THE BLOOD BROTHERS
Daily Mail 26 Dec 2000 
by Christopher Hudson

The Story of Capt. John Nunneley and his Comrade, Friend and Batman Tomasi

FOR better or worse, the middle-aged today are almost a different breed from middle-aged people 30 years ago. 

They were survivors. They might have been doing quite ordinary things, such as teaching, farming, stock broking or running an estate agency. But many of them, the men especially, had emerged from life-or-death wartime experiences which we can scarcely begin to contemplate today. 

For Instance, in 1968, John Nunneley looked exactly as you would expect a chief passenger manager of British Rail to look as he proudly reported the success of his new concept called Intercity services. 

The idea that, 24 years earlier, this BR execu­tive had been fighting for his life in the steaming jungles of Burma, and shooting dead a wounded Japanese soldier who could have endangered his patrol, seems far-fetched. 

What set Nunneley apart was his ability to bring those wartime experiences to life, as he does in his book about the King’s African Rifles (KAR)*. It’s in the tradition of adventures of G. A. Henty, John Buchan and R C. Wren’s Beau Geste, which Nunneley enjoyed as a child. But there is a difference, because his service in Africa and Burma made him revise his starry-eyed notions of honour and glory. 

It is really the story of two men, Nunneley and his African batman Tomasi, a young Luo tribesman from the Kenyan shores of Lake Victoria. Like the Englishman, Tomasi Kitlnya was bursting with adventurousness. 

Educated at a White Fathers’ mission school, he found employment, aged 13, with a white settler as a ‘kitchen toto’, the cook’s dogsbody. 

After three years, armed with approving references, he hitchhiked to Nairobi, and heard of thousands of Wazungu (white people) at the great army camp outside the city. 

John Nunneley, at 19 not much older than Tomasi, had been looking out for a personal servant. As a platoon com­mander in the KAR he would need someone to fetch hot water for his bath, wash and starch his clothes, polish his boots and brass and make and tend fires.

Nunneley was squatting in his collapsible bath, using a canned-fruit tin as a makeshift shower, when he saw a lanky youth walking towards him with a shy smile on his face.

‘His shirt and shorts were spotlessly clean and his cheerful, open face was heavily etched with tribal markings,’ he recalls. Having read his references, and trusting to instinct, he engaged Tomasi on the spot. 

By then — it was February 1942 —Nunneley must already have regarded himself as something of a veteran. 

HIS FATHER had fought in the Boer War; he had been brought up on tales of battle and, along with other boys, had per­suaded the headmaster of his school to set up an Army Cadet Force unit so that they could ready for any future war. 

Underage when he joined the Royal East Kent Regiment (The Buffs) —nobody demanded to. see his birth certificate — he was determined to see action. 

Aged 18, he was commanding a machine-gun section at Hawkinge and Lympne airfields, having the time of his life firing at Messerschmitts diving to the attack with machine guns and cannon blazing from their nose and wings as they came in to drop their bombs. -

‘For me’ he writes, ‘this was a ripping Boy’s Own yarn come to life with myself as hero.’ 

Sent for officer training in late 1941, he was accepted for special service m the Far East and embarked in a convoy on board a Cunard liner, which was diverted to East Africa. 

He headed to Nairobi to join the KAR. After picking Tomasi as his servant, he was sent north to the Abyssinian capital Addis Ababa, recently won back from Mussolini’s Italian forces. 

As soon as the British commanders found that Nunneley did not play contract bridge, he was sent to a dis­tant outpost in British Somaliland to guard Italian prisoners-of-war. 

As he had already discovered, the King’s African Rifles was unlike any other British regiment. Set up in 1902, the ‘Gurkhas from Africa’ were African soldiers, or askaris, com­manded by British officers and NCO5 on secondment from other regiments. Nunneley’s company consisted of askaris from Tanganyikan tribes —and Private Risasi from the Gold Coast, whose tribe practised canni­balism and who would tell his wide-eyed comrades that for sheer enjoy­ment the most succulent eating was the buttocks of a young girl. 

To have been selected for the KAR conferred Immense prestige on askaris who had taken ‘Kingi Georgie’s shilling’. 

Tomasi enjoyed his new-found status as batman and quickly forged a strong bond with Nunneley. In Somaliland, he nursed Nunneley through virulent local dysentery.  There was no British Army medical officer within 200 miles, and for ten days Nunneley, often in agony, hovered between consciousness and coma while Tomasi watched over him. Eventually, a medical officer arrived with antibiotics which put Nunneley back on his feet.

THE situation was reversed a few months later when Nunneley and Tomasi set off on a 1,000-mile journey south to Nairobi, where Nunneley had been sent for training. They were seven days out of Addis, in a convoy of l5cwt trucks going down to Kenya for a major overhaul when the truck lurched and Tomasi leapt out to save his master’s whisky bottles.

The truck ran over the back of his knee, grinding it into a mess of blood and gristle. They were hundreds or miles or mountain and desert from the nearest medical centre. Taking a fellow officer and six askaris in another truck as armed escort (the area was crawling with armed Somali outlaws: they handed prisoners over to their womenfolk, whose ‘least worst’ torture was to tie them to a tree, rip open their belly with a dagger so that their intestines fell at their feet, and then mutilate them for hours), Nunneley set off south as fast as the potholed tracks allowed. Tomasi lay in the back in agony; Nunneley knew that septicemia or gangrene could set in. 

They drove all day, and started off again at first light, having canni­bailsed new wheels from an over­turned three-tonner they passed. Eventually they reached Nakuru hospital in Kenya’s White High­lands. Assured by doctors that Tomasi would recover, Nunneley left the hospital wondering he would see his friend again. Determined to get out east and into the thick of the fighting, Nunneley went to Nairobi and, in October 1942, transferred to 11 Battalion of the KAR at Yatta. After a dispute with its com­manding officer, he was transferred to a junior staff post at brigade headquarters. But, before he could look around for a new personal servant, he was taken to hospital with a serious eye infection. This was where Tomasi found him. Discharged from Nakuru, he had searched for his master, only to be told that he had returned to Somaliland. 

Tomasi hitched lifts, first north to Somaliland, then to each battalion department of the KAR, ending in Addis Ababa. Drawing a blank, he had then hitched the 1,000 miles back south. 

AT Nairobi, he heard that Nunneley had trans­ferred to 11 Battalion. He made his way to Yatta, then back to the hospital where Nunneley lay. In three months, he had travelled almost 3,000 miles. 

For KAR officers, it was a solitary life, made worse when they reached Ceylon by terrifying reports of jungle warfare with the Japanese. 

Isolation could turn to brooding despair. Two fellow-officers in Nunneley’s old battalion, which he had rejoined, put revolvers to their heads and blew their brains out. 

The order came that personal servants must enlist and receive training as infantrymen, or else be repatriated to East Africa. 

Knowing that there would be no time to give him more than basic training, Nunneley begged Tomasi to return home. Tomasi refused. He wanted to be an askari.  Of the battalion’s 45 personal ser­vants, he was one of only four who enlisted for the Burma campaign. Nunneley’s war, and Tomasi’s, took place in Burma’s Kabaw Valley, which was 10 to 20 miles wide and flanked by mountain ranges. For the Japanese, whose push into north-east India had recently been reversed by the British at the battles of Imphal and Kohima, the Kabaw Valley was their escape route into Burma. 

Through it ran the road to Mandalay, by the summer of 1944 a narrow river of mud through the waterlogged jungle, criss- crossed by wide streams. 

Painfully slowly, starving or dying of beri-beri, malaria or scrub typhus, thousands of Japanese dragged their way down towards the Chindwin River. 

They called it Human Remains Road because there were so many bodies beside the track; the whole valley smelled of putrefaction. Yet the Japanese could not surrender, because to do so, in their military code, was to ‘cease to exist’. 

The King’s African Rifles were charged with locating and destroy­ing the pockets of armed resis­tance, the elite Japanese White Tigers, as they pushed down the valley. 

Nunneley was made Battalion Intelligence Officer after the presiding officer was shot. Coating his face and hands with black camouflage cream (since the Japanese would always shoot first at the white man among black soldiers) he went out on patrols. 

Dawn attacks on local settle­ments brought the KAR plenty of Indian captives from Chandra Bose’s ‘Traitor Army’, which had sided with the enemy, but very few Japanese. 

In early October, Nunneley led a reconnaissance patrol to a hill thought to be concealing Japanese. It was. In an open space on the hill­side, a sentry came into view ten yards away and saved them from walking into the enemy camp. 

Sending an askari back with the news that fresh troops were entrenching in the valley, Nunneley machine-gunned the sentry while the rest of the patrol opened fire with rifles.

Taking advantage of the surprise, they ran back down the track, keeping the Japanese pursuers at bay with deterrent fire. 

The Japanese fought back. Ten of Nunneley’s fellow officers, and many more askaris, were killed. 

WITH the Japanese advancing up the Kabaw Valley via a chain of fall-back defensive positions, the decision was taken to send a KAR company, spearheaded by Nunneley’s Intelligence Section, to attack them at a river crossing where they had just ambushed a platoon. 

For weeks, Tomasi had been reminding Nunneley that he was no longer a servant but an enlisted private soldier who had a right to accompany him on operations. 

Conscious of his lack of any experience beyond basic training, Nunneley had so far refused. This time, however, it was not to be a patrol but a planned attack by about 100 men. 

Nunneley agreed to let Tomasi come, so long as he stayed exactly five paces behind him at all times. And when the shooting started, he was to throw himself to the ground, take cover and await orders. Tomasi’s face lit up; he rushed off to make himself ready. 

The two askaris ahead of Nunneley had already reached the fast-flowing chaung (tidal creek) and were wading across it, thigh-deep, when the Japanese opened up with automatic and rifle fire. 

While the others took cover, Nunneley joined them in the water and charged to the other side. Pinned down by fire, they could not raise their heads above the bank, but threw grenades and fired at the enemy. 

Nunneley’s ammunition ran low. Assault parties were slithering towards the bank, grenades were failing dangerously near and still there was no sign of the rest of the company attacking across the chaung. 

Nunneley gave covering fire while the two askaris waded upstream to where they could escape back across the river. 

JUST then, a grenade burst by Nunneley’s right leg. With his last rounds he tired three short bursts at the Japanese and hurled himself into the water. 

Miraculously,  he crossed unscathed and fell into a depression on the other side just deep enough that the humming bul­lets ripped through the bushes barely an inch or two above his head. 

After some minutes, and a last look at the crumpled photograph of his Italian fiancée, he called out to the askaris to give him covering fire and dived into the safety of the jungle. He was greeted by the askaris with total disbelief; they had supposed him dead. But where was Tomasi? 

Nunneley made his way to the main track and spotted his Intettigence Section taking cover on the other side. Tomasi’s face broke into joy and relief. Leaping to his feet, he started to cross the track towards Nunneley. 

He had taken five paces when the Japanese machine-gunner cover­ing the approach to the chaung fired a long, long burst.  

Tomasi was buried beside the main track, the road to Mandalay, with a wooden cross above his grave. Following the British advance, a reburial squad would recover the body and take it to be buried in a war graves cemetery. 

In the soldierly novels of Nunneley’s childhood, that is how the story would have ended. 

Invalided out of Burma, Nunneley met the battalion’s former medical officer who seemed to remember seeing the wooden cross by the track with Tomasi’s name, rank and number painted on it. 

But years later, when Nunneley requested a photograph of the grave of his servant and comrade, the Commonwealth War Graves Com­mission had to write back in reply that there was ‘no known grave’.

John Nunneley was left to com­memorate Tomasi as best he could, on the flight-deck of a British Airways 727 thundering through the night over Burma. 

The pilot was persuaded to dip a wing in salute to the young African who had met his death so far away from the shores of Lake Victoria. 

* TALES From The King’s African Rifles by John Nunneley (Cassell, £16.99).

Webmaster's comments - John has also co-written an excellent book giving a number of accounts by Japanese soldiers.  That book 'Tales By Japanese Soldiers' is also published by Cassell and is also priced at £16.99