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the mud, using elephant tracks where possible and trying to move as quietly as they could. Supplies were scheduled to be dropped from the air every four days, but when the weather closed in the gaps between deliveries got wider. For men carrying 80lb packs, K-rations were meagre fare, but if they were lucky they sometimes got rice from the villagers in exchange for parachute cloth.
Water was always in short supply, and the men were not allowed to drink during hourly stops in the steaming heat. On several occasions, the heavily laden mules came to the rescue by guiding a patrol to a stream deep in the forest. Each man lived with the dread of being badly wounded and being shot by a medical orderly or by the column padre to avoid being left behind and falling into the hands of the Japanese.
Patrols set up road-blocks and, working with the Royal Engineers, blew up railway lines. The enemy was all around them and Hilder had a lucky escape when a bullet struck his water bottle. At night, Japanese aircraft would scour the ground, searching for their camps, and try to shoot them up.
Units in danger of being overwhelmed dropped mortar shells with coloured smoke on the Japanese positions and called up American Mustang dive bombers to attack these targets. The men took pills for malaria, but the platoons still lost half their fighting strength to foot rot, dysentery and disease.
Richard Waterhouse Hilder was born in York on July 3 1921. His father, Tom, had served with the 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoons in the First World War and took part in fierce fighting on the Somme, at Cambrai and , at Amiens. ; In 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, he was called up as a reservist and his son, who had just left Eton, had to run the 250-acre farm with the help of his mother and an old soldier who had fought in the Boer War.
After his father returned from Dunkirk, young Richard joined the Life Guards as a trooper. He was on stable guard during an air raid at Windsor, and when a bomb was dropped he scrambled over the stable door and narrowly missed being hit by shrapnel.
He went to OCTU (Officer Cadet Training Unit) at Blackdown, near Aldershot, for six months before being commissioned and posted to the 6th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards.
There were widespread riots. Soldiers straying into areas of the city that were off-limits were frequently murdered and strategic targets like telegraph offices were attacked. After a posting to a camp near Poona, Hilder was seconded to the 26th Hussars.
Towards the end of the Chindit campaign in Burma, Hilder was posted to the 3rd Carabiniers as a troop leader, and in May 1945 he took part in an attack on Prome, east of the Arakan. By the end of the month they were in Rangoon.
The worn-out tanks were scrapped and they were issued with new ones, but the plan to invade the Japanese mainland was aborted after the dropping of the atom bombs.
During six months behind the lines, Hilder and his men had covered about 1,000 miles; they ended up with one depleted platoon and no mules. His weight had gone down from 12 stone to a little over seven. They marched to Mogaung and were flown out of Myitkyina to Assam.
Japanese soldiers, once seen as invincible in the jungle, were no longer regarded as supermen - the Chindit operations had dispelled that notion. Hilder said afterwards that the campaign had taught him self- reliance, but had left him with one thought: “I will never have anything so bloody awful in my life again.”
He took a convoy along the Grand Trunk Road to Rawalpindi before being posted back to England. On a stop-over in the Middle East, he came across three Gurkhas sitting on a bench. They stood up and saluted and he saw that all three were wearing the medal ribbon of the VC. They were returning to India after being presented with their awards by the King in London.
In July 1946, after a stint as adjutant of a Polish transit camp near Oxford, he was demobilised and bought a farm at Stock, Essex.
Richard Hilder married, in 1947, June, daughter of Brigadier R E C Carolin of the Essex Regiment. She predeceased him and he is survived by their two sons and a daughter. For a decade from 1968, his companion (who changed her name by deed poll to Hilder), was Jennifer Kaye (nee Tatchell) whose father, Gerald, was killed in action in May 194O.
Richard Hilder, born July 3 1921, died September 18
2O22. He was sent with a draft of officers to India and was
stationed at a transit camp in Bombay.
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