by Fergal Keane
Masao Hirakubo’s immediate preoccupation was with finding food supplies. He discovered a huge warehouse containing what he estimated was three years’ supplies for the entire 31st Division. It was an unimaginable treasure trove. Men were hurriedly set to work dragging bags back to a safe storage position. Hirakubo took what was required for his own battalion and left the other supply officers to look after their men. The British across the road in Kohima were now awake to what was happening and the warehouse was promptly bombed and the rice burned to ashes. It was a small moment at the beginning of a great battle, but it would resonate through the weeks to come.
The war correspondent Yukihiko Imai was with the first troops into the Naga Village. He sent an excited message to Tokyo which was immediately flashed around the world. ‘Kohima has fallen,’ it declared. The report was seized on by Mutaguchi, delighted to have some good news for his anxious superiors. Henry Turner, a Royal Artillery officer, was a prisoner of war on the Burma railway and heard the news from a gleeful guard. ‘I recall working on the railway one day, when a Nippon corporal, who was in charge of our party, announced that India had been captured by the mighty Nippon forces. We learned afterwards that they were at Kohima near Imphal and that technically they were on Indian soil. We were delighted with this, because it meant a break of a few minutes in our work. In order to keep the conversation going, we asked about Europe and were told that mighty Nippon had long ago conquered Europe. Apparently they had not heard of Hitler, who was the resident landlord at the time.’ But a British denial was quick in coming via the Reuters news agency. Imai later gracefully acknowledged that he had been wrong.
The Naga Village lay outside the northern end of Richards’s defensive perimeter and it gave the Japanese a foothold for mortars and artillery. Closer to Kohima Ridge they began building bunkers and trenches for the infantry, overlooking Hugh Richards’s headquarters on Garrison Hill and Charles Pawsey’s bungalow. There were also Japanese gun positions to the south on Aradura Spur, the 5,000 foot ridge where the British patrol had been scattered the previous day.
At the other end of the perimeter, on GPT Ridge, Lieutenant Donald Elwell of the 1st Assam discovered that his platoon of mule drivers was now on its own after a composite Indian company had fled. Elwell set off alone to find reinforcements and was given a platoon of the unfortunate Shere Regiment. On his way back he felt the ground heave as the Japanese started shelling. The Shere Regiment troops vanished. Fire whipped through the vegetation from garrison troops nearby. Elwell got back to find that his own troops had fled. Back he went again to get reinforcements, always one step ahead of the mortar blasts. He eventually rounded up his own men and a company of Gurkhas and went back to the ridge. As the day progressed, the Japanese increased their bombardment. That night, INA soldiers in the front line began calling out to Indian troops to change sides. Intriguingly, the Assam Regiment war diary refers to the ‘defection’ of some Indian troops; this, and the bombardment, ‘affected the Gurkhas, some of whom withdrew during the night’. The remainder fought bravely and suffered heavy casualties. Japanese infantry were now swarming on to the ridge and outnumbered the defenders. By dawn, the remaining defenders had withdrawn from GPT Ridge to Jail Hill. The first of Richards’s positions was gone.
Arriving at Jail Hill the ninety or so survivors found there were no trenches for them. Those that did exist were occupied by Assam Regiment troops and had been dug too shallow by garrison labour. Japanese shelling had already caused a large number of casualties and panicky shooting by garrison troops was getting worse. An Assam Regiment captain worried that his ‘men were shaky and control by the NCOs was poor’.
The rain had only stopped just before midnight and had nearly ruined the troops’ enjoyment of the Jane Wyman film Tail Spin, a tale of daring in the skies projected on to a screen under the slender shelter of a basha. Private Norman was aggravated by the downpour but had found yet another dietary consolation. Padre Randolph, ascetic and lean, looking as if he had never enjoyed a meal in his life, had taken over running the tuck shop. Norman enjoyed the packet of biscuits he had purchased. While he and the rest of the battalion struggled through the film, Lieutenant Colonel John Laverty was attending a conference with Brigadier Warren.
Now that the entire Japanese 31st Division seemed about to arrive in Kohima, Warren explained, the West Kents would have to go back up the road as quickly as they could. Transport would be ready to move them at dawn. At 2330 hours Laverty gave orders that the battalion was to be ready to move off at 0630 hours. The men knew that an order that late at night meant they were heading into battle. They had heard about the Japanese probes the previous day. There were curses about the incompetence of the brass. Sending them all back down to near Dimapur meant the West Kents had lost three full days when they could have been working on the defences and getting to know the lie of the ground.
The trucks arrived at 0430 hours. Inside the cabs, exhausted Indian drivers rubbed the sleep from their eyes. They ferried men and supplies, day and night, up and down the road to the British positions along the road to Kohima. Captain Donald Easten and the other company commanders were busy supervising the loading of equipment and supplies. Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes thought it was all a bit of a ‘scurry around. They said “into the trucks we’re going back to Kohima.”’ NCOs like himself and Lance Corporal John Harman moved around, hurrying the men along, making sure no important pieces of kit were left behind. Before they left, the cooks served up a breakfast of tea, porridge, fried eggs and sausage, before packing up their utensils and joining the convoy to the threatened village.
The West Kents made up the main body of the convoy. With them were supporting artillery – four guns – as well as sappers and a field ambulance platoon. The rest of 161 Brigade, including Brigadier Warren, would follow the advance group up the road. Lieutenant John Faulkner had only just joined the battalion and was posted to A company. It was his first appointment, and first experience of battle, after having been commissioned in Bangalore two months previously. Faulkner was stocky, with fair curly hair and penetrating blue eyes, and had been born in Bombay where his father worked for the Greaves Cotton Company. When his mother became ill with malaria, Faulkner was brought home to Plymouth, where his father took a job as manager of the Spillers flour mill. John was sent to Plymouth College, a private school, and groomed to follow his father into the flour business. In fact, he was working as a trainee at Spillers when war broke out. ‘We think he may have lied about his age to get in early,’ his daughter Margery said. ‘He joined the army before being conscripted, very keen!’ John Faulkner shared the Irish Protestant roots of his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Laverty; his maternal grandfather, who came from Cork, had been a career soldier in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. As the convoy moved up towards Kohima, Faulkner was ‘fully expecting and prepared to meet opposition around the next bend’. But in the initial stages all was quiet. The schoolteacher Captain Harry Smith remembered being ‘entirely ignorant’ of what might await them until they met ‘groups of frightened non-combatants fleeing down the road’.
These were some of the men Richards had ordered out of Kohima. ‘There was all these bedraggled-looking troops coming down, all dispirited,’ Dennis Wykes recalled. ‘I thought to myself “if these are running the Japanese are not going to be far behind”.’ According to Ray Street, the fleeing men were shouting frantically and threw their weapons and bandoliers of bullets into the Royal West Kents’ vehicles. There were trucks packed with men, some hanging on to the back and sides as they hurtled down the road. ‘Others ran, trotted or walked. They all looked petrified.’
Private Ivan Daunt was staggered by the sight of so many fleeing men. ‘Blimey they come down the road, hundreds of them, all pulling out of Kohima. You know, orderlies, hairdressers all that sort of thing. Can you imagine?’ In addition to the ‘disheartening stream of deserters and stragglers’, Lieutenant Tom Hogg had by now learned that positions in Kohima were b
eing abandoned without a shot being fired. ‘Chaos and low morale reigned supreme. The prospect did not appeal.’ John Laverty travelled at the head of the convoy and watched the oncoming stream with growing unease. ‘Officers dispatched by the Commander of the Kohima garrison to meet the Bn … brought news of the contact battle, painting such a picture of disorganisation and lack of spirit within the perimeter …’ At one point he ordered the convoy to stop and sent word back along the line that the fleeing men were not deserters but were being allowed back to reduce the number of ‘mouths’ in Kohima.
It was partially true. Richards was still trying to rid Kohima of the non-combatants, who did nothing more than consume rations and provide targets for the Japanese. Laverty had a harder time explaining why fully armed men were among the throng. He decided to disarm any of them carrying automatic weapons that would be valuable to his own men. But the West Kents’ commander now faced his most difficult choice. For all he knew, Kohima might be about to fall; his signals men had tapped into the telephone line at the roadside but were unable to contact the garrison or 161 Brigade headquarters. In view of the emerging picture, was there any point in continuing? Might the better course of action be to return to a more defensible position along the road? Proceeding to Kohima, if it was already overrun, could result in the slaughter of his battalion. Laverty decided to go on, hoping ‘the situation would not have deteriorated to a complete collapse’ before his men were in.
Donald Easten’s D company was the first to come under fire. They were leading the convoy as it came into Kohima. Easten saw at least two of his men killed as they got down from the trucks. There was no time to ponder the losses. ‘We just debussed and charged into the position where we were told roughly where to go.’ The lead vehicles had come to a halt on the road close to Garrison Hill where Hugh Richards had his command post. Lieutenant John Faulkner of A company was among the first to climb the hill. He saw the truck ahead of him pull into the side of the road. There was a bend here and a high bluff on one side of the road, with a steep drop on the other. He marched his platoon up a pathway ‘past a very pleasant looking bungalow, round a cabbage patch, past two corrugated iron huts, across a flat stretch dotted with numerous tents and on up the main hill to the top’. The bungalow he had passed belonged to Charles Pawsey and would cease to look pleasant very shortly. As his men started to dig in, Faulkner heard bangs coming from the roadway below.
The Japanese gunners on ridge ranged the stationary convoy and began shelling. Lieutenant Hogg saw ‘all hell let loose with artillery and mortars. Shell and small arms fire came in from all sides.’ Private Ivan Daunt jumped off his lorry and crawled towards the steep bank for cover. The explosions set fires burning around him. ‘You can imagine, bang here, and bang there, and a lorry catching fire a few yards away and all the drivers shouting and hollerin’ … don’t know what to do, no one to lead them, tell ’em what to do.’ Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes was convinced the Japanese had waited until the convoy was right beneath them before opening fire. ‘We was staggered and shocked, but the Captain said “come on, out of the trucks,” and fortunately at the side of the road was a monsoon ditch.’ The men lay head to toe along the soaking ditch. Rounds cracked around their ears. Men were being wounded as they jumped out of the trucks. Wykes saw the doctors trying to treat screaming men in the shallow cover of the ditch. A pit was hastily dug for the wounded. But the mortars kept coming. ‘They were the worst. With an artillery shell you can hear it coming ’cos of the trajectory, but a mortar just comes right down on top of you.’ A private named Fred Worth was hit in the foot. ‘He said to me: “I got hit in the foot but when I shake me shoe I can hear it rattling.” I thought that was funny. When I went back later to see how he was getting on, he had died, as quick as that, from gangrene. It just galloped through his body and took him.’
The C company runner Ray Street saw lorries in flames and drivers running for their lives down the Dimapur road. Some were trapped in their blazing cabs. The next thing Dennis Wykes remembered was his captain walking up the road through the hail of fire and shouting at his men to get up and dig in. ‘So we all bolted up the hill in spite of the fire and dug in.’ Lieutenant John Wright, an officer of King George V’s Own Bengal Sappers and Miners, was travelling further back in the convoy. Having seen what was happening to the West Kents, he stopped half a mile away from the shelling, got his men on to the road, and started climbing the slope to Garrison Hill. Once on top, they began digging in at speed. Looking back down the Dimapur road, Wright witnessed the disheartening spectacle of troops fleeing. ‘We saw a large number of State Battalion [Shere Regiment] troops with their officers in front pass through our lines and shove off down the road back towards Dimapur.’ An Assam Regiment officer who saw the West Kents arrive felt relief. ‘There can be little doubt that had the battalion of the Royal West Kents not arrived that day, Kohima must surely have fallen before night was through. This fully equipped and fresh force, under command of Lieutenant Colonel Laverty, put new heart into the defenders.’
Laverty was met by Hugh Richards. ‘Our meeting was not happy,’ Richards remembered. He told Laverty how glad he was to see him and briefed him on the latest situation, as well as providing guides to the sectors where the West Kents were to deploy. Laverty was brusque. ‘Where’s Kuki piquet?’ he demanded. Taken aback, Richards pointed the way and Laverty marched off, followed by several of his staff. To Hugh Richards, Laverty’s attitude was inexplicable. It hurt and it would not be the last of rejections from the man who was technically his subordinate. It may have reflected something more than Laverty’s lack of interpersonal skills. The scenes on the road with stragglers streaming away in panic, the reports of units fleeing before they had fired a shot, had profoundly affected Laverty, as had his earlier reconnaissance when the West Kents had been briefly dug in before being pulled back to cover Dimapur. The badly dug trenches and the critical water situation convinced him that Richards and his garrison staff were incompetents who could not be trusted with the lives of his men.
In an account given to a sympathetic author, Laverty claimed to have found a British officer cowering in a foxhole at the start of the siege. ‘John stopped and said, “Who the hell are you?” The man replied, “I’m from the stores depot and I’ve got to get out of here quick. My men have all gone, the rotten bastards, and I’m no good. You must let me out I’ve got to get back to Calcutta.”’* Appalled, Laverty left him there and walked on. Anybody who has ever spent time in the company of well-trained troops on the front line will understand that hostility towards other formations is part of a long tradition; men need to believe their unit is the best if they are going to risk their lives. That ingrained sense of superiority is multiplied dramatically when they encounter line of communications troops like many of the Kohima garrison. Added to this was the battalion’s experience of successive disasters, from Dunkirk through Alam Halfa to the Tunnels.
There was a natural fear that the men holding the positions alongside them would cut and run. Given what had happened in the previous twenty-four hours it was a reasonable fear. Laverty found approximately 2,000 troops waiting in the garrison but ‘no account had been paid to the quality, organisation and leadership’ of these men. The Assam Regiment troops were exhausted from hard fighting and marching, and the rest of the British and Indian troops, while ‘excellent material … were not organised in proper fighting sub-units, did not know their officers and the latter did not know them’. The remaining 40 per cent of the garrison were line of communications troops or non-combatants, ‘a heavy liability, unable or unwilling to fight, whose low morale was a danger in itself, and whose supply requirements, protection and disposal was an extra burden on a strained system’. The real fighting strength of the garrison now, including the West Kents, amounted to about 1,500 men. This to face a Japanese force around 15,000 strong.
The 4th battalion war diary’s criticism of the garrison officers is an extraordinary combination of anger and co
ndescension. On the defensive preparations, it remarks: ‘The Garrison Comd’s own immediate HQ area was the only area well provided in this respect. Vital wireless sets were not dug in … Water points themselves were in exposed positions and no effort had been made to construct other points … no less than 5 separate uncoordinated R.A.P.s [regimental aid posts], not dug in, were operating when the Bn. Arrived.’ The clear implication is that Richards had taken care to make his own bunker safe while failing to ensure others were equally well protected. A disparaging reference in the diary to staff officers at Richards’s headquarters is scribbled over in thick pencil, Laverty apparently employing some restraint on re-reading the entry. Such restraint would vanish after the war, when accounts of Richards’s alleged failings began to appear. At least one 4th battalion officer was horrified by Laverty’s attitude. ‘Laverty brushed him [Richards] aside with an “I’m in charge now” sort of attitude, which was unfortunate,’ said Major Donald Easten. ‘You had these two men each saying, “I’m in charge.” And it was really uncalled for. He went around visiting chaps in the trenches and so on. I had great respect for him. He was an old man compared to us. But the sort of chap you had respect for. He was brave and a good soldier.’ The conflict was not limited to Laverty and Richards. The CO of the 1st Assam Regiment, ‘Bruno’ Brown, also clashed with Laverty. As one of his officers put it: ‘Friction soon arose over the exact distribution of command.’ After a row with the West Kents commander Brown, a far more combative character than Hugh Richards, left the headquarters area and set up his own command post.