Road of Bones (60 page)

He followed that up with a defiant signal to General Kawabe suggesting that Mutaguchi should be examined for signs of mental illness and his staff sacked. ‘They are leading the entire army’s self-destruction minute by minute. The commander has lost his dignity and is shifting responsibility to the lower ranks … This is truly unprecedented. They do not have [a] sense of responsibility; they threaten their subordinates. I have observed the truth ever since I was in Kohima.’ Several days later, on 24 July, Sato sat opposite Kawabe in his Rangoon office. Here was the man whose failure to confront Mutaguchi had helped propel thousands of Sato’s men to their deaths. The 31st Division leader struggled to contain himself. Kawabe nervously twiddled his extravagant moustache as he spoke.

He told Sato to prepare himself for a health check. Sato knew immediately that this was the first stage in the conspiracy to have him declared insane. ‘I don’t need a health examination. I am quite strong,’ he snapped. Kawabe insisted. ‘It has been arranged. Please take your examination.’ Sato told him it was rude to force a healthy person to take a health examination, then kicked his seat away and walked out. When an officer was sent to call him for the ‘health check’, Sato raged again. ‘How come you cannot hold a court martial openly? If I am charged for the crime of disobeying the order, then Mutaguchi and Kawabe ought to be charged for treason to massacre the Imperial army for his private gain and ambition? How dare you call me mentally ill for the fear of taking this to the court martial?’ The following day four army doctors arrived at the guesthouse where Sato was staying and questioned the general. Their report is worth quoting. ‘The attitude, facial expression and language of Gen Sato were completely normal and stable and no sign of anxiety and fret/impatience was seen. Speed of recall during conversations was clear with no circumlocution and idle speech. His ability to recall and memory was brilliant. There was no indication of emotional disturbance; no excitement or depression was observed. The ability to control his will was sufficient; recklessness and subservience/meanness were not seen at all. He was a fine general.’ The doctors added that Sato was mentally and physically exhausted and needed
rest. Mutaguchi and Kawabe were beaten. After recuperating, Sato was sent to Java as a military adviser, where he remained until the end of the war.

Four months later, when the scale of the calamity could no longer be denied in Tokyo, a signal was dispatched removing Mutaguchi as commander of 15th Army. Kawabe was also dismissed. The two architects of the disaster lasted longer than war minister Tojo, who had clutched at the dream of victory they offered. Amid rising disquiet over war losses, he was forced from office in July.

General Sato’s 31st Division had crossed the Chindwin into India approximately 15,000-strong. Nearly half never came back. A soldier came across a body where maggots were feasting on the eyes. He tried to remove the boots from the corpse and heard the man speak: ‘Please … please don’t take off my shoes yet … I will go [die] very soon.’ Another soldier also recalled how dying men would cling to the legs of passing comrades and cry, ‘Please bring me along.’ For many of the survivors the emotional torment of hearing the dying call out for mothers, wives, children would endure for a lifetime. Some dying men asked to be cast over cliffs to spare remove the burden on exhausted stretcher bearers. Humanity and horror followed the retreating army. The remnants of the 15th Army were still being harried and killed in the corpse-littered Naga Hills well into the autumn. A British intelligence signal of 19 September 1944, reported: ‘V Force patrol shot one moribund Jap straggler.’ It was a poignant, if fitting, epitaph for Mutaguchi’s dream of conquest.

The hour of immediate trial had passed for Admiral Mountbatten. Slim was chasing the 15th Army to destruction and his line of communication was holding despite the monsoon. The American planes had been returned but the RAF was continuing to drop supplies. The supreme commander could sense a famous victory. By the time Mountbatten reached Kohima on 1 July the bodies had been buried; the British and Indians were placed in single graves, the Japanese dead piled into pits. The place was still a ruin. On Garrison Hill he was shown the bunkers where the defenders had held out for over a fortnight. ‘One could not visit this pathetic little hillock without being deeply moved at the gallantry of this scratch lot of defenders,’ he wrote.

Mountbatten met Charles Pawsey, back now in a makeshift office in Kohima, and heard how the Nagas had done ‘everything in their power to help us and volunteered to carry our wounded back under fire, proudly refusing any pay … These Nagas, primitive headhunters though they be, have shown themselves true friends of the British and we must do everything we can for them.’ Mountbatten resolved to write to the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, to insist on the speedy rebuilding of the Naga Village. The supreme commander passed on. He would not have known, or sensed, that the hills were in a state of flux at that moment; the passage of modern armies back and forth across their lands, and the hunger and disease wrought by fighting, had traumatised traditional communities. Twelve-year-old B. K. Sachu Angami returned from the forest to Kohima at the end of June 1944.
‘It was difficult to locate our plot of land because of all the destruction. Everything was gone. Everything. We saw a lot of British bodies and also Japanese … People used to go and see these dead bodies.’

Twelve thousand Nagas were still depending on food relief by the autumn of 1944; unknown thousands more had vanished into remote forests and nobody knew what their condition was. Yet in the immediate aftermath of the siege Charles Pawsey spoke with apparent confidence about returning to the old way of life. In June 1944 he told a visitor that the ‘presence of war and British and Indian troops on their territory is not likely to have any profound influence on the Nagas. In the Kohima area they are very conservative and have never even been into the plains.’ Cut off from the political mainstream, Pawsey was still the benevolent patriarch of a territory he knew better than any other foreigner, and he could not have been expected to imagine how swiftly the end of empire would arrive. In the vacuum left by the advance of Slim’s army there was a resurgence of headhunting. Intelligence reports from late 1944 and into the following year give a vivid picture of a deteriorating situation:

August 1944:
There has been some raiding between the Patkoi and the east Boundary of our Control Area and one village in our Control Area was attacked, five heads were taken.

September 1944:
An outbreak of head-taking in the Southern Sangtam country is reported. The troops which were in the area till fairly recently have left and the Nagas find it difficult to understand why they cannot attack their enemies just as we attack the Japanese.

The toll in one raid in 1945 was four hundred heads of men, women and children. The war brought new weapons into the hills; for the first time Nagas were using Tommy guns and stocks of Chinese rifles sold across the border from Burma. The Governor’s adviser on tribal areas, J. P. Mills, an old friend of Pawsey’s and a veteran of the hills, warned officials to take armed escorts. ‘While the wilder Nagas, being headhunters, are apt to kill inoffensive strangers, the tribes of the
North-East Frontier Agency only attack strangers in what they imagine to be self-defence … precautions have to be taken against possible unfortunate results arising from an entirely unintentional shock administered to the nerves of “jumpy” savages.’

India was still under British rule, the Congress leaders still in jail, but the expectation of independence after the war was now palpable among the country’s educated elite. The Nagas did not belong to this consensus. The Assam leaders of Congress regarded them as one of many tribal groups who belonged in the united India that would soon replace the Raj. Naga independence, or the creation of some sort of British protectorate, was anathema to a movement faced with the claims of numerous different ethnic groups.

The British were still too busy fighting a war to contemplate what political future they envisaged for the hills, but in the long run, beset by the looming crisis of partition, they would leave the Nagas to make their way with India. A Naga minister, the Reverend L. Gatpoh, recalled that ‘most of our people were not at all aware of what was coming into the political arena of India; they just had no idea of the rapid developments that were taking place in the rest of the country’. The clash of cultures between hill and plain, the separateness entrenched under British rule, the absence of any united Naga movement, and the destabilising effect of war had left the Nagas tragically ill-prepared for the independence that was coming. The Naga historian Sajal Nag put it well when he wrote that to the Nagas Indian administration ‘meant the rule of
babus
, a category of people they mortally detested … as they had found the plains people to be arrogant who looked down upon the Nagas as a naked and primitive people’.

Ursula Graham Bower stayed in the hills until the war ended. She met her husband-to-be, Major Tim Betts, when he arrived on a butterfly-hunting expedition early in 1945. As a V Force soldier, he had walked from the Chindwin to Kohima in the early days of the Japanese invasion but had been evacuated just before the siege began. On the day her guerrilla unit was disbanded, Graham Bower presented gifts of cash, ivory, knives and guns. She handed over her
Sten gun and the Tommy gun belonging to her bodyguard Namkia. Nobody at that moment could have predicted how they might be used in the future, or what lay in store for the Nagas. Namkia scoured the countryside and found a huge pig for a feast. ‘In the lengthening light the whole camp was a flurry of scarlet, of bordered Kuki clothes, of Magulong in dance-dress with huge tam-o’-shanters of wound cotton thread, and hornbills’ feathers quivering in the stiff breeze. The spectators formed a ring … they danced all night.’

Ursula became briefly famous in the British and American press. She was the subject of a comic strip, ‘The Jungle Queen’, and was described by
Time
magazine as ‘pert, pretty … an archaeology student who looks like a cinema actress … [who] declared war on Japan’. The piece quoted her mother back in Wiltshire as saying, ‘An extraordinary girl; she never would sit still.’ With the coming of independence she and her husband returned to England in 1948. She longed for the hills. ‘How could one explain that home was no longer home, that it was utterly foreign, that home was in the Assam hills and that there would never be any other, and that for the rest of our lives we should be exiles? … We had gone, we had striven, we had tried, we had loved the tribesmen in spite of ourselves and they had loved us, and though everything else might perish – our bodies, our memories – nothing could ever wipe out and destroy that.’

The West Kents passed bodies all the way down to the Chindwin and across into Burma. On the advance 4th battalion lost Major Winstanley. First he was shot in the leg and then he went down with typhus. It was enough to see him evacuated out of the war for good. Major Donald Easten was gone too; the wound he took at Kohima became infected and he was shipped back to Britain to be reunited with his wife Billie after an absence of nearly four years. Lieutenant Tom Hogg fought on for two more months before being selected for a staff officer course. Captain Harry Smith, who had been hit by mortar fire on the last day of the siege, woke up in a hospital in Assam with a lump of metal on his bedside table. It had been removed from his skull after Kohima. Smith rejoined the battalion
and crossed into Burma for Slim’s advance. But the CO, John Laverty, was gone for the time being. The 14th Army sent him on a lecture tour around India to tell other battalions the story of Kohima.

His fellow commander at Kohima, Hugh Richards, spent the months after the siege at Dimapur visiting the wounded and making arrangements for their welfare. There was no fighting job for him now, but he accepted the life of the rear echelon with equanimity. At Dimapur he heard that some of the men from his old outfit, the 3 West African Brigade, were in the Poona base hospital 1,800 miles away. Back in 1943 Richards had been preparing to lead these men into Burma when Wingate had judged him to be too old. What had happened to them he wondered. Who was left alive? Lieutenant Barry Bowman, who was recovering from dysentery at Poona, recalled Richards’s arrival and the West Africans’ welcome. ‘His was officially an inspection of the base but in practice it took the form of huge groundnut stew lunch which he wolfed into with great relish. He departed around three hours later well watered (Ginned) and nourished. A quiet, courteous truly great man – a pivotal figure in the 14th army.’

Slim went on to smash the Japanese as he had promised, driving them out of Mandalay by March 1945, and retaking Rangoon, abandoned by the Japanese as it had once been by the British, on 3 May. Privates Ray Street and Ivan Daunt, Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes, and the other footsloggers of 4th battalion fought their way south with Slim. Often on the road they would talk about what had happened at Kohima and, remembering the men lying on the ridge, pray that they would never see anything like it again. Private Daunt was thinking of getting back to Chatham and his wife Audrey. He thought about all the days that had passed since the fall of France, when he had escaped from behind German lines. He grouched to his mates. ‘What with bloody Dunkirk, with the bloody desert and now this lot, where is it going to end?’ Some men contracted cholera from drinking water contaminated by Japanese bodies. Dennis Wykes contracted typhus from lice and did not wake up for a fortnight. ‘As I woke up and looked around, the orderly said: “I thought you
wouldn’t wake up. I had a hole dug for you outside.”’ Wykes made up his mind to eat and continue eating; he would eat when he was hungry and when he wasn’t. There was no way he was going into a hole in the ground.