Road of Bones Read online

  The image of the shell-shocked soldier has become one of the stock clichés of our time. Yet war, even the horror of Kohima, does not turn every man into a shaking wreck for the remainder of his life. Many of the men, probably the majority, understandably felt emotional pain, but were not disabled by their experiences. Private Tom Greatly of C company had lied his way into the army at the age of sixteen. He was twenty-one when he came home from Burma. Several lifetimes of horror had passed before his eyes in that time. He went home to Worcestershire, married and lived a contented life; his great pleasure was to go ballroom dancing with his wife three times a week. Yet there was a shadow of the war’s impact. Tom got a job working in a children’s hospital, and part of his duties were in the morgue. ‘It never affected me like it did some people. Maybe that had something to do with Kohima.’ He was one of the men who had helped Padre Randolph collect the possessions of the dead and mark their graves so that they could be found later on.

  Towards the end of his life, John Shipster of the Punjab Regiment experienced nightmares about fighting the Japanese. ‘I would wake up screaming in the middle of the night, waking my wife up, and never be able to give a clear explanation of what it was. I knew it was about the war, but I never actually came to the end of it.’ After the War he transferred to the British Army and went to fight in the Korean War where he again narrowly escaped death facing the Chinese on the Yalu River. Although a professional soldier for more than thirty-five years, looking back he felt that war had been a fruitless endeavour. ‘Here we were bashing each other around in a very small area, and then spending some weeks afterwards clearing up all the mess and putting people into graves, merely to move on, say, fifty to a hundred miles and do it all over again on some other plot of ground … What did I think I was fighting for? I wasn’t some crusader or anything of that sort. My country was at war and I joined up and fought in it, I never queried the individual battles, or said I’ll fight in this battle but not in that. I went along with the tide. I had faith in the aims of one’s particular country.’

  The commander of B company, Royal West Kents, John Winstanley, survived his leg wound and typhoid and went to medical school. ‘I felt I couldn’t waste any more time and worked like a slave for the exams.’ When his leg wound flared up, the hospital authorities told him he would have to give up his dream of being a general surgeon. So he became one of the country’s most successful eye-surgeons. In peacetime he missed the intensity of friendship that war had created. There was a world of shared experience to which others, not even those closest to him, could ever be admitted. The regimental associations and the Burma Star Association became for many a kind of parallel family. ‘It is just fragments, but when we get together, those who are still alive, all the old friendships and associations come out.’

  Donald Easten stayed in the army and retired with the rank of colonel. On retirement he lived with Billie in the village of Wormingford where he immersed himself in the parish council, and continued to fish and shoot as he had since he was a young man. Their daughters and grandchildren were regular visitors. The residents named a street in his honour. Easten Green. When Billie died he faced the choice of moving to a smaller place but he loved the landscape and the home they had made. The River Stour is nearby, running alongside the border with Suffolk, and, now in his nineties, Donald Easten continues to walk the fields accompanied by an excitable terrier. On Remembrance Sunday he walks the couple of hundred yards to the old parish church at Wormingford to remember the boys of D company he left behind in Kohima.

  I listened to the stories of the veterans over many years and was always struck by their modesty, by the way in which they resisted any temptation to exaggerate their experiences or their role in the battle. The majority had never spoken with their children about Kohima. In part, this was generational. Men of the post-war era lived by a standard of emotional restraint uncommon in modern Britain. They were the quiet fathers who made their way in a new country where interest in the Far Eastern war was always limited and where, in any case, their energies were absorbed by the imperatives of work and family. That is very different, however, from saying that the war was not present in houses across Britain.

  Margery Willis, the daughter of Lieutenant John Faulkner, remembered never being allowed to drink Rose’s lime juice because it reminded her father of his time in the jungle when there was no water and only the tart lime juice to slake his thirst. ‘The War was generally not to be mentioned at home at any time,’ she recalled. Later, her mother told her that John had ‘terrible nightmares’ after he came home. To his daughter he was a controlling man, a rigid disciplinarian with a bad temper, ‘a difficult man to live with’. The only glimpse she was given of what the war meant to her father was on Remembrance Sunday. The family would be told sit down and watch the service. John Faulkner would sit with them and cry. Once the service was over the war was put away again. After he died, Janet opened his diary of the siege and began to understand the man whose memory she was struggling with. Written in Dimapur a few weeks after the battle, it speaks with the voice of a young soldier astonished by his own survival. His daughter believed that settling into a normal existence after Kohima was very difficult for John Faulkner. The three years in Burma were the most important of his life. As more than one veteran put it to me: ‘You can never explain it to someone who wasn’t there.’

  For the families whose sons and fathers never came home, the sight of demobbed soldiers could be agonising. In most cases, all they were told was that their loved one had died or was missing in action. In a war in which hundreds of thousands of British troops had died, only the extraordinary death merited more than a couple of lines. Nor did the families have graves where they could go to grieve. The dead were lying in Asian war cemeteries which the majority could never afford to visit.

  The father of Victoria Cross winner Lance Corporal John Harman built a stone memorial to his son on Lundy Island where John had roamed in his childhood summers. The day of the unveiling was strikingly beautiful with a blue sky and a calm sea for the large group travelling to Lundy on the ferry MV Lerina. Among the party were John Laverty and several other West Kents, including Sergeant Tacon, the machine-gunner who had slaughtered the Japanese as they ran from Detail Hill. By the time they had walked from the ferry pier to the quarry, many of the group were perspiring and anxious to find shade. They clustered around the huge slab of granite on which John Harman’s name and date of death were inscribed. They sang ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ and the Reverend H. C. A. S. Muller, vicar of Appledore, read from the 24th Psalm. This was followed by another hymn, ‘Fight the Good Fight’, and the playing of the Last Post. Martin Coles Harman told his guests that the quarry where his son had played as a child was thought to be nearly two million years old, and in 20,000 years the rocks would still look the same. Only this, he seemed to be saying, is imperishable. The island’s caretaker, Felix Gade, who had taught John so much of what he knew about the natural world, told the visitors about the extraordinary thing that had happened after John had died. It was the custom in that part of the country when a beekeeper died for another to go to his hives and ‘tell’ the news to the inhabitants. But when Gade arrived he found all the bees had flown away.

  John was the firstborn of his family and had the same wayward spirit that had carried his father through many adventures; they were alike in their romantic readiness and Harman senior had never once tried to dampen his boy’s wilder ambitions. He had encouraged and helped to pay for his prospecting schemes and for the travels to Europe and New Zealand. After John’s death his father never spoke of him to the other children. But he carried his son’s Victoria Cross with him for years after the war and, as his daughter Diana recalled, would take it out and show it to strangers. ‘Wherever he was he would say “Have you ever seen this? Well, you probably won’t see another. Take a good look.”’

  It would be tempting to believe that the experience of Kohima gave all those who went through it
a common bond. And it is true that the majority of General Slim’s men – British, Indian, Nepalese and Burmese – felt that they had shared an extraordinary trial. But there was in the decades after the war an angry distance between the two men who had held together the defence of Kohima during those sixteen days in April 1944. The earlier writers on the subject, most of them former soldiers, mention the ill feeling between John Laverty and Hugh Richards, but either did not know of its scale or else decided against making it public. Given the fact that both men were still alive, their discretion is understandable. It began on the battlefield, with Laverty’s curt dismissal of the senior man on the day he arrived. His refusal to engage with Richards beyond the four-word question ‘Where is Kuki Piquet?’ left the garrison commander feeling diminished in front of his subordinates. None of the danger the two men shared in the following fortnight altered Laverty’s attitude.

  It was Richards, as garrison commander, who nominated Laverty for his DSO, praising ‘his personal tenacity and leadership [which] … was responsible for the defeat of attack after attack by the Japanese … Lt. Col Laverty was quite tireless and displayed powers of leadership and command of the highest order.’ It could be said that Richards had no choice but to make the recommendation. But his post-war record was always one of public praise for the actions of the Royal West Kents. They had been magnificent, he said. So it is not hard to imagine Richards’s hurt when two West Kent officers, neither of whom had served at Kohima, produced a book of 4th battalion’s war experiences that undermined the garrison. Published in 1951, From Kent to Kohima by Major E. B. Stanley Clarke and Major A. T. Tillott declared boldly that ‘The command and staff of the garrison of Kohima before the arrival of the battalion were not equal or willing to take the task of commanding the 4th Royal West Kents … command throughout the battle was virtually operated from the Headquarters of the 4th Royal West Kents.’

  There was worse to come. In 1956 another serving army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Campbell, published a fictionalized account of the siege based on the experiences of an anonymous West Kent intelligence officer. In Campbell’s book Richards’s bunker floor is described as being made from upturned rum and brandy bottles, while the picture of the garrison and its command is strikingly familiar to any reader of the 4th West Kents’ War Diary. The impression is of a bunch of incompetents rescued by the 4th West Kents. Certainly Laverty thought Richards was out of his depth. In one of his very rare talks with his son Patrick about the war, John Laverty gave the impression that Hugh Richards was a ‘complete idiot, should never have been there, and did not know what he was doing. Perhaps not the words but that was the impression. When he came in to Kohima he rated it a complete shambles, and that any junior military man worth his salt would have done better.’

  This was the view communicated to Arthur Campbell by Laverty when the two met in 1956. Over a fortnight’s holiday spent together in the West Country, the 4th battalion commander gave the writer his detailed account of the siege.

  Hugh Richards was horrified when it was published. At first his friends, including the garrison second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Borrowman, demanded an apology from Campbell. In August 1956 Borrowman wrote to Campbell accusing him of doing a ‘grave injustice’ in a story ‘that was wildly inaccurate … definitely libellous and untrue’. It was Richards and not Laverty who had been in control, and it was Richards who went to see the men in the trenches ‘when the going got sticky’. There was only one issue on which Borrowman agreed with Campbell. ‘What surprised me chiefly was the patience which Richards showed towards Laverty who was incredibly offensive. You have yourself given a perfect description of him as a “bloodyminded Irishman”.’ Campbell wrote back ten days later from his address at the Army Staff College in Camberley, Surrey. Campbell claimed that, as a serving soldier, he could not present the two sides of the story. This seems to suggest that he did not want to publicise the breach between the two commanders at Kohima. ‘I therefore chose to tell the story of the battle as the RWK saw it and lived it … if anyone wants to publish the other side of the story they are at liberty to do so.’ Borrowman was being given the brush-off but he refused to let it drop. In his communications with Hugh Richards he spoke of how he ‘would like to rub Laverty’s face in the dirt!’

  Borrowman wrote to Campbell again on 24 August, with a renewed demand for an apology ‘to the garrison in general and Brigadier Richards in particular’, under threat of legal action. As for Campbell’s assertion that as a serving soldier he could not tell both sides of the story, he wrote: ‘[I] would have thought that that fact should have made you even more careful not to blackguard another officer and other “serving soldiers” without even trying to learn the true facts.’ Borrowman wrote to the official historian at the Cabinet Office, Brigadier M. R. Roberts, who reassured him, ‘I also feel that the story is merely a glorification of Laverty.’ The official version would support Richards. The row percolated to the very top of the old 14th Army command. Borrowman wrote to General Slim, who was by then serving as Governor General of Australia. The letter is intriguing, for it suggests that Slim had acted once before to redress the balance in Richards’s favour. ‘You will remember after the Kohima show in 1944’, Borrowman wrote, ‘that Laverty of the R.W.K. went about boasting that he had done everything and that Hugh Richards had done nothing – you and Sir George Gifford [sic] dealt with that at the time, but that did not stop Laverty.’ Borrowman may have been referring to the lecture tour given by Laverty in the wake of the siege and the publicity accorded to the West Kents.

  Giffard had written the citation for Richard’s award of the DSO and described his old comrade from Africa days as ‘solely responsible for this fine defence’. Slim wrote to Borrowman that he had never doubted that it was Hugh Richards who conducted the defence of Kohima, and he confirmed this in his celebrated account of the war, Defeat into Victory. ‘I am sorry that Laverty has been so unjust and so unpleasant about Hugh Richards,’ wrote Slim. ‘I hate these public stinks but I can quite understand how Richards feels about it all.’

  Eventually Richards himself put pen to paper. He was a man constitutionally averse to any kind of row, least of all a public spat with a fellow officer. But the absence of a personal apology from Campbell spurred him to action. Writing in October 1956, Richards praised his Indian troops and pointed out that it was the men of the Assam Regiment who had held the tennis court longer than any other unit. As for himself, he told Campbell that he had done him ‘as grave an injury as it is possible for one man to do another’. This settled the matter for Campbell. Richards’s words and the outrage of other senior officers had cut home. He wrote to Hugh Richards a fortnight later. ‘I am glad to have heard from you personally on this matter. I do confirm most sincerely, that I regret the hurt I have done you personally in The Siege. I have tried to explain in my letters to Borrowman how it came about so I won’t repeat it here. I will only say that I am truly sorry.’ He suggested that a film of the book was being considered and hoped it could undo the hurt that had been done. Richards had won the battle of the books. In every subsequent account, all written by former military men, he was given due credit for the defence of Kohima.

  What was the truth of the matter? As this book suggests, the picture at Kohima was complicated. Richards arrived to find a garrison pitifully unprepared for war. His second-in-command, Borrowman, was only just out of hospital after a three-week stay and missed the build-up to the Japanese invasion. There was no proper planning in his absence. Five days after he arrived the Kohima area was placed under the control of an administrative officer, General Ranking, who was unqualified for such a big task. The mess could be traced to the first three months of 1944 and the failure of the Army Command to properly garrison either Dimapur or Kohima, but they in turn faced the immense challenge of planning offensives in the Arakan and the north-east with the most limited resources. Richards and his staff struggled to make the best of a messy situation, evacuati
ng as many non-combatants as possible and desperately trying to improve the defences before the enemy arrived. What Laverty saw when he arrived was undoubtedly a sorry spectacle to an efficient soldier from a battle-hardened regiment. But his mistake was to blame Richards for the mistakes of others. In the heat of battle his assumptions might have been understandable. But not afterwards when the true facts were there to be discovered. It is equally true that without the professionalism of the Royal West Kents, and Laverty’s calm leadership, and unerring ability to spot and reinforce gaps, the garrison would have collapsed within days. The ‘bloody-minded Irishman’ inserted steel into the backbone of every man of the 4th West Kents. What came to pass between the two commanders was tragic, not least because both were fine soldiers and decent men who in their very different styles of leadership complemented each other.

  After the war Hugh Richards took up poultry farming and lived in Haywards Heath in Sussex. He was short of money and hindered by severe arthritis, but content that his reputation had been vindicated. He remained in contact with many of the old garrison staff and was an honoured guest at reunions of the Assam Regiment and his old favourites the West African Brigade, with whom he had spent the happiest days of his life. He spoke very little about Kohima to his only child, Roger, except to say that it had been ‘a very close thing’. In old age he moved with his second wife to the sunshine of Malta, where he died in 1983. His son followed him into the Worcestershire Regiment and two of his grandsons joined the army as well.