Road of Bones (47 page)

Lieutenant Geoffrey Page of the 1/8 Lancashire Fusiliers, 4 Brigade, led small patrols which spied on the Japanese lines of communication around Kohima. ‘It was terrible. I was frightened to death most of the time. You spent your time with a platoon or just two or three chaps, miles behind the Jap lines. You get terrified. When I got back to the unit I broke down and cried. It was the mental strain and stress and the relief when you got back. Some patrols lasted a few hours … the worst one of all lasted all day because we were several miles to the east of where we were spying on the lines of communication and on three separate occasions we were within a whisker of walking into Japanese.’ Another Fusilier remembered the jungle quiet being broken by the sound of Japanese banging tins, and shouting: ‘Hey! Johnny, are you there?’

For troops new to the hills there were other surprises. Keith Halnan of the 7th Worcesters thought it would be a good idea if they were to bed down in some abandoned Naga huts. ‘This was a great mistake. There were mosquitoes and rats and there were bloodsucking leeches.’ Sitting among his comrades, Halnan found himself privately objecting to their foul smell, until he realised that he was smelling himself.

The British and Indian forces were edging closer to Kohima. With the road open to Warren at Jotsoma, General Stopford sent the newly arrived 6 Infantry Brigade up to join the relief effort. That would mean both 4 and 6 Brigades advancing to Kohima, while Hawkins and 5 Brigade held their present positions and deployed along the road to stop any Japanese attempts at encirclement. The artillery, tank and anti-tank components of 2nd Division were also
arriving to add to the pressure on the Japanese. The threat to Dimapur had been extinguished, although Stopford still feared it was possible that the Japanese general might try to cut the railway, halting supplies going to China and infuriating the Americans. The 23rd Long Range Penetration Group (Chindits) and 1st battalion of the Queen’s Royal Regiment patrolled at different points along the line. Major Michael Lowry of the 1st Queen’s rode with a mobile column in a specially armoured train into which were crammed eighty-four mules, the troops of the 1st Queen’s and a mountain artillery battery. Passing over a series of bridges, ‘nine or ten of which were unprotected’, he noted how ‘there was nothing to prevent a few men of an enemy fighting patrol blowing one up, or even several, or perhaps the enemy might hold a vital bridge area in strength, covered from the jungle hills’. Lowry need not have worried. The time for such an initiative had passed. Sato would not be moving anywhere.

At General Sato’s jungle headquarters, about four miles from Kohima, intelligence was reporting an ominous build-up of British forces. As always, the general listened to the reports of his subordinates calmly. Inwardly he raged at Mutaguchi’s plans, which were ‘simply an essay written by children at their desk’. But, so far, the ill feeling towards his boss had been kept at the level of occasional comments to more trusted members of his staff. Sato listened and thought. Rising to inspect the map on the wall of his bamboo hut, he traced his finger along what his scouts believed were the lines of the British advance. He knew by now that his attempts to outflank the relieving forces had failed. The British had fought well and they had resisted the trap of encirclement. On the night of 15 April, an attempt had been made to cut the Dimapur road once more. But Hawkins’s men were waiting for them. The 33 Corps account states briskly, ‘they were thrown back and valuable documents captured’. At Zubza the 1st Cameron Highlanders captured an entrenched enemy position and CSM Tommy Cook, ex-Army boxing champion, seized a Japanese officer’s sword and slaughtered the owner and several
others with it, for which he was awarded the DCM. Tommy was later killed in Naga Village.

Now the Imphal operation was stuck in the mountains, with two divisions unable to shift the British, and he was being held at Kohima, with more British reinforcements arriving by the hour. If Sato had premonitions of defeat at this stage, like any good general he kept them from his staff. His infantry commander, Miyazaki, had started out as a believer in the operation, and still gave his staff and soldiers an impression of commitment to it. Before setting out for Kohima, Miyazaki had delivered a stirring speech to his officers. They were to have faith in one another, he said, and to see the officers and men of the Imperial Army as the divine arms and legs of the emperor. He also warned them of the challenges they would face. ‘Enemy planes and firepower are, as you know, usually superior in numbers. Even in jungle fighting its progress has been quite rapidly advanced recently. When the enemy challenges us, usually they are thoroughly prepared. Therefore, never underestimate them.’ But then Miyazaki lapsed into the hyper-confident rhetoric characteristic of so many Japanese generals, scorning the determination of the British and Indian forces. ‘They are men without fighting spirit, a slave-like army without unity and without any noble cause. Their commander’s capabilities are very limited, they lack quick decisive action, and are afraid of shock action. They have innumerable weak points … You, gentlemen, will answer the enemy’s challenge, go out and meet them without fear and “bring home the bacon” … You must crush the enemy’s will to oppose.’

The Royal West Kents, the Assam Regiment, and all the others who were despatched to fill gaps in the defences made a mockery of his assertions. But Miyazaki consoled himself that the perimeter was still shrinking. All it would take was for a breakthrough at the tennis court and Garrison Hill could be taken. Like Sato, he did not know the full scale of reinforcements coming up from Dimapur, although he already understood the British advantage in air supply and artillery. But that would matter less if the infantry could seize control of all of Kohima Ridge. Miyazaki knew it was a defensive position
that could sap the blood and time of several enemy divisions. The orders from imperial headquarters had been to establish a line that could be held through the monsoon, until there was time to bring up reinforcements from Burma. That was still possible.

Miyazaki was impressed by his men’s bravery. He did not control the individual decisions of company or platoon commanders in the heat of battle, but he did approve an overall strategy that pressed the sheer weight of numbers against the defender’s guns. Against a resolute defence it guaranteed high casualties. To the Western observer there is an understandable temptation to view Japanese officers as profligate with the lives of their men, or to take the view, as Slim and his commanders did, that the Japanese were tactically unimaginative. But Miyazaki was gambling on the breakthrough that would bring the siege to a sudden end. Miyazaki had two mottos as a soldier: the first was ‘Total Effort’; the second ‘Get to the Objective’. They were to the forefront of his mind as the siege now entered its most decisive phase.

In a prison camp at the war’s end, Miyazaki wrote a memoir of Kohima. It used a narrative device made famous by the Japanese novelist Soseki Natsume, who wrote a book in which his pet cat is the authorial voice. Quirky and subtle, it is a device popular in a culture where deep feeling is so often expressed at a remove. In Miyazaki’s case the story is narrated through the voice of his pet monkey Chibi, which he carried with him throughout the war. Referring to one of the failed assaults he wrote: ‘That night attack failed but I realised my master gets stronger and stronger the greater the hardship.’ If the defenders thought their firepower would stop Miyazaki, they would be shown how wrong they were. He would attack while he thought there was any chance of breaking through. The 58th Regiment could be thrown back once, twice, twenty times, but as long as he thought a gap might open up they would fight on. For General Miyazaki the battle was still young; many of the men had fought long and hard in China and others at Guadalcanal and still emerged strong to fight at Kohima. Hundreds had been lost in the past fortnight. They were low on food and ammunition was growing short, but they had water and
their trenches and bunkers were deep and solid. Miyazaki stressed that he wanted attacks that had a real military purpose, not glorious suicide charges for honour and the emperor. ‘I feel sorry for the soldiers who committed suicide in battle. I believe it is important to live life and to bring more men home alive.’

But for Sato, who was dealing with Mutaguchi and asking for the promised food supplies, disillusionment was growing. Later he would say bitterly, ‘It had been planned that 31 Div should receive supplies amounting to ten tons per week, of which seven tons were to be foodstuffs. These were to be transported to the CHINDWIN and Westwards to KOHIMA until such time as IMPHAL fell and the IMPHAL – KOHIMA road could be used to supply the division … the Division received NO rations of any kind.’

Private Manabu Wada, 3rd battalion, 138th Regiment, searched for food in burned-out buildings around Kohima’s Naga Village. Such visions as their leaders had painted of supplies to be captured! Now Wada found ‘not a grain of rice or a round of ammunition was left for us in the captured enemy positions’. Richards had ordered the destruction of all supplies that could not be carried into the garrison. The task of scavenging food was taking its toll on the supply officers. The majority of Naga villagers had fled into the forest and 31st Division had already consumed much of the available food in the area. Lieutenant Chuzaburo Tomaru of the 138th Regiment had experienced hunger during the war in China, but by mid-April he could tell the situation at Kohima was far more serious. Whenever rations from the allied supply drops drifted towards the Japanese lines, men would risk being shot by snipers in order to drag in the canisters of ‘Churchill rations’. Tomaru remembered the ‘delicious’ taste of canned cheese, and the luxuries of chewing gum and cigarettes rescued from no-man’s-land. He was still trying to find food for around five hundred men: rice balls, rolled in the palms of the hand, which day by day grew smaller. Tomaru would wait while his cooks boiled the rice, then, signalling to a few privates, he would divide up the ration and make the suicide run to the forward trenches. ‘I thanked for my men because they were so brave and patient. When
the campaign started, 15th Army promised to send food by transport aircraft, but it did not happen and there was no supply of food more than a month. I was so mad.’

The popular Lieutenant Kameyama, who had joked with his soldiers about holding their testicles before the battle of Jail Hill, consoled himself that he had not lost a battle yet. If he was going to win at Kohima it would come down to the most basic law of war. He and his troops would have to kill and keep killing until the enemy surrendered or were exterminated. ‘When the enemy appeared before us … our duty was only to bring down who ever was in front.’ Kameyama consoled himself in his lonelier moments by writing a song while resting between assaults. It was gradually picked up and sung throughout the 58th Regiment, to the tune of the popular hit ‘Thank you for your Trouble’. It is notable for its fatalistic acceptance of the attacker’s dire predicament:

When there is no more rice, we eat grass

When there is no more tobacco, we smoke weeds

When there are no more bullets, we fight with flesh

The flag of the rising sun raised in Kohima.

Thank you for your troubles, thank you for your troubles

Seizing enemy pillbox

One lights a victorious cigarette

Another day in safety

The crescent moon also smiling in the sky

Thank you for your troubles, etc.

With only three shells per mountain gun

Even 58th Regiment soldiers

Cannot hold Kohima.

If only they had shells, but we can only shed blood.

Thank you for your troubles, thank you for your troubles

The arrival of allied Hurricanes and Vultee 1 Vengeance dive-bombers in mid-April added to the pressure on the Japanese. To the supply officer Masao Hirakubo air strikes were ‘fire from a long way
away’, which killed several men he knew. The men in the forward trenches were fortunate in only one respect: the aircraft did not risk bombing them for fear of hitting the British entrenched nearby. The planes boosted the spirits of the garrison. ‘To see them roaring in low, the whole place rocking with the noise of their engines and then above this sound to hear the loud voices of the bombs, renewed our hearts every time them came,’ said a soldier from the Assam Rifles.

The pilots included a large number of New Zealanders and Canadians. Jimmy Whalen, from Vancouver, had earned his status as an ‘ace’ fighting the Luftwaffe in France and the Japanese during the attack on Ceylon in 1942. At Kohima, Whalen flew a Hurricane fighter-bomber, or ‘Hurribomber’, with 34 Squadron RAF on bombing and strafing runs twice a day. The situation of the village, in a valley between high mountain ridges, meant the pilots had to pass low over well-dug-in Japanese on their approach. The small arms fire spattered upwards. Whalen’s wingman, Flight Sergeant Jack Morton, witnessed his death. ‘We bombed in sections of two and Jimmy and I were first in bombing with two 250 lb. bombs with 11 second delays fitted. I was slightly behind Jimmy and we dropped our bombs at about 50 feet and as we left the target area Jimmy’s plane did a barrel roll and crashed. It was a very sad day on the Squadron because he was by far the most popular officer and pilot in both the Officers’ and Sergeants’ Mess. We carried out two more attacks that day and on both occasions we looked for his plane but there was nothing to be seen in the dense jungle.’ Another pilot, a New Zealander, was forced to bail out over Kohima but had the good luck to land behind British lines. He was back flying within twenty-four hours. Another went missing and was found flying around aimlessly, possibly a victim of battle fatigue, before being escorted back to base by two comrades. ‘When we landed he could not remember anything about the trip,’ Morton recalled.