The Tragic Destiny of Basil Blackwood

April 2014

In his last letter, written to his children on March 24, Basil expressed excitement about the tough fighting and very real danger. Though surrounded and attacked by the enemy, he was still confident of victory:

At the moment I am in a camp in a plain which has got the Japs all round it, so we have got to get all our food and ammunition and all things dropped to us from aeroplanes every day. But we get plenty so we are all right. I was just about the last car to get through on the road before these Japs closed it, so I was in luck.

So now we are like a besieged city in olden days (like Troy). I am writing this in a slit trench as it is six o'clock and the sun is going down so the Japs are shelling us and I'm afraid they are going to attack us again tonight. They attacked us the night before last and got into the middle of our position but we drove them out and counted 300 dead bodies the next morning which was jolly good, though they killed a few of ours which was very sad.

Printed sources, including the official British history of the Burma campaign, The War Against Japan, Vol. IV: The Reconquest of Burma (HMSO, 1965), romantically but mistakenly state that Basil died in Ava or even in Fort Dufferin in Mandalay. In fact, he was killed in a Japanese ambush on March 25, 1945, on a covert mission with the Indian Field Broadcasting Unit (IFBU), more than 100 miles south-west of Mandalay.

In Telegram from Guernica, the biography of the war correspondent George Steer who was also killed in Burma, Nicholas Rankin wrote that Basil was filmed just before his death: "Stanley Charles was a combat cameraman with the South-East Asian Command Film Unit, who were roving film reporters. In Burma in March 1945, Charles met a ‘very pleasant' captain who invited him to film the IFBU at work. Charles filmed them putting up their apparatus, which included a loudspeaker on a tripod, then broadcasting surrender terms in Japanese to an enemy unit in a tunnel on a hill, with the captain lying prone. He was still filming from about 75 yards away when a Japanese mortar fired on the Indian Field Broadcasting Unit and killed the captain." Basil's family was notified of his death through diplomatic channels by the Crown Princess of Sweden; his body was never recovered.

The recently discovered military documents include full-face and profile photographs of Basil, in captain's uniform, which show his dark hair and skin and his attractive, aristocratic features. In his SOE Personnel History Sheet he wrote that his religion was Church of Ireland, his profession politics. He had "considerable knowledge" of India and Burma in 1930; experience in the Indian Franchise Commission (on voting rights) in 1932; and extensive travel through "all colonial possessions," including Mauritius, Zanzibar, Tanganyika, Aden and Hadramaut in the Arabian peninsula, as well as Madagascar and Albania, when he was Secretary for Colonies. He had a speaking, reading and writing knowledge of French, and noted his other interests as shooting, golf, literature and racing.