by Fergal Keane
There were three Japanese columns advancing on Kohima via different routes. General Sato sent Miyazaki off with the main infantry group in the direction of the village of Ukhrul, where he would capture stores and then move to block the road at Kohima. Another battalion of 58th Regiment was sent through the wilds of the Somra tract to the north, while Sato’s own column would travel the central route via Kharasom. The routes of advance were dictated by what passable tracks existed and took the advancing Japanese in the direction of three British garrisons. There was little room for improvising on the move, given the size of the army and the wildness of the terrain. Lieutenant Nishida’s map-making foray would gain Sato vital time on his advance, but for the marching soldiers the journey into India was a trial.
The supply officer, Lieutenant Masao Hirakubo, felt physically weak compared to the other soldiers of 58th Regiment. He was a softly reared city boy, whose speciality was administration. The privates, who had spent more than three years in China, were mostly peasants who could walk for days without proper sleep. Hirakubo trudged along up the steep mountains. Just after crossing the Chindwin he heard the sound of massed aircraft overhead. ‘What is it?’ men called to each other. Somebody said they were gliders heading behind the Japanese lines. What Hirakubo and his comrades had heard were the Chindits heading to landing strips inside Burma. Deep in the jungle, he heard monkeys chatter and birds call, and experienced a darkness so thick that men tied ropes from wrist to wrist so as not to become lost off the path. The column was accompanied by a thousand oxen to carry baggage and provide meat on the hoof. But the animals quickly tired in the mountains. The soldiers’ remedy was to light a candle and hold it to the animal’s tail. But once this had been done three or four times the animals would simply refuse to get up. Then a soldier would shoot the ox and the luggage would have to be carried by the troops. Lieutenant Shosaku Kameyama of the 58th Regiment knew that Burmese oxen were used to pull carts and not to carry baggage. ‘Soldiers of the company had a hard time training oxen for carrying loads on their backs, for oxen did not budge when they were tired. These ideas of top brass proved to be wishful thinking which disregarded the harsh reality.’
To the war correspondent Yukihiko Imai, the sound of human and animal cries mingling in the mist-shrouded mountains was mournful; the cold weather was the greatest shock to his system. Even in daytime, the severity of the cold made it difficult to sleep. At one point he collapsed on the peak of a mountain after forty hours’ hard marching. He was woken by the sound of a tiger growling nearby and fled to catch up with his party. The terrain here, and the creatures and maladies it concealed, was utterly different to anything the men had experienced in China or on Guadalcanal. They were introduced to the hideous Naga sore, best described by an Englishman who treated refugees fleeing from Burma in 1942. It begins, he wrote, ‘as a small blister usually on the leg or foot in a place where there is not much flesh. It develops rapidly for four or five days and then stops. By this time it may be five inches in diameter and half an inch deep, destroying all the upper layers of skin and often the tendons and muscles as well. Though it often has a clean appearance when washed, the under part frequently stinks to high heaven from the pus which rapidly accumulates in the cavity … On one occasion kerosene oil was poured into a hole in a small boy’s head, and three hundred and fifty half-inch maggots, of four different species, were removed.’
Men pushed up near-vertical slopes. On occasion, food and ammunition had to be abandoned because there were no means to carry them. Animals died from exhaustion or fell over the side of cliffs. ‘Many, many times that happened. It was a big noise,’ recalled Masao Hirakubo. Finally it happened to Hirakubo himself. Reports had come back from the front of the column of an engagement with the British. A three-day forced march followed. ‘On that occasion everybody was walking and sleeping. There was no road. These mountains were 3,000 to 5,000 metres above sea level.’ Hirakubo weighed seventy-five kilograms and carried a pack of more than twenty-five kilograms. Swaying in a semi-sleep, he toppled and fell over the side of the cliff, plunging a hundred metres. The lieutenant frantically grabbed at leaves and roots as he tumbled down. About two thirds of the way down he struck a large rock and was knocked unconscious. He did not know how long he had been knocked out, but on coming to he saw flashlights and heard shouting. ‘I thought they were praying for my soul. I shouted. I heard them talking, saying I was still alive. A doctor and three soldiers were sent down to me. I was told to follow slowly. He said “the fact you didn’t die after falling all that distance means you have been guaranteed your life for the whole operation.”’ Cut and bruised, he was transferred to a stretcher and then left at an improvised aid station. There was no doctor and it was bitterly cold. Hirakubo eventually decided to take his chances and make for the front with a mountain artillery unit that was passing. But for all the privations of the march, Sato’s army remained in good spirits and advanced steadily on the British positions leading to Kohima.
Since at least February Slim had anticipated a thrust into the Naga Hills by a relatively small force. In Defeat into Victory he wrote: ‘A Japanese regiment (three battalions) would, we foresaw, make for Kohima to cut the main Imphal-Dimapur road and threaten the Dimapur base.’ A regiment of the Imperial Japanese Army amounted to approximately two-and-a-half thousand men. It was a small force but given Japanese fighting ability it was not inconsequential, as Slim must have known. Slim always maintained that his greatest mistake was to underestimate the Japanese ability to move a large force through the Naga Hills. But the failure to prepare to meet even a regimental size force, let alone the division that would materialise, would establish the mood of crisis, and exact a heavy price on the men sent to defend Kohima. By Slim’s own account Dimapur had been left without a garrison at all, and Kohima only a ‘scratch’ force. Allied intelligence gave a date of 15 March for the start of Mutaguchi’s offensive. It was not that Slim failed to appreciate the danger, but rather the speed at which the entire machine of command responded that created the crisis. With ever-stronger signs of impending attack Slim asked his superior, the Army Group Commander, General Sir George Giffard, for substantial reinforcements. On 5 March, a few days before Mutaguchi’s first troops crossed the Chindwin, the Supreme Commander, Lord Mountbatten, told Giffard to expedite the movement of troops to cover Dimapur and Kohima. Mountbatten was away between 7 and 14 March, visiting the Chinese armies of General Stilwell at Ledo, when the first Japanese crossed into India. Going to see Stilwell was not one of Mountbatten’s more pleasurable tasks. Like most British officers he found the American tiresome, carping and a remorseless anglophobe. Mountbatten, however, had the grace, and good sense, to rise above Stilwell’s tendency to bait his British guests and established a working relationship with the American. It was the battlefield tour that the American laid on that distressed the supreme commander.
‘I have never taken kindly to the few fresh battlefields I have visited, chiefly because the smell is so appalling, but this was particularly unpleasant. At one place I saw at least fifty Japanese bodies and half a dozen horses which had been killed the day before. Already the maggots were running all over their faces, which looked puffed and blown out, and it was with the greatest of difficulty that I overcame a wave of nausea and avoided being sick.’ Worse was to follow. On his way back to Stilwell’s base Mountbatten, sitting in an open jeep, was struck by a bamboo stick jutting out from the side of the road. He was taken to see Captain Scheie, the famous US Army opthalmic surgeon, who ordered him to bed. The Supreme Commander spent five days with both eyes bandaged while the nurses were ‘feeding me like a baby, washing me, reading to me and attending to all my other wants’.
Mountbatten was not dallying while the Japanese advanced. The eye injury was severe and he was lucky to save it. Once discharged, on 14 March, Mountbatten flew directly to see Slim and the Commander of the 3rd Tactical Airforce, Sir John Baldwin. The news from Imphal was of potential disaster. The 17 Indian Divi
sion was fighting to escape a Japanese encirclement on the road to Imphal and an urgent airlift of reinforcements was needed to protect the base. According to Slim Mountbatten ‘saw the urgency at once’. That night in Delhi the Supreme Commander challenged Giffard about the delay in moving reinforcements. In fact Giffard had given orders for three brigades to move to the Dimapur front and the 5th Indian Division was to move once it could be freed from the fighting in the Arakan.* It was all taking too long, however. The British 2nd Division was available in India but Giffard told the Supreme Commander he was worried about ‘getting a division to the Central front over the already crowded Assam line of communication, and of maintaining it there on arrival.’
In another time it would have been a reasonable consideration. But this was a moment to take what Giffard later called an ‘administrative risk’ and get 2nd Division moving. If Mutaguchi took Dimapur there would be no line of communication at all.
Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Sir Henry Pownall, by no means an uncritical servant of the supreme commander, found Giffard ‘extremely cagey on the subject and distinctly complacent about the whole situation’. Giffard told Pownall that Slim had ‘plenty of troops and could move them as he wanted … it was clear he didn’t propose to intervene himself or give the spur to Slim and he made it plain that he would regard intervention by Mountbatten as unwelcome.’
The crisis exacerbated the already poor relationship between Mountbatten and his senior soldier. During the Great War, Giffard had chased the columns of the German Commander, Von Lettow-Vorbeck, around East and Central Africa. He was wounded and awarded a DSO. As the commander of all allied land forces in South-East Asia he had worked hard to ensure Slim was given the authority and resources to build the force that would become the 14th Army. Giffard was a decent and thoughtful soldier who struggled to take his much younger and less experienced supreme commander seriously as a military equal, let alone superior. Giffard’s humour was also soured by the endless interventions of the Chindit leader, Major General Orde Wingate, who was attempting to promote his own interests directly with Mountbatten. Giffard was right that Mountbatten was no strategist, but the supreme commander did have an instinct for spotting trouble. The mess he saw enveloping 14th Army would sweep Giffard, Slim and Mountbatten away, to say nothing of tens of thousands of troops, if something wasn’t done quickly. Even allowing for Mountbatten’s already tainted view of Giffard, and his tendency to describe himself as essential to great events, he had a point when he wrote to Edwina of how worried he was about how the situation had escalated in his absence.
The problem now for Mountbatten was that finding the necessary aircraft would involve diverting American planes carrying supplies into China.
Mountbatten decided to send the planes and get permission afterwards. It was the kind of imperious, and absolutely necessary, act of a man gifted with supreme self-confidence. Mountbatten took care to enlist the support of Churchill in London, who cabled Roosevelt that ‘the stakes are pretty high in this battle, and victory would have far-reaching consequences’. Not to mention defeat. Within five days Mountbatten had diverted twenty C-46 ‘Commandos’ from the ‘Hump’ route into China. Such a triumph could not be allowed to pass without a little self-glorification. He told his wife Edwina on 20 March that ‘if the Battle of Imphal is won it will be entirely due to Dickie overriding all his Generals!’
Slim’s senior general for the coming battle at Kohima would be the commander of 33 Corps, Lieutenant General Montagu George North Stopford. On the morning of 16 March, as yet unaware of his appointment, Stopford was sitting in his office in Poona, eighteen hundred miles from the Burma frontier and having a tedious time. It began with ‘weighing off a young arse called Parsons who had lost his identity card’. Judging the man to be a victim of bad luck the general let him off. There were more interviews to follow, all of them ‘awful’. The tone in his diary is of a soldier who is bored, aware that the action is taking place elsewhere while his forces must bide their time.
Stopford was the great-grandson of an Anglo-Irish earl and had the mien of a landed aristocrat. One journalist wrote that when ‘he walks around his units he might be inspecting his barns, or noting the progress of his crops’. He entered the Rifle Brigade from Sandhurst in 1911 and was awarded the Military Cross in France during the Great War. Afterwards he was an instructor at the Staff College, a contemporary of Arthur Percival, who would go down in history as the man who surrendered Singapore, and the future Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), General Sir Alan Brooke. Stopford was tall and strongly built, an imposing physical figure, with a manner that suggested a man resolutely sure of his own judgement. A staff officer who met Stopford around the time of the Japanese invasion remembered that while ‘his walk was unhurried, his mind moved very fast … He was very ambitious; some would call him ruthless; but that he was a very professional commander, there could be no doubt whatsoever.’
On the day Slim summoned Stopford to take command of the Dimapur area the 33 Corps commander wrote in his diary, ‘we are going to buy a very sticky show unless we are careful’. By 21 March Stopford was experiencing a ‘pretty thrilling day’ organising his move to the front. At this point Stopford had only one division, the British 2nd, under his command. But when Stopford met the 2nd Division commander, General John Grover, he found him ‘completely bewildered’. Grover was hardly to be blamed. On 16 March he had met General Giffard to discuss another issue and, aware of the growing crisis, he raised the issue of reinforcements for Dimapur and Kohima. Given that Giffard was under intense pressure from both Mountbatten and Slim to get troops moving, the scene Grover describes in his diary is decidedly unusual.
Had personal discussion with General Giffard, who showed me latest situation on his Ops Map showing three Japanese Divisions having started to cross the Chindwin on 15th March, and indicating a threat to 4th Corps L. of C. I asked at once whether there was not now a possibility of 2 Div. being employed operationally as a formation. General Giffard replied that there was no such chance, and that in any case it would not be possible to maintain a British Division in the 14th Army area because of the shortage of British reinforcements. Arrangements for dispersal of 2 Division could continue.*
Grover was told to disperse his troops to barracks after the completion of training. Now, just four days later, he was being ordered to hurry them to the front as quickly as possible. Stopford was ‘more than concerned than ever that Army Group [Giffard] and S.E.A.C. have no control of the situation’.
The troops of 2nd Division had spent months training, not for warfare in the mountains and jungles, but for amphibious landings which had repeatedly been postponed because landing craft could not be spared from Europe. In fact Grover’s initial orders for Burma on 18 March were to prepare to move to Chittagong as a departure point for the Arakan. There they would relieve the 5 Indian Division which would be airlifted to Dimapur. But two days later those orders were countermanded. Grover’s division was now to make for Dimapur. It would not be the last twirl in the dysfunctional gavotte of order and counter-order.
Major General John Malcolm Lawrence Grover was forty-seven years old when he was ordered to the Kohima front and had been with 2nd Division since 1941 knowing ‘almost everyone in it by name regardless of rank’, according to Major David Wilson, who served under Grover from 1942.* Wilson gives an impression of a Grover as a man who was liked ‘but could frighten the life out of each of us with his elegantly phrased rockets of displeasure’. Wilson remembered that when he arrived at the Division, instead of being marched in front of Grover as was usual, he was asked to join him for dinner in the mess. The man he met there was ‘short, lithe, very smart, very precise in his speech, and blessed with very blue piercing eyes’. According to another young officer Grover was ‘highly charged with nervous energy … correct, punctilious, and a perfectionist’, the kind of general who would berate a cook with dirty fingernails. ‘Wherever the General walked the air
quivered with nervous excitement and apprehension’. Yet for all that he was popular with the ranks whom he made a point of visiting frequently to discuss their food and welfare. But both Grover and his division had always visualised fighting their war against the Germans and not, according to one of his officers, ‘to defend a fading empire against Japanese aggressors’.† They were now being called upon to save the British empire from what could be the most humiliating defeat since the fall of Singapore.
General Stopford flew to Comilla to see Slim on 23 March, arriving in a torrential downpour and after a hideous flight which had made several of his staff sick. Slim’s headquarters was situated in a spacious and elegant colonial home with a large garden, and after tea the two generals sat down to discuss the growing crisis. Slim must have been typically blunt about the continuing the threat to Imphal and the danger posed by the Japanese coming through the Naga Hills, for the meeting unsettled Stopford. Afterwards, he confided to his diary: ‘The situation in North Burma is not good and it is touch and go whether reinforcements arrive before the Japs can get to Imphal and Manipur Road.’
At Imphal a potentially disastrous sequence of events had unfolded. The order to withdraw 17th Indian Division, the key to luring Mutaguchi’s main forces onto the plain where they could be destroyed, was given too late by the 4th Corps Commander, General Geoffrey Scoones.* Since 13 March the Indians had been fighting their way through Japanese attempts at encirclement. It took three major battles for 17th Indian Division to reach Imphal in early April.