Road of Bones Read online

  Lieutenant Colonel ‘Bruno’ Brown and the Assam Regiment, who had been in battle constantly since the end of March, walked for two miles to reach the trucks. Of an estimated 400 men who had been deployed from Kohima the previous month, the 1st Assam had lost more than half in the battles of Kharasom, Jessami and Kohima. Albert Calistan described the Assam Regiment survivors ‘marching and doubling some two miles down the main road to Dimapur … [where] we picked up transport’. They arrived at teatime and the battalion war diary records that the men ‘although very tired indeed were in excellent spirits. They were given hot tea, and a good meal. Each man had a stretcher, sheets, blankets and pillows for the night.’

  The West Kents found hot baths waiting for them, lined up in the open at Dimapur. ‘They cut these drums in half,’ recalled Dennis Wykes, ‘so you had half a drum full of water and you jumped in, it felt really good.’ They scrubbed off the grime and the smell of death, and then they shaved, using several blades to get through the tangled beards. Ray Street remembered being sprayed with disinfectant and some men having their bodies shaved because of lice. ‘We slept through the next twenty-four hours, missing meals, despite being called and woken up for them.’ In his waking moments, Street was disconcerted by the silence. For two weeks he had lived with the sound of shells exploding and guns firing. ‘In a strange way,’ he wrote, ‘I missed the bombardment.’

  Back up the road at Kohima, Hugh Richards watched the completion of the relief. At about four in the afternoon he got a message telling him to report to 2nd Division headquarters on the road to Dimapur. He went back to his bunker and collected his few possessions, and walked away from Garrison Hill towards the waiting trucks.

  * * *

  * Rawlley went on to become vice chief of staff in the Indian Army after a distinguished career.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Attrition

  True to form, Private Norman was thinking of his stomach again. On the night they reached Dimapur he took care to record what the 4th battalion was given for dinner. At 1800 hours the survivors of Kohima sat down to bully-beef rissoles, potatoes, fried tomatoes, gravy, plum duff and treacle. That was followed with ‘unlimited supplies of canned fruit, jam, bars of plain chocolate, ½ packets of biscuits. Soap, chewing gum, fags, matches, playing cards.’ Reading his diaries of the siege and its aftermath, one ceases to regard his obsession with the minutiae of each meal as pedantic; food, its rituals and timings, was the way for Private Norman to keep a grip on his sanity. While he could still eat, and meticulously detail the food, Harold Norman could believe that he was alive and that some part of his old self was surviving.

  He was glad to see that Padre Randolph had reopened his canteen and was selling tea and half-packets of biscuits between meals. The men got mail. Norman opened five parcels, which included letters from home, a copy of the Hotspur, a Hampshire Chronicle and two crime novels. The following day he set off into Dimapur to visit Sergeant Tacon, the famous Bren gunner who had mown down the Japanese fleeing Detail Hill in the early days of the siege. Tacon had just been told that his brother had been killed in action in Europe. The sergeant was making a good recovery, but Norman’s diary does not record his reaction to the loss of his brother. The schoolmaster, Captain Harry Smith, had spent an uncomfortable night, the result not of his own head wound, but of ‘listening to the cries of the wounded’ in the beds around him.

  Private Norman was shocked by the conditions in the hospital. ‘Our lads have not yet had their wounds dressed, their sheets changed or been bathed yet.’ He also ran into Private Charlie Howell, who told him that a sniper had killed five West Kents with seven shots in fifteen minutes near the bungalow. For troops who had been in different sectors of the defence, cut off from each other by noise and by snipers, the first days of peace were a chance to find out what had really happened at Kohima. Some men sat in clusters and talked, others went off by themselves, and many simply slept. Those who chatted heard which of their friends had lived and which died. There was no drama. The 4th battalion had lived with sudden deaths for so long now that the men did no more than shake their heads at such news. The grief simply became part of all the other grief that they suppressed in order to survive.

  John Winstanley wondered what news, if any, had reached his mother. She lived alone in a cottage in Kent and had already had ‘those awful telegrams’ telling her he had been wounded in the Arakan, and about the wounding of his brother in Europe. ‘You don’t know, is he dead or is he scratched or is he badly wounded.’ She had heard no news of him since he had gone into battle in the Arakan. What would she be thinking now, this woman who had lost her husband in the last war, and who had devoted her life to her two sons’ upbringing and education? He wrote immediately to tell her he was safe.

  Lieutenant Bruce Hayllar was able to write to his parents from hospital in Dimapur on 20 April, two days after he had limped out of Kohima with the rest of the wounded. The experience had convinced him, he wrote, to devote his life to God. ‘I have never seen, and never shall again see, such bravery and unselfishness as I saw up there.’ There was in his letter a deep undercurrent of anger, not only at the war, but at some of those who had never experienced the hell of a front line. ‘A man with an M.C. or D.S.O. is so far, far superior to a successful businessman or politician. Again, some people are a bit lazy about the war … content to let it run on without worrying much about it except as to how it affects themselves. They should just see what a battle involves. It is a terrific and most disgusting thing. Far worse than any slum or brothel and far bigger. As long as fighting is going on people should be conscious of this. And do all they can to help, so that it can be finished quickly.’

  John Laverty was up early on the morning after their arrival at Dimapur. He called a conference of his officers for half past nine. A diminished band arrived, clean-shaven but haggard. Laverty went through the events of the previous fortnight and then read out a congratulatory message from General Grover. They discussed plans for sports for the men and for reorganising the shattered companies. Fresh drafts of troops were available in Dimapur to join the battalion. They would do what they had done after Dunkirk and after Alam Halfa. Start again with unfamiliar faces and trust the old warriors to keep the new ones alive long enough to become proper jungle fighters. Before he finished, Laverty told his officers to come back to him with recommendations for decorations among the troops. The most obvious contender was John Harman of Easten’s D company, who had charged two machine-gun nests and given his life in the process. Easten decided he should be put forward for the highest medal in the armed forces, the Victoria Cross. He felt Laverty should know something of Harman’s eccentric personality before he made a decision.

  ‘He was a man who took the law into his own hands … I went to Colonel Laverty and told him all this and he said, “There is really only one thing you can do and that is put him up for the VC.”’ Easten then decided to share the story Harman had told him about the old man in Spain promising he would live to old age. ‘There is one thing, Sir,’ he told the CO, ‘I think Harman believed he was immortal.’ Laverty took the news in his stride. ‘Well Donald,’ he replied, ‘you don’t judge people by that, you judge them by comparison with ordinary men and their fellow soldiers around them.’ Harman would get his VC.

  The following day, 22 April, Brigadier Warren, CO of 161 Brigade, arrived and spent the day with 4th battalion. The men were gathered together and Warren read out the special message of congratulations from General Grover. ‘This is the first time in history that one battalion has stopped an enemy division.’ It was a statement meant for the ears of the West Kents only, but it set them apart from their fellow defenders of Kohima. The war diary does not record whether the men cheered or not. Laverty told them he was being put up for the DSO for the defence of Kohima, but ‘it was for all of us’. For some of those gathered listening, the time of rest and backslapping would be short.

  That afternoon word went around that a composite company,
made up from B and D companies, was being put together to guard a position at Milestone 32 on the road to Kohima. This was not the front line, and the job was simply to guard the line of communications up to the troops starting the fight for Kohima Ridge. But the men heard the news barely forty-eight hours after getting out of Kohima. Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes was not happy. ‘We scraped out by the skin of our teeth. We weren’t happy to be going back again.’ The rest of the battalion would stay at Dimapur for the time being. For some of the Kohima veterans, this was an order too far. What happened next has never been mentioned in any of the written accounts of the siege, nor is it referred to in 4th battalion’s war diary.

  Dennis Wykes remembered it taking a week to reorganise the battalion, and during this time a corporal and ten men vanished. They walked out of the gates and into Dimapur and got on to a train. The medic, Frank ‘Doc’ Infanti, had sympathy with them. ‘Some of them were brave men, one of them was recommended for a military medal, but they couldn’t face going back up.’ Dennis Wykes was called in by his company commander and told to pick three men and find the deserters. It took about a fortnight to find them. They had travelled across India and reached Bombay, where they promptly handed themselves in to the military police. There was nowhere else for them to go in India and boarding a ship home to England was out of the question. When Wykes arrived to collect them the men were lined up outside the guardroom. ‘I said, “You know the score. You’ve all been through the siege. We’ve all seen that and known what you felt.”’ One of the men told Wykes that a bullet had parted his hair and creased his scalp at Kohima. After that he didn’t worry about what the army might do to him. On the train back the corporal told Wykes that he and the other guards should get some sleep. ‘It took about a week to get across India. The corporal said, “You can get yer heads down and get some sleep and we won’t try to escape.” So we trusted them and they didn’t escape.’ In the First World War such men would have been shot. But the army had moved some way in its understanding of what battle can do to the human mind. Laverty knew what the men had endured and he realised what a blot a court martial would place on the 4th battalion’s achievement at Kohima. There was no court martial. According to Wykes, the men were used as ammunition-carriers for the remainder of the war.

  The story of Kohima’s epic defence had already reached the newspapers. As early as 18 April, a military correspondent with South-East Asia Command was quoting a West Kent private, presumably one of the evacuated wounded, praising padre Randolph, who ‘used to sleep in the hospital trenches alongside the wounded and did everything to make us comfortable’. By their deeds the West Kents and the 1st Assam Regiment, and all the other defenders of Kohima, provided the army publicity machine with a boon. Within a week, public relations officers had descended on Dimapur, ‘all eager to get at first hand personal stories of the doings of the battalion’. They were directed not to any of the Indian regiments but to the West Kents, where the bemused soldiery were interrogated by military correspondents.

  One of them was a Captain Kitchen, described as an ‘Observer with the 14th Army’, who collected the first account of John Harman’s death, perhaps embellishing the story in his telling of his final minutes. ‘Officially he shot four and bayoneted a fifth, but it is probable he killed ten,’ Kitchen announced. ‘He was severely wounded by machine-gun fire, but got back to his trench. There he took off his equipment, lay back and said “It was worth it – I got them all.” He refused aid from stretcher-bearers, crossed his arms, closed his eyes and, two minutes after the action, died.’

  For reasons of wartime secrecy, the name of the battalion was not given. Instead, 4th battalion was referred to as ‘a home counties unit’. This infuriated several of the officers, including padre Randolph, who fired off a stiff missive regretting ‘the abrupt dismissal of the work of the Royal West Kents’ to SEAC, the newspaper of South-East Asia Command, edited by Mountbatten’s propaganda chief and former Fleet Street editor, Frank Owen. It took until 13 June for SEAC to name the West Kents under the headline ‘First Story of a Proud Battalion’, by Reg Foster.

  If the West Kents received little publicity by name, the Assam Regiment, Assam Rifles and other garrison troops saw even less. But the Assam soldiers were treated to a visit by the man they revered above all others. On 2 May, General Slim came and ‘walked round and spoke to all the V.C.O.* and men in the area. He asked us to pass on his message of congratulations to all other men in the Bn.’ Within a month the 1st battalion, Assam Regiment, was on a train to barracks at Shillong, where the road was lined with cheering men from the training battalion. They were given a hot meal and rum and two days’ holiday.

  There was never a conspiracy to play down the achievements of the men who had fought in the siege of Kohima; they suffered the fate of all warriors on remote fronts. By the time the full story was told to the press, the excitement over D-Day was inevitably dominating public attention.

  Charles Pawsey had little concern for publicity. He had spent the last twenty years of his life cut off from daily newspapers, in a place where the happenings of the wider world were known to him only via the crackly airwaves of the BBC, and reception was never very good. But, the newspaper men found him. His was a story too good to be ignored. He is described in one account as ‘Pawsey Sahib’ and in another as ‘The White Chief’, the headline writers indulging with abandon their fondness for the colonial stereotype. Graham Stanford of the Daily Mail met Pawsey – ‘tall, sinewy with graying hair’ – near Kohima at the end of April and described him as ‘the type of Englishman that I always thought lived only in the pages of Somerset Maugham novels’. He recorded Pawsey’s sadness at losing his collection of Naga ‘craft-work’ which had taken him years to accumulate.

  Had Pawsey read a later dispatch of Stanford’s he might have been roused from his customary good manners, for the Mail writer denigrated his Naga friends. ‘Perched 5,000 feet up in the border mountains,’ wrote Stanford, ‘Kohima in peace time was a place of no importance to anyone save grinning, grunting Naga headhunters.’ It was writing of its time, and little changed from the discourse of ‘savages’ that had informed the accounts of nineteenth-century travellers in Nagaland. Only later would the British generals and writers publicly outdo each other in their lavish praise of the Nagas.

  By late April, Naga men were still heavily engaged in war work for the British, and Charles Pawsey was touring the refugee camps and villages and seeing the scale of the disaster suffered by civilians. He estimated that 7,000 Nagas needed rations immediately but warned the figure could rise to 30,000; he wanted 10,000 blankets, 12,000 earthenware pots and 3,000 mosquito nets. Some American Baptist missionaries appeared on the scene, offering to help Christians. Pawsey replied firmly that ‘unless they are willing to help everybody their offer will not be accepted’. Pawsey made sure that the army chiefs knew of the Nagas’ devotion to the British cause. He told a correspondent travelling with 14th Army that Nagas were supplying the army with 4,000 day-labourers, none of whom would take payment. ‘They are very gentle with the wounded always carrying them at the same level no matter how steep the gradient is.’

  Making his way around villages in British-occupied territory, the deputy commissioner was given messages from Naga contacts. A constable he knew well wrote to him describing how he had led troops to the capture of a government building held by the Japanese, and how he was staying on with the army in the jungle, trying to track the enemy. ‘Sir I am still at Chihawa with Major Henchman collecting information from every direction and all the police within my area are employed in leading the troops in every direction. Sir I am trying to meet you soon.’ Many other Nagas were crossing the Japanese lines to find Pawsey. Krusischi Pashkar, from Kohima village, saw the men marching through the jungles to the British lines, and mothers with small children being given rations at the sentry posts. Pawsey opened a temporary hospital at Dimapur and Pashkar saw him come ‘every day to see the refugees and to enquire of their
sufferings and to arrange their relief. Pots, clothes and tarpaulins were brought and supplied to the Kohima men.’ Without the rations organised by Pawsey the refugees would have starved. Travelling from one hiding place to another, twelve-year-old B. K. Sachu Angami lived on roots foraged from the jungle. Weak with hunger the boy day dreamed about the feasts his people held before the war. A feast every month of the year with plenty of game. Now when he went into the jungle with his catapult and tried to find small birds there was silence and empty branches. ‘We were taken here and there by our parents. For want of food we could hardly survive.’

  By the time Kohima was relieved the threat from deserters marauding the hills had ceased. Ursula Graham Bower and her Naga scouts were continuing to patrol and gather intelligence, but the sense of imminent threat was gone. She was sent reinforcements, a half-section of Assam Rifles and their V Force officer, all of whom had survived the siege. They arrived at her hilltop headquarters and went to bed for forty-eight hours. ‘When they had done that and emerged again, they cleaned everything until it glistened and then looked around for some more Japs.’ Graham Bower took advantage of the relief to take herself to 14th Army headquarters at Comilla for supplies and because it was ‘an excuse to let me get to Calcutta and get a perm wave’. News of her presence in Comilla reached Slim and she was sent for. Her first thought was that her command was going to be terminated; the siege was over and the days of Tommy gun-toting eccentrics, especially female ones, would be brought to an end. At headquarters she was marched by a brigadier along a long veranda with ‘lots of offices going up in order of importance’. The brigadier knocked on a door and announced: ‘Miss Bower, Sir!’ Slim leapt up and held out his hand, a look of relief on his face. ‘Oh, thank God,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be a lady missionary in creaking stays.’ Slim paid fulsome tribute to the Nagas and their spying work for the British, and told her about the battles at Jessami and Kharasom where the Assam Regiment had delayed Sato’s advance. After this pat on the back, Graham Bower was sent back to the hills to help train allied airmen in jungle survival techniques. For now the V Force war of stalk and ambush in the hills was in abeyance. Kohima was becoming a battle of attrition.