Road of Bones Read online

  From their first meeting Laverty treated Richards as a man he would only do business with out of necessity. As for Richards’s orders stating that he commanded all the troops in Kohima, Laverty ignored them. ‘The position as it so transpired’, wrote Richards, ‘was that Laverty regarded himself as under command of Warren … Warren so regarded Laverty. My orders were quite specific. I was placed in operational control of all [author’s italics] troops in Kohima.’ If Warren had decided to give orders directly to Laverty there was precious little Richards could do. The garrison now had two separate commands: Laverty directed the operations of his men, while Richards was left in command of the Assam Regiment and the various other detachments of local and composite troops. All Richards would say publicly was that ‘my relations with the CO were strained and I found him difficult to deal with’. Laverty now believed himself to have ‘virtually assumed command of the defenders of Kohima’. It was humiliating and frustrating for Richards and would take all his reserves of patience to endure.

  While the exchange between Laverty and Richards was going on, the West Kents’ various companies were deployed. Ray Street and his C company comrades were sent to Detail Hill, close to the centre of the defence; Major John Winstanley’s B company was despatched to Kuki Piquet, adjacent to Garrison Hill; Donald Easten’s D company was detailed as the reserve; the battalion headquarters company under the schoolmaster Major Harry Smith joined A company on Garrison Hill, where Laverty set up his own command post a little way from Richards’s but further up the slope. Laverty’s trench was about nine feet long, with room for himself, four of his officers and the all-important wireless set. He immediately ordered telephone lines to be run out to each of the company positions and to Richards’s post just down the slope.

  John Faulkner sent a party of men back to the road to collect their baggage, including essential bedding, from the trucks. A sergeant returned with bad news. Faulkner wrote down the exchange:

  ‘Christ, sir! There’s a hell of a mess down there.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Japs are shelling the trucks and most of the Indian drivers have fucked off back to Dimapur.’

  Faulkner raced down to the roadway and saw the trucks blazing and oil leaking everywhere. A water main had been punctured, probably the garrison lifeline from Aradura, and ‘a dozen miniature fountains’ were spraying the road and the boxes of mortars and grenades strewn across it. Faulkner could find no sign of his own kitbag. He made his way back up the hill and heard a voice calling out, ‘Would you mind giving the doctor a hand sir.’ Looking round, he saw a West Kent soldier lying between two native bashas with blood streaming from his arm. The man spoke quietly and was waiting for the medic, who was busy dealing with another casualty. The second man was ‘lying on his back in a grotesque attitude, his shoulder smashed’. Faulkner handed the doctor bandages and scissors as he needed them. Then he helped hold the ‘poor chap’ down as the doctor applied a tourniquet. ‘What happened?’ he asked the doctor. ‘Jap machine gun caught them in here,’ came the reply. Faulkner felt very scared. The same machine gun could easily open up again. But the medical officer kept working, quickly and quietly. When it was done, Faulkner ‘pushed off, covered in someone else’s blood and feeling a little sick’. His baptism by fire was not over. Heading back to his own position he heard two loud bangs. Two Sikhs with 3.7 inch Howitzers were trying to find the range of the Japanese guns. Faulkner had only gone a few steps when he was blown on to his face by a salvo of Japanese mortars. He heard a scream of agony and a yell for stretcher-bearers. Faulkner moved quickly to his own trench. The four-gun mountain artillery battery that had accompanied the West Kents was deployed in the bungalow area. The commander, Major Richard Yeo, was talking to Hugh Richards when the Japanese opened fire. Enemy observers had seen the guns being assembled and brought into position.

  Richards ran for cover while Yeo tried to bring his guns into action. It was futile. The Japanese would knock them out once they had the range. Yeo hid the guns and decided he and his men would act as observers for 161 Brigade artillery outside the perimeter. It was a decision that probably did more to prolong the life of the garrison than any other.

  Ray Street had a lucky escape from the Japanese guns. He and the runner from Easten’s D company were in a trench behind a tree but feared it was too obvious a target. They moved further up the hill and started digging again. ‘We were worn out and lay in our trench to rest.’ He looked out and saw a man standing in the doorway of a basha, close to one of the water tanks. Suddenly a shell exploded on the spot and the man vanished, blown to pieces by a direct hit. Street threw himself down as more shells screamed over. When the barrage ended he looked down and saw that his old trench behind the tree had been blown up.

  Private Norman was shouting to a corporal to jump into the pit he was sharing with his friends Dick Johnson, a bank messenger in civilian life, and Ernie Thrussel, a bookbinder. No sooner had the corporal arrived in the pit than a mortar exploded a yard from where he had been standing. To make matters worse, the food-conscious Norman was left unfed, there being no ‘tiffin, dinner or tea’, only endless firing. At about half past five he witnessed an unsettling spectacle. An Indian unit sharing the position was mortared and ‘they started running away but we drove them back. We were told we were only here to stop [them] running away.’* Towards nightfall Ray Street heard that the Japanese had closed the ring around Kohima. The rest of 161 Brigade was down the road and cut off from the garrison, and in the process of being cut off from Dimapur. Sato had carried out a double encirclement. Hopes of being reinforced ‘within a day or two’ evaporated. As Major Donald Easten put it, ‘the door was shut behind us and that was it. It was as close as that.’

  At the other end of the perimeter from where the West Kents had arrived, a fierce battle was taking place on Jail Hill. Lieutenant Bruce Hayllar was told by Richards to take another hastily formed unit and go up Jail Hill to help the Assam Regiment and other defenders. His immersion in combat had been short and swift, but he had learned an important truth: ‘You don’t lead people in battle. You drive them!’ He screamed at men who were simply holding on to their rifles to shoot at the Japanese. As he pushed the Indian soldiers up Jail Hill men fell dead around him.

  When some of his troops made to flee, Hayllar forced them back at bayonet point. At one point he turned to the sergeant and asked him who was in charge. ‘You are,’ he said. When Hayllar asked where the other officers were, the man pointed to a dead soldier lying on the ground. ‘Now you’ve got to decide what to do,’ he shouted. Very soon after that Hayllar was shot himself. The bullet struck him in the back and his courage vanished. ‘The Japs were close and all my nerve went like a pricked balloon. I staggered up and fled flat out for safety.’ Before leaving he had seen his orderly, a Muslim soldier from the Punjab named Allahadad, shot dead. The guilt over his death would live with Hayllar for years. ‘He had a wife and a little son in India … I was the silly volunteer. He was just someone who was told to go.’

  Jail Hill was turning into a charnel house for the defenders. By 10 a.m. on 6 April the forward positions had been lost. A petrol dump was struck by Japanese fire. Clouds of acrid black smoke now billowed into the sky, choking attackers and defenders alike. With streaming eyes and chests heaving with dry coughing, men looked frantically through the smoke for the enemy. Japanese mortars blasted groups of Indian stragglers who tried to shelter near the jail itself. With no NCOs or officers to steady them, they blundered around, screaming in panic and agony as the mixed force of British, Indian and Burmese troops was driven off Jail Hill.

  The only hope of regaining the position was a counter-attack by the best infantry in the garrison. A message was sent to Laverty, who in turn summoned Donald Easten. As commander of the reserve, Major Easten could expect to be given the nasty jobs that cropped up around the perimeter. Laverty was under the impression that the position was occupied by no more than a platoon of Japanese. Accordingly, h
e sent only a platoon to try to dislodge them. Easten soon realised the odds were against him and the attack was called off. Hugh Richards estimated that two hundred men were killed or wounded in the fighting at GPT Ridge and Jail Hill. The Japanese were also bleeding heavily. At GPT Ridge alone they lost 110 men. Lieutenant Shosaku Kameyama, wounded in the jaw at Sangshak where he had seen his company reduced to twenty battle-fit men, was horrified at the fresh casualties. ‘One hundred and ten men killed just to break through a position!’ The southern perimeter now began at Detail Hill, where Ray Street and C company were entrenched. Soon the Japanese were pounding the West Kents from the newly captured positions at a range of a couple of hundred yards. The defenders had one big advantage, however. There was a high bluff on their side of the road. It would prove a formidable obstacle for the Japanese trying to cross and scale the ridge in the days ahead.

  Laverty was trying to identify gaps in the core defences around Garrison Hill and Pawsey’s bungalow. On his last visit to Kohima he had been quartered at the Treasury, which now lay outside the northern perimeter and was within easy sniping and mortar range of Pawsey’s bungalow; it was important but had been abandoned by Richards before the siege because he lacked the troops to defend it. Laverty now saw it as a serious threat to the garrison and went to Richards’s headquarters to press for a company to be sent. Richards was away visiting other positions and his second-in-command refused Laverty’s request. The West Kents’ CO did not let the issue drop. He eventually got Richards to send a company of the Shere Regiment out to the Treasury. By now Richards was well aware of the quality of the Shere Regiment and its capacity for bolting, but he had no other troops to turn to. The force of Laverty’s personality may have decided the matter.

  The company of the Shere Regiment was duly sent; rifle fire was heard coming from the Treasury, and the company ran back. They left an officer and several men behind, claiming the Treasury was held by the Japanese and their attack was a failure. But at dawn Richards had a message from the missing officer saying that he held the Treasury and needed the rest of the company. The familiar fiasco followed. ‘I sent the company out again. No further communication was received from the Treasury, nor was the company seen again.’ The British officer sent to command the Shere troops, Captain Jimmy Patrick, 7 Gurkha Rifles, wrote his own account of what happened. ‘The troops refused to pass the field of fire of a sniper. Had to double across first before others would follow. All then crossed safely. Crossed main road in the glare of burning transport and advanced along south side of spur towards Treasury Knoll. Used shadows cast by clouds crossing moon to cross road between us and pine-clad slopes leading up to Treasury lawn … solitary Jap threw firecracker. Discovered whole company had fled hurriedly, leaving me alone on lawn. Went down to foot of slope, and managed to reform two platoons to try again. No firecracker this time but same chicken-heartedness. All ran away. After much effort, gathered together two platoons out of three who started out, and withdrew to Kohima. Reported failure.’

  There was one shred of good news. A company of the 4/7 Rajput, who had fought alongside the West Kents in the Arakan, made it through the Japanese lines to reinforce the garrison. They would be the last British and Indian troops to do so for a fortnight. Richards called a conference at his headquarters. Word was sent to ‘Bruno’ Brown of the Assam Regiment, Major Keene of the Assam Rifles, and John Laverty. Laverty did not appear. ‘At the time I thought nothing of it,’ Richards said, ‘there were plenty of reasons why he could have been elsewhere.’ But Richards’s attempt at establishing his leadership was being ignored. When he went to see Laverty at the West Kents’ headquarters, immediately above his own position, Richards found that he seemed to resent his presence. ‘I tried my best to get close to him but he remained aloof and his attitude to officers of the Garrison was quite unjustified. It should have been possible to work closely together and the fact that it was not was no fault of mine. Instead of help I got no cooperation.’ When Richards sought to borrow a charger for the garrison wireless set – his own had broken down – Laverty refused him. It may well have been because Laverty wanted to protect his own communications, but it meant that all radio traffic to the outside had to pass through him. Laverty’s direct line to Warren at 161 Brigade headquarters shut out Richards.

  At ten o’clock that night, Laverty called Warren and gave his report. ‘All quiet except for occasional shelling. Main threat from south, but skin not yet punctured. Body threatened by pin-pricks on all sides except right shoulder. Am trying to evacuate wounded and non-combatants tomorrow. That’s all – off.’ Shells smashed into Detail Hill as night fell. The defenders, battle-tested warriors and terrified amateurs alike, pressed themselves deep into their dugouts. Outside, the Japanese were digging, crawling into position, forming themselves into attacking formations. From now on, there would be no rest, only days and nights of screaming and death.

  * * *

  * This account is based on the anonymous statements of Laverty and other West Kent officers to Arthur Campbell for his book The Siege (Allen and Unwin, 1956). Hugh Richards was indignant and described the impression of morale collapse within the garrison as ‘disgraceful’. It would later become the subject of a bitter dispute between Richards and Laverty and their respective supporters (see Chapter 26).

  * IWM, file no. 81/16/1, Diary of Private Harold Norman. Norman refers here to the Assam Rifles running away, but this is not consistent with the recorded facts. According to the garrison diary, Norman’s C company was positioned on Detail Hill with two platoons of Mahratta Light Infantry and an Indian composite company. It is more likely that he mistook the latter for the Assam Rifles, who were actually based at Hospital Ridge and IGH Spur.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘Hey! Johnny, Let Me Through’

  John Faulkner felt the round snap by him. The sniper had a good line on his position. Rounds had been flying since daylight. Sitting in his trench and hoping the war would pass him by was not an option. He was a novice and the veterans of A company watched his reactions continuously. They had not been touched by the panic of the deserters from some of the garrison units, but all it took was one scared officer and things might be very different. Faulkner went first to the cookhouse and ate breakfast and then headed for the road to try and recover some of the kit, including bedrolls, left during the shelling of the previous day. Many of the West Kents had spent the cold, damp night huddled up in trenches without bedding. As he moved down the hill, Faulkner met Lance Corporal John Harman. Faulkner would have found Harman a difficult person to understand – not that it was personal, it was just that he disliked people who didn’t attempt to fit in. ‘He was typical of his generation,’ his daughter Margery recalled, ‘he was a conformist, very aware of status.’ When they met, Harman was scanning a track which ran along GPT Ridge. ‘Snipers on that track,’ he warned Faulkner. As they spoke, an Indian soldier darted along the track. A shot rang out and dust exploded at the soldier’s heels. He kept running and reached the cover of a wall, where he turned to shout in joy. Survival at Kohima was based on the most slender margins.

  Faulkner ran out himself. ‘I heard the “thump” of a bullet as it passed over the track behind me.’ Looking back, he saw Harman ‘strolling unconcernedly down with one hand in his pocket’. Once more fate had smiled kindly on the soldier from Lundy Island. Faulkner himself endured a terrifying scuttle around the litter of abandoned and burned-out vehicles. The moment he stuck his head out from behind a vehicle a round cracked past. He dodged from truck to jeep to truck, but only found a few 3 inch mortar rounds. ‘Every little helped,’ he said. What stuck in his mind was the strange good luck of Lance Corporal Harman. Faulkner was probably too new in the battalion to have heard the stories about Harman from the Arakan; his daredevil sniping from paddy fields, how he shot a cow to get meat for his men, and the assurance he gave to Donald Easten that he would live to a ripe old age. Harman was living up to an image of himself that he had nurtured, as the immort
al outsider who disdained the path of privilege. His fellow soldiers had long ago lost the habit of sneering at his posh accent and manifest eccentricity. Easten regarded him as the best infantryman in D company but was troubled by his strangeness. To stay alive in war a man must respect the instinct for self-preservation. He can never do it entirely of, course; battle is about facing the risk of death or maiming. But every soldier will recognise the sane margins of behaviour; a man with such contempt for snipers has either crossed the line from bravery to recklessness or is seeking a glory in death that has been impossible for him to find in life. Harman was ready for glory.

  By the afternoon of 6 April, the road to Dimapur was finally closed to all traffic. Hopes of moving casualties out by that route vanished. Medical arrangements within the perimeter were seriously inadequate. The hospital was under fire from mortars and machine guns; there were several small regimental aid posts but no advanced dressing station for treating serious cases, and no central point where casualties could be brought and assessed – the crucial task of triage, in which men are separated into the doomed and the saveable. Nor was there a senior medical officer present who could direct operations. This left Richards and Laverty to manage large numbers of wounded men in a heavily shelled area at the same time as fighting a battle for the garrison’s survival. They needed a well-protected dressing station with deep interconnected and ventilated bunkers where surgeons could work in safety and relative cleanliness. That was clearly impossible now. What they got instead was one of the most remarkable men in the history of war medicine.

  On the afternoon of 6 April, an officer, ‘slight and wiry of figure’, arrived in Kohima, escorted by a handful of Indian soldiers. Lieutenant Colonel John Young, commanding officer of 75th Indian Field Ambulance, was by this stage an old friend of the West Kents. His surgeons and orderlies had treated the wounded and dying in the Arakan; Young himself had been present at the tunnels when the West Kents were mauled by their own artillery. He was a cosmopolitan figure, a good polo-player who had once studied art in Vienna, and a keen student of military tactics; he spoke fluent Urdu and, most importantly, his presence in a field hospital calmed men. Young had the gift of appearing unafraid, which is not to say that he felt no fear but that he had learned to master it. To a grievously wounded man, listening to shells landing close by, the face of the calm doctor was a last link with hope.