by Fergal Keane
The battalion padres held regular religious services in the midst of this darkness. A gunner with the 99th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, took Holy Communion to the sound of a comrade calling fire orders beside him. ‘Draw near with faith, and take this Holy Sacrament to your comfort,’ came the padre’s solemn voice, ‘accompanied by the clanging of four breeches slamming shut, the thunderous bang of our four guns, the clatter of empty cartridge cases being extracted from the breeches’. Soon afterwards the gunner had the dreadful experience of watching a Royal Armoured Corps tank knocked out on the road below him. The Japanese threw an incendiary bomb and the tank was quickly engulfed in flames. Enemy machine guns covered the road on either side. The tank crew faced a choice that was no choice at all: stay and get burned alive, or run and get cut down by the machine guns. They chose the latter and all were killed.
At the tennis court the 2nd Dorsets were gaining on the Japanese. They had been fighting their way down towards Pawsey’s bungalow since their arrival on 26 April. They suffered fifteen casualties while taking over the position but gradually wore the Japanese down, advancing to Pawsey’s garden by early May. Private Tom Cattle was an apprentice butcher in the beautiful Dorset village of Corfe Castle when he was called up for the army. By April 1944 he had travelled halfway around the world but had yet to hear a shot fired in anger. The Kohima tennis court would be his introduction to war. Lying in one of the pits originally dug by John Winstanley’s West Kents, he watched his corporal pop his head briefly out of the trench. There was an instant crack and the man fell back on top of his comrades with a single bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. ‘That shows you what you could and couldn’t do.’ There were three people in a trench that was no more than eight feet long and two feet wide. To sleep, they crouched on their heels. At one point of the perimeter the Dorsets were within two yards of the Japanese, prompting Grover to remark later that ‘the occupants must have heard everything that went on in their post’. At one stage a Japanese soldier was digging soil from a foxhole when the dirt landed in a British trench. He was killed by the prompt dispatch of a grenade.
To drive the Japanese out of the bungalow the Dorsets needed a tank, but there was a problem. The road leading up to Pawsey’s bungalow had been built at his own expense and the corners were cut rather sharply, making it slow going for a car, let alone a lumbering tank in the line of Japanese fire. The Royal Engineers came to the rescue and bulldozed a track into the garden, all the time under enemy machine-gun and sniper fire. The 2nd Dorsets’ commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel O. G. W. White, described what happened when a tank opened fire on the bungalow at point blank range. ‘It got among about two dozen Japs who ran round and round wildly. They’re apt to do that in a crisis. We got about a dozen of them and the tank shot some of them individually with its 75.’ A mountain artillery gun fired forty-eight shells into the bungalow. Forty Japanese ran from the building. ‘The gun couldn’t fire at them because it had no more ammunition, but the Sikhs manning the gun fired everything they’d got at them. I’m told some of them got so excited they even threw stones.’ Fighting raged from room to shattered room where Pawsey had entertained Richards and his staff to cocktails a few weeks before. A Japanese in the garden who waved a yellow and white flag from his trench had his hand shot off. Pole charges were dropped down the deeply burrowed foxholes to make sure no Japanese were left alive.
By the night of 13 May the Dorsets were in control of the bungalow sector, bringing to an end one of the most prolonged periods of close-quarter combat of the entire war. Along the rest of Kohima Ridge the sustained attacks were taking their toll on the defenders. On the same day as the tennis court was regained, the Japanese vanished from Jail and Supply Hills. They had already abandoned GPT Ridge to 6 Brigade and on 15 May they left the Treasury overlooking the road to Dimapur. General Grover appeared the following day and was there to greet Stopford, who was ‘very much impressed by their tremendous morale’.
It would take another three weeks of tough fighting to drive the Japanese from the positions around Kohima. On 7 June, the day after the last major position at Aradura Spur was abandoned, Stopford sent an emissary to press Grover once more to speed up his advance. Now Stopford wanted him to get on the road and break through the Japanese roadblocks between Kohima and Imphal. The message was followed up with a phone call from Stopford. The breakthrough to Imphal finally occurred on 22 June 1944, when the relieving troops of 2nd Division met soldiers of Scoones’s 4 Corps fighting up from Imphal. Officers and men from both corps climbed from their vehicles and shook hands, knowing that they had broken the siege of Imphal and with it the Japanese 15th Army.
Soon afterwards General John Grover was fired. It happened, with supreme irony, on the day the three divisions of Mutaguchi’s army were ordered to retreat from India. Stopford went to see Grover on 5 July. Stopford took him to one side and told him his command was being terminated. Lancashire Fusilier John McCann wrote of the puzzlement of the troops, who were ‘part of a force that has inflicted on the enemy a massive defeat … [and] it is totally unjust that “the Powers That Be” have separated from each other John Grover and his men’.
Stopford’s diary makes it abundantly clear that frustration with Grover had been building for several months; and it continued after the recapture of Kohima, with 33 Corps staff accusing the 2nd Division of being ‘frightened of shadows’ as it advanced towards Imphal in mid-June. Grover had few supporters outside of his own division. But he was also partly a victim of the military politics of the Raj in its twlight. The 2nd Division was British but was paid for by the Indian government, a source of grievance with the Congress Party and with Indian Army formations. It also cost more to maintain than an equivalent Indian division. This helped form a bedrock of resentment against Grover. More damagingly, he was perceived as having scant regard for Indian troops. One Indian Army officer set out the charges in a letter to Arthur Swinson who served under Grover in the 2nd Division. ‘The impression was gained that he regarded the Indians as “coolie labour”. His staff could scarcely have been unaware that this rumour was spreading, yet they appear to have done nothing to counter it … had the General only gone around the Indian units once or twice, the pages of history might have been a little different.’
There is some anecdotal evidence from 2nd Division soldiers to lend support to this assertion. Dick Reynolds, a sapper with 208 Field Company, complained in June that ‘we could get no men to reinforce us, not Englishmen anyway’, and that Grover refused the offer of Indian reinforcements. According to Stopford’s official account, the total British and Indian dead from 4 April to 22 June amounted to 911 with a further 266 missing and more than 3,000 wounded, the majority of those casualties incurred by the 2nd Division in its long fight to clear Kohima Ridge. When the 7th Division commander, General Frank Messervy, arrived on the scene, he is said to have been furious at Grover’s use of his men. The evidence for this comes from Major David Young, an Indian Army officer, who witnessed Messervy’s outburst. ‘General Messervy, having visited … 33 Brigade, went off to see, first General Stopford, then General Slim, to demand that 33 Brigade be removed from the control of 2nd Division because of the unnecessary high casualties which were occurring in consequence of what he, General Messervy, said was inept handling by General Grover. I was present when General Messervy, in a furious rage, saw Brigadier Warren [161 Indian Brigade] and spent a few minutes in his headquarters fuming at the overall situation.’
Grover undoubtedly harmed himself at the very beginning by suggesting that he would clear up the Kohima mess in a matter of days and by continuing to promise a swift breakthrough after he had seen the scale of the country. The British troops moved slowly and the rate of casualties was high as they faced heavily entrenched defenders. But his men felt anger at the news. The 2nd Division had been pulled from training in central India and hurled into battle at the last minute; it was delayed reaching Kohima in full strength because Slim and Stopfor
d feared, wrongly as it turned out, that Dimapur and the railway were threatened. As for the high rate of casualties, 2nd Division’s lack of experience in fighting the Japanese was a factor, but attacks on such formidable defensive positions were inevitably going to be costly. And the Japanese were only able to gain such a foothold on Kohima Ridge because Slim and Stopford had decided to concentrate resources on the defence of Dimapur until it was almost too late to reverse the situation. Grover was sent home to become Director of Army Welfare, an inauspicious sinecure for a man still in his forties. He made no public comment except to thank his men for their sacrifice at Kohima. When the troops of 2nd Division arrived back in Britain in 1945 Grover was waiting at Southampton to meet them. As the ship came in to dock some of the men spotted Grover. The news spread quickly around the decks. A witness described how ‘the Captain became concerned as all the men suddenly ran to the side near the dock, pushing all the weight over to one side’.* A chant rose up from the ranks. ‘Grover, Grover, Grover.’ Eventually John Grover stepped forward to cheers and made a short speech of welcome to his men. In his mind and theirs they were still his men. Many years later his son, Lieutenant Colonel David Grover, was asked why his father had never complained publicly about his treatment. ‘He was loyal to the army,’ came the brisk response.
Stopford carried out the sacking of General Grover, but it was done with Slim’s full authority.*
The British drama of command at Kohima was unpleasant but it was settled in the accepted traditions of the army. Nobody complained. Nobody explained. What was about to happen between the Japanese generals would be of a different order, a story of hubris and self-deception, and a collision of powerful personalities, which foreshadowed the greatest catastrophe in the history of the Imperial Japanese Army.
* * *
* Arthur Swinson asserts that the troops resented Sato’s absence from the battlefield and quotes an unnamed 58th Regiment soldier who visited 31st Division Headquaters as saying: ‘From this distance the battle seems like a dream … you would not know it was going on!’ Arthur Swinson, Kohima (Arrow Books, 1996), p. 221.
* The Japanese referred to captured suplies as a gift from Churchill or ‘Churchill rations’.
* This account was given to Gordon Graham of the Cameron Highlanders by a comrade who was on board the ship.
* Slim never mentioned Grover’s sacking in Defeat into Victory, whether out of deference to the general’s feelings or a desire to bury the incident it is not possible to say. It came at the end of a period of great pressure on the 14th Army commander. Because Slim had misread Japanese intentions, Mutaguchi came close to striking a decisive blow against 14th Army. Had he started his invasion a few weeks earlier, as planned, Kohima and Imphal might well have been told as stories of British disaster. Slim was saved by his capacity to react decisively, by luck, allied superiority in planes and weapons, and the determination of his troops. ‘I was saved from the gravest effects of my mistake in underestimating the enemy’s capacity to penetrate to Kohima by the stubborn valour of my troops …’ he wrote in Defeat into Victory (Cassell, 1956), p.311. John Grover’s 2nd Division suffered the majority of the 4,000 allied killed and wounded at Kohima as they fought to drive the Japanese out. For more detailed accounts of the different units involved in the second phase of the Kohima battle I refer the reader to Leslie Edwards, Kohima, the Furthest Battle (The History Press, 2009) and Peter Hart, At the Sharp End – From Le Paradis To Kohima (Pen and Sword, 1998).
TWENTY-FOUR
The Road of Bones
The hubris of the Japanese advance, the ferocity of the battle, the growing hunger and desperation, are all recorded in an anonymous Japanese doctor’s diary, found by a platoon of Gurkhas lying among a hundred bodies on a hill above Imphal. At the beginning of April the doctor had noted how the enemy was defending with full force ‘but it is useless against the sons of heaven’. He was proud to be on the front line but missed the season of cherry blossoms just beginning at home. Within a fortnight he was dealing with ‘many cases of diarrhoea and dysentery’; a week after that, hunger was such that the men ‘can barely keep going’. Lying in the jungle at night, the doctor craved sweet potatoes. A man nearby said he wanted to die with all the delicacies of Japan in his stomach. ‘Even to think of what we used to eat at home makes my mouth water and my mind swim … at times you are driven to hide food from your best pal instead of sharing it with him.’ The bombing was shredding his nerves. He wrote of seeing flesh fly into the air and of the ferocity of the advancing British and Indians. Only a handful of men were left in his company. On 18 May he wrote: ‘Am I the only M.O. left? More than ever, then, I must try to do my utmost.’ The rains descended in the last week of May and he began to pray for a night of dry weather. He had a shoulder wound which was discharging pus and was now struck by amoebic dysentery. The doctor’s last entry, on 23 May, asks, ‘If I weaken and fail what is going to happen?’ The Gurkha major who witnessed the last hours of the doctor and his comrades told of how they were killed by a stream of machine-gun fire while huddling around the flag of the rising sun. It was a scene destined to be repeated across the Imphal and Kohima battlefields.
By the middle of May, General Kotuku Sato knew that the battle of Kohima was lost. There was no food. There would be no food. The trucks that might carry food were being used to bring reinforcements to the Imphal battle, which was itself in terminal decline. In the account he wrote for 31st Division veterans, Sato gives 12 May as the day when his infantry, led by the tireless Miyazaki, realised the British could not be held off much longer. Sato ordered his troops to begin slipping away from the positions along the ridge on 13 May, moving towards the Naga Village and a series of strong defensive positions to the south of Kohima. Lieutenant Hiroshi Yamagami, the flag-man of the 58th Regiment, was told to report to Miyazaki’s headquarters and prepare himself to move. ‘As an officer I was expecting it … it was impossible to go on … it made no sense to stay any longer.’
Sato had been building towards his moment of truth. On 4 May he went over Mutaguchi’s head and signalled the head of the Burma Area Army, Lieutenant General Kawabe, to say that 15th Army had failed to supply him with food. A furious Mutaguchi told him never to address Kawabe directly. Sato ignored him and went even higher, signalling the powerful Count Terauchi, commander of all Japanese forces in South-East Asia, as well as imperial headquarters in Tokyo. But it made no difference to his supply situation.
On 25 May, Sato signalled to Mutaguchi his intention to withdraw from Kohima. ‘Retsu Division has run out of food for the soldiers and horses, and the supply of ammunition and shells is scarce. The division will withdraw by June 1 at the latest and move to a location where supplies can be received.’ Predictably, Mutaguchi was livid and his reply intemperate. ‘How dare you use such an excuse of difficulty of supply and renounce Kohima? I want you to maintain your position for ten days.’ He asked also how Sato would explain his retreat to the ‘dead heroes’ and, to add a final insult, quoted the old proverb: ‘Before a resolute will even the gods give way.’
Willpower could not keep hunger at bay, however, nor was it a match for Slim’s army. On the evening of 26 May, the 4/1 Gurkha rifles captured one of the best-entrenched positions at the Naga Village, followed up a few days later by 1st battalion, the Queen’s Royal Regiment, who chased the last Japanese away. Sato signalled to 15th Army that he would deal with the situation using his own initiative – in other words, he would ignore Mutaguchi. ‘Nothing [of Mutaguchi’s orders] was founded on the actual situation of the war and the Division,’ he wrote.
On the night of 26 May 1944 General Kotuku Sato sent a further signal, of a kind unprecedented in the history of the Imperial Japanese Army. ‘We have fought for two months with the utmost courage, and have reached the limits of human fortitude. Our swords are broken and our arrows gone. Shedding bitter tears, I now leave Kohima. The very thought is enough to break a general’s heart.’
Mutaguchi told him t
hat if he retreated he would be court-martialled. Sato’s reply bristled with contempt. ‘Do as you please, I will bring you down with me.’ A little later he sent another signal. ‘The tactical ability of the 15 Army staff lies below that of cadets.’ Mutaguchi was unable to respond. Sato had turned off his wireless. Soon afterwards, the 15th Army commander issued an order of the day to his exhausted troops. Even by Mutaguchi’s standards it was an extraordinary display of self-deluding bombast. ‘It is my resolve’, he told them, ‘to reassemble the whole Army and with one great push capture Imphal … You must realise that if decisive victory is not obtained we shall not be able to strike back again. ON THIS ONE BATTLE RESTS THE FATE OF THE EMPIRE.’
Lieutenant Chuzaburo Tomaru, the supply officer from the 138th Regiment, was foraging for food on 1 June and returned in the evening to find troops leaving their trenches. Thinking that they were deserters, he started to shout, ‘What is happening here?’ At battalion headquarters he met a corporal who explained, ‘We got an order from division to retreat and it says, “Don’t leave a single soldier alive on the battlefield.”’ The men packed their few belongings, collected the wounded from the trenches, and staggered away from Kohima Ridge. The veterans do not describe a sentimental farewell, no backward glances filled with anguish for their lost comrades; there was simply relief that they were leaving hell.
For all the bad news flooding into his headquarters, Mutaguchi seemed unable to grasp the reality of impending defeat and make plans accordingly. The 15th Army commander had moved his headquarters to Indainggyi, about one hundred miles from the Imphal battle, in early May. The good life of his villa in Maymyo was gone, replaced by a simple bamboo hut. An officer remembered his increasing resort to prayer. ‘Near his house he had a special place for prayer in Shinto style, a flat narrow square area covered with white sand with bamboo poles on four corners. Every morning he sat there and recited Shinto prayers loudly. As the Japanese advance was beaten back … he spent more time there; he was praying for God’s help for victory.’ The war correspondent Yukihiko Imai, who had been with the 58th Regiment throughout the Kohima battle, was contemptuous of the officers he met at 15th Army headquarters. Although the battle was still a long way away, Imai found them constantly panicking and he recorded their reactions with contempt. ‘“Aircrafts is coming!” “The caterpillars [tanks] are near at hand!” they cried like mad in the midnight. I could not sleep with such a noisy nonsense. In the rear … they saw the soldiers carried back to their camp wounded so awfully that it made them become more cowardly.’ When the worsening picture was relayed to Tojo he put on a brave face at a staff conference in Tokyo. The meeting took place in front of the entire senior leadership of the army. Tojo chided the messenger. ‘You never tell until a battle is over. Don’t be so faint-hearted.’ However, the Japanese writer, Ryoichi Tobe, records that at a small meeting shortly afterwards Tojo ‘was perplexed, holding his head in his hands, and said, “This is an awkward situation!”’ Still, the 15th Army would fight on at Imphal and Sato would be made to toe the line.