Road of Bones Read online

  Nearly three hundred miles away in the Arakan, Ray Street, the runner with C company, 4th battalion, the Royal West Kents, was making the most of his rest after the battle of the tunnels. Brigadier Warren addressed the men on parade and told them of his regret at the loss of so many lives. They were based in a deserted village and camped in the empty bashas. New men started to arrive as replacements for those killed at the tunnels. Most of the new faces were Welsh and that night, over some beers, the West Kents welcomed them with a sing-song. Street and some others found a lake and waded in, only to find that it was just a foot deep. ‘We stripped off and dashed towards the lake, naked like a crowd of eager school kids … we made the most of it splashing and cooling off.’ There were parcels from home. Street received cigarettes and chocolate, and there were extra rations of beer and food. The entertainers George and Beryl Formby were flown in and Street recalled how Beryl was persuaded ‘to sit on the back of an elephant … the elephant sat down and she slid off. Of course everyone erupted with laughter.’

  Street was resting in the shade of his basha when an NCO came and told him to tell the company commanders to report to battalion headquarters. His instinct told him it meant trouble. On 23 March the battalion was placed on two hours’ notice to move. Lieutenant Colonel Laverty had been told about the Japanese offensive developing along the Chindwin but he was struggling to get information on the West Kents’ exact destination. A measure of his frustration can be gleaned from an entry in the battalion war diary: ‘One formation approached for information seriously suggested reference to … [military] newspapers.’ Two days later, Laverty received his orders and briefed his officers and NCOs. The battalion was to move to the airstrip at Dohazari and would be flown from there to the front.

  Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes remembered being told that the Japanese were threatening Dimapur and that if they got there it would cause serious trouble, ‘because India at the present time was still a troubled place. I didn’t think they had too much care for the British anyway and the Japanese might have had a lot of sympathy there.’

  The entire 5th Indian Division of 15,000 men would be flown, along with artillery, vehicles and mules, into the battle zone over the next few days, in 748 sorties. Laverty and his headquarters staff left for Dimapur on 27 March, followed two days later by the rest of 4th battalion and their comrades in the 1/1 Punjab and 4/7 Rajput. The men were crammed on to barges for the journey to the airstrip at Taungbro. No sooner had they embarked than they were told that the troops sent to replace them in the Arakan were in trouble and that they might have to go back and help them. Everybody climbed off the barges. The rumour proved false. The men and mules were loaded once more, amid much swearing. Arriving at the village of Taungbro, they were told they would have to march the rest of the way. There were more curses and muttering. But the men were in high spirits as they marched through the forest to the airstrip. Waiting officers saw the dust from the advancing column rise above the tree tops. The men were singing:

  Japs on the hilltop

  Japs in the Chaung

  Japs on the Ngadkedauk

  Japs in the Taung

  Japs with their L. of C. far too long

  As they revel in the joys of infiltration.

  On arrival they were given water and fresh food. There was time to purchase chocolate, cigarettes, soap and razors from the nearby base. Private H. F. Norman spent his waiting time at the airstrip eating a large breakfast and getting a haircut and shave from the nappi wallah. At some point he got into a conversation with an American aircrew member and told him how much he wanted to visit New York. The Yank replied that, as he came from the west, he hated the city.

  Lieutenant Tom Hogg was dispatched to the airstrip early by Laverty to oversee the loading of the RAF Dakotas and the larger American C-46 Commandos. The airstrip was nothing more than a clearing hacked out of the jungle. Above it hung a thin drift of mist. Along the fringes of the forest cover there were anti-aircraft positions, manned by Sikhs who had downed a Japanese fighter three days before. It was one of the few Japanese aircraft to get past the squadrons of Spitfires dominating the skies. Hogg watched the guns being dismantled, probably for the first time since North Africa, and listened to the curses of the gunners. Next came the mules, which were loaded six to a Dakota. ‘Immediately the engines roared into action,’ Hogg recalled, ‘the Mules urinated and the results leaked through the floor and collected in the bottom of the fuselage where it sloshed about among the electrics … The tropical humidity and high temperatures created a powerful odour of which the aircrew did not approve.’

  Donald Easten of D company, now promoted to major, was amused by the technique used to get the mules on board the aircraft. On either side of the aircraft doors were two rings. A rope was tied to one of the rings and then looped past the mule’s backside to the second ring to act as a pulley. ‘Then as many men as were required pulled and the poor old mule went zipping up the thing.’ The Americans were unsentimental about obstreperous mules that might endanger the aircraft. An animal that became unruly in the air was immediately shot. The jeeps, too, had to be loaded. This was done by bouncing them from the ramp through the plane’s loading door, and then bumping them by hand into the narrow interior.

  After his troops had boarded, Donald Easten remembered an American crewman sticking his head through the door and barking instructions. ‘There’s a guy called “Slide Rule” is gonna be comin’ round here,’ the American said, ‘and he if tells you to move something you move it. OK?’ The careful distribution of weight was essential to keep the aircraft from crashing. ‘Slide Rule’ duly appeared and ordered ammunition to be moved here and there. Ray Street remembers how the navigator kept telling them that if they saw any Japanese they were to shoot through the windows with their Bren guns. ‘That didn’t do much for our confidence.’ Most of the men had never been on an aircraft before.

  These Yanks were tired, scruffy and unshaven. They swore at the Indians loading the planes if they slowed down for a moment. A mobile canteen stood next to the line of aircraft and crew members would break off periodically to wolf down breakfast. The pressure of time on these men was enormous. While the aircrew slept for a few hours, the ground technicians worked through the night to prepare the aircraft.

  The RAF account described, in typically understated fashion, the touch-and-go nature of the operation. ‘It was, in fact, a matter for speculation whether this enemy thrust would be started before the fly-in.’ The airlift shuttled men to both Dimapur and Imphal. There were, after all, two potential sieges to worry about. The Japanese 33 and 15 Divisions were still fighting towards Imphal while Sato’s 31 was advancing into the Naga Hills. Crammed together in the sweaty interiors of the Dakotas and Commandos, the men heard the engines roar and felt the aircraft rattle as they took off across the jungle towards Dimapur. Private Ivan Daunt was sitting next to a cockney who asked the American aircrew why they had parachutes and the West Kents didn’t. ‘Because it’s our plane,’ came the reply. The cockney responded by leading his comrades in song:

  We are the West Kent boys.

  We are the West Kent boys.

  When we are marching down the Old Kent road,

  the doors and windows open wide,

  then you’ll hear the people shout,

  put those bloody Woodbines out,

  ’cos you are the West Kent boys.

  * * *

  * Slim’s intelligence came from an eclectic variety of sources, most of which operated without coordinating their activities. There were no fewer than five organisations gathering information on the ground: the patrols of V and Z Force, the SOE (Special Operations Executive), led Force 136, the MI6-controlled ISLD (Inter-Services Liaison Department), and the Burma Intelligence Corps. In addition to this was signals intelligence gathered by the Ultra code breakers based at the Wireless Experimentation Centre (WEC) in Delhi. According to an account written by Alan Stripp, who worked on Ultra at WEC, Slim had access to ‘ope
rational and movement orders, strength returns and locations which … gave General Slim a complete order of battle of the Japanese force.’ (P. 167 Codebreaker in the Far East, Alan Stripp, Oxford University Press, 1989.) Stripp was quoting his superior and the man who organised the distribution of the Ultra Intelligence, Group Captain F.W. Winterbotham. Winterbotham was later criticised for overstating the importance of Ultra in some operations.

  * Brown was deputy commander before taking over full command on 27 December, 1941. The 1st Assam spent the first two years of its existence on jungle training excercises, patrolling remote areas of the border and doing garrison duty at the Assam oil fields at Digboi.

  * The Japanese 33 Division and some elements of 15 Division had crossed the Chindwin on 8 March.

  * Operation Thursday was launched on 5 March 1944 and landed up to 10,000 men of Special Force, along with artillery and mules, at two remote jungle clearings. It was the largest airborne operation in history up to that point. On the second day the Chindit leader, Major General Orde Wingate, was killed in a plane crash. Operation Thursday caused some disruption to Mutaguchi’s lines of communication and the Chindits helped the American General Joseph Stillwell and his Chinese troops in the capture of the northern Burmese city of Myitkyina in August 1944. The overall impact on the battles at Kohima and Imphal was negligible, although the Chindit 23 Brigade harried General Sato’s lines of communication.

  * Mullen arrived in Imphal in time to be debriefed and his intelligence was sent to 14th Army on 24 March. What he witnessed indicated something larger than a regimental sized crossing of supplies and ancillary troops, yet the information was not passed on to the garrisons in the way of the 31st Division advance. Cited in Leslie Edwards, Kohima – The Furthest Battle (History Press, 2009), p. 68.

  * One was the 50th Indian Parachute Brigade and the other two were Chindit units, not designed for the defensive role the situation demanded. Writing in March 1945 Giffard said he had ‘for many months been anxious to increase the strength of 4 Corps by another division; but the low capacity of the line of communication had prevented its maintenance in that area and I had to be content with one extra brigade … with the start of the Japanese offensive, administrative risks had to be taken and General Slim decided to move 5 Indian Division from Arakan to Imphal-Kohima area … the move was finished on the 12th of April.’ (General Sir George J. Giffard, Commander-in-Chief, 11 Army Group, South-East Asia Command, ‘Operations in Burma and North-East India from 16th November, 1943 to 22nd June 1944’, Despatch submitted to the Secretary of State for War on 19 June 1945, supplement to the London Gazette, Monday 19 March 1951 (HMSO).

  * Indian troops were not used as reinforcements in British regiments.

  * Grover was born in the Punjab, the son of an Indian Army major, and was sent to England as a boy to be educated at Winchester and Sandhurst. He was wounded three times in France during the Great War and awarded the Military Cross, before being posted to India where he spent most of the inter-war years. During 1939 and ’40 he was in France as a staff officer before being appointed to command 2 Division in 1941.

  † ‘On the Silence of General Grover’, Gordon Graham (Dekho!, Winter, 2009). Major Gordon Graham, MC, of the Cameron Highlanders, recalled that after being shipped to India in April 1942 the division was greeted less than wholeheartedly by the colonial authorities. ‘At troop level, evidence of a cool welcome was confinement, for ten days after our arrival, to troopships, which we had now occupied for two months … to GHQ India, the 2nd Division became a prolonged headache and it was mutual.’

  * A decade after the war Slim told the Official Historian that he had been ‘too optimistic about the way the Imphal battle would go.’ He had been asked why he had committed six divisions to the Arakan while 4 Corps ‘was left with its original three divisions to meet the enemy offensive …’ It was the critical question. ‘Obviously in view of what happened I ought to have done so [placed more troops in Assam], and if you say I made a mistake I will not contradict you,’ Slim wrote to the historian. He explained that he was anxious for an emphatic victory in the first major test of the new army in the Arakan, that there were worries about being able to maintain extra reinforcements in Imphal due to the number of non-combatants building the base there, and that he had calculated there would be enough time to move troops to the north east to meet the expected threat there. (Cited in Ronald Lewin, Slim, The Standard Bearer (Wordsworth Military Library, 1999 edition), pp.159–60.

  TWELVE

  Flap

  When the telegram came on 20 March, Colonel Hugh Richards might have wondered what fresh misfortune was about to befall him. The colonel had set his heart on fighting with Wingate’s Chindits but, having completed the rigorous training, he was told that at the age of forty-nine he was too old for the jungle. Those who had served with Richards in West Africa, where he had commanded 3 West African Infantry Brigade, thought Wingate’s decision ‘total nonsense’ and an injustice to ‘an enormously popular commander’. He had spent the war until that point on the sun-withered northern border of Nigeria preparing to attack the neighbouring Vichy colonies. But when the French declined to resist the allied occupation of Timbuktu the West Africans were sent to India and given to Wingate. The Army Group Commander, General Sir George Giffard, was a fellow veteran of West Africa and had known Richards for years. He gave the unhappy colonel a job as commander of the Delhi area, an unappealing sideshow in which a man might languish indefinitely in boredom. The March telegram from General Giffard brought what appeared to be good news. Richards was to leave Delhi immediately and fly to Imphal. From there he would travel up to Kohima and take command of the garrison. There is no trace in the military records of an explanation as to why the commander of a West African brigade, recently rejected by Wingate, had been chosen for this task; Richards had no experience of commanding Indian and Burmese troops, who provided the majority of the garrison, and he had never fought the Japanese.

  The appointment might have had a lot to do with the exigencies of war when the British were still scrambling to catch up with the pace of the Japanese advance. Richards’s African bond with Giffard may also have helped push him to the forefront. But the appointment also had something to do with the personality of Hugh Richards himself. He had a reputation for being steady. When Giffard was told to send an officer to hold Kohima, he replied, ‘I will send you someone who will do that.’ Tall and strongly built, Hugh Upton Richards wore a slim moustache and an expression of calm. He was not a fire-eater or a martinet. Like the man who would become his great friend, Charles Pawsey, Richards had been tested in the fire of the Western Front, and was another of the few who had survived from 1914 through to 1918. Like Pawsey, he had also been taken prisoner.

  Richards came from a middle-class family in Worcestershire and joined up as a private before being commissioned in the field in 1915. His experience in the ranks gave him a sympathy for the ordinary soldier that would prove invaluable when it came to the desperate onslaughts on the trenches at Kohima. Between the wars in Nigeria he befriended an Australian oil engineer, a man of some wealth, who helped the eternally penurious Richards with funds to educate his son. ‘This man was a truly generous person. I think he admired my father who was a kind and upright person,’ his son recalled. ‘My father loved that life in Africa. He could live properly there and not constantly worry about money the way he had to at home.’ Between the wars he also served in Palestine.

  Hugh Richards’s orders were clear on the issue of command: ‘You will be in operational control of all [author’s italics] the troops in KOHIMA and of 1 Assam Regiment.’ This would assume great importance for Richards as the battle developed and he came to appreciate the challenge of working with a man as tough and self-contained as the CO of 4th battalion, the Royal West Kents, Lieutenant Colonel John Laverty.

  On 22 March Richards flew to Imphal and the following day he boarded a two-seater plane for the short flight to Dimapur, ‘touching down on a
rough airstrip which seemed to be in the middle of nowhere … nothing but jungle was visible from the airstrip’. Richards was taken to Charles Pawsey’s bungalow where Pawsey immediately gave permission for him to establish a garrison headquarters at the residence. Captain Walter Greenwood, who acted as Richards’s staff captain, remembered that it was ridiculously overcrowded. At any time there could be up to fifteen staff officers working in the small building, along ‘with any visitor who happened to drop in’.

  Richards toured the defences and was shaken. ‘I had been told there were no defences, but even so, I was appalled at what I found.’ Part of the problem was that the existing commander had only recently emerged from a three-week hospital stay. Those who had been charged with building defences in his absence had been tardy. Richards noted: ‘Trenches had in many cases not been dug by men who had a knowledge of what was required to provide protection against high explosive. They were too wide and few had any head cover.’ Hugh Richards, veteran of the Western Front, understood the necessity for strong trenches. The digging had been done by Naga labourers and not by soldiers. He also noticed that the troops were organised into small box formations, placed near the main installations such as hospitals and stores. But they were too widely dispersed and could easily be picked off by the enemy. Astonishingly there was no barbed wire.*

  Of equal concern was the constant change in overall garrison strength. Lorries were leaving and arriving at a dizzying rate. Some carried supplies and ammunition, others came to bring men from the hospital down to Dimapur. As an official account put it: ‘The[re was] constant fluctuation of the Garrison. Many units were moved without reference to Garrison HQ, and the size of the Box and the number of troops available to man it were therefore almost impossible to compute.’ An Indian Army officer, Lieutenant Dennis Dawson, one of the logistics officers based at Kohima, felt sorry for Richards. ‘Nobody took any notice of him, because we came under 253 sub area administratively, and whatever he said, we said, “well you’ll have to go through district.” He didn’t know from one day to another how many troops he had in Kohima at all. Nobody could tell him. We were in a terrible position.’