by Fergal Keane
Lieutenant Shosaku Kameyama’s facial wound was causing him such pain that he could hardly open his mouth or eyes. His only food was milk poured into his mouth as he tilted his head upwards. He came across his company commander, who was also wounded, and who asked him if he would go on to the next battle. ‘I had to say, “I will accompany you,” against my personal inclination. So both the commander and I were bandaged like monsters and went to Kohima.’
* * *
* This is the figure given by the official history. S. Woodburn Kirby, The War Against Japan, vol. 3: The Decisive Battles (HMSO, 1961), p. 237. Harry Seaman gives a figure of 900, ‘of whom 100 were made prisoners of war, later to be released … Just two British officers remained unwounded to reach Imphal and join the ninety fit men who won through it all to remuster a single company.’ Seaman quotes a casualty toll of roughly 80 per cent in the 152nd battalion, with some 350 dead out of the 700 who had started the battle. The 153rd battalion lost 35 per cent of its strength; the brigade defence platoon and machine-gun company sustained losses of 75 per cent, and the machine-gun units each suffered 25 per cent casualties.
† Out of the 2,180 men in the Miyazaki column, the Japanese gave a casualty figure of 580, of whom nearly half were killed. Again Seaman differs. His figure is 1,000 men killed and wounded, based on the estimate of an officer responsible for calculating the food supplies for the 58th Regiment.
§ Slim’s ‘Special Order of the Day’, 31 August 1944, acknowledged that 50 Indian Parachute Brigade had borne ‘the first brunt of the enemy’s powerful flanking attack, and by their staunchness gave the garrison of Imphal the vital time to adjust their defences’.
FOURTEEN
To the Last Man
They were coming. Nobody doubted it any longer. The 1st Assam patrols had already ambushed the enemy east of Kharasom, about nine miles away, and killed a ‘lot of Japs with little loss to themselves’. Colonel Hugh Richards, who was visiting Brown at his base in Jessami on 26 March, found an ‘atmosphere of complete confidence and eager anticipation’. Lieutenant Colonel ‘Bruno’ Brown’s men had been busy. He had chosen the junction of two jeep tracks to make his stand. There was an outer ring of bunkers and foxholes and inside it a second line where the command, mortars, and dressing station were sited. Unlike Hope-Thomson at Sangshak, or Richards at Kohima, Brown had ample supplies of barbed wire and his perimeter was well secured, with vegetation slashed away to clear accurate fields of fire.* Any Japanese infantry appearing along the road would come straight into a withering fusillade.
Richards told Brown that if the Japanese bypassed him he was to take to the jungle and strike at the enemy from the rear. Brown reassured Richards that he expected an attack within twenty-four hours by a battalion-sized Japanese force, usually around 1,400 men, and ‘could hold out indefinitely against a formation of that size’. There is an interesting coda to the meeting, indicating some unease beneath Brown’s usually tough exterior. Just before Richards left, he asked him if the order he had been given to fight to the last man and the last round stood. ‘I said that it must,’ Richards recalled. ‘On my return journey I was very much worried about this order.’ Richards spent the night with Charles Pawsey, who was helping refugees in a village along the road towards Kohima. He thought through the night about what was being asked of Brown. There was no proper water supply inside the perimeter at Jessami and the garrison would inevitably be cut off from outside sources. Nor was it planned to stage the main battle at Jessami. It was intended merely as a delaying post. In those circumstances it made more sense for the 1st Assam to fight but then withdraw, continuing to launch hit-and-run attacks on the Japanese as they advanced.
Back in Kohima on 27 March, Richards received two devastating pieces of information. First he was told that the West Yorkshires, his only infantry battalion, was to be withdrawn and sent to Imphal to strengthen the defences there. Later, Pawsey’s Naga scouts arrived with news that the Japanese force moving up from the Chindwin was not a regiment but an entire division. True, this was intelligence coming from outside the normal military chain, and doubters might ask how a Naga tribesman could tell the difference between a division and a regiment. But the Nagas had been schooled by V Force officers in estimating the size of military formations, and they had been reliable informants up to now. Pawsey was convinced they were right.
The 1st Assam detachments numbered four hundred in total and now faced thousands of Sato’s men advancing along the tracks to Kharasom and Jessami. Brigadier Warren of 161 Brigade and the area commander Ranking met Hugh Richards at Kohima on 29 March, where they discussed what to do about the ‘last man, last round’ order to the Assam Regiment. Given the disparity in numbers, it was far better to get the Assam men back to help defend Kohima. Richards decided to cancel the order and send troops from 161 Brigade to help the Assam Regiment fight its way out of Kharasom and Jessami.*
Richards’s unease about the position of 1 Assam dated to the night of 26 March. But the ultimate decision on the battalion’s fate was not Richards to make. It was not until his conference with General Ranking and Brigadier Warren on 29 March that it was agreed Richards should order the withdrawal of the Assam troops.* The delay has never been explained but it made the task of transmitting new orders infinitely more difficult. Brown vanished from radio contact on the 29th, which meant the only available means for passing on orders was by couriers infiltrating through Japanese lines or by aircraft dropping a message; both were hazardous, with no guarantee of success. There were two attempts by air, both of which failed, and the messages fell into the hands of the Japanese. They were not coded, because Richards feared Brown lacked the facilities for decoding, and the result was that the Japanese now knew precisely what the defenders were going to do. Three different attempts by men from the Assam Rifles, who knew the terrain well, also failed to get through to Brown. Eventually an Assam Regiment officer managed to slip through the Japanese lines and warn Brown. The battalion adjutant, Captain Michael Williamson, heard firing and shouting on the southern perimeter as men responded to what they thought was a Japanese probe, ‘but very soon we heard John Corlett [the messenger] shouting like mad at us to stop firing’. But the message was too late for the isolated detachment at Kharasom.
As the crow flies, the village of Kharasom is just nine miles south of Jessami. But to men relying on a narrow jungle track it is twice that distance. Looking down the track towards the Chindwin at daybreak on 27 March, Captain John Young of A company, 1st Assam, saw a Japanese battalion approaching fast: the elephants hauling artillery, mules loaded with ammunition and supplies, and the long line of infantry with bayonets at the ready. Young ordered his mortars to open fire. Calculating the time it would take to reinforce his position, and the time it would take the Japanese to reach him, Captain John Young knew that A company would be fighting on its own. He had 120 men with him, including the mortar detachment and some signallers, and even though he had chosen a strong defensive position on top of a hill, Young, who was vastly outnumbered, understood that if he stood and fought he must eventually be overrun. But his orders were to fight to the last man and that was what he would do.
When he had arrived in Kharasom the previous month, Young had established his perimeter about three hundred yards outside the village and sent patrols out towards the border. Nothing was heard of the Japanese until the first V Force reports reached Brown at Jessami on 20 March. Four days later, Young welcomed a part of V Force and the Assam Rifles escaping the Japanese advance. At 0610 on 27 March 2nd Lieutenant D. B. Gurung heard the enemy attack. ‘It was felt that the attack was coming from all sides. The enemy was charging, shouting and firing as they charged.’ Young called Brown on the field telephone to tell him the shooting had started. It was the last the CO or anybody else heard from him. The line was cut just after his call. Now only a courier, or an extremely accurate message drop by the RAF, would be able to get orders to Young. Neither course was attempted. With the Japanese almost on t
op of his small force, it would probably have been too late.
The troops advancing towards him were from the 138th Regiment, an advance guard of the main 31st Division column making its way to Kohima. Lieutenant Chuzaburo Tomaru, a supply officer with the 138th Regiment, was hiding behind some rocks as the infantry went in. The first waves were mown down. ‘I saw killed infantry troops sent from front line again and again. Looking at them, I thought that this may be it.’ Tomaru had been drafted into the military in 1939 and moved from a machine-gun company to administrative work, a possible indication of his superiors’ view of his soldierly skills. Tomaru dreaded the enemy machine guns but did not have to join the attack. At Kharasom the Japanese had more troops than they needed. A commander on the right flank, instead of making direct for Kohima as directed, had decided to follow the sound of the guns and join the assaults on Kharasom and Jessami. The proverbial hammer was being taken to the nut. When General Sato came forward and saw the imbalance in forces he was livid. Why were so many men being deployed against such small objectives when they could be marching to Kohima? He upbraided the major who had deflected from his course: ‘Your correct course of action was to leave enough troops to contain the garrisons here and push on to Kohima.’
After Miyazaki’s delay at Sangshak, Sato was losing patience with commanders who were failing to see the wood for the trees. There were three Japanese attacks on Young’s positions before nightfall. All were repulsed. The defenders had laid out two lines of wire around the perimeter which made Japanese infiltration all the more difficult. Scores of Japanese were shot down in repeated assaults the following day.* Havildar Sohevu Angami, based with a mortar platoon back in Jessami, met one of the Assam survivors soon afterwards. ‘The man told me that Young shouted at them to “wait, wait” until the Japanese were very close before firing. He was brave that Young. There were so many Japanese but Young refused to surrender. The Japanese were screaming at our men all the time and Young was shouting out, “I won’t go, I won’t go.”’
Two days after the action began the Japanese managed to break into the perimeter, where the astonished defenders saw them gorging on animal feed; the shadow of hunger followed the 138th Regiment just as it had the 58th at Sangshak. By the morning of the third day the pile of bodies in front of A company’s positions was swelling and stinking in the heat. Young sent men to clear the corpses away and to repair breaks in the line. They were sniped at but succeeded in fixing the wire. Inside the perimeter Young’s situation was becoming impossible. He was running out of water, food and ammunition. On the morning of 30 March he saw fresh columns of Japanese arriving, and they continued to arrive throughout the day. Japanese spirits were also raised when they drove back an attempt to relieve Kharasom by Indian troops from the newly arrived 161 Brigade.
Young did not know about the failed attempt to relieve his position. Had he done so, it would surely have confirmed the painful decision he now made. Calling together his officers and NCOs, he announced that they were to evacuate under cover of darkness. However, he would not be going with them. As one of his officers, Lieutenant D. B. Gurung recalled, the captain, ‘seeing the hopelessness of the situation gave orders for the company to withdraw to Kohima’.
He told his officers he ‘could not leave the wounded’. Come nightfall, they were to filter through the lines and make for Kohima. Fifty-six men reached Kohima two days later. Young was last seen stacking grenades and Tommy-gun magazines in his bunker, where a wounded Indian soldier had joined him to man the Bren gun. The Nagas reported that the Japanese attacked at dawn. There was a short and fierce exchange of fire, followed by silence. Hugh Richards described Young in fulsome terms: ‘As an example of complete self-sacrifice nothing could be more magnificent. It is sad that such a gallant officer should have been lost.’ Despite such praise, John Young was never awarded any medal beyond those given to all who served in the Burma theatre. Had he been a cook at Dimapur he would have received the same acknowledgement. His family never complained publicly and the failure to honour him was never explained.* Later, the local Nagas told Charles Pawsey that the Japanese had been so moved by Young’s bravery that they had shaved his head in the tradition of fallen heroes and buried him with full military honours.
At Jessami Brown’s force had spent their time in ‘feverish preparation’, expecting the Japanese to arrive at any moment. Scouts reported columns advancing from the east and south of the village. One of the forward positions spotted a party of about twenty-four Japanese coming up the track. The concealed Assam troops waited until they were almost on them and then scythed down the advancing men. Two crawled away into the undergrowth. ‘Spirits soared as the news spread through the garrison,’ an officer recorded. The first that Havildar Sohevu Angami knew of the Japanese arrival was when he saw a comrade from the Kuki tribe being shot down. ‘The Japanese were screaming at us and we were screaming back at them. The sound of our voices stopped us being afraid. I have to say the Japanese were effective fighters. We could tell this straight away.’ The havildar was lightly wounded by a shell fragment which struck his forehead. He kept fighting, exhorting the men of his platoon as they fired mortars into the attackers. Over the next three days the Japanese infantry threw repeated attacks against the perimeter. Some broke through but the majority fell in tangled heaps. The Bren guns did murderous work. Soldiers scorched the flesh on their hands as they replaced the red hot barrels. ‘Japanese grenades and cracker-bombs were picked up and thrown clear of the trenches with all the calmness in the world, and there did not seem to be a man in the garrison afraid to carry out any task given to him,’ the War Diary recorded. By now the Japanese were pushing five battalions of infantry, a mountain artillery regiment as well as 31st Division Headquarters along the Jessami track, the bulk of ten thousand men. Brown’s position at Jessami had been under attack for three days when Hugh Richard’s messenger finally made it through. ‘We were shooting at him until we realised it was our own man,’ remembered Havildar Sohevu.
Hugh Richards’s orders called for the Assam Regiment to leave at 0300 hours, but the pressure on the perimeter was so great that Brown put off the move for twenty-four hours. Brown called a conference of his officers and told them the battalion would pull out at 0300 hours on the following day; they would travel in two large parties, one travelling east and the other west, both making for Kohima. The Japanese attacked throughout the day with concentrated artillery and mortar fire. Agonisingly for the defenders, an RAF plane came in low and dropped a message that fell directly into the hands of the Japanese. Brown now knew for certain that his plans for withdrawal were compromised. There was no question of waiting until 0300, when the enemy would be waiting for the move. Nor could the battalion move off in two large groups. Instead, smaller parties would filter out as soon as it was dark enough to do so. The withdrawal began at 1900 hours and continued until midnight, when the command post was evacuated and all documents destroyed. One of the last to leave was Sepoy Wellington Massar, the Khasi tribesman who had taken part as a human guinea pig in the fight to rid the hills of kala-azar. Massar had fought hard at Jessami, the pile of dead bodies outside his bunker attesting to his remorseless Bren-gun fire.
The Japanese did not strike during the evacuation. They had, however, prepared ambushes along the tracks leading away from Jessami. No sooner had the first troops moved off into the jungle than they faced Japanese attacks. As a result the battalion fragmented, with some troops heading towards Kohima, others reaching Dimapur, and some killed, wounded or captured by the Japanese. One British officer was beginning to go blind with shock and hunger but was saved by Naga villagers. He would later recall how they put him to sleep in a large double bed with the words ‘Home Sweet Home’ embroidered on the pillows. A group of sepoys and their havildar were captured by the Japanese and taken to a village where they saw a captured British officer with bleeding feet and a loose rope hung around his neck. He was kept away from the other prisoners. The group was forced to lie
on the ground where the Japanese guards taunted and jabbed at them with bayonets. One of the men, Sepoy Ngulkathang, struck out in fury and used his feet to knock down a Japanese officer. It was a fateful mistake. He was forced to his knees and beheaded. That night the havildar and other sepoys managed to undo their bonds, steal some weapons and flee into the jungle. In another incident Major Albert Calistan and a large column were leaving one end of a village as the Japanese were entering at the other. ‘Had the Japs caught up with us there is little doubt that most of my party would have been too weak to put up much resistance,’ he wrote. On arrival at Kohima Calistan and his party of 167 men were fed, clothed and given ‘a liberal issue of rum and cigarettes’. Out of an original strength of around 400 men Lieutenant Colonel Brown was able to call on 260 to help defend Kohima by the time the last of the stragglers reached the garrison on 3 April 1944.
By nightfall on 29 March, when the 1st Assam were still fighting for their lives at Jessami and Kharasom, 4th battalion, the Royal West Kents, had settled into temporary billets in Kohima. Battalion headquarters was set up in one of the hospital buildings, from which convalescing soldiers had been evacuated to Dimapur. The troops dug in around the position and the cooks got to work. In every new position the cooks played a role beyond the merely physical; they were the great normalisers, the men who kept the customary rhythms of battalion life moving. For the evening meal they served up bully beef rissoles, potatoes, carrots, plum duff and tea. As the men settled down for the night, much of the talk was about the nature of the terrain. From Dimapur the road climbed and dropped, passing into the gorge of Nichuguard, which ran for about four miles and was, according to a local tea-planter, ‘a fisherman’s paradise and a motorist’s nightmare. The road consisted of a ledge cut out of the almost perpendicular cliff. On the left the rock rose straight up to anything up to five hundred feet, on the right it fell sheer away to the river 200 feet below which flowed through the gorge in a series of rapids and tempting pools.’ The gorge offered the best position from which to defend Dimapur should the Japanese either bypass or breakthrough at Kohima. Leaving Nichuguard, the road climbed, skirting rice fields and brushing the side of steep cliffs. At Zubza, 3,000 feet above sea level, the West Kents caught their first glimpse of Kohima Ridge, ten miles away. The road climbed sharply once more, some 1,700 feet in a space of seven miles, before reaching Kohima, from where, looking south, they could see mountains and the ghosts of mountains, the brooding heights of Mount Pulebadze and Aradura Spur, whose jungle slopes could have concealed an army. Men felt dwarfed, crowded in by the immensity of the ranges.