Road of Bones

He did not at first sight cut an intimidating figure. The new CO was about five foot nine and not heavily built. But Lieutenant Colonel John Laverty had a presence that could cow the toughest of the battalion’s hard men. He was forty-four when he came to lead 4th battalion, still a comparatively young man but nearly two decades older than most of those under his command. Laverty was variously known as ‘Texas Dan’, because of the cowboy-style military hat he wore, or ‘Colonel Lavatory’, the latter nickname apparently derived from a rugby song the precise lyrics of which have been lost to history. Neither men nor officers ever dared to use the nicknames to his face. Laverty carried a long bamboo rod to use as a climbing stick; it could also give him the appearance of a prophet descending from the heavens with the judgement of God.

John Laverty did not tolerate muttering from his officers. When Lieutenant Tom Hogg went to him to complain about problems created by a soldier in his platoon, Laverty immediately asked him which rifle company he wanted to join. ‘By those who understood the situation this amounted to a “slap across the face” for me,’ recalled Hogg. ‘In fact, that aspect of it went completely over my head at the time, and I enjoyed the prospect of doing some real fighting.’

One of the battalion medical orderlies, Lance Corporal Frank Infanti, gave a different picture of Laverty. Infanti had a troubled history with the battalion. Both his parents were Italian and this had led to his brother being interned in the opening months of the war, ironically while Frank himself was being evacuated with the West Kents from Dunkirk. When he was refused permission to visit his brother in the internment camp Infanti said he would no longer carry a rifle. In a moment of compassion the then CO decided against disciplinary action and made Infanti a medical orderly. ‘I got on extremely well with Laverty because I’m a little fella. I would never have got in the army normally because I’m too short. And he sort of respected me because I kept up with everybody! On the marches and all that. He was an unusual bloke, Laverty. He used to call me “Doc” Infanti which was a great compliment to an orderly … he spoke in a very cultivated voice … almost as if he had had elocution lessons.’

John Laverty was born Henry Jarvis Laverty in Londonderry on 8 October 1900 to a prominent family in the building trade. His father Henry built the Protestant cathedral of St Anne’s in Belfast and had a large brickyard in Carrickfergus, which one employee reckoned had ‘made the mortar for half the houses in Carrick in those days’. He went to school at Foyle College, which numbered a Lord Chancellor of Ireland, numerous rugby internationals and a Viceroy of India among its alumni. A month before the end of the First World War, John Laverty applied to Sandhurst, from where he was commissioned into the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in 1921. These were bad years in his home country. Ireland was convulsed by war between the IRA and the forces of the crown. As a member of a prominent Protestant family who had decided to join the British army, it is safe to surmise that John Laverty would have had little sympathy with Irish rebels.

What Laverty retained of that Ulster Protestant upbringing was the flinty outward manner of a man raised among righteous but unyielding citizens. His son Patrick, who saw his father only once during the war, thought him a soldier to the core. ‘Pure and simple he was a warrior. That is what he was good at … He was pretty tough. They called him bloody-minded and I think he probably was. You didn’t get anywhere. I mean once he made up his mind he couldn’t be varied at all. He was absolutely pig-headed in that regard.’

After three years in the Inniskilling Fusiliers, Laverty joined the Essex Regiment, where his index card referred to him as ‘Mad Jack’, possibly a reflection of the bloody-minded personality described by his son and some of his junior officers. His war-fighting experience was gained in the small colonial police actions of the inter-war period, firstly in Kurdistan and later in Sudan. He was awarded a Military Cross during the suppression of the Kurds in 1932 and was later promoted to be Inspector of Signals for the British-controlled Iraqi army. By the time the Second World War broke out John Laverty was back with the Essex Regiment, with the rank of major, and had married Renee Stagg, a doctor’s daughter from Southend, whom he had met while playing golf. Within a few months of their wedding she was pregnant with the first of three children. On the outbreak of war Laverty was posted to the East End of London on ‘anti-panic’ duty, while Renee and her baby were sent to Shropshire to escape the Blitz. ‘There was a big parting of the ways. Everybody was going through those kind of separations,’ Renee recalled. John Laverty was eventually posted to serve with the Essex Regiment in India in 1942. By the following year he had been promoted from major to the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel and sent to lead 4th battalion, Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, into battle.

Captain Donald Easten remembered his arrival. ‘I thought to myself, “Thank God, at last we have someone who knows what he is talking about.” He was not the kind of person you would say, “I would do anything for this chap,” but at least he was competent. You knew his decisions would be properly thought out. I didn’t love him. I don’t think any of us did. We respected him.’ Respect would have been enough for John Laverty.

The men were coming to the end of their training period and could properly call themselves ‘jungle wallahs’. Ray Street was one of the smaller men in the battalion and weighed only eight and a half stone, but he was quick on his feet and brave, ideal material for a battlefield messenger who would have to run quickly between positions under fire. He had started the war as a soldier in the Worcester Regiment but after undergoing his jungle training in India was sent off to 4th battalion to help bring them up to full strength for the fighting ahead. Street had not seen combat yet, but had heard his father’s stories of the fighting at Gallipoli and the throat wound that had nearly ended his life. His experience of war on the home front had been eventful. Having enlisted first into the Home Guard, Street was allocated to Birmingham city centre and found himself there during a German bombing raid. A stick of bombs hit the street next to where he was standing. Running to the scene he saw that a cinema had been hit and the street was full of screaming, wounded people. He rushed inside to help evacuate the survivors. A woman sat with her arms folded serenely in the seat where she had been watching the film. But her head had been sliced cleanly off by a piece of flying metal.

By now the old Kentish character of 4th battalion had changed. There was still a core of men like John Winstanley, Ivan Daunt and Donald Easten who had been through France and North Africa together, and who came from within a few miles of each other at home in England. But Ray Street was a Brummie and his mate Dennis Wykes came from Coventry; the new CO was an Irishman; and there were Welsh and Scottish voices to be heard too. The Kentish component had gradually come to accept Dennis Wykes and the other replacements, although he was still some way from being able to call any of them his friends. ‘They looked at us warily as if to say “you haven’t seen any action and we wonder what you’re going to be like.”’

The oddest of the newcomers to join them in India was the posh boy. Of all the men in the ranks of 4th battalion, John Harman was the most enigmatic, not only because of the extraordinary nature of what he would do, but also because his background was so different and his personality so resistant to easy definition. He must have been one of the most unlikely candidates to win the Victoria Cross of the whole war. John Pennington Harman, known to his friends as plain ‘Jack’, was the eldest son of a millionaire. His sister Diana, one of three siblings, said, ‘Although he seemed to disregard society right through his life he wasn’t at all insensitive. It’s just that he didn’t play by the same rules. He found that they led you up blank ways. He didn’t find that he was pursuing the things he was interested in if he conformed.’ At prep school in Bristol he was unhappy; it was not just the normal pain of a child removed to a boarding school at seven years of age, but also the sense of being forced into a straitjacket of discipline and expectation for which he had no sympathy. There was an added complication. John’s dormitory was close to the Bristol Zoo in Clifton and at nights he was distressed by the sounds of animals. They represented, according to his sister, ‘unwelcome captivity and restraint’. He ran away from school twice before his parents brought him home.

He was then sent to the famous Bedales School in rural Hampshire. Founded by J. H. Badley in 1893, Bedales was a revolutionary establishment by the standards of its day. Stressing that each child needed to be treated as an individual human being, Badley saw the era after the First World War as ‘a great opportunity, one of the greatest in our history, if only it can be realised and utilised to the full’. The school was a haven for nonconformists and while John never focused on his academic work, lacking ‘concentration in things which did not interest him’, he was allowed to indulge his love of nature in the school’s ample grounds. As his sister Diana saw it, ‘he seldom wanted to finish something he had embarked upon – it didn’t seem quite important enough to engage him’.

John’s father, Martin Coles Harman, owned Lundy Island, a craggy and beautiful piece of land off the Devon coast. Harman senior was prone to eccentricity. He liked to consider Lundy his private fiefdom, even going so far as to mint his own coins, a presumption of sovereignty that saw him prosecuted and fined. Lundy became for his son the one place where he could live according to his own designs. The cliffs and coves, the old granite quarry, were places where dreams could be fashioned without disturbance from the mundane demands of everyday life. John dreamt of finding precious metals on Lundy and engaged in a prolonged correspondence with a Spanish mineral ‘diviner’ who claimed extraordinary powers of underground perception. Boreholes were drilled but nothing was found. The family’s retainer on Lundy, Felix Gade, wrote that John ‘seemed to feel that it only needed a stroke of genius for him to be provided with a fortune, without grinding work!’ The two shared an interest in the island’s bees and worked together on the hives, with occasional advice from John’s father. John’s friends from Bedales would visit Lundy in the summer holidays and were, according to his sister, ‘all oddities, people like himself, who didn’t quite conform’. There was a chaste romance with a girl called Denny, one of six children who formed a large gang with the Harmans. They swam, fished and chased all over the island, and in the evenings read Dickens by lamplight. His sister remembered John’s body shaking with laughter.

His diaries of life on Lundy reveal a boy who was a careful observer of weather, wildlife and landscapes, but not remotely sentimental about the harsher aspects of the natural world. Entries for February 1932 describe shooting a cock sparrow with his catapult at twenty yards and witnessing a staged fight between a ferret and a rat. ‘The ferret killed the rat in about 30 seconds.’ Yet a week later he was describing how he heard a thrush and a lark singing in the morning and was nursing a chaffinch with a broken leg given to him by Felix Gade. ‘Thurs. 31st … Heard Chaffinch singing in Millcombe. My chaffinch is still all right and ought to be singing soon.’

But to understand John Harman and the exceptional figure he later became at Kohima, it is necessary to examine what happened to his world at the beginning of the 1930s. His mother, Amy Ruth Harman, was a beautiful and vivacious woman who enjoyed the social whirl of London far more than the countryside but who, by the close of the 1920s, had become seriously ill with kidney failure. She was given morphine to ease the excruciating pain but died in 1931 at the age of forty-seven. John Harman was deeply distressed by the early death of his mother, in the same year that he was due to leave school. And the family’s troubles were set to deepen.

Martin Coles Harman had made his fortune in corporate finance, quitting school at sixteen to join Lazard’s as a clerk on £48 per year and eventually accumulating a portfolio of companies worth an estimated £12 million – a vast sum in the 1930s. The Daily Sketch described him as the ‘pre-war City’s wonder man’. ‘Bushy-browed Martin Harman always did things the big way … Veteran financiers clucked their tongues as Harman zoomed from a bank clerk’s high chair to the chairman’s swivel chair in a dozen different board rooms – all this between 1923 and 1933.’ Yet a year after the death of his wife he was declared bankrupt, with liabilities of £550,000 and assets of just £10,000. The precise source of Harman’s financial catastrophe is hard to ascertain; family members suggest he got into difficulty during the Great Depression. Worse was to follow. In 1933 Harman senior was convicted of embezzlement and sent to Wormwood Scrubs prison for eighteen months. According to Diana Keast, her brother was devastated. ‘He so looked up to his father. They really were very close. I know that it hurt him a great deal to see that happen to his father. Of course he never doubted his father, never.’ Throughout this grim period Lundy Island remained the beacon of stability. Martin Coles Harman had placed the island in trust so that it could not be seized by his creditors.

It was at this time, when he would have been about eighteen years of age, that John set off on his travels. His journey would take him the best part of four years, from Spain to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. He worked on sheep farms, cut timber in forests and tried his hand at gold prospecting, always eventually moving on. The only note of any romantic involvement was with a woman in New Zealand who shared with him an interest in the paranormal. Throughout his life John Harman would seek out clairvoyants and soothsayers. After returning from his travels he went to Lundy and worked again with Felix Gade and the bees. But in November 1941, with the tide of war still running against Britain, John decided to enlist in the Household Cavalry, believing he would be working with animals. Almost immediately, and predictably, he found that military life was not to his taste. Writing to his father – now free from jail and discharged from bankruptcy – he cursed the life of the barracks. ‘Life is just bloody hell, dirty, noisy, crude and inefficient. I heartily wish I had never joined up. There is no time to do anything after the set tasks are done … how I would like to be stalking deer in NZ a free man … I learn almost nothing each day.’ In April 1942 he was thinking of running away ‘to a life of solitude … I can hardly constrain a desire to desert and damn the consequences.’

One can imagine how strange this well-spoken son of a millionaire must have appeared to his fellow soldiers, a great many of them tough working-class lads from the inner cities. There are several references in John Harman’s letters to the ‘crudeness’ of barracks life, the boredom of being a soldier and the pain caused to his feet by marching. What is perplexing is Harman’s refusal to take the commission that would have offered him a more comfortable existence. With his education and background, even allowing for the disgrace of his father’s imprisonment, Jack Harman would have been a likely candidate for officer training. In a letter to his father he explained his reluctance, in spite of the fact that he considered himself to be a ‘gentleman’. Self-doubt was at the root of his decision: ‘I have given the matter of taking a commission a lot of thought and there is no doubt that if I was an officer I would be able to resume the life I was used to, to some extent. On the other hand I am constitutionally so unsoldierly that I am filled with doubts about the whole thing … Does the status of Gentleman entitle a man to be an officer with the King’s Commission though he is not the soldier-type? I think not … well!’

By September, John was with the Worcester Regiment and having second thoughts about his status in the ranks, writing to his father that he was going to apply for a commission as soon as he could. He never did. ‘I am still a private soldier after a year in the army,’ he wrote to a friend. He was still interested in divining and considered putting up a proposal to the War Office to use his ‘special knowledge’ to help detect submarines. Nothing seems to have come of that. By the end of January 1943 he had changed regiments once more and was soldiering with 20th battalion, The Royal Fusiliers, and on his way to India. A friend, Wally Evans, who was with him on the troopship to the East saw Jack frequently gathering up ‘empty beer bottles that were laying around the ship in order to recover the deposits paid on them’. He would use the money to buy equipment that was lighter and less bulky than his own. When a call went out for volunteers to join depleted regiments, John Harman and several others put their hands up to join a draft going to 4th battalion, Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment. ‘The biggest blunder of our lives,’ remembered Evans, ‘for what we had to go through in Burma.’ But Harman was looking forward to the possibility of fighting in Burma, or at least getting himself to the jungles of South-East Asia. In August 1943, just over a month before the 4th battalion shipped out to the front line, he wrote to his father with a romanticised view of jungle warfare: ‘Four years in NZ stand me in good stead and if we ever have to fight in the Burmese Jungles it will be right down my street. Frankly, I would rather hear the noises of the jungle than the ceaseless clattering and yapping of the barrack rooms; and eating food almost entirely out of tins gets me down. In the jungle a man may “spit” a snake over a fire and eat it all himself and make a decent cup of tea.’

Harman was sent to D company, under the command of Captain Donald Easten, an assignment that was providential: he was placed under the authority of a man who wore his rank lightly but with great effect. Easten had the wisdom to look the other way at the minor indiscretions of his men, and he had the gift of showing them that he cared for their welfare. He was swift to sense the potential in John Harman. ‘He was a great countryman who found his way everywhere day or night, he understood ground as well as obviously being a very solid citizen who wasn’t going to bolt if something nasty happened. He was brave and of course in the end it was proved.’

In early October 1943 John Laverty was given orders to move out for Burma. The 4th battalion was to be shipped across the Bay of Bengal for General William Slim’s coming offensive. What Slim did not appreciate was that the Japanese were also planning an attack in the Arakan. The operation, code-named Ha-Go (literally Operation Z), was designed to draw away British resources and attention from the frontier with India, where the commander of the Japanese 15th Army was planning an audacious surprise. Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi sweeps through the story of the Burma war like a force of nature, and in late 1943 he was offering his superiors a tantalising vision of victory.

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