Road of Bones Read online

  There were 350,000 American military personnel in the country by the end of 1945 and these new soldiers moved with their shoulders back and their chins up, as if the future belonged to them. To speak to the veterans of the 31st Division, it was as if they were barely aware of the victors’ presence, certainly in the first few months after their return from Burma. Home, with all its losses and ambiguities, was still home. The machine-gunner Yoshiteru Hirayama was in hospital with cerebral malaria when he dreamt that he was on a train going home to his father’s monastery in Saitama, outside Tokyo. But when the train would not stop he shouted and tried to jump off. When he woke up, there were guards trying to stop him from jumping from the hospital window. Hirayama believed that his spirit had travelled home ahead of him. Back in Saitama, he studied for the Buddhist priesthood, eventually taking over from his father as abbot. He married and had three children, but never spoke of Kohima until his children asked. ‘My children wanted to know about it but I hesitated and even then when I did talk I didn’t tell them the worst. I don’t really want to talk. I felt such grief.’

  When General Sato came home to Amarume he was a man without a job or a home of his own. He moved with his family into his brother’s home, where they occupied a few small rooms in an annexe. There was no bathroom and when he wanted to bathe the general would cross to his brother’s house and ask to use the facilities there. ‘I want to take a bath in my own house some day,’ he told his son Goro. There was a military pension, but the family was constantly short of money. Eventually General Sato sent his son to the pawnshop with the family’s valuables. ‘He pawned stuff in order that we could feed ourselves,’ Goro said. A cousin across the river in Sakata gave them firewood which Goro and his sisters went by boat to collect.

  General Sato knew there were some in the area who regarded the retreat from Kohima as a betrayal, among them a veteran of the Kempeitai who ran a seed store in town and began to whisper against him. His younger brother, Kinchiko, an army colonel, was also among those who felt he had done the wrong thing. Most veterans of the 31st Division took a different view. He was invited to reunions and hailed as the man who had saved their lives. But it never removed the guilt he felt for those who had been left in the mountains. When he had finished his journey of atonement, walking the roads of Amarume to visit the families of the war dead, General Sato helped to organise a lobby group for the relatives. To his own children, though, he said almost nothing about Kohima.

  Goro would go for walks with his father, or work in the family plot with him. ‘I sensed it as a great loss inside him,’ he recalled. The general took up calligraphy and studied with a local master, devoting hours to the delicate choreography of the brush. ‘I will leave depressing days in the past,’ he wrote. He went fishing with a friend but would ignore the float in the water and stare instead at the sky, a man with thoughts miles away from the river. At some point in the late 1940s, Goro noticed that his father’s drinking was getting worse. He had always been a heavy drinker, but the alcohol had a grip on him now. When he became ill and went to hospital they diagnosed liver disease. ‘Afterwards he asked the doctor, “How long do I have left?” and he wanted to know the name of the sickness. He pushed him to say the truth. He said: “Don’t lie” … The doctor said he had a year and a half. My impression was that he looked relieved when he knew how long he had left.’ From then on, he went to more veterans’ parties and meetings.

  He told his son, ‘Okay, from now on I live only eighteen months so I will do what I want to do.’ The general’s body could no longer cope with alcohol and his son watched him vomit many times, even after the smallest amount. ‘It was so sad to see him like that … just throwing up. He would ask me to massage his body because he was in so much pain.’ There was a summons to the war crimes tribunal, where prosecutors questioned him and decided there was no case to answer; he was flattered when the Americans called him to Tokyo to tell their officers what it was like to fight the Russians. The drinking and his health got worse and he could be irascible with his family. His daughter, Yukiko, found him strict and chose her words carefully when answering his questions. ‘I was careful of answering his question because he would consider words like “but” or “because” to be directed against him. My father would get mad saying, “you are not honest”, if I forgot to do something. I tied ribbon around my finger not to forget things before I went out. If I took a rest due to a headache, my father scolded me for being “Lazy”.’ He lived by the codes of an older Japan in which a parent’s word was law. Yet Yukiko would always revere him for making sure she had an education. By the summer of 1958 he had undergone an operation for the removal of a liver tumour. ‘He was nothing but skin and bone,’ his wife Fumiko recalled. The following February he went into hospital for the last time. He told his family to build an altar and then make a bonfire of his letters and documents. Only the list of the dead from Kohima was spared. He thought of them to the end. Kotuku Sato died on 26 February 1959 on a day of heavy snow.

  On the day of his funeral veterans from across the division came to the Jigan temple. There were also men who had served with him in Korea and fighting the Russians. His old infantry commander, Miyazaki, came, dressed in a grey woollen suit and looking like a prosperous businessman. He told the curious that he now made his living running a pottery shop. Goro Sato noticed a small stir at the back of the room. When he looked across he saw General Renya Mutaguchi standing among the officers. ‘I didn’t have a feeling of hatred. I was too busy to notice what was happening. I just said, “Well, he has come.” We just accepted the fact.’ What happened next astonished the general’s family. Suddenly Mutaguchi got down on his knees and prostrated himself before them. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. The room was silent. After a few minutes General Sato’s wife said something in response, but Goro Sato was so overcome that he cannot remember what it was. Word filtered out of the room to veterans in the temple corridors. Mutaguchi had apologised! The man who had never admitted he was wrong had said sorry.

  If it had rested there, Mutaguchi might have seemed a larger man to them. But his post-war life was a prolonged exercise in self-justification. He was cursed by 31st Division veterans and he knew it. ‘Some said, “how dare you still live?” It was a painful experience,’ he told an archivist. Four years after Sato’s funeral he was interviewed by a researcher from the library of the Japanese parliament, the National Diet. He began piously enough. ‘General Sato passed away already. It is not right to whip the dead for his mistake,’ he said. Mutaguchi then proceeded to trample over the dead man’s memory. Sato had made a ‘terrible error in leadership’ and had disobeyed orders; he was surely mentally imbalanced. Mutaguchi even cited Slim’s criticism of Sato in his list of charges, and then berated Kawabe for holding him back from Dimapur. The agreement was that the interview would not be released for thirty-three years after his death.

  For a period after the war Mutaguchi had been held as a suspected war criminal. Troops under his command had taken part in the massacre of patients and staff at the Alexandra Military Hospital in Singapore. The Prosecutor General rejected the case because Mutaguchi had not been present when his troops ran riot, bayoneting and shooting the wounded. ‘The massacres were committed in the heat of battle and I do not see how responsibility can be attached to a Senior Officer who was not present unless it can be shown that he had some cognizance of what took place.’ He was released from Changi prison in Singapore on 5 June 1947 and sent home to Japan, where he was appointed to the staff college of the Self-Defence Force, a piece of excellent fortune for a man who had presided over the greatest battlefield defeat in his country’s history, to say nothing of the disaster he had inflicted on the people of northern Burma and the Naga Hills.

  The 31st Division veterans would back Sato until the end. But it took forty years to erect a memorial to him in Amarume. A monk friend of his family explained that locals wanted to forget the war. Also, Sato’s actions had divided the townspeople. Abbot Hakuho Abe
, over a hundred years old when we met, told me that veterans approached the family soon after Sato died. ‘They asked his family for permission to construct the stone much earlier, but they could not say yes because they were blamed a lot after the war. They were made to feel ashamed.’ The simple grey obelisk was erected in the spring of 1985 and after prayers the veterans posed together for a photograph. Every year they went to 31st Division reunions, and to the dinners of its component regiments. Many went back to Kohima to see the place where the bones of their comrades were buried in mass graves. As for the thousands who fell along the tracks to the Chindwin and beyond, they had a champion in the form of Hiroshi Yamagami, the colour-bearer of the 58th Regiment. I met him in his small, file-cluttered flat in Tokyo, where he has lived alone since the death of his wife. They had no children and had travelled widely together around the world. But it was Burma that kept drawing him back, and he visited the old battlefields, searching for the remains of the dead. When he found some bones he offered prayers. Some of them must have been of men he had once known. Of that he was sure.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The Quiet Fathers

  On the train there was a bunch of Birmingham lads he got chatting with, all going home like himself, and all of them wondering how it would have changed. When he got off at Coventry they skimmed their berets across the platform through the carriage windows and cheered him on. Dennis Wykes waved goodbye, shouldered his duffel bag and walked out of the station. He was wearing his bush hat and hoped someone would notice and say, ‘Hey, were you in the Fourteenth Army?’ He would nod modestly if they did, even answer a few questions about how tough it had been. But nobody said anything. People looked tired and the city was in a state. Bombed to blazes. Still, the excitement kept him going for the two mile walk home. Jesus, he thought, home. How many times at Kohima had he pictured his feet quickening up Melbourne Road and then forced the thought out of his mind, because nothing is so far away as the home you might never see again.

  He turned into the road and started to walk up the hill. ‘I started to feel “Oh God” and then I saw they had all the flags outside and “Welcome Home”. And there was a neighbour woman who was always leaning over the front gate of her house. And there she was still leaning over the front gate! She saw me coming and dashed out and rushed down the road and threw her arms around me.’ Dennis walked on, up the steps, and knocked on the door. He heard feet racing through the house. The whole family was there, his mam and dad, aunts, uncles, cousins. After that it was all cheering, crying, patting him on the back and questions. He could answer them up to a point, but found himself sticking to generalisations. It was bloody hard, he told them. The Japs were savage fighters. But there was a point you could not go beyond. His parents didn’t need to hear the truth of it, and he was not sure he could get the words out in any case.

  There was the person who had left England and then there was him. They were so different he couldn’t even start to explain. ‘It was pretty hard to take … My mother and father, I think they thought I would come home and be the same fellow. Of course I wasn’t. She said, “You sit in that armchair and read your Beano, Dennis. It’s always been your armchair, it’s yours now.” And I thought, “I don’t want no armchair. I’ve been on the trot for four years in the army, at war.” I never stopped moving.’ Now there was time that stretched ahead forever and the habits of four years to break free from. He got up at dawn each day, put on his uniform and went out walking, looking for anybody he knew. He found himself searching the faces for dead men.

  One day he was walking in Spond Street in the city centre and the loneliness was unbearable. He just wanted to sit down with an old army mate and have a drink and talk about what it had been like. For the first time in his life he went into a pub and drank himself senseless. There was another army man in there drinking who had been home for a long time and they swapped stories. ‘I realised I was drunk. I said, “I can’t go home and disgrace myself in front of my parents.”’ There was a circus on nearby and he decided to go there and try to sober up. But getting off the bus, he stumbled and was knocked out. When he came to there was a Frenchwoman sitting over him and mopping up the blood from the cut on his head. Drunk and concussed, he started pouring out his story to this foreigner, ‘but I don’t think she ever understood … I was still in a foreign land really.’

  The men of 4th battalion came home from the Far East to a country leached of colour by war. Winston Churchill, the leader who had sent them to India, was gone, voted from office by a nation haggard from sacrifice and eager for change. Britain had taken the first steps towards becoming a welfare state. In 1944 the Cabinet accepted the recommendation that there should be a National Health Service and by the time the men returned from India the new Labour government had introduced acts to cover pensions, national insurance and family allowances, much of this the brainchild of a man born in Bengal under the Raj, Sir William Beveridge, the most influential social reformer of modern Britain.

  The war had left Britain beggared. The US$31 billion owed to the Americans in war-time loans underlined the true shift of international power. Britain could no longer afford a global empire and her imperial horizons retracted by the month, nowhere more swiftly than in the East. Burma became independent in 1947 and refused to join the Commonwealth, eventually, in 1962, becoming a military dictatorship which lasts to this day. When India left the empire the following year she was sundered into two bitterly opposed nations whose enmity threatens the stability of the sub-continent still.

  Yet if Churchill’s hope of imperial redemption was forlorn, then Roosevelt’s ambitions for China would prove equally misplaced. All the supplies shipped across the Hump, and up the Burma Road, all the thousands of lives lost and the millions spent could not save Chiang Kai-shek’s regime from the armies of Mao Tse Tung.

  Yet the returning soldiers did not tend to look backwards, or to torment themselves with questions about what the fight had been for. Very few had gone into battle imbued with a spirit of imperial glory. They had fought not for a vanishing dream but for each other and, most importantly, for their own lives. They were imbued with righteous anger by the appalling brutality of the Japanese, an anger that Slim had carefully channelled to become the great moral purpose of 14th Army. But there was a larger achievement. A Japanese victory at Kohima and Imphal might easily have propelled British India into an era of grave political instability. Remember that the battle was fought at a time when the leaders of Congress were languishing in jail, cut off from the Indian masses and watching the Japanese advance with mounting unease, as uncertain as the British about how the people would react. We are of course in the realms of speculation but a triumph for Mutaguchi in Assam could have sparked widespread unrest in the north-east and in Bengal, bringing with it communal violence and a familiar response of British repression leading to unknown consequences. Japan might only have enjoyed a short triumph; American power would ultimately have seen to that. But the humiliation of defeat would have gravely weakened the British in the post-war moves to settle the question of India. The victory over Mutaguchi did not save the Raj as Churchill had hoped. But after the humiliations of Malaya, Singapore and Burma it restored to the British the prestige needed to be able to negotiate the end of empire.

  The 14th Army was made up of men of all political persuasions and it is wise to avoid generalisations about how they viewed Britain or the empire. Yet, having spoken with large numbers of veterans, the overwhelming impression is of men who returned home anxious to build, to forge ahead, and not to waste time mourning what was gone. The grief would come later and would be stirred by the memories of friends, not the loss of the eastern lands.

  Dennis Wykes set up a thriving building firm and when he took his summer holidays in a caravan at Newquay he thought himself one of the luckiest men alive. He lived to get married, to have children, to see them inherit his business and go to university. When I last met him, three months before he died, he told me about a famil
y Christmas party he had attended. He was asked to sing a song. All he could think of was one from the war. ‘I got to the second verse and I just couldn’t go on any more. I didn’t burst into tears, I just couldn’t go on any more. I was really upset. And I said afterwards: “I made a fool of myself trying to do that.” But my daughter said, “No you didn’t. It was a fitting thing to do.”’ For Dennis Wykes, there was always the voice of the Welsh boy, Williams, hit by the bomb that should have killed him, begging, ‘Don’t let me die,’ and Dennis thinking, ‘I can’t stop you dying, mate.’

  When the C company runner Ray Street arrived back in Birmingham he found himself missing his army friends more than he could have thought possible. His father, a veteran of Gallipoli, took him aside and told him to take his return slowly, ease himself back into English life gradually. ‘Don’t worry about anything,’ he said. The advice was kind and was backed up by the older man’s knowledge of war and its bonds. Ray married a ‘very maternal’ Irish girl called Anne and set up his own furniture business, working until ten o’clock every night, telling himself, ‘if I can do the army I can do this. People wanted their furniture delivered and I did it every night.’ The business thrived and he moved to a bigger house. When his wife died, Ray took over caring for their two children, as well as running the business. His son Bob thought him ‘a kind dad, considerate and unassuming’, who told stories of Kohima that ‘were better than any bedtime stories, a real adventure’. Ray Street told me that Kohima had not affected him mentally, apart from one thing. ‘I hate people touching me on the shoulder when I am asleep … the shells feel like they are coming straight at you. Boom. And it might be over there.’ His second wife, Valerie, learned a long time ago never to try to shake him awake. He would sit bolt upright as if somebody were attacking him.