by Fergal Keane
Swinson was with the vanguard of 5 Infantry Brigade as it prepared to advance towards Kohima. The brigade was made up of three battalions – one each from the Cameron, Dorset and Worcestershire Regiments. Their first task would be to reach Warren and 161 Brigade, and then to relieve the garrison at Kohima before the Japanese could sweep through to Dimapur. Nursing a vile cold and with his brigadier, Victor Hawkins, in a bad temper, Swinson regarded the coming days with foreboding.
On 11 April, while the West Kents were regrouping after the loss of Detail Hill, Swinson was sorting out a great traffic jam on the road. Hawkins was reduced to fury by the absence of road discipline among the Indian drivers. ‘They went when and how they liked. If they didn’t like they just stopped – or tried to. They parked anyhow and anywhere and trying to get things done with them was like a nightmare.’ The brigadier told Swinson to sort out the mess before the Japanese started shelling ‘or there’d be hell to pay’. It was here that Swinson saw the first wounded men from the battles being fought up the road. These were men of the 7th battalion, Worcestershire Regiment, sent to hold the Japanese at bay while the rest of 5 Brigade deployed. Most of them were not badly wounded but in deep shock; it was their physical expressions that struck Swinson most profoundly. The men’s eyes were weary and there was an uncontrollable tremor in their voices. He was told that an officer he knew well, a man named Watkins, had been the first to be killed, and remembered back to ‘the wild days after Dunkirk when he joined the Regiment, a shy boy who never quite succeeded in coming to terms with life’. Watkins had been afraid of women and ill at ease with men, and lived aloof from his fellows. ‘Perhaps he would have found his niche and stumbled on the happiness his rare spirit was seeking. But 25 years was not enough.’*
The following day, 12 April, Swinson was temporarily rid of his brigadier, who had gone to establish a headquarters near Zubza, about ten miles from Kohima. Before leaving, Hawkins had addressed a gloomy gathering of his officers. He was going ahead even though the brigade was not yet ready. Troops were still arriving but the need to stop the Japanese was too urgent to wait. Kohima was encircled, Warren and 161 Indian Brigade were cut off, and the Japanese were now threatening 5 Brigade on the Dimapur road. The spectre of a swift attack on Dimapur while the British were still deploying loomed over the gathering. Battalions from the Cameron Highlanders, Worcestershire and Dorsetshire regiments were coming into the line, but there was no sure answer to the question that still haunted Slim: could they do it before the Japanese took Dimapur? When Hawkins arrived at Zubza and was able to view the terrain he quickly realised that his brigade could not hope to take Kohima on its own, as Grover had ordered. ‘I was a bit appalled at my original orders.’ He persuaded General Grover to come and see for himself. The result was a compromise. The garrison would be relieved first and then there would be a discussion about driving the Japanese out. Through the second week of April the Camerons, Dorsets and Worcesters were all involved in fighting towards Kohima.
Captain Keith Halnan of the 7th Worcesters had gone ahead with the troops trying to break through to Warren. Like Swinson, he tried to keep clear of Brigadier Hawkins. ‘He was rather stick in the mud … He disliked my background. I wasn’t regular. He probably thought I knew too much.’ Halnan was a medical student at Cambridge when the war broke out and was gifted with a precocious intelligence. It occasionally caused him trouble, and was almost certainly at the root of his problems with the brigadier. He had alienated a previous CO by producing a paper on radar and sending it off to GHQ without consulting his boss.
Halnan initially felt relieved to be out of his previous camp, littered as it was with the excrement of previous occupants. Then the shelling began. Halnan was blown to the ground. When he recovered he saw that his batman, Private Gordon Ollier, had been killed. Halnan then made the frightening discovery that a piece of shrapnel had penetrated his wallet. The wallet was sitting in a pocket directly over his heart. The shelling gave Halnan his first sight of dead bodies. That evening he had to recover the possessions of his batman and write a letter to the man’s family, a task he found far more difficult than looking at the dead. He found that he could remember nothing of the incident, not even the fact that Ollier had been standing beside him. Shock had wiped his memory clean. Nonetheless ‘everybody dug holes much more effectively and better after that’.
Brigadier Hawkins worried about the rawness of his troops. An early attack on a Japanese position had failed because ‘we had done so many exercises and always made them as real as we could that the chaps were finding it difficult to realise they were on the real thing at last’. As 5 Brigade advanced, by night the local Nagas guided a long column of men away from the road and across the hills in a flanking move. ‘We went in single file down several thousand feet at night,’ Halnan recalled. The men wore plimsolls to reduce noise and carried their boots around their necks. Halnan could hear some distant shellfire but not much else. Occasionally a shell whistled as it went overhead. Before setting out the men were issued with FS1 cards which, Halnan recalled, said, ‘I am well. I will be writing as soon as possible. Everything is alright.’ His father had been given the same card at Ypres, just before he was gassed.
CQMS Fred Weedman of C company 7th Worcestershire Regiment was following his mules along the same precarious path. To one side there was a cliff-face and on the other a soaring drop into the darkness. The mules picked their way along expertly, ‘never faltering or stumbling’. On the morning of 12 April the company took up position on a hill to the east of Zubza which offered a good view of the local countryside. Barbed wire was run around the perimeter, with tin cans attached; ledges were dug in the trenches for lining up grenades. The following night a corporal heard movements outside the perimeter at around 2330 hours. The warning was passed via ropes which had been run from the company headquarters trench to all the others around the perimeter. A tug at the end of the rope meant ‘stand to’. Dozens of eyes stared out into the night, but with no moon they could see nothing. The darkness crowded on the lips of their trenches. They heard woodpeckers tapping in the jungle. Some men thought it might be the enemy signalling to each other. Fred Weedman sensed an attack was coming, and wondered if the enemy would be the snarling, bloodthirsty creatures he had been told about. There was a twanging noise, a wire being cut. Every heart inside the perimeter pounded. Orders were quickly whispered by section commanders and the ‘night was split asunder with deafening explosions followed by the screams of the Japanese wounded’.
Weedman heard bullets hit the trees and others ricocheted into the darkness ‘like an angry bee’. After a long exchange of fire there was silence. Nobody in the Worcesters’ trenches relaxed. A second attack came at half past two in the morning. Now the Japanese made no attempt at silence. A screaming wave attacked the right flank and ran straight into a curtain of Bren and rifle fire. Weedman heard his company commander shout to the cooks, clerks and batmen to fix bayonets and be ready in case the enemy broke through. Again the attack was beaten back. In the morning the sentries found seventeen Japanese rifles strewn about the hill, all of them outside the perimeter. A body lying about twenty yards away was seen to move. A puff of smoke rose from it. It might have been a phosphorus grenade. ‘He smouldered for the rest of the day and slowly burnt himself to death.’ Another Japanese body was dragged inside the perimeter and searched for maps or documents. When the men had finished, the corpse was placed in a shallow grave. A private composed an ‘epitaph’ which was placed on the man’s grave:
Little Jap upon the hill,
Very cold, very still,
To the top he tried to get,
He doesn’t know what hit him yet!
The trek towards the Kohima front had its bizarre moments. Fred Weedman was leading the mules, loaded with boxes of stew, up a steep trail in the jungle and saw one Japanese carrying another on his back. Weedman threw a grenade and there was a scream, quickly followed by a burst of Japanese machine-gun fire. At this poi
nt a mule named Gladys went wild and sprayed the area with boiling-hot stew. The Japanese vanished.
Far above Weedman, in the world of the Generals, Stopford was urging Grover onwards. When the latter said he worried about being cut off from water, Stopford brushed aside his concerns. ‘The relief of Kohima must be carried.’
General Slim was feeling marginally less anxious. Flying between his Comilla headquarters and the bases at Dimapur and Imphal, he was ‘beginning to see light’. At Imphal the Japanese were still battering away fruitlessly; with air supply and a continuing flow of reinforcements the risk of losing 4 Corps was rapidly receding. Like Stopford, he watched the build-up of British forces at Dimapur and read the reports of enemy losses around Imphal, Sangshak and Kohima, and concluded that the tide could soon turn. By 11 April, Grover and two of his brigades were at Dimapur with a third just arriving. In addition, Brigadier Lancelot Perowne’s 23 Long Range Penetration Brigade (Chindits) had been tasked to guard the railway line and then to move out to attack the Japanese lines of communication around Kohima.
The Japanese had Kohima in a stranglehold, but Slim knew their advance had been costly. ‘For their gains they had paid a higher price in dead and wounded, and, above all, in time, than they had calculated on their plan.’ Slim had an approximate parity in numbers of troops in the area, and would soon have superiority when the 7th Indian Division arrived from the Arakan; but, above all, he had the air support and supply lines essential for victory. ‘As I watched the little flags representing divisions cluster round Imphal and Kohima on my situation map, I heaved a sigh of relief. As the second week of April wore on, for all its alarms and fears I felt that our original pattern for the battle was reasserting itself.’
That was the big picture, but, as Slim acknowledged, it was by no means the complete one. Hugh Richards and the Kohima garrison were in ‘dire peril’. Warren was held up on the road outside Kohima. There was still time for Sato to overrun the garrison, or to sidestep it and keep moving towards Dimapur and the railway. Slim wanted to fight his battle not on the railway but at Kohima. If the Japanese took Kohima Ridge in its entirety, it would take months of fighting – as Pawsey and Richards had warned – to shift them, and would delay Slim’s plans for an offensive into Burma. This strategic reality was behind Slim’s original decision to make a stand at Kohima. Subsequently he had agreed with Stopford when the latter feared Dimapur would be the target. Now, after acknowledging that error, Slim resolved to make Kohima his battleground by diverting resources from Imphal; as he put it, ‘at the cost of skimping Scoones I must nourish Stopford’. There had been serious mistakes in his reading of Japanese intentions – mistakes he honourably acknowledged – but Slim was right to believe that the battle was still his to win.
Defeat at Kohima would wreck everything he had worked for since the retreat of 1942. Slim had forged a new army, despite being starved of resources and facing Churchill’s scepticism and, frequently, American hostility. He had instilled in the men of 14th Army the belief that they could win. The damage to morale of defeat would be catastrophic, let alone the ramifications for relations with the Americans and for the fragile political situation in India. Slim was always alert to the political as well as military dimensions of his battles, and at Kohima this filtered down to his subordinate commanders, who felt the pressure for swift advances in a landscape where they were frequently impossible.
For now, the political priority was maintaining American air support. As Mountbatten’s chief of staff, Lieutenant Sir Henry Pownall, wrote: ‘The hard fact is that the Americans have us by the short hairs … We can’t do anything in this theatre, amphibious or otherwise, without material assistance from them … So if they don’t approve they don’t provide, and that brings the whole project automatically to an end. They will provide stuff for north Burma operations … but they won’t for anything else … who pays the piper calls the tune.’ Slim’s Burma battle would have American air support for as long as it served the American interest in keeping open links to Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese army.
Recognising the reality of the threat from Mutaguchi, Churchill backed to the full Mountbatten’s push for more American aircraft. At a Cabinet meeting on 11 April, Churchill told his ministers that air transport was the key to success. The dramatic airlift from the Arakan had convinced him of that. ‘We should not hesitate to press the United States authorities to make still further air transport available, at the expense of transport to China, if the urgent needs of the battle justify this.’ He had already signalled Roosevelt to this effect.
Slim’s entire plan, and the lives of the men at Kohima and Imphal, would depend on the continuing success of the relationship. Mountbatten played the Americans with skill. They would get the offensive action they wanted to protect the supply line to China, but American planes would be needed to do it. Writing to Roosevelt at the end of March, he had stressed that ‘without air transport and air supply we are tied to roads which we have to build behind us across the most wild and desolate mountain jungle I have ever seen. Without overwhelming air support it would take years to drive the Japanese out of Burma.’
Mountbatten also kept up his morale-boosting trips to the frontline areas. Sergeant Jim Campion, of 1/8 Lancashire Fusiliers, was preparing to depart from Bangalore for the Kohima front when Mountbatten arrived. ‘He was given a tremendous ovation when he said (I quote) “I know the brothels have been out of bounds since you arrived, but as from now, the ban is lifted. So, in the short time you have left here, make the best of it.” This order was duly complied with.’
Arriving in Imphal on 8 April, Mountbatten went to see the 4 Corps Commander Scoones, whom he found ‘full of bounding enthusiasm and [who] told me that in every encounter there with the Japanese we are getting the better of them’. Mountbatten was nearly ninety miles by road from Kohima, but the road was cut and beyond the Japanese roadblocks a vision of hell was unfolding, hardly imaginable to the supreme commander. Mountbatten was introduced to a Japanese prisoner who assured him he was being treated well, ‘the same as your prisoners are receiving from the Japanese’. The statement provoked a rare outburst of fury in Mountbatten’s diary. ‘When I think of what they have been doing to our prisoners it makes me sick,’ he wrote. He had been told a few days before of an incident in which a mule train of the West Yorkshire Regiment had been captured by the Japanese. Twenty-three men were caught, tied to trees and flogged until they passed out. When they recovered consciousness, a Japanese officer killed them all, except one, with a bayonet. ‘The one who did not die and eventually recovered had twenty-one bayonet thrusts in him. This is only a sample of the many atrocity stories I am beginning to collect.’ Mountbatten returned to Delhi on 13 April, impressed with the ‘dash and go’ of everybody he had met at the front and despairing of the negative atmosphere in the capital. Soon afterwards, and at the height of the Kohima fighting, he moved his headquarters to Kandy in Ceylon.
The great struggle at Kohima existed on the war’s periphery. It is important to remember the larger context of the spring of 1944. The CIGS, General Brooke, and Churchill were preoccupied with planning the greatest invasion in history: D-Day was only six weeks away, and in Italy, allied forces were engaged in a bitter struggle to break out of the Anzio beachhead. However, it was not that the Asian theatre was ignored. Rather it was a source of deep discord. Churchill provoked the most bitter dispute of the war with the Chiefs of Staff over his demand for amphibious landings in South-East Asia. The plan, codenamed ‘Operation Culverin’, involved a classic piece of Churchillian dash, leapfrogging from Sumatra to Singapore and Rangoon, and obviating any need for a slog through the Burmese jungles. Brooke was exasperated at plans he regarded as impractical and a distraction. After a meeting with the Chiefs of Staff on 17 March where Churchill had pressed the case for an invasion of Sumatra, Brooke wrote in his diary: ‘I began to wonder whether I was in Alice in Wonderland, or whether I was really fit for a lunatic asylum! I am honestly getting ver
y doubtful about his balance of mind and it just gives me the cold shivers. I don’t know where we are or where we are going regards our strategy, and I just cannot get him to face the true facts! It is a ghastly situation.’ According to Brooke’s account, after another meeting five days later the Chiefs had decided ‘it would be better if we all three resigned rather than accept his solution’. Yet another discussion of ‘Operation Culverin’ a few days later left Brooke feeling ‘like a man chained to the chariot of a lunatic!! It is getting beyond my powers to control him.’ The matter was settled not by Brooke or by Churchill, but by Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi who, as the debate raged in Whitehall, was busy changing the facts on the Indian frontier.
Kohima is mentioned in the notes of War Cabinet meetings and in the weekly summaries prepared for Churchill by the Chiefs of Staff. On 3 April, the War Cabinet was given an optimistic, if not utterly misleading, version of events. ‘To the north, other Japanese forces that had cut the road between Imphal and Kohima had been driven back. Japanese forces in this area had been drawn off in order to deal with our penetration groups further to the east.’ Throughout the first weeks of the siege there is no specific reference to Kohima or to Imphal in Brooke’s diaries, although on 12 April the CIGS met Mountbatten’s deputy chief of staff ‘to discuss India and Dickie Mountbatten’s problems’. A day later he met with Orde Wingate’s former second-in-command, George Symes, when Burma was discussed, followed by an hour with ‘Rowland from Indian Civil Service on grain sitn etc.’ Brooke was not indifferent to the war in the Far East; the lack of detailed reference in his diaries simply reflects the scale of priorities he faced. But he was hostile to allocating more resources to Burma. His pragmatism rebelled against adventures that consumed scant resources for an imperial cause that he already feared was lost. Back in February 1942, when news of Singapore’s fall was coming in, he had written: ‘I have during the last ten years had an unpleasant feeling that the British Empire was decaying and we were on a slippery decline!’