Road of Bones Read online

  When he looked at the quality of the soldiery available to him, Richards was apprehensive. The best unit, 1st battalion, Assam Regiment, had been deployed to Jessami and Kharasom to delay any Japanese advance. Among the assortment of troops at Kohima there was a battalion from the Royal Nepalese Army, a detachment of Assam Rifles, two companies of Burmese troops, and two platoons of Mahratta Light Infantry. In addition, there were several hundred line of communications troops – signallers, construction teams, cattle controllers – and about two hundred British troops at the reinforcement camp, mostly older soldiers or men recovering from tropical illnesses. Walter Greenwood, a survivor of the fall of Singapore, arrived in Kohima to find the place full of a ‘motley crew of useless mouths and hangers on’ with ‘no real competent soldiers in charge’. Some of the ancillary units such as canteens, rest camps and field hygiene sections were sent back to Dimapur. Greenwood estimated that by the time some 3,000 non-combatants had been evacuated, there were 2,500 men left, but more than half were ancillary troops. The total number of riflemen numbered around a thousand, pulled together from ‘all sorts and services’. Richards was inclined to be generous when speaking of his eclectic band of warriors, reaching back to a memory from the First World War. ‘It struck me that the composition bore some similarity to the line as it was composed in front of Hazebrouck in 1918 when the cooks and the bakers and the butchers turned to [soldiering].’

  Lieutenant Pieter Steyn, a South African serving with the 1st Assam, described the mess. ‘In spite of the deplorable military situation,’ Steyn wrote, ‘a clear plan had not been formulated for the defence of Kohima. Administrative arrangements had been completely disrupted and telephonic communication was chaotic.’ There were three separate telephone exchanges in the town and nobody seemed to know which military sector each was supposed to serve. With such inadequate communications between headquarters and the other sectors, ‘command therefore devolved almost entirely on local commanders, for the most part inexperienced junior officers, who were called on to exercise and assume unexpected responsibilities often beyond their rank’.

  Kohima had been the responsibility of General Scoones at Imphal until 28 March but under mounting pressure himself he was incapable of preparing the defence of the ridge. As Scoones was about to be cut off at Imphal, and with Stopford still on his way, Slim ordered General R.P.L. Ranking, who commanded the rear area and line of communication, to prepare to defend both Dimapur and Kohima. Slim described the appointment as ‘a sudden plunge from administrative duties in a peaceful area into the alarms and stresses of savage battle’. It was a considerable understatement. Ranking was an Indian Army man who was awarded a Military Cross on the Somme before returning to Regimental Headquarters in Uttar Pradesh, but he was not a battlefield general and with the fews day left to him he could only hope that his garrison commander, Hugh Richards, could hold Kohima until reinforcements arrived.*

  As late as 23 March, Richards was being told by his superiors that the narrow jungle paths could not be passed by any force larger than a regiment and that there would certainly be no artillery. The intelligence showed the nearest Japanese were some thirty-five miles east of Kohima. There was one shaft of light. On 24 March Richards looked down the road to see a convoy of trucks grinding up from Dimapur. They were carrying some old friends. The British troops who arrived in Kohima that afternoon were from the 2nd battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment, with whom Hugh Richards had served as second-in-command for three years in Palestine. Since then, they had fought in North Africa and Burma. With new hope, he wrote, ‘I felt reasonably happy about our ability to hold the enemy.’

  In the last days of March General Slim toured the defences at Dimapur with customary cheer, not betraying his unease for a second. ‘As I walked around, inspecting bunkers and rifle pits, dug by non-combatant labour under the direction of storemen and clerks, and as I looked into the faces of the willing but untried garrison, I could only hope that I imparted more confidence than I felt.’

  Throughout India a vast war machine was on the move. General John Grover’s British 2nd Division was crammed into trains heading to Dimapur, and the entire 5th Indian Division, which included the 161 Indian Brigade of which the West Kents were part, was being airlifted. The commander of 161 Indian Brigade, D. F. W. Warren, arrived at Dimapur ahead of the main body of his troops. He was an avuncular figure, an old India hand, well liked by the men, who nicknamed him ‘Daddy’. Warren was acutely conscious of the human cost of his decisions. His son was serving as a company commander in the Arakan.

  At a meeting in Dimapur, Slim gave Warren and the local commander, Ranking, three tasks: prepare the defence of Dimapur and hold it; reinforce Kohima and ‘hold that to the last’; and prepare to receive the large reinforcements that were coming. Slim called Warren outside and walked up and down the path with him. He outlined ‘without any attempt to minimise the hazardous task he was being set, a fuller view of the situation, and especially of the time factor’. In plain language Warren was told to get his troops moving up the road fast. If there were a breakthrough at Kohima, the battle would be lost. Slim’s instinct was to make a stand at Kohima. It offered the best defensive position on the approach to Dimapur. The ridge dominated the road and whoever held it had a huge tactical advantage. But everything was predicated on the defenders holding out until reinforcements arrived from the British 2nd Division.

  General Grover’s 2nd Division was made up entirely of troops from English, Scottish and Welsh regiments. Among the reinforcements was Captain Arthur Swinson of the 7th Worcestershire Regiment, who found his train ‘packed so tight we can hardly move’. At Calcutta on 31 March he bought a copy of the Statesman newspaper, which reported that three Japanese columns were advancing over the frontier. The following morning his train reached the Brahmaputra river in the early mist and the troops transferred to a ferry; he saw from the deck the green hills of Assam and away to the north the mountains of Tibet. They boarded another train and moved through the wet jungle. At lunchtime the war intruded in an unexpected way. Wounded from the Imphal battles appeared. ‘We were having lunch when an ambulance train passed. The tail end of it stopped opposite us for a few minutes and I looked at the rows of weary men. Some sitting up smoking, others lying quite still, but all with a glazed hollow look in their eyes. It does you no good seeing ambulance trains, not when you’re on your way to the front, it doesn’t.’

  Swinson was attached to the staff of 5th Brigade, whose commander, Brigadier Victor Hawkins, was a tall, spare figure, explosive when annoyed and inclined to hound his younger officers into joining him in ostentatious displays of fitness. However, Hawkins was a brave and thoughtful soldier. Although Swinson suffered the lash of his tongue, he wrote, ‘the whole brigade had a great affection for him’, not least because ‘he detested the waste of a single life’.

  Hawkins’s progress to the front had been frustrating and emblematic of the chaos induced by the Japanese advance. When he arrived at Stopford’s headquarters as ordered he ran into a senior officer, who was puzzled by his presence. ‘Hallo, what are you doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘We were told to report here,’ Hawkins replied.

  ‘Oh, we cancelled that last night,’ he was told. Hawkins was to go directly to Dimapur. After a rough night’s sleep in an improvised mess, he went down to the airstrip for his promised flight to Dimapur. Again, there was nobody to meet him. There followed a search of various buildings until he found the aircrew. His temper was not improved by the situation he found at Dimapur. ‘The local situation was staggering. There was no appreciation of the seriousness of the situation, or even of the situation itself … There were some 80,000 unarmed coolies in the base depots liable to stampede at the first shot. There were no immediate defence plans. There were two transit camps full of troops from IV Corps who had now been cut off from their units and could not get back. None of these were organised in any way … discipline seemed to be conspicuous by its absence. In fact, compl
acency was the chief order of the day, and plans were completely lacking.’

  When Stopford arrived to see the situation for himself he was challenged by Hawkins, and ‘things began to alter for the better’. The first of Hawkins’s troops reached Dimapur on the evening of 1 April, and Arthur Swinson had his first brush with death. A soldier clearing his rifle discharged a shot which whizzed past his ear. The Dimapur base was ‘in one big flap’ and what Swinson called the ‘chairborne troops in the L of C area’ were digging trenches and rolling out wire. Wild-eyed Indian drivers were speeding north with only six inches between the trucks, and haggard-looking porters staggered around with huge loads. Refugees were also flooding in, ‘with their whole world on their heads’. Some collapsed and blocked the traffic, but nobody made an effort to assist them. Rumours were flying. There was a story that there were only 10,000 rifles for the 80,000 men in the place; one sentry was allegedly seen with a wooden gun.

  Slim later wrote that he had asked the brigadier commanding the base how many men he was feeding. ‘Forty-five thousand near enough,’ he told the army commander. ‘And how many soldiers can you scrape out of that lot?’ I inquired. He smiled wryly. ‘I might get five hundred who know how to fire a rifle.’ This puts Slim’s nervousness about facing even a regiment of Japanese at this early stage into perspective.

  At dinner Swinson met a Royal Army Medical Corps officer who had been up the road to Kohima and was pessimistic. ‘He didn’t like the look of things and thought the lack of plans was pitiful.’ Swinson went to bed soon afterwards but could not sleep. His nerves were on edge. That night he wrote in his diary: ‘Lord, give us time and we’ll ask nothing else.’

  Lieutenant Bruce Hayllar of the Indian Armoured Corps arrived in Dimapur a day later. He had been pottering about in Secunderabad, where his regiment was training with tanks and troop-carriers, when orders came to go to Dimapur. Before he left there had been a big party. ‘Very, very merry. Played tiger – tossed in the blanket – I got debagged.’ He discovered his trousers up a tree, before staggering to bed at 2 a.m. On his way to Dimapur with fellow officers, Hayllar stopped in Calcutta for four days, waiting for transport to the front. Writing home to his parents on 31 March, his voice is that of the eager public schoolboy, still astonished that he has been given charge of the lives of other men. ‘We had breakfast in bed at 10. We joined the Saturday Club and bathed there daily. We dined at Firpo’s (price about 10/-), we ate luscious cream cakes at a Swiss Café, we sat in the best seats in the best cinemas and saw lovely films. We drank Scotch Whiskey at 2/6 the glass and Indian hooch at 1/- the glass … Everyone there has some sort of story to tell. It was quite the most romantic place I have ever been to. And all of this was heightened because the Japs had started advancing into India and the news wasn’t good.’

  Boarding a train for Dimapur, Hayllar saw some Indian and West African troops squaring up to each other with knives. He put this down to persistent stories of the West Africans bullying the Indians and stealing their women. He finished his letter with an unusual apology. ‘This ending is very bad, sorry, but really can’t write a dramatic sob-stuff ending because I may go nowhere near the fighting. Just assume everything is allright. It always is.’

  Hayllar arrived at Dimapur on 1 April. That night he wrote in his diary, ‘March in circle to rest camp. The biggest shambles you ever saw … the flap on. Raining. Air raid alarm.’ A call went out for officers to volunteer to go up to Kohima and help with the defence. Bored and desperate to see action, Bruce Hayllar immediately stepped forward. ‘I volunteer,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Up the Hayllars!’

  There were also troops pushing through Kohima to help the defence of Imphal. The journey to Kohima was a stomach-churning progress along the steep, winding road. Lieutenant John Hudson, a sapper with 91 Royal Bombay Field Company, experienced constant hold-ups as lorries overheated. His column never went more than 10 miles per hour. Men were thrown from side to side as the trucks lurched around hairpin bends. Worse, there was ‘Burma Road Sickness’, caused by a combination of engine fumes, dust, tobacco smoke, rising heat, a constant backward view and gut-wrenching potholes. ‘Man after man vomited over the stern gate and collapsed into stupor.’ Passing through Kohima, he glimpsed the village ‘set like a jewel on the rim between Assam and Manipur. Whitewashed buildings gleam amongst rich foliage, the red splash of the corrugated tin roof over the Mission Chapel and the mown precision of the tennis court contrasted with the tumbled savagery of the blue-green mountain backdrop.’ It would be one of the last occasions a traveller would ever have such a view of Kohima.

  In the Naga Hills British and local scouts were retreating fast ahead of the Japanese advance. Ursula Graham Bower in remote Cachar was one of the last Europeans to get news of the Japanese attack. On 28 March she heard a radio announcement about the Japanese advancing on a wide front. For the previous eighteen months she had done little soldiering but a great deal of relief work dealing with victims of hunger and disease. On the same day as the broadcast her assistant Namkia announced the arrival of two British soldiers. The sergeants told her that fifty Japanese had been seen in the vicinity. ‘They said “Please Miss have you seen any Japs?” … This was a little startling … Things were looking a little nasty.’ Worse still, she learned that the frontier had been rolled back so that the only British-occupied areas were Imphal, Kohima and the handful of posts held by the Assam Regiment at Jessami and Kharasom. The V Force detachments nearer the Chindwin had either been overrun or had fled. ‘I woke up one morning to find out we were twenty miles behind the front line … we had no troops at that moment and 150 Nagas armed with muzzle-loaders who were supposed to be watching the tracks for agents filtering through.’ Her darkest moment came when Namkia and the other leaders in the group asked for permission to go back to their villages. ‘This is it,’ she thought to herself. She was alone with the Japanese army heading towards her. Twenty-four hours later the Nagas were back. They had gone home to make their wills, say goodbye to their families, and to dress for battle, leaving the sacred heirloom necklaces behind for their sons to inherit. ‘After all,’ Namkia said to Graham Bower, ‘which was the better thing? To desert and live, and hear our children curse us for the shame we put on them; or to die with you, and leave them proud of us for ever?’

  A telegram was sent from V Force telling her to get out of the Cachar district immediately. It crossed with her own cable to headquarters: ‘Going forward to look for enemy. Kindly send weapons and ammunition soonest.’ Graham Bower set about posting her men into the jungle so that they could warn of any Japanese approach. Runners were sent into the hills to call the scouts in from their labour and hunting, and within two days a line of sentries had been established. Graham Bower herself kept to a normal routine, staying in the village even though she knew it would be the first target of any advancing enemy. To sleep in the jungle would have given the impression of panic to the locals. Code words were established. ‘One Elephant’ meant ten Japanese. This had unintended consequences, as Graham Bower later wrote: ‘Somebody caused confusion left and right by turning up on the Silchar border with forty genuine elephants.’

  As the leader of a guerrilla band, Graham Bower could have expected no mercy if captured. A Mr Sharp of the Indian Civil Service had been appointed to the temporary rank of major in V Force and was captured by the Japanese five days later. He was never heard of again. Patrolling in the thick jungle terrified Graham Bower. She watched the faces of the experienced scouts, learned from the way they moved and from the manner in which they listened to the jungle. Without the skill and knowledge of those born to the forest she would not have lasted a day at war. This she always cheerfully acknowledged. She told a story of how a Naga was taking a patrol through particularly dense jungle, walking point ahead of the main group, when he walked straight into a Japanese patrol. Had he doubled back the Japanese would have caught the patrol unawares, so the man stood and fought, killing the leading Japanese before the others ri
ddled him with bullets. Another stayed behind in his village when the Japanese approached, because ‘he was a subject of the king and he was going to do his bit’. The warrior attacked with his spear, sword and shield and killed five Japanese before they shot him.

  Many V Force officers fleeing from the advance owed their survival to the Nagas. Captain Tim Betts, a tea-planter in civilian life, was with a small party of Indian troops when his post was overrun. Betts was seventy miles from Kohima in a direct line but the steep mountains, thick jungles and absence of any road meant the journey was nearly three times that distance. It was Betts’s initial bad fortune to have Kuki tribesmen as scouts. This was the same tribe that had experienced brutal repression at the hands of the British in the 1920 rebellion, with the loss of their harvest and livestock and the destruction of their villages. The scouts rapidly deserted to the Japanese once they arrived.

  Betts kept a diary of his extraordinary escape. On 25 March he recorded: ‘I can’t go on with this cross-country mountaineering. My only chance is the river and the main tracks, and that is the only way we will make progress. If the men won’t come with me we shall soon have to part. I was for getting down to the river again where we could at least get fish and flat going and not this appalling hillside clambering among slipping precipices and gulf-like nullahs.’ He then met some Nagas who gave the group food. But it became clear to Betts that his men were losing the will to keep going. He gave the order to move and began to march himself. After half a mile he stopped and looked around. There was no sign of the troops.