Road of Bones Read online

  Back in the Arakan his men forded waist-high paddy fields under sniper fire to reach casualties. On the first day of Operation Jericho the previous December, they had dealt with eighty-three casualties in the first ninety minutes of combat. By the end of January, Young’s men had evacuated 258 battle casualties and 299 sick, as well as carrying out a mass inoculation of 12,000 civilians against cholera. More prosaically, several gunners of the 24th Mountain Regiment were treated after consuming mushrooms that had produced unexpected effects. ‘Typical symptoms not unlike those of acute alcoholic intoxication were noted. Complete inability to orientation was general. The mushrooms had been eaten fried for breakfast,’ the war diary recorded. By the time the 75th Indian Field Ambulance reached Kohima there was little in the way of sickness or wounds they had not confronted.

  Young’s medical orderlies had been in action at Kohima from the moment the 4th West Kents arrived. When the shelling started, they jumped out of their trucks and began to tend to the wounded. Moments later one of their vehicles took a direct hit. Lieutenant Colonel Young was still at 161 Brigade headquarters when this news arrived. He felt his place was with his men at Kohima. At 0630 hours on 6 April Young was told by Warren that garrison morale was low and the situation in Kohima ‘extremely serious’. Half an hour later the message was reinforced when shells began to land in Warren’s own camp at Milestone 42, outside Kohima.* By 0900 hours Young was meeting Warren once more. Laverty’s second-in-command, Major Peter Franklin, made the perilous journey out of Kohima to report that the medical situation was critical. It was enough for Young who set out on foot with his escort, passing through territory crawling with Japanese patrols to reach Kohima at 1430 hours.

  Young arrived in Kohima with a vigour that must have impressed Hugh Richards. From the outset he treated Richards with the respect due to a garrison commander. He set to work straight away, inspecting the existing facilities, quickly formulating a plan, which Richards accepted. By 1800 hours the majority of the different aid posts were consolidated into an advanced dressing station (ADS) near Laverty’s and Richards’s bunkers; the medical stores were also brought together in the same area. A handful of posts remained with different companies to offer immediate treatment to smaller wounds or to comfort dying men.

  When he arrived, Young found that medical personnel had been pulled away to act as infantry. They were swiftly brought back and given work treating the wounded. In three and a half hours seventy-nine casualties were brought in, given immediate treatment, and had their names recorded. This last was more than an administrative procedure. Recording a man’s name reassures him that he is not going to be forgotten. Lieutenant Bruce Hayllar, wounded in the chaos of Jail Hill, was an early beneficiary of Young’s actions. ‘Young was a very good chap. There was this tiny little trench where we were treated and he was so good there, working non-stop to keep people alive. Also you felt relieved to be lying among men who had also been through it; you didn’t feel so alone.’

  Young asked Laverty for a platoon of pioneers to build a dugout that would shelter up to a hundred casualties; he commandeered a hundred non-combatants to build trenches where more casualties could be accommodated. A team of stretcher-bearers was dispatched to bring in rations and ‘medical comforts’, a probable reference to whisky and rum liberated from the abandoned stores under cover of darkness. By the end of the day, Young could confidently declare to Warren over the West Kents’ radio that the ‘medical situation [was] … fairly satisfactory’. It would not remain that way for long.

  Major Nagaya’s company was in mourning. Nagaya, who had wept for his dead soldiers and for the shame of not recovering their bodies at Sangshak, was gone. The colour-bearer of the 3rd battalion, Lieutenant Hiroshi Yamagami, was in his trench when the news came through. ‘I was told that he went to observe the fighting and he ran into the British and was killed. He fought them with his sword. I felt so very sad about that.’ Nagaya was struck on the head by fragments from a grenade thrown by hidden defenders. Yamagami heard that it had happened when Nagaya stumbled on a British pillbox near Detail Hill. Lieutenant Shosaku Kameyama was nearby and came running to his stricken leader. ‘When I ran to him, he was dead, lying on a makeshift stretcher, a tent sheet tied between two poles.’ A bundle of white wild chamomile had been laid near the major’s nose as a death offering. Captain Kameyama gave orders to cut off a finger from the corpse, cremate it, and send the ashes to the dead man’s family in Japan. Kameyama was heart-sore. ‘Such a genuine man! I had felt that I could go with this man without a hesitation.’

  Having given his orders about the body, Kameyama returned to his company and started to organise men for a frontal attack from the newly captured Jail Hill across to Detail Hill. He wondered about the strain on the younger ones, the replacements drafted in since China. To relieve the tension he formed them up and made a short speech. ‘“You see,” I said to my soldiers, “keep your heads, keep cool. If you want to find out just how cool you are feeling put your hands inside your trousers and feel your penis – if it is hanging down it is good.” I tested mine but it was shrunk up so hard I could hardly grasp it. More than thirty soldiers did the same thing, then looked at me curiously, but I kept a poker face. I said, “Well mine’s down all right. If yours is shrunk up it’s because you’re scared.” Then a young soldier said to me: “Sir, I can’t find mine at all. What’s happening to it?” With this everyone burst out laughing and I knew I had got the confidence of the men.’

  The Japanese waited until nearly 2300 hours and began to move down Jail Hill in small groups. Perhaps because the bright moonlight made concealment impossible, the soldiers formed up without the usual orders for silence. They had won GPT Ridge and Jail Hill in just twenty-four hours and the men were confident Detail Hill would soon be theirs. Lieutenant Hiroshi Yamagami, colour-bearer of the 2nd battalion, was sure the defenders had seen the troops forming up for their attack. There was too much light for them to miss. It was harder for the attackers to spot the defenders hunkered in their trenches. Men who could speak a few words of English were sent up to shout at the defenders. ‘Hey! Johnny, let me through, let me through, the Japs are after me; they’re going to get me.’ But this time there was no response. It was an old tactic: try to establish the defenders’ exact location by getting them to make a noise. The West Kents had experienced this before in the Arakan; the voices in the darkness, shrill echoing cries that rose above the sound of the night insects, confirming that an attack was coming.

  Above them, on the bluff that overlooked the roadway, the West Kents were waiting in their trenches. C company had just endured several hours of shellfire. One round exploded above the commander, Major Shaw, wounding him in the thigh; he was one of the best officers in the battalion but would play no further part in the battle. Shaw may have been a victim of his own tactics. He had ordered the removal of all overhead cover in order to improve his men’s field of fire. His replacement, Captain Phillip Watts, nicknamed ‘Dodo’ after the English film star Dorothy ‘Dodo’ Watts, was a classics scholar from Oxford who had won the Military Cross at Alam Halfa for moving ‘continuously amongst the forward troops encouraging them to close with the enemy … [and] showed great qualities of leadership under very dangerous and difficult conditions.’ Watts spoke quietly to his men. They would wait and hold their fire until he gave the order. Wait until the enemy was very close.

  The C company positions on Detail Hill and overlooking the road were about thirty yards long and twenty yards wide, on top of a hill that was itself only 160 yards long and about forty yards wide in the middle. The hill was overlooked by Japanese positions on the recently taken Jail Hill and could also be fired on from GPT Ridge. Cramped and exposed, the West Kents were also depending on untried garrison troops to hold the northern end of the perimeter. Beside them, on Supply Hill, the next of the Kohima dominoes, Captain Donald Easten’s D company, was providing covering fire.

  At about 2100 hours Private Norman, the devoted gourma
nd of C company, heard picks and shovels clanging and spotted the Japanese digging in nearby. His sergeant, Stanley ‘Butch’ Tacon, ran down the slope and threw grenades at the work party. His speed caught the enemy off guard. Before they could react, the little bombs were exploding among them. A corporal covering Sergeant Tacon shot several more. Between them they killed at least thirteen Japanese before the sergeant returned to his pit.

  An hour and a half later the attack began. There was a shouted order and screaming. Ray Street heard the wave of sound approaching and felt a spasm of terror. ‘The Japs made a hell of a racket, blowing bugles, screaming and shouting, psyching themselves up for the charge.’ He saw the enemy come down Jail Hill and on to the roadway. Then they started to cross the road. The defenders waited. An observer from a mortar platoon crawled to the edge of the bluff to direct fire on the assembling mass. ‘They were about thirty yards away when we let them have it,’ Street recalled.

  Lieutenant Yamagami felt as if the fire was coming from everywhere. Mortars were dropping among men whose screams of agony mingled with the shouts of encouragement from the officers. Yamagami followed his instincts. ‘I jumped into the trench with colour in my hand. I was amazed about the fact that I could momentarily enter into such a small trench at the same time as the enemy’s gunfire broke.’ He was luckier than many of those around him. Scores of men were killed and wounded as successive attacks were broken up.

  Ray Street saw waves of men sweep towards him. ‘We cut them to ribbons but they still got through. There was that many of them.’ Roy Wellings, a C company corporal, was in a forward trench and one of the first West Kents to experience being overrun. He was one of the replacement drafts who had joined the West Kents in India, but had come through the Arakan with the battalion and belonged now as much as any of the old-timers. Roy was the adopted son of parents who had lost two children in the great influenza epidemic of 1918–19. He could not bear to think of them getting a telegram announcing that the boy they had adopted was dead. He fired relentlessly but could not stop the wall of men moving towards him. They ran past, not even stopping to deal with him. At one point he was stabbing vertically with his bayonet as the Japanese ran over the trench. Wellings astonished himself by surviving. It was a short-lived feeling of relief. ‘The only trouble with being an infantryman is that you survive one battle only to go on and fight the next. The feeling of invincibility begins to wear a bit thin.’

  The perimeter was breached near C company headquarters. A cook and two privates were killed before the Japanese were driven back. The situation was so desperate that wounded men refused evacuation in order to stay and fight alongside their comrades. The commander, Captain Watts, was felled by a grenade fragment which struck him in the back. He was the second C company commander to be wounded in twenty-four hours. Watts was taken to join Major Shaw among the wounded and command passed to a B company officer.

  The Japanese frontal assaults had failed. Now the attackers switched around to the northern edge of Detail Hill. Lieutenant Kameyama told his men to leave their knapsacks behind and follow him. The Indian garrison troops here were surprised and quickly overwhelmed. This allowed the Japanese to infiltrate between the C company positions; Kameyama’s men took over some empty bashas while others infiltrated a warehouse and a bakery. From these positions they could fire on C company from behind and were ‘so close in some places that they could throw hand grenades into their trenches’. But if Kameyama did not capture the hill by daybreak and get his men into cover, the West Kents of D company, entrenched on neighbouring Supply Hill, would spot them and start firing. He had two hours before light and there was still fire from C company, at the top of Detail Hill.

  Lieutenant Colonel Laverty had ordered Donald Easten and D company to get across and ‘restore the situation’ on Detail Hill and as the sun came up Easten made his reconnaissance. But the gulley between his positions and the Japanese on Detail Hill was under enemy artillery fire. That made direct assault impossible. He sent one platoon to the north-east, avoiding the enfilading artillery fire, and another to a ridge at the foot of the hill to provide supporting fire. Easten and his headquarters followed the main assault platoon.

  Dawn came and the West Kents’ mortars began pounding Kameyama’s men on Detail Hill. Kameyama could see that Easten’s men were crawling up towards his newly taken positions. The West Kents on Supply Hill were mounting a counter-attack to relieve their brothers. ‘So I had to say, “I will do the job with you. Fight with me to the death.”’ He threw grenades at the oncoming West Kents, watching as one of his section leaders was shot in the head, and another wounded by shell fragments. The supporting fire kept most of the Japanese heads down until Easten’s main assault group reached the bashas and warehouse buildings. Grenades were thrown and Bren guns opened up; mortar rounds fell on the occupied bashas. As the flames crackled the defenders faced the agonising choice of waiting to be consumed by fire or shot by snipers. Many died in the bashas, burned alive or blasted by shellfire. One D company subaltern threw grenades into three bashas and ‘shot at least 12’ Japanese.

  Sergeant Tacon of C company joined in the shooting. A later army account described the horror of that night as if it were a country shoot. ‘His first bag came when Japs were seen scurrying like rabbits out of burning bungalows. He picked 15 off and felt he had had a good day. But he had only got his eye in … Sitting cross-legged in the moonlight atop his trench the next night he killed 20 more … the Japs made another bold rush at 11 in the morning – too bold in fact for Sgt Tacon killed another eleven. His officer told me, “The Sergeant just looked like a gamekeeper. He had a little black Naga dog as his companion to make it even more realistic.”’ Company Sergeant Major Harwood was sitting beside Tacon during the slaughter. ‘He got ’em coming down that bank … there was a big mound of bodies. He had a old stray dog sittin’ with him, and we were knocking these Japs off, left right and centre.’

  A corporal with C company was credited with killing nine men as they ran from the bashas and ‘his next contribution was picking off individual Japs and in his own words “helping them downhill”’. A Japanese officer who hesitated at a small bluff was shot by the corporal, the force of the round sending him sailing ‘through the air, his cloak billowing like a parachute’. In peacetime the corporal was a gamekeeper on the Kent estate of Lord Astor.

  An ammunition dump exploded, adding to the apocalyptic vision that confronted Kameyama. He feared panic would set in. ‘At this stage the only method to defend this place was to stand united. And what we needed was a dependable commander. As I was the only officer there, I pulled out my sword and cried, “Battalion Adjutant Kameyama will command you men here! Survivors of every unit! Come here with your wounded men.”’ About thirty able men and the same number of wounded gathered around him in a circle. They piled bags of soya beans and sugar around them and tried to dig defences, constantly sniped at by Easten’s sharpshooters from other buildings. The trucks parked at the warehouses caught fire and sent flames on to Kameyama’s makeshift sandbags. His men resorted to hurling cans of condensed milk on to the fires. Grenades thrown by D company were bouncing over the warehouse roof and on to Kameyama’s group. The lieutenant told his men to hold up a tent sheet so the grenades would bounce off. But the casualties kept mounting. By the afternoon of 7 April there were only eighteen men capable of fighting. Forced to stay lying down, the Japanese struggled to find a safe angle from which to throw grenades, fearful always that they would drop back on top of them. Eventually Kameyama was ordered to retreat. The example of his dead commander, Major Nagaya, preyed on his mind. He could not leave the dead to rot and send nothing home to their families. After the wounded had been taken off the hill, Kameyama ordered the removal of the dead. He hauled a corpse on to his shoulder and made his way downhill. Kameyama would always remember the cold of the dead man’s head as it pressed into his neck. Of the thirty men who had formed up at the start, nearly half were dead.

  T
he Japanese now held only one position, a bakery, from which machine-gun fire was being directed on to C company. Some of the attackers were taking cover in the ovens. Easten decided to call on the sappers. Lieutenant John Wright of the Bengal Sappers and Miners fastened hard guncotton on to one of the bakery doors, then added a detonator and fuse to make a large bomb. He and Easten ran towards the bakery, slammed the door against the brick wall and set the fuse, before racing back to find cover. They had just dived into a trench when a huge blast demolished the building. The disorientated survivors staggered out and were cut down. Some were on fire, screaming and rolling on the ground to try and douse the flames. One came running straight at Easten, who shot him at point-blank range.

  Private Norman saw Japanese bodies falling everywhere. He killed two. Searching in the ruins, the West Kents found forty-four bodies. Two badly wounded Japanese, a lieutenant and a corporal, were taken prisoner and sent back to the ADS. In spite of blood transfusions the officer died, but his corporal survived for eight days, long enough to provide valuable intelligence about the 58th Regiment’s dispositions. Hugh Richards recalled that the officer’s backpack contained ‘excellent Survey of India half-inch maps’, a welcome addition to the garrison collection.