Road of Bones (32 page)

The machine-gunner Yoshiteru Hirayama believed the British had left because they had inflicted enough damage on the Japanese.
There were, according to his recollection, only some wounded Indians and a single white man left alive. British and Japanese sources agree that at Sangshak the wounded were well cared for. There was a good reason for this. When Miyazaki arrived on the battlefield he saw that a popular Japanese officer who had been killed in the battle had been wrapped in a blanket and given proper burial. ‘Our men were all moved by this,’ wrote Lieutenant Shosaku Kameyama. ‘As the enemy treated our company commander respectfully, our regimental commander ordered that enemy wounded should be treated as prisoners of war [and those captured] should not be killed.’ Miyazaki bowed over the corpses of his own dead and thanked them. The British badly wounded were sent to Japanese field hospitals with instructions that they were to be well treated. Those able to walk were pressed into service as porters, before being stripped of everything save their underpants and released near the British lines.

There may have been one exception to the good treatment afforded the prisoners. The war correspondent Yukihiko Imai recalled seeing a group of five or six prisoners, among whom were some English. When the men were searched, they had letters and photographs on them. Imai thought, from the photographs, that they came from a rural area. He then saw the soldiers being led away into the shadow of the mountain by some Japanese. ‘The Japanese soldier only came back to our line. I noticed their shoes were changed to the new English ones.’ He remembered one English soldier, ‘young and tall, bending his head in the blue moon’, who had now disappeared from sight. ‘The persons in the photograph in his pocket whom he loved best in England, I felt that on this eastern night they would be expecting his healthy return in high spirits. I knew they would be thinking of him today.’ When he spoke to the Japanese lieutenant in command about what had happened he received the simple reply: ‘This is the war.’

Approximately six hundred defenders were killed, wounded or taken prisoner at Sangshak, out of a garrison of approximately 2,000.
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The survivors staggered through the jungle, across the same kind of razor-backed mountains that the Japanese infantry had cursed on their way to Sangshak. They drank from streams on the valley floors and ate the leaves of magnolia trees to ease the pangs of hunger. There was no question of using the mountain tracks by day, when Japanese patrols were moving about. Harry Seaman remembered the ‘nightmare for the wounded’ as they were carried or limped along winding tracks in the darkness.

As for General Miyazaki, he had won, but at a heavy cost. Two infantry battalions had been ravaged. Of the eight hundred men of 2nd battalion only half were fit for duty; of equal concern was the loss of many of his best officers, from platoon to company commander level.
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The 58th Regiment still contained formidable fighters, but it was not the same unit that had crossed the Chindwin eight days before. What was more, Hope-Thomson had delayed the Japanese advance on Kohima by six days. He had bought time for Slim to rush reinforcements up to the front. Despite warm praise from Slim later on, the 50 Brigade commander received no decoration for the defence.
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Instead, he was wrongly blamed, by malicious
whispers in the staff offices at Imphal, for having made a stand in a poor position and almost getting wiped out in the process. According to Harry Seaman, Hope-Thomson suffered a knock on the head and concussion when he fell during the retreat. The gossip mills began to grind immediately. Before long it was ‘common knowledge’ that the brigadier had suffered a nervous breakdown. According to Lieutenant Seaman this diagnosis was placed on Hope-Thomson’s file. The 50 Indian Parachute Brigade was blamed, at first by word of mouth, and then implicitly in the official report by the 4th Corps Commander, General Scoones. The bitterness at this unjust portrayal of events would remain with many veterans for the rest of their lives.

Lieutenant Shosaku Kameyama’s facial wound was causing him such pain that he could hardly open his mouth or eyes. His only food was milk poured into his mouth as he tilted his head upwards. He came across his company commander, who was also wounded, and who asked him if he would go on to the next battle. ‘I had to say, “I will accompany you,” against my personal inclination. So both the commander and I were bandaged like monsters and went to Kohima.’

They were coming. Nobody doubted it any longer. The 1st Assam patrols had already ambushed the enemy east of Kharasom, about nine miles away, and killed a ‘lot of Japs with little loss to themselves’. Colonel Hugh Richards, who was visiting Brown at his base in Jessami on 26 March, found an ‘atmosphere of complete confidence and eager anticipation’. Lieutenant Colonel ‘Bruno’ Brown’s men had been busy. He had chosen the junction of two jeep tracks to make his stand. There was an outer ring of bunkers and foxholes and inside it a second line where the command, mortars, and dressing station were sited. Unlike Hope-Thomson at Sangshak, or Richards at Kohima, Brown had ample supplies of barbed wire and his perimeter was well secured, with vegetation slashed away to clear accurate fields of fire.
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Any Japanese infantry appearing along the road would come straight into a withering fusillade.

Richards told Brown that if the Japanese bypassed him he was to take to the jungle and strike at the enemy from the rear. Brown reassured Richards that he expected an attack within twenty-four hours by a battalion-sized Japanese force, usually around 1,400 men, and ‘could hold out indefinitely against a formation of that size’. There is an interesting coda to the meeting, indicating some unease beneath Brown’s usually tough exterior. Just before Richards left, he asked him if the order he had been given to fight to the last man and the last round
stood. ‘I said that it must,’ Richards recalled. ‘On my return journey I was very much worried about this order.’ Richards spent the night with Charles Pawsey, who was helping refugees in a village along the road towards Kohima. He thought through the night about what was being asked of Brown. There was no proper water supply inside the perimeter at Jessami and the garrison would inevitably be cut off from outside sources. Nor was it planned to stage the main battle at Jessami. It was intended merely as a delaying post. In those circumstances it made more sense for the 1st Assam to fight but then withdraw, continuing to launch hit-and-run attacks on the Japanese as they advanced.

Back in Kohima on 27 March, Richards received two devastating pieces of information. First he was told that the West Yorkshires, his only infantry battalion, was to be withdrawn and sent to Imphal to strengthen the defences there. Later, Pawsey’s Naga scouts arrived with news that the Japanese force moving up from the Chindwin was not a regiment but an entire division. True, this was intelligence coming from outside the normal military chain, and doubters might ask how a Naga tribesman could tell the difference between a division and a regiment. But the Nagas had been schooled by V Force officers in estimating the size of military formations, and they had been reliable informants up to now. Pawsey was convinced they were right.

The 1st Assam detachments numbered four hundred in total and now faced thousands of Sato’s men advancing along the tracks to Kharasom and Jessami. Brigadier Warren of 161 Brigade and the area commander Ranking met Hugh Richards at Kohima on 29 March, where they discussed what to do about the ‘last man, last round’ order to the Assam Regiment. Given the disparity in numbers, it was far better to get the Assam men back to help defend Kohima. Richards decided to cancel the order and send troops from 161 Brigade to help the Assam Regiment fight its way out of Kharasom and Jessami.
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Richards’s unease about the position of 1 Assam dated to the night of 26 March. But the ultimate decision on the battalion’s fate was not Richards to make. It was not until his conference with General Ranking and Brigadier Warren on 29 March that it was agreed Richards should order the withdrawal of the Assam troops.
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The delay has never been explained but it made the task of transmitting new orders infinitely more difficult. Brown vanished from radio contact on the 29th, which meant the only available means for passing on orders was by couriers infiltrating through Japanese lines or by aircraft dropping a message; both were hazardous, with no guarantee of success. There were two attempts by air, both of which failed, and the messages fell into the hands of the Japanese. They were not coded, because Richards feared Brown lacked the facilities for decoding, and the result was that the Japanese now knew precisely what the defenders were going to do. Three different attempts by men from the Assam Rifles, who knew the terrain well, also failed to get through to Brown. Eventually an Assam Regiment officer managed to slip through the Japanese lines and warn Brown. The battalion adjutant, Captain Michael Williamson, heard firing and shouting on the southern perimeter as men responded to what they thought was a Japanese probe, ‘but very soon we heard John Corlett [the messenger] shouting like mad at us to stop firing’. But the message was too late for the isolated detachment at Kharasom.

As the crow flies, the village of Kharasom is just nine miles south of Jessami. But to men relying on a narrow jungle track it is twice that distance. Looking down the track towards the Chindwin at daybreak on 27 March, Captain John Young of A company, 1st Assam, saw a Japanese battalion approaching fast: the elephants hauling artillery,
mules loaded with ammunition and supplies, and the long line of infantry with bayonets at the ready. Young ordered his mortars to open fire. Calculating the time it would take to reinforce his position, and the time it would take the Japanese to reach him, Captain John Young knew that A company would be fighting on its own. He had 120 men with him, including the mortar detachment and some signallers, and even though he had chosen a strong defensive position on top of a hill, Young, who was vastly outnumbered, understood that if he stood and fought he must eventually be overrun. But his orders were to fight to the last man and that was what he would do.

When he had arrived in Kharasom the previous month, Young had established his perimeter about three hundred yards outside the village and sent patrols out towards the border. Nothing was heard of the Japanese until the first V Force reports reached Brown at Jessami on 20 March. Four days later, Young welcomed a part of V Force and the Assam Rifles escaping the Japanese advance. At 0610 on 27 March 2nd Lieutenant D. B. Gurung heard the enemy attack. ‘It was felt that the attack was coming from all sides. The enemy was charging, shouting and firing as they charged.’ Young called Brown on the field telephone to tell him the shooting had started. It was the last the CO or anybody else heard from him. The line was cut just after his call. Now only a courier, or an extremely accurate message drop by the RAF, would be able to get orders to Young. Neither course was attempted. With the Japanese almost on top of his small force, it would probably have been too late.

The troops advancing towards him were from the 138th Regiment, an advance guard of the main 31st Division column making its way to Kohima. Lieutenant Chuzaburo Tomaru, a supply officer with the 138th Regiment, was hiding behind some rocks as the infantry went in. The first waves were mown down. ‘I saw killed infantry troops sent from front line again and again. Looking at them, I thought that this may be it.’ Tomaru had been drafted into the military in 1939 and moved from a machine-gun company to administrative work, a possible indication of his superiors’ view of
his soldierly skills. Tomaru dreaded the enemy machine guns but did not have to join the attack. At Kharasom the Japanese had more troops than they needed. A commander on the right flank, instead of making direct for Kohima as directed, had decided to follow the sound of the guns and join the assaults on Kharasom and Jessami. The proverbial hammer was being taken to the nut. When General Sato came forward and saw the imbalance in forces he was livid. Why were so many men being deployed against such small objectives when they could be marching to Kohima? He upbraided the major who had deflected from his course: ‘Your correct course of action was to leave enough troops to contain the garrisons here and push on to Kohima.’

After Miyazaki’s delay at Sangshak, Sato was losing patience with commanders who were failing to see the wood for the trees. There were three Japanese attacks on Young’s positions before nightfall. All were repulsed. The defenders had laid out two lines of wire around the perimeter which made Japanese infiltration all the more difficult. Scores of Japanese were shot down in repeated assaults the following day.
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Havildar Sohevu Angami, based with a mortar platoon back in Jessami, met one of the Assam survivors soon afterwards. ‘The man told me that Young shouted at them to “wait, wait” until the Japanese were very close before firing. He was brave that Young. There were so many Japanese but Young refused to surrender. The Japanese were screaming at our men all the time and Young was shouting out, “I won’t go, I won’t go.”’