Road of Bones Read online

  As for the British public, the extreme peril of the Kohima garrison and the scale of the Japanese threat were unknown. This was not in any sense exceptional or suspicious. It simply reflected the nature of wartime communications and censorship, and the peripheral nature of Burma to the overall scheme of the war. But in India the political calculation was different. The suppression of information from the front led to protests from several war correspondents who were convinced that Delhi was hiding bad news. Speaking to an open session of the Indian Assembly in the first week of April, the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, General Auchinleck, sounded sanguine. ‘We cannot stop every Japanese threat as soon as it makes itself apparent, but it is therefore always possible that some of these may succeed in temporarily interrupting the communications … I am convinced that the security of Assam has never been in danger, let alone the security of India.’ An Indian government statement of 8 April was at utter variance with reality. ‘It is obvious that the enemy’s timetable has been thrown completely out of gear … other than attacking the key towns and gaining full possession of the roads, the Japanese effort can now be of little else than nuisance value.’ This statement was greeted with astonishment in Kohima. Captain Walter Greenwood heard Auchinleck state that ‘Kohima was very strongly defended’ while he was crouching in Hugh Richards’s bunker.

  The Japanese had blocked the key road and were besieging Kohima, the one strong defensive position in front of the railway and the supply base at Dimapur. This ‘nuisance’, as Auchinleck described it, would cost thousands of lives. Both Slim and Stopford still feared that Sato could make a flanking move towards Dimapur at any moment. The distortions in Delhi had far less to do with preserving the morale of the fighting troops, who could see the situation for themselves, than with keeping damaging news from restive Indian ears.

  There was some reporting of the fighting on the BBC and in censored newspaper accounts. Captain W. P. G. MacLachlan of the Kohima garrison remembered how ‘at 5.30 p.m. each day the operator on the telephone exchange would connect all the lines, and the owner of the radio would put his telephone mouthpiece against the loudspeaker. Thus the whole camp could hear the news and when Kohima eventually figured in the bulletins, derisive guffaws could be heard over the telephone system at the BBC’s bald descriptions of what we had been doing two or three days before.’ One officer on General Grover’s staff said they depended on the BBC broadcasts because communications with headquarters were so poor.

  The government in London was also reluctant to say anything while the battle still hung in the balance. Burma had been the source of too much previous humiliation. Early attempts to obtain a parliamentary statement on the fighting in the Naga Hills were rebuffed. On 4 April, the day the West Kents were told to return to Kohima, the war minister, Sir James Grigg, was asked to make a statement. ‘Not at the present time,’ he declared. Grigg would repeat this for some weeks to come. In time, the defenders of Kohima would come to regard themselves as part of a ‘forgotten army’, but in those first weeks of April 1944 they were unaware of the marginal consideration being given in London to the fighting. The men saw no further than the corpse-littered ground in front of them, while their commanders watched the middle distance, praying that Warren or Grover, or both, would break through in time to save them.

  The brigadier could give the impression of nonchalance. Having bought some chickens from a local village ‘Daddy’ Warren ordered a run built near the officers’ mess. He could be seen eating his morning eggs accompanied by wild raspberries while the guns blasted away towards Kohima; in the evenings, according to Arthur Swinson, he played numerous hands of vingt-et-un. Yet appearances were deceptive. Warren worried constantly about the state of the garrison; at one point, moved by the appeals for help from Laverty, he suggested to Grover that he and his men try to march up the road and into Kohima. Luckily the request was dismissed by Grover before it resulted in disaster. Warren’s position was two miles along from Kohima on the way to Dimapur. From there his eight mountain guns, in constant contact with Yeo and his observers in Kohima, could devastate the Japanese as they formed up to attack.

  The guns of the British 2nd Division also pounded the Japanese. Sergeant William ‘Tug’ Wilson, 16 Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, directed harassing fire on the Japanese positions. ‘Harassing fire means you covered an area … If you hit something that’s a benefit. One gun fired one round per minute. One degree left, then reverse and go the other way … We were firing over the whole area.’ It was an effective method of keeping Japanese heads down and frustrating plans for attack.

  At Jotsoma Warren had fought off several Japanese infantry attacks on his positions in the first week of April. By the second week he was nearly as isolated in the Jotsoma box as Laverty was at Kohima, although experiencing nothing like the same pressure from the Japanese. The 1/1 Punjab had driven the Japanese off a ridge east of Jotsoma, offering Warren a good vantage point of Kohima. His observers could now range the enemy positions with great accuracy. With some of the 2nd Division infantry already in the battle and other brigades arriving at Dimapur and pushing up the road the numerical odds were growing in favour of the British and Indians. But there was no sign of any weakening in Japanese determination. On 14 April as dawn broke a Japanese patrol broke into the 5 Brigade HQ area killing one man and wounding two. ‘The Jap party then rushed through the area on to the hill above, from which they shouted “Come on up to us,”’ a General’s diary recorded. ‘The Worcesters accepted this invitation and organised a pheasant drive with three Companies with which they cleared the Japs off the hill feature.’ The following day Brigadier Hawkins received the welcome news that a jeep had arrived to collect him. It had been sent by Warren from Jotsoma. Sato’s attempt to cut the link between Dimapur and Kohima had ended in failure. The road to 161 Brigade was open.

  * * *

  * Lieutenant Alstan Heath Watkins was killed on 11 April 1944. Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

  EIGHTEEN

  Dreams Dying

  Whenever they got ready to form up, the shells began to fall. Someone said to Lieutenant Hirayama that it looked as if the sky was vomiting fire on them. Shards of metal, dirt, stones, and lumps of flesh rained down. ‘It was so very, very loud the artillery.’ The air pressure smashed the eardrums of men close to the blast. Blood ran from their ears. Hirayama saw body pieces fly into the air. They were not pieces of the living but of the dead who had been hastily buried in the previous days. Hirayama was back at Kohima after having been sent to Zubza to block the road. He was lying in a trench near Charles Pawsey’s tennis court on the northern fringe of the garrison, a critical part of the steadily closing encirclement. Having driven the defenders off GPT Ridge, Jail Hill and Detail Hill, cut the roads in and out of Kohima, and placed artillery on the ridges overlooking the garrison, the Japanese felt Kohima must surely fall soon. Yet for all the ground they had made in the first week, the attackers were suffering heavy losses from the guns at Jotsoma and Zubza, and the close-quarter fighting on Detail Hill had been a savage and costly affair, as the experience of Captain Kameyama’s company proved.

  Every time they formed up for an attack, units were targeted by the distant guns. Lieutenant Hiroshi Yamagami lay flat on his stomach, face in the mud, as the shells landed. ‘At the same time, the trench swung like an earthquake.’ He and his battalion commander had been lying in the trench since the previous evening, pinned down by the guns. Yamagami poked his head up and looked with his field-glasses at the British lines. Some troops he took to be Gurkhas were firing at the Japanese trenches. In that instant Yamagami felt a flash of hatred for the men trying to kill him. ‘The battle of Kohima, life in a trench for forty days, had begun.’

  During one night attack the company commander was looking for an enemy trench to attack. He made the mistake of firing a flare. The British spotted the light and within minutes shells were landing, gradually ranging in on the attacking group. ‘It came to us step by ste
p and subconsciously I jumped into a nearby trench. I did really well because it was so small!’ Yamagami was amazed by the accuracy of the artillery and despaired of the slaughter. ‘One group would attack and be targeted and be annihilated. Then another one would come up and the same thing would happen. Gradually in a single night an entire company would be gone.’

  The supply officer from the 138th Regiment, Chuzaburo Tomaru, who had refused to behead a civilian during the war in China, was never the keenest of warriors; he was sure that if he moved from his trench the British would get him. Tomaru had already succeeded in obtaining a transfer out of a machine-gun company, because ‘I had heard the rumour that soldiers in Machine Gun Company are easily targeted in the battle.’ The artillery was like ‘thunder and it felt as if one hundred of the guns were firing all at once’, but Tomaru still had to deliver food to the forward trenches. At this point there was still rice to make into a ball for each man, and ‘water dropwort’ from the river instead of vegetables.* Tomaru felt anguish for the infantry. ‘The men were so brave and patient. At one point I was hiding behind rocks with members of battalion HQ and I saw them go out in wave after wave and being killed again and again. Eventually I had no intention of fighting myself at all.’

  Tomaru was an exception. Most of Lieutenant General Kotuku Sato’s troops were still willing to die for their general and emperor on the slopes of Kohima. Dr Takahide Kuwaki, a medical officer with 124th Infantry Regiment, looked out across the desolate battlefield and felt his death would come soon. ‘When I arrived there I thought “this is the place where I will do my best and I will give my life.”’ Unlike the 58th Regiment, which had fought a brutal battle at Sangshak, Kuwaki’s 124th had had a comparatively easy progress to Kohima, although the hell of Guadalcanal was still vivid in the memories of veterans. For Kuwaki, entering battle for the first time, the regiment was the vanguard of an army dedicated to Japan’s imperial expansion, a cause for which he would gladly be martyred. Yet visions of dying a glorious death for the empire were punctuated by the mundane business of pulling lice from his clothes. In quiet moments he would set the vermin to fight each other, a pastime the dark resonance of which evaded Kuwaki at the time. Expecting his death to come at any moment, the doctor wrote some death songs to be passed on to his children, imagining that his dynasty would endure forever, in prosperity.

  Children and grandchildren

  taking thousands of years

  to die in prosperity

  that is my eternal wish.

  He believed that the Japanese only needed to hold on and keep the road closed between Imphal and Dimapur and the British would be starved out. The power of British air supply, and growing hunger in the Japanese lines, would eventually disabuse him of that notion.

  Kawaki regarded the British as careful. There were no rash charges. ‘They first fired the guns, then they sent observers, and only then did they attack.’ For the men leading the attacks on the British trenches in the second week of April, the easy successes against the Nepalese Shere Regiment and other rear-section troops were forgotten in the face of fierce hand-to-hand fighting with the likes of the West Kents and the Assam Regiment. Lieutenant Togawa, a section commander with the 58th Regiment, was caught with his men in no-man’s-land and decided to make a rush attack in the middle of the night. In the darkness he fell into a trench where he was set upon by several defenders. ‘I hurried to draw off my sabre, but they gripped both my arms. One enemy [struck] my head, but I felt almost none for the sake of my iron hat.’ Outnumbered in the trench, he thought that if he surrendered he would be made a prisoner of war. That would be far worse than death. Togawa managed to draw his sabre, which ‘glittered in the moon’, and all the defenders except one ran away. ‘One so brave grappled with me,’ he recalled. The men rolled ‘up and down, again and again’, with Togawa trying to drive home his blade. The Japanese proved stronger and he stabbed his opponent, who ‘ceased to move and lay on his face’. The incident shocked Togawa, for he wrote of having to ‘recover’ his mind immediately afterwards. When he did, he realised shells were falling. One exploded nearby and sprayed him with searing metal fragments.

  The man who had launched the 15th Army into India was still at his headquarters in Maymyo, replete with geishas and sake, and increasingly convinced of the uselessness of his generals on the distant battlefields. The commander of the 33rd Division, General Yanagida, would soon be sacked for his supposed faint-heartedness at Imphal; the ailing General Yamauchi, commander of 15th Division, was also bogged down outside the town and being cursed for his lack of vigour. Lieutenant Colonel Iwaichi Fujiwara, the intelligence officer who had done so much to prepare the way for the invasion, was piecing together a portrait of disunity which induced despair. ‘The Army Comdr did NOT command the complete obedience of the 3 Comdrs of the Divs he had under his command.’ Fujiwara had no idea how much worse things would get.

  Years later, Mutaguchi would concede that his temper had been a problem. The staff officers were too afraid to speak their minds. But typically the general excused himself. ‘In a long campaign when it was not working out well, a burst of my temper from time to time is inevitable.’ Of his divisional commanders, Mutaguchi had scarcely a good word to say. Only the Kohima battle still held promise, but even here Mutaguchi had been stymied. The 58th Regiment had just arrived in Kohima when Mutaguchi signalled General Sato to strike on for Dimapur and capture the British supply base. In this, Mutaguchi’s aggressive instincts were correct: he wanted Sato to do what Slim and Stopford feared most. ‘I then gave the order to the 31st division leader by saying “Chase the withdrawing enemy immediately and move through to Dimapur.” … I thought that the necessary food for the division’s soldiers and horses would be obtained by the attack of Dimapur.’ But such a move would mean eventually coming into the open, where British air superiority would count. Mutaguchi signalled Lieutenant General Kawabe, commander of the Burma Area Army, for air support. Kawabe was horrified, as ‘Dimapur was not within the strategic objectives of the 15 Army’. Mutaguchi was told, ‘this is not good! Considering the overall situation please stop it.’ Had Sato headed straight for Dimapur on 4 April he would have found the base still in a shambles with troops arriving by rail and air.*

  From his office in Rangoon, the Burma Area Army chief could feel the Imphal campaign slipping away. The weather reports indicated that the monsoon might come earlier, raising the prospect of 15th Army being swamped and unable to receive supplies, even if sufficient food and ammunition could be found – a doubtful prospect, as Kawabe knew, with matters in the Pacific getting worse. Since the start of the year the Americans had dislodged the Japanese from island after island. The Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana islands had all been assaulted and the big Japanese base at Rabaul destroyed. There was no question of Kawabe persuading Tokyo to release aircraft to support the troops in India.

  Kawabe had sent Mutaguchi into the mountains with instructions to get the campaign wrapped up before the monsoon. From the outset, Kawabe had always recognised the invasion as a gamble, but he counted on Mutaguchi’s track record of energy, and luck and British ineptitude to see the enemy beaten before the rains. Now it was not only the weather that filled him with foreboding. The British were not fleeing, and their air superiority had astonished the Japanese infantry. Had Kawabe paid more attention to the fighting in the Arakan that had preceded the invasion of India, he would not have been so surprised.

  Communications between 31st Division and 15th Army headquarters were becoming increasingly difficult. Lieutenant General Sato’s infantry commander, General Miyazaki, found that most of his wireless batteries became useless in the damp. Even without the monsoon, men were dying of disease and hunger-related illness, and ‘heavy casualties – caused mostly by artillery’ had depleted his ranks at Sangshak. Yet Miyazaki remained full of vim and would have struck for Dimapur had Kawabe not cancelled the orders. General Sato, however, remained convinced that he had been sent in the wrong directi
on from the start. Mutaguchi should have thrown all three divisions against Imphal to strike a crushing blow against 4th Corps. ‘It was a huge mistake to have directed the force to Kohima.’

  Still, at that early stage, on 6 April, Sato seems to have been ready to obey the order to go forward to Dimapur, in spite of his opposition in the past. Perhaps the prospect of capturing supplies for his men had changed his mind. For all his growing misgivings about the operation, Sato felt pride in his men’s achievement in getting as far as Kohima, traversing a mountain wilderness the British did not believe could be crossed by a division. ‘I believe that is something that is worth a special mention in the military history … Its achievement is great and gave the enemy the damage and casualties.’

  After the first week of fighting at Kohima what worried Sato most was hunger. Already men were sick. Too little nourishment had reduced their resistance to disease. The doctors were treating endless cases of dysentery. As he had feared from the outset, Mutaguchi’s promise of ten tons of supplies per day had not materialised. Fewer than a fifth of the cattle that crossed the Chindwin had reached the front line and mules were being consumed in their stead. This had a knock-on effect. Fewer mules meant delays in bringing ammunition and food up from supply dumps to front-line positions. Yet, by the second week of April, Sato still believed a victory at Kohima was possible. At any moment the garrison could be overrun by his troops. Once Kohima Ridge was entirely his, the British would have an almighty job pushing him off. He banked on capturing the remaining supply stores in Kohima and digging in for a long fight.