addition to Indian and European languages, Callow also became fluent in Malay and can also speak Cantonese and Arabic. However, the military idea behind learning languages was not purely for linguistics. “The reason I learned all these languages is that we had to know the culture of the people, particularly so that we would not offend them. You also had to know their religions, history and customs. You had to learn all these things because that was what Special Forces was all about. It took them two years to teach me all that I had to know before I started fighting.”
The Burma Campaign
When Callow arrived in India the Allies were only just beginning to turn the tide of the war in the Far East. In 1941 Imperial Japan had launched lightning attacks to expand Japanese territories in the Pacific region and vast swathes of European colonies had fallen. Hong Kong and Indochina had capitulated with ease, while the British suffered its worst defeat during World War II when they lost the Malay Peninsula and Singapore. 80,000 Allied personnel were taken
prisoner, but the situation deteriorated further when the Japanese overran the Dutch East Indies and captured many island bases in the western Pacific. The security of both Australia and India was threatened, and the Japanese invaded Burma in early 1942.
The Japanese advance into Burma had two goals: to prevent military aid from travelling overland on the Burma Road into nationalist China, and to place their forces at the door of the Indian border. It was believed that the near presence of the Japanese army would spark an insurrection against the British Raj, and thousands of captured Indian soldiers from Singapore had already been recruited by a Bengali nationalist to form an ‘Indian National Army’ to fight the British.
The invasion of Burma began well for the Japanese and Rangoon was captured, which deprived the Chinese of their only easily accessible supply base. Meanwhile, the British Burma Corps retreated under a scorched-earth policy until May 1942, when a tense stalemate lasted until the end of the year. In 1943 Lord Louis Mountbatten became the supreme allied commander of South East Asia Command, but the Allied resurgence in Burma was largely thanks to Lieutenant General William Slim and Brigadier Orde Wingate.
Wingate had created special operations units known as ‘Chindits’ to perform long-range raids against Japanese troops, facilities and communication lines. The Chindits initially incurred heavy losses, but their courage and endurance proved that British forces could take on the Japanese in the Burmese jungle. Elsewhere, Slim became the commander of 14th Army, imbued it with a new spirit and encouraged the soldiers to hold firm against Japanese attacks while they were supplied from the air.
When the Japanese attempted to strike
Assam and the Arakan 14th Army stood firm, and fierce battles raged, with both sides fighting for every inch of ground. Nevertheless, the Japanese were now outnumbered and with American and Chinese Nationalist forces entering Burma from the north the tide began to turn in the Allies’ favour. It was into this bitterly fought and harsh campaign that Second Lieutenant Robert Callow would be parachuted as a commando.
Force 136
Upon his arrival in India, Callow expanded his training to include paramedic skills for jungle warfare, “There are no hospitals in the jungle so I had to do a nine-month course in Madras Medical College, learning how to do amputations. They wouldn’t let me practice on real people so I could only do it on cadavers. I also practised giving painkillers, stitching wounds, giving anaesthetic and, if need be, if a man was going to die or be captured then we would give him morphine.”
During his paramedic training Callow was recruited into a British Special Forces unit known as ‘Force 136’, which formed part of the ‘Inter-services Liaison Department’ (ISLD). The ISLD was the same organisation as the more famous ‘Special Operations Executive’ (SOE) that had been formed in 1940 to carry out sabotage and subversive operations behind enemy lines in occupied Europe. Once the war with Japan had begun it was decided to adapt the SOE in the Far East, and the ISLD acquired its deliberately bland name to provide operational cover.
The ISLD established its headquarters in India, and the code name Force 136 was used for commando sections being formed in French Indochina, Malaya, Siam and Burma. Force 136 was allocated its own RAF squadron for airborne missions, and all recruits were volunteers who either had knowledge of the country, previous experience in Europe or a
“THE CHINDITS INITIALLY INCURRED HEAVY LOSSES, BUT THEIR COURAGE AND ENDURANCE PROVED THAT BRITISH FORCES COULD TAKE ON THE JAPANESE”
useful area of expertise. With his skills in explosives and languages Callow was an ideal choice, and he was personally selected in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) by Major General Adrian Carton de Wiart VC.
Callow recalled, “Adrian Carton de Wiart actually selected us in Ceylon and we were chosen for our skills. Mine were explosives, languages and paramedics. Carton de Wiart interviewed us when I was in the medical college and took one of us who each had different skills. He introduced us all and then recommended us.”
Carton de Wiart was a legend of the British Army who, among other things, had fought in the Boer War and won a Victoria Cross at the Battle of the Somme. By the end of World War I he had been wounded eight times, including the loss of an eye and a hand. Even during World War II he had been captured and held prisoner by the Italians and made five escape attempts before he was repatriated in 1943. Nevertheless, Callow knew comparatively little about the heavily scarred man who wore an eye-patch and selected him for commando service. “I only met him very briefly but he was quite a character, and I didn’t realise quite how important he was at the time.”
Once he was selected to serve in Force 136, Callow joined small teams that would be flown into enemy-occupied Burma to carry out acts of sabotage against Japanese forces behind enemy lines. The nature of Force 136’s work was so secretive that Callow didn’t even know the names of his colleagues. “We didn’t know each other, but we had to adapt to each other. One was an artilleryman and another in signals so each one was busy with his three skills, which in my case were explosives, languages and paramedics. The only man I knew there was ‘Geordie’ because we were both in the OCTU [Officer Cadet Training Unit] but I didn’t know his full name because we didn’t use real names. We used pseudonyms, and mine was ‘Longshanks’. You couldn’t use your real name because if you were captured and tortured by the Japanese you couldn’t give away any other information about other people.”
“CALLOW JOINED SMALL TEAMS THAT WOULD BE FLOWN INTO ENEMY-OCCUPIED BURMA TO CARRY OUT ACTS OF SABOTAGE AGAINST JAPANESE FORCES BEHIND ENEMY LINES”
Baptism of fire
After months of training, Callow was ready to begin active operations in late 1943. His first mission was to be airdropped over the River Tenasserim in southeast Burma to blow up Japanese machine gun towers at a large prisoner of war camp. Flying in a long-range B-24 Liberator, Callow was part of a six-man team, and he was the last to jump. “We were flying in overnight. We had a major in charge of us, and I had the explosives in a kitbag and was going to jump last, which is what I did.”
Despite all his training, chance meant that the mission went wrong immediately. “It was just before dawn when we arrived and the major jumped, but he jumped too soon. He landed on the west side of the river, and I jumped too. Nobody wanted to be near me with all the explosives but there was a mist on the river. I don’t think it was deliberate but there was a Japanese patrol on the ground on the east side and they saw us coming down. They couldn’t see me because I was above the mist of the cloud but the major landed and was seen.”
Once Callow’s commanding officer had been spotted chaos ensued. “The Japanese all fired and I could see their tracers. It was like a white hosepipe of fire coming up and it hit Geordie. He got blown in half because he had detonators and high explosives around his waist and they were triggered. His legs fell away and that was the last time I saw Geordie. I had to write to his parents afterwards and say that I’d seen him die and that he’d died painlessly.”
Under this level of fire the mission was over before it had begun, and Callow now had to focus on survival by hiding from the enemy. “I
went into the river, struck my chute, got rid of my explosives and landed in the mist. I swam ashore and realised that the Japanese would be all over looking for me, so I used my knife to dig into the bank like The Wind in the Willows! I made a hole and stayed there for days because the Japanese were looking for me up above before I came out.”
Callow was in a perilous situation and had to implement the skills his training and natural resourcefulness had equipped him with. “There was nothing you could do, and you had to use your brain. I had my rations for two days, but then when I thought it was safe in the mist I’d swim out and get terrapins. They were terrible to eat raw and you couldn’t cook, so I was sucking the juice out of them.”
After several days hiding in the river bank Callow made his escape. “After a few days I decided that the Japanese had stopped looking for me so I came out, found the track and started going westwards towards the coast. I then heard some people coming and so I hid and got my knife ready to kill, but in fact it was my major bringing two of the special forces who didn’t belong to us: an Australian and an American from the SOE and OSS [Office of Strategic Services]. They were teak planters and were living there on a plantation, but the Japanese never got to them. They took us out and it was about 40 miles [64 kilometres].”
Callow and the major were the only members of the original six-man team to survive. Geordie had been killed during the drop and the other three were captured and executed.
“WE WAITED UNTIL THE TRAIN WAS GOING OVER AND THE LOCOMOTIVE, DRIVER, TRUCKS AND EVERYTHING ELSE WOULD GO DOWN WITH THE BRIDGE BECAUSE THEY WERE ALL CARRYING THE AMMUNITION”
Blowing up bridges
Callow’s first mission had been a horrific experience, but he went to on to carry out many covert operations against the Japanese in Burma. Often working with Indian troops, he was tasked with disrupting Japanese communication lines and supply chains by blowing up bridges in the jungle. “They didn’t have any external supplies like food or medical supplies except ammunition so we would make sure they would run out by bringing down the wooden bridges.”
Destroying bridges was a routine operation and although Callow’s thoughts on these dangerous missions are understated, the odds were alarming. “All we did was hide in the jungle, prepare some explosives on a railway and waited for a train to come along and blow it. There were 134,000 Japanese in Burma compared to around 100,000 of us [British] but I didn’t know that at the time.
Callow remembered that blowing up
Japanese bridges required specific explosives and delicate timing: “We mostly used nitroglycerine on the bridges, which would make a cutting explosion. We would put it onto the wooden supports and once it was detonated it would take the supports away from the train. We waited until the train was going over and the locomotive, driver, trucks and everything else would go down with the bridge because they were all carrying the ammunition.”
Operations like this would later be immortalised in the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai but Callow is scathing about its historical accuracy: “The film was a load of rubbish because we would blow up all the little wooden ones. The real bridge on the River Kwai was a big steel and concrete structure and the Americans nearly blew themselves up bombing it from 1,000 feet [305 metres]. Groups of six people would blow up the wooden bridges around it, and that’s what we were doing by dropping the trains full of ammunition into the water and blowing them up. We couldn’t blow up a big steel, concrete bridge like that.”
Force 136’s attacks against enemy bridges was prolific and Callow lost count of how
many he destroyed. “I couldn’t put an approximate number on how many bridges we blew up, it was a case of whenever we could we did. We hid from the enemy in the jungle, and if we came across any bridge then we hid there, came out at night, put out the explosives, blew it and then got the hell out.”
Callow’s expertise in explosives meant that he was also adept at creating craters on roads against travelling enemy convoys. “You’d dig and bore a hole about 12 feet [3.7 metres] deep, put some amatol in at the bottom and then blow it to form a chamber. Then you put black powder in that, place a fuse in there
(both safety and electric) and when you’re ready you choose your time to blow it up. Depending on what you were doing you could make craters for blowing up roads instantly. Otherwise we’d wait until there was some transport coming and you blew it up then.”
Despite the dangerous nature of his work Callow never had many feelings about successful operations. “It was just the sense of a job well done, we didn’t have any emotions about it. We were just glad to be out of it and alive.”
In addition to his sabotage operations, Callow played a part sinking German U-boats en route to Japan after a mission. “They sent us a flying boat from Calcutta. When we got to the coast the American and the Australian had recruited the local pirates to spy on the Japanese. The pirates found that German U-boats were coming down through the Straits of Malacca. They had
“REMARKABLY THE MINES THAT HE HELPED TO PLANT WOULD LATER SEVERELY WOUND HIM AFTER THE WAR”
German engineers in them who had invented the V1 and V2 rockets and they were sending them on to Japan to carry on [the war]. The Germans realised that things were going badly for them by this time and they were building up Japan with all these things. This was late 1944 and they were doing this already.”
This vital piece of intelligence had to be relayed to Allied authorities and Callow made one of the calls. “The pirates reported this to the American and Australian and they then told me. I got onto our radioman in Ceylon and he went in to get mines planted near an island off Malaysia to stop them. We sunk about 12 U-boats afterwards.” Callow maintains that his role during this incident was “wheels within wheels” but remarkably the mines that he helped to plant would later severely wound him after the war.
Jungle warfare
The jungle was a particularly harsh environment to fight in, but Callow felt that his training had adequately prepared him for operating there. “It had taken a long time going out on the ship to India and by the time I got into the jungle, that was about nine months later, so we had quite a bit of time to adapt.”
Nevertheless, conditions were harsh. “It rained all the time. Humidity was often 100 per cent and you’d sleep on the mud. We wore trousers because it was wet as hell and if you wore shorts you could be bitten by deadly lice.” Callow would find that the experience of commando operations was ultimately dehumanising. “You have no choice and it’s all excitement. You’re like an animal and you’re living like one. If there was a leaf that looked wrong it alerted you, if you heard a sound that was not right you were up and awake and ready to fight.”
Even 70 years later Callow’s training can still cause problems. “It becomes a snag. I was in hospital a few weeks ago when they did my leg in an operation. Afterwards, I had a nightmare and pulled the hair and ears of one of the nurses because I thought I was being attacked. It never leaves you, and this is dangerous. I felt terrible and was really apologetic to the nurse, but they’d seen lots like me. I didn’t know that instinct was still there, but it’s survival.”
Despite the ferocious nature of the campaign and contrary to what many other Allied soldiers felt, Callow did not hate the Japanese. “I respected them because they were very good soldiers. They were killers of course and we would kill them, which we did. Out of 134,000 there were only 25,000 left afterwards.”
Instead, Callow held the Koreans who served in the Japanese forces with contempt. “The Japanese had Korea as their subsidiary. They put the Korean women into brothels for the Japanese soldiers and they made the men into prisoner of war guards. The men I mostly blew up were Koreans. They were not fighting men, and that’s why I had no compunction about killing them, because of the way they treated POWS and everyone else – they ill-treated everybody. It’s also why the Japanese ill-treated the Koreans – they didn’t trust them.”
The brutality of the Japanese forces during World War II is well known and Callow vividly remembered the human cost of the Burma Campaign. “We had one in four casualties. We lost 26,000 men and there were 100,000 of us. There were also 330,000 Indians and they also lost one man in four, which is about 86,000, and then the bloody War Office wouldn’t give them any pensions! But we made the [British] government pay them eventually.”
Far away from the Burmese jungle events were changing rapidly. On 8 May 1945 Nazi Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allies in Europe, but VE Day had no effect on the war in the Far East because the Japanese refused to surrender. Consequently, the bloodshed continued in Burma. Callow recalled, “Churchill declared VE Day in Europe in May 1945 but we lost 4,000 men between May and August.” In fact, Robert Callow’s experiences in Burma were only the beginning of a unique military career.
Dr Robert Callow is the Welfare Officer for the Coventry branch of the Burma Star Association that is part of the British Legion, the United Kingdom’s largest armed forces charity. It upholds the memory of the fallen and provides lifelong support for the Armed Forces community, including serving men and women, veterans and their families. For more information visit: www.britishlegion.org.uk