Road of Bones (54 page)

Making his way around villages in British-occupied territory, the deputy commissioner was given messages from Naga contacts. A constable he knew well wrote to him describing how he had led troops to the capture of a government building held by the Japanese, and how he was staying on with the army in the jungle, trying to track the enemy. ‘Sir I am still at Chihawa with Major Henchman collecting information from every direction and all the police within my area are employed in leading the troops in every direction. Sir I am trying to meet you soon.’ Many other Nagas were crossing the Japanese lines to find Pawsey. Krusischi Pashkar, from Kohima
village, saw the men marching through the jungles to the British lines, and mothers with small children being given rations at the sentry posts. Pawsey opened a temporary hospital at Dimapur and Pashkar saw him come ‘every day to see the refugees and to enquire of their sufferings and to arrange their relief. Pots, clothes and tarpaulins were brought and supplied to the Kohima men.’ Without the rations organised by Pawsey the refugees would have starved. Travelling from one hiding place to another, twelve-year-old B. K. Sachu Angami lived on roots foraged from the jungle. Weak with hunger the boy day dreamed about the feasts his people held before the war. A feast every month of the year with plenty of game. Now when he went into the jungle with his catapult and tried to find small birds there was silence and empty branches. ‘We were taken here and there by our parents. For want of food we could hardly survive.’

By the time Kohima was relieved the threat from deserters marauding the hills had ceased. Ursula Graham Bower and her Naga scouts were continuing to patrol and gather intelligence, but the sense of imminent threat was gone. She was sent reinforcements, a half-section of Assam Rifles and their V Force officer, all of whom had survived the siege. They arrived at her hilltop headquarters and went to bed for forty-eight hours. ‘When they had done that and emerged again, they cleaned everything until it glistened and then looked around for some more Japs.’ Graham Bower took advantage of the relief to take herself to 14th Army headquarters at Comilla for supplies and because it was ‘an excuse to let me get to Calcutta and get a perm wave’. News of her presence in Comilla reached Slim and she was sent for. Her first thought was that her command was going to be terminated; the siege was over and the days of Tommy gun-toting eccentrics, especially female ones, would be brought to an end. At headquarters she was marched by a brigadier along a long veranda with ‘lots of offices going up in order of importance’. The brigadier knocked on a door and announced: ‘Miss Bower, Sir!’ Slim leapt up and held out his hand, a look of relief on his face. ‘Oh, thank God,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be a lady missionary in creaking stays.’ Slim paid fulsome tribute to the Nagas and their spying work for the
British, and told her about the battles at Jessami and Kharasom where the Assam Regiment had delayed Sato’s advance. After this pat on the back, Graham Bower was sent back to the hills to help train allied airmen in jungle survival techniques. For now the V Force war of stalk and ambush in the hills was in abeyance. Kohima was becoming a battle of attrition.

It had been a ‘very excellent show’, General Stopford agreed. The Kohima garrison had saved everybody from grievous embarrassment. The commander of 33 Corps arrived at Dimapur at eight in the morning on 18 April, as the first wounded were being brought out of Kohima. He was swiftly transferred to a jeep for the trip to meet General Grover, under whom he intended to light a small fire. Nearly two weeks had passed since Grover had assured him that the Kohima mess would be cleared up in four or five days. Instead, he was calling for more troops for what was looking increasingly like a battle of attrition. The relief of the garrison had been achieved, but the Japanese were still commanding the road to Imphal and Slim and Mountbatten wanted to know when it would be clear.

On the way General Stopford passed all the welcome trappings of an army moving forward: the lines of trucks loaded with ammunition and food, belching thick smoke on to the men following them; the mule trains which would be swinging off the road and up into the hills; the military police vainly trying to impose order on the traffic; and the picqets of Victor Hawkins’s 5 Brigade protecting the line of communications. Hawkins had been the one to bring home to General Grover the difficulties of the terrain. Grover had confided in Hawkins that he was nervous about the meeting with Stopford and feared he would get a ‘bowler hat’ for asking for more troops. ‘Don’t worry sir,’ Hawkins replied, ‘I am quite sure you are right.’

It took Stopford nearly three hours to complete his journey and he arrived at 2nd Division headquarters to find ‘John Grover … in good form but rather strung up’. Grover went through his difficulties. He was still lacking in signals, engineers, artillery and service corps, and he feared attacks on his line of communications. To Stopford’s impatient
ears this may have sounded like special pleading; as he put it later, ‘In view of the lack of enterprise on the part of the enemy this was overdone, and it became clear that the risk … must be accepted as normal.’ Grover was told he must get moving and dominate territory.

Stopford was facing his own strains. On 20 April he confided to his diary that the Americans believed the British were in no hurry to open the road to Imphal because they could depend on American aircraft. As if that were not a problem enough, the Chinese generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was sticking his unhelpful oar in, refusing to commit his divisions in northern Burma and blaming the British for ‘messing up’ the Assam campaign. ‘Washington supports this view,’ Stopford mournfully recorded. This information must surely have come via Slim, who was privy to Mountbatten’s negotiations with the Americans.

The worsening political news translated into fresh pressure on Grover. A new memo was despatched to the commander of 2nd Division, also on 20 April, explaining ‘why he must not waste time in clearing up the Kohima situation’. Grover told the officer who delivered the memo to his headquarters about his difficulties – essentially a repetition of what Stopford had heard a day earlier. The Japanese were dug in on the high ground around Kohima and he feared being cut off behind. Another officer visiting 2nd Division returned to Stopford’s headquarters later in the day with more baleful tidings. ‘Later in the evening Steedman, who has just returned from H.Q. 2 Div, told me that he had attended John G.’s conference this morning at which the latter had painted such a picture of methodical build-up that we shall never capture Kohima.’ The griping continued over the next few days. Stopford was ‘disappointed’, even ‘horrified’, and feared Kohima would not be cleared for a fortnight. If only he could have imagined how inadequate that projected timescale would be. News came on 23 April that the Durham Light Infantry, 6 Infantry Brigade, had lost two officers and ninety men wounded at Kohima, and Stopford was complaining that Grover was ‘hopelessly sticky and seems to have lost his tactical sense’.

The day after receiving Stopford’s letter, Grover went up to see Garrison Hill for himself. His guide was the irrepressible CO of the
75th Indian Field Ambulance, Lieutenant Colonel Young, who, after a night’s sleep, was back checking the medical arrangements. Grover learned enough about the ferocity of the battle from what he saw, and from a meeting with Hugh Richards in Dimapur, to convince him that the fight ahead would be long and bloody. The chances of a swift advance were evaporating.

Stopford did not agree. On 24 April he set out for Dimapur again and had a long meeting with Grover. On this occasion the corps commander came directly to the point. He told Grover he had been very slow, ‘which he did not like very much’. It is hard to pinpoint the precise moment at which John Grover’s fate was sealed, for he would survive as the British commander at Kohima for some weeks yet, but by the end of April Stopford appeared to have lost faith in his ability to deliver an imminent breakthrough. Slim would later write that, while Stopford was correct to urge speed at the end of April, the terrain and type of warfare were new to the troops and ‘the unavoidable arrival of the division piecemeal made the task of Grover … a difficult one’. That tolerance would evaporate over the coming weeks.

Three days after his meeting with Grover, Stopford went up to the battlefield and watched the air strikes and the infantry advancing. On the way back he stopped at a river, thinking that a spot of fishing would be nice. He proceeded to throw some grenades into the water. Water gushed up from the detonations and the surface was covered with dead catfish and carp. When weighed they amounted to twenty pounds of fish. ‘Thoroughly satisfactory day,’ the general noted.

General Slim followed the progress of his army from the mildewed town of Comilla, about two hundred miles to the east of Calcutta, on the banks of the Ghumti river. Since Slim had begun rebuilding the 14th Army, Comilla had become a major airbase and centre for casualties. The human consequences of the war he was directing were never far from Slim at Comilla. He disliked the place, for it had ‘a sideline in melancholy all its own’, presumably encouraged by the monuments to British officials murdered by Bengali rebels over the previous two decades. Still, by the end of April the first of Slim’s
nightmares had been put to rest. There was no question now of the Japanese seizing his Dimapur base and cutting off the line of communications. The four British and Indian brigades now invested at Kohima would soon push the Japanese aside and move down the road to break the blockade of Imphal.

There, General Scoones and 4 Corps had been holding off the Japanese 15th and 33rd Divisions since mid-March; although reinforced by elements of two Indian divisions, and well supplied and supported from the air, the defenders were not sanguine. They did not yet understand the increasingly dire state of the Japanese line of communications. Mutaguchi’s divisions had been pressing on Imphal along six routes, with battles breaking out on hills and tracks as the enemy infiltrated behind the defenders and were in turn outflanked themselves. The close-quarter fighting in these encounters was every bit as vicious as at Kohima. Overlooked by the mountains, on the Imphal plain around 150,000 men were surrounded and dependent on air supply; more than 400 tons of stores per day had to be flown in by the RAF and USAAF. Delivering this essential materiel were eight Dakota squadrons, amounting to around 130 aircraft, and the twenty C-46 Commandos loaned by the Americans at Mountbatten’s behest. But they were not devoted to Kohima and Imphal alone; there were still troops to be supplied in the Arakan and air drops to the Chindits on Wingate’s second mission, as well as Stilwell’s Chinese forces in the north of Burma. To ease the pressure on supplies, Scoones flew out nearly 30,000 non-essential personnel. But if the Americans, helped along by Chiang’s drips of poison, withdrew their aircraft, Imphal’s defenders would find themselves hungry before long. Adding to the problems was pressure from General Alexander for the return of the Dakotas, which had been diverted from the Italian campaign where allied forces were still struggling to break out of the Anzio beachhead.

Although it was far from a priority in the pre-D-Day months, the relief of Kohima was a welcome piece of news from an area usually distinguished by a reputation for catastrophe. The notes of the War Cabinet on 24 April recorded that ‘Our stand at Kohima seems to
have stayed the Japanese thrust towards Dimapur … Generally, the outlook in the Imphal – Kohima area was hopeful.’ Churchill would write later that he ‘could feel the stress amid all other business’, and he cabled Mountbatten on 4 May in emphatic terms: ‘Let nothing go from the battle that you need for victory. I will not accept denial of this from any quarter, and will back you to the full.’ Which was all very well, but the retention of the vital American aircraft was not in Churchill’s gift. Nor was his CIGS, General Brooke, sympathetic to advancing any new resources to the Burma campaign.

Whatever his well-documented aversion to fighting the Japanese in the jungle, and his unrealistic schemes for seaborne landings in Sumatra, by the end of April, Churchill recognised that he was in a fight at Kohima and Imphal and that losing would inflict grievous damage on already strained relations with Washington, and leave Britain humiliated in India and the Far East. On 9 May he wrote to General ‘Pug’ Ismay, his military secretary and link with the Chiefs of Staff, that the aircraft gap ‘must be filled at all costs … we cannot on any account throw away this battle’. He was willing to telegraph Roosevelt and inform him of the ‘disastrous consequences to his own plans for helping China which would follow the casting away of this battle’. Less than a week later he returned to the theme. Mountbatten’s battle would not be ruined by the folly of sending the aircraft away. But the delay in clearing Kohima was having a negative impact in Washington. As Mountbatten’s chief of staff, General Sir Henry Pownall, confided gloomily to his diary on 6 May: ‘I don’t think any of the Americans have any faith in the way our land operations are being conducted …’

Slim would prove them wrong. But first he had to drive the enemy off Kohima Ridge, away from the approaches to Imphal and back across the Chindwin to disaster.

General Sato had just come from his bath. It cannot have been an elaborate affair, the tub tucked into a basha in a thick part of the jungle close to the river bank. Emerging into the clearing outside, he met a young officer who had just arrived from Kohima. He recognised the younger man. ‘You did a good job in the front line,’ Sato said. ‘I just finished bathing. You will take a bath now.’ The muddy soldier did not know how to respond. Here was a senior general offering him the unimaginable gift of a bath, yet the young man kept picturing his men in the filthy trenches of Kohima. ‘Thank you for your kindness,’ he replied, ‘but thinking about my men in the battlefield, I cannot take a bath.’ The remark cut Sato, as he read into it a criticism of himself. He shouted at the man. ‘You don’t know my feeling. As a division leader, of course I would like to let all men in front line take bath if possible. Realistically, my wish does not come true, so at least I want you to take a bath on behalf of the others.’ The officer took his bath and resolved not to mention it to his men.
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