by Fergal Keane
Only half of the 48,000 tons of supplies promised to Mutaguchi by Southern Area Army headquarters in Singapore had arrived in Burma by the end of January 1944, and the plan to move up to 3,000 tons per day to the front was stillborn. Throughout the period of Mutaguchi’s offensive only four hundred tons per day were ever transported, and most of this would go to the divisions advancing towards Imphal.
Lieutenant Yoshiteru Hirayama of 58th Regiment experienced constant pressure from allied air raids on his journey north to the invasion launching point. Along with the problems of supply, they made him doubt the invasion plan. ‘From Rangoon we went to Mandalay and from there to Sangin. That journey was my first experience of seeing bombs fall from a plane. The allied air power was very strong and this added to my doubts. But this was not the kind of thing you said openly, for two reasons: if the Kempeitai [military police] heard that you were saying such things you could get your head chopped off! Also it would only reduce the men’s morale.’ He remembered back to an incident in officer training school when a cadet who had been to university in America was asked to talk about his experiences. What was the country like? How many people were there? What kind of cars and machines did they have? The cadet stood and started to mutter his answer. ‘It was like he was not speaking the full truth, as if he didn’t want to tell us how powerful it was.’ The young man was killed serving in New Guinea later in the war.
The 31st Division would have to cross the Chindwin river and face an obstacle course where mountains soared up to 8,000 feet and plunged into humid jungle valleys. Mutaguchi and his planners estimated it would take the division twenty days to reach Kohima. Each soldier was given twenty-five kilograms of rice and a salt ration to last until they could capture British supplies. The supply clerks carried Indian currency to buy food in the villages. Japanese problems with food supply pre-dated the invasion. A secret memorandum sent by a V Force officer in January 1944 had given early warning of the crisis that would face the Japanese, and of British plans to reduce the amount of food available to be captured. ‘As the Japs are so very short of food in their forward areas, rice dumps would be one of the most valuable things for them to capture. I am therefore keeping our stocks well back and draining border villages of their stocks so that if the Japs effected a sudden advance they would obtain no additional food. I am aided in this by the fact that the villages in the S.E. corner of North Lushai have had similar crop failures to the Chin Hills. I am further reducing their stocks by borrowing rice to feed the Punjab Coy and “V” Force troops and porters. I give a receipt in return for the rice and the chief can either have payment in cash or rice returned from our near stocks within 3 months. This also relieves patrols and porters from carrying their rice rations on long trips, and rice eaters can live off the country.’
Mutaguchi could not claim ignorance of the situation. Sato and his fellow commanders all complained about the supply situation before the offensive began. The 31st Division commander recalled that they ‘expressed huge concern and each division offered its opinion … and tried to spur the senior staff’. A senior air force officer, Lieutenant General Tazoe, commander of the 5th Air Division, who watched the build-up of allied air strength, and the fly-in of Wingate’s Chindits, warned Mutaguchi he was facing a very different enemy. ‘The Allied power to bring in transport, troops, guns, tanks, and equipment is beyond anything you have visualised.’
The army commander, however, ignored the warnings and put his faith in captured stocks. It had worked before in China and Malaya, why not in India? He clearly preferred not to think about what had just happened in the Arakan, or to dwell upon the disastrous experience of the Japanese in New Guinea in 1942, where some troops had resorted to cannibalism when supplies failed to reach them. To bolster his supplies, Mutaguchi looked to the example of Genghis Khan who fed his Golden Horde with cattle on the hoof. Orders were sent out to conduct an experiment to find out how far cattle could march in a day. Some cows were duly selected and taken on a daylong forced march. The beasts managed thirteen kilometres. What Mutaguchi had failed to take into account – or had decided to ignore – was that the cattle had been marched along roads in the Burmese staging areas and not up steep mountains like those on the Indian frontier. And they had only been tested on their endurance over a day’s march, whereas they would be expected to keep moving for nearly three weeks to pass through the Naga Hills. Fifteen thousand cattle were assembled. Mutaguchi also ordered that each division be given ten thousand sheep and goats.*
The divisional supply officers were less sanguine about the prospect of living off the land. Lieutenant Masao Hirakubo was a supply officer with the 58th Regiment and arrived in Rangoon to a bleak message from the divisional accountant. ‘He said to me: “We know this campaign cannot be carried out but GHQ ordered us and we should do this. That is a soldier’s destiny. I cannot expect to see you again.”’ With this gloomy forecast, Hirakubo learned that he was responsible for feeding a thousand men. He remembered back to the arguments he had had with his father in the lead-up to the war. Hirakubo senior had opposed the conflict and told his son that Japan would survive only by building up her trade. ‘I was very young and militarised. Always I was shouting at him while he spoke of negotiations and compromise. Now I felt that my father was right. Japan had got the politics all wrong.’
Preparations were dealt a further blow when Mutaguchi was faced with having to delay his offensive. The main infantry strength of 15th Division had been held back in Thailand for a mixture of road-building and security duties, amid rising tension in the kingdom. The intelligence officer Fujiwara was sure that this made a significant difference to the invasion plan. ‘When a decision was finally made to send this Division most of them moved on foot [and] the main battle strength … was still on the way by the middle of March.’ But Mutaguchi forged on, convinced that the British and Indians on the other side of the Chindwin would fold and run as their comrades had done before.
Our view of the Japanese fighting man has been conditioned by accounts of savagery and unyielding fanaticism. The massacre at Nanking, the slaughter of ethnic Chinese at Singapore, the devastation inflicted on Manila, and the merciless treatment of POWs, all earned the Japanese soldier a reputation for barbarism in modern warfare outdone only by the SS divisions in eastern Europe. Yet if the Imperial Army acted in a manner that confounded the capacity for understanding, its soldiers were no less varied as individuals than their British, Indian, Chinese and American enemies.
The men of Sato’s 31st Division who prepared to advance across the Chindwin were fiercely loyal to their emperor and their unit but they grumbled to each other as much as any soldier anywhere. A barrack-room ballad found on the body of a dead Japanese at Kohima in June 1944 was written in the universal voice of the soldier.
Any man who joins the bloody army of his own free will is an
Absolute fool, but it’s all in the sacred name of patriotism.
You’ve to forsake your parents, dedicate your body to the state.
Then do your damndest for your country.
The author was writing about army life before the battle. He listed his complaints in detail. There was the endless guard duty, midnight raids on barracks to check for absentees which dragged everybody out of bed, the NCOs and officers who were ‘a swell-headed lot’ and scroungers, the close arrest if you got back five minutes late on a leave pass.
The system is so well organised that you do every blessed thing
To the bugle – get up, go to bed, attend sick parade and ‘orders’ –
You even eat at its bidding.
There’s pay parade every ten days, but you get so little that
You can’t even buy yourself fags.
Had the ballad been discovered, the man would certainly have faced pain at the hands of the Kempeitai. Yet the tone of disillusionment does not mean he would refuse his duty. It simply shows after seven years of war, with victory no closer, he had few illusions left.
&nb
sp; Yoshiteru Hirayama was a new lieutenant with the 58th Regiment and was given command of a machine-gun company which had seen combat in China. The men were clearly wary of their new officer and tested his reactions with numerous stories of how difficult their experience had been in China. ‘All the stories had been about how hard it had been … they didn’t indicate how I should behave in combat or what I should do. They just said how tough it was.’
Chuzaburo Tomaru, the son of a banker from Nagoya, was a supply officer with the 138th Regiment and could trace his doubts back to the moment he was crossing a river near Changsha in China. ‘I just heard that the war against USA started. I thought Japan was in big trouble. We were already fighting with China and then a big country like USA became our enemy. It was massive.’ Tomaru had already gained plenty experience of ‘living off the land’. It meant stealing from Chinese peasants. ‘There was no food coming from behind so we went into Chinese houses. It was usually a family without men. I saw women trembling on the bed. We took their food.’ His enduring memory of China was the day they brought in a suspected spy. In practice this could mean anybody arrested on the whim of a Japanese soldier. The man was terrified. One of Tomaru’s comrades dug a hole and forced the suspected spy to sit in it. Then the company commander came to Tomaru and asked him if he wanted to behead the man. ‘I said I did not want to. I had never done it before. So another soldier cut his head off and the man rolled over in the hole and they covered him with sand.’ Such scenes were repeated with nauseating frequency in Japanese-held areas of China. After his service at Changsha, Tomaru was sent to Shanghai, where he set sail for Singapore and ended up marching five hundred miles into Thailand. On the way he met British prisoners of war constructing a bridge on the Kwai river. The men were ‘miserable’-looking but he remembered how one had said to him that British forces would one day cross this bridge to defeat the Japanese. ‘I thought “what are these guys saying?” They will have no chance.’ But as he marched away, the image of the emaciated men haunted him. It looked to him like a possible vision of his own future.
Senior Private Manabu Wada, of the 138th Regiment, had a similar encounter. ‘A British soldier came up to me and said, “Japanese master, please give me a cigarette.” He was a very tall man. Owing to the hard daily work he was skinny but well shaped … I gave him a few cigarettes from my chest pocket, and we each lit one and smoked together. He smoked with great enjoyment and blew out great puffs of smoke. Although we could not understand one another clearly we managed a dialogue with gestures.’ The POW told him Japan would be defeated because it had to depend on human labour rather than machinery to build the railway. Without fail the British would win, he said. ‘I was displeased with his words because he was actually smoking my cigarettes … “Japan will win definitely,” I said.’
Dr Takahide Kuwaki, an army doctor from Tokyo serving with 124th Regiment, was an ideologue, deeply influenced by the ultranationalist circles in which he had moved while at university. There was also a wilful streak in his nature. Against the tradition of the times, he defied his parents and married for love, with a girl he had met at university. By the time of his departure for the war, Takahide was the father of a baby boy. ‘It was an extraordinary thing to do in that period when arranged marriages were the thing to do. I had a very strict upbringing and my father was really mad.’ The family would acknowledge neither wife nor child. When the time came for him to leave, Takahide’s wife was forbidden from accompanying him to the station. That would have involved her meeting his parents. Travelling to the forward positions of 31st Division, he was enraptured by the landscape of ‘high mountains, big rivers and wild fields’, and convinced by the propaganda about Asian unity. The 124th Regiment had lost nearly a third of its strength at Guadalcanal and Takahide had every expectation that they would be in the forefront of Sato’s advance into India. ‘I had a firm resolve to die. I believed human beings had to do something good and correct. When I was young I learned about people who gave their lives for something good and that was something I believed in. I thought the percentage chance of my surviving would be low. Even in a situation where 90 per cent of people are dying I didn’t want to survive in that circumstance. To escape was a nonsensical idea.’
Sato spent the last weeks before the attack camped within easy march of the Chindwin. His infantry were based at three points along the approach to the river, waiting for the order to advance. One day Sato and his staff officers sat discussing the routes each regiment would take after crossing into India. They were debating how long it would take them to march from the Chindwin through the hills to Kohima. A soldier who was present recalled what happened. He refers to Sato throughout by the old samurai honorific, ‘My Lord’. ‘Most of the men, especially the young ones like us measured a map by ruler and answered the distance. My Lord got angry and said: “You cannot instruct the campaign that way. In a battle in mountainous area, the vertical level of mountains affects marching schedule. You have to think about the distance, considering this level.” Just like My Lord said, I wrote the vertical level of mountains on the graph … It means that if there is 100 km, then you actually have to march 200 km. My Lord instructed to consider the gap between regular paths and rocky paths; whether there are bridges on mountain stream or not and so on.’ With his experience of battle, and his foreboding about the operation, Sato knew such details could mean the difference between life and death.
On 12 February 1944 Sato received a visit from an old friend, Lieutenant General Naka, chief of staff of the Burma Area Army. They had both attended the Sendai Military Academy and Sato felt able to press him on the question of supplies. The whole business needed to be re-examined, he said. As a parting gift Sato gave his friend a pair of peacocks and an elephant’s tooth. After the meeting he reached a decision in his own mind that, if supplies were not forthcoming, the 31st Division would leave the battle. Not long afterwards, he received a second and more unwelcome visitor. Mutaguchi had sent his sycophant, the geisha-loving Major General Kunomura, with new orders. ‘I have a special request to pass on from the Army Commander,’ said Kunomura. ‘If 31 Division sees the opportunity, he wants you to advance to Dimapur. It is his most earnest wish.’
There followed a blazing row. Sato rounded on Kunomura, saying he could not accept that he was being asked to turn a plan to consolidate the defence of Burma into an offensive on the main British supply base in north-east India. ‘My orders from the 15 Army itself are to occupy Kohima. I will do my utmost to achieve that. But how can I move on to Dimapur at a moment’s notice? What is the enemy strength there? What supplies will I have? Just saying “Go to Dimapur” without examining any of these factors is foolish.’ In an attempt to placate Sato, Major General Kunomura committed 15th Army to delivering ten tons of supplies per day once Sato had set off. The promise would lead to bitter recrimination later on.
By 24 February, more than a fortnight before the 31st Division crossed the Chindwin, the war correspondent of the Domei News Service, Yukihiko Imai, travelling with the 58th Regiment, noted that the men were already eating pineapple roots and wild grasses to preserve their food stocks. ‘They were suffering diarrhoea, gastric ulcers and beri beri.’ He also recorded that allied aircraft could be heard constantly flying above the canopy. Many of the 31st Division veterans recalled their anxiety at seeing British and American fighters overhead and an almost complete absence of Japanese planes. The Commander of 15th Army was not deterred. A visitor to his headquarters in Maymyo met him in the blooming garden where Mutaguchi told him: ‘My officers do everything, I just tend my roses.’
* * *
* Yi Sun-sin led the Korean navy against repeated Japanese invasions. During his career he suffered imprisonment, torture and reduction to the ranks as a result of political machinations. He was killed at the battle of Sachon Bay on 15 December 1598.
* The Soviet commander was a then little-known lieutenant general, Georgi Zhukov, who at Khalkin Gol used the tactics that would bring hi
m victory at Stalingrad and Kursk and all the way to Berlin. He won in Mongolia by combining massive firepower with a ruthless disregard for casualties that the Japanese would have understood. The Soviets enjoyed total material superiority and the Japanese ran out of supplies for their artillery.
* The battle of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands took place over seven months in 1942–43 and ended with the Americans forcing the Japanese defenders off the island. It is not possible to say how many veterans of Guadacanal fought at Kohima.
* In a rare moment of candour he wrote later: ‘the animals collapsed on their way and in the end it was not a useful idea’. Japanese National Diet Library, transcript of audio recording of talk given by Renya Mutaguchi, 1965.
ELEVEN
Into the Mountains
It was a job that demanded patience, stealth and strong nerves. The Chindit officer, F. H. A. Lowe, gave a vivid account of jungle patrolling. ‘Visibility is practically nil – a man could creep to within five yards of a sentry without being seen – the jungle is full of small sounds – the creaking of trees, the rustling of bushes and undergrowth, the snapping of twigs and branches, the whisper of grass disturbed by a snake or small animal – or was it a man’s stealthy footfall? The call of a night bird – or was it a signal to a lurking enemy? The jungle closes in on the motionless sentry, every flickering shadow seems to be a man. Let any man who has never known fear stand in such circumstances, and, if he has any imagination at all, his hair will begin to prick the back of his neck, his spine will chill, and, if he is honest, he will say “I am afraid.”’ The secret war was escalating. All through December reports were coming from the villages of probes by the Japanese and their INA allies. By day and night V Force was tracking the infiltrators. On occasions the war of track and skirmish developed into full-scale battles. There was hand to hand fighting between the Assam Rifles troops of V Force and the Japanese on 23 December with the attackers ‘being cut up by our kukris’. As the year came to an end such encounters became numerous.