Road of Bones Read online

  On the tennis court the Assam were still holding their own. But Calistan’s troops were also being overtaken by fatigue and, for some, a conviction that they would not survive. Lieutenant Pieter Steyn wrote of how ‘many were the anxious questions being asked. “Sahib, how long do you think we can hold out?” asked one man on DC Bungalow. But how could they be answered – anyhow with what certainty? Officers and men who asked such questions could only trust blindly that they were not destined to be annihilated. Many felt they were in the presence of something too big to grasp.’

  On Kuki Piquet the defenders looked down the slope into the darkness and waited for the charge. Donald Easten tried to rally his men of D company. ‘I was wounded but not so bad I couldn’t do something. I tried to rally people. I hope to a certain extent I was able to steady things. I think I said, “Come on, chaps, it’s not as bad as all that”, and then I gave instructions about where they should position themselves.’ Private Tom Jackson was Easten’s company clerk, ‘which meant general dogsbody’, and was regarded by his boss as ‘a wonderful fellow, a cockney and a man I became very fond of’. Jackson had delivered a signal to another trench when the Japanese opened up. ‘All hell let loose: shells, rifle fire, shouting Japanese.’ Company Sergeant Major Bill Haines, blind and still leaning on the arm of a helper, shouted at Jackson to withdraw to a trench further back. Jackson took off and jumped into a hole, where he met an Indian officer and the sapper Lieutenant John Wright, the man who had blasted the Japanese out of the bashas on Detail Hill an eternity ago. ‘I jumped in,’ Jackson recalled, ‘and the lieutenant asked me what was happening. I said that if the Japanese came up the hill “we’d had our chips”. He said, “Right, we’ll use bayonets.”’

  At half past two in the morning the defenders heard screams on the slope below and the sound of men clambering towards them. This time the wave stuttered before the Bren and rifle fire but then swept onwards until the Japanese were in among the defenders. Artillery support broke up the Japanese reinforcements at the bottom of the hill for a short while, but the enemy revived and came again. CSM Haines found Jackson and told him to retreat up the hill. ‘We were clearly getting a hammering and couldn’t hold the position. Off we went, one of the signallers getting wounded in the leg as he jumped into a hole.’ At thirty, Haines was one of the battalion’s old soldiers, a veteran of France, where he had been awarded a Military Medal and, according to Easten, ‘one of those chaps who never pushed himself forward but you knew if you said, “what do you think we ought to do about this?” he would come up with the right answer’.

  How much could he see of what was happening around him? With his eyes badly damaged from the mortar blast, it may have been only the flaring light from the fires or shadows darting around him. But Haines would have certainly heard the noise, the screams of British and Japanese, the explosions and shooting, and his own hoarse voice urging the defenders to hold on. A few minutes after jumping into his new trench Tommy Jackson heard that Haines was dead. The men nearby quickly recovered Haines’s badge, revolver and compass, and gave them to Jackson. Donald Easten had come forward to direct a Bren-gun crew when he heard the news. ‘A company sergeant major in battle is your right-hand man. He was about thirty yards from me at the time. I went down to talk to some chaps about getting a Bren gun in a certain position and there was his body. It was dreadful.’

  The Japanese scattered the remaining defenders before them. The men of D company, the Assam formations, the 4/7 Rajput and Rawlley’s composite Indians fled from Kuki Piquet and on to Garrison Hill. This brought the Japanese to within one hundred yards of the command bunkers. In what can only have been an act of desperation, Laverty ordered Tom Hogg of B company to gather up his three survivors from 10 platoon and ‘enough stray men’ to retake a position captured by the Japanese. Hogg was horrified. Fortunately the conversation took place over the field telephone. ‘There was no mention of any kind of support. I realised it could be only a vain suicide mission and I hesitated before replying, long enough fortunately for a shell to burst sufficiently close by to stop the conversation and I heard no more of that proposition.’ John Laverty had run out of options. He did not have the numbers to make a counterattack. The hill was crowded with fighting troops; the number of wounded had now swollen to around six hundred and added to those were the increasingly panicked non-combatants. If the Japanese were to come in strength now, he felt sure Garrison Hill would fall. Where in God’s name was the relief? His mortar platoon commander, Sergeant King, struggled into the command bunker. King and his mortar team had worked relentlessly, bringing fire down on any concentration of Japanese that could be seen. He wanted permission to move his mortars so that he could fire on Kuki Piquet before the Japanese had time to form up. In an account given later, King was described as having ‘half his jaw … hanging away so that he could talk, only half intelligibly, out of the side of his mouth. His right shoulder was hunched forward with the shot-away portion of the jaw resting on it. While he spoke he kept spitting out gouts of blood on to the floor of the dugout.’ Laverty told King to get himself treated at the ADS. The wounded man would go only after he had first been given an order to bring his mortars into action. They were soon falling on the Japanese occupiers of Kuki Piquet.

  With the entire garrison in peril, 2nd Division artillery renewed its bombardment, not only on the Japanese infantry positions but on Sato’s artillery as well; the British 25 pounder guns were directed by the observers inside the garrison and forward observers creeping close to Japanese positions. Captain Arthur Swinson witnessed the bombardment from the road outside Kohima. ‘Stood and watched the flashes spurt and die as they fired, lighting up the camp one second to plunge it into darkness the next. What with these lighting effects and the demoniacal roar of sound, the whole scene was pitched into the over-real vividness of a nightmare.’

  Somehow the Japanese guns kept up their fire, with more shells falling among the wounded throughout the night. John Faulkner was directing mortar fire and watched two men ‘ramming bombs down the barrel as fast as they get ’em out again, laughing like a couple of schoolboys’. Early the following morning, Hugh Richards left his bunker and climbed towards Laverty’s position. On the way he saw West Kent trenches filled with dead from the previous night’s shelling. At 0600 hours Lieutenant Colonel Young and his orderlies went round the wounded telling them that they would be evacuated that morning. This time there would be no false dawn. Warren was on the radio from Jotsoma half an hour later to tell Young to expect relief by the 1/1 Punjab at any time. Once they arrived, the evacuation of the wounded could start. But this did not mean the relief of the garrison. Only a company of 1/1 Punjab was expected and an all-out Japanese assault was still likely at any moment. At 0700 hours the combined artillery of 2nd Division and 161 Brigade began pounding the Japanese once more; the shelling was to give the defenders respite and allow the relief troops to break through.

  Events moved rapidly. At 0710 hours Young ordered that all patients be given morphine half an hour before being evacuated; ten minutes later the commander of the 1/1 Punjab appeared at the ADS. His men were through. The road was open. The Japanese roadblocks had been blasted away. It is hard to imagine what the troops’ arrival represented to Young and the other medics. They had long passed the point at which human beings are meant to cease functioning in a logical manner. Thirteen days of siege with only snatched fragments of rest. But the newly arrived 1/1 Punjab officer found Young in complete command of the situation, punctiliously checking the arrangements for the movement of his wounded men and dispensing advice on the deployment of the fresh troops. The 1/1 Punjab had taken up positions overlooking the road from where they could help cover the evacuation. There were tanks following to give support. The combination of armour and artillery fire kept the Japanese pinned in their positions for the time being. The evacuation could begin.

  At first Lieutenant Bruce Hayllar could not believe what was happening. ‘It was a marvellous moment
. They started saying, “If you can walk down the hill they are sending up some lorries to take you out.” The walking wounded set off. Our reaction was “I don’t believe it.” It was wonderful when it happened. Some people were getting up and walking down to where we knew there was a road. I went with another chap. We had a stick each and walked. We met various corpses on the road. Some were ours and some were Japs.’ Down at the road there were lorries and Hayllar saw the stretcher cases being loaded. He felt jealous of them because he was afraid there would be no lorries left to take the walking wounded. Hayllar made it on to a lorry, and as he was driven down towards Dimapur they met British troops marching to Kohima. ‘They looked horrified when they saw us. We hadn’t shaved for a fortnight and had no water. They gave us cigarettes and water. We were too ill to talk about it.’ Another soldier, Mark Lambert of the West Kents, had spent the previous days at the ADS in agony from a leg wound, and from constipation. Evacuation brought sudden relief. ‘I was taken down the road in an open truck. The constipation I had just stopped. The motion of the truck was like an explosion!’

  Private Harold Norman was assigned to stretcher duty. He was told to check the men lying on stretchers, ‘and if they were dead I had to send the Indian stretcher-bearers around the back of the feature where they put the bodies in a heap to be buried later’. At around 11a.m. he was helping carry a stretcher to the main road when shells began exploding. There was screaming from newly wounded men and from others terrorised by this last-minute assault. Corporal A. E. Judges who was helping the wounded was killed, and a West Kent captain badly wounded. He would die later. Private Norman ran for cover, passing the mutilated bodies of men who, a few moments before, had been on their way to safety. ‘I saw trunks without legs and arms, and bodies with heads blown off.’ The stretcher-bearers were also under pressure from Japanese machine-gun fire. Five medical orderlies, including a major, were wounded. Eventually, four tanks arrived and put the Japanese artillery out of action. Fighter-bombers again flew in and attacked the enemy trenches.

  The evacuation went on throughout the day with Lieutenant Colonel Young in the thick of things. At one point he discovered that a group of casualties seemed to be missing. Young found them near the Indian hospital where the terrified stretcher-bearers had taken cover from machine-gun fire. He gathered the men together and led them down to the road to the ambulances. Among those who left on 18 April was Charles Pawsey. By staying throughout the siege he had shown the Nagas that they would not be abandoned by the British; now there was much work for him to do with the thousands of refugees who had fled their villages. Pawsey would go to Dimapur and insert himself among the officers and officials who controlled the food and medical supplies. By 1640 hours the Advanced Dressing Station, scene of so much agony, was cleared of patients. Lieutenant Colonel Young, however, stayed on. The road was open but the main relieving forces had not yet appeared.

  In Laverty’s bunker there was an urgent discussion about the tennis court position. The West Kents’ CO wanted to know if it could be let go and the Assam troops take up new positions on the edge of Garrison Hill. ‘I said it must be held,’ wrote Richards, ‘as if it were not the whole of Summerhouse [Garrison] Hill could be rolled up from that flank.’ Laverty agreed and the 1/1 Punjab were sent to the tennis court to take over from the exhausted 1st Assam troops.

  That night the Japanese artillery plastered Garrison Hill once again. Captain Harry Smith of headquarters company, 4th battalion, was struggling to get to the command post when a mortar blast knocked him over. A shell fragment lodged at the front of his skull and he lost consciousness. The 1/1 Punjab who took over the tennis court positions were heavily attacked but drove the Japanese back. There was no sign at all of an attack from Kuki Piquet. By the morning of 19 April the men in the trenches were feeling something like hope. They saw the arrival of the 1/1 Punjab as a signal of greater things to come. Later that day, Richards noted, the ‘Div artillery put down a most terrific concentration on KUKI piquet for quarter of hour. Seemed nothing could live.’ But enough Japanese survived to defend Kuki Piquet against the 1/1 Punjab’s attempted counter-attack. John Faulkner saw them charge, ‘with blood curdling yells’, but they failed to gain any ground. They may, however, have given the Japanese an undue impression of the strength of the reinforcements on Garrison Hill. Sato had to draw off men from the assault in order to deal with the reinforcements arriving on the road from Dimapur, and must have realised that he would soon be forced on to the defensive. That night, the Japanese did gain some ground after the ill-fated Shere troops once more abandoned their positions, this time about forty yards from Laverty’s headquarters. A counter-attack by A company of the West Kents drove the enemy out, killing over twenty of them, including a trenchful of men who were burned alive by exploding petrol and phosphorus grenades. Private Norman helped dispose of Japanese bodies on the perimeter. ‘We collected all the pieces and put then in a pit and burnt them.’

  The defenders held on throughout 19 April thanks to artillery support and the failure of the Japanese to launch an all-out assault from Kuki Piquet. Richards was convinced that one push was all it would take to annihilate the garrison. Perhaps it would come the following morning.

  On the morning of 20 April, Captain Harry Smith, still groggy with morphine, looked up to see British troops in ‘nice clean new uniforms making their way up around the top of the hill covered by a very heavy barrage of 2 Division’s artillery’. The men were from 1st battalion, Royal Berkshire Regiment, 6 Brigade, and had come to take over the defence. Smith thanked God and then told the new arrivals to watch out for snipers.

  Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes, A company, was in a weapons pit overlooking the tennis court that morning and came as close to death as he ever believed he would. He was staring out through an observation slit when a sniper opened fire. The bullet just missed his face and slammed into the rear of the trench. With his heart pounding, Wykes jumped back from the slit. Soon afterwards an unfamiliar soldier slid into the pit beside him. This man had shaved. He wore a clean uniform, and his eyes were clear. ‘He said, “I’m taking over your position now.” I said, “You’re welcome to it.” We shook hands. I warned him about the sniper. I said “Move quick, don’t show your face.” How I got off that hill I never did know.’ All day the West Kent survivors staggered down the hill in twos and threes, towards waiting lorries. Private Tommy Jackson was carrying the belongings of Sergeant Major Haines as he was evacuated, knowing that the big man was lying back among the Japanese on Kuki Piquet. ‘But you don’t talk about that. You laugh at all the little things you got away with. It’s impossible to explain,’ he said.

  They were shelled and sniped at again as they formed up to leave. The tanks immediately responded. Dennis Wykes felt numb with weariness. He walked for several miles until he saw an officer standing by the roadside with a large canteen full of fruit salad. ‘He was ladling it out. He said “Well done lads, you done well.” And I thought to myself, “You ain’t done a bad job yourself here.”’

  The relieving forces were shocked at the survivors’ appearance. Brigadier Victor Hawkins, commander of 5 Brigade, saw them coming down the road to Dimapur. ‘They were a sight for the gods. Long beards of all hues and their clothes fit only for scarecrows.’ The sights and smells nauseated the Royal Berkshires taking over the positions on Garrison Hill. Many doubled over and retched. An artillery officer wrote of ‘the stench of festering corpses … the earth ploughed by shell-fire … human remains … rotting as the battle raged over them … flies swarmed everywhere and multiplied with incredible speed.’ He came across a Japanese bunker in which about twenty men had fought and lived for several days, ‘littered with their dead companions and their own excreta’. Ray Street, the C company runner, gave what advice he could to the incoming men. There was a last-minute tragedy in Ivan Daunt’s trench. Daunt had just left when a sniper opened fire on Private Horace Collins, killing him and then wounding another man. Collins’s brother Len had b
een killed a few days earlier. ‘He didn’t know about it,’ remembered Ray Street, ‘we were going to tell him about it when we’d got out.’ He knew two other men who were shot by snipers as the trucks were being loaded.

  Donald Easten, John Winstanley, John Faulkner and the other surviving officers of 4th battalion saw their men safely on to the trucks. Lieutenant Tom Hogg led a party of around fifteen men to the road and met an incoming patrol who offered them tea and rock buns. He could not eat. John Laverty and his headquarters staff were the last of the West Kents to leave, moving like sleepwalkers until they reached the roadway and the waiting trucks. A witness described Laverty as ‘dead beat’, literally sleeping on his feet as he walked to the trucks, the strain of constantly trying to fill gaps with fewer and fewer men lifted from his shoulders at last. The West Kents’ CO had also lost many men whom he knew and upon whom he had depended; most of his senior officers were wounded or dead; the companies were shredded and existed only in name. The battalion had lost seventy-eight dead and nearly two hundred wounded, more than half of the men who first came into Kohima.

  As the vehicles carrying the West Kents rolled down to Dimapur they were clapped and cheered by the advancing troops of 2nd Division, British and Indian alike. ‘Shabash [Well done], Royal West Kents,’ they shouted. Ten miles from Kohima, Captain Arthur Swinson saw the first of the West Kents. He found it hard to believe that they were British troops. Only their rifles indicated they were not a band of ghostly tramps. He saw men with faces caked with dry blood, many covered in filthy, blood-soaked bandages. ‘Some were falling fast asleep but others though palpably crazed with fatigue were buoyed with excitement and a blessed relief. Their dull, haunted eyes brightened into a smile as they waved to the troops along the roadside.’