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O'Brien had completed a tour of
operations flying bombers in England and survived the Japanese
advance on Singapore and Java when he volunteered to join the 4/9th
Gurkha Rifles assigned to General Orde Wingate's Long Range
Penetration Group, better known as the Chindits. He was appointed the battalion's air liaison officer and, after an arduous six-month training period, landed by glider with the advance party on a hastily prepared jungle strip east of the Irrawaddy river, deep behind Japanese lines. He first helped to organise the expansion of the airstrip to allow Dakota transport aircraft to land with supplies before the Gurkhas set out on their patrols towards the Burma-China border. O'Brien was responsible for establishing the dropping zones and for co-ordinating the essential air operations to keep the column supplied as the force marched through the jungle in the remote mountainous region of northern Burma attacking Japanese lines of communications and depots. Much of his time on the march was spent organising and guiding the mule train that carried the column's supplies and armament. After almost four months, during which he contracted malaria and lost 70lb in weight, O'Brien and the remnants of his column returned to Allied lines having lost some 80 per cent of their force. |
O'Brien's native Australian scepticism
and disdain for the
Such operations, he maintained, were not always harmonised
with the wider strategy or tactics of Allied Command and were very
wasteful of life. He always believed that Wingate and other leaders did
not listen to advice, and delegated far too little to the men on the spot. In November 1941 he volunteered to lead a flight of
Hudsons to Singapore, arriving as the city was under unremitting attack,
and joined No 62 Squadron, which lost five crews within a week. The
squadron was forced to evacuate to Java to continue operations against the
Japanese, but nine more crews were lost and O'Brien was one of the few to
escape from the island by boat and reach India. For six months he trained
reconnaissance crews near Bombay, but then came a call for junior officers
to volunteer for special operations. In August 1944 he was appointed to command the Dakota
flight of No 357 Squadron, flying from an airfield near Calcutta In
1945 he was made a DFC, and from the French Croix de Guerre with Gold
Star. |
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