Born in India, Michael Calvert became a jungle-fighting legend, leading Orde Wingate's Chindits behind Japanese lines in Burma.
He went on to help build the SAS, but a court martial in Germany ended his career, and he died in poverty, having sold his medals.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a man called Michael Calvert, or as he was better known, "Mad Mike".
[00:00:32] He was one of the most decorated British soldiers of the Second World War, a man whose ideas still shape the most famous regiment in the British Army. And his story ends with one of the saddest falls from grace in British military history.
[00:00:49] So let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:54] In 1997, a set of military medals was put up for sale.
[00:01:00] There was nothing particularly unusual about that. Medals are bought and sold all the time, usually long after the original owner has died.
[00:01:11] But these medals belonged to a living man. He was 84 years old, he was living in south-west London, and he was selling them because he needed the money.
[00:01:24] Among them were two Distinguished Service Orders, which is one of the most distinguished medals you can get.
[00:01:32] The man selling them was called Michael Calvert. And fifty years earlier, he had been one of the most celebrated soldiers in the British Army.
[00:01:43] He had led troops behind Japanese lines in the jungles of Burma. He had been recommended for the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest military honour, on three separate occasions. He had commanded the SAS, and later, he had brought it back from the dead.
[00:02:01] So, you might be thinking, how does a man like that end up poor, and forgotten, selling his own medals to pay his bills?
[00:02:11] The answer involves one of the most remarkable military careers of the twentieth century, and a single trial in Germany that destroyed it almost overnight.
[00:02:23] Let's start at the beginning.
[00:02:25] Michael Calvert was born in India in March of 1913. His father was a senior official in the British administration there, and like many sons of empire, young Michael was sent back to England for his education.
[00:02:43] He went on to the Royal Military Academy and joined the Royal Engineers. The Royal Engineers are the part of the army that builds things: bridges, roads and defences. They are also the part of the army that blows things up, and it was this second skill that Calvert would make his own.
[00:03:03] He was also a natural athlete. He boxed for the Army, becoming its middleweight champion, and he was also a good swimmer.
[00:03:12] He was clever, too, and was sent by the army to Cambridge, to study Mechanical Engineering.
[00:03:19] In 1934, he was posted to Hong Kong, where he learned Cantonese.
[00:03:26] And in 1937, he was present during the Japanese assault on Shanghai, shortly before the infamous massacre at Nanjing, witnessing one of the most modern and brutal armies in the world at work.
[00:03:41] This was something of an eye-opener for the young officer.
[00:03:45] At the time, the general view in the British military was that Japan was not a serious threat. Its soldiers were thought to be poorly equipped and no match for European troops.
[00:03:59] Calvert had seen them fight. He knew this view was dangerously wrong, and within a few years, he would be proved right.
[00:04:09] Now, when the Second World War broke out, Calvert had a brief and frustrating time in the failed Norwegian campaign of 1940. But the army had noticed his talent for demolitions and irregular warfare, and in 1941 he was sent east again, to run something called the Bush Warfare School in Burma, in modern day Myanmar, but then a British colony.
[00:04:38] His job was to train soldiers in guerrilla warfare: how to operate in small groups behind enemy lines, how to ambush, how to sabotage, how to survive in the jungle.
[00:04:51] So when the Japanese invaded Burma in early 1942, Michael Calvert was one of the few men in the entire British Army who knew how to fight back.
[00:05:05] There was very little he could do, though, because the campaign was a disaster from the start.
[00:05:12] The Japanese soldiers who crossed into Burma in January 1942 were hardened veterans, with years of fighting in China behind them. They were trained for the jungle, they travelled light, and they moved fast.
[00:05:29] The British defence, on the other hand, was built around roads. The thinking was that the thick Burmese jungle was impassable, so the jungle was left largely unguarded. The Japanese simply walked through it, slipped around the British positions, and set up roadblocks behind them. Again and again, British units discovered that the enemy was already behind them, cutting off their escape.
[00:05:59] And to make matters worse, many of the defending troops were raw recruits who had never seen battle. When the capital and main port of Rangoon fell just a couple of months later, there was no longer any way to bring in supplies or reinforcements.
[00:06:19] What followed was the longest retreat in British military history. The army fell back around 1,500 kilometres, through jungle, mountains and monsoon rains, all the way to India, with the Japanese close behind for most of the way.
[00:06:38] And it was during that chaotic retreat that Calvert met the man who would change his life.
[00:06:45] Orde Wingate was one of the strangest officers the British Army has ever produced, and that is saying something.
[00:06:53] He was intense, difficult, and completely indifferent to what anyone thought of him. He ate raw onions because he believed they were good for his health. He quoted the Old Testament in military briefings. He held meetings while completely naked, brushing his body with a rubber brush.
[00:07:14] Most officers thought he was mad. Calvert thought he was a genius.
[00:07:20] The two men became firm friends almost immediately.
[00:07:24] Wingate's big idea was this. Instead of facing the Japanese army head-on, Britain should send columns of specially trained troops deep behind enemy lines, marching through the jungle and supplied entirely by air. They would cut railways, destroy bridges, and attack the Japanese where they least expected it.
[00:07:49] The force became known as the Chindits, named after the chinthe, the mythical lion statues that guard Burmese temples.
[00:07:59] In February 1943, around 3,000 Chindits marched into Japanese-occupied Burma. Calvert commanded one of the columns.
[00:08:10] It was a brutal experience, and the jungle itself was as dangerous as the Japanese. It was dense, steaming hot, and crawling with leeches and mosquitoes. The men marched for weeks on end, carrying everything on their back and on mules, relying on supply drops from the air that didn't always arrive where they were meant to, or arrive at all.
[00:08:36] Malaria and dysentery spread through the columns. Rations ran short. And the men who were badly wounded or too sick to walk often had to be left behind, because there was simply no way to carry them out.
[00:08:52] The men were exhausted. Roughly a third of them never came back, and many of those who did were so broken by disease that they never fought again.
[00:09:04] But Calvert's column was the star of the operation, blowing up railway bridges and cutting off supply lines. And somehow, remarkably, getting back to India largely intact.
[00:09:17] He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. And somewhere along the way, his men started calling him "Mad Mike", for his bravery, and sometimes "Dynamite Mike", for what he liked to do to Japanese bridges and railways.
[00:09:33] By early 1944, Wingate had convinced Winston Churchill and the Americans to back a far bigger operation. This time, an entire division would be flown into the heart of Burma, landing at night, in gliders, on jungle clearings hundreds of kilometres behind Japanese lines.
[00:09:56] Calvert, now a brigadier at the age of just 30, commanded the leading brigade.
[00:10:03] The landing zones had been given the names of famous streets: Piccadilly and Broadway. And on the evening of the operation, the 5th of March 1944, an aircraft brought back last-minute photographs showing that Piccadilly was blocked. Someone had covered the clearing with tree trunks.
[00:10:26] Was it a trap? Did the Japanese know they were coming? Nobody could say. Senior commanders hesitated, and the whole operation hung in the balance.
[00:10:36] Calvert did not hesitate. "I am prepared to take the whole of my brigade into Broadway," he said, "and we can do without Piccadilly."
[00:10:46] So they went. That night, Calvert and his men crash-landed in gliders onto a rough jungle clearing deep inside enemy territory. The gliders carried men, weapons, a few unlucky mules, and several small bulldozers, which the engineers used to carve a proper airstrip out of the clearing.
[00:11:08] The airstrip was ready within twenty-four hours, and from then on, transport planes landed night after night. Within a week, some 9,000 men and over 1,300 mules had been flown in behind Japanese lines.
[00:11:27] As it turned out, the tree trunks on Piccadilly had been left there by Burmese woodcutters. The Japanese had no idea the British were coming.
[00:11:37] What followed showed both sides of Calvert.
[00:11:41] There was the planner, who built a fortified base called White City, surrounded with barbed wire, mines and artillery. It got its name from the hundreds of white supply parachutes hanging in the trees around it. For weeks, the Japanese threw themselves at it in furious night attacks, and the defences Calvert had designed held every time.
[00:12:06] And then, there was the fighter. Early in the campaign, at a place called Pagoda Hill, Calvert found his men pinned down by Japanese troops on higher ground. His response was to get up and personally lead a bayonet charge up the slope, with officers and soldiers scrambling up beside him.
[00:12:28] The fighting at the top was hand-to-hand. Calvert later described it as an extraordinary scene, "everyone shooting, bayoneting, kicking at everyone else, rather like an officers' guest night."
[00:12:44] This, you understand, was a brigadier, a senior officer. Brigadiers are supposed to be several kilometres behind the fighting, sipping tea, looking at maps and radioing in instructions. That was never Calvert's style, and as you might imagine, his men loved him for it.
[00:13:05] Then, at the end of March 1944, disaster. Wingate, Calvert's hero, was killed when his plane crashed into a hillside. The Chindits had lost their leader and their protector.
[00:13:20] In May 1944, the Chindits were placed under the command of an American general, Joseph Stilwell, a man known as "Vinegar Joe".
[00:13:32] Stilwell had little time for the British and even less for the Chindits. Calvert's brigade was already worn down by months in the jungle. Then, it was ordered to capture the key Japanese stronghold of Mogaung.
[00:13:48] The monsoon had broken. The land was flooded. The men were exhausted, wet through, and riddled with malaria, dysentery and jungle sores. And Mogaung was defended by thousands of fresh Japanese troops with orders to hold it at all costs.
[00:14:09] Calvert's brigade took Mogaung in June 1944, after almost a month of some of the most savage close-quarters fighting of the entire war.
[00:14:20] The cost was appalling. He had started the campaign with around 3,500 men. By the time Mogaung fell, battle, disease and sheer exhaustion had reduced that number to around 300.
[00:14:38] And then, a few days later, Calvert's radio operators picked up a BBC news report. General Stilwell's headquarters had announced that Mogaung had been captured by Chinese troops.
[00:14:52] There was no mention of the Chindits at all.
[00:14:56] Calvert's reply has gone down in British military legend. He sent a signal to Stilwell's headquarters that read: "Chinese reported taking Mogaung. My Brigade now taking umbrage."
[00:15:11] To take umbrage, by the way, means to be offended, to take insult at something. Even then it was an old-fashioned and very British expression. The story goes, and this part may be more legend than fact, that Stilwell's American staff searched their maps for a town called Umbrage, trying to work out where it was.
[00:15:35] Shortly afterwards, when Stilwell's headquarters ordered his shattered brigade on to yet another battle, Calvert shut down his radios, refused, and went to see Stilwell in person, to give him a piece of his mind.
[00:15:52] When the pair finally met face to face, Stilwell understood what the brigade had been through. The American general relented, and the survivors were flown out to India.
[00:16:04] Calvert was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for a second time, as well as the American Silver Star. Three separate commanding officers recommended him for the Victoria Cross, although he never received it.
[00:16:21] By 1945, Calvert's reputation was such that he was given command of the SAS Brigade, the special forces units fighting in Europe.
[00:16:31] The war ended soon afterwards, and Britain began dismantling its special forces. The SAS, in the eyes of the military establishment, was an expensive wartime experiment with no place in peacetime, and in October 1945, it was formally disbanded.
[00:16:52] Calvert thought it was a mistake. He pushed hard for an official study into what the SAS had achieved and what it could do in future wars. That study helped keep the idea alive, and a part-time territorial SAS unit was formed in 1947.
[00:17:12] But the real second birth came in Malaya, the then-British colony now known as Malaysia.
[00:17:21] In 1948, a communist uprising had broken out. Communist fighters were operating out of the deep jungle, ambushing, killing and disappearing, and the British were losing.
[00:17:37] In 1950, Field Marshal Slim, the most respected British soldier of his generation, described Calvert as perhaps the greatest expert on guerrilla warfare then serving in the British Army. Calvert was asked to study the problem and propose a solution.
[00:17:56] He spent months touring Malaya, often going out on patrols himself, and he produced a report whose central message was blunt: there must be one man, with one plan, and the power to carry it out.
[00:18:13] One of his recommendations was for a special force that could live and fight in the deep jungle for weeks at a time, beating the communist fighters at their own game.
[00:18:25] And naturally, Calvert was told to go and create it.
[00:18:29] The unit he formed in 1950 was called the Malayan Scouts. He was given very little support and, in many cases, the men no other commander wanted. He trained them his own way, with an emphasis on initiative and independence rather than parade-ground discipline, and he sent them into the jungle in small patrols.
[00:18:54] His training methods were unusual, to put it mildly. At one point, his men practised jungle combat by stalking each other through the undergrowth armed with air rifles, wearing fencing masks to protect their faces. If you got shot, you had been careless, and the sting of the pellet was a pretty strong incentive not to be.
[00:19:18] The unit was rough around the edges, and it picked up a reputation for bad behaviour. But the core idea worked. In 1952, the Malayan Scouts were renamed.
[00:19:32] They became 22 SAS, the special forces regiment that still exists to this day.
[00:19:40] Calvert, though, was increasingly ill. By the middle of 1951, his body had finally given up. Malaria, dysentery, miscellaneous jungle diseases and twelve years of hard soldiering had wrecked his health, and he was sent home to recover.
[00:20:01] He was 38 years old. He had every reason to expect that this was a temporary blip, and that the best part of his career was still ahead of him. Unfortunately, it was not.
[00:20:14] In 1951, Calvert was posted to Germany, to the British forces stationed near Hanover.
[00:20:22] And it was there, within months, that his world collapsed.
[00:20:27] He was accused of gross indecency with young German men. In other words, homosexual acts, which at the time were a criminal offence under both British and military law.
[00:20:41] He was court-martialled, tried in a military court. The evidence against him was thin and contradictory, and part of it was later withdrawn by the very witnesses who had given it.
[00:20:55] He was found guilty anyway. The sentence was dismissal from the army.
[00:21:02] For a man like Calvert, this was a form of death. The army had been his entire life since the age of 19. In a single day, he lost his career, his reputation, his income and his place in the world. The hero of Mogaung was now, in the eyes of society, a criminal and a disgrace.
[00:21:27] He denied the charge until the day he died. His biographer, who spent years studying the case, came to believe he had been framed, that is, deliberately set up with false evidence.
[00:21:41] Calvert had made enemies in his career, so perhaps this was their revenge. Or perhaps it was something closer to a robbery gone wrong. The young men in question later admitted that they had gone to his flat to steal from it.
[00:21:57] The court martial records were sealed and remain closed to the public until 2028, so even today, no one can read the full evidence against him.
[00:22:09] What is certain is what happened next.
[00:22:13] Calvert drifted. He drank, heavily, and became an alcoholic. He tried to build a new life as an engineer in Australia, and it fell apart. At his lowest point, this man who had commanded thousands in battle was doing casual manual labour, sleeping rough, an anonymous drifter on the other side of the world.
[00:22:38] Slowly, he managed to claw some of it back. He wrote well-regarded books about the Burma campaign. He lectured on guerrilla warfare, and in the 1970s he appeared as an expert in the celebrated television documentary series The World at War. Old comrades, especially SAS men, stood by him and campaigned to restore his reputation.
[00:23:05] But the stain of his 1952 court martial never left him. In his lifetime, there was no pardon, no review, no apology. He never married, he struggled with money all his life, and in 1997 he was forced to sell his medals.
[00:23:26] He died the following year, in November 1998, at the age of 85.
[00:23:32] Today, the regiment he rebuilt is one of if not the most famous special forces unit in the world. The tactics he worked out in the jungles of Burma and Malaya became standard practice, taught to generations of soldiers who have never heard his name.
[00:23:50] And in 2028, the sealed files from that court martial in Germany are due to be opened at last.
[00:23:58] Thirty years after his death, "Mad Mike" Calvert may finally get his answer.
[00:24:06] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on "Mad Mike" Calvert.
[00:24:10] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:24:14] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:19] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a man called Michael Calvert, or as he was better known, "Mad Mike".
[00:00:32] He was one of the most decorated British soldiers of the Second World War, a man whose ideas still shape the most famous regiment in the British Army. And his story ends with one of the saddest falls from grace in British military history.
[00:00:49] So let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:54] In 1997, a set of military medals was put up for sale.
[00:01:00] There was nothing particularly unusual about that. Medals are bought and sold all the time, usually long after the original owner has died.
[00:01:11] But these medals belonged to a living man. He was 84 years old, he was living in south-west London, and he was selling them because he needed the money.
[00:01:24] Among them were two Distinguished Service Orders, which is one of the most distinguished medals you can get.
[00:01:32] The man selling them was called Michael Calvert. And fifty years earlier, he had been one of the most celebrated soldiers in the British Army.
[00:01:43] He had led troops behind Japanese lines in the jungles of Burma. He had been recommended for the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest military honour, on three separate occasions. He had commanded the SAS, and later, he had brought it back from the dead.
[00:02:01] So, you might be thinking, how does a man like that end up poor, and forgotten, selling his own medals to pay his bills?
[00:02:11] The answer involves one of the most remarkable military careers of the twentieth century, and a single trial in Germany that destroyed it almost overnight.
[00:02:23] Let's start at the beginning.
[00:02:25] Michael Calvert was born in India in March of 1913. His father was a senior official in the British administration there, and like many sons of empire, young Michael was sent back to England for his education.
[00:02:43] He went on to the Royal Military Academy and joined the Royal Engineers. The Royal Engineers are the part of the army that builds things: bridges, roads and defences. They are also the part of the army that blows things up, and it was this second skill that Calvert would make his own.
[00:03:03] He was also a natural athlete. He boxed for the Army, becoming its middleweight champion, and he was also a good swimmer.
[00:03:12] He was clever, too, and was sent by the army to Cambridge, to study Mechanical Engineering.
[00:03:19] In 1934, he was posted to Hong Kong, where he learned Cantonese.
[00:03:26] And in 1937, he was present during the Japanese assault on Shanghai, shortly before the infamous massacre at Nanjing, witnessing one of the most modern and brutal armies in the world at work.
[00:03:41] This was something of an eye-opener for the young officer.
[00:03:45] At the time, the general view in the British military was that Japan was not a serious threat. Its soldiers were thought to be poorly equipped and no match for European troops.
[00:03:59] Calvert had seen them fight. He knew this view was dangerously wrong, and within a few years, he would be proved right.
[00:04:09] Now, when the Second World War broke out, Calvert had a brief and frustrating time in the failed Norwegian campaign of 1940. But the army had noticed his talent for demolitions and irregular warfare, and in 1941 he was sent east again, to run something called the Bush Warfare School in Burma, in modern day Myanmar, but then a British colony.
[00:04:38] His job was to train soldiers in guerrilla warfare: how to operate in small groups behind enemy lines, how to ambush, how to sabotage, how to survive in the jungle.
[00:04:51] So when the Japanese invaded Burma in early 1942, Michael Calvert was one of the few men in the entire British Army who knew how to fight back.
[00:05:05] There was very little he could do, though, because the campaign was a disaster from the start.
[00:05:12] The Japanese soldiers who crossed into Burma in January 1942 were hardened veterans, with years of fighting in China behind them. They were trained for the jungle, they travelled light, and they moved fast.
[00:05:29] The British defence, on the other hand, was built around roads. The thinking was that the thick Burmese jungle was impassable, so the jungle was left largely unguarded. The Japanese simply walked through it, slipped around the British positions, and set up roadblocks behind them. Again and again, British units discovered that the enemy was already behind them, cutting off their escape.
[00:05:59] And to make matters worse, many of the defending troops were raw recruits who had never seen battle. When the capital and main port of Rangoon fell just a couple of months later, there was no longer any way to bring in supplies or reinforcements.
[00:06:19] What followed was the longest retreat in British military history. The army fell back around 1,500 kilometres, through jungle, mountains and monsoon rains, all the way to India, with the Japanese close behind for most of the way.
[00:06:38] And it was during that chaotic retreat that Calvert met the man who would change his life.
[00:06:45] Orde Wingate was one of the strangest officers the British Army has ever produced, and that is saying something.
[00:06:53] He was intense, difficult, and completely indifferent to what anyone thought of him. He ate raw onions because he believed they were good for his health. He quoted the Old Testament in military briefings. He held meetings while completely naked, brushing his body with a rubber brush.
[00:07:14] Most officers thought he was mad. Calvert thought he was a genius.
[00:07:20] The two men became firm friends almost immediately.
[00:07:24] Wingate's big idea was this. Instead of facing the Japanese army head-on, Britain should send columns of specially trained troops deep behind enemy lines, marching through the jungle and supplied entirely by air. They would cut railways, destroy bridges, and attack the Japanese where they least expected it.
[00:07:49] The force became known as the Chindits, named after the chinthe, the mythical lion statues that guard Burmese temples.
[00:07:59] In February 1943, around 3,000 Chindits marched into Japanese-occupied Burma. Calvert commanded one of the columns.
[00:08:10] It was a brutal experience, and the jungle itself was as dangerous as the Japanese. It was dense, steaming hot, and crawling with leeches and mosquitoes. The men marched for weeks on end, carrying everything on their back and on mules, relying on supply drops from the air that didn't always arrive where they were meant to, or arrive at all.
[00:08:36] Malaria and dysentery spread through the columns. Rations ran short. And the men who were badly wounded or too sick to walk often had to be left behind, because there was simply no way to carry them out.
[00:08:52] The men were exhausted. Roughly a third of them never came back, and many of those who did were so broken by disease that they never fought again.
[00:09:04] But Calvert's column was the star of the operation, blowing up railway bridges and cutting off supply lines. And somehow, remarkably, getting back to India largely intact.
[00:09:17] He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. And somewhere along the way, his men started calling him "Mad Mike", for his bravery, and sometimes "Dynamite Mike", for what he liked to do to Japanese bridges and railways.
[00:09:33] By early 1944, Wingate had convinced Winston Churchill and the Americans to back a far bigger operation. This time, an entire division would be flown into the heart of Burma, landing at night, in gliders, on jungle clearings hundreds of kilometres behind Japanese lines.
[00:09:56] Calvert, now a brigadier at the age of just 30, commanded the leading brigade.
[00:10:03] The landing zones had been given the names of famous streets: Piccadilly and Broadway. And on the evening of the operation, the 5th of March 1944, an aircraft brought back last-minute photographs showing that Piccadilly was blocked. Someone had covered the clearing with tree trunks.
[00:10:26] Was it a trap? Did the Japanese know they were coming? Nobody could say. Senior commanders hesitated, and the whole operation hung in the balance.
[00:10:36] Calvert did not hesitate. "I am prepared to take the whole of my brigade into Broadway," he said, "and we can do without Piccadilly."
[00:10:46] So they went. That night, Calvert and his men crash-landed in gliders onto a rough jungle clearing deep inside enemy territory. The gliders carried men, weapons, a few unlucky mules, and several small bulldozers, which the engineers used to carve a proper airstrip out of the clearing.
[00:11:08] The airstrip was ready within twenty-four hours, and from then on, transport planes landed night after night. Within a week, some 9,000 men and over 1,300 mules had been flown in behind Japanese lines.
[00:11:27] As it turned out, the tree trunks on Piccadilly had been left there by Burmese woodcutters. The Japanese had no idea the British were coming.
[00:11:37] What followed showed both sides of Calvert.
[00:11:41] There was the planner, who built a fortified base called White City, surrounded with barbed wire, mines and artillery. It got its name from the hundreds of white supply parachutes hanging in the trees around it. For weeks, the Japanese threw themselves at it in furious night attacks, and the defences Calvert had designed held every time.
[00:12:06] And then, there was the fighter. Early in the campaign, at a place called Pagoda Hill, Calvert found his men pinned down by Japanese troops on higher ground. His response was to get up and personally lead a bayonet charge up the slope, with officers and soldiers scrambling up beside him.
[00:12:28] The fighting at the top was hand-to-hand. Calvert later described it as an extraordinary scene, "everyone shooting, bayoneting, kicking at everyone else, rather like an officers' guest night."
[00:12:44] This, you understand, was a brigadier, a senior officer. Brigadiers are supposed to be several kilometres behind the fighting, sipping tea, looking at maps and radioing in instructions. That was never Calvert's style, and as you might imagine, his men loved him for it.
[00:13:05] Then, at the end of March 1944, disaster. Wingate, Calvert's hero, was killed when his plane crashed into a hillside. The Chindits had lost their leader and their protector.
[00:13:20] In May 1944, the Chindits were placed under the command of an American general, Joseph Stilwell, a man known as "Vinegar Joe".
[00:13:32] Stilwell had little time for the British and even less for the Chindits. Calvert's brigade was already worn down by months in the jungle. Then, it was ordered to capture the key Japanese stronghold of Mogaung.
[00:13:48] The monsoon had broken. The land was flooded. The men were exhausted, wet through, and riddled with malaria, dysentery and jungle sores. And Mogaung was defended by thousands of fresh Japanese troops with orders to hold it at all costs.
[00:14:09] Calvert's brigade took Mogaung in June 1944, after almost a month of some of the most savage close-quarters fighting of the entire war.
[00:14:20] The cost was appalling. He had started the campaign with around 3,500 men. By the time Mogaung fell, battle, disease and sheer exhaustion had reduced that number to around 300.
[00:14:38] And then, a few days later, Calvert's radio operators picked up a BBC news report. General Stilwell's headquarters had announced that Mogaung had been captured by Chinese troops.
[00:14:52] There was no mention of the Chindits at all.
[00:14:56] Calvert's reply has gone down in British military legend. He sent a signal to Stilwell's headquarters that read: "Chinese reported taking Mogaung. My Brigade now taking umbrage."
[00:15:11] To take umbrage, by the way, means to be offended, to take insult at something. Even then it was an old-fashioned and very British expression. The story goes, and this part may be more legend than fact, that Stilwell's American staff searched their maps for a town called Umbrage, trying to work out where it was.
[00:15:35] Shortly afterwards, when Stilwell's headquarters ordered his shattered brigade on to yet another battle, Calvert shut down his radios, refused, and went to see Stilwell in person, to give him a piece of his mind.
[00:15:52] When the pair finally met face to face, Stilwell understood what the brigade had been through. The American general relented, and the survivors were flown out to India.
[00:16:04] Calvert was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for a second time, as well as the American Silver Star. Three separate commanding officers recommended him for the Victoria Cross, although he never received it.
[00:16:21] By 1945, Calvert's reputation was such that he was given command of the SAS Brigade, the special forces units fighting in Europe.
[00:16:31] The war ended soon afterwards, and Britain began dismantling its special forces. The SAS, in the eyes of the military establishment, was an expensive wartime experiment with no place in peacetime, and in October 1945, it was formally disbanded.
[00:16:52] Calvert thought it was a mistake. He pushed hard for an official study into what the SAS had achieved and what it could do in future wars. That study helped keep the idea alive, and a part-time territorial SAS unit was formed in 1947.
[00:17:12] But the real second birth came in Malaya, the then-British colony now known as Malaysia.
[00:17:21] In 1948, a communist uprising had broken out. Communist fighters were operating out of the deep jungle, ambushing, killing and disappearing, and the British were losing.
[00:17:37] In 1950, Field Marshal Slim, the most respected British soldier of his generation, described Calvert as perhaps the greatest expert on guerrilla warfare then serving in the British Army. Calvert was asked to study the problem and propose a solution.
[00:17:56] He spent months touring Malaya, often going out on patrols himself, and he produced a report whose central message was blunt: there must be one man, with one plan, and the power to carry it out.
[00:18:13] One of his recommendations was for a special force that could live and fight in the deep jungle for weeks at a time, beating the communist fighters at their own game.
[00:18:25] And naturally, Calvert was told to go and create it.
[00:18:29] The unit he formed in 1950 was called the Malayan Scouts. He was given very little support and, in many cases, the men no other commander wanted. He trained them his own way, with an emphasis on initiative and independence rather than parade-ground discipline, and he sent them into the jungle in small patrols.
[00:18:54] His training methods were unusual, to put it mildly. At one point, his men practised jungle combat by stalking each other through the undergrowth armed with air rifles, wearing fencing masks to protect their faces. If you got shot, you had been careless, and the sting of the pellet was a pretty strong incentive not to be.
[00:19:18] The unit was rough around the edges, and it picked up a reputation for bad behaviour. But the core idea worked. In 1952, the Malayan Scouts were renamed.
[00:19:32] They became 22 SAS, the special forces regiment that still exists to this day.
[00:19:40] Calvert, though, was increasingly ill. By the middle of 1951, his body had finally given up. Malaria, dysentery, miscellaneous jungle diseases and twelve years of hard soldiering had wrecked his health, and he was sent home to recover.
[00:20:01] He was 38 years old. He had every reason to expect that this was a temporary blip, and that the best part of his career was still ahead of him. Unfortunately, it was not.
[00:20:14] In 1951, Calvert was posted to Germany, to the British forces stationed near Hanover.
[00:20:22] And it was there, within months, that his world collapsed.
[00:20:27] He was accused of gross indecency with young German men. In other words, homosexual acts, which at the time were a criminal offence under both British and military law.
[00:20:41] He was court-martialled, tried in a military court. The evidence against him was thin and contradictory, and part of it was later withdrawn by the very witnesses who had given it.
[00:20:55] He was found guilty anyway. The sentence was dismissal from the army.
[00:21:02] For a man like Calvert, this was a form of death. The army had been his entire life since the age of 19. In a single day, he lost his career, his reputation, his income and his place in the world. The hero of Mogaung was now, in the eyes of society, a criminal and a disgrace.
[00:21:27] He denied the charge until the day he died. His biographer, who spent years studying the case, came to believe he had been framed, that is, deliberately set up with false evidence.
[00:21:41] Calvert had made enemies in his career, so perhaps this was their revenge. Or perhaps it was something closer to a robbery gone wrong. The young men in question later admitted that they had gone to his flat to steal from it.
[00:21:57] The court martial records were sealed and remain closed to the public until 2028, so even today, no one can read the full evidence against him.
[00:22:09] What is certain is what happened next.
[00:22:13] Calvert drifted. He drank, heavily, and became an alcoholic. He tried to build a new life as an engineer in Australia, and it fell apart. At his lowest point, this man who had commanded thousands in battle was doing casual manual labour, sleeping rough, an anonymous drifter on the other side of the world.
[00:22:38] Slowly, he managed to claw some of it back. He wrote well-regarded books about the Burma campaign. He lectured on guerrilla warfare, and in the 1970s he appeared as an expert in the celebrated television documentary series The World at War. Old comrades, especially SAS men, stood by him and campaigned to restore his reputation.
[00:23:05] But the stain of his 1952 court martial never left him. In his lifetime, there was no pardon, no review, no apology. He never married, he struggled with money all his life, and in 1997 he was forced to sell his medals.
[00:23:26] He died the following year, in November 1998, at the age of 85.
[00:23:32] Today, the regiment he rebuilt is one of if not the most famous special forces unit in the world. The tactics he worked out in the jungles of Burma and Malaya became standard practice, taught to generations of soldiers who have never heard his name.
[00:23:50] And in 2028, the sealed files from that court martial in Germany are due to be opened at last.
[00:23:58] Thirty years after his death, "Mad Mike" Calvert may finally get his answer.
[00:24:06] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on "Mad Mike" Calvert.
[00:24:10] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:24:14] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:19] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a man called Michael Calvert, or as he was better known, "Mad Mike".
[00:00:32] He was one of the most decorated British soldiers of the Second World War, a man whose ideas still shape the most famous regiment in the British Army. And his story ends with one of the saddest falls from grace in British military history.
[00:00:49] So let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:54] In 1997, a set of military medals was put up for sale.
[00:01:00] There was nothing particularly unusual about that. Medals are bought and sold all the time, usually long after the original owner has died.
[00:01:11] But these medals belonged to a living man. He was 84 years old, he was living in south-west London, and he was selling them because he needed the money.
[00:01:24] Among them were two Distinguished Service Orders, which is one of the most distinguished medals you can get.
[00:01:32] The man selling them was called Michael Calvert. And fifty years earlier, he had been one of the most celebrated soldiers in the British Army.
[00:01:43] He had led troops behind Japanese lines in the jungles of Burma. He had been recommended for the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest military honour, on three separate occasions. He had commanded the SAS, and later, he had brought it back from the dead.
[00:02:01] So, you might be thinking, how does a man like that end up poor, and forgotten, selling his own medals to pay his bills?
[00:02:11] The answer involves one of the most remarkable military careers of the twentieth century, and a single trial in Germany that destroyed it almost overnight.
[00:02:23] Let's start at the beginning.
[00:02:25] Michael Calvert was born in India in March of 1913. His father was a senior official in the British administration there, and like many sons of empire, young Michael was sent back to England for his education.
[00:02:43] He went on to the Royal Military Academy and joined the Royal Engineers. The Royal Engineers are the part of the army that builds things: bridges, roads and defences. They are also the part of the army that blows things up, and it was this second skill that Calvert would make his own.
[00:03:03] He was also a natural athlete. He boxed for the Army, becoming its middleweight champion, and he was also a good swimmer.
[00:03:12] He was clever, too, and was sent by the army to Cambridge, to study Mechanical Engineering.
[00:03:19] In 1934, he was posted to Hong Kong, where he learned Cantonese.
[00:03:26] And in 1937, he was present during the Japanese assault on Shanghai, shortly before the infamous massacre at Nanjing, witnessing one of the most modern and brutal armies in the world at work.
[00:03:41] This was something of an eye-opener for the young officer.
[00:03:45] At the time, the general view in the British military was that Japan was not a serious threat. Its soldiers were thought to be poorly equipped and no match for European troops.
[00:03:59] Calvert had seen them fight. He knew this view was dangerously wrong, and within a few years, he would be proved right.
[00:04:09] Now, when the Second World War broke out, Calvert had a brief and frustrating time in the failed Norwegian campaign of 1940. But the army had noticed his talent for demolitions and irregular warfare, and in 1941 he was sent east again, to run something called the Bush Warfare School in Burma, in modern day Myanmar, but then a British colony.
[00:04:38] His job was to train soldiers in guerrilla warfare: how to operate in small groups behind enemy lines, how to ambush, how to sabotage, how to survive in the jungle.
[00:04:51] So when the Japanese invaded Burma in early 1942, Michael Calvert was one of the few men in the entire British Army who knew how to fight back.
[00:05:05] There was very little he could do, though, because the campaign was a disaster from the start.
[00:05:12] The Japanese soldiers who crossed into Burma in January 1942 were hardened veterans, with years of fighting in China behind them. They were trained for the jungle, they travelled light, and they moved fast.
[00:05:29] The British defence, on the other hand, was built around roads. The thinking was that the thick Burmese jungle was impassable, so the jungle was left largely unguarded. The Japanese simply walked through it, slipped around the British positions, and set up roadblocks behind them. Again and again, British units discovered that the enemy was already behind them, cutting off their escape.
[00:05:59] And to make matters worse, many of the defending troops were raw recruits who had never seen battle. When the capital and main port of Rangoon fell just a couple of months later, there was no longer any way to bring in supplies or reinforcements.
[00:06:19] What followed was the longest retreat in British military history. The army fell back around 1,500 kilometres, through jungle, mountains and monsoon rains, all the way to India, with the Japanese close behind for most of the way.
[00:06:38] And it was during that chaotic retreat that Calvert met the man who would change his life.
[00:06:45] Orde Wingate was one of the strangest officers the British Army has ever produced, and that is saying something.
[00:06:53] He was intense, difficult, and completely indifferent to what anyone thought of him. He ate raw onions because he believed they were good for his health. He quoted the Old Testament in military briefings. He held meetings while completely naked, brushing his body with a rubber brush.
[00:07:14] Most officers thought he was mad. Calvert thought he was a genius.
[00:07:20] The two men became firm friends almost immediately.
[00:07:24] Wingate's big idea was this. Instead of facing the Japanese army head-on, Britain should send columns of specially trained troops deep behind enemy lines, marching through the jungle and supplied entirely by air. They would cut railways, destroy bridges, and attack the Japanese where they least expected it.
[00:07:49] The force became known as the Chindits, named after the chinthe, the mythical lion statues that guard Burmese temples.
[00:07:59] In February 1943, around 3,000 Chindits marched into Japanese-occupied Burma. Calvert commanded one of the columns.
[00:08:10] It was a brutal experience, and the jungle itself was as dangerous as the Japanese. It was dense, steaming hot, and crawling with leeches and mosquitoes. The men marched for weeks on end, carrying everything on their back and on mules, relying on supply drops from the air that didn't always arrive where they were meant to, or arrive at all.
[00:08:36] Malaria and dysentery spread through the columns. Rations ran short. And the men who were badly wounded or too sick to walk often had to be left behind, because there was simply no way to carry them out.
[00:08:52] The men were exhausted. Roughly a third of them never came back, and many of those who did were so broken by disease that they never fought again.
[00:09:04] But Calvert's column was the star of the operation, blowing up railway bridges and cutting off supply lines. And somehow, remarkably, getting back to India largely intact.
[00:09:17] He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. And somewhere along the way, his men started calling him "Mad Mike", for his bravery, and sometimes "Dynamite Mike", for what he liked to do to Japanese bridges and railways.
[00:09:33] By early 1944, Wingate had convinced Winston Churchill and the Americans to back a far bigger operation. This time, an entire division would be flown into the heart of Burma, landing at night, in gliders, on jungle clearings hundreds of kilometres behind Japanese lines.
[00:09:56] Calvert, now a brigadier at the age of just 30, commanded the leading brigade.
[00:10:03] The landing zones had been given the names of famous streets: Piccadilly and Broadway. And on the evening of the operation, the 5th of March 1944, an aircraft brought back last-minute photographs showing that Piccadilly was blocked. Someone had covered the clearing with tree trunks.
[00:10:26] Was it a trap? Did the Japanese know they were coming? Nobody could say. Senior commanders hesitated, and the whole operation hung in the balance.
[00:10:36] Calvert did not hesitate. "I am prepared to take the whole of my brigade into Broadway," he said, "and we can do without Piccadilly."
[00:10:46] So they went. That night, Calvert and his men crash-landed in gliders onto a rough jungle clearing deep inside enemy territory. The gliders carried men, weapons, a few unlucky mules, and several small bulldozers, which the engineers used to carve a proper airstrip out of the clearing.
[00:11:08] The airstrip was ready within twenty-four hours, and from then on, transport planes landed night after night. Within a week, some 9,000 men and over 1,300 mules had been flown in behind Japanese lines.
[00:11:27] As it turned out, the tree trunks on Piccadilly had been left there by Burmese woodcutters. The Japanese had no idea the British were coming.
[00:11:37] What followed showed both sides of Calvert.
[00:11:41] There was the planner, who built a fortified base called White City, surrounded with barbed wire, mines and artillery. It got its name from the hundreds of white supply parachutes hanging in the trees around it. For weeks, the Japanese threw themselves at it in furious night attacks, and the defences Calvert had designed held every time.
[00:12:06] And then, there was the fighter. Early in the campaign, at a place called Pagoda Hill, Calvert found his men pinned down by Japanese troops on higher ground. His response was to get up and personally lead a bayonet charge up the slope, with officers and soldiers scrambling up beside him.
[00:12:28] The fighting at the top was hand-to-hand. Calvert later described it as an extraordinary scene, "everyone shooting, bayoneting, kicking at everyone else, rather like an officers' guest night."
[00:12:44] This, you understand, was a brigadier, a senior officer. Brigadiers are supposed to be several kilometres behind the fighting, sipping tea, looking at maps and radioing in instructions. That was never Calvert's style, and as you might imagine, his men loved him for it.
[00:13:05] Then, at the end of March 1944, disaster. Wingate, Calvert's hero, was killed when his plane crashed into a hillside. The Chindits had lost their leader and their protector.
[00:13:20] In May 1944, the Chindits were placed under the command of an American general, Joseph Stilwell, a man known as "Vinegar Joe".
[00:13:32] Stilwell had little time for the British and even less for the Chindits. Calvert's brigade was already worn down by months in the jungle. Then, it was ordered to capture the key Japanese stronghold of Mogaung.
[00:13:48] The monsoon had broken. The land was flooded. The men were exhausted, wet through, and riddled with malaria, dysentery and jungle sores. And Mogaung was defended by thousands of fresh Japanese troops with orders to hold it at all costs.
[00:14:09] Calvert's brigade took Mogaung in June 1944, after almost a month of some of the most savage close-quarters fighting of the entire war.
[00:14:20] The cost was appalling. He had started the campaign with around 3,500 men. By the time Mogaung fell, battle, disease and sheer exhaustion had reduced that number to around 300.
[00:14:38] And then, a few days later, Calvert's radio operators picked up a BBC news report. General Stilwell's headquarters had announced that Mogaung had been captured by Chinese troops.
[00:14:52] There was no mention of the Chindits at all.
[00:14:56] Calvert's reply has gone down in British military legend. He sent a signal to Stilwell's headquarters that read: "Chinese reported taking Mogaung. My Brigade now taking umbrage."
[00:15:11] To take umbrage, by the way, means to be offended, to take insult at something. Even then it was an old-fashioned and very British expression. The story goes, and this part may be more legend than fact, that Stilwell's American staff searched their maps for a town called Umbrage, trying to work out where it was.
[00:15:35] Shortly afterwards, when Stilwell's headquarters ordered his shattered brigade on to yet another battle, Calvert shut down his radios, refused, and went to see Stilwell in person, to give him a piece of his mind.
[00:15:52] When the pair finally met face to face, Stilwell understood what the brigade had been through. The American general relented, and the survivors were flown out to India.
[00:16:04] Calvert was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for a second time, as well as the American Silver Star. Three separate commanding officers recommended him for the Victoria Cross, although he never received it.
[00:16:21] By 1945, Calvert's reputation was such that he was given command of the SAS Brigade, the special forces units fighting in Europe.
[00:16:31] The war ended soon afterwards, and Britain began dismantling its special forces. The SAS, in the eyes of the military establishment, was an expensive wartime experiment with no place in peacetime, and in October 1945, it was formally disbanded.
[00:16:52] Calvert thought it was a mistake. He pushed hard for an official study into what the SAS had achieved and what it could do in future wars. That study helped keep the idea alive, and a part-time territorial SAS unit was formed in 1947.
[00:17:12] But the real second birth came in Malaya, the then-British colony now known as Malaysia.
[00:17:21] In 1948, a communist uprising had broken out. Communist fighters were operating out of the deep jungle, ambushing, killing and disappearing, and the British were losing.
[00:17:37] In 1950, Field Marshal Slim, the most respected British soldier of his generation, described Calvert as perhaps the greatest expert on guerrilla warfare then serving in the British Army. Calvert was asked to study the problem and propose a solution.
[00:17:56] He spent months touring Malaya, often going out on patrols himself, and he produced a report whose central message was blunt: there must be one man, with one plan, and the power to carry it out.
[00:18:13] One of his recommendations was for a special force that could live and fight in the deep jungle for weeks at a time, beating the communist fighters at their own game.
[00:18:25] And naturally, Calvert was told to go and create it.
[00:18:29] The unit he formed in 1950 was called the Malayan Scouts. He was given very little support and, in many cases, the men no other commander wanted. He trained them his own way, with an emphasis on initiative and independence rather than parade-ground discipline, and he sent them into the jungle in small patrols.
[00:18:54] His training methods were unusual, to put it mildly. At one point, his men practised jungle combat by stalking each other through the undergrowth armed with air rifles, wearing fencing masks to protect their faces. If you got shot, you had been careless, and the sting of the pellet was a pretty strong incentive not to be.
[00:19:18] The unit was rough around the edges, and it picked up a reputation for bad behaviour. But the core idea worked. In 1952, the Malayan Scouts were renamed.
[00:19:32] They became 22 SAS, the special forces regiment that still exists to this day.
[00:19:40] Calvert, though, was increasingly ill. By the middle of 1951, his body had finally given up. Malaria, dysentery, miscellaneous jungle diseases and twelve years of hard soldiering had wrecked his health, and he was sent home to recover.
[00:20:01] He was 38 years old. He had every reason to expect that this was a temporary blip, and that the best part of his career was still ahead of him. Unfortunately, it was not.
[00:20:14] In 1951, Calvert was posted to Germany, to the British forces stationed near Hanover.
[00:20:22] And it was there, within months, that his world collapsed.
[00:20:27] He was accused of gross indecency with young German men. In other words, homosexual acts, which at the time were a criminal offence under both British and military law.
[00:20:41] He was court-martialled, tried in a military court. The evidence against him was thin and contradictory, and part of it was later withdrawn by the very witnesses who had given it.
[00:20:55] He was found guilty anyway. The sentence was dismissal from the army.
[00:21:02] For a man like Calvert, this was a form of death. The army had been his entire life since the age of 19. In a single day, he lost his career, his reputation, his income and his place in the world. The hero of Mogaung was now, in the eyes of society, a criminal and a disgrace.
[00:21:27] He denied the charge until the day he died. His biographer, who spent years studying the case, came to believe he had been framed, that is, deliberately set up with false evidence.
[00:21:41] Calvert had made enemies in his career, so perhaps this was their revenge. Or perhaps it was something closer to a robbery gone wrong. The young men in question later admitted that they had gone to his flat to steal from it.
[00:21:57] The court martial records were sealed and remain closed to the public until 2028, so even today, no one can read the full evidence against him.
[00:22:09] What is certain is what happened next.
[00:22:13] Calvert drifted. He drank, heavily, and became an alcoholic. He tried to build a new life as an engineer in Australia, and it fell apart. At his lowest point, this man who had commanded thousands in battle was doing casual manual labour, sleeping rough, an anonymous drifter on the other side of the world.
[00:22:38] Slowly, he managed to claw some of it back. He wrote well-regarded books about the Burma campaign. He lectured on guerrilla warfare, and in the 1970s he appeared as an expert in the celebrated television documentary series The World at War. Old comrades, especially SAS men, stood by him and campaigned to restore his reputation.
[00:23:05] But the stain of his 1952 court martial never left him. In his lifetime, there was no pardon, no review, no apology. He never married, he struggled with money all his life, and in 1997 he was forced to sell his medals.
[00:23:26] He died the following year, in November 1998, at the age of 85.
[00:23:32] Today, the regiment he rebuilt is one of if not the most famous special forces unit in the world. The tactics he worked out in the jungles of Burma and Malaya became standard practice, taught to generations of soldiers who have never heard his name.
[00:23:50] And in 2028, the sealed files from that court martial in Germany are due to be opened at last.
[00:23:58] Thirty years after his death, "Mad Mike" Calvert may finally get his answer.
[00:24:06] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on "Mad Mike" Calvert.
[00:24:10] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:24:14] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:19] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
