by Fergal Keane
A runner was dispatched to race through the burning jungle and fetch help. But it was nightfall before Frank Infanti and the other medics were able to reach the position and start bringing men down. ‘We went to pick up the bits and pieces,’ he recalled. His abiding memory is of John Winstanley, ‘a very brave man, calm as a cucumber’, giving orders and taking care of his men. Word came through from Lieutenant Colonel Laverty that the survivors were to dig in for the night and hold out until a relieving force could get through. As the medics made their way back down the hill with the wounded they came under Japanese sniper fire. Another Japanese group attacked the survivors, but was driven off after throwing a few grenades. Seventeen men were killed and forty-one wounded. Winstanley had lost roughly half his company strength. CSM Harwood and C company moved in to replace Winstanley’s ravaged group. ‘We moved through them and I’ve never seen anything like it. Bodies … arms hanging in the trees and what have you.’ Captain Harry Smith, the schoolteacher from Suffolk, went forward with the pioneer platoon to bury the dead. They dug a communal grave and ‘buried the sad, shell-torn victims’ under continuing mortar fire.
That night at battalion headquarters Laverty called in the artillerymen and demanded an explanation. It turned out that the hill positions had been wrongly mapped – an ever-present danger in such thick jungle country – with the Japanese placed where B company were lying in wait to attack. It had been a devastating experience not only for B company but the entire battalion.
On the road in front of the western tunnel the battle continued for Donald Easten and D company. After reaching the western tunnel, Easten positioned a platoon on one side of the road and two platoons on the other, with company headquarters in a gully close by. The fire from the Japanese positions was intense. Two of Easten’s men were killed on the road, the bodies lying there until after dark because it was too dangerous to retrieve them in daylight. Lance Corporal John Harman was close by and volunteered to creep up towards the Japanese positions. But Easten did not want to lose any more men to the machine guns.
After several failed attempts by the infantry to gain ground, the battalion called up tanks. Easten had pinpointed the Japanese firing points and volunteered to climb aboard a tank and direct the gunner. But there was insufficient room inside and he was forced to sit outside behind the turret, shouting instructions through a telephone. The Japanese fired at him constantly, the bullets zipping past as he tried to give accurate directions to the gunner. ‘It was most unpleasant,’ he recalled.
A few days later the West Kents were relieved and sent to the rear to clean up and, they hoped, enjoy a proper rest, the first in several months. The battalion was exhausted. The men had suffered the catastrophe of being shelled by their own artillery, and many had seen death for the first time. But they would never forget that throughout the Arakan fighting the battalion had never been forced to retreat. When they did meet the Japanese the enemy proved tough, but not superhuman. They could be beaten.
* * *
* Seven officers, and ninety-eight other ranks, British and Indian, were either killed or posted missing in the first morning of fighting. Anthony Brett James, Ball of Fire: The Fifth Indian Division in the Second World War (Gale and Polden, 1951).
† The attack on the dressing station took place on the night of 7 February 1944. Soldiers who retook the position found the bodies of thirty-one patients and medical staff.
* The two battles of Passchendaele took place between July and November 1917 on the Western Front. Allied casualties were estimated to be in the region of 310,000, while German losses were around 260,000.
TEN
Sato San
Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi understood that he had better be quick about crossing the Chindwin and beating the British. He had succeeded in diverting British attention towards the Arakan, but the monsoon loomed in a couple of months, with rains that would end all hope of supplying his divisions. Imperial headquarters had given him just fifty days to complete his operations. Three divisions would be sent across the Chindwin into India from early March. The 15th and 33rd were to move against the British and Indian 4 Corps at Imphal, while 31st Division would climb into the Naga Hills and cut the British line of communication at Kohima. The British and Indian positions certainly looked vulnerable on paper. The forces around Imphal were widely dispersed over terrain that made quick reinforcement difficult. The defensive line straggled for two hundred miles and the two main forward elements, the Indian 20th and 17th Divisions, were separated from each other by mountains. The small garrison at Kohima represented no significant threat, Mutaguchi believed, and could be rolled up within a few days, removing any British threat to his flanks and rear and allowing him to strike against the 14th Army supply base at Dimapur.
The task of implementing Mutaguchi’s ‘modest plan’ fell to his three division commanders. The 15th Division, led by the old aristocrat Lieutenant General Masafumi Yamauchi, a former military attaché to Washington, would cross the Chindwin and advance westwards to cut the Dimapur – Imphal road, before turning to attack Imphal from the north. The 15th was the weakest of the divisions, with its three infantry regiments below full strength and one regiment each of field artillery and engineers. By the time the offensive began, 15th Division troops were still arriving from road-building duties in Thailand. Lieutenant General Yamauchi was chronically ill with tuberculosis and enveloped in a mood of gloom about the operation. One of the few comforts for this ageing warrior on the long road to Imphal was his ‘thunderbox’ – the Western-style pedestal lavatory carried in the general’s baggage train.
The 33rd Division, under Lieutenant General Genzo Yanagida, was the best armed, with attached tank, engineer and medium artillery regiments. Yanagida was to make a two-pronged advance towards the Imphal plain. The main force would march up the Kabaw valley, where so many refugees had perished on the escape from Burma, and emerge to destroy the 20th Indian Division at Tamu, near the Chindwin, before seizing the airfields on the northeast of the Imphal plain. The other column would destroy 17th Indian Division before marching on Imphal from the south.
The third element, 31st Division, was led by a man whose character is central to understanding the crisis into which the Imperial Japanese Army was propelled during the spring and summer of 1944, and whose personal battle with Renya Mutaguchi would ultimately destroy the careers of both men. Lieutenant General Kotuku Sato had been an adversary of Mutaguchi’s from the army’s pre-war factional fighting and the mutual animosity lingered. He mistrusted Mutagushi’s bluster and his belief that will alone could conquer all difficulties – the fatal conceit at the core of Japanese military thinking. The words ‘moron’ and ‘blockhead’ were liberally used by Mutaguchi’s divisional commanders, but only Sato would ultimately be willing to openly confront the army commander.
In both background and character they were very different men. Kotuku Sato was born in Amarume, in Yamagata prefecture, in 1893 into a family of twelve children – five boys and seven girls – who were all encouraged to compete with each other. The general’s mother, Haruyo, was the dominant figure. His grand-nephew, Shigehiko Sato, recalled her as a ‘very strict woman’ who pushed her children to achieve. ‘They said she was strong like a man. She urged them to be the best.’ Haruyo Sato also believed in the further education of women, an untypical view in the Japan of the early twentieth-century. One of her daughters became the first woman from Amarume to go to university.
The Sato family had traded in the town for over three hundred years, running a kimono factory and a pharmacy. They were well respected, and the young Kotuku was treated with deference by the townspeople. Hakuho Abe, now a revered Buddhist monk in Amarume, remembered that the family was one of the richest in the area. ‘They were upper middle class. I came from the poor temple and he was from a rich family, so there was a bit of a distance. I got the impression he was a bit proud.’
Kotuku was the first in his family to join the army, after he
aring Admiral Tetsutaro Sato, a much garlanded veteran of the Russo-Japanese war, speak at his school. ‘That meeting really touched him and it made up his mind to be a soldier,’ Sato’s grand-nephew recalled. The admiral was an advocate of the expansion of Japan’s naval power and one of the architects of the pre-emptive strategy that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The admiral took a keen interest in Kotuku’s military career and remained a mentor until his death in 1942. His influence on Kotuku Sato’s future path is best expressed in one of the admiral’s favourite sayings, uttered by the military commander he most revered, the sixteenth-century Korean warrior Yi Sun-sin: ‘If I pursue honour by flattering people in power, it will be a tremendous shame.’* Throughout his lifetime, and despite the devastating personal consequences, Kotuku Sato adhered to this precept.
Sato had been one of the outstanding students of his class at the military academy and by the age of forty-four he was commanding the 75th Regiment in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. He was an ardent supporter of imperial expansion and was friendly with Tojo. His son Goro Sato remembered being taken to General Tojo’s house in Tokyo where the future prime minister patted him on the head while he discussed politics with his father.
Sato fought the Russians as a brigade commander at Lake Khasan on the Soviet – Korean frontier in July 1938, a battle that saw the Soviet commander, Vasily Blucher, executed afterwards by the NKVD for incompetence and where Sato led successful assaults against Soviet fortifications. He faced the Soviets again in 1941 at the battle of Nomonhan on the Mongolian border. The catastrophe there led to Japanese casualties of more than 50,000 killed, wounded or captured in the largest tank battle the world had ever seen.* At one point in the battle there was just one pontoon bridge to bring supplies to the front line, hopelessly slowing the logistical effort. An army whose supply lines were so precarious could not hope for victory. It was a lesson Sato would remember well.
General Sato was married young, to Fumiko, the daughter of a wealthy aristocratic family in Sendai, the largest city in north-eastern Japan. Her life with Kotuku, like that of any military officer’s wife, was entirely subordinate to the army’s demands. She moved from Japan to Korea and Manchuria with him, transferring her son through four different elementary schools and three high schools. She also endured the boorish drinking parties that were part of the ritual of barracks life. The general would dance for his men and sing. On one occasion he arrived home speechless with drink and wearing a flowerpot on his head. His son Goro remembered dinners at which his father would fall asleep drunk while his subordinates carried on carousing around him. ‘He was always saying: “Come to my house and drink.” My mother understood the situation. He would just tell her: “You’ve got to take care of them.” She accepted it. I really never saw her complain.’ At the that time Sato probably drank in the same manner as the majority of Japanese officers; it was a culture of alcohol-soaked machismo, but it was not allowed to interfere with his daily work. It was only later, after the disaster, that alcohol became the destroyer.
An officer of the 138th Infantry Regiment who served with Sato at Kohima wrote an affectionate account of his commander. ‘It is evident that My Lord Sato’s face is round. His nose is like rice dumpling. His eyes are slightly sharp. Due to such a facial feature, you may imagine that he laughs in such a large-hearted way but the truth is that he giggles with pipe in his mouth. It was one of his uniquenesses to giggle when he made the other person puzzle and face a predicament. When it is funny, he lets his body roll back and laughs “Ha, Ha, Ha” shaking his big belly. My Lord Sato was a funny person.’
In September 1943 General Sato and his headquarters staff flew from Bangkok to Rangoon before moving to the town of Pegu. Here 31st Division aroused the animosity of the locals. As a Japanese civilian, Shudo Akiyama bore the brunt of people’s anger. They came to his language school every day to complain. The soldiers beat the population and took their food at gunpoint. Women reported being attacked after nightfall.
Akiyama had been sent to Pegu by the ministry of education in April 1942 and found it a quiet, pleasant town with a ‘mild environment’. There were shady, tree-lined streets, a lake to sit by in his spare time, and the statues of the Buddha, reclining and four-faced, which were famous across Asia. The only Japanese there when he arrived were the stationmaster, four military policemen and a handful of businessmen. Now, in May 1943, the place was crammed with troublesome soldiers. ‘The number of cases grew and it was so frequent it was beyond my capacity,’ he wrote. Akiyama decided to go to the aide-de-camp of the divisional commander and seek a meeting with his boss. ‘In those days I was a hot-blooded young man. I left with a determination to meet and have a fight with the aide if that was necessary.’
He arrived at the commander’s residence and managed to get to speak with the general himself. He remembered him as heavy-set and pale, with short-cropped hair and, at first, a stern expression; his face and physique reminded Akiyama of the statue of the last of the great samurai, Saigo Takamori, in far-off Ueno Park in Tokyo. The general listened impassively to Akiyama as he listed the complaints against the division. ‘Burma was not the enemy land and I appealed upfront that it is important to maintain rapport with Burmese people and respect their customs.’ When he had finished the general exclaimed in a loud voice, ‘Understood. I issue an order immediately today.’ It is easy to imagine the general’s anger. Had he not made a point of taking his officers round the villages to point out the similarities between the Burmese and Japanese? As far back as the 1930s, when he had been stationed in Korea, he had drummed into his own son the importance of winning over the local population. When Goro Sato was in his second year at elementary school, and living in barracks with his parents, he had teased a Korean woman who cut the grass in their garden. ‘That woman got really mad at me and she chased me with the grass clippers. That night my father heard what happened. He said to me: “Don’t tease these people. Now you go back to the woman’s place and apologise to her.” I was sent with my mother and a lieutenant to go and apologise. My father hated the idea of racism or the division between rich and poor. He didn’t have that kind of feeling. It was the kind of thing that really made him mad.’
The day after Akiyama had made his complaint a young officer arrived at the language school to apologise for the failure to maintain discipline among the troops. Later the general himself arrived, wearing an artificial cherry blossom on his chest where his badge of rank would normally be. ‘“I am General Cherry,” said he, bursting into laughter as soon as he saw me. “Please refer to me as so to your students to keep military secret,” he said. That day I had my students sing Japanese school songs in choir. He was charmed by their singing.’ Akiyama was to become Sato’s friend and the chronicler of the events that unfolded in the spring of 1944.
The previous December, Lieutenant Susumu Nishida of the 58th Regiment led a scouting party into the Naga Hills to map routes to Kohima. The spies noted trails and found a sizeable track that the British had cut from the banks of the Chindwin leading to the village of Jessami, one of the advance posts of the garrison at Kohima. The British had been working on the track in preparation for their own offensive. The reconaissance showed that even if they did manage to get help from the local tribes, Sato’s division would need to show extraordinary resilience until they reached the vast stocks of British food which, Mutaguchi promised, were waiting to be snatched.
The 31st Division infantry group was made up of three regiments: the 58th and 138th had both seen action in China and then spent several months on garrison duty in Malaya; the 124th had fought against the Americans at Guadalcanal in 1942–43, in fierce battles which ultimately claimed 24,000 Japanese casualties.* Supporting the infantry group was a mountain artillery regiment. The group was commanded by Sato’s best officer, the diminutive and plump Major General Shigesaburo Miyazaki, another member of the league of non-flatterers, respected by the troops for his personal bravery, and a loyal subordinate to Sato.
His one eccentricity was to ride into battle with a pet monkey called Chibi perched on his shoulder.
Sato lacked heavy artillery and tanks, and even if the latter had been available they could never have traversed the steep mountain tracks into the Naga Hills. The whole of 15th Army was hamstrung by chronic deficiencies in air support, weaponry and ammunition. The artillery units of the 31st Division carried only 100–150 rounds per gun, compared with 1,000 rounds per piece for the 33rd Division heading towards Imphal. This was a reflection of chronic shortages throughout the Imperial Japanese Army. One senior officer reckoned there was a ‘difference of a century’ between the equipment and weapons of the British and the Japanese at this point in the war. Beyond a generalised picture of a British build-up on the Imphal plain, Mutaguchi’s headquarters was miserably short, too, of reliable intelligence on the enemy’s capabilities. Lieutenant Colonel Iwaichi Fujiwara was furious at the low priority given to intelligence. The problem was systemic. ‘In every Japanese HQ, intelligence officers are regarded as subordinate to planning and operations officers and are given poor facilities for intelligence work.’ The Japanese struggled and failed to break British codes, while forward British units like V Force could operate ‘without [our] ever being able to discover details of their organization and methods’.
American pressure in the Pacific had dramatically reduced the numbers of aircraft and pilots available for Burma. Aerial reconnaissance was negligible. The deficit of fighters also meant that there were no escorts for supply-dropping transports, although these aircraft, too, were in pitifully short supply. Mutaguchi ordered his supply dumps to be carefully concealed in thick forest, but estimated that up to 20 per cent of the stocks were destroyed in allied bombing raids. The great hopes of resupply for Mutaguchi’s army rested with the new Thailand – Burma railway, and yet allied aircraft constantly harassed that line.