Road of Bones (42 page)

For now, the political priority was maintaining American air support. As Mountbatten’s chief of staff, Lieutenant Sir Henry Pownall, wrote: ‘The hard fact is that the Americans have us by the short hairs … We can’t do anything in this theatre, amphibious or otherwise, without material assistance from them … So if they don’t approve they don’t provide, and that brings the whole project automatically to an end. They will provide stuff for north Burma
operations … but they won’t for anything else … who pays the piper calls the tune.’ Slim’s Burma battle would have American air support for as long as it served the American interest in keeping open links to Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese army.

Recognising the reality of the threat from Mutaguchi, Churchill backed to the full Mountbatten’s push for more American aircraft. At a Cabinet meeting on 11 April, Churchill told his ministers that air transport was the key to success. The dramatic airlift from the Arakan had convinced him of that. ‘We should not hesitate to press the United States authorities to make still further air transport available, at the expense of transport to China, if the urgent needs of the battle justify this.’ He had already signalled Roosevelt to this effect.

Slim’s entire plan, and the lives of the men at Kohima and Imphal, would depend on the continuing success of the relationship. Mountbatten played the Americans with skill. They would get the offensive action they wanted to protect the supply line to China, but American planes would be needed to do it. Writing to Roosevelt at the end of March, he had stressed that ‘without air transport and air supply we are tied to roads which we have to build behind us across the most wild and desolate mountain jungle I have ever seen. Without overwhelming air support it would take years to drive the Japanese out of Burma.’

Mountbatten also kept up his morale-boosting trips to the frontline areas. Sergeant Jim Campion, of 1/8 Lancashire Fusiliers, was preparing to depart from Bangalore for the Kohima front when Mountbatten arrived. ‘He was given a tremendous ovation when he said (I quote) “I know the brothels have been out of bounds since you arrived, but as from now, the ban is lifted. So, in the short time you have left here, make the best of it.” This order was duly complied with.’

Arriving in Imphal on 8 April, Mountbatten went to see the 4 Corps Commander Scoones, whom he found ‘full of bounding enthusiasm and [who] told me that in every encounter there with the Japanese we are getting the better of them’. Mountbatten was nearly ninety miles by road from Kohima, but the road was cut and beyond the Japanese roadblocks a vision of hell was unfolding,
hardly imaginable to the supreme commander. Mountbatten was introduced to a Japanese prisoner who assured him he was being treated well, ‘the same as your prisoners are receiving from the Japanese’. The statement provoked a rare outburst of fury in Mountbatten’s diary. ‘When I think of what they have been doing to our prisoners it makes me sick,’ he wrote. He had been told a few days before of an incident in which a mule train of the West Yorkshire Regiment had been captured by the Japanese. Twenty-three men were caught, tied to trees and flogged until they passed out. When they recovered consciousness, a Japanese officer killed them all, except one, with a bayonet. ‘The one who did not die and eventually recovered had twenty-one bayonet thrusts in him. This is only a sample of the many atrocity stories I am beginning to collect.’ Mountbatten returned to Delhi on 13 April, impressed with the ‘dash and go’ of everybody he had met at the front and despairing of the negative atmosphere in the capital. Soon afterwards, and at the height of the Kohima fighting, he moved his headquarters to Kandy in Ceylon.

The great struggle at Kohima existed on the war’s periphery. It is important to remember the larger context of the spring of 1944. The CIGS, General Brooke, and Churchill were preoccupied with planning the greatest invasion in history: D-Day was only six weeks away, and in Italy, allied forces were engaged in a bitter struggle to break out of the Anzio beachhead. However, it was not that the Asian theatre was ignored. Rather it was a source of deep discord. Churchill provoked the most bitter dispute of the war with the Chiefs of Staff over his demand for amphibious landings in South-East Asia. The plan, codenamed ‘Operation Culverin’, involved a classic piece of Churchillian dash, leapfrogging from Sumatra to Singapore and Rangoon, and obviating any need for a slog through the Burmese jungles. Brooke was exasperated at plans he regarded as impractical and a distraction. After a meeting with the Chiefs of Staff on 17 March where Churchill had pressed the case for an invasion of Sumatra, Brooke wrote in his diary: ‘I began to wonder whether I was
in Alice in Wonderland, or whether I was really fit for a lunatic asylum! I am honestly getting very doubtful about his balance of mind and it just gives me the cold shivers. I don’t know where we are or where we are going regards our strategy, and I just cannot get him to face the true facts! It is a ghastly situation.’ According to Brooke’s account, after another meeting five days later the Chiefs had decided ‘it would be better if we all three resigned rather than accept his solution’. Yet another discussion of ‘Operation Culverin’ a few days later left Brooke feeling ‘like a man chained to the chariot of a lunatic!! It is getting beyond my powers to control him.’ The matter was settled not by Brooke or by Churchill, but by Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi who, as the debate raged in Whitehall, was busy changing the facts on the Indian frontier.

Kohima is mentioned in the notes of War Cabinet meetings and in the weekly summaries prepared for Churchill by the Chiefs of Staff. On 3 April, the War Cabinet was given an optimistic, if not utterly misleading, version of events. ‘To the north, other Japanese forces that had cut the road between Imphal and Kohima had been driven back. Japanese forces in this area had been drawn off in order to deal with our penetration groups further to the east.’ Throughout the first weeks of the siege there is no specific reference to Kohima or to Imphal in Brooke’s diaries, although on 12 April the CIGS met Mountbatten’s deputy chief of staff ‘to discuss India and Dickie Mountbatten’s problems’. A day later he met with Orde Wingate’s former second-in-command, George Symes, when Burma was discussed, followed by an hour with ‘Rowland from Indian Civil Service on grain sitn etc.’ Brooke was not indifferent to the war in the Far East; the lack of detailed reference in his diaries simply reflects the scale of priorities he faced. But he was hostile to allocating more resources to Burma. His pragmatism rebelled against adventures that consumed scant resources for an imperial cause that he already feared was lost. Back in February 1942, when news of Singapore’s fall was coming in, he had written: ‘I have during the last ten years had an unpleasant feeling that the British Empire was decaying and we were on a slippery decline!’

As for the British public, the extreme peril of the Kohima garrison and the scale of the Japanese threat were unknown. This was not in any sense exceptional or suspicious. It simply reflected the nature of wartime communications and censorship, and the peripheral nature of Burma to the overall scheme of the war. But in India the political calculation was different. The suppression of information from the front led to protests from several war correspondents who were convinced that Delhi was hiding bad news. Speaking to an open session of the Indian Assembly in the first week of April, the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, General Auchinleck, sounded sanguine. ‘We cannot stop every Japanese threat as soon as it makes itself apparent, but it is therefore always possible that some of these may succeed in temporarily interrupting the communications … I am convinced that the security of Assam has never been in danger, let alone the security of India.’ An Indian government statement of 8 April was at utter variance with reality. ‘It is obvious that the enemy’s timetable has been thrown completely out of gear … other than attacking the key towns and gaining full possession of the roads, the Japanese effort can now be of little else than nuisance value.’ This statement was greeted with astonishment in Kohima. Captain Walter Greenwood heard Auchinleck state that ‘Kohima was very strongly defended’ while he was crouching in Hugh Richards’s bunker.

The Japanese had blocked the key road and were besieging Kohima, the one strong defensive position in front of the railway and the supply base at Dimapur. This ‘nuisance’, as Auchinleck described it, would cost thousands of lives. Both Slim and Stopford still feared that Sato could make a flanking move towards Dimapur at any moment. The distortions in Delhi had far less to do with preserving the morale of the fighting troops, who could see the situation for themselves, than with keeping damaging news from restive Indian ears.

There was some reporting of the fighting on the BBC and in censored newspaper accounts. Captain W. P. G. MacLachlan of the Kohima garrison remembered how ‘at 5.30 p.m. each day the operator
on the telephone exchange would connect all the lines, and the owner of the radio would put his telephone mouthpiece against the loudspeaker. Thus the whole camp could hear the news and when Kohima eventually figured in the bulletins, derisive guffaws could be heard over the telephone system at the BBC’s bald descriptions of what we had been doing two or three days before.’ One officer on General Grover’s staff said they depended on the BBC broadcasts because communications with headquarters were so poor.

The government in London was also reluctant to say anything while the battle still hung in the balance. Burma had been the source of too much previous humiliation. Early attempts to obtain a parliamentary statement on the fighting in the Naga Hills were rebuffed. On 4 April, the day the West Kents were told to return to Kohima, the war minister, Sir James Grigg, was asked to make a statement. ‘Not at the present time,’ he declared. Grigg would repeat this for some weeks to come. In time, the defenders of Kohima would come to regard themselves as part of a ‘forgotten army’, but in those first weeks of April 1944 they were unaware of the marginal consideration being given in London to the fighting. The men saw no further than the corpse-littered ground in front of them, while their commanders watched the middle distance, praying that Warren or Grover, or both, would break through in time to save them.

The brigadier could give the impression of nonchalance. Having bought some chickens from a local village ‘Daddy’ Warren ordered a run built near the officers’ mess. He could be seen eating his morning eggs accompanied by wild raspberries while the guns blasted away towards Kohima; in the evenings, according to Arthur Swinson, he played numerous hands of
vingt-et-un.
Yet appearances were deceptive. Warren worried constantly about the state of the garrison; at one point, moved by the appeals for help from Laverty, he suggested to Grover that he and his men try to march up the road and into Kohima. Luckily the request was dismissed by Grover before it resulted in disaster. Warren’s position was two miles along from Kohima on the way to Dimapur. From there his eight mountain
guns, in constant contact with Yeo and his observers in Kohima, could devastate the Japanese as they formed up to attack.

The guns of the British 2nd Division also pounded the Japanese. Sergeant William ‘Tug’ Wilson, 16 Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, directed harassing fire on the Japanese positions. ‘Harassing fire means you covered an area … If you hit something that’s a benefit. One gun fired one round per minute. One degree left, then reverse and go the other way … We were firing over the whole area.’ It was an effective method of keeping Japanese heads down and frustrating plans for attack.

At Jotsoma Warren had fought off several Japanese infantry attacks on his positions in the first week of April. By the second week he was nearly as isolated in the Jotsoma box as Laverty was at Kohima, although experiencing nothing like the same pressure from the Japanese. The 1/1 Punjab had driven the Japanese off a ridge east of Jotsoma, offering Warren a good vantage point of Kohima. His observers could now range the enemy positions with great accuracy. With some of the 2nd Division infantry already in the battle and other brigades arriving at Dimapur and pushing up the road the numerical odds were growing in favour of the British and Indians. But there was no sign of any weakening in Japanese determination. On 14 April as dawn broke a Japanese patrol broke into the 5 Brigade HQ area killing one man and wounding two. ‘The Jap party then rushed through the area on to the hill above, from which they shouted “Come on up to us,”’ a General’s diary recorded. ‘The Worcesters accepted this invitation and organised a pheasant drive with three Companies with which they cleared the Japs off the hill feature.’ The following day Brigadier Hawkins received the welcome news that a jeep had arrived to collect him. It had been sent by Warren from Jotsoma. Sato’s attempt to cut the link between Dimapur and Kohima had ended in failure. The road to 161 Brigade was open.

Whenever they got ready to form up, the shells began to fall. Someone said to Lieutenant Hirayama that it looked as if the sky was vomiting fire on them. Shards of metal, dirt, stones, and lumps of flesh rained down. ‘It was so very, very loud the artillery.’ The air pressure smashed the eardrums of men close to the blast. Blood ran from their ears. Hirayama saw body pieces fly into the air. They were not pieces of the living but of the dead who had been hastily buried in the previous days. Hirayama was back at Kohima after having been sent to Zubza to block the road. He was lying in a trench near Charles Pawsey’s tennis court on the northern fringe of the garrison, a critical part of the steadily closing encirclement. Having driven the defenders off GPT Ridge, Jail Hill and Detail Hill, cut the roads in and out of Kohima, and placed artillery on the ridges overlooking the garrison, the Japanese felt Kohima must surely fall soon. Yet for all the ground they had made in the first week, the attackers were suffering heavy losses from the guns at Jotsoma and Zubza, and the close-quarter fighting on Detail Hill had been a savage and costly affair, as the experience of Captain Kameyama’s company proved.