by Fergal Keane
The intelligence told Slim to expect an offensive by the 15th Army in mid-March. Imphal would be the target but a smaller force, probably no larger than a regiment, would be sent to cut the road at Kohima. The conventional military response would be to strike first and gain the initiative.* In the background, but always an insistent presence, the Americans were pressing for offensive action to forestall Mutaguchi. On 23 February, 1944, Roosevelt wrote to Churchill: ‘The continued build-up of Japanese strength in Burma requires us to undertake the most aggressive action within our power to retain the initiative and prevent them from launching an offensive that may carry them over the borders into India … I most urgently hope therefore that you back to the maximum a vigorous and immediate campaign in Upper Burma.’
But Slim planned to do precisely the opposite. He would wait for Mutaguchi to come to him. In fact he would do something even riskier. Once the enemy offensive had begun, the divisions facing them on the Chindwin would be ordered to withdraw, conforming to the stereotype of previous British retreats. The Japanese would follow, their line of communication getting steadily longer and more exposed, until Slim stood and faced them on the Imphal Plain. There he had ample supplies of food, an advantage in armour and artillery and, most important of all, two all-weather airfields. Slim knew there were generals in Delhi who were petrified at the risk he was taking. Suppose the Japanese advanced too quickly and outflanked the retreating divisions? The staged retreat might easily become a chaotic rout? Timing, Slim agreed, was everything. Fatefully, he left the decision on that with his Corps Commander, Liutenant General Geoffrey Scoones.
In Kohima they had been getting reports about increased Japanese activity in the Naga Hills since the beginning of the year. Infiltrators had attempted to recruit villagers as spies. Charles Pawsey’s deputy, P. F. Adams, wrote on 17 January that he had entered a village that he suspected was going over to the enemy and recommended it ‘should be strongly dealt with’. Another village was also suspected of entertaining the Japanese. ‘I then decided to punish Sahpao by destroying one half to two thirds of their rice houses, this would also prevent the Japs buying supplies of rice. This was done and we then withdrew.’ Nowhere in Adams’s account is there any indication of concern about the consequences of such destruction for a people caught in the middle of a war.
It would be wrong to conclude that the British regarded these as anything more than small scale probes but they fitted with the bigger intelligence.
‘The whole disposition of the Japanese forces,’ wrote Lieutenant Steyn of the 1st battalion Assam Regiment, ‘… implied that an offensive was contemplated along a broad front.’
In early February the 1st Assam, which had large numbers of Nagas and other hill-men in its ranks, was ordered to deploy to Kohima. The 1st Assam had been raised just three years before and was part of one of the youngest regiments in the Indian Army. ‘You have the prouder and more arduous task of making your own history,’ the Governor of Assam had told them, ‘… grand as it is to carry on glorious traditions, it is even grander to make them.’ The battalion contained only three Sandhurst trained officers; the rest were mostly young men on secondment from British and Indian units, or tea-planters, among them an Austrian who had fled Vienna just ahead of the Nazi takeover. In the beginning there was an air of the grand colonial adventure about the war. At the first guest night at the regimental mess a local planter presented two wild boar tusks to the regiment from his trophy collection. Among the British NCOs brought into train the recruits was a six-foot machine gun sergeant from Yorkshire who found himself being taught to hunt with a crossbow and mud pellets by a diminutive Naga. Sohevu Angami, a Naga, was twenty-five when he set out for the regimental depot at Shillong in Assam. ‘When I was a child I would see soldiers playing football in our village and I thought to myself that it looked like an easy life! When they set up the Assam Regiment I think that picture was in my mind … having fun and a good time!’ To a young man who had spent his childhood hunting with spears and knives, the jungle held no fear, neither did the rigours of training. Sohevu remembered that the British officers treated the Nagas well, ‘because they believed we were braver than the Indian soldiers who came from the plains’. He recalled that the commander’s wife even sent mufflers from London to keep the Nagas warm.
Lieutenant Colonel W. F. ‘Bruno’ Brown was forty-four years old when he became commander of the 1st Assam. He was a native of Cambridgeshire and an experienced colonial soldier who had served in Afghanistan, Persia, the Punjab and the Naga Hills.* Brown had fair hair and large eyes which projected a fierce intensity at the person to whom he was speaking. One account described him as ‘physically extremely tough, able to march his battalion off its feet and demanding a very high standard from the young British and Indian officers who had come to him from civilian life and whom he expected, like himself, always to live rough’.
Of all Brown’s officers it was the fiery-tempered Major Albert Calistan who left the strongest impression on the young recruits. Sepoy Sohevu Angami recalled that the major looked like a Punjabi, and was certain that he came from an Anglo-Indian background. When he passed by, men jumped to attention; those who failed to react to his presence immediately found themselves on punishment duty, running in full pack or tasked with extra work around the camp. ‘This man was the kind of person who scared us. Yes, we were frightened of him. He gave tough orders and heaven help you if you didn’t get to it. But you end up respecting a man like that because you felt he was strong. If he was tough with us then he would be tough in the battle.’ At some point in the middle of Brown’s tough training schedule Calistan was given leave during which he met, and subsequently married, an American military nurse. The unfortunate bride was court-martialled for breaking the army code and sent back to the USA.
There were some promising soldiers. Even before he joined the Assam Regiment, nineteen-year-old Wellington Massar showed a talent for sticking his neck out. When the British launched a campaign to eradicate kala-azar, a potentially fatal disease spread by a parasite, Massar was one of five members of his tribe to volunteer to be infected and treated. ‘He had already shown courage in the public service,’ recalled the Governor of Assam. ‘The result of this experiment was to establish scientifically the method of transmission of this disease … and thus to provide material assistance in the campaign against it.’
On 17 February 1944, Lieutenant Colonel Brown and his staff left for Kohima just after dawn, followed an hour later by the rest of the battalion. The only exception was a Scot, Captain John Young, who was deputed to stay behind and hand over the base to the incoming unit, the 1/9th Regiment. He also attended a josh group intended to reinforce the men’s morale against Indian National Army propaganda.
Young was a Glaswegian who had come to the army from a lower-middle-class family, a bank clerk who was the son and brother of bank clerks. In May 1939 he had joined the Territorial Army and after three weeks was promoted to lance corporal. John McCulloch Young was strongly built, 5 feet 11 inches and 12 stone 7 pounds. Within the next twelve months he was promoted to sergeant, indicating a talent for soldiering that saw him commissioned into the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in 1941. In the summer of 1942 he sailed for India, where he found himself seconded to the 1st Assam. By March 1944 he had been five years in the army.
At Kohima, the 1st Assam were welcomed by Charles Pawsey, who invited the officers to a cocktail party in his bungalow. Brown’s belief that they were already in ‘battle mode’ led him to order his officers to attend in battle dress. Some nurses from the two Kohima hospitals, where wounded or malaria-infected troops convalesced, were invited to cheer the men up; most knew they would be heading to remote jungle outposts where there would be no socialising for months. An officer who was present remembered no sense of foreboding, ‘only the laughter of good fellowship’.
The other ranks were fed and issued with new uniforms from the stores of the Assam Rifles, the police unit permanently bas
ed at Kohima. Kohima in those days was the centre of a major supply depot for units like V Force. There were bakeries, the ovens of which filled the air with the scent of fresh bread every morning, butcheries where dozens of men worked to keep the garrison supplied with fresh meat, and several engineering workshops.
The 1st Assam were to provide a screen in front of Kohima. Brown would establish defensive positions at the villages of Jessami and Kharasom, on the route any Japanese troops were likely to take through the Naga Hills. A battalion of the Burma Regiment and some V Force men established a third position at the village of Phek. None of these positions had the strength in men or weapons to do more than delay a Japanese advance. It was all entirely speculative, of course. Perhaps the Japanese would not come that way at all. The morning after the cocktail party the troops began marching the sixty miles to the village of Jessami. It took them three days. ‘Although the march was strenuous,’ an officer wrote, ‘the fitness of the men and the wonderful scenery around them made the war seem very distant.’ On 23 February Brown had sent Captain John Young ahead with an advance party to Jessami, and then onwards to Kharasom, with a force of a hundred men. Young was to establish the first blocking post in the way of any Japanese advance from the Chindwin. The main Assam base would be at Jessami. Brown would never see the young Scotsman again.
Jessami had a bad name with the other Nagas in the area, as Brown discovered when he asked why there were so few paths leading to other villages in the area. Black magic was the problem. Ursula Graham Bower remembered it from pre-war days as a place where her Naga friends would only venture with great reluctance. ‘One after another they came to me to explain why we shouldn’t go.’ On arrival at the village, the normally stout-hearted Nagas became panic-stricken, ‘shaken to gibbering point’, and pointed at an object hanging in the gateway to the village. On inspection, it proved to be a large egg in a basket. According to the scouts, this represented black magic of the most fearful kind. ‘The very large cat was, of course, now out of the bag,’ she wrote, ‘Jessami was a nest of wizards.’
Brown ordered the building of strong defensive perimeters. Sohevu Angami, by now promoted to the rank of havildar, knew the area well. His own village of Phek was only three miles away. ‘To me it was as simple as going to my home area. I spoke the same dialect and was familiar with the countryside. By this stage I was in charge of a mortar platoon so we dug our pits and got ready for whatever might happen. I don’t remember being frightened at this stage. Not at all. It was still exciting for us. My concern was for my parents and my two sisters who were still in the village.’ Lieutenant Colonel Brown began sending out patrols along routes the Japanese might be likely to use. It was one of these that would bring him the first news of Japanese invaders heading his way.
On the last day before crossing the Chindwin river, 15 March 1944, Susumu Nishida remembered the dew on the trees and the deep blue of the north Burma sky, and it reminded him of autumn in Japan. Lieutenant Nishida, of the 58th Regiment, had already reconnoitred the tracks towards Kohima on the other side of the Chindwin. Now he would lead a company of around 110 men across the river and into the war. They had been waiting for several days at their staging point about four kilometres from the Chindwin. On this last morning men were cleaning their weapons, checking their knapsacks, collecting rations, and some hummed songs from their homeland. Some grumbled about the weight of their packs. Even for men as used to the hardship of soldiering as the 58th Regiment, the extra weight of twenty days’ rations was a painful burden. The lighter men found it difficult to stand up again with their packs once they had sat down.
Nishida checked the plan for the crossing repeatedly but was still convinced he had forgotten something. The day dragged on. He worried that the order to advance would be cancelled at the last minute. Then at last the sun, great and flaming, began to sink beneath the mountains. ‘The time passed 19.00, 20.00 and 21.00. I wondered [when] was going to be the advance order. The tension turned to irritation and my brain was occupied by uneasiness and suspicion.’ At 21.15 an orderly rushed in with instructions to get ready to move. All along the river bank, through the regiments of General Sato’s 31st Division, there was a stirring of men and animals. To Nishida it was as if the hands on his watch were speeding up. By the time he had finished summoning his company, checking animals and equipment, it was 22.30. There were ninety minutes left to X-hour. Platoon leaders were checking their men, quietly warning them about making noise. Nishida described it poetically. ‘When my slow footpath stopped at the centre of [the] line, the air was filled with complete and stuffy quietness.’
The men remembered the special order of the day from the army commander, issued when preparations were gathering pace. Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi had told them this operation might even lead to the conclusion of the war. ‘This operation will engage the attention of the whole world and is eagerly awaited by a hundred million of our countrymen. Its success will have a profound effect on the course of the war, and may even lead to its conclusion. We must therefore expend every ounce of energy and talent to achieve our purpose.’ To men who had fought in China and at Guadalcanal, bringing the war to an end was no doubt an appealing prospect.
Nishida faced his men and drew out his sword, which flashed in the light of the full moon. ‘Fix bayonet,’ he shouted. Then, ‘Present arms!’ He thought the line of bayonets flashing in the moonlight looked like the crest of a wave. Nishida noticed that the soldiers’ eyes were wet with tears. He felt the blood throbbing in his veins. They pledged their lives to the fatherland:
Into the mountains
To see his bones bleached in the Battlefield,
Let’s die alongside the Emperor,
We would not regret.
The troops moved off towards the river. Within an hour they were moving through head-high reeds, aware of the noises of load-carrying elephants, of a tiger roaring on the other side of the river, and the allied planes far above in the darkness. At last they emerged from the reeds and saw the Chindwin in the moonlight.
Earlier, Lieutenant General Sato had addressed his senior officers. ‘I’ll take the opportunity, gentlemen, of making something quite clear to you. Miracles apart, everyone is likely to lose his life in this operation. It isn’t simply a question of the enemy’s bullet. You must be prepared for death by starvation in these mountain fastnesses.’ No one could say they set out with illusions.
From their staging points in an arc around the town of Homalin, the soldiers of Sato’s three infantry regiments, his mountain artillery and support units were now converging on their designated crossing points.* The war correspondent Yukihiko Imai saw the tiny red lights of soldiers’ flashlights on the other side of the river, guiding boats into the bank. The flickering lights and the sound of the engine on the sampan would remain in his memory forever.
Hiroshi Yamagami, the colour-bearer with the 58th Regiment, remembered that it was quiet on the boat. ‘We didn’t talk. We expected resistance. Then nothing happened. It was a relief. I felt “the time is coming.” I had high spirits and the rest were the same.’ The machine-gunner Yoshiteru Hirayama crossed the river twice. On the first occasion he had to carry his unit’s baggage across with the engineers. The following day he crossed with the troops, telling himself as they approached the bank, ‘We have got to fight, we have to go for it.’
But the Japanese were being observed from the jungle. Lieutenant Walton, seconded to V Force from the Frontier Force Regiment, was on the enemy side of the river on the night of 15 March. From his jungle hiding place he saw a large fire being lit and heard noise and hammering. Boats were being pushed together into an improvised pontoon bridge. At 2 a.m. Walton judged it was safe to go as far as the river in the direction of the noise. He reached what he took to be a stores area and found another hiding place. ‘I lay up all day and considerable quantities of stores were carried up from lorries to the top of the hill where I was. In the evening they were taken down to the river bank
.’ Once the bridge was in place, the troops, ponies and bullocks began to cross. To infiltrate as far as he did was an enormous risk. Capture would have meant brutal torture and death. But Walton, like many of the V Force operatives, had become adept at jungle movement. He crept away and made for Imphal, evading a Japanese patrol on the way and carefully noting every unusual detail: creeping through the jungle near the road, he saw a Japanese dispatch rider and new telephone wires strung along the route of the advance. Walton does not appear to have had a wireless set with which to warn his headquarters about the scale of the advance.
A group of Chindits, flying in for ‘Operation Thursday’ behind Japanese lines, had crash-landed near the Japanese staging area and noted the crossing of the 31st Division.* Lance Corporal Mullen, of 82 Chindit Column, was with a group of eighteen survivors who emerged stunned but otherwise unhurt from the wreckage. The pilot was killed, the wireless smashed and all the weapons lost. The men first burned their operational maps and struck out in the direction of the Chindwin. On the march they were attacked by a Japanese patrol and six men went missing in the jungle. Arriving at Thangdaut on 17 March, the Chindits hid out and watched the river. ‘From one hour after sunset to one hour before sunrise we watched Japanese crossing continually in collapsible boats similar to our assault boats … our Sergeant, who was the only one who could swim, crossed the Chindwin but was never seen again.’ Two days later the men found an abandoned sampan and used it to cross the river, finding a solitary Japanese asleep on the western bank. They had no weapons so they quietly stole the rice from his mule and made off into the jungle. Without a working wireless they had no means of relaying the intelligence.*