Road of Bones Read online

  A medical orderly, George Senior, was swiftly immersed in the hell of Garrison Hill. Mortars came in about twenty yards away as the attack on the Durham Light Infantry began. Then groans and shrieks started. Terrified, the orderly started talking to himself: ‘Let someone else go. Yes, someone else will go in your place, you low snivelling yellow coward … but I feel too weak to move … What would Dad say if he saw you now? … I mustn’t let him down.’ He jumped out and ran to the wounded. He had never seen so much blood. It was splattered everywhere. All over the wounded, the ground, the trees, and, soon, all over himself, as he went about his work. The following morning he sat by a stretcher case with a gaping wound in his shoulder. The man was being given a blood transfusion in a last attempt to save his life. ‘He was restless and kept asking if he could go to sleep now but what little chance he had would have gone if he did go to sleep. So I sat there, keeping him awake and watching him slowly fall in an eternal sleep.’ Nearby were the bodies of the men killed in the assault. There were not enough blankets to cover the dead and Senior saw bodies twisted grotesquely. One had a foot missing, another had half his skull blown away. Of the three Durham companies in forward positions there were only four out of fifteen officers left, while one company had shrunk from 136 men to sixty. Gordon Graham of the 1 Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders recalled how death ‘was always a surprise, followed by a flash of survivor’s guilt.’ Ninety-three Cameron ‘Jocks’ were killed at Kohima but twenty-nine of the bodies were either never found or identified; the majority were killed in fighting at Naga Village.

  Within a few days the Japanese soldiers in the trenches on GPT Ridge, Jail Hill, Supply and Detail Hills, and Kuki Piquet were defending against repeated British attacks. Lance Corporal Tukuo Seki fought off two attacks on his trench in the first week of May. But a heavy machine gun was blown up and the British were able to overrun the position. Seki survived and ran back, only to see a shell destroy a mortar position. At the tennis court the Japanese were mounting the last of their all-out assaults in the first week of May. The supply officer of 3rd battalion, 58th Regiment, Lieutenant Masao Hirakubo, was summoned into action for a night attack. ‘Come with me to make a total attack,’ the company commander screamed. Masao drew his sword and followed his commander into battle. It was pitch dark and he could barely see in front of him. There was sudden fighting as they collided with the defenders. Men were grappling with each other and striking out. ‘We dashed on them. They didn’t expect us. I couldn’t see his face so we hacked and stabbed.’ Afterwards, still filled with adrenaline, he noticed that his sword was covered in blood. ‘I killed somebody but I did not see his face. I felt nothing.’

  Climbing the mound to the tennis court, Second Lieutenant Yoshiteru Hirayama, 58th Regiment, prayed that the British would not hear him coming. Hirayama did not consider himself a born warrior. He had been brought up in the calm of the Buddhist monastery in which his father and grandfather had been abbots. Now he found himself leading a ten-man section into the teeth of the British guns, fighting hand to hand with strangers and knowing death could come at any second. For weeks the same tactic had been tried. Men formed up on the mound and raced upwards to try and seize the British trenches. But so often the artillery had come down and ripped them to pieces before the attack could even begin. If that didn’t do the job, they were cut down by the men in the trenches.

  Hirayama’s orders were to seize the first British trench on the opposite side of the tennis court. He ran with his section and jumped into an empty trench. The air around him exploded with machine-gun fire. ‘One man got shot but we managed to get cover near a water supply tank on the British side. There was nothing there except bodies.’ Hirayama could see that the situation was hopeless and withdrew. A few days later he was sent back and this time they managed to cross the tennis court. But again the British drove them back. As he ran, Hirayama was shot in the thigh. Blood spurted from the wound as he crouched and tried to run on. His rifle gone, he clutched a knife and hoped he would not encounter the enemy. Collapsing back into his own trench, Hirayama felt his life slipping away. ‘It was very heavy blood. Another medic came with an emergency medical kit captured from the British.’ The medic was Lance Corporal Tokuo Seki, who had heard a colleague shouting to him above the shooting, ‘Please come and stop [the] bleeding.’ Seki jumped out of his trench and raced to where Hirayama was lying. ‘In his trench, there were seven or eight injured soldiers lying in line. The trench was so smelly.’ Two younger medics were trying to stem the bleeding from his thigh but lacked the proper experience. Seki found some pebbles and wrapped each one in cotton wool to make a pressure compact which he strapped into the wound. Hirayama’s bleeding stopped for the time being. He was eventually brought to a field hospital, a filthy and overcrowded hut where he watched the flies lay eggs in his wounds. Seki looked around at the other wounded men in the trench. None had had their bandages changed for days. Pus was flowing out of wounds. The medics were boiling filthy uniforms to make into dressings but could not keep up with the demand. To Japanese new to the battlefield the sights were no less horrifying than they were to the men of the Durham Light Infantry and the Royal Berkshires on the other side. Sergeant Satoru Yanagi, 124th Regiment, arrived from the rear area to Jail Hill around 5 May to reinforce the ravaged ranks of the 58th Regiment, which had been fighting for three weeks. ‘I saw all dead soldiers, from both sides. Six hundred dead bodies I saw in that single Jail Hill.’

  Food became an obsessive preoccupation for the Japanese in the trenches. A fortnight before, they had been able to convince themselves that supplies would come soon. But by the anniversary of their first month at Kohima not a single grain of rice had arrived from 15th Army. Some of the supply officers were overcome with shame at their failure to provide more than a single rice ball to each man. As Masao Hirakubo of the 58th Regiment recalled: ‘Mr Ito who worked with the Mountain Artillery couldn’t get food and was blamed by the soldiers and he decided to kill himself. I don’t know how he did it. At least five times I met him and I said I could retain some food for two or three days, and he had only food for tomorrow and he was so busy trying to find it from somewhere.’ A Lieutenant Nagashima of the 58th Regiment could not stand the deteriorating food and refused to eat it, starving himself to death. Another officer who had malaria, beri-beri and dysentery killed himself with a grenade when his batman went to go to the toilet. The man thought he was a burden to his servant.

  According to the war correspondent Yukihiko Imai, some of the Japanese night raids were made purely to get food. He was lying on the floor of Miyazaki’s headquarters, a captured barracks on GPT Ridge, when he heard the cries of the night attackers. It was about two in the morning and the darkness was filled with the sound of shooting and shells. Imai knew the men were from the 58th Regiment, ‘born in snowy Niigata … [a] tenacious and steady charactered district’. He wrote: ‘They were so hungry and sometimes they got the Churchill issue from the enemy base.’* He noted that they did not want to share their food with others in the rear. Private Manabu Wada managed to scavenge some bully beef and biscuits but was weak from hunger. ‘How could he be expected to fight in these circumstances?’ A perfect illustration of the supply gap between the two sides was found by the medic George Senior, who was full of praise for the quality of the bunker he occupied on Garrison Hill. It was covered with wonderfully blast-absorbent material: sacks of rice for which the British and Indians had no need.

  The drivers of the 2nd Division convoys rolling up to Kohima came around the final bend before the village and saw a large white noticeboard: ‘From this point on you are in view of the enemy.’ General Grover set out to alter that reality in early May by trying to drive the Japanese from Kohima Ridge and the positions they occupied in the valleys around it. The pressure from Stopford and Slim was unrelenting. They made a joint visit to 2nd Division headquarters on 2 May, with Grover noting that ‘Slim was very insistent on the need for speed, very largely for political re
asons. He evidently thought we had been going rather slowly, but appeared surprised at the size of the country. He was also a little sceptical as to the strength in front of us … Later events proved that we were correct and he was wrong.’ Grover was irked at the lack of understanding and was again pressed on 5 May by Stopford, who told him his projected date of 9 May for the capture of Jail Hill was too late. He pushed Grover to agree to 7 May. As Sato had learned when he was laying siege, setting dates at Kohima was a charter for despair. The place had an awful way of destroying men’s plans.

  Grover’s offensive against Kohima Ridge involved a three-pronged assault with 4 Brigade moving against GPT Ridge to the south, 5 Brigade swinging behind the Japanese and attacking the Naga Village and Treasury area to the north, while 6 Brigade would strike against the positions on Kohima Ridge in the centre. Each brigade would be supported by artillery and air strikes.

  The 4 Brigade marched for four days across steep hills to get into position behind the Japanese at GPT Ridge, with an attacking force made up of 2nd battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment, the 1st Royal Scots, and machine-gunners from 2nd battalion, the Manchester Regiment. Three of the Manchester’s companies had not fired their guns in anger since the evacuation from Dunkirk. When they did open fire, an ‘observation shoot’ to see if they could flush out any hiding Japanese, the experience ‘raised the men’s spirits tremendously’. Before the battle of Kohima was over the Manchesters would fire a million rounds.

  Private George Gordon, Royal Corps of Signals, remembered a miserable journey during which he was ravaged by fleas after having slept in abandoned Naga huts en route. The Naga porters accompanying the column suddenly disappeared. Later, it was found that they had gone to mourn comrades killed in a Japanese ambush. According to Private Gordon, the loss of the porters resulted in an exhausting trek back and forth. ‘As each man had a personal load of 70 pounds, it meant that the machine guns, three inch mortars, wireless sets and batteries had to be left under guard and the machine gunners, mortar men and Signals had to make the day’s march, leave their packs and return for the equipment. What a day it was! The track was wet, slippery and steep and there were places where we literally had to crawl along or pull each other up by hand.’

  A Norfolks officer struggled to keep going. ‘You drag your legs upward till they seem reduced to the strength of matchsticks … Your heart pounds, so that it must burst its cage … all you can think of is the next halt.’ They climbed for nearly two miles up the steep face of Mount Pulebadze, an 8,000 foot peak, whose razor-backed ridge would bring them within striking range of the Japanese on the rear of GPT Ridge. At dawn on 4 May they came down the mountain towards the Japanese trenches. On the way they passed the corpse of a British sentry killed the previous night, with ‘round staring eyes … scores of flies already buzzing around’. At 0700 hours the Japanese snipers opened up. The column was held up for around half an hour, with thirty casualties, while George Gordon reckoned ‘we had hardly fired a shot ourselves!’ Over the next week 4 Brigade, and the Norfolks in particular, would fire plenty as they fought from bunker to bunker to dislodge the Japanese. Captain Jack Randle, with B company of the Norfolks, was awarded Kohima’s second Victoria Cross for charging a bunker despite a shrapnel wound in the knee, and silencing a machine gun that was pinning down his company. Randle was mortally wounded as he ran, but managed to throw a grenade into the bunker and then throw his own body across the slit to ensure that the Japanese could not fire out. He was twenty-six when he died and left a wife and small son in England.

  Like the West Kents, the Royal Norfolks had been through the crucible of Dunkirk, where they had suffered a grievous atrocity at the hands of the SS Death’s Head Division. Ninety-seven prisoners were machine-gunned at Le Paradis in the Pas-de-Calais on 27 May 1940. At Singapore three other battalions of the Norfolks were taken prisoner and badly used by the Japanese, some shot out of hand and others sent to work on the Death Railway into Burma.

  In the battle for GPT Ridge the Norfolks fought with fierce zeal. ‘Then the “Holy Boys” shouted their battle cries until the whole ridge rang with their challenge. The line began to move,’ an officer recalled. ‘The shouted orders of officers were drowned by the battle cries as the line moved forward. It was an afternoon of terror for the Japanese. Unable to fire from their bunkers because the fire slits were facing the wrong way, they came from their holes and stood in groups, petrified by the sight of the shouting British, who advanced relentlessly. Some had left their weapons in the bunkers, the weak quailed and fled, the braver ones put their weapons into the aim. Up to this point the “Boys” had held their fire, but now the Japs went down like corn before a sickle. Over 100 enemy dead were counted that day.’ The Japanese were driven to the north-eastern spur of GPT Ridge, where they resisted with customary ferocity, shooting dead the 4 Brigade commander, Brigadier Willie Goschen, while he directed an attack on some bunkers. His successor was killed a week later.

  All along Grover’s front the rifle companies were suffering heavy losses. Company commanders were being shot down at a fearsome rate and, according to Swinson, there were virtually no platoon commanders. In one action around the Naga Village the Camerons lost thirty-eight men killed and wounded; the Royal Welch on Garrison Hill had seven officers killed or missing, thirty-three men killed and more than a hundred wounded; the Durham Light Infantry lost 175 men and two thirds of their officers. Every unit invested at Kohima Ridge in that first fortnight of May could tell a similar story of advances halted by storms of fire. Captain Gordon Graham, Cameron Highlanders, came across the corpses of four comrades while on patrol. He found himself curiously detached from the experience. ‘Looking at the corpses we found on this patrol – the first battle casualties I had seen – I felt surprisingly impersonal. Friends of mine had inhabited these bodies until a few days before, but when death is not sanitized by funeral rites you feel intiuitively that the people are still around.’

  Arthur Swinson, the young 5 Brigade captain and an aspirant writer, wrote of how officers and men would ‘look at the great ring of mountains encircling them, and wonder how on earth it could be taken, how flesh and blood could possibly stand much more’. When Grover came up to see the Dorset Regiment in the bungalow sector in early May, he recognised a scene reminscent of the First World War, where he had suffered in the trenches as a young man. All the men here had beards, he noted, although he was glad to see that the water ration was now enough to give them three pints of tea each day. Supplies of water were still being dropped by the RAF.

  Victor Hawkins and 5 Brigade had set off to traverse a wide valley so that they could emerge behind the Naga Village. On 1 May he received orders to take the Naga Village quickly, ‘from both a political and a military point of view’. The instruction was followed up by a personal message from Slim two days later. Hawkins pushed on and by 4 May the Camerons had captured the western tip of the position. ‘[There were] thousands of flies and filth of every description, including the innards of numerous pigs and cows to which the Japs had helped themselves,’ wrote Hawkins. ‘We not only overlooked the complete KOHIMA battlefield but right into the back of the Jap positions … we wasted no time in getting mortars on to them and disturbed them considerably.’ Hawkins had the unsettling experience of shaving for the first time in several weeks and being confronted with the face of an ‘old graybeard’. He looked over his shoulder before realising he was looking at himself.

  Hawkins’s 5 Brigade were making ground, and so too were 4 Brigade on GPT Ridge, but 6 Brigade were making no impression against the Japanese positions in the centre of Kohima Ridge. The Royal Welch Fusiliers briefly seized the top of Kuki Piquet before being driven off. They lost 189 men in successive attacks and their commanding officer was eventually sacked. Stopford answered Grover’s plea for extra men by sending in 33 Brigade of the 7th Indian Division. An officer of the brigade, arriving at Kohima on 6 May, believed he was ‘watching a dozen different battles going on in front of us�
�. The following day, elements of 33 Brigade attacked Jail Hill and Major Michael Lowry, Queen’s Royal Regiment, witnessed the ‘closest thing to a snowball fight that could be imagined’. Grenades were hurled between both sides and the Queen’s ‘did a fair amount of damage to these little blighters’. The rain and mist came and gave respite from the sniping. When the sun appeared again Lowry saw that a friend of his, Captain John Scott, was dead. ‘In cold sweated horror I saw the contents of that clever head spread out on the ground. No grey and white matter could have been portrayed with such awful clarity.’ Scott was twenty-three years old and a lawyer in civilian life. Lowry was at a loss to comprehend the wretchedness he saw around him. Like many other veterans of Kohima, he remembered the profusion of flies with particular disgust. They alighted on corpses, on latrines, on men’s food, on their bodies. ‘I, for one, have eaten several of the largest filthy-looking blue bottles, having settled on a bully-beef sandwich between the hand and mouth.’ The attempt to retake Jail Hill was a costly failure.

  Major John Shipster, seconded to 33 Brigade from the 7/2 Punjab Regiment, arrived in mid-May. Although only twenty-two, he was a veteran of the Arakan campaign where he was awarded an immediate DSO. He saw old parachutes swaying on the blackened stumps of trees and on the road he passed the body of a Japanese soldier embedded in the soft tarmac. ‘As the days passed, his thin, wafer outline gradually disappeared.’ At Kohima he found a vast uncovered necropolis where men learned ‘to respect the dead, but did not mourn for them … it was essential for our own mental well-being’.