Road of Bones Read online

  Fifty-six wounded men were killed outright by Japanese shelling and many more died later of their fresh wounds. By night Indian non-combatants drafted in as orderlies carried the dead to a makeshift burial ground where they were hastily interred. Frequently Japanese shelling unearthed the corpses. The events of these hours were systematically recorded by Young, or one of his orderlies, in the battalion war diary. On 12 April the diary recorded that sixty casualties had been rewounded and ten killed. Three more men died later in the day. The following morning, on what survivors would always call the ‘Black Thirteenth’, the ADS was ‘very heavily mortared and shelled, resulting in the deaths of casualties already under treatment and in rewounding approximately 30 more’. Twenty-one men were killed where they lay. Just after dawn, a salvo had rained down on the ADS area which lasted for an hour, an unimaginably long time to lie in the open under bombardment. The operating pit took four direct hits. The doctors took what cover they could but two Indian officers, Captains M. Y. Siddiqi and Abdul Majid Chaudry, Indian Army Medical Corps, were mortally wounded and John Young was slightly hurt. When the shelling stopped, there were body parts mingled with the medical equipment and all the other detritus of the dressing station was cast among the still-living, who lay distraught with terror in their trenches. Immediately Young’s deputy, Captain F. R. Glover, set about clearing up the mess with his orderlies.

  By 1530 hours the ADS was back in action. But two hours after that, the shells came in again. There were thirty direct hits over the area in which the patients lay. Ten were killed and many more rewounded. Yet another doctor was killed and one seriously wounded. That night, after having listened to the screams of the wounded and dying all day, Captain Glover wrote in his diary of ‘a terrible day … the preservation of human life appears useless. Our operations very unsuccessful, most of them dying on the table or very shortly afterwards.’ Three of Young’s seven doctors were killed during the siege and another badly wounded. Patients were dying of post-operative shock because there were too few nurses to care for them.

  The 4th West Kents’ medical orderly, Frank Infanti, remembered helping Young to perform an amputation by night in a trench away from the main pit. A blanket had been placed on poles over the trench to protect the wounded man from the elements, and to ensure that the Japanese could see no light. Infanti held the torch while another West Kent held the man’s leg. Young administered anaesthetic from a bottle. ‘Follow the knife, follow the knife,’ Infanti was told. The thin beam stayed with the blade as it cut through muscle and bone. ‘It was as if we were living a hundred years ago,’ said Infanti. ‘I don’t think anybody who had their legs amputated survived.’

  Young had enough anaesthetic and dressings left, but he had no plasma and there was a constant crisis over water. Within two days of reaching Kohima, and just as Laverty had feared, the Japanese had found and quickly severed the water pipeline from Aradura Spur. A small stream of water still seeped through, but the tanks and canvas balloons that made up the emergency supply were targeted by shelling and thousands of gallons leaked away. It was six days since Hugh Richards had issued his order restricting each man to what amounted to a pint of water per day and forbidding washing and shaving.* His staff officer, Walter Greenwood, had limited the intake in the command bunker to three quarters of a mug of tea in the morning and the same in the evening. Lieutenant Colonel Young’s war diary records: ‘During the night enemy captured D.C.’s bungalow area, water point now under fire. Water situation serious since could only be collected & drawn at night by amb. sepoys of 75 Ind Fd Ambulance, the remaining personnel at the ADS proving unreliable under fire.’

  Laverty’s second-in-command, Major Peter Franklin, took control of managing the water supply. He enjoyed a better relationship with Richards than did his boss. A roster was drawn up for the different units, which worked in relays, with priority given to the ADS. The water point was six hundred yards from the headquarters area and to reach it men had to negotiate a 300 foot drop, before returning heavily laden. The most anybody could manage to carry was two gallons. The source was little more than thirty yards from the Japanese, ‘and men had to crawl forward singly to fill containers’. A second water point was found near the spur that overlooked the road to Dimapur, but again the Japanese were nearby and supplies could only be drawn at night. Private Leslie Crouch of the West Kents’ pioneer platoon spent night after night edging his way down to the water stand. ‘We had rifles protecting us but carrying two cans of water you couldn’t do much … others went purely for defence. You had to go two or three times a night.’ The Indian non-combatants helping the wounded were restricted to drinking the juice from the ample supplies of tinned peas and fruit taken from garrison stores.

  The situation in and around Richards’s bunker became increasingly crowded as the siege wore on. Walter Greenwood saw the number of men he was responsible for feeding rise from around thirty to seventy in a few days. He needed fifteen gallons of water per day for this number, but could fetch only ten. The surplus was made up by the generosity of the West Kents’ water teams, with a promise from Greenwood that he would repay the favour when he could. Life inside the perimeter was governed by the overriding imperative of keeping under cover: there was not a single piece of open ground that the Japanese did not overlook. The garrison was spied on by malevolent and ever-watchful eyes. The headquarters area bunkers were all approximately five feet deep, eight feet wide and the same across. On top there were timbers and about two feet of earth to absorb blasts.

  Hugh Richards regularly left the comparative safety of his bunker to visit men in their trenches, as did Charles Pawsey, who made his rounds ‘in a trilby hat with an umbrella and two Naga spearmen as his escort’. Major Donald Easten was struck by Richards’s courage. ‘He was an old man compared to us … It was great if you were in our position to see a senior officer who was willing to face the same dangers.’ Every morning Richards climbed the hill to Laverty’s bunker, noting with characteristic understatement that it was a ‘quite unpleasant’ journey, with snipers constantly active. There they discussed the overnight reports. It was an improvement from the total distance which existed between them at the start of the siege. Yet despite the fraught circumstances, the men never bonded. Laverty kept to his bunker and was not seen in the trenches, leaving the work of encouraging the exhausted troops to Richards, Major Franklin and the company commanders. This had nothing to do with lack of courage. One of Laverty’s staff, Captain Douglas Short, who spent the siege cooped up with the CO, believed his strength was as a tactical commander. He had nerves of steel, but if Laverty was shot dead in the trenches he would be of little use to his men. ‘He was a fine soldier and tactics were his thing. My view is that he knew the tactical side of things and Richards didn’t.’ The voice of a calm CO giving orders at the end of a field telephone can be just as much use to a company commander under fire as any morale-boosting appearance in the trenches.

  With supplies of water and plasma running dangerously low, Hugh Richards signalled to Warren, via Laverty’s radio, for an air drop. He added grenades and 3 inch mortar ammunition to the shopping list. When the drop came, the American Dakota pilots missed the target and dropped the ammunition on to the Japanese lines. The mortar shells were quickly fired back at the garrison, using captured British mortars. A second drop by the RAF brought more ammunition but it was intended for Warren’s guns at Jotsoma and useless to the Kohima garrison. When a third run succeeded in dropping water, much of it caught in the trees and the metal cans were riddled by Japanese bullets. Some containers smashed to the ground in no-man’s-land and the defenders watched their supplies leak into the ground; others crashed on to and killed some Indian soldiers. The staff officer, Captain Walter Greenwood, reckoned that only 50 per cent of the parachutes fell in areas controlled by the garrison. The remainder fell equally in no-man’s-land and in the Japanese lines. But some of the medical supplies from the first drop did survive. After dark, Young went with a par
ty of non-combatants and recovered enough of them to alleviate the situation at the ADS. Patients were given morphine and gas gangrene serum.

  Making his inspection of the positions, Colonel Hugh Richards was worried about the men’s morale. The West Kents and the Assam Regiment had both held their ground until it was impossible to do so; other units of composite troops, with the exception of the Shere Regiment, had fought better than anybody had expected. But after the events of the Black Thirteenth, Richards sensed that the moment had come for some public affirmation of the garrison. He went to see Laverty, who suggested Richards issue a special order of the day. Crouched in his bunker, Richards dictated the message to his clerk, who duly typed out a copy for each unit and gave it to the runners. Richards’s voice was firm and confident: ‘By your acts you have shown what you can do. Stand firm, deny him every inch of ground … put your trust in God and continue to hit the enemy hard wherever he may show himself. If you do that his defeat is sure.’

  While the fierce battles for GPT Ridge, Jail Hill and Detail Hill had been taking place between 5 and 13 April, the Japanese had started an assault in the area around Charles Pawsey’s bungalow. If they could break through here, the garrison and West Kent headquarters, and Young’s ADS, would be next in line. Taking Garrison Hill would give Sato command of Kohima Ridge and make resistance futile. Already, the scene on the hill was becoming chaotic. In addition to the wounded, there were upwards of 1,500 scared non-combatants milling around.

  From his position, Lieutenant John Faulkner could hear shooting coming from the bungalow. Between Faulkner’s trench and Pawsey’s bungalow was a distance of about 230 yards. The route dropped down the hill in a succession of terraces. If the bungalow went, the Japanese would have to climb about thirty-five feet to the next terrace, where trenches had been dug at the edge of the tennis court. Lieutenant Faulkner was experiencing the mental shock of battle for the first time. His body trembled ‘like a leaf’ as he climbed out of the trench. In just three minutes, forty mortar shells landed in his platoon area on the hill. One of them hit the lip of his dugout. Faulkner steadied himself and went around the position. Astonishingly, only two men had been wounded: one had a shell splinter in his back, another had an eye full of dust thrown up by an exploding shell. In his handwritten account of what followed, Faulkner headlined this chapter ‘Three Day Nightmare’. Down at the bungalow a composite group of British troops, about two hundred men in all, were dug in around Pawsey’s garden of rhododendrons and cannas. These were mostly older soldiers, who were part of a reinforcement camp at Kohima, and some artillerymen unable to use their mountain guns. The Japanese came sweeping up from the roadway. The defenders fought hand to hand but were eventually driven up the slope by the sheer weight of numbers. There were counterattacks by Assam and Burma Regiment platoons. The bungalow changed hands three times in the course of the day, but by its end the Japanese were ensconced. The tennis court area became the new perimeter. Here the defenders and the Japanese faced each other in trenches across a patch of ground no more than twenty yards wide. One British soldier left behind on the Japanese side played dead until dark, trampled on by enemy in his trench, until he could jump up and run to the British lines.

  Now came Lieutenant Faulkner’s turn to lead. A company was sent to restore the situation at the bungalow. The rain poured down as they climbed out of their trenches and crept forward. At the tennis court, one platoon occupied the clubhouse, a little shack of brick and wood on the right-hand side, while the others took up positions along the centre and left. The composite troops who had been pushed back earlier in the day immediately attached themselves to the West Kents. For Faulkner, the morning was ominously quiet. He had the sense of plans taking shape that could involve his death or maiming. At 1300 hours the ground exploded. The mortars killed several men immediately. The dead were wrapped in blankets and laid in front of the trenches, ‘until we could find time to give them holes’. Any time one of A company tried to climb along the top of the ridge to Laverty’s headquarters, a sniper opened up. A light machine gun fired at anything that moved along the path down to the A company positions. Three hours after the first bombardment came a second. Faulkner was lucky. He had picked an abandoned bunker for his position. It had been well made. A direct hit caused no damage. It was the sniper and machine gun that were causing most casualties. By the end of the day, A company had abandoned the idea of running messages and a phone line was laid to Laverty at headquarters after dark. A third barrage came in after 1900 hours. Faulkner felt that the shelling was building towards something. Three hours later they came.

  ‘A hell of a din arose from the tennis court.’ The forward sections went through boxes of grenades ‘like butter’ and the Bren guns sizzled. After half an hour the shooting stopped. Faulkner went forward to see what had happened. He bumped into a Sergeant Bennett, ‘coming back like a young bullock that had seen red’. The NCO was desperate. He shouted at Faulkner: ‘For Christ’s sake let me have a section quick or they’ll be through us.’ The lieutenant ran to his position, grabbed four men and led them back to the NCO, skirting around the line of fire of a Japanese machine gun. Within a few seconds one of the replacements had been shot in the neck. The wounded man was carried back to Faulkner’s bunker but immediately got up to go back into the line. ‘Where the hell are you going?’ Faulkner demanded. ‘Back with Ferguson. The poor kid’s alone with that gun and it needs two,’ he replied. Faulkner found another man to go forward.

  Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes was also dug in with A company at the tennis court. In old age, his heart would still quicken as he described the Japanese attack. ‘They came howling and screaming and full of go. It was terrifying but the only good thing was the screaming let you know where they were coming from and so we got our lines of fire right and mowed them down. Wave after wave we cut them down with machine guns. I didn’t know if I was killing one or a dozen. I just swept the machine gun through ’em and that was it.’

  Wykes shared his trench with a boy called Williams from Wales. He was one of a draft of about twenty Royal Welch Fusiliers brought in as replacements to augment the West Kents. One day, during a lull, they were talking about food. ‘I said to this lad Williams, “Oh, I’m hungry. I think I know where I can get some biscuits.” So he said, “Yeah, I could do with something to eat.” I’d only got about ten foot away from the trench when this shell came in.’ Wykes was blown on to the ground. He looked up and saw a large cloud of smoke. Scrambling back to the trench he saw Williams lying on his back. He had been hit in the stomach; it was a death wound and Williams and Wykes both knew it. The boy grabbed Wykes’s arm and cried out. ‘“Don’t let me die. Don’t let me die.” And I thought, “Oh god, I can’t stop you from dying, mate.”’ Wykes kept telling him that things would be all right. He shouted for medical help, but Williams died soon after arriving at the ADS. Another Welsh soldier, Walter Williams, heard the screaming. ‘I will always remember a young Welsh boy, no more than nineteen, with his tummy hanging out calling out to his mother in Welsh. “Taffy,” he says, “Taffy,” he says, “I want my mother. I’m very lost” … with half his tummy out.’

  Another soldier, Mark Lambert, who had worked as an assistant in a gentlemen’s outfitter’s store before the war, kicked and punched at the men who came for him; he used his rifle as a hammer to smash in Japanese skulls. ‘You don’t forget that kind of thing. From both sides we were animals.’ Lambert drank heavily during the siege. ‘More often than not I was tanked up with rum. I was section leader and I persuaded the men that rum was not good for them.’ He offered to do the dawn guard duty in return for the men’s rum ration. Lambert never thought of home. He mentally disowned his family because thinking about them brought too much pain. Only later would he find out that his younger brother in the navy had been killed off the Italian coast in 1942.

  At the tennis court a battle of attrition had begun. Separated by only twenty yards, defender and attacker settled into sniping and throwing
grenades, punctuated by Japanese wave attacks. A Japanese soldier who stood up in the early dawn light, believing he was out of sight, was promptly killed by a batman from A company. Much of the greatest damage was done by the artillery firing from Jotsoma under the direction of Yeo and his observers. The men in the forward trenches would hear the Japanese forming up for an attack on the terrace below the tennis court. It took all of Yeo’s skill to avoid disaster and bring ‘fire down on call on any sector at incredibly short distances in front of our own troops’. Everybody in the battalion remembered what had happened to B company at the tunnels in the Arakan.

  The Japanese replied in kind, as Faulkner recorded: ‘At 6 p.m. the Jap did his damndest to blow us clean off the whole spur. To use an Americanism, he threw everything at us except the kitchen stove.’ Mortar rounds and shells from the 75 millimetre guns came screaming in. Faulkner’s bunker shook from near misses. He sat with one hand on the telephone, a cigarette in the other, ‘smoking furiously and trying to think of my girlfriend at home’. Another officer was sobbing uncontrollably. Two others played cards, forcing their minds to concentrate on something other than the fear of dying. Suddenly a soldier dashed in and began to scream about people being killed, ‘completely off his rocker’. The phone was blown to pieces by the shock waves of the next blast. Faulkner was terrified. ‘No man can be brave at times like that.’ His most trusted NCO, Sergeant Deacon, stumbled into the bunker. ‘He looked awful. His face was white and he couldn’t say anything – just looked at me.’ At that moment the roof took a direct hit. Dust flooded the interior and the beams sagged. But Faulkner’s luck held. The bunker did not collapse. There was a long silence, or so it seemed to Faulkner as he watched the dust float to the ground. The sergeant spoke up. ‘George Mann’s dead. Heaney’s badly wounded. York is shell shocked, and Stuart has buggered off. His nerve went. There’s only Laver left now.’ Faulkner realised that there was now a gap to his right. The shell-shocked soldier got up and went over to the sergeant. Together they left the bunker and went back to the trench on the right. A wounded man who had been resting in the bunker followed them. In this way the gap was filled. Later, Laverty sent a message to A company. ‘Bloody good show!’ He promised they would be relieved the following day. The exhausted men fought off two more assaults before John Winstanley’s B company came to relieve them. The ground around their position was littered with broken weapons. Faulkner waited until the last of his men were gone and then raced up the hill after them, imagining the snipers taking a bead on his back. ‘I ran so fast up the track that I must have been within an ace of shitting my trousers.’