Road of Bones (30 page)

Hope-Thomson had no intelligence on the size or direction of the Japanese forces in his area. As far as he knew, the main thrust of the Japanese attack was against Imphal, along routes a long distance from Sangshak. As one of his battalion commanders, Lieutenant Colonel Hopkinson, wrote later, they knew ‘nothing about any offensive towards Imphal … and Kohima from our front’. From Hope-Thomson’s point of view, the strength of his base and outposts should have been adequate to deal with a small Japanese formation. He had a thousand fighting men. There were another eight hundred or so support troops. However, a Japanese group of even regimental strength would have substantially outnumbered the defenders.

Hopkinson wrote that he had ‘always been very puzzled as to how the Japanese managed to cross the Chindwin apparently entirely unobserved from the air and by ground posts’. But they had been observed. The intelligence was simply never passed on to 50 Brigade.
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It meant that brigade was still adhering to a training schedule as the Japanese 58th Regiment bore down on its way to Kohima.

Hope-Thomson had sent men from his 152nd battalion to join the 4/5 Mahratta Regiment at positions about nine miles from Sangshak, at a place called Sheldon’s Corner, along the route of any likely Japanese advance. Three miles further along again were the last defensive outposts at Point 7378. The CO of 152nd battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Hopkinson, met V Force stragglers and
Nagas who reported seeing parties of Japanese. But there was no suggestion that these were large groups or that they were advancing on Sangshak. However, on 18 March he received a wireless call from his outpost down the road. The officer told him that an exhausted V Force man had just stumbled into the camp with an alarming report. The Japanese were across the Chindwin in strength. As many as nine hundred had already been counted and they were heading up the track towards the forward positions. Early the following morning Hopkinson sent another message. Battle was under way.

It was only a week since they had left the Chindwin but to Lieutenant Yoshiteru Hirayama, machine-gun squad leader with 3rd battalion, 58th Regiment, it felt as if they had been marching forever. There was sun and clear air at the top of the mountains, and always a heavy blanket of wet air waiting at the bottom. ‘It was up and down and up and down every day. I couldn’t wait to get there. I had no map to see where we were or how long was left.’ They were tormented by leeches. No matter how tightly a man buttoned his tunic or wrapped his puttees, the bloodsuckers found a way in. There were occasional distractions from the monotony of the march, like the watercress the men found growing at the streams in the bottom of valleys. ‘We took them to our mouths as hungry locusts,’ remembered the war correspondent Yukihiko Imai. Later, he saw the bright green stools of several hundred soldiers scattered all over the ground.

He also recorded how the Japanese recruited local labour. ‘As soon as we reached the hamlet we caught the women and the children, and the soldiers locked them up in the cottage. It was sure their husband or parent come back to help and they got their near relative in exchange for their own labour. When we reached the next village we released them and in the same way we got labour next.’ The Naga would remember this in a few months’ time when the Japanese were passing in the opposite direction.

The first indications Lieutenant Hirayama had of the British presence were the machine-gun bullets zipping through the foliage around him. He found cover with the rest of his unit. The lieutenant
was now able to see the British trenches, but every time a Japanese soldier moved there was a burst of fire in response. A day attack was impossible. Waiting for darkness, he understood that the China veterans around him would watch every move he made. Hirayama faced his first great test as a soldier and a leader. At school he had suffered bullying because of his class background: he was the son of a monk, well-to-do and well dressed, living apart from the peasant children whose tiny houses skirted the monastery gates. They would not accept him. Now he commanded a unit of tough peasants who were obliged to offer him respect because of his rank. He would not feel he had earned it until the men had seen him act bravely in battle.

When night came, Hirayama was given orders to mount a flanking movement to the left of the British trenches. Once in position, he settled down and waited for further orders. Suddenly he saw figures moving in front of his position. Should he shoot? He held off. ‘It was actually our men and it was good I didn’t shoot!’ he recalled. It was his good judgement rather than physical bravery that first inclined his men to have faith in their young officer.

Hirayama and the rest of 3rd battalion had bumped up against C company, 152nd battalion of the Parachute Brigade. The first Japanese assault was beaten off. But through the night there were two subsequent attacks which gained ground. There were about 170 defenders, among them seven British officers, but with the main mortar section out of range on another hill, the company commander could only hope to slow down the Japanese. Hopkinson received a last message from Point 7378 at dawn on 20 March. The commander, three other officers and forty men were already dead. Relieving troops had become bogged down in thick jungle or found the Japanese resistance too stiff to penetrate.

The official history of the 58th Regiment described the closing stages of the fight. A party of about twenty British and Indians charged downhill, firing and shouting as they came. But between them and the Japanese was a wide ravine, into which some of the men fell. Most of the others were forced to surrender, while a few escaped. The Japanese then witnessed an extraordinary scene. ‘At the
very top of the position an officer appeared in sight, put a pistol to his head and shot himself in full view of everyone below. Our men fell silent, deeply impressed by such a brave act.’ The suicide of an officer in full view of the enemy was not part of any British military tradition. But it was a gesture the Japanese understood perfectly and it gave them food for thought. These were different soldiers from the ones routed in Burma and Singapore.

The 58th Regiment suffered 160 casualties in the thirty-six-hour battle, during which ‘the enemy had resisted with courage and skill’. In the immediate aftermath Hirayama was sent to check a nearby track. As the patrol moved along, a landmine exploded, killing his friend, Second Lieutenant Oshima. Years later, what would remain with Hirayama was not the blood and gore but the image of his friend’s sandals which were packed away in his backpack. ‘They were the sandals for mountain hiking which he loved. That was his personality, a man who loved the open places.’

The defenders at the main blocking position three miles further back in the direction of Sangshak now retreated. On reaching Sangshak, Lieutenant Colonel Jackie Trim, CO of the 4/5 Mahratta, was allocated an area of about fifty square yards for his entire battalion, such was the confined space of the perimeter. ‘There was much confusion,’ he wrote, with considerable understatement. As his men were digging in, a heavy thunderstorm descended and a company commander received a severe electric shock. To add to his woes, Trim found himself under fire from his own machine guns. Frightened soldiers were shooting at shadows. ‘The men were hungry and tired and as a result became trigger happy but we managed to calm them down,’ he wrote. The storm did bring one benefit: the heavy rain provided a source of water for the parched Mahrattas.

The Japanese were busy foraging for food in the nearby village of Ukhrul. Lieutenant Shosaku Kameyama of the 58th Regiment arrived to find, ‘to our great disappointment’, that the British had set fire to their stores before leaving. A sergeant major found a bottle of whisky which he presented to the infantry group commander, General Miyazaki, who had arrived to direct the battle. Kameyama’s
men were desperate for rest after a tough six-day march from the Chindwin. Miyazaki had no intention of stopping now.

By the time the Japanese encirclement was complete, Hope-Thomson had approximately 2,000 men inside his perimeter. They were well trained but facing battle together for the first time. Because of insufficient transport, the remainder of his 153 battalion was left behind in the village of Litan, between Sangshak and Imphal.

General Miyazaki was not meant to stop at Sangshak. Kohima was his objective and any attack on Sangshak was supposed to have been left to the 15th Division, which was heading this way towards Imphal. But the 15th Division was behind schedule and 50 Indian Parachute Brigade was a threat to Miyazaki’s line of communications. In his view, marching past Sangshak was not an option.

At dusk on 22 March the Japanese launched the first concerted attack. It came from the west, down a hill and across the village football field. As they flitted between burning native huts, the defenders saw them as shadows and spectres, smashed backwards by the fire from mortars and mountain guns, but regrouping for a second attack – a relentless enemy whose high-pitched war cries carried across the contested ground between the blasts of high explosive. In the darkness, and with the smoke from explosions, a defending soldier might only see a Japanese as he arrived in front of him. ‘With the firing, Very lights and shouting, we might have been watching a Hollywood movie,’ wrote medical officer Eric Neild. Another described the effect of seeing the troops tumbling in the face of machine-gun fire as watching men die in slow motion.

A Japanese lieutenant urged his men forward screaming
‘Tsukkome!’
– ‘Charge!’ – and, reaching the first trenches, used his sword to cut down four Indian soldiers before being felled by gunfire. Lieutenant Yoshiteru Hirayama was surprised by the amount of artillery fire. ‘It felt like hundreds of shells.’ His platoon was driven backwards. ‘We set up our machine gun and we could see the British trenches. The British shot down at us as they had dug their trenches
first.’ The heavy fire gave an impression of defensive strength at variance with the reality.

The colour-bearer with the 58th Regiment, Second Lieutenant Hiroshi Yamagami, smoked a last ‘Java’ cigarette with his comrades before going into the attack. If he were killed, it was agreed that one of the NCOs would take up the flag. If the nominated man were killed, another would take over, and so on. The last man would burn the colours with gasoline and destroy the coat of arms with a grenade. A canteen full of gasoline was permanently on hand.

Lieutenant Kameyama of the 3rd battalion saw his company commander break down in tears because the enemy fire was too heavy for his men to recover the bodies of the dead. The CO was wounded in the neck but continued to shout instructions. ‘Hearing my report, the commander finally realised that the attack could not be carried out and he broke down in tears, a man weeping in front of his subordinates, saying, “Too shameful not to recover the bones of Lieutenant Ban and soldiers of 8th Company.”’

At dawn on 23 March, the defenders looked across the football field to see around one hundred dead Japanese. Only twenty men had survived from one company and they had lost their commander. One battalion would lose more than four hundred killed and wounded in repeated attempts to breach the perimeter. The sight of so many dead Japanese gave heart to the encircled troops.

The mood of optimism did not last long. An air drop of supplies that afternoon fell outside the perimeter and into Japanese hands. The Dakota pilots, with one exception, were flying too high for the accurate drop the tight perimeter demanded. Day after day the same scenario was repeated. The Dakotas flew too high, except for one which flew so low that the defenders ‘could almost distinguish [the pilot’s] features in his cockpit, and watch the dispatchers at work in the doorway as the aircraft passed attracting a storm of small-arms fire from the enemy on each circuit, as the brave and skilful crew delivered every last pound of its priceless cargo within the bounds of the perimeter’. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Hopkinson, 152nd parachute battalion, later discovered that this particular aircrew had
taken part in training with 50 Brigade and felt a special responsibility to the men on the ground.