SAS Rogue Heroes may have caught the popular imagination, but the Chindits of Lieutenant General “Bill” Slim’s 14th Army were equally significant in the development of special forces. Charles Mercer is believed to have been the last surviving British officer of the “Spidermen” of the 3rd (West African) Brigade who took part in the second Chindit campaign in Burma from early March to mid-August 1944.
The name Chindit derives from the Burmese chinthe, the fabulous, elusive beasts of the jungle whose statues — half lion, half mythical griffin — guard the Burmese temples and whose image became the Chindits’ formation sign. The name isalso connected with the Chindwin River, just inside the Burmese border with India, the first obstacle the Chindits had to cross in their deep penetration operations.
The name Spidermen came from the formation sign of the 81st (West African) Division, a black tarantula spider. The division, formed in March 1943 from the old West African Frontier Force, comprised brigade groups from the Gambia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast (now Ghana). The 3rd Brigade Group included three battalions of the Nigeria Regiment, all recruited in northern Nigeria from among the Hausa and Fulani people, including Mercer’s 7th Battalion (7NR). British colonial military policy had long favoured the Hausa emirates, whose menfolk were generally tall and slim, and whose horsemanship was taken as evidence of a more martial spirit. In addition, the Hausa could be relied on to police and suppress any resistance in southern Nigeria
Mercer had enlisted in The Royal Sussex Regiment on the outbreak of war, and in early 1942 he was sent for training at Number 161 Officer Cadet Training Unit, located first at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and then at Mons Barracks, Aldershot. He received an emergency commission with the Sussex in March 1943 and was immediately seconded to the Nigeria Regiment, joining 7NR at Kaduna, some 500 miles northeast of Lagos, to take command of a platoon.
Although most of the officers were white, Hausa was the language of command at platoon level. Several colonial district officers, fluent in Hausa, had been commissioned in the regiment, and Mercer was expected to acquire quickly something approaching their proficiency. Some of the battalion had seen action in east Africa against the Italians, but as a whole the 3rd Brigade was untried. After six months’ training, however, 7NR sailed from Lagos to India via the Cape.
Soon after arriving in their battle training area in the Central Provinces they were inspected by the future Field Marshal Lord Slim, then commanding 15th Corps but soon to take over “the Forgotten [14th] Army”. In his celebrated memoir Defeat into Victory he wrote of how impressed he was by the Nigerians’ discipline and smartness: “They were more obviously at home in the jungle than any troops I had yet seen.”
However, the assumption of most British officers of both King’s and Indian regiments was that the West African Division would be of only limited use in action against the Japanese. Indeed, when Major General Orde Wingate, the Chindits’ founder and leader, learnt that Slim had detailed the 3rd Brigade to join his coming operation, he protested strongly. Having then been forced to relent, Wingate decided he would use the Spidermen as porters.
Slim was anyway sceptical of the cost-effectiveness of the Chindit concept. The first expedition, in brigade strength (some 3,000 men), marched over 1,000 miles during its three-month jungle sojourn beginning in February 1943, losing nearly a third of its strength in the process, and more from long-term sickness on return. It had certainly inconvenienced the Japanese, but not seriously.
However, in August Churchill, Roosevelt and the combined chiefs of staff met in Quebec to discuss future Allied strategy. Churchill had taken Wingate with him to present his proposed plans on how long-range penetration brigades could operate in Burma to disrupt Japanese communications in support of Chinese forces under the US’s General Joe Stilwell in Yunnan province. The plans were enthusiastically accepted, and huge US air support was offered.
Wingate could now cut down his logistic “tail” and rely more on air resupply. The Spidermen need no longer be porters therefore but combatants, albeit with a limited role, for he simply did not believe they had the intelligence to operate in the Chindit role. His concept for 1944 — Operation Thursday — was straightforward: “anchor” units would establish firm jungle bases, with airstrips for resupply, from which “floater” units would sally to disrupt Japanese lines of communications. The West African Brigade would be broken up to provide anchor units.
After their six months’ training in the Central Provinces, Mercer’s platoon, with the rest of 7NR, began their 1,000-mile journey by rail to Lalaghat airstrip in Assam, northeast India, built specially to mount Operation Thursday. There the battalion was divided into two “columns”, Nos 29 and 35, to join the 77th Indian Infantry Brigade commanded by Brigadier Mike Calvert, who was later instrumental in re-raising the SAS in Malaya.
During the night of April 6, Mercer’s platoon took off in three US Waco CG-4A gliders towed by Douglas Dakotas. The Waco was smaller than its British counterpart, the Horsa, carrying just 13 men, but it could land in tighter corners. Mercer’s column put down in the early morning at “Aberdeen” base (others were called Broadway, White City and Blackpool) north of Indaw, an important route centre near the Irrawaddy River.
Although Mercer had not yet seen action, he was in no doubt of the Nigerians’ capability, as he made clear in his history of 7NR. Calvert too had changed his — or rather, Wingate’s — mind, deciding to use them in the “floater” role from his brigade base at “White City”, southeast of “Aberdeen”, near Mawlu.
On April 13, Mercer’s platoon led the 35th Column’s attack on the nearby railway, coming under heavy fire in a battle lasting four hours, the Japanese positions only taken in the end at the point of the bayonet. A fortnight later, the column established a road block to the south of Mawlu, holding it for three days against successive attacks during which they took several prisoners — unusually, for Japanese troops rarely surrendered, even when wounded.
Conditions then began to deteriorate, predictably, with the onset of the monsoon, and with it the disruption to air resupply. Malaria and scrub typhus took its toll, although the Nigerians’ tolerance to disease was generally higher than that of the British troops, and even the Indians. Movement became exceptionally difficult, with every watercourse swollen by the rains. Wingate himself had been killed earlier when his plane crashed during a storm. Nevertheless, the Chindits kept up their offensive for a full three months, the Nigerians more than holding their own.
In an echo of Freddie Spencer Chapman’s memoir of the Special Operations Executive in southeast Asia, The Jungle is Neutral, Major Charles Carfrae, commanding 7NR’s 29th Column, wrote: “The black riflemen, accustomed to living simply and demanding little, adapted easily and without complaint. Making no effort to fight the jungle, they surrendered to it.”
By the time they were evacuated by air from Myitkyina in mid-August, Mercer was commanding a company as a temporary major. He was subsequently mentioned in dispatches “in recognition of gallant and distinguished services”.
Charles Henry Mercer was born in Brighton, Sussex, in 1919 and educated at Collyer’s School in Horsham, the grammar boarding school founded in the early 16th century. He left school at 17 to work for a local publishing company. By the time he began officer training in 1942 after nearly three years in the ranks he was engaged to Joan Rice, who worked for the aircraft manufacturers Saunders-Roe. They married soon after he was commissioned and then didn’t see each other for three years. Joan died in 1998. Their son, Michael, who lives in Australia, survives him.
On return to England, in 1947 Mercer gained a short-service commission in the Sussex, with substantive rank of captain, and served on the staff of West Africa Command. However, with the progressive reduction in the size of the regular army, when his five years were up there was no vacancy for a regular commission. He therefore transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC), home for many a wartime infantryman and one in which there was room for further promotion, and much sport.
He served with them in the British Army of the Rhine and in Cyprus during the EOKA insurgency, and frequently captained the Corps cricket XI. When the RASC divided in 1965 to form the Royal Corps of Transport, reassigning other functions to the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, Mercer transferred to the latter. He served on the staff in the MoD and BAOR, retiring in 1974 as assistant director of Ordnance Services (Combat Supplies) HQ BAOR in the rank of colonel. For the next ten years he worked for Wandsworth borough council, before finally retiring to Ewhurst, Surrey, where he lived independently (and continuing to drive) until well into his century.
Arguments continue about the cost-effectiveness of the Chindit operations. Slim himself wrote, “They did not give, militarily, a worthwhile return for the resources in men, materiel, and the time that they absorbed.” None, however, could doubt the courage and endurance of the troops themselves. It is not insignificant that when in 2014 the British Army formed a new brigade for “guerrilla” information warfare, they numbered it “77” and adopted the Chinthe for its badge.
Colonel Charles Mercer, Chindit officer, was born on November 14, 1919. He died on February 28, 2025, aged 105
