McNaught decided that it was no use having a second crack at the Pimple until a well co-ordinated fire-plan had been worked out, and West agreed. The Camerons were now coming forward and they were ordered to pass through the Dorsets. On the morning of the 4th, they occupied the Pimple, then put in an attack on Big Tree Hill. The weather was still foul and the slopes were slippery, but somehow the Jocks managed to keep going. The leading company was commanded by Major Angus Douglas, the battalion second-in-command, and directing his troops on the hill, he was shot through the neck and died soon afterwards. He was a small, dapper man, with Highland courtesy, and great wit. He was immensely popular, not only in his own regiment but throughout the whole brigade, and his death brought a tremendous feeling of melancholy. The dying phases of the battle were proving just as bitter as the others.
In the afternoon a fighting patrol was sent out to try and ascertain the strength of the enemy, which was found to be considerable. There was therefore no alternative but to put in a full-dress attack the following morning.
Again a heavy artillery concentration was put down and two companies went into the attack. The going was difficult at first, through thick jungle, and the troops came across a nala which no one had warned them about. By the time they had all succeeded in wading across half an hour had been lost, which meant that the advance took an hour. Apart from seven batteries of 25-pounders, the Camerons were supported by a troop of tanks firing over their heads from the Treasury, the brigade mortars, and two platoons of the Manchesters’ machine-guns. They had been issued with smoke grenades in order to indicate their progress, and this device worked admirably. Watching them from his command post, West was able to keep the fire from the Manchesters and the tanks just ahead of the Jocks. One of the Camerons’ officers was beside the tank commander with his radio set to report regularly on the progress of the infantry. This arrangement worked excellently too, and the Camerons were full of admiration for the close support they had received. By 1130 hours the whole position was in their hands. The battalion consolidated on the crest and sent out patrols towards Garage Spur which was found to be clear of the enemy.
While the Camerons were engaged in this attack the Dorsets pushed forward a patrol towards Pfuchama. By noon they had reported it clear, and Jock McNaught set off with the rest of the battalion. Like all the hooks that preceded it, this operation involved passing through some formidable country. First the troops had to climb down a thousand feet to the Warno Nala lying in its dark, rocky chasm, then up again along a track which seemed determined to reach the sky. Before the village the track split in two, and when the leading company was misled by its Naga guide, McNaught found himself heading the advance, and had to bring up a second company to put ahead. Towards the summit, the leading troops came under heavy fire, and the situation looked serious as the track was so precipitous that no one could move off it. The whole battalion therefore had to retrace its track down the hill and follow the company which had gone wrong, round the track to the right. Clive Chettle, leading this company, managed to get into the village by late afternoon and reported it now clear. Then it was learned that a platoon of another company had come across some heavily-laden Japs getting out of the village to the north, and killed them. Among their weapons was found a Taisho light machine-gun, presumably the one which had been firing earlier on. The battalion had now been on the move for sixty hours, mostly in the pouring rain, and with no opportunity to brew up char, so was feeling somewhat tired. However, when orders were reached to start patrolling towards Phesema, the village on the Imphal road, where the hook was to be completed, the men somehow found the energy.
The morning of the 6th June dawned bright and clear and even by seven o’clock the day was warming up. It was sticky, too, and the least physical movement brought a rash of sweat. The whole morning the Camerons, 5th Brigade headquarters, and parties from the rear echelons struggled up the steep hill towards Pfuchama. On the narrow track the troops jostled with the mules and several brave characters grabbed hold of their tails to help pull them up. Luckily the mules didn’t seem to mind and went plodding on. Towards eleven o’clock the heat and humidity became almost unbearable, and the troops found themselves only able to climb in short bursts. So there was a good deal of crossing and re-crossing and the units became jumbled, though no one worried. All that mattered was to reach the top. Some time before noon the village came in sight and the column wound its way through an ornately carved gateway, ascended a flight of stone steps, and found itself in the village street. Here the tall figure of Michael West was standing, and as the sweating, exhausted troops came by him he shouted: ‘Come on, stick it! The Second Front has opened. We’ve landed in Normandy!’
Feeling this to be such an important moment in history, the staff captain slipped off his pack and, having got his breath, paused for a moment to fix the scene in his memory. That night he wrote:
‘What a place to be told this news! The sunlight was streaming across the mountains, stretched west and south as far as the eyes could see. Aradura lay opposite, and below Veswema, and far away on the southern horizon the great height of Mao Songsang. Great, green, untamed country, almost as unaware of man’s presence on the earth as the day God created it. I gazed for a moment, then thought of Normandy and the men fighting that vital battle there. Their battle seems very far away from our own, but all today I found myself thinking of it… of the Normandy beaches where I have swum so many times, and hoping the troops have got across them. Other people must have felt like this too, as all day the troops have been coming up to our signallers asking “How’s it going? How are they doing in France?”’
After tea, Michael West held a conference, producing a message from Grover congratulating 5th Brigade on breaking through the ring of Japanese defences. ‘The Jap,’ he added, ‘is undoubtedly trying to pull out. Our task now is to get hard after them, cut them off if we can and try to let no enemy escape. Flat out everybody.’ To achieve this desired end, a company of the Worcestershires were already marching across country towards Phesema. They arrived there in the evening after eleven hours on the move, and occupied the high ground above the village. At 1900 hours the rest of the battalion began advancing to join them. ‘It was an extremely hard march,’ Major Elliott has written, ‘as it was done on a pitch black night, through waterlogged, terraced paddy fields, and the terraces were just too high to step up, which meant climbing up three or four feet every hundred yards or so. However, by dawn we had occupied our objective.’
The road was now cut behind Miyazaki’s men on Aradura; and it now remained to be seen if they would pull out, as anticipated.
They did. During the night of the 6th, Patrols from the Lancashire Fusiliers pushing forward on to the lower slopes of the Spur found that the Japs had slipped away, and operations began immediately to clear the road-blocks by Garage Spur so that the armoured column, which had now been organized, could now surge forward. Meanwhile the Royal Scots were on the move early and soon contacted the Worcestershires. By lunch the Royal Norfolk were passing through the Royal Scots; and by evening 4th Brigade headquarters and the Lancashire Fusiliers were established at Kigwema, nearly three miles to the south of Phesema. The whole division was suddenly full of fight and itching to get on again—after Aradura, the men felt things could never be quite so bad again. Brigadier Smith (an Indian Army officer) who came to take over 6th Brigade after Shapland was wounded wrote later: ‘I was amazed at the fortitude of these soldiers and their officers, and their amazing powers of recovery. 6th Brigade was really badly mauled on the night before I took over… and yet within a fortnight they set off down the road after the Japs like a real good pack of foxhounds.’
*
In the excitement of getting on the move again, no one noticed that the battle of Kohima had come to an end…. That when the Jap rearguard slipped silently off the rear slopes of Aradura Spur in the darkness soon after midnight, the whole ridge was clear from end to end.
The battle
had lasted sixty-four days and seen some of the most stubborn, close, and bloody fighting in the whole of the Second World War. It had been fought across an utterly incredible terrain, in appalling weather. Surely not even the battlefields of Flanders saw such rainfall. The courage and fortitude shown by all ranks and all races, and by both armies had been utterly astonishing. The British, Indian and Gurkha troops had suffered some 4,000 casualties, an abnormally high proportion of them officers. Sato had lost over 3,000 men killed and 4,000 wounded; his division was smashed irretrievably. Yet outgunned, bereft of air cover, and denied supplies of reinforcements, he had fought a great defensive action. Though never succeeding in taking the whole of Kohima, he had given Mutaguchi two months to crack the Imphal box, and even now the road was still cut. No general on earth could have achieved more.
The job of opening the road was to take another fifteen days. Though Miyazaki had only 750 men, the country was in his favour, the road winding up towards Mao Songsang like a snake, and crossing hundreds of culverts and bridges.
Four hundred and fifty of Miyazaki’s men were from the 124th Regiment, under Major Ishido, and the remainder from the 58th. Relations between these two regiments had deteriorated even further at Kohima, the 58th maintaining that the 124th had not done its fair share of the fighting, and was unreliable anyway. Only the strong personality of Miyazaki,’ one soldier has written, ‘held the rearguard together and inspired it to action.’
This action in very favourable country was most effective. Each time the rearguard blew a bridge or culvert and then covered it with fire the whole 2nd Division was brought to a halt.
To reduce delays to a minimum, Grover had thought out the composition of his armoured column very carefully. It consisted of a troop of armoured cars with a sapper officer, a troop of tanks, and then the vanguard commander in a carrier. He was followed by infantry in carriers, then the gunner O.P. officers. After them came more tanks, more infantry, and more sappers. The drill was that when a bridge was found blown, the tanks would engage the enemy with fire, while the sappers got out to do a reconnaissance, and the infantry set off on a flanking movement. Other sappers removed mines and obstacles from the road, often under fire. Once the road was clear and the bridge or culvert mended, the whole column would move on again, but nevertheless the whole job would take at least three hours and often more. Sometimes the infantry had to go up several hundred feet through difficult country to get round behind the Japs.
The difficulties of these outflanking actions were not appreciated by 33rd Corps staff, who kept sending back adverse reports on 2nd Division’s progress. ‘They’re advancing very slowly and being frightened by shadows…. Have advanced only two and a half miles against practically no opposition….’ Stopford kept blaming Grover, who in return urged his men forward.
The actions weren’t confined to clearing road-blocks. At Viswema Miyazaki prepared a formidable defensive position which was only cleared on the 14th after five days of fighting and patrolling. All this time the rain kept pouring down; and the battalions, through sick, wounded, and killed, kept dwindling and dwindling. When Geoffrey White, who took over the Dorsets from Jock McNaught (who had been promoted to command 4th Brigade) had the battalion paraded, to his horror he found that they could all stand in a single basha.
Stopford’s impatience to get on—as at Kohima—is very understandable. The supply position at Imphal was still deteriorating. As early as the 19th May the Chiefs of Staff had been asking Giffard why, with so many divisions employed, ‘the fighting is characterized by company and platoon actions’. Giffard replied that the first objective was killing Japs and this had to be done by destroying each Jap in his foxhole. The Chiefs of Staff also criticized the passive role of 4th Corps: Why, they wanted to know, weren’t they pushing up the road in force to meet 33rd Corps coming down it? Giffard had to explain that that wasn’t their job. On the 8th June Mountbatten sent a telegram to the Chiefs of Staff in Washington, saying that the air transport at his disposal was insufficient, and that the reserves on the Imphal plain would be down to six days by the end of June. To deal with this situation he planned to step up the airlift, even if necessary diverting planes from the Strategic Air Force; he would also ask 4th Corps to develop their offensive northwards to meet the southward drive of 33rd Corps. Further measures (he added) would be the evacuation of as many sick and non-combatants from Imphal as possible, and the slaughter of local cattle to help with meat supplies. Finally, he intended to investigate the Bishenpur track as a possible supply route.
Slim received a copy of the telegram on his return from the Northern Front on the 12th, and realized immediately how impractical some of the points were. The slaughtering of cattle would have had a disastrous effect on the Manipuris, both from a religious and an economic angle. And the Bishenpur track could not be used until the great suspension bridge at milestone 52 had been repaired. The only way the situation could be saved was by opening the road as soon as possible. In a directive on the 9th June, Mountbatten laid down that it must be open by mid-July, and concerning this Slim has noted: ‘I was grateful to him [Mountbatten] for not being stampeded by more nervous people into setting too early a date. I intended that the road should be open well before mid-July, but I was now much more interested in destroying Japanese divisions than in “relieving” Imphal.’ If that was Slim’s precise aim, it was not shared by other members of the high command. On the nth June, Stopford received a letter from Giffard announcing that at a meeting at Mountbatten’s headquarters it had been proposed that ‘we force a large convoy through to Imphal in the same way that convoys were forced through to Malta.’ Stopford’s remark on reading this suggestion is neither repeatable nor printable. All he could deduce was that, in their frantic hurry to get the road open, some of the S.E. A.C. staff had completely lost touch with reality.
From the 12th to the 15th it poured in torrents; but on the 15th, with Viswema now in their hands, the 2nd Division moved on again. On the 17th, the leading troops passed over the ridge at Mao Songsang, where a major action had been expected, with barely a halt. On the 18th, 5th Brigade rushed forward behind the armoured column a record distance of thirteen miles and halted before a blown bridge, facing the great ridge of Maram. All Intelligence reports now indicated that the Japs were pulling out to the east (where Messervy’s column would get them) and indeed some indication of their plight was evident to the British troops as they advanced. More and more corpses were strewn along the road, some of them naked, having been stripped of their clothes by their ragged comrades. Sato was trying to get 1,500 stretcher cases across the mountain tracks to the Chindwin, a task of frightening proportions. The tracks had become quagmires in the valleys and mud-slides on the slopes; and the men carrying the stretchers, like everyone else in the columns, were half-starved and exhausted. The tracks were littered with the arms and ammunition they were throwing away as they staggered and slithered forward. From the 6th June, Sato had lost radio contact with Mutaguchi and had no knowledge as to whether the rearguard had been destroyed, or how close the Allied columns were behind him. When the 15th Army Chief of Staff, Major-General Momoyo Kunomura, came forward to see Sato, he declared himself astonished at the amazing—and in the Japanese Army unprecedented—spectacle of headlong retreat. The object of Kunomura’s mission was to deliver Sato an order from Mutaguchi. This told him to stop withdrawing and to send his main body to help the 15th Division, still fighting to the north of Imphal. Sato refused point-blank. He said angrily: ‘The 15th Army have failed to send me supplies and ammunition since the operation began. This failure releases me from any obligation to obey the order—and in any case it would be impossible to comply.’ When Kunomura reminded him of the possible consequences of refusing to obey an order, Sato retorted: ‘It won’t worry me at all, if I am put on trial—I will expose the truth. I have got statements here from two generals who agree with me that Kohima was a stupid battle. Somehow I will make Terauchi and G.H.Q. Tokyo realize how fool
ish Mutaguchi has been.’
This interview (according to Colonel Yamaki who was there) took place in Sato’s tent, the staff waiting outside and ‘trembling a little when we heard Sato’s voice raised in anger’.
The reason why Mutaguchi had sent his Chief of Staff in person was that a few days previously (on the 14th June) he had despatched a signals officer, Lieutenant Nose, who came back somewhat crestfallen with a dusty answer. The actual date of the Sato-Kunomura meeting is in some doubt; the archives in the National Defence College give it as the 22nd June, while other authorities quote the 21st. Colonel Yamaki says that according to his records it happened on the 19th.
Kohima Page 30