Road of Bones Page 50

  John Laverty became head of the Infantry Training Centre at Colchester and then took a job in the War Office. His wife, Renee, spoke of the post-war years being ‘an awful sort of let-down’, in a job he hated. The War Office years were no more than a countdown to a pension, working among desk soldiers and civil servants, with whom he had nothing in common. At home he was a distant father, certainly in the memory of his son, Patrick. The war was not discussed. ‘I tried to raise it with him but I got nowhere at all. You just got slapped around the choppers and told to mind your own business.’ The marriage never recovered from the separation brought about by the war, and his drinking increased, though he only drank after six o’clock in the evening, his son recalled. ‘We had been apart for so long. It was not easy,’ his wife remembered. ‘He liked a drop of whisky and it got a bit worse after the war. That’s the way it went.’ The couple split up some time in the late fifties. As his son Patrick put it, ‘there wasn’t a family to belong to after that’.

  After retiring from the War Office John Laverty’s life centred on the officers’ club and Colchester Golf Club. A very different figure to the stern and forbidding colonel emerges in the description given by one of his golfing partners, a teenage boy. Chris Booth remembered Laverty playing regularly with his father and a retired RAF chaplain, Monsignor John Roach, an Irish catholic priest. ‘Up to twenty or so golfers would turn up on a Saturday lunchtime and John, with military efficiency aided by several pink gins, would make up the four ball matches for the afternoon … John was a neat, efficient and busy type of man but had the charm of the Irish … but he had a very determined streak evident when he played golf.’ Both Booth and his father had a keen interest in military history and were aware of Kohima but Laverty ‘would not be drawn on the subject, at least not to me or my father’. He went to reunions of his old regiment, the Essex, but kept in touch with very few of the West Kents. In 1960 John Laverty’s youngest daughter, Maureen, died of cancer. She was the child closest to him and her death left him devastated. By that time he was living alone. Patrick remembered a happy trip they made together. It was after Patrick had married and had children of his own, and was working in the west of Ireland. John Laverty travelled across to Connemara to see his son and grandchildren. It was the first time he had visited the land of his birth since he left it in 1918. Father and son played golf together and went to the pub in the village of Spiddal, overlooking the Atlantic. They talked about Ireland, about golf, about the grandchildren, but the war remained a closed book. Still, it was as close as they had ever been or would be again. When John Laverty died of cancer a year later there were many men of the West Kents among the funeral crowd.

  Of all the characters who dominated the story of Kohima, only one remained with the place from the beginning to the end of the war. He knew it as a peaceful home and land of lost content. Long after the armies had moved on into Burma, Charles Ridley Pawsey was dealing with the cost of the battle. There was all his work trying to rebuild the fabric of Naga life battered by war, the business of reestablishing markets and courts; and there were the requests, coming every few days by the mail from Dimapur, for information about men whose bodies lay under the soil of Garrison Hill. On 9 September 1944, long after Grover’s 2nd Division had chased the Japanese out of Kohima, Pawsey was looking for the grave of a Captain A. N. Lunn who had died on Jail Hill. ‘So far the Graves Reg. Officer has not found his body,’ he wrote. ‘I am told he was with a V Force officer called Gould and his body has not been found. The latter’s mother is continually enquiring about his grave and I’ve not been able to find anyone who knows where it is.’

  After the war Pawsey stayed on as deputy commissioner and oversaw the construction of a new Kohima, and the creation of a war cemetery on the grounds of his old bungalow and tennis court. He set up a district council to unite the Nagas, but his dream of a peaceful future was stillborn. The Naga Hills were convulsed by the dramatic changes taking place in India. As independence approached Naga activists established a National Council to negotiate their future status. For a people so divided by clan loyalties, there was unanimity on the fundamental principle: they were not Indian and wanted independence. Jawaharlal Nehru called the independence demand ‘unwise, impracticable and unacceptable’. India was divided enough along confessional lines. Pawsey, caught between his loyalty to the Nagas and the remorseless logic of history, tried to persuade the Naga National Council to accept district autonomy within India. ‘Independence will mean: tribal warfare, no hospitals, no schools, no salt, no trade with the plains and general unhappiness,’ he wrote. The National Council split and a more radical leader, A. Z. Phizo, from the village of Khonoma, emerged to lead the independence movement.* Mahatma Gandhi met with Naga leaders and assured them, ‘I will ask them to shoot me first before one Naga is shot.’ Gandhi was dead at the hands of a Hindu extremist before the promise could ever be tested. Rano Mese Shaiza, now an eighty-nine-year-old grandmother, was a niece of Phizo, and was imprisoned for her activism. She remembered Charles Pawsey with affection, but carries the sense, common among many of the older generation, of having been abandoned by Britain. ‘When the British left they left us to India. But we are Nagas. We are not Indians,’ she said.

  By 1955 the political crisis in the Naga Hills had exploded into civil war.† Naga rebels fought the Indian army. Moderate political leaders were assassinated. Foreign journalists were banned from the area so that the scale of human rights abuses was hidden from the international community. The Nagas sent emissaries to their old friends in England. A party of four elders came to Ursula Graham Bower’s home in Scotland in the early 1960s pleading with her to intercede with the British government. Would the old rulers help them to stop the persecution? Graham Bower persuaded her friend David Astor, editor of the Observer, to send an undercover reporter into Nagaland in April 1962 to verify the stories of atrocity. Gavin Young described a reign of terror at the hands of the Indian security forces. ‘Individuals told of how they had been beaten and tied up for hours without water; how they had been bound and hung head downwards from trees to be flogged; how sons, brothers and fathers had been bayoneted to death.’

  As Ursula’s daughter Trina recalled: ‘In the interest of Commonwealth Relations, which were at the time very difficult with the newly independent colonies all feeling their new freedoms and powers, and the South African debacle just beginning, nothing was done by the British Government. To Ursula’s everlasting frustration she could do nothing for the people that had adopted her and done so much for the British and their interests.’

  Charles Pawsey left India in 1948 and retired to Woodbridge in Suffolk where the Pawseys had lived for generations. He married the widow of an Assam sawmill owner who had also returned from India and became a gentleman farmer near the town of Woodbridge. Pawsey followed the news from the Naga Hills assiduously. His papers in the Centre for South Asian Studies in Cambridge are filled with newspaper cuttings from the period and the letters he wrote on the subject. In 1965 he was asked by the Indian government to return to the Naga Hills to try and broker a peace agreement or, as his wife Lady Jane put it, to ‘knock some sense into the rebels’. He spent at least a month in the Naga Hills but it was a vain hope. Pawsey was a man from a lost age, who spoke of common sense and compromise in a place too divided and traumatised to hear him. He came home apparently appalled by the abuse of human rights in the Hills.*

  When Mountbatten promised that Britain would never forget her debt to the Nagas, he was not indulging in mere rhetoric. But the supreme commander was speaking in the bright glow of victory, when nobody could have imagined a civil war in the hills. It was an easy time to make promises. Once the war was over, Britain turned to the great project of national reconstruction, and the dismantling of the rest of her empire. Relations with India were governed by the principle of British interests first. Any attempt to interfere in the new nation’s handling of its domestic affairs would have been firmly rebuffed. At Kohima they had fought
and won the last great battle of empire; but when it was all over, the victors found their strength sapped, their influence vastly diminished. The Nagas could plead forever, but the British had neither the power nor the political will to help them. Such is the story of empires and the small tribes caught in their fall.

  The Nagas who stayed on in the Indian army after the war were posted to Bengal to police the referendum that established East Pakistan. Others were sent to the Punjab where they patrolled train stations thronged with the refugees of Partition, ‘like the Burma Retreat of 1942, only worse because there was no apparent enemy’. Havildar Sohevu Angami, who had joined up after seeing soldiers playing football in his village, went home and married and resumed his life as a hunter. ‘I had a double-barrelled shotgun after the war and I went hunting deer. I loved that.’ He had twelve children who gave him more than thirty grandchildren, who have so far produced three great-grandchildren. He wrote regularly to his fellow veteran of the tennis court, Lieutenant Pieter Steyn, and would always say that he loved the British officers he fought alongside. In his village there is only one reminder of the war, the grave of a Japanese soldier killed during the retreat from India. When he visits Kohima, a rare occasion now that he is in his nineties, he dresses in his good suit and wears his board of war medals with a small badge saying World War Two Veteran. He is a thin, dignified figure moving slowly on his walking stick through the bustling markets, from Naga Village across the road to Kohima Ridge, and along the bottom of Pawsey’s old garden where the headstones of his dead comrades shimmer white in the morning sun on that old ground where Richards and Laverty, Brown and Calistan drove them to victory, and where the words on the memorial of Naga stone remind passers-by:

  When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say

  For Your Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today.

  * * *

  * Khonoma had a tradition of rebellion dating to colonial times. It was here that the British political officer, G. H. Damant, met his death at the hands of Naga rebels in 1879.

  † Accurate casualty figures are not available. The number of Naga dead is estimated at anything between 20,000 and 100,000. These casualties occurred as a result of insurrection and factional fighting between Naga groups and, during the 1990s, with the Kuki tribe. The Indian security forces also sustained thousands of casualties.

  * The era of large-scale insurgency has ended in the Naga Hills. However, India still employs the draconian Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. Journalists are often refused permission to visit or discouraged from visiting by the simple expedient of delaying endlessly their requests for permits. On a visit to Kohima in 2009 this writer was aware of the omnipresence of Indian security forces. In neighbouring Manipur, where the battle of Imphal was fought, there are continuing attacks on the army and police and the familiar accusations of human rights abuse. The most common complaint in the Naga Hills now is of poverty. B. K. Sachu Angami was a twelve-year-old boy during the battle of Kohima and looked to the aftermath of victory with optimism. ‘What we expected was that something good would come if the Britishers won. But we are lagging behind India now. We are a thousand years behind. What does independence mean in such a poor economy?’ (Interviewed for this book.)

  EPILOGUE

  After Hatred

  It is always early when we meet. The early dog-walkers and the joggers are out and groups of children are crossing on their way to school. As we walk along the edge of the common, I constantly slow myself to keep to his pace. I have learned that it is pointless to try and talk to him when we are outside like this. My words sail over him and, although he nods and smiles, I know he has no idea what I have said. This polite man walking across Ealing Common is in his eighties now and frequently tells me that he will soon be gone. There is nothing maudlin about his statement. He is a grateful old soldier. Life after the war was good to him. He was never out of work, he lives in a comfortable house in west London, and his children are all in good jobs. They have no interest in the war. ‘Perhaps it is my wife’s influence. She does not like talking about the war because I am always talking about it,’ he says.

  At the coffee shop I take out my tape recorder and we pick up where we stopped at the end of our last meeting. From my notebook I see that he was talking about the days after the Japanese retreated. No matter how many years have elapsed, he says, there is no hiding from what happened. The faces are there as if it were today, this morning. ‘I did a very wrong thing in leaving the men,’ he says. I keep quiet and watch the tiny wheels of my tape machine whirr as he tells his story. He is back in the mountains. They were climbing higher and higher and had reached a small clearing when he saw the dying soldiers lying under a tree. The smell was terrible and he told himself, ‘I am not with them.’ So Masao Hirakubo kept on moving. When he passed through the villages he noticed that soldiers were clustered around the pagodas and calling out for rice. There were so many of them, but he did not dare to stop. He kept on going, across the Chindwin, down over the hot plains to the Irrawaddy and across to Rangoon, always marching until he left the scarecrows behind him.

  It was harder to shut out the deaths of men he knew. There was an NCO who worked for him at Kohima gathering food, a man called Mr Miura, who went into the jungle and never came back. ‘It hurts me still when I think of him,’ he says. After the war, back in Japan, Hirakubo Masao went to Miura’s family so that they would know what had happened to him. So many of those he knew and saw dying on the road of bones asked him to contact their families when he got back. Tell them what happened, they said.

  Back home in Yokohama, Hirakubo got his old job back, working for a trading company. He still lived at home with his parents and he was glad of the time he had with his father. But the guilt dogged him constantly. Eventually, a friend suggested he visit a priest. ‘I was a Buddhist and this friend was a Catholic. He said to me that I could say why I felt bad and the priest could maybe help. I wanted to know why I had escaped from death.’ Hirakubo saw the priest every day for a year. By the end he believed that he was meant to be alive. There had to have been a purpose that brought him through the mountains, something to justify his survival.

  The allied occupation of Japan ended in 1952 and the country was edging its way out of the grey years. His company was growing and expanding into European markets. One day the boss called him in and asked if he would like to go to England and be the representative there. This was in the early 1960s, and he wondered how a Japanese man would be regarded in London. In the popular imagination they were still the bandy-legged, buck-toothed barbarians, the slave drivers of the River Kwai. Certainly there were people in England who did not accept him. Often they were families of prisoners of war, or of men who did not come home from the East. But most were welcoming. He found the English a tolerant people. His children grew up with the English language and went to local schools. When he tried to live in Japan after a decade, both he and his wife found they could not settle there and made their way back to Ealing again. For Hirakubo there was too much to be done in England. He had found his purpose in the work of reconciliation.

  The Japanese old soldier met a British veteran, Gwilym Davies, who fought with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and together they set up a society to promote reconciliation. More British veterans became involved, among them Colonel John Shipster of the 7/2 Punjab, who travelled to Japan to meet the men he had fought against. On another occasion, the Japanese and British went back to Burma together and walked the old battlefields, and on their last night together drank beer and sang ‘Home Sweet Home’ in both languages.

  It was not always a meeting of minds. There were vigorous arguments. Hirakubo called the dropping of atomic bombs a war crime; his close friend Philip Malins of 20th Indian Division, spoke for most of his comrades by saying the bombing had saved countless allied lives. But their friendship continued. Hirakubo was no blind nationalist, nor did he want to run from the truth of Japanese war crimes. In this he was certainly different from the men who governe
d his country after the war – indeed, until the present day. The culture of denial around the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army is a stain on generations of Japanese politicians.

  Hirakubo never claimed to speak for the majority of Japanese veterans, except to say that they felt no hatred now towards the old enemy. That was certainly true of the dozen or so men I met in Japan. But there was a contradiction between their anguish over the experience of war and the continuing need of some to justify Japan’s aggression. Dr Takahide Kuwaki, who went to Kohima determined to die for the emperor, insisted that Japan was right to make war on Britain and America. ‘Did we fight a war of invasion? Did the spirits of the war dead in Yasukuni Shrine do a war of invasion? I do not think so. The spirits of the war dead did their best to protect their own country and family from foreign control.’

  Perhaps nothing – no apology, no compensation – could make up for the anguish of the prisoners of war or alter the memory of Japanese barbarism for many of the British and Indian veterans. One of the reasons they survived at Kohima was because they had learned to fear the Japanese so much that they would never surrender to them. Among the veterans of Kohima I interviewed, most had an abiding hatred for the enemy. The Cameron Highlanders’ officer, Gordon Graham, attended a 2nd Division parade with his friend Masao Hirakubo and heard a veteran behind them mutter ‘Japanese bastard.’ According to John Laverty’s son Patrick, his father would gladly have seen the Japanese veterans ‘garrotted in the street’. Even the clergyman, the Reverend Bruce Hayllar, who was shelled as he lay among the wounded, refused to buy Japanese cars and struggled with himself on the few occasions when Japanese Christians came to him for Communion. He was changed by a single experience. ‘I had to baptise a baby and it was half Japanese,’ he recalled. ‘That cured me, because I said, “Don’t be so stupid. This child isn’t to blame for all of this.”’