Road of Bones Read online

  Sato could not have known the size of the British and Indian reinforcements coming up to meet him, nor could he have fully appreciated their superiority in firepower and supplies. Slim dismissed Sato as ‘without exception, the most unenterprising of all the Japanese generals I encountered. His bullet head was filled with one idea only – to take Kohima … he could by the 5th April, have struck the railway with the bulk of his division.’ Slim told of how he had to dissuade some enthusiastic RAF officers from launching an air strike on Sato’s headquarters. ‘They were astonished when I suggested they abandon the project as I regarded their intended victim as one of my most helpful generals!’ Slim was wrong. When he wrote those words after the war he could not have been aware of Kawabe’s orders not to move on Dimapur. Nor did he understand the true nature of his adversary. Sato was not stupid. His reluctance to gamble was based on care for the men under his command. ‘The priority is not to make impossible demands of the men,’ he wrote. ‘If you do … each unit will get exhausted.’ It was a fine aspiration but, as Sato himself knew by now, what was being asked of his men at Kohima was entering the realm of the impossible.

  Kohima was the furious heart of the battle and on both sides men were enduring unimaginable privation. But beyond Kohima, among the hills and jungles, the war had also swept through the lives of the Naga tribespeople with the force of a monsoon storm. Several thousand had been driven from their villages and fled to refugee camps in Assam, but the flood of refugees and retreating troops from the Imphal plain posed an even greater problem. As many as 29,000 Manipuris had fled their homes in April 1944 to cross the hills and seek safety in Assam.* Among them were the flotsam and jetsam of various Indian and Burmese units overrun by the Japanese. The guerrilla leader Ursula Graham Bower deployed her twenty-strong unit of Naga scouts, equipped with muzzle-loading rifles, to protect villages threatened by looters and army deserters. Villagers were being beaten, their women attacked and food stolen. ‘Though the Nagas were giving every assistance, their only rewards were assaults and lootings. Villagers took to the woods, normal life came to a standstill; and as the tide spread westwards and reached us, it became increasingly hard to maintain order – the whole intelligence network was threatened.’ Augmented by a patrol of Gurkhas and a V Force officer, Graham Bower set off for one village just occupied by thirty of these marauders. In less than an hour her force had successfully surrounded and captured the deserters. ‘They went off under escort in a depressed file, elated Gurkhas marched ahead and behind and Zemi porters carrying the collected weapons in firewood-baskets.’

  The V Force screen along the Chindwin had vanished with the Japanese advance. She had no wireless and therefore was dependent on a series of beacons that ran from the front and could be seen from different high points in her patrol area. If they were fired it meant trouble was coming. In the jungle, her scouts cut holes in the vegetation in which to sleep. ‘We honey-combed the scrub with tunnels and little chambers beaten and cut out … no outsider ever knew where exactly in the wide spread of bushes we were hidden.’

  In the villages close to Kohima there was a desolate atmosphere. The population was subject to shelling and the depredations of the increasingly desperate Japanese. Up to thirty people would cram into small huts in the jungle, believing they could find safety there. But even so, the Japanese followed and dragged men off to become porters. ‘The Kohima men were so angry but flesh cannot fight steel,’ recalled Krusischi Paschar from the Naga Village at Kohima. According to another Kohima man, Salhoutie Mechieo, who spent the siege behind British lines, there was an argument between the deputy commissioner, Charles Pawsey, and the army over the shelling of the Naga Village. ‘DC kept saying not to burn down Kohima village but the army said Japanese will occupy the village and fight us. We have to burn down the houses. If we will win we will help rebuild them. So the army, although the DC tried to stop them … burnt down our village.’

  Krusischi Paschar saw people digging trenches to evade the British artillery fire. ‘The Zubza cannons vomited terrible shells into Kohima, so that the people began to dig trenches to shelter them and hide their valuables in. The Zubza shells increased more and more, thus the people had to move to low sites and to take shelter in trenches … Kohima village was burnt seven times altogether.’ In the ruins of their villages, Nagas were confronted with the disaster that war had inflicted on the most vulnerable: babies trying to nurse at the bodies of their dead mothers, children made mute by the terror of explosions, and everywhere the stench of rotting bodies. When allied rations dropped behind Japanese lines, men would frantically scramble under fire to reach them. ‘We fought for that,’ one man remembered. ‘When we go for biscuits we die. When they [Japanese] come, they also die.’

  However, the Naga men continued to volunteer for service with the British. A pastor in the village of Tolloi, Phanit Phan, described how men slipped through the lines to carry maps of Japanese positions to the British. ‘This was repeatedly done. Besides we used our own laid signals to the British planes (pilots) for ascertaining enemy targets … their secret places were almost all bombed.’ Rhizotta Rino from Jotsoma was one of those who carried out mapping for the British. He initially volunteered as a porter for Warren’s 161 Indian brigade and led troops to water sources under cover of dark. ‘I remember taking the British through the forest to where the water was and they would stay back while we went to the water’s edge. They were afraid of being ambushed at the water by the Japanese. Why did we fight for the British? They were our protectors. They were here before the Japanese and they protected us. We had to help them!’ The diaries of British officers refer to the courage of Naga guides and stretcher-bearers. As the fighting escalated throughout April, warriors began to arrive at British headquarters seeking weapons with which to fight the Japanese. Captain Arthur Swinson met a group who came to 5 Brigade headquarters. In his diary he marvels at their appearance, albeit in tones that can appear condescending to the modern eye. ‘A fine group of men they were, with dark, smooth skinned limbs and a manly bearing … Their dress was pretty, there’s no other word for it. It consisted firstly of a short, tight fitting skirt of some rough black material, rather reminiscent of the flappers in their early hay-day [sic]. Their knees were covered by a series of bangles piled one over the other. Their torso was left quite bare though some older men wore bright red coatees … Carmen Miranda herself was never more loaded with bangles, rings, necklaces, beads, ear-rings, charms, nick-nacks and ju ju … to complete the picture was their jet black hair, cut pudding basin wise and decorated with flowers.’ The warriors were given captured Japanese weapons. Swinson observed that as the British government would not allow them to ‘scalp each other what an excellent opportunity [it was] for keeping their hand in by practising on the Japs’.

  The commander of 2nd Division, General John Grover, found his own attitude to the Nagas changed by the experience of working with them. He was struck by their intelligence and their ability to read aerial photographs at first sight, as well as their good humour in frequently grim circumstances. ‘They offer to take on any job, usually of an Intelligence nature, to visit some village behind Jap lines, or to provide porters or guides whenever required, and offer to do all this for nothing. We are insisting on paying them. One has been taught to regard the Nagas as savage head-hunters. Some of them are, but the great majority are extremely lovable.’ Grover established a ‘Naga reception centre’ where tea and biscuits were given to locals arriving with intelligence about the Japanese.

  In at least one infantry brigade there was a sliding scale of rewards for enemy taken dead or alive by the Nagas. Operational Instruction No. 10 for 23 Infantry Brigade (Chindits) ordered payments as follows:

  Capture alive Japanese officer:

  Rs1000

  Captured other rank:

  Rs500

  Dead Jap officer:

  Rs100

  Dead other ranks:

  Rs50

  Live hostile individual o
ther than Jap:

  Rs75

  Dead individual other than Jap:

  Rs25

  In a frank statement of military priorities, the family of a Naga killed in action would be paid just 300 rupees, less than a third of what was paid for a live Japanese officer, whose worth as an intelligence asset was highly valued.

  The schoolteacher Khumbo Angami escaped from Kohima and became an interpreter with 23 Infantry Brigade, a Chindit formation that had been detailed to guard the railway and gradually to move across the Japanese line of communications. Khumbo Angami rounded up eight other Nagas, including his brother, and set off into the jungle with the Chindits. He would be gone for three months. Any suspected enemy found by this group were to be held and questioned. A Bengali prisoner, suspected of belonging to the INA, twice attempted to escape. He had no hope of evading the Naga in the jungle, and would find the quality of their mercy strained. ‘They started very early in the morning and found him in the jungle at about 12 o’clock at noon. But as soon as the Nagas saw him he threw stones at them, but the Nagas went boldly on and caught him, but he bit them and tried to run away so they chopped his head into two pieces.’

  The most important function of the Naga tribes was as intelligence-gatherers. Ursula Graham Bower knew of two men who had gone into Japanese service, posing as simple-minded rustics, but had managed to steal valuable maps. With all the European V Force operatives dead, captured or in hiding, and the RAF’s aerial photography of limited value in jungle terrain, the Nagas provided the only reliable flow of intelligence to 2nd Division on Japanese movements around Kohima. One thread remained consistent in all of their information. The Japanese were short of food. All the villages still occupied were reporting Japanese foraging parties seeking rice and livestock. But they were also well dug in on the ridges and hills at Kohima. They did not appear as if they intended to retreat any time soon.

  * * *

  * This plant is unlikely to have been ‘water dropwort’, which has several very poisonous species. It is more probable that Tomaru was referring to a form of watercress or wild parsley.

  * This is the greatest of ‘what ifs’ of the invasion and what Stopford and Slim had feared most. An attack by 31 Division on Dimapur would have, at the least, thrown British plans into chaos.

  * Official figures are imprecise. For the initial period of the invasion the Assam government recorded 8,060 people, including Nagas, Manipuris, Nepalis and Chins, uprooted from their homes. By September 1944, relief measures were still feeding approximately 12,000 Nagas and Manipuris. In addition, there were some 29,000 Manipuris listed as refugees. NA, WO 203/4504, Assam Notes, and SECRET Cable from BURON SHILLONG TO COMERL NEW DELHI.

  NINETEEN

  The Black Thirteenth

  They called it the morning hate and the evening hate. It came without fail. The Japanese gunners could see them clearly. The wounded lay in shallow trenches on the slope. The tree cover had been destroyed by shelling. All the artillery had to do was to fire over open sights. The wounded could not move. So they listened for the sound of the shell firing. But the distance was so close that it had often exploded among them by the time the sound arrived. The mortars, too, arrived without any warning, dropping soundless until the moment of impact. Once it started, the wounded pulled the blankets up over their faces, like children terrorised by the dark.

  Men were killed or rewounded. Bits of bodies flew into the air. Frank ‘Doc’ Infanti, the medical orderly with the West Kents, thought the wounded were safer in their own trenches. ‘If a bloke got wounded and they shouted out “stretcher-bearers” as they used to, we would go down, dress him and he was safer left in his own trench than bringing him back up.’ Even there, you could not be sure. Two of Infanti’s own section were killed by mortars that dropped right on the parapet. Up at the ADS he ran into Major Shaw, the former commander of C company, who had been wounded in the attack on Detail Hill. Shaw was lying in a shallow trench with a fractured femur and several shrapnel wounds. ‘I marvelled at how he lay there for the whole two weeks completely helpless, but always cheerful.’ In fact, Infanti’s lasting memory of the wounded was of their stoicism. ‘They tried so hard not to moan or to cry out even though you knew they were in agony.’

  By 10 April, Lieutenant Colonel John Young of 75th Indian Field Ambulance had two hundred casualties at the ADS. They lay with the smell of the dead upon them. For the most part, men rotted where they had been killed. Anybody going out to collect bodies was a target for snipers. ‘Oh my God, the stink of those dead bodies!’ recalled the wounded Bruce Hayllar. Too many sentences use the words ‘cloying’ or ‘sickly sweet’ to describe the smell of death. Nobody who has ever walked a battlefield could believe that. The corpse is a dead animal. It reeks of the knacker’s yard. If the smell sits in the air around you long enough, you start feeling the rot is part of the lining of your skin, it sticks in your nose and mouth, as if death has partly claimed you. Take a lot of corpses and stick them in a wilderness of unburied excrement, add kerosene, cordite, stagnant water, the reek of hundreds of frightened men, stick all that in one small place and you have the smell of Kohima.

  Up at the ADS, Young and his surgeons knew all the variations of rot by now. The bodies that that had been killed in the previous twenty-four hours, the ones that had been out there for a week and more; they knew how the different kinds of wounds looked when the field-dressings were peeled away, how gas gangrene stank as it worked its way remorselessly through living tissue, and how men with dysentery reeked as their strength leaked away. Gas gangrene thrived in the filthy conditions of Kohima and untreated it could kill within forty-eight hours. It is so called because of the gas blisters that form around the infected area; the wound changes colour from red to a blackish green, and the stricken man sweats profusely and feels acute anxiety. He is denied the relief of unconsciousness. Often he will be fully alert until shock brings on a coma and finally his kidneys fail.

  Young and his fellow surgeons saw and smelled all of this in the two pits that served as operating theatres. They worked with only the briefest of pauses for rest. The pits were roughly six feet deep. Across one of them the Indian pioneers had constructed a timber roof; the other was protected from the elements, and from Japanese fire, by nothing more substantial than a piece of canvas. Inside the pits, flickering hurricane lamps lit the faces and hands of the surgeons and orderlies as they worked. One of Young’s doctors wrote in his diary of ‘Shocking wounds … terrible casualties … awful nights.’ Clouds of flies settled over the dead or busied themselves on the wounds of the living. The rain swamped wounded men in their trenches, leaving them shivering in sodden clothes and lying in an ooze of mud and body fluids.

  Lieutenant Bruce Hayllar, wounded in the fight for Jail Hill, was an early arrival at the ADS and remained there throughout the siege. He felt relieved to be with others who had been wounded and were still alive. They drew hope from each other’s presence. There were British and Indian men lying together. ‘We felt very close to each other. Whether you were a Christian or a Muslim or anything we used to pray together and help each other. It didn’t matter what you were.’ The most extraordinary moment of Hayllar’s war came when a wounded Japanese soldier was placed next to him. The man had been captured in the battle on Detail Hill. Because Hayllar was an officer he was told to look after him. ‘I remember that man. He was just like us. He was just my age, about nineteen or something, and he wasn’t responsible. He could not talk. He lay under my blanket with me. We knew we were trying to help each other but that was it.’ The soldier died later that night. Hayllar read ‘the whole of St John’s Gospel’ from a pocket Bible his parents had given him and passed the holy book on to the men in the pit with him.

  The other wounded were an eclectic mix of imperial soldiery. There was a seventeen-year-old Naga called Isaiah who had run away from an American mission school to join the Assam Regiment; an English officer called Hammon, blinded in one eye; a Rajput who, despite his thi
rst, would not drink after another person had used the cup; an old havildar of eighteen years’ service; and a Jemadar* of the stretcher-bearers who ‘was always grinning’. The Jemadar only broke down once, when an exhausted Young rounded on him over some mishap.

  The men were visited by Charles Pawsey, Hugh Richards, or the West Kents’ padre, Roy Randolph. On Easter Sunday, Randolph performed a swift service, as Hayllar recalled, ‘because we were constantly under fire and lots of people were dying’. Hayllar was able to receive Holy Communion. The Reverend Randolph, a man who loathed war or any kind of violence, would always be haunted by the experience of Kohima, as his son, Roy junior, remembered. ‘All he would say is he did his best to comfort the wounded and the rewounded and the dying. The memories were too painful for him to be able to talk about.’

  Randolph believed that too little was being done to relieve the suffering of the wounded. A writer who met the West Kents’ CO Laverty afterwards wrote that he and his staff found it ‘even harder to bear because the responsibility for it rested on their shoulders and they were in no way free to show their emotions; if they did they would soon succumb and the battle … would be lost’. Randolph wanted the wounded moved to a proper hospital, but it was out of the question now. He was able to comfort Major Shaw of the West Kents by bringing him a Bible, which he read throughout the siege.

  The C company runner Ray Street, who had to race between his company position and Laverty’s headquarters, took comfort in his faith. He had a strip of paper with a piece of writing from St John. ‘Let not your heart be troubled neither let it be afraid.’ Running to deliver messages, Street prayed frantically. ‘I had to leave the trench to deliver messages. I had to deliver a message where a hand just came out of the trench from under a tin sheet and grabbed the message. One said, “Come on, Streetie, don’t hang about too long. Keep moving.”’ Battle tends to bring out the superstitious and godfearing side in even the most sceptical of men. Mementoes of home, lucky charms, are grasped close in the fury of combat. Street met a corporal who was helping to move some wounded but was upset because he had lost a teddy bear given to him by his wife. ‘She told him that while he had this bear he would be safe.’ The man was killed by a Japanese shell. The eternally pragmatic Street decided he would not hold on to any ‘lucky’ mascots.