Road of Bones Read online

  It had been a ‘very excellent show’, General Stopford agreed. The Kohima garrison had saved everybody from grievous embarrassment. The commander of 33 Corps arrived at Dimapur at eight in the morning on 18 April, as the first wounded were being brought out of Kohima. He was swiftly transferred to a jeep for the trip to meet General Grover, under whom he intended to light a small fire. Nearly two weeks had passed since Grover had assured him that the Kohima mess would be cleared up in four or five days. Instead, he was calling for more troops for what was looking increasingly like a battle of attrition. The relief of the garrison had been achieved, but the Japanese were still commanding the road to Imphal and Slim and Mountbatten wanted to know when it would be clear.

  On the way General Stopford passed all the welcome trappings of an army moving forward: the lines of trucks loaded with ammunition and food, belching thick smoke on to the men following them; the mule trains which would be swinging off the road and up into the hills; the military police vainly trying to impose order on the traffic; and the picqets of Victor Hawkins’s 5 Brigade protecting the line of communications. Hawkins had been the one to bring home to General Grover the difficulties of the terrain. Grover had confided in Hawkins that he was nervous about the meeting with Stopford and feared he would get a ‘bowler hat’ for asking for more troops. ‘Don’t worry sir,’ Hawkins replied, ‘I am quite sure you are right.’

  It took Stopford nearly three hours to complete his journey and he arrived at 2nd Division headquarters to find ‘John Grover … in good form but rather strung up’. Grover went through his difficulties. He was still lacking in signals, engineers, artillery and service corps, and he feared attacks on his line of communications. To Stopford’s impatient ears this may have sounded like special pleading; as he put it later, ‘In view of the lack of enterprise on the part of the enemy this was overdone, and it became clear that the risk … must be accepted as normal.’ Grover was told he must get moving and dominate territory.

  Stopford was facing his own strains. On 20 April he confided to his diary that the Americans believed the British were in no hurry to open the road to Imphal because they could depend on American aircraft. As if that were not a problem enough, the Chinese generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was sticking his unhelpful oar in, refusing to commit his divisions in northern Burma and blaming the British for ‘messing up’ the Assam campaign. ‘Washington supports this view,’ Stopford mournfully recorded. This information must surely have come via Slim, who was privy to Mountbatten’s negotiations with the Americans.

  The worsening political news translated into fresh pressure on Grover. A new memo was despatched to the commander of 2nd Division, also on 20 April, explaining ‘why he must not waste time in clearing up the Kohima situation’. Grover told the officer who delivered the memo to his headquarters about his difficulties – essentially a repetition of what Stopford had heard a day earlier. The Japanese were dug in on the high ground around Kohima and he feared being cut off behind. Another officer visiting 2nd Division returned to Stopford’s headquarters later in the day with more baleful tidings. ‘Later in the evening Steedman, who has just returned from H.Q. 2 Div, told me that he had attended John G.’s conference this morning at which the latter had painted such a picture of methodical build-up that we shall never capture Kohima.’ The griping continued over the next few days. Stopford was ‘disappointed’, even ‘horrified’, and feared Kohima would not be cleared for a fortnight. If only he could have imagined how inadequate that projected timescale would be. News came on 23 April that the Durham Light Infantry, 6 Infantry Brigade, had lost two officers and ninety men wounded at Kohima, and Stopford was complaining that Grover was ‘hopelessly sticky and seems to have lost his tactical sense’.

  The day after receiving Stopford’s letter, Grover went up to see Garrison Hill for himself. His guide was the irrepressible CO of the 75th Indian Field Ambulance, Lieutenant Colonel Young, who, after a night’s sleep, was back checking the medical arrangements. Grover learned enough about the ferocity of the battle from what he saw, and from a meeting with Hugh Richards in Dimapur, to convince him that the fight ahead would be long and bloody. The chances of a swift advance were evaporating.

  Stopford did not agree. On 24 April he set out for Dimapur again and had a long meeting with Grover. On this occasion the corps commander came directly to the point. He told Grover he had been very slow, ‘which he did not like very much’. It is hard to pinpoint the precise moment at which John Grover’s fate was sealed, for he would survive as the British commander at Kohima for some weeks yet, but by the end of April Stopford appeared to have lost faith in his ability to deliver an imminent breakthrough. Slim would later write that, while Stopford was correct to urge speed at the end of April, the terrain and type of warfare were new to the troops and ‘the unavoidable arrival of the division piecemeal made the task of Grover … a difficult one’. That tolerance would evaporate over the coming weeks.

  Three days after his meeting with Grover, Stopford went up to the battlefield and watched the air strikes and the infantry advancing. On the way back he stopped at a river, thinking that a spot of fishing would be nice. He proceeded to throw some grenades into the water. Water gushed up from the detonations and the surface was covered with dead catfish and carp. When weighed they amounted to twenty pounds of fish. ‘Thoroughly satisfactory day,’ the general noted.

  General Slim followed the progress of his army from the mildewed town of Comilla, about two hundred miles to the east of Calcutta, on the banks of the Ghumti river. Since Slim had begun rebuilding the 14th Army, Comilla had become a major airbase and centre for casualties. The human consequences of the war he was directing were never far from Slim at Comilla. He disliked the place, for it had ‘a sideline in melancholy all its own’, presumably encouraged by the monuments to British officials murdered by Bengali rebels over the previous two decades. Still, by the end of April the first of Slim’s nightmares had been put to rest. There was no question now of the Japanese seizing his Dimapur base and cutting off the line of communications. The four British and Indian brigades now invested at Kohima would soon push the Japanese aside and move down the road to break the blockade of Imphal.

  There, General Scoones and 4 Corps had been holding off the Japanese 15th and 33rd Divisions since mid-March; although reinforced by elements of two Indian divisions, and well supplied and supported from the air, the defenders were not sanguine. They did not yet understand the increasingly dire state of the Japanese line of communications. Mutaguchi’s divisions had been pressing on Imphal along six routes, with battles breaking out on hills and tracks as the enemy infiltrated behind the defenders and were in turn outflanked themselves. The close-quarter fighting in these encounters was every bit as vicious as at Kohima. Overlooked by the mountains, on the Imphal plain around 150,000 men were surrounded and dependent on air supply; more than 400 tons of stores per day had to be flown in by the RAF and USAAF. Delivering this essential materiel were eight Dakota squadrons, amounting to around 130 aircraft, and the twenty C-46 Commandos loaned by the Americans at Mountbatten’s behest. But they were not devoted to Kohima and Imphal alone; there were still troops to be supplied in the Arakan and air drops to the Chindits on Wingate’s second mission, as well as Stilwell’s Chinese forces in the north of Burma. To ease the pressure on supplies, Scoones flew out nearly 30,000 non-essential personnel. But if the Americans, helped along by Chiang’s drips of poison, withdrew their aircraft, Imphal’s defenders would find themselves hungry before long. Adding to the problems was pressure from General Alexander for the return of the Dakotas, which had been diverted from the Italian campaign where allied forces were still struggling to break out of the Anzio beachhead.

  Although it was far from a priority in the pre-D-Day months, the relief of Kohima was a welcome piece of news from an area usually distinguished by a reputation for catastrophe. The notes of the War Cabinet on 24 April recorded that ‘Our stand at Kohima seems to have stayed the Japane
se thrust towards Dimapur … Generally, the outlook in the Imphal – Kohima area was hopeful.’ Churchill would write later that he ‘could feel the stress amid all other business’, and he cabled Mountbatten on 4 May in emphatic terms: ‘Let nothing go from the battle that you need for victory. I will not accept denial of this from any quarter, and will back you to the full.’ Which was all very well, but the retention of the vital American aircraft was not in Churchill’s gift. Nor was his CIGS, General Brooke, sympathetic to advancing any new resources to the Burma campaign.

  Whatever his well-documented aversion to fighting the Japanese in the jungle, and his unrealistic schemes for seaborne landings in Sumatra, by the end of April, Churchill recognised that he was in a fight at Kohima and Imphal and that losing would inflict grievous damage on already strained relations with Washington, and leave Britain humiliated in India and the Far East. On 9 May he wrote to General ‘Pug’ Ismay, his military secretary and link with the Chiefs of Staff, that the aircraft gap ‘must be filled at all costs … we cannot on any account throw away this battle’. He was willing to telegraph Roosevelt and inform him of the ‘disastrous consequences to his own plans for helping China which would follow the casting away of this battle’. Less than a week later he returned to the theme. Mountbatten’s battle would not be ruined by the folly of sending the aircraft away. But the delay in clearing Kohima was having a negative impact in Washington. As Mountbatten’s chief of staff, General Sir Henry Pownall, confided gloomily to his diary on 6 May: ‘I don’t think any of the Americans have any faith in the way our land operations are being conducted …’

  Slim would prove them wrong. But first he had to drive the enemy off Kohima Ridge, away from the approaches to Imphal and back across the Chindwin to disaster.

  * * *

  * Viceroy’s commissioned officers were subordinate in rank to all British officers. The rank of V.C.O. was equivalent to that of Warrant Officer in the British Army.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Trials of Victory, and Defeat

  General Sato had just come from his bath. It cannot have been an elaborate affair, the tub tucked into a basha in a thick part of the jungle close to the river bank. Emerging into the clearing outside, he met a young officer who had just arrived from Kohima. He recognised the younger man. ‘You did a good job in the front line,’ Sato said. ‘I just finished bathing. You will take a bath now.’ The muddy soldier did not know how to respond. Here was a senior general offering him the unimaginable gift of a bath, yet the young man kept picturing his men in the filthy trenches of Kohima. ‘Thank you for your kindness,’ he replied, ‘but thinking about my men in the battlefield, I cannot take a bath.’ The remark cut Sato, as he read into it a criticism of himself. He shouted at the man. ‘You don’t know my feeling. As a division leader, of course I would like to let all men in front line take bath if possible. Realistically, my wish does not come true, so at least I want you to take a bath on behalf of the others.’ The officer took his bath and resolved not to mention it to his men.*

  Sato’s sensitivity had everything to do with the worsening predicament of the 31st Division and his conviction that, with Mutaguchi in charge, he was subordinate to a dangerous fool. On 17 April, Mutaguchi sent him an order to strip his division of three infantry battalions, roughly a third of its strength, and a mountain artillery battalion, and to send them to Imphal. This when the British 2nd Division was clogging the roads to Kohima with reinforcements and threatening to throttle him. Still, sitting in faraway Maymyo, Mutaguchi was working on the assumption that all of the Kohima Ridge would be in Japanese hands by 29 April. The date was no coincidence. It was the emperor’s birthday and Mutaguchi intended presenting the hillside village as his personal gift. Sato initially instructed his commanders to prepare the troops for departure to Imphal at Aradura Spur, the huge ridge south of Kohima. Then he apparently thought differently and chose to ignore Mutaguchi’s order. When a reminder came, Sato replied that the order was impossible. It was finally cancelled, with unconscious irony, on 29 April. Sato had signalled his future intentions by defying the 15th Army commander.

  It was now well clear to the Japanese at Kohima that they were confronting a changed British and Indian enemy. Even Mutaguchi was beginning to sense that he may have underestimated them. Not only were they better armed and equipped, but they were fighting back. ‘For this I could not help showing respect to the British leadership – they were once in a difficult situation, but seized the opportunity created by the delayed Japanese attack [on Kohima] and regrouped, which led them to a victory in the end.’ A British correspondent’s contemporary account brings home the superiority in firepower of 2nd Division. ‘Across the valley … the Japanese sit and watch the convoys roll on to Kohima. In the past few days they have seen vast lines of vehicles coming up from Dimapur to swell the British attack. Every lorry is a possible target for Japanese guns and except where the road twists behind the spurs, every mile is in shell range … From these peaks every muzzle flash can be pinpointed and on the British side at least there is a mass of guns on call to hammer back at every Jap artilleryman who dares to fire.’

  The supply officer Lieutenant Masao Hirakubo remembered the arrival of 2nd Division. ‘It all changed … every five minutes they fired. We couldn’t walk in the daytime at all. Only at night we moved. I remember I said to myself “why are they making so heavy when they know we have no guns, only six shells a day for our mountain artillery?”’ At night harassing fire continued, with men never knowing where the shells would land. Aircraft attacked Hirakubo’s kitchen area. One of his cooks was shot by cannon fire and ‘his stomach just exploded’.

  But it was the appearance of tanks that made the greatest impression on the new defenders of Kohima Ridge. The intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel Iwaichi Fujiwara thought the armour of 2nd Division a graver threat to morale than the aircraft. Men formed suicide squads and attacked the tanks with magnetic mines and bombs. ‘Unfortunately these tactics involved a heavy sacrifice of our best men and could be regarded only as a temporary expedient.’ The 138th Regiment supply officer Lieutenant Chuzaburo Tomaru saw a tank shoot in his direction and thought the battle was finally lost. ‘I said to myself, “This is it!”’ By Fujiwara’s reckoning the pounding from 2nd Division’s artillery knocked out five Japanese guns, and those remaining were restricted by shell shortages to firing no more than five or six rounds each day.

  For General Sato there was one more ominous portent. The river near his divisional headquarters was a slow and sleepy jungle waterway. In early May there was a succession of downpours and the general watched it muddy and swirl, fattening by the hour until it swept away a small bridge and caused a mudslide on the banks. ‘Its appearance had completely changed,’ he wrote. The season of mud and disease was nearly on him.

  At Kohima the men of the 1st Royal Berkshires and the 2nd Durham Light Infantry, 6 Brigade, who had taken over the positions on Garrison Hill, fought off the last of the Japanese attacks. Number 10 company of the Japanese 124th Regiment made little packages of hair and nails to be sent back to their families. They were instructed to send all correspondence back to headquarters, ‘so the enemy can’t say, after you’re dead, that you are unmanly and sentimental, burn all your photographs and family letters’. The officer who gave the order, Captain Yoshifuku, examined his own prized keepsake. It was a photograph of his eldest son in his first year at school. The boy was smiling and thrusting his arm forward to show a badge naming him ‘Top of the Class’. He caught himself speaking to the photograph and then spotted another officer who was doing the same thing. The two men smiled at one and other. Captain Yoshifuku was killed later that night.

  The familiar pattern was repeated. On the night of 22 April screaming waves of men surged from Kuki Piquet into the British trenches; the Japanese bombardment had the fortuitous effect of igniting an ammunition dump behind the defenders. In normal circumstances this might have been a disaster, but the blast set fire to the re
maining tree tops on Garrison Hill and the glow illuminated the advancing Japanese, who came under a storm of Bren and rifle fire. The newly arrived British troops were thrown into hand-to-hand fighting, with ground lost and then regained, until the position was restored. The Durhams lost about one hundred men killed and wounded, while total Japanese casualties, although uncounted, were estimated to run to several hundred. Documents captured by the British showed that there had been fifteen survivors out of one company of roughly 180 men. In all, four companies were blasted and shot out of the battle. A Japanese major on Miyazaki’s infantry group staff wrote of the ‘hornet’s nest’ of defenders and how ‘both Right and Left Attack Forces … suffered many casualties without making appreciable progress … even when he is surrounded by our forces, he will, supported by aircraft and artillery fire, resist to the bitter end’.

  The tone of contempt for the British and Indian enemy was changing to one of grudging respect. The costly attacks on Garrison Hill convinced Sato to change strategy. In his own account he gives 23 April as the date he went over to the defensive, although he preferred to call it ‘waiting’. He would dig in and hope that enough supplies would come soon to enable him to last out the monsoon. Sato was helped by an interlocking system of trenches and bunkers described by Slim as being ‘as formidable a position as a British Army has ever faced’.