Road of Bones (59 page)

The unit of colour-bearer Lieutenant Hiroshi Yamagami began by marching in good order. But as food ran out men drifted off to try and scavenge in the villages. Those too sick to move were given a small supply from whatever rations were left and then abandoned on the side of the road. Yamagami would never overcome the feelings of guilt he experienced. ‘Sometimes I met friends who were just dying there. Their faces said “Help me” but there was nothing we could do.
It is hard to put into words what it is like to see that. I feel still that I abandoned those people. How can I explain that emotion to you?’ Yamagami told himself to be patient. At Ukhrul they would find food. But by the time he got there the meagre supplies had all been consumed. Had Mutaguchi appeared at that moment he would have been killed by the men. ‘We were so angry. We had hatred of him.’

By the time Sato’s column reached Humine, Dr Takahide Kuwaki, the medical officer with the 124th Regiment, was sick with amoebic dysentery and malaria. The man who had dreamed of dying gloriously for the empire was helped along by two medics who turned discreetly away when he limped into the bush to empty his bowels. To suffer amoebic dysentery is an agony even when good medical facilities are at hand. The stomach feels as if it is being slashed inside by razors, unrelieved by the repeated streams of bloody diarrhoea. The suffering is deepened by fever and headaches. There was no medicine with which to treat the men of the 31st Division and nowhere clean for them to be nursed. They died by the road in pools of their own excrement. Dr Kuwaki tried to shout encouragement to men who had given up and were waiting to die. ‘Sometimes I even did it from the stretcher. But perhaps that was cynical, eh? Me on the stretcher shouting at them to keep going!’

Conditions in the military field hospitals on the retreat from Kohima and Imphal were so grim that men regarded being left there as a death sentence. In many cases they committed suicide, asked colleagues to shoot them, or were summarily shot by their own officers. A British patrol entered one hospital to find only skeletons on the beds. An account published in
The Listener
in the autumn of 1944 described the scene at a jungle camp. The British medics tried to treat the men, but most were beyond help. ‘The hospital staff had deserted, leaving the sick and wounded to die without attention … Many had acute beri-beri; they had passed the stage where the stomach swells and had become dehydrated human sticks. The skin, stretched tightly on the bone framework, was covered with sores … on one track over 5,000 Japanese were found lying dead from exhaustion. Elsewhere the body of a high ranking Japanese officer sat in his useless staff car.’

One of the most chilling accounts was given by a Japanese Sergeant Major Tochihira of the 15th Division, retreating from Imphal. He saw about 120 men lying on the side of the road. They had been abandoned by their comrades who had heard tanks coming. Tochihira watched the scene from a hideout in the hills. An Indian soldier approached the wounded with a container of what Tochihira took to be water. He poured it over the men and then flicked his cigarette into the liquid. The wounded were engulfed in flames.

The rear-guard of the 31st Division, commanded by Miyazaki, was struggling to stay ahead of the advancing British and Indians when it reached Ukhrul at the end of June. General Miyazaki, still with his pet monkey Chibi perched on his shoulder, was an angry man. He had lost 1,700 men in the fighting around Kohima. Now, with the remaining 870 fit troops, he was trying to slow the enemy down so that the rest of the 31st Division could reach the Chindwin. Nearly half of his men would die in the process.

Looping around behind the 31st Division and across the line of communications was 23 Brigade Long Range Penetration Group (Chindits), whose commander, Brigadier Lancelot Perowne, told his men on 10 May, ‘Our task remains as it was – to exterminate the Japanese vermin in our path.’ Perowne was a notably aggressive commander, a veteran of the commandos in France, and wanted to make his mark on the great battle. His men experienced a gruelling slog through the jungle, killing scores of Japanese, but frustrated by terrain, weather and illness. ‘We had been sodden for weeks, were covered with mud, and we stank,’ one officer wrote. ‘Hollow-eyed, wasted, hungry, and yet incapable of eating more than a minute meal, we talked of nothing else but food.’ A column of the Essex Regiment operating with 23 Brigade took twelve hours to complete a march of twelve miles. Animals were lost in mudslides. Perowne’s pony broke its neck after falling six hundred feet. Two thirds of the brigade went down with diarrhoea, although there were fewer cases of the amoebic dysentery that afflicted the Japanese. Lieutenant
Desmond Earley recalled how his orderly, a young Irishman, went off into the bush to relieve himself and stepped on an anti-personnel mine. ‘He died soon afterwards after apologising, of all things, for having caused so much trouble.’

In late May, the Chindits had come close to Sato’s headquarters but, according to the war diary, ‘an attempt to stage a raid was abortive’. The result was a Japanese counter-attack, described by a Naga guide with the Chindits. ‘Early in the morning at about 4 a.m. fifty Japanese came to our camp … The British troops had to fight against the enemies for two days and one whole night.’ The Japanese were eventually driven off after losing fifteen men. The Chindits repeatedly ambushed small groups of Japanese so that ‘many Japanese were killed by wide and energetic patrolling and a large number of prisoners and animals taken’.
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Passing through Ukhrul in the footsteps of the 31st Division there was an outbreak of typhus, ‘with high mortality’, which the brigadier believed was the result of sleeping in bashas previously occupied by Japanese. ‘This [area] was highly contaminated with dead Japs and filth.’

The Japanese were harried by the British divisions advancing from Kohima and Imphal and by the revived guerrillas of V Force, reappearing through May and June. The V Force situation reports for summer 1944 are filled with references to starving Japanese stragglers. A note to V Force headquarters in July talks of one hundred Japanese drowned trying to cross a river; another speaks of twelve Japanese killed by Nagas. The hill tribes turned on the retreating army with a vengeance.

In some cases they lured them to their deaths with offers of food. On 20 August, three Japanese stragglers were offered rice by Nagas. As they were eating, their hosts opened fire and killed two of them. No mention is made of what happened to the other man. B. K. Sachu Angami of Kohima was hiding with other villagers in the forest when
a Japanese soldier sought refuge among them. The man was given food and had his shaved so that he resembled a Naga, but he was eventally killed. ‘This Naga wanted a medal and so he took him into the jungle and cut off his head.’

In another incident three INA men, offered a bed in a Naga village, were stabbed to death as they slept. ‘Several noses of victims have been produced.’ The reports provide a grim litany of suffering. Fifty dead Japanese found in Pyangbok village; three killed at Tuitum and an ‘ear and pay book brought in’; around fifty dead on the road to Nangadeikon; a track near Thanan Nala ‘littered with Jap dead … and open latrines and temporary shelters’. As the defeated men headed down the tracks towards the Chindwin, the 31st Division resembled an army of ghosts.

Yoshiteru Hirayama, the monk’s son from Tokyo, managed to avoid being abandoned in a hospital. His greatest fear was that his stretcher-bearers would throw him into one of the steep ravines. It was happening with growing frequency. ‘It was hell. Men would throw their friends into the valley below.’ The carriers were starving and exhausted, their feet sinking into the mud, deperate men on a road without end. Hirayama was lucky. The men with him were from Niigata of the snows, ‘strong men with a strong will’. When Hirayama reached the Chindwin he saw dead soldiers lining the river bank and others begging for food. They stumbled with hands outstretched and then, seeing he had nothing to give, passed listlessly on.

A recurring image in the memories of survivors is of groups of men gathering together to die. Dr Kuwaki of the 124th Regiment passed many as he was carried to the Chindwin. ‘I saw the dead soldiers lying in groups under trees. It was a human thing. They didn’t want to die alone. One would be dying and others would crawl towards him. I was sick as well but looking at the dead I had the will to live.’ His comrade Chuzaburo Tomaru explained the clinging together as a spiritual necessity. ‘I found out people goes to river side when they die. I used to hear from my father that the spirit calls spirit. It was true. One soldier approached the river side and died; then, other soldier went there and died next to him.’ He saw men left
behind on stretchers. He approached one sitting soldier who appeared to have his hand raised. The man was frozen in rigor mortis. In a prisoner-of-war camp at the end of the war, Tomaru heard from other survivors that the British had captured deserters and had not killed or tortured them. Such civilised treatment of prisoners would have been unimaginable to the average Japanese soldier. ‘When I heard of it, I thought how kind British army was!’

At the top of every hill there were groups of men who had stopped to rest. The supply officer Masao Hirakubo found himself saying hello to men who were dead. ‘Just like taking a rest. Next to him would be one already white bone. Next one would have maggots and clothes rotted. People who died earlier were existing in the same place as the ones who sat down now.’ A popular soldier, a married man with children, looked up to by the others, went off on his own after telling his friends he felt much better. He would catch up with them later. They found him a short time later, dead in the middle of the road where he had placed his big toe in the trigger of his rifle, pointed the barrel at his head and blown his brains out. ‘In tears some of our younger soldiers held on to him,’ said Staff Sergeant Yasamusa Nishiji, 20th Independent Engineer Regiment. He saw soldiers committing suicide in pairs, one clutching a grenade to his chest and then embracing the other. Another dying man was handed a grenade with which to commit suicide by an officer who continued on his way. The dying man screamed at the departing officer: ‘You’ve lorded it over me; what have I got in return? I’ll bloody kill you.’ Nishiji drew some of the scenes he witnessed. The result was a harrowing tableau: an army nurse injecting wounded men with lethal poison; men swept away in a raging river; a dying soldier raising his hand in protest after another has stolen his knapsack; another man laying out his clothes and belongings on a rock and then lying down to die.

Reaching the Chindwin was by no means a guarantee of survival. Private Manabu Wada, 138th Regiment, marched through jungle filled with corpses where ‘thousands upon thousands of maggots crept out of bodies lying in streams and were carried away by the fast
flowing waters’. At one stream he found the skeletons of ten or more soldiers who had, like himself, come for water. On reaching the Chindwin with three other men, Manabu helped to build a raft. They set off on their tiny bamboo craft as twilight came on, swept along by the swift rainy season currents. The water was red-brown and capped with white waves and they clung on, afraid to move for fear of capsizing. There were periodic attempts to steer towards the eastern shore. One of the men stripped to his loincloth, tied a rope to the raft and swam with the other end towards the shore. But when he clambered out of the racing waters the raft shot onwards and the rope was whipped from his hands. Manabu last saw him disappearing into the jungle. After a journey that lasted weeks – he lost count of the time – Manabu Wada was dragged to safety by his surviving comrades. At one point they beat him with a stick to wake him, knowing that if he lay down on the road he would never get up. As for the man who had sent the 15th Army into India, Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi, he was seen by the military correspondent Masanori Ito, sipping rice gruel while watching his men stagger towards the Chindwin. ‘You want a statement,’ he asked Ito. ‘I have killed thousands of my men. I should not go back across the Chindwin alive … that is all I have to say.’ But he did go back back across the Chindwin and continued to blame his commanders.

By the end of June, Mutaguchi had sacked the commanders of the 15th and 33rd Divisions. On 7 July he removed General Sato. The battle between the two men was about to enter a new realm of bitterness.

Mutaguchi’s intention was to have Sato declared insane. That would remove the danger of a court martial at which all kinds of unpleasant facts about the supply plans for the invasion might be made public. Sato, on the other hand, wanted his day in court. He first headed to 15th Army headquarters to organise supplies for the troops he had left behind. According to his biographer, Sato succeeded in persuading a staff officer to send some relief. He then signalled 31st Division. ‘General Sato is always with you.’