Road of Bones Read online

  Laverty calculated that the odds against the defenders were in the region of seven to one, but still believed the garrison could hold out. It was an underestimate. An officer informed him bluntly that the odds were ‘heavy by any standards’. ‘Thank you Douglas,’ he replied tartly. ‘That puts the position very clearly.’

  Examining the ruined bashas, Private Norman ‘found that a lot of milk tins had been opened and all the dead Japs had milk smeared on their mouths, so they were obviously hungry’. Norman slumped wearily back into his trench. That night the wind picked up and he shivered despite the bedroll he had been given by Indian soldiers. The shelling kept up all night and he slept for only two and a half hours. By morning, the snipers were working and Norman was told to fire smoke bombs to allow stretcher-bearers to bring in a sergeant hit in a forward trench. The man was dead by the time they carried him past Norman.

  Back at the warehouse buildings, Donald Easten and his D company sergeant major, Bill Haines, faced a fresh problem. Despite the ferocity of the West Kents’ assault, the Japanese in his northern sector were not yet beaten. ‘There were quite a lot of empty trenches, because we couldn’t occupy them all … In this particular case the Japanese had got into this empty bunker and they got a machine gun in there and got us pinned down.’ Lance Corporal Harman was standing close by and heard Easten ask Haines how best to tackle the gun. He interrupted, ‘I think I know what to do, Sir.’ ‘The next thing we knew he’d gone off,’ recalled Easten. Racing the thirty yards towards the bunker, Harman crept under the slit from which the Japanese were firing. Easten saw him pull the pin from a grenade, then call out ‘One, two …’ before dropping the grenade through the slit. By waiting the few crucial seconds Harman had made sure the men inside would have no time to grab the grenade and fling it out. Easten heard ‘an almighty immediate explosion’ and saw Harman charge in. Seconds later he emerged triumphantly brandishing the machine gun.

  All battles are marked by confusion, but at Kohima the rate at which trenches and foxholes changed hands tested the most experienced fighters. Easten was dominating the attack in his sector, but nearby, C company was fighting for its life. That evening, 8 April, the Japanese attacked C company again. They threw ladders against the bluff to try and climb up from the road but were driven back by grenades. The Bren gunners in the forward pits were changing red-hot barrels and being constantly resupplied with ammunition by Private Norman and those further back. One of the gunners, Corporal Rees, told Norman that ‘he and the others in the forward trenches were enjoying themselves knocking the Japs down in “batches”’. Inside his six foot by three foot bunker with two other men, Private Tom Greatly was cramped and exhausted, thirsty and filthy, and constantly waiting for attack. Greatly was only eighteen, having lied his way into the army two years before. ‘It was awful in the trench,’ he said, ‘we never ate a cooked meal and we all ended up with beards and long hair.’ Outside his position the bluff fell about twelve feet to the roadway. Keeping guard while his mates tried to sleep, Greatly heard noises and looked out to see a Japanese raiding party trying to climb towards him. He immediately dropped grenades down and killed them. Later he spotted a Japanese officer, probably overcome with dysentery, drop his trousers and squat in the road; only the utter desperation of illness could have made him take the risk. The eighteen-year-old watching from the bunker raised his rifle and shot him dead.

  Up at his ADS on Garrison Hill, the centre of the Kohima defence, Lieutenant Colonel Young was facing a crisis. His position was already overcrowded and new casualties kept arriving. The position was now being shelled and sniped at. There were nearly a hundred walking wounded cluttering the area, as well as the terrified non-combatants. Young told Laverty that an evacuation of these men was imperative. But the West Kents’ commander wondered how it could be done with the Japanese circling everywhere around them. He also knew that the sight of men leaving could spark further panic among the less steady of the garrison troops.

  Young suggested taking the same route out that had brought him in, past the Indian hospital at the summit of Garrison Hill and down into the valley towards the north-west. In total it was a journey of three and a half miles across country to come out on to the road beyond the Japanese positions. This was based on the hope that they would not encounter the enemy on the way. A long line of wounded men would have no chance. Young decided to put three control posts along the route, where fit troops would manage the flow of evacuees and report their safe progress. Young would go himself, along with Laverty’s second-in-command, Major Peter Franklin, to ensure there was no stampede and to tend to any men who struggled.

  Captain Watts of C company, recently arrived from Detail Hill, was one of those detailed for evacuation. ‘Colonel Young said he would take out all the walking wounded. So he led the head of the column and I was the tail end.’ At 2030 hours the word came from an advance patrol in the valley that the way was clear. Burmese troops guarding the perimeter near the hospital reported Japanese troops nearby but immobile in their trenches. Fifteen minutes later Young went with the first batch of twenty wounded through the perimeter. He saw them as far as the valley, where they struggled ‘very slowly’ down the slope. He then returned for the second group. There was some firing from the Japanese near the hospital, but darkness and the fact that the men remained quiet seems to have saved them from a full-scale attack. Matters suddenly became precarious when a group of about a hundred Indian soldiers was spotted following the evacuees. Young was convinced they were deserters who would draw the attention of the Japanese and risk the lives of the wounded. ‘An endeavour was made to turn them back but with little success since quietness was essential.’ In fact, the men had been given orders to leave by the garrison commander, Hugh Richards, who was trying to clear the area of ‘useless mouths’. He wrote later that ‘with the wounded went some non-combatants’. Either the information was never passed to Young or Laverty, or it was lost in the desperate circumstances of that night. Decades later Captain ‘Dodo’ Watts still believed the non-combatants were a planned part of the evacuation. A platoon of the Assam Rifles was sent down to the road to stop any further movement of the non-wounded. Within an hour all of the wounded had left the Kohima perimeter.

  Two of Charles Pawsey’s Naga guides led the way as they struggled along the valley. The term ‘walking wounded’ cannot do justice to the condition of many in the column. For a fit man, the steep slopes and tangled undergrowth would have been testing; for those with bullet wounds in their arms and shoulders, or with shattered knees and leaning on the shoulder of a comrade, it was hell. Wounds tore open again as men stretched or fell. The sharp edges of broken bones jarred. The men stifled their cries, aware that the Japanese were all around them in the jungle.

  At midnight Young was called to the radio at Laverty’s bunker. It was brigade headquarters reporting that all the casualties had arrived safely. Captain Watts was one of those taken to a field hospital in Dimapur and then to the peace of a hill station. Fifty years after the battle, the shrapnel was still in his back.

  Late into his life Donald Easten would still puzzle about Corporal Harman. He had been as close as anyone could be to the man, and regarded him as the best soldier in D company. But those last minutes on Detail Hill would be replayed over and again in his mind as he struggled to understand.

  In the early hours of 9 April, Private Norman heard the tell-tale sound of digging near his trench. The Japanese were about to launch another assault on C company, the third in twelve hours. A sniper was tormenting the trenches and shot ‘poor Private Nobby Hall in the head’. The stretcher-bearers were pinned down, so Norman and his comrades did their best to comfort Hall. He died after a few hours. Exhaustion and overwhelming firepower were telling against the defenders. This time the Japanese swept up the bluff and captured the forward pits.

  More than ever, C company needed support from Donald Easten and his men. As the sun rose Easten could see the extent of the Japanese penetration
. Detail Hill was being wrenched away from the West Kents. ‘I was rather thinking, “How the hell are we going to get these chaps out?”’ About twenty yards away on the right, Corporal Harman was watching some Japanese firing from an old C company trench further down the slope. Easten heard him shout, ‘Give me covering fire,’ before leaping out of his trench and racing downhill. A machine gun peppered his route but Harman was untouched. Sergeant Tacon popped up to shoot a Japanese preparing to throw a grenade. Harman scrambled to the edge of the pit and opened fire. Four Japanese were killed instantly and a fifth bayoneted. There is dispute about what happened next. According to Corporal Norman, ‘instead of running back as we were shouting for him to do, he walked back calmly, and the inevitable happened’.

  It is a description that accords with the experience of John Faulkner, who had witnessed Harman’s blasé attitude towards snipers. However, Donald Easten made no mention of a calm stroll back. He could see Harman coming and then collapse, smashed in the back by a machine-gun round. Risking his own life, Easten crawled out of his trench and pulled Harman back in. ‘The poor chap … I called for the stretcher-bearers but he said, “Don’t bother Sir … I got the lot. It was worth it.”’ Easten held Harman in his arms as he died.*

  The action claimed two other victims. The Welshman, Corporal Rees, dubbed with the obligatory ‘Taffy’ by his mates, had earlier told Norman about killing Japanese in ‘batches’; he stood up to observe what was happening to Harman and was shot twice in the side. ‘I tried to pull him back because the Jap had fixed lines [of fire] on our pit, but he wouldn’t let me,’ remembered Norman. Sergeant Tacon tried to crawl out and reach him but was shot in the arm and leg. Rees was paralysed and became delirious. He screamed and cried for eight hours. He called for his wife, mother and father, and at times he prayed. It was torment for the listening men. Rees was only a few yards away but they dared not move towards him. Eventually the screaming stopped. Corporal Rees was dead.

  Norman and the men around him begged to be allowed to evacuate their post. ‘It was really nerve-wracking for the 14 of us left because we couldn’t defend ourselves if we were attacked … We kept pleading to the Company Commander that our nerves were all “shot to pieces” … what with poor Taffy shouting, poor old Nobby Hall dying in our arms, and the continuous mortaring, shelling and sniping, we also had nothing to eat or drink since breakfast the day before.’ A Japanese 75 millimetre gun was firing at the trenches over open sights. One officer was saved when his dying batman fell on top of him, shielding him from flying shell fragments. Private Norman and his comrades were now under the command of Captain Coath from B company. There were emotional exchanges as they pleaded to withdraw. An NCO with Norman told the new commander that he had no idea what the men had been through. The captain promised that if they stayed he would ensure relief before nightfall. The promised relief came in the form of a B company platoon sent to drive the Japanese out of the positions in front of Norman. The attack failed and after a fifteen-minute wait the NCO gave Norman and the others the signal to withdraw. He had no permission to give the order and the commander ‘went wild but could do nothing’. The ground was lost to the Japanese.

  The following day, 10 April, five days after the West Kents had entered Kohima, Private Norman was ordered to go back with five others and creep up to the new Japanese positions on Detail Hill. Whether they were threatened by their officer, or felt chastened by what had happened the previous day, or simply followed the instincts drilled into them during training, Norman and the others obeyed and crept back, convinced that it was a suicide mission. ‘We were surrounded on three sides by hundreds of Japanese … If they had looked over the side of their feature they would have seen us.’ The West Kent team observed strict silence. There was shooting, but none of it directed at Norman’s group. Eventually a runner crawled through with news that they could withdraw. Behind them as they slipped away, Norman and his comrades heard the Japanese attack once more, racing into the abandoned positions.

  Every man in the forward positions was dead. Convinced by reports from the scene that further resistance was futile, Lieutenant Colonel Laverty ordered a withdrawal from Detail Hill. Three companies from 4th battalion had fought in different stages of the battle, but only C company had been there from the beginning to the end of the four terrible days. They had ceased to exist as a company, reduced from around a hundred to just fifteen men. All now retreated to the next position, on Supply Hill, which was the second to last defensive bastion to the north of Garrison Hill where the headquarters and the wounded were situated.

  For D company there was another blow. Donald Easten was trying to direct mortar fire when a shell landed between him and a sergeant. ‘It blew the poor chap to bits … and I got hit in the arm.’ Easten was blown backwards into a trench. The fall knocked his spine out of joint and a tiny shell fragment had paralysed one arm. He was carried back to Young’s ADS. Around him on Detail Hill the trees had all been shredded. Blackened stumps poked out of the ground. There were arms and legs too, sticking up out of the shallow graves where men were stiffening into rigor mortis. The C company runner Ray Street could smell burning flesh on the breeze. Others had observed the Japanese pouring petrol and setting fire to bodies. West Kents and Japanese burned together. The smell followed the retreating men down the hill, into the afternoon.

  * * *

  * Warren and the remainder of 161 Indian brigade – 1/1 Punjab regiment, 4/7 Rajput and a mountain artillery battery – were unable to follow Laverty into Kohima when the Japanese closed the road. In any case there would have been no room on Kohima Ridge for them to deploy. Warren’s new base was at Jotsoma, about two miles west of Kohima.

  * There is some confusion over the precise date of Harman’s actions. The 4th battalion war diary gives it as 7/8 April, while his medal citation refers to 8/9 April. Cited in Lucas Phillips, Springboard to Victory, p. 168.

  SEVENTEEN

  Over the Mountain

  There was a heavy rainstorm at teatime and at his headquarters on the banks of the Brahmaputra river General Montagu Stopford found the temperature tolerably cool. It was a balm after a day of worrying news from Kohima. The 2nd Division commander, John Grover, with his men hurriedly drafted in from training exercises, had flown up from his newly established base at Dimapur. He told Stopford that Kohima’s Naga Village had been taken by the Japanese, and the Shere Regiment had bolted in the face of the enemy, who were at that moment infiltrating all around Kohima. Stopford seemed unperturbed. ‘I think that all shall be well now,’ he wrote in his diary for 6 April. There were, after all, strong reinforcements arriving: 5 Brigade of Grover’s division was already moving forward, while 6 Brigade was arriving in Dimapur. Warren’s 161 Brigade, although nearly encircled, was trying to push its way through to the garrison from a position about two miles west of Kohima. Warren was being pressed to step up his efforts. ‘I am not satisfied that Warren of 161 Bde. is going flat out to clear up the situation and I feel that some ginger may be required,’ Stopford wrote. Driving on seemingly hesitant commanders would become a recurring theme of Stopford’s view of the battle; it was a perception that failed to appreciate the difficulties of the terrain and the threat from the Japanese who would manoeuvre around and between Warren and Grover as they tried to reach Kohima. Sato had already sent a detachment towards Dimapur with the precise intention of blocking the road to Kohima.

  By 10 April, the day on which the West Kents were being driven from Detail Hill, Warren was seeking permission to withdraw the garrison. Grover responded by saying the ‘garrison must stay put because withdrawal might open the road for Japs’. He also warned Warren of the ‘grave’ political and propaganda consequences of withdrawal, a nod to likely ructions in Delhi, London and Washington. Reinforcements were coming, he promised, and any move might hamper the advance of 5 Infantry Brigade who were at that moment deploying towards Kohima.

  Privately, Grover suspected the garrison might not hold. On the same da
y that he turned Warren down he called Stopford who in turn signalled Slim for permission to order a pull-out if the situation looked impossible. Stopford was frustrated by his physical distance from 14th Army headquarters, located six hundred miles away at Comilla, and complained to his diary that Slim’s far-away staff lacked appreciation of the local realities. It was ironic that Stopford, impatient with his own commanders as they struggled with the conditions, should feel ill done-by at the hands of 14th Army.

  But there is another factor which should be considered. Generals Slim, Stopford and Grover were all veterans of the attritional battles of the Great War. Each knew what it was to fight in trenches and watch the months accumulate and the casualties rise with no clear advantage gained. However subconsciously, the memory of that experience must have lingered for all three men as the armies dug in at Kohima.

  Every morning the monkeys made a ‘devilish row, screaming at each other among the tree tops’. Captain Swinson also heard an elephant trumpeting in the distance before breakfast. A sentry who thought he saw a Japanese crawling up on him had wounded a tiger ‘that went howling away’. A signaller got into bed to find he was sharing it with a snake. ‘Apart from these odd incidents we have no excitement,’ Swinson reported. He walked down to the river where a prayer service was under way. ‘At the “Non Sum Dignus” the sun rose from the hills and the golden light cascaded down the valley.’ The men recited the Hail Mary, ‘Mother of mercy, our light, our sweetness, our hope … with rather more feeling than usual’. Arthur Swinson was an aspiring writer who carried two anthologies of war poetry in his pack; for him, the close press of the jungle was not a source of terror but a repository of the exotic that helped keep the tension of war at bay.