Farthest Field

by Karnad, Raghu

  The fight for Sinzweya was bestial, even by the standards of an animal war. On 7 February, the main medical dressing station was overrun by a force of Japanese supported by JIFs. The doctors and orderlies were stopped mid-surgery and led away, roped to one another by the neck. Bayonets dug in where their scalpels had been working. Thirty-six hours of fighting later, as British and Indian troops pressed back, it was the doctors’ turn to be executed, one by one. The Indian orderlies were forced to carry out the Japanese wounded, and then they were shot as well. One doctor, Lieutenant Basu, had a revolver fired twice at his temple. Both times the bullet exploded in the chamber. When he realised he was still alive, Basu slipped his hands into the wounds of his friends, borrowing blood to cover his own head and neck.3 Then he lay there in the gore, playing dead until he could be rescued.

  After word reached Bobby’s brigade about the atrocity in the field hospital, a change came over the men. They began to fight with relish. The jawans had been ambivalent about their countrymen who marched with the enemy, but that was now swept aside by simple loathing. Wright had no compassion left either, he said. In view of the Japs’ fondness for easy targets, his idea was to build a dummy hospital to lure them in – and booby-trap it to blow them to pieces.

  The enemy offensive to the east of the Mayu swept over the passes, and knifed into the rear area of the 5th Division. All the way down Bobby’s road, enemy patrols stalked each other and the bamboo groves flashed with fire. On his own patrols, Bobby learned to spot the spoor of Japanese snipers, fresh pockmarks in banks of earth. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of the men on the other side: a soldier washing his tunic in a stream in the rain-chased sunlight, indifferent to the demands of war, until shots rang out and he slipped into the water; a row of thin conscripts knee deep in a creek, bowed at the waist with bamboo yokes on their shoulders, forming a human bridge for their officers to cross.

  In the evenings the jumbled silhouettes of the woods stirred to life. The wind raced over the hills, and the trees on the horizon were like dark creatures bounding. Any shape might be coming to kill you. Behind the screen of jungle noise the Japanese signalled to each other, mimicking woodpeckers and scops owls. They prowled around the camp, blasting grenades at random. These were ‘jitter parties’, intended to scare the men into returning fire: wasting ammunition and revealing their positions. The sappers were forewarned. In Tori, trigger-happy recruits had been forced to wear saris, making the point that real men controlled themselves and did not shoot prematurely.4 Now they lay silent, even as the enemy passed near enough to toss rocks into their camp.

  One night a jitter party strayed inadvertently through a gap in the wire. Shots rang out, and the Japanese went to ground in the middle of the brigade encampment, with no idea how to get out. The alert about an infiltration came down to the sappers from a Hyderabad machine-gun company dug in on a rise behind them. Nothing was visible in the silvered darkness, and the platoon hunched in their foxholes, bleary but breathing hard.

  There was a shout from above: ‘Khabardar, risala aa gaya!’

  It rang in their ears, and was repeated.

  ‘Look out! Stand by to repel cavalry!’

  An astonishing sound – a trampling of hooves – built up around the lone voice, and Bobby half rose in his trench, mystified, imagining a squadron of spirit lancers materialising up the hill. What appeared instead was a seething dark cataract, sounding, above the hooves, of indignant snorts and bits of bouncing harness. Then the brigade’s entire mule pack cantered by, concealing in its midst the infiltrators who had found the mule lines, cut the tethers, and bolted out clutching at the animals’ manes. The stampede passed right over the sappers, and bursts of gunfire lit up in it.

  By morning light, they found no enemy felled – only twitching animals, their coats bloodied black. ‘Well, we’re able to say that we’ve withstood a cavalry charge,’ Wright said, in consolation. ‘And one from behind.’ But there was little humour in his voice, because the men had grown protective of their mules, who were so stout and unfaltering. Nobody felt a deeper camaraderie with the mule than the sapper. Engineering in the forward areas often meant building mule tracks, and Bobby learned a careful appreciation of the gradient, breadth and zigzag turning radius a loaded mule needed to stay on its feet. Like the sappers, mules were half-warriors, half-carriers; together they opened rough paths to take troops to the front and sustain them there.

  Other creatures joined the fray. Kites and vultures speckled the sky above the battlefield. Mosquitoes hit against Bobby’s face and arms each time he moved, and leeches hung off his ankles and thighs like shining mulberries. Both armies lost thousands of casualties to the common adversary of ticks, scorpions and kraits.

  Herds of wild elephant crashed through the woods. On one occasion, a patrol of 1/1st Punjab near the Rehkat Chaung was saved by a wild elephant who ‘moved in close support’, drawing fire and revealing an enemy strongpoint. ‘The first recorded use of elephants in close support since the days of Hannibal,’ their unit diary bragged. Chained tuskers were a more frequent sight, used to haul lumber to bridging sites. A bull elephant could drive his tusks under a log and lift it ten feet, and push it gently into place on the joists – making a few minutes’ work of what would have taken the company hours. ‘To watch an elephant building a bridge,’ Slim would write, ‘was to realise that the elephant was no mere transport animal, but indeed a skilled sapper.’5 Bobby had joined the army with dreams of a fantastical, mechanised war, but they had left that behind in the desert. This war was fought off steaming backs and raw flanks, of men as well as beasts.

  The Japanese had their own elephants, commandeered from the teak plantations to build roads and causeways and bring up supplies for their own side. Just like the elephants, serving masters on one side and then the other, were the men of the Indian National Army. In physical appearance they were identical to the men of the Indian Army, but the one extra word turned them deadly enemies. The company’s rear base at Ngangyaung was attacked with flame-throwers, and as they pumped fire onto the supply dumps, voices shouted out in Punjabi calling the men to fight for their own. Two sentries vanished that night, in defection or in flames.

  The meaning of the JIFs’ presence at the front was not lost either on the ranks or up the chain of command. As the offensive against 7th Division began, ‘Tokyo Rose’, on the Japanese propaganda broadcast, had sung:

  The March on Delhi has begun.

  Tanahashi, the victor of Arakan, will be in Chittagong within a week.

  New British Fourteenth Army destroyed.

  … Why not go home? It’s all over in Burma.

  The offensive had aimed to deal quickly with the Arakan, and to reach Chittagong where the perfidious Bengalis would be roused by their countryman Bose, casting eastern India into havoc. The Japanese columns had moved fast, not weighed down by rations. As with captured British supplies, Slim saw: ‘None of our transport was to be destroyed. It was all wanted intact for the March on Delhi.’ This grand strategy was held up by the resistance of the embattled 7th Indian Division. The largest air battles yet seen in South-East Asia took place above the eastern Arakan, giving cover to a great effort to air-drop supplies into the Admin Box. So, reversing the logic of centuries, the men in the siege received food and ammunition, while the besieging soldiers went hungry. The diary of a captured Japanese officer described their perspective: ‘Their planes are bringing whisky, beer, butter, cheese, jam, corned beef, and eggs in great quantity,’ he said. ‘I am starving.’

  The retraining of the Indian Army had had its effect, on ability as well as morale. Within weeks, the enemy division was scattered and its famished soldiers hunted down across the Mayu slopes. Razabil was taken, and the railway tunnels. It seemed certain that the tide had turned, that from here the Fourteenth Army could march into Burma – until new orders reached 2nd Field Company: mobilise immediately to Dohazari Airfield. They were being airlifted back to Assam, where the true offensive and the
real wrath of war were impending.

  17

  Fight with Your Ghost

  Kohima and Jotsoma, April 1944

  The steel jaw fell open, banged hard on the tarmac, and the mouth of the plane lay agape, waiting for men to enter. It looked to Bobby like a great sacrifice, the feeding of the whole 5th Division to the bird gods, the Dakota and Commando transports. They never stopped coming – materialising in the heavens and descending to the airstrip, where they moaned until they were fed.

  Their mouths dropped open and hundreds of loaves of bread, stacked like bricks into long parapets, snaked in. Jeeps drove up the long tongues to be swallowed, with the help of some manual hauling, deep into their bellies. It was, to be sure, a matter of ritual precision and the shamans presiding were surly pilots of the USAAF. They pawed at their red eyes and barked orders for the exact loading of the very inexact paraphernalia of an army division – folded acres of canvas tentage; small, shining stupas of cooking pots, one for each caste; typewriters, water pakhals, camouflage netting, crated mustard, bootlaces, blood plasma and a thousand other things. The planes swallowed it all.

  Bobby looked down the loading table, which detailed exactly which men of 2nd Field Company, by rank and trade, would board each aircraft, along with which equipment. The idea was to avoid concentrating any class of personnel or gear in one plane, in case that plane did not reach its destination. The emplaning orders changed constantly, so Bobby had told the men to drop their packs in a patch of forest shade at the edge of the airstrip, where they sucked on their beedis and mulled over the prospect of lorrying through the sky. The British platoon nearby regaled them with some newly composed verse:

  Japs on the hilltop

  Japs in the Chaung

  Japs on the Ngakyedauk

  Japs in the Taung

  Japs with their L-of-C far too long –

  As they revel in the joys of in-fil-tration!1

  Bobby’s attention was on the mules, the only element of the brigade that was resisting the Dakota’s maw. The airmen had devised a mechanism to encourage them, a rope run through the steel handles on either side of the bay door and looped behind an animal’s rump. When they yanked on the ends, the mules were flung into the dark fuselage. Inside, they were tethered at the fore with a wooden spar behind them to keep them still. The pilots scowled at all of this, and warned that any animal that got out of hand would be shot mid-flight or pushed off the plane. The idea of the dear grey bodies dropping through the blue was enough to persuade one volunteer in each plane to sit leaning against the spar, and risk a reproachful kick in the ribs.

  For the first and only time in the war, an entire division – 15,000 men, with guns, jeeps, mules – was being pulled out of action on one battlefront to be airlifted to another. The urgency was plain to the men on the ground. Thirty of Curtis’s Commandos had been diverted by Mountbatten from their routine flights over ‘the Hump’, without even waiting for sanction by US air command. He had taken a liberty with that, but there simply wasn’t enough time.

  The 161st Brigade would be the last to fly, and the sappers of 2nd Field spent three days waiting at Dohazari – three days of hot dinners and haircuts, and motion pictures flickering through the night – before their turn came. By then, the pilots of that air-group had already made more than 700 sorties ferrying the division to Imphal.2 Bobby had barely ducked under the vibrating palate of the aircraft and found a seat among the piles of stores before the bay door slammed shut, and they were off.

  This was Bobby’s first time in flight. Five years ago he had sat in the Loyola College canteen, picking the skin off his filter coffee, listening to Manek explain that it was aeroplanes that would win the war for Britain, or lose it. Nearly a year ago one of those planes had met the rushing rock and blown Manek’s soul out of his body, sending it into flight eternal. Somewhere in these hills below him.

  He wiped the window where it was fogged from his breath. The coastal plain had boiled up, first into low hills like scoops of chutney, then into vast green furrows, the Lushai Hills, which merged in the east with the Chin Hills, and in the north-east, along their path of flight, with the isolated ranges of the Naga tribes. Together they formed the awesome barrier that ran unbroken from Tibet to the Burmese coast, and had sealed eastern India against invasion for so long – though no longer. The enemy was lunging across it, racing Bobby to his destination.

  Deep within the sea of hills was a single stepping-stone: the flat, oval valley of Imphal, speckled with villages and the ancient capital of Manipur. Barely a cart track had linked Imphal to the Assam plains two years earlier, when the piteous refugees and the 17th Indian Division dragged themselves through there from Burma. By 1944, it was the site of a corps HQ and humming Allied airfields, the keystone of the frail bridge between eastern India and the central Burmese front.

  Japan’s offensive in the Arakan had been a diversion. An army thrice as large was deploying against Imphal, and the Allied brass were stunned by its size and speed. Three full Japanese divisions had crossed the Chindwin by stealth, leading 12,000 horses, 30,000 oxen and more than a thousand elephants. They had formed an arc three hundred miles across, then closed in a circle around Imphal, cutting it off from the plains of Assam. With them was a brigade of Bose’s soldiers, despatched with his promise: ‘We shall carve our way through the enemy’s ranks, or if God wills, we shall die a martyr’s death, and in our last sleep we shall kiss the road which will bring our Army to Delhi.’

  The spearheads of the Japanese Empire had pierced India at last, and they seemed to be driving at its very heart. If the invading horde captured Imphal, Japan could raise its head over Assam, Bengal and the country beyond. The retreating British government would scorch the earth, and the eastern provinces would starve afresh. Bose would ride the juggernaut through a country put to flames in his welcome. Indian troops would fall in with him to march on Calcutta, even Delhi, and Britain, overwhelmed by mutiny and massacre, would sue for peace. Gandhi and Nehru would be pulled out of jail to meet their new masters and learn that the days of empire were anything but over.

  For two hours the Commandos’ engines strained, spooling in the horizon. The planes carrying Bobby’s brigade did not turn east to unload them in Imphal, as they had done with the rest of the division. They droned on, north and slightly west, and descended in the late morning over the slushy airfield of Dimapur.

  When the aircraft banked to land, Bobby looked down on the grey clutter of the town. Dimapur looked from above like the underside of a truck, obscured by grime but holding all the springs and sprockets that could move this campaign to its end. It was a depot town, formed by the static build-up of things that wanted to be moving, things which had piled up into a city before a front line that had not shifted in two years. Dimapur held sufficient supplies to provision an army for an entire year. Trains entered and went no further. It was the final railhead at the end of Assam, beyond which a single road wound east and up to a hill post called Kohima, then turned south to Imphal.

  On the ground, Dimapur was in a state of high alert and consternation, with no coherent end. Bobby felt at once the déjà vu of a defenceless city awaiting invasion. That same day, the Japanese had captured the road beyond Kohima, and dug in with a northern vantage over the Imphal Plain. Imphal was surrounded: still, half an army was garrisoned there for its defence. More appalling was the discovery of another enemy column coming over the hills, directly at Dimapur itself. The town’s cornucopia of stores, vital for besieged Imphal, was just as vital for the Japanese, whose dwindling supply line was stretched over the jagged wilderness.

  British commanders had anticipated a light enemy force, a battalion at most. But what was emerging over the hills was the whole of the Japanese 31st Division. At Sangshak and Jessami, two border villages, bloody resistance had slowed it down by a few days. But Kohima remained poorly defended, and Dimapur not at all. The officer-in-charge had told Slim that, of the 45,000 mouths he had to feed at Dimapur,
he ‘might get 500 who know how to fire a rifle’. They could do little more than wait while 15,000 Japanese soldiers crossed the ranges and rivers to destroy them.

  The 161st Brigade was spat out of its aircraft straight into lorries. At first they sped between pasture and terrace plots of mineral-tinted water, but then they slowed to climb, and the earth beyond the shoulders of the road went wildly aslant. One side went right up and the other right down, falling to the floor of sea-deep valleys. They crawled between peak and precipice, and by sundown, a final lunge brought into view the Kohima Ridge.

  It was a mile-long green saddle, slung from the heights of Mount Pulebadze in the south and a Naga-settled peak in the north. In between, in expanding detail, Bobby could make out red tin roofs of a colonial settlement, a hospital, bakery and stores; a sight that reminded him of Coonoor, the hill station north of Malabar. On one rise was the bungalow of the Deputy Commissioner, skirted with flower gardens and a clay tennis court, and surrounded by pines. Beyond it, the colonial postcard gave way to the rough woodcut of the tribal village: clustered dank thatch shivering on its height, exhaling wood smoke, snatching up and casting off wet blankets of cloud. The Nagas had emerged to watch their arrival, shining like beads strung across the hillside in their shawls of martial red and black. Behind them, the colossal herd of blue hills raised their heads and humps and filled the world to the horizon.

  The sappers spread their bedrolls in the rooms of an evacuated hospital and shuttered the windows against the creeping mist. While they settled down, the OC called in Bobby and the others for a situation briefing. The garrison in Kohima was desperately unready to face the coming attack. Prior to their arrival, the town held only a single battalion of proper infantry, the Assam Regiment, which was itself the remains of a crumpled rearguard that had slowed the Japanese advance from the border. The other troops were a mess of hill levies, men pulled out of convalescent wards and stray recruits clubbed into new units under unfamiliar officers – what the local commander called his ‘odds and sods’.