by Fergal Keane
Captain Donald Elwell of the Assam Regiment was racing to escape Japanese mortar and sniper fire when he almost rolled in the doorway of a West Kent dugout. ‘Why don’t you come in, instead of cluttering up the doorway?’ a voice asked. With the mortars dropping close by, Elwell crawled in and was offered a cup of tea. ‘Sorry the missus isn’t in, Sir,’ his host declared. ‘Meanwhile, here we are and here we stay. That’s it, sir, isn’t it?’ Elwell could only nod in agreement.
If they were lucky, soldiers might catch an undisturbed hour or two of sleep. One man stayed awake, the other dozed. This was only in the daytime. Nobody risked dropping off at night. By 16 April John Winstanley and B company had moved from the tennis court and across Garrison Hill to Supply Hill, the next target for the Japanese on the southern perimeter. ‘Fatigue was the greatest danger,’ he recalled; ‘as a company commander you had to be on your toes ready to act around the clock and the Japs never stopped and if you relaxed for a moment you would be overrun.’
Anyway, there was always too much noise. The bloody whining of the voices from Japanese loudhailers urging them to give up, the howls of the human wave as it swept across the tennis court, and then the fractured symphony of battle: Bren guns rattling vengeance, grenades and mortars, and the artillery from Jotsoma and Zubza crashing along the perimeter, the sound of weapons and fists clashing in close-quarter combat. Then came the other noises: elongated screams of pain that only a man who had been in these the trenches for days would recognise as coming from a human being. Macabre as it might sound, there was comfort of a kind in this noise. It was better than the shivering silence before a night attack.
There could be some unusual visitations. Private Ivan Daunt heard a clattering noise coming from the road. ‘We heard all this noise and that coming up the road and it was a load of horses, and they drove the horses forward … then they attacked, they come with it, and they come up the bank attacked us up the bank … all we had to do when they come up was [throw] grenades, piece of cake that was.’ Thirty Japanese fell dead among the horses. On another night, a soldier listening to the wounded crying out for water heard from the Japanese lines a voice singing the Scottish ballad ‘Annie Laurie’, presumably an officer who had once lived in the West.
Come the morning, men felt the adrenaline flood away to be replaced by the most unimaginable exhaustion. Soldiers found their movements slowed and would often shake uncontrollably. The effects of fatigue and shock could turn men inwards. In a few, the small details of a human death could provoke much anguish. Dennis Wykes watched the burial of a soldier in a weapons pit. There was not enough earth to cover him properly and his toes stuck out. For some reason these uncovered digits made Wykes imagine the man as he might have been when he was a boy. He turned his face away. No point in letting those feelings get a hold of you, he told himself. There was a man called Napper in Wykes’s platoon who had a strange high-pitched laugh. It helped raise morale because it made everybody else laugh. One day towards the end, Napper cracked and told Wykes he was going. ‘This day he said to me, with the Japs attacking, “I’m off. I can’t stand for that lot. I’m going to go.” So I said, “If you want to be shot in the back you better go because we will shoot you in the back.” He didn’t run. They’re not all saints and not all good soldiers if it comes to the push. Let’s face it, if it comes to the push, we were all ordinary people in ordinary life before we came here, but we had to do the best that we could.’ Napper stayed put.
Ray Street of C company was under mortar fire on Garrison Hill when he saw a man called Williams climb out of his trench and start to run in panic. This was not like the man. Williams had come through Alam Halfa, and he had helped a shell-shock victim at the tunnels on the day of the friendly-fire incident. Williams had only made a few yards when a mortar landed directly in front of him. ‘Although badly injured he was well aware of what was happening and we carried him back to the first aid post … his injuries were severe and three days later, he died.’
What is striking in all the accounts of survivors from the frontline rifle companies is how few men cracked. The shared imperative of killing Japanese in large numbers certainly helped keep them mentally focused. At the back of every man’s mind was the knowledge of what would await anyone taken prisoner. Wykes had been up to the ADS and had seen his wounded friends lying in the open pits. He was convinced they would have been bayoneted immediately on surrender. For them, as much as for himself, he fought on. One story doing the rounds was of a West Kent who had been taken prisoner and had had his eyes gouged out with barbed wire. It may or may not have been true, but in battle with the Japanese the men were conditioned to believe the worst. Private Len Brown confronted the screaming waves night after night. ‘No soldier is brave. We are all frightened. Every one of us was frightened. If we put our hands up and surrendered our battalion would have been finished … we knew that if the Japs had got us they would have shot us and tortured us.’
Captain Harry Smith felt the steady press of despair. ‘Day after day our hopes were dashed … we began to walk around like zombies.’ In the quieter moments officers watched their men for signs of shell shock, the dislocated stare into the distance, the lips mumbling non-stop, the trembling that was different, more intense, deeper, than the shaking they all suffered from. ‘They had lived surrounded by suffering and sudden death, noise, filth, and stench and some became callous as a result,’ wrote Lieutenant Pieter Steyn of the Assam Regiment. But Steyn was struck by the vagaries of human behaviour in battle. ‘A man who had watched without any emotion of any kind his friends fall and die would turn and give his last drop of water to a stranger in need of it.’
Up at the ADS, Lieutenant Donald Elwell of the Assam Regiment came across some of his wounded men. He was impressed that they tried to salute him even though they were lying on stretchers. What could he do for them? They could not move and it became clear that they had lost hope of being relieved, as one told him. ‘They will not be able to reach us, sahib; there are too many Japanese.’ He left, promising to come and visit them again. When he did, two days later, the trench was empty but stained with clotted blood. ‘Returning to my slit trench, I sat down to write to my parents and to my fiancée, but what was there to say? Censorship forbade us to say anything of the fighting. So we just wrote that we were well, we would write at length in the near future and we sent our love. It seemed a poor little letter, written with the stub of a pencil on someone else’s paper and saying nothing. I folded my cap badge into Pauline’s letter and thought it might be the last thing that I would ever send.’ Perhaps it would be found by a Japanese soldier searching the bodies, or be blown to shreds along with himself.
Men were cautious about any movement. Soldiers were continually being picked off by snipers. CSM Bert Harwood of C company was asked by an officer to organise a party to move some boxes of ammunition on Supply Hill, the next target in line for the Japanese attacking the southern perimeter. Harwood studied the ground and saw that anybody moving towards the ammunition in daylight would be shot. ‘I had an argument with him. I said, “You are asking to create more casualties by doing that at this particular time. We know it’s there, the Japs must know it’s there … rather than try and move it now in the daylight … it would have been much easier to do it in the dark.”’ Harwood believed another man was given the job and killed by a sniper.
Major Donald Easten of D company was in action again after having been wounded in the fight for Detail Hill. A shell fragment had lodged in his arm but he was keen to be away from the ADS and back with his men. He dealt with the constant tension by thinking of home. He knew that some of the men found this too painful. They lived only in the present and thought only of surviving for that day. But he found comfort in imagining himself with his new bride, Billie. His was the idealised imagery of a man who knows he may not live beyond the next hour: he saw the two of them walking in the Kent countryside in summer, or conjured visions of idling by a trout stream or riding to hound
s in winter along the North Downs. That love of the country was something he had shared with poor John Harman, lying now in his shallow grave on Garrison Hill. Survival here was pure chance, he thought, nothing but chance. Could they keep holding out? As long as the Japanese kept up the human-wave tactics there was a chance. The West Kents’ rifle companies had all lost up to half, in some cases more, of their numbers. But as long as there was ammunition for the Brens, and the artillery kept up its support, they could survive another few days. ‘Up until that time the Japanese had it a great deal their own way – and they suddenly came up against this dogged, bloody-minded British infantry attitude; they just bashed their heads against it and didn’t get anywhere. They didn’t vary their tactics at all. It was just wave after wave of attacks in the same positions and places.’
For all Miyazaki’s assertion that he did not want suicide attacks, to the defenders the assaults on the tennis court looked like a prolonged exercise in self-destruction. Private Leslie Crouch of the pioneer platoon saw the Japanese approach. ‘They were easy targets to hit. They didn’t seem to be afraid of death.’ But Japanese numbers were starting to count. Private Leonard Brown saw ‘literally hundreds coming at a time toward us, so much so that the manpower strength just pushed us back from one trench to a trench that was roughly ten foot behind us’. In some places the fighting see-sawed. The Japanese would gain the forward trenches and be driven back out by a counter-attack. The grappling, stabbing and hacking went on, back and forth, a murderously intimate duet in which men looked into each other’s enraged and frightened eyes as they manoeuvred for the killing strike. Some of the men would remember their bayonet training at Axminster in the bitter winter of 1940, a lifetime ago; hours had been spent plunging their blades into sacks of tightly packed straw. How the instructors had yelled at them then, Go low up and in to the hilt, use your foot if the blade gets stuck. They had cursed the endlessness of it, the boredom and the play-acting, as their fingers froze. Now they pushed their blades home into the sinewy frames of Japanese, slicing through gut and scraping bone, or trying for a quick blow to the throat, parrying the enemy’s attempt to do the same. The dead or dying Japanese lay heavy on the end of a rifle and a soldier might allow the body to topple backwards before placing his foot on the man and wrenching the blade free, making sure that he never dropped his guard but kept his eyes open, through the smoke and noise, for another enemy who might be creeping up on him. One soldier paid dearly for his attempted panache. He tried to remove a small Japanese from his bayonet by hoisting him and tossing him to one side. As he did so, a Japanese officer came up and slashed him almost in half with his sword.
Down on the tennis court the Assam troops who had replaced John Winstanley’s B company found their store of rage and hurled it at the Japanese. At dusk on 16 April a party of four men, led by a local Naga corporal, jumped out of their trenches and raced down the slope and across the court. The commander, Major Albert Calistan, could sense the tension rising among his soldiers. They had survived the encirclement of Jessami and fought their way through the jungle to Kohima, but the constant shelling and the shrinking of the perimeter had shaken them. Now they could hardly move during the daytime without drawing sniper and machine-gun fire. The best way to deal with it, Calistan decided, was to take the fight across the tennis court. This would lift the feeling of impending doom. It might also, of course, result in getting every one of the raiding party slaughtered. But Calistan sensed that if he did not take a risk to boost his men’s morale the chances would grow of a Japanese breakthrough at the tennis court. Calistan had two Bren guns giving suppressing fire from left and right. One of them was manned by Sepoy Wellington Massar, who had proved his courage in the fighting at Jessami.
On the night of the raid, Wellington Massar put his Bren gun on the billiard table of the ruined clubhouse on the slope above the tennis court. It gave him a good line of fire over the Japanese trenches, but once he started firing Japanese in other positions would easily spot him. The raid would have to be swift. Before they left the trenches the men would remove the pins from their grenades, giving them seconds to sprint the twenty yards to the Japanese trenches. The Japanese were taken unawares. The machine-gun team was killed and documents and an officer’s sword were captured. But as the raiders raced back, Wellington Massar’s gun jammed. The Japanese had time to raise their heads. He was quickly spotted and shot in the leg, rolling off the table and crashing to the floor. Despite the pain, Massar levered himself back on to the table and resumed firing until the raiding party was back. Carried out of the clubhouse under cover of darkness, he refused to be taken to the ADS, possibly deciding he was safer in his own trench than out in the open under shellfire, and that a journey uphill under the eyes of snipers would risk his comrades’ life. He would linger for several more days before dying. Major Calistan sent a message to Richards saying that he would rather remain on the tennis court ‘to avoid the casualties inevitable in the process of relief’. The rush attacks had stopped. Now the Assam men watched for small parties of the enemy racing up in the dark with bombs made from slabs of guncotton. One of these would have blown the occupants of a trench to pieces, but every attack was stopped by accurate fire. Calistan had been observing the Japanese tactics carefully. ‘We soon came to know that the Japs worked to a timetable, for almost without fail he tried something every dusk … and again at or just before first light. All one had to do was listen acutely and if one heard the slightest movement near one, throw a grenade. In this manner all his tricks came to nought.’
The West Kents’ company commanders were also asking to mount raids. Repeated requests were being sent to Laverty’s bunker. He consistently refused. Laverty felt certain his men’s morale would survive the constant pressure of being under attack. He told one officer, ‘You know damn well that while we keep to our positions we can inflict ten times the number of casualties we suffer, but as soon as we start throwing our weight about we’ll lose men in numbers we can’t afford. You’ve only to do one of your simple sums to see how it works out. Whatever the effect on morale we must refuse them.’
By the night of 16 April the garrison had been under siege for eleven days. Advancing from the south, the Japanese had captured a succession of hills, GPT Ridge, Jail Hill, Detail Hill, and they were entrenched in the bungalow sector. They now moved against the last two positions on the ridge before Garrison Hill where Richards, Laverty and the wounded were sited. At both Supply Hill and Kuki Piquet there was a mix of West Kents, Assam Rifles, and a composite formation of Indian troops. John Laverty’s skill was in the fine measurement of defence; he was constantly revising the perimeter to what he believed he could hold, and sappers were sent to booby-trap any approaches where troops were thin on the ground. Still, he was now hemmed in to an area roughly 500 by 500 yards, with around seven hundred men of the garrison still able to fight, and another 1,700 either non-combatant or wounded.
Laverty and Richards had been promised by wireless on 15 April that relief would arrive the following day. A patrol of 4/7 Rajput from Jotsoma succeeded in getting through and reinforced the message. But help did not arrive on 16 April. Richards went up to Laverty’s bunker later and found the West Kents’ CO talking to Warren on the radio. ‘I also spoke to Warren and said that unless relief came quickly, it would be too late. He replied that he was doing his best but intended to make a proper job of it.’ Some measure of Laverty’s frustration can be gauged from the regiment’s war diary. ‘This was the fourth occasion on which, after statements by relieving forces that they hoped to make contact on the morrow, hopes of relief, reinforcement or evacuation of casualties were dashed.’
Richards, too, was becoming exasperated. Wherever he looked there were wounded men in desperate straits. ‘We had many disappointments. On 10 April a message from 161 Bde that it was hoped to make a speedy relief. On 13 report from 161 Bde that effect of their advance should soon be felt. On 16 a message saying that they hoped to make contact “this morning�
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The men were briefly buoyed by an intense bombardment from Warren’s 161 Brigade and 2nd Division artillery. Hugh Richards wondered how anybody could have survived the pounding given to the Japanese lines. He was sure that without the accurate fire drawn down by Major Yeo and his observers the Japanese would have long ago broken through. The RAF joined in with bombs and cannon fire.
The Japanese pressure was making life a misery for the cooks. They hunkered in covered pits trying to heat the ubiquitous bully-beef stew on open fires the constant smoke of which tormented their lungs. There was still enough food, but the problem was getting it to the men in the trenches. Ray Street saw the 6 foot 4 inch frame of Sergeant Jack Eves crawling into small trenches with tins of bully-beef stew and hot tea, apparently oblivious to the bullets whizzing past him. ‘It was actions like his that lifted morale.’ When the pangs of hunger hit Street he thought of Firpos restaurant in Calcutta where the men went on leave and ate duck with green peas and potatoes.
Army cooks are among the world’s most highly evolved scroungers and in the early stages of the siege, when some movement was still possible, they liberated large quantities of tinned fruit and vegetables. At least one case of whisky was discovered and buried near the tennis court for distribution at the appropriate moment, presumably when the garrison was either relieved or on the verge of being overrun. The air drops helped to vary the diet, although Mark Lambert of the West Kents grew to loathe the soya-link sausages. ‘They were made of soya flour and came in the shape of sausages. They tasted bloody awful!’ The men at the edge of the perimeter, in places like the tennis court, could spend days without a hot meal, eating only the cold bully beef and hard-tack biscuits they had brought with them. There was another challenge, which affected them more than the rest of the garrison. With snipers constantly on the watch for movement, how were men to go to the toilet? Most waited until nightfall and crept a little way away from their position. Tom Hogg at the tennis court recalled men filling empty bully-beef tins with their excrement and then hurling it at the Japanese. ‘You had to go the best place you could,’ said Dennis Wykes. ‘You wouldn’t stand outside doing whatever. You had to keep the latrines under cover.’ For men with diarrhoea or dysentery the conditions were impossible. Unable to control their bowels in the confinement of the trenches they either fouled themselves or risked a sniper’s bullet.