by Fergal Keane
On 5 June, four days after Sato’s dramatic signal of withdrawal, the commander of Burma Area Army, General Kawabe, arrived to see Mutaguchi. He noted in his diary: ‘Mutaguchi was in good health but his eyes were filled with tears. “We are at the crossroads but have no fears,” he greeted me. I did not touch on the situation, but postponed it until the afternoon.’ Kawabe was a very sick man, ravaged by amoebic dysentery, and needed to rest before they spoke.
The following day, 6 June, as allied armies were pouring on to the beaches of Normandy, the two men held a strategy meeting that would consign the Japanese army in India to disaster. Kawabe was well aware that the British were winning on every front. The 15th and 33rd Divisions were being steadily pulverised at Imphal. With tanks advancing along the road from Kohima and blasting Japanese roadblocks, it was only a matter of time before the town would be relieved. Mutaguchi asked Kawabe for reinforcements but, astonishingly, made no mention of Sato’s withdrawal. He also announced that he had just sacked the commander of the 15th Division, General Yamauchi, for his failures at Imphal. This was the second sacking of a divisional commander within a matter of weeks. Yamauchi died of tuberculosis a short time later in a field hospital.
Then came one of those moments upon which destiny turns. The two men looked at each other in silence for a few moments. After the war, Mutaguchi would claim that he almost asked Kawabe to cancel the Imphal operation. ‘I guessed Kawabe’s real purpose in coming was to sound out of my views on the possibility – or otherwise – of continuing the Imphal operation. The sentence, “The time has come to give up the operation as soon as possible” got as far as my throat; but I could not force it out in words. But I wanted him to get it from my expression.’ According to the historian and Japanophile Louis Allen, Mutaguchi may have tried to use hara-gei, Japanese ‘belly art’, in which meanings are conveyed by subtle changes of facial expression. The intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel Fujiwara believed that ‘face’ prevented either man from admitting defeat. This may be a generous interpretation. Certainly the unwillingness to confront failure was an important cultural trait; both had gambled their prestige on the success of the invasion and Kawabe had promised imperial headquarters that he could control Mutaguchi.
But equally relevant here is Mutaguchi’s self-serving nature. He never lost an opportunity to divert blame for what happened on to both his subordinates and his superiors. It was Kawabe’s fault, he implied, that he did not guess Mutaguchi’s real wishes. As a result of the meeting, Kawabe told imperial headquarters and Southern Area Army about some of the problems facing 15th Army, but he did not seek permission to cancel the operation. ‘Belly art’ or no, both Kawabe and Mutaguchi showed themselves to be moral cowards. The Imphal operation was allowed to run for another disastrous month.
In the light of what had passed between them a week earlier, Mutaguchi’s orders to Sato on 9 June defied belief. He was to leave a portion of his forces at Aradura Spur to block the British advance on Imphal, and go to the village of Ukhrul with the remainder to collect supplies and ‘link up with … 15 Division and prepare to attack towards Imphal [author’s italics]’. A starving division, desperately short of ammunition, was now expected to hold the British advance on the Imphal road and join a fresh offensive against the town. Sato was to have his men in position by the following day, 10 June. He now began to suspect that Mutaguchi was losing his reason. ‘I was flabbergasted … This incredibly non-commonsensical plan simply appalled me. I could not help questioning the Army’s HQ’s sanity.’ Kawabe learned of the plan from one of Mutaguchi’s subordinates, and took no steps to countermand it. There was an unwelcome surprise for Sato on 21 June when Mutaguchi’s most devoted staff officer, the newly promoted Lieutenant General Kunomura, arrived to reinforce the order. He was not a man likely to be welcomed at 31st Division. It was Kunomura who had blithely assured Sato before the advance that 31st Division would get ample supplies from 15th Army.
At first, Sato refused to see Kunomura, talking to him through a staff officer. When he did relent, the exchange between them was furious. It ended with Mutaguchi’s envoy asking Sato directly, ‘Do you intend to carry out Army orders or to disobey?’ Sato replied, ‘I have not said I will not carry out Army orders but first we must eat. Carrying out Army orders comes after that.’ Mutaguchi savaged Kunomura when he returned to headquarters and threatened him with a reprimand for being too timorous with Sato. It was too much for the devoted servant, who proceeded to tell Mutaguchi the exact state of Sato’s men, who were not ‘recognizable as Japanese soldiers … never had he seen such a sight in his whole career’.
By late June, events were racing ahead of both Sato and Mutaguchi. On 22 June the British 2nd Division swept aside the last of the Japanese roadblocks and opened the Kohima – Imphal road. Mutaguchi and his staff blamed the disaster on Sato’s withdrawal. The newly appointed commander of the 15th Division, Lieutenant General Ryuichi Shibata, was furious with his 31st Division counterpart. ‘I feel confident that if 31 Div had NOT begun the retreat in the North, my own troops, weakened as they were, could still have faced the food shortage for several weeks and, had they been given the opportunity to attack, could have carried on indefinitely on supplies captured from the ALLIES.’ It was nonsense, the face-saving roar of a man who has inherited defeat. The battles around Imphal had drained the strength of the 15th and 33rd Divisions every bit as much as the Kohima struggle had destroyed the 31st Division. Mutaguchi would also fire the 33rd Division commander, Lieutenant General Yanagida. The intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel Iwaichi Fujiwara described a collapse of trust between Mutaguchi and his commanders. There were ‘violent and angry’ signals, and ‘the beginning of the breakdown of command and discipline’. Signals staff at Mutaguchi’s headquarters were reported to be horrified at the crudity of some of the messages they were being asked to send to subordinate commanders. ‘Get your fat arse moving’ was one of the milder instructions reported.
Fujiwara was based at 33rd Division headquarters for much of this time, but he kept his ear to the ground as regards what was happening across the divisions. Retreat and insubordination went against the grain and he could never bring himself to accept that what Sato did was right. But that did not make him an uncritical supporter of Mutaguchi. As a well-trained intelligence officer, Fujiwara was always amenable to facts. Hunger, lack of ammunition, exhaustion and the strength of the enemy pointed to a catastrophe. Like Sato, he watched the worsening weather and was ‘surprised by its violence’. Throughout June and into July, the storms would turn the mountain tracks into quagmires and cut off all hope of supplying 15th Army. As it was, more than half the vehicles were out of commission due to lack of parts, and petrol was in chronically short supply. The rain came in moving walls, pummelling bodies, making pools of trenches, a rain that carried chills and fevers across the valleys, unearthing the graves of the newly dead. ‘Despair became rife,’ Fujiwara wrote.
As June wore on, Mutaguchi sent further messages urging Sato to send men to join the assault on Imphal, but nothing came of the scheme. The 31st Division limped on, ignoring the orders as the pleas of a madman. After the British and Indian breakthrough on the Imphal road on 22 June, Mutaguchi appeared finally to grasp the nettle. He signalled Kawabe and asked for permission to withdraw his men. Kawabe in turn asked for the approval of Terauchi in Singapore and imperial headquarters in Tokyo. While he waited for a reply – his messenger was delayed by bad weather – Kawabe persisted in sending orders for offensive action to Mutaguchi. Imaginary battalions of fit men were to be thrown against Imphal. Nothing came of the plans.
It now became a race to get what was left of 15th Army out of India and back to Burma, where they could recover to face the expected British offensive after the monsoon. What Mutaguchi did not calculate was that Slim would abandon precedent and fight through the monsoon. The 14th Army leader had the Japanese where he had always wanted them, caught at the end of a useless line of communications and facing a s
tronger army. It took until 3 July for the message from imperial headquarters to reach Kawabe, by now bedridden and feverish with amoebic dysentery. He signalled Mutaguchi on 5 July. The Imphal operation was over. The suffering of the defeated army, however, was about to become much worse.
By the third week of June 31st Division had lost 7,315 men killed or wounded and the dying would continue as the men moved towards the Chindwin.* They carried with them around eight hundred wounded. There was no food left save what could be scavenged on the road towards Ukhrul, the main supply base for the battle of Imphal and about fifty miles from Kohima as the crow flies. Food would be waiting here they were promised.
On the road they stopped at Kharasom, where John Young of the Assam Regiment had fought alone against Sato’s advancing army at the end of March. The men had been told they would find food for four days at Kharasom, enough to keep them moving until they reached Ukhrul. But as the leading troops in the column limped into Kharasom they saw the corpses of starved Japanese lying by the roadside. Sato gave permission for the slaughter of the remaining military horses. They reached Ukhrul to find that the 15th Division still fighting near Imphal had already taken the supplies. Lieutenant Chuzaburo Tomaru of the 138th Regiment found only an empty storehouse. ‘Then, I complained to high-ranking accounting officer. He offered me left-over rice in camping pot. I ate it. It was delicious for hungry stomach.’ He saw men searching desperately for rice; some fought each other for small scraps and others broke into local homes. In his report on the general Japanese retreat from Kohima and Imphal, Lieutenant Colonel Fujiwara described ‘a complete breakdown in morale, and the Japanese troops began to throw away their arms, quarrel and fight for food’.
Sato’s column pressed on towards the village of Humine where, again, food was supposed to be stockpiled. But there they found only enough rice for two days. The scouts reported back that the landscape beyond Humine was empty of food. The procession stretched back for miles along the jungle track. They moved slowly, feet squelching in the mud of the early rains, every man of them conscious of his weakening body. The lice in their armpits and crotches tormented them. A Japanese account estimated that the men marched an average of between four to eight kilometres each night. During the day they hid from aircraft and tried to forage bamboo shoots and grasses.
At some point on the route, Lieutenant Tomaru saw General Sato ride by with his staff. The men stopped and put their hands together in prayer and faced him. For a few minutes there was no noise at all among the ranks. It was, explained Chuzaburo, an expression of gratitude for taking them away from Kohima. Another soldier witnessed Sato’s intervention in a fight over the attempted theft of his horse. The thief and his lieutenant, a man named Yamagauchi, were being berated by a staff officer who told them to go ‘starve and die’. The witness described what happened when the general appeared. ‘He heard what happened and said: “Don’t say stupid things. I am fighting with Mutaguchi over food. It’s not this soldier’s fault but the fault of the person who sent them to fight without food.”’ General Sato told the soldier accused of stealing that he had fought well. He took out some dried bread from his own dwindling stock. ‘Please share this dried bread with everybody,’ Sato said. The soldier hesitated to accept. ‘He said: “General it is way too much.” But the General said to him not to be constrained … Yamaguchi had tears in his eyes. The General said: “Now go back to your own trench and let the others eat this. Be patient and take care of yourself.” … [The men] were really touched by this. All the soldiers who got some dried bread and a piece of sugar promised they would die for General Sato.’
The unit of colour-bearer Lieutenant Hiroshi Yamagami began by marching in good order. But as food ran out men drifted off to try and scavenge in the villages. Those too sick to move were given a small supply from whatever rations were left and then abandoned on the side of the road. Yamagami would never overcome the feelings of guilt he experienced. ‘Sometimes I met friends who were just dying there. Their faces said “Help me” but there was nothing we could do. It is hard to put into words what it is like to see that. I feel still that I abandoned those people. How can I explain that emotion to you?’ Yamagami told himself to be patient. At Ukhrul they would find food. But by the time he got there the meagre supplies had all been consumed. Had Mutaguchi appeared at that moment he would have been killed by the men. ‘We were so angry. We had hatred of him.’
By the time Sato’s column reached Humine, Dr Takahide Kuwaki, the medical officer with the 124th Regiment, was sick with amoebic dysentery and malaria. The man who had dreamed of dying gloriously for the empire was helped along by two medics who turned discreetly away when he limped into the bush to empty his bowels. To suffer amoebic dysentery is an agony even when good medical facilities are at hand. The stomach feels as if it is being slashed inside by razors, unrelieved by the repeated streams of bloody diarrhoea. The suffering is deepened by fever and headaches. There was no medicine with which to treat the men of the 31st Division and nowhere clean for them to be nursed. They died by the road in pools of their own excrement. Dr Kuwaki tried to shout encouragement to men who had given up and were waiting to die. ‘Sometimes I even did it from the stretcher. But perhaps that was cynical, eh? Me on the stretcher shouting at them to keep going!’
Conditions in the military field hospitals on the retreat from Kohima and Imphal were so grim that men regarded being left there as a death sentence. In many cases they committed suicide, asked colleagues to shoot them, or were summarily shot by their own officers. A British patrol entered one hospital to find only skeletons on the beds. An account published in The Listener in the autumn of 1944 described the scene at a jungle camp. The British medics tried to treat the men, but most were beyond help. ‘The hospital staff had deserted, leaving the sick and wounded to die without attention … Many had acute beri-beri; they had passed the stage where the stomach swells and had become dehydrated human sticks. The skin, stretched tightly on the bone framework, was covered with sores … on one track over 5,000 Japanese were found lying dead from exhaustion. Elsewhere the body of a high ranking Japanese officer sat in his useless staff car.’
One of the most chilling accounts was given by a Japanese Sergeant Major Tochihira of the 15th Division, retreating from Imphal. He saw about 120 men lying on the side of the road. They had been abandoned by their comrades who had heard tanks coming. Tochihira watched the scene from a hideout in the hills. An Indian soldier approached the wounded with a container of what Tochihira took to be water. He poured it over the men and then flicked his cigarette into the liquid. The wounded were engulfed in flames.
The rear-guard of the 31st Division, commanded by Miyazaki, was struggling to stay ahead of the advancing British and Indians when it reached Ukhrul at the end of June. General Miyazaki, still with his pet monkey Chibi perched on his shoulder, was an angry man. He had lost 1,700 men in the fighting around Kohima. Now, with the remaining 870 fit troops, he was trying to slow the enemy down so that the rest of the 31st Division could reach the Chindwin. Nearly half of his men would die in the process.
Looping around behind the 31st Division and across the line of communications was 23 Brigade Long Range Penetration Group (Chindits), whose commander, Brigadier Lancelot Perowne, told his men on 10 May, ‘Our task remains as it was – to exterminate the Japanese vermin in our path.’ Perowne was a notably aggressive commander, a veteran of the commandos in France, and wanted to make his mark on the great battle. His men experienced a gruelling slog through the jungle, killing scores of Japanese, but frustrated by terrain, weather and illness. ‘We had been sodden for weeks, were covered with mud, and we stank,’ one officer wrote. ‘Hollow-eyed, wasted, hungry, and yet incapable of eating more than a minute meal, we talked of nothing else but food.’ A column of the Essex Regiment operating with 23 Brigade took twelve hours to complete a march of twelve miles. Animals were lost in mudslides. Perowne’s pony broke its neck after falling six hundred feet. Two thirds of the br
igade went down with diarrhoea, although there were fewer cases of the amoebic dysentery that afflicted the Japanese. Lieutenant Desmond Earley recalled how his orderly, a young Irishman, went off into the bush to relieve himself and stepped on an anti-personnel mine. ‘He died soon afterwards after apologising, of all things, for having caused so much trouble.’
In late May, the Chindits had come close to Sato’s headquarters but, according to the war diary, ‘an attempt to stage a raid was abortive’. The result was a Japanese counter-attack, described by a Naga guide with the Chindits. ‘Early in the morning at about 4 a.m. fifty Japanese came to our camp … The British troops had to fight against the enemies for two days and one whole night.’ The Japanese were eventually driven off after losing fifteen men. The Chindits repeatedly ambushed small groups of Japanese so that ‘many Japanese were killed by wide and energetic patrolling and a large number of prisoners and animals taken’.* Passing through Ukhrul in the footsteps of the 31st Division there was an outbreak of typhus, ‘with high mortality’, which the brigadier believed was the result of sleeping in bashas previously occupied by Japanese. ‘This [area] was highly contaminated with dead Japs and filth.’