Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #318388 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-30
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Customer Reviews

A Rattling Good Yarn
'Mad' Mike Calvert was certainly a character, and here he describes how he got out of Burma when the Japanese invaded, met a strange brigadier called Wingate, and ended up leading a column of Chindits later in the war. An excellent first-hand account of war in the Far East.

Leopard Crawl Through The Jungle
Calvert (a relative of a friend of a friend) died a few years ago after a long while living in very reduced circumstances at the Charterhouse in the City of London, but was (I was told) able to more than slightly enjoy his drink until not long before the end of that life. My friend and the relative remember carrying him back to his lodgings. That slight anecdote is more than irrelevant name-dropping, because it was his fondness for booze that let him down in 1950's West Germany, where his military career ended after allegations (which went to court) of sexual carryings-on with a couple of teenage boys. This book deals with the period from 1946 to date of publication of the first edition, in 1967, in less than one page...It is clear that Calvert wished to be remembered for his famous exploits in Burma in WW2, when the Regular Army Captain (Royal Engineers) was made up for the duration to Brigadier (after WW2, reduced again, to Major).

Calvert was born in India and schooled in the UK, commissioned into the Royal Engineers, but always chafed at the bit of ordinary soldiering, a fact both he and his commanders sometimes blamed on his ancestry: like many another unconventional British soldier, he had Irish ancestry, in his case from his mother. To Calvert, war meant one thing: action. In 1940 he volunteered for the temporary 5th Battalion of the Scots Guards even though it meant a reduction to private soldier (possibly irrevocable). That did not last long. The Finnish Winter War, for which the Battalion had been raised, finished before they arrived. Calvert was then put onto training men for warfare in China and the jungles, in the UK and then Australia. He got so frustrated wanting action in person that he even considered deserting and then joining an Australian frontline unit! Before that happened, he was posted to Burma and the "forgotten army".

In Burma, Calvert rapidly got involved in the action he craved, including taking a force on a paddleboat up the Irrawaddy. This was initially a success, but another aspect of Calvert's command made its appearance. He says that, after he left to return to HQ, the force hit trouble and half of it was wiped out. As someone once said "I've nothing against heroes, they just tend to crook it for other people"!...

One adventure of the early period was that, while swimming in a river, Calvert, who was round a bend from his men, came upon a Japanese officer who was in like situation. They fought to the death with bare hand, Calvert eventually drowning his opponent, after which he alerted his small force: they killed the bathing Japanese. War was brutal in the jungle. A later engagement was like something from the Crimean War but without the latent chivalry, involving cold steel only: kukris, Japanese officers' swords (which hacked off arms), bayonets, knives.

The book goes into a lot of detail about his later exploits with the Chindits, the force commanded overall by Orde Wingate, the eccentric and egocentric general (and pro-Zionist) later killed in a plane crash. His photo shows the sort of person I distrust: the kind where white shows all over the eyes, usually the sign of the unbalanced. Calvert, however, liked him, probably because he usually plumped for action when there was a choice.

Calvert's career in the jungle and his war against both Japanese and staff officers ended with him being transferred to the latter stages of the European theatre. He liberated a camp on the Dutch-German border, full of 6,000 Polish women, who, however (contrary to propaganda) had been loosely guarded by mostly elderly German soldiers. The girls were, he says "fairly fit, well-fed and man-hungry"" and he and his few soldiers managed to get out of the camp only after being all but stripped! He later sent in a force of Polish soldiers, who shot the guards the girls didn't like, spared the rest and had what Calvert euphemistically calls "a beano", though it would seem that some sort of al fresco woodland orgy was the more likely denouement. Calvert then went to Norway, where the Germans were not the only unpopular ones: the RAF had hit a school and killed 300 children in Bergen not long before. Calvert's sensitivity comes out in his having been struck by the aura of evil hanging over some otherwise nondescript Russians whom he calls "Commissars", meaning, presumably, officers of the N.K.V.D. (the forerunner of the K.G.B.) or its offshoot, GULAG (the General Directorate of Camps), in Norway to assist with the repatriation of thousands of luckless Russian prisoners.

A book well worth reading, with an interesting cover painting by a lady called Lynn Williams, portraying soldiers on jungle patrol, the foliage being executed somewhat in the style of Shishkin.