by Fergal Keane
Lieutenant Tom Hogg was preparing to take over the positions vacated by A company. Hogg was one of only two remaining officers under Major John Winstanley. The others were dead or wounded. The positions at the tennis court were by now very precarious. The Japanese controlled not only the bungalow area but had infiltrated snipers into some cherry trees overlooking the West Kents’ positions above the court. The Japanese attacked three times on the night of 12 April, showering the defenders’ trenches with grenades as they came. Heavy mortar fire from B company helped drive them back. During one of the assaults Hogg had a moment of blind terror. He watched a dozen Japanese race towards his position in the centre, but when he raised his automatic rifle it jammed. A Japanese reached the edge of the trench and stabbed at him. The blade caught in Hogg’s webbing belt. There was just time to recock the weapon and empty an entire magazine into the attacker. The others swept past his trench and engaged John Winstanley’s position further back. B company held on, but casualties were mounting. Tom Hogg was saved when one of his NCOs sheltered him from a grenade, taking the full blast of shrapnel into his back. A Bren-gunner in one of the forward positions, right on the edge of the tennis court, survived repeated assaults by Japanese coming from just twenty yards away, before eventually being killed by a sniper.
Walter Williams was twenty-two years old, an apprentice plumber from Caernarvon, and already married. He was manning a Bren gun in a trench at the clubhouse. He and his partner fired into a dense mass of men coming from just a few yards away. The gun barrel glowed red in the darkness. Eventually it seized up and some Japanese who had crept around the clubhouse attacked. Williams’s partner was bayoneted and killed. Men were jabbing and striking. Williams grabbed a spade and jumped out of the trench to confront the Japanese. A soldier stabbed him with a bayonet and the blade sliced through his cheek and out of his nose. Enraged, Williams hacked at the enemy, using his spade like an axe. ‘That made me worse. Now I was very agile and tough in those days and I killed the chap that bayoneted my friend and I walloped one or two of the others and they ran away.’ Williams threw grenades after the fleeing men. He was taken to the ADS to have the bayonet wound treated. As he was being treated, a shell came in and killed the doctor attending him. ‘I must have a cat’s life really,’ he said.
The ADS was again hit by shelling just after dawn on 14 April and two casualties on whom Young had performed amputations were killed. A dugout with ten casualties received a direct hit, blowing to pieces everybody in it. Again, the process of dressing the rewounded and freshly wounded began. By 0930 hours a new ADS had been built. This one was 10 feet long by 6 feet deep, with a ‘splinter-proof roof’, and proved its robustness by taking a direct hit with little damage. Around midday Young lost one of his doctors to what the war diary calls ‘nervous exhaustion’. In the circumstances, it is extraordinary that only one man on the medical team is recorded as having succumbed.
That same day, as he waited to be relieved, Major John Winstanley looked out at the dead piled on the tennis court. ‘Somehow we hung on. The stench was terrible. The [Kohima] perimeter even to begin with was only hundreds of yards rather than miles and day by day as more and more shrinkage took place the place was just littered with our own and Jap bodies.’ As a regimental historian put it, ‘two days in this area was thought to be long enough’, and B company was pulled out and replaced by a company of the Assam Regiment. Tom Hogg counted what was left of his platoon. Himself and two other men. On 14 April, after nine days of fighting, the Royal West Kents’ strength had been reduced from around 444 to fewer than three hundred men, while the garrison as a whole had lost four hundred. With the fall of GPT Ridge, Jail Hill and Detail Hill, and the infiltration of the bungalow sector, the perimeter had now been reduced to roughly 500 by 500 yards. Word came through on 15 April from Warren at Jotsoma that relief could be expected in two days. All the garrison needed to do was hold on for that dangerous interval and they would be saved.
Richards and Young began making plans for the evacuation of the wounded. Word leaked down to the men in the trenches. Something like hope began to trickle through the lines. Some of the older hands were worried about the effect of raised expectations. ‘It was only snippets I heard from the Coy Commander,’ recalled CSM Bert Harwood of C company. ‘I didn’t tell the men … we were getting low in numbers anyway … it was best really to keep it to yourself … it would upset the morale … to think you might get relieved … You knew that they were so near and yet so far … You were thinking to yourself, “oh god, how much longer?”’ Private Leonard Brown, who faced the Japanese on the tennis court, recalled that there were messages from Colonel Laverty. ‘Every day Danny Laverty, the Colonel, said, “Hang on, if you let go India is falling” and day after day … we got the same reply coming back from the old man, “Hang on there [2nd Division] breaking through.”’ Major Calistan of the 1st Assam Regiment wearily noted that ‘we were continually hearing of 161 Bde coming up to relieve us, then 2 Div. being only 10 miles away, then tanks could be seen and so on, but as each day went by and still no reinforcements came up, we did not think there could be any truth in all these stories’. Havildar Sohevu Angami was among the Assam troops relieving the West Kents. As he made his way down the slope to the tennis court a sniper round whipped past. It killed Major James Askew instantly. The havildar was grimly fatalistic about the death. ‘I saw him being killed. He was giving us orders and going up and down and that is when they got him. I accepted it as the thing that will happen to you in the army. If your time will come it will come.’ Eight other Assam soldiers were killed or wounded. An officer moving into his position at the tennis court found several men leaning on the parapet in firing positions. He ordered them to move and then he pushed one. There was no response. They were all dead.
* * *
* A rank in the Indian Army, equivalent to Lieutenant.
* Richards refers to a pint per day, while other sources refer to a half-pint.
TWENTY
A Question of Time
General Stopford was buoyed by the good news. On 14 April he received a report from the 2nd Division commander, General Grover, ‘who thinks it may be possible to push on quickly tomorrow to clear up the whole situation at Kohima’. Ever mindful of the political pressure to wrap up the battle, Stopford took the news at face value. But Grover’s report was a considerable overstatement and at odds with what Hawkins of 5 Brigade had told him a few days before. Was Grover attempting to placate a superior whom he knew was anxious for swift progress? It is hard to imagine that he thought a swift victory was likely in the circumstances, with 4 and 6 Brigades of 2nd Division still deploying forward from Dimapur and the Japanese invested so strongly at Kohima. All the evidence pointed to a battle of attrition.
Had Stopford spoken to the troops working their way through the thick jungle towards Kohima, he might have come to a different appreciation. Brigadier Victor Hawkins described how a column he was leading became dispersed in the mountains. ‘We were now split into four parties. I was alone with ten unarmed men. It was getting on for daylight and I hadn’t the faintest notion where I was or how much farther we had to go. There was only one alternative and that was to keep going and hope that other people would do the same and that eventually we should all join up again.’ Hawkins was lucky. His group was reunited later that day. But the going was slow for troops who had never operated in a mountain environment before. Ron Thomas, a runner with 1 Royal Welch Fusiliers, 6 Brigade, marched for two hours through the jungle to find his unit. They were watching for Japanese trying to cut behind the advancing forces. Thomas was the son of a coal-miner from Wrexham and was working in a steel works when war broke out. He had just come from jungle training in India, but the thickness of the foliage here terrified him. ‘It is very seldom that you get a clearing and when you are walking knowing that there is some enemy in front, you are looking at every tree! You’re on pins.’
Lieutenant Geoffrey Page of the 1/8 Lancashire Fusi
liers, 4 Brigade, led small patrols which spied on the Japanese lines of communication around Kohima. ‘It was terrible. I was frightened to death most of the time. You spent your time with a platoon or just two or three chaps, miles behind the Jap lines. You get terrified. When I got back to the unit I broke down and cried. It was the mental strain and stress and the relief when you got back. Some patrols lasted a few hours … the worst one of all lasted all day because we were several miles to the east of where we were spying on the lines of communication and on three separate occasions we were within a whisker of walking into Japanese.’ Another Fusilier remembered the jungle quiet being broken by the sound of Japanese banging tins, and shouting: ‘Hey! Johnny, are you there?’
For troops new to the hills there were other surprises. Keith Halnan of the 7th Worcesters thought it would be a good idea if they were to bed down in some abandoned Naga huts. ‘This was a great mistake. There were mosquitoes and rats and there were bloodsucking leeches.’ Sitting among his comrades, Halnan found himself privately objecting to their foul smell, until he realised that he was smelling himself.
The British and Indian forces were edging closer to Kohima. With the road open to Warren at Jotsoma, General Stopford sent the newly arrived 6 Infantry Brigade up to join the relief effort. That would mean both 4 and 6 Brigades advancing to Kohima, while Hawkins and 5 Brigade held their present positions and deployed along the road to stop any Japanese attempts at encirclement. The artillery, tank and anti-tank components of 2nd Division were also arriving to add to the pressure on the Japanese. The threat to Dimapur had been extinguished, although Stopford still feared it was possible that the Japanese general might try to cut the railway, halting supplies going to China and infuriating the Americans. The 23rd Long Range Penetration Group (Chindits) and 1st battalion of the Queen’s Royal Regiment patrolled at different points along the line. Major Michael Lowry of the 1st Queen’s rode with a mobile column in a specially armoured train into which were crammed eighty-four mules, the troops of the 1st Queen’s and a mountain artillery battery. Passing over a series of bridges, ‘nine or ten of which were unprotected’, he noted how ‘there was nothing to prevent a few men of an enemy fighting patrol blowing one up, or even several, or perhaps the enemy might hold a vital bridge area in strength, covered from the jungle hills’. Lowry need not have worried. The time for such an initiative had passed. Sato would not be moving anywhere.
At General Sato’s jungle headquarters, about four miles from Kohima, intelligence was reporting an ominous build-up of British forces. As always, the general listened to the reports of his subordinates calmly. Inwardly he raged at Mutaguchi’s plans, which were ‘simply an essay written by children at their desk’. But, so far, the ill feeling towards his boss had been kept at the level of occasional comments to more trusted members of his staff. Sato listened and thought. Rising to inspect the map on the wall of his bamboo hut, he traced his finger along what his scouts believed were the lines of the British advance. He knew by now that his attempts to outflank the relieving forces had failed. The British had fought well and they had resisted the trap of encirclement. On the night of 15 April, an attempt had been made to cut the Dimapur road once more. But Hawkins’s men were waiting for them. The 33 Corps account states briskly, ‘they were thrown back and valuable documents captured’. At Zubza the 1st Cameron Highlanders captured an entrenched enemy position and CSM Tommy Cook, ex-Army boxing champion, seized a Japanese officer’s sword and slaughtered the owner and several others with it, for which he was awarded the DCM. Tommy was later killed in Naga Village.
Now the Imphal operation was stuck in the mountains, with two divisions unable to shift the British, and he was being held at Kohima, with more British reinforcements arriving by the hour. If Sato had premonitions of defeat at this stage, like any good general he kept them from his staff. His infantry commander, Miyazaki, had started out as a believer in the operation, and still gave his staff and soldiers an impression of commitment to it. Before setting out for Kohima, Miyazaki had delivered a stirring speech to his officers. They were to have faith in one another, he said, and to see the officers and men of the Imperial Army as the divine arms and legs of the emperor. He also warned them of the challenges they would face. ‘Enemy planes and firepower are, as you know, usually superior in numbers. Even in jungle fighting its progress has been quite rapidly advanced recently. When the enemy challenges us, usually they are thoroughly prepared. Therefore, never underestimate them.’ But then Miyazaki lapsed into the hyper-confident rhetoric characteristic of so many Japanese generals, scorning the determination of the British and Indian forces. ‘They are men without fighting spirit, a slave-like army without unity and without any noble cause. Their commander’s capabilities are very limited, they lack quick decisive action, and are afraid of shock action. They have innumerable weak points … You, gentlemen, will answer the enemy’s challenge, go out and meet them without fear and “bring home the bacon” … You must crush the enemy’s will to oppose.’
The Royal West Kents, the Assam Regiment, and all the others who were despatched to fill gaps in the defences made a mockery of his assertions. But Miyazaki consoled himself that the perimeter was still shrinking. All it would take was for a breakthrough at the tennis court and Garrison Hill could be taken. Like Sato, he did not know the full scale of reinforcements coming up from Dimapur, although he already understood the British advantage in air supply and artillery. But that would matter less if the infantry could seize control of all of Kohima Ridge. Miyazaki knew it was a defensive position that could sap the blood and time of several enemy divisions. The orders from imperial headquarters had been to establish a line that could be held through the monsoon, until there was time to bring up reinforcements from Burma. That was still possible.
Miyazaki was impressed by his men’s bravery. He did not control the individual decisions of company or platoon commanders in the heat of battle, but he did approve an overall strategy that pressed the sheer weight of numbers against the defender’s guns. Against a resolute defence it guaranteed high casualties. To the Western observer there is an understandable temptation to view Japanese officers as profligate with the lives of their men, or to take the view, as Slim and his commanders did, that the Japanese were tactically unimaginative. But Miyazaki was gambling on the breakthrough that would bring the siege to a sudden end. Miyazaki had two mottos as a soldier: the first was ‘Total Effort’; the second ‘Get to the Objective’. They were to the forefront of his mind as the siege now entered its most decisive phase.
In a prison camp at the war’s end, Miyazaki wrote a memoir of Kohima. It used a narrative device made famous by the Japanese novelist Soseki Natsume, who wrote a book in which his pet cat is the authorial voice. Quirky and subtle, it is a device popular in a culture where deep feeling is so often expressed at a remove. In Miyazaki’s case the story is narrated through the voice of his pet monkey Chibi, which he carried with him throughout the war. Referring to one of the failed assaults he wrote: ‘That night attack failed but I realised my master gets stronger and stronger the greater the hardship.’ If the defenders thought their firepower would stop Miyazaki, they would be shown how wrong they were. He would attack while he thought there was any chance of breaking through. The 58th Regiment could be thrown back once, twice, twenty times, but as long as he thought a gap might open up they would fight on. For General Miyazaki the battle was still young; many of the men had fought long and hard in China and others at Guadalcanal and still emerged strong to fight at Kohima. Hundreds had been lost in the past fortnight. They were low on food and ammunition was growing short, but they had water and their trenches and bunkers were deep and solid. Miyazaki stressed that he wanted attacks that had a real military purpose, not glorious suicide charges for honour and the emperor. ‘I feel sorry for the soldiers who committed suicide in battle. I believe it is important to live life and to bring more men home alive.’
But for Sato, who was dealing with Mutaguchi a
nd asking for the promised food supplies, disillusionment was growing. Later he would say bitterly, ‘It had been planned that 31 Div should receive supplies amounting to ten tons per week, of which seven tons were to be foodstuffs. These were to be transported to the CHINDWIN and Westwards to KOHIMA until such time as IMPHAL fell and the IMPHAL – KOHIMA road could be used to supply the division … the Division received NO rations of any kind.’