In the north-east corner, the Assam Regiment held out against the worst of the onslaught. The DC’s pretty bungalow was long gone. The defenders hung on, barely, at the tennis court, and the earlier use of that ground was perversely echoed in the arcing of grenades and charges back and forth. It was a microscopic replay of the trench battles of the Great War: the no-man’s land diminished to twenty yards, and at times to barely five. A successful charge ended in bestial struggle, with daggers, rifle butts and worn muscle. Death had no ceremony there, as one officer learned when he slipped into a dugout at the tennis court and landed among several jawans, crouched over their rifles to face the enemy: all of them unresponsive to his commands, he found, because all of them were dead.
There was no respite, no reinforcements and no water: the thin pipe that brought them their only steady supply had been found and cut. Since then the defenders had subsisted largely on what the RAF could drop in inner tubes, less than a pint a day for each man. There was no barbed wire, not a single coil,1 nothing between the defenders and the attackers except the open air and as much lead as they could fill it with. The men who had been at Ruweisat Ridge fantasised about wire, the taut double aprons and the bouncing concertinas, the thorny monoculture that had seemed to cover the desert. They recalled also the desert’s huge and utter flatness, so unimaginable from a place where every bluff and gully mattered. On the eastern face of Supply Hill, the Japanese used ladders to try and scale the slope. At the northern end, a fifteen-foot cutting above the Imphal Road was all that denied the enemy’s encroachment. In the south, each degree of the hillside gradient could mean the difference between survival and the tip of a bayonet.
There was no sleep. The Japanese charged at sundown and the break of dawn, and in between they tried to sneak in through the dark. At odd hours the voices of the JIFs rose like delirious dreams. Half the time they called out in the wrong language, appealing in Urdu to the West Kents, while the Japanese mocked the bewildered Rajputs on loudhailers, saying: ‘Johnny, Johnny! … Come over to us … We’ll give you a cup of tea!’ As the nights passed, the temptation to go over to the more numerous enemy grew, yet not a single Indian defected.
Night was also when the sappers could move in the open, to assist infantry counterattacks or to lay booby traps at weak points in the perimeter. Wright spent most of those hours staring into the abyss that tipped away before him. If he nodded off, he woke in panic to check that it was still a friend in the next foxhole. By daylight he would be trembling with exhaustion, and if no enemy came, he closed his eyes until they did. NCOs slithered out to shake the sappers’ shoulders and wake them, but that was only necessary till the shells came screaming in and punching up the mud.
Inside the perimeter – which meant, at most, a few hundred yards back – the sappers worked exposed on the hillsides, digging, which was barely less dangerous than manning the trenches. They dug latrines: a measure of sanitation, if an increasingly futile one. As the attacks intensified and the perimeter shrank, more men caught dysentery, including Wright himself. Eventually they just squatted on empty coffee tins, then sent them flying toward the enemy trenches. In the worst areas, such as the tennis court, they squirted down their pant legs in despair.
They dug the battalion HQ, the artillery observers’ post, graves and surgical dugouts. Some of the sappers were in those dugouts already; one was in a grave. This was Wright’s first casualty, a new recruit who had joined 2nd Field just days before they drove up to Kohima, and a picture of innocence. His NCO had told him to stand guard – meaning be alert – but the boy climbed out and stood up on the hillside as if on sentry. He was shot in the gut before anyone noticed. Wright visited him in the aid post, and nearly cried as he watched the boy die.
On Garrison Hill, they dug the ever-extending pits to hold the wounded. There were hundreds, each stretcher-length, and it was a morbid moment when a living man was lowered into one. Those men suffered the worst, gasping in agony day after day. From where they lay, some could watch the Japanese mortar-men dropping rounds into the hot pipe, the charge flashing, and the bomb arcing over toward them. Shells punched into the denuded treetops, and the air bursts plastered the trenches with shrapnel, dealing new wounds to the wounded. On Thursday the 13th, the day Wright spoke to the OC, the enemy guns found the main dressing station and shelled it steadily for an hour, creating a diabolical lab: each man’s bits grafting onto another’s, hair in gut, gut in bone, bone in brain. It ended the lives of twenty-one wounded men.
The fate of the wounded, if the ridge was overrun, was only too apparent. That image helped the defenders to hang on past blind exhaustion, adding hour after impossible hour to the calendar of endurance. Daily the message flew from Dimapur to Jotsoma, from Jotsoma to Kohima, and was rolled into the foxholes: ‘Hold on, and you will have made history.’ ‘If you let go, India falls.’ Relief would come tomorrow, hold on.
Tomorrow came again and again, and so did the attacks. The guns at Jotsoma bucked and spat, sending down to Kohima an invisible giant that stamped out onto the enemy each time they formed up. The guns never rested. In one period of five hours, on one bearing alone, they launched some 3,500 rounds; entire Japanese companies could be obliterated overnight by the barrage. The guns were joined by screaming flights of Hurricanes and Vengeance bombers. The Japanese soldiers’ ears bled from the shockwaves. They were running out of time as well, but their sheer numbers, iron discipline and suicidal ecstasies kept them rising and charging.
Wright did his best to keep the sappers sane, though there were signs they were losing that battle as well. One jemadar, Nazir Hussain Shah, had his orderly dig a hole for him – as deep as possible. He went in and refused to emerge until the end. Wright’s own orderly, the staunch and weathered Raham Ali, fully thirty-eight years old, was near the brink. He shared Wright’s dugout, and during one lull in the shelling, he asked, ‘Sa’ab, when we are out of here, can I go back to the depot?’ Then he said: ‘Bahut ho gaya, sa’ab’ – It’s been too much.
Wright felt himself coming apart too: his hands were badly burned from a grenade explosion, and although he had them salved and bandaged at the aid station, they seemed to be going rotten. Blood throbbed in the burns when he had his hands down, so he held them continually above his head. The worst wasn’t his hands, though. It wasn’t the skin rash or the fatigue or the ribbons into which his stomach had been torn by dysentery. The lack of sleep was physical torture, but even worse was the toll of the ceaseless, mounting fear. Every man there felt it. Only a matter of time.
Time itself seemed to reel from the blasts. Night’s bright inferno passed into black dawns streaming with cinders. Overcast afternoons lit up as evening fell and flares rose into the sky, small suns guiding in the supply drops. On the night of 17 April, the Supply Hill was overrun, and the defenders fell back into bunkers on Kuki Picket. Wright felt his heart stop as a body plunged into his dugout. It was the West Kent company clerk, Private Tom Jackson.
‘If they come up the hill, we’ve had our chips,’ Jackson shouted.
‘We’ll use bayonets,’ Wright replied.
Their flank gave in before they could attempt it, and they fled back again to the edge of Garrison Hill. Fewer than fifty men were still in any condition to resist on their sector: shreds of the Assam Regiment, West Kents, Rajputs and sapper Mussalmans. Behind them were the desperate commanders, the petrified non-combatants, the 600 wounded men lying in their not-yet graves. In the medical station, officers on stretchers asked to have pistols by their sides. They backed into their burrows like rats facing a terrier’s teeth.
Hours passed. As the sky blanched they tensed one last time, waiting for the screams that would announce the final onslaught, and their last stand. There was grinding and firing in the distance, to the west; otherwise nothing. Then Raham Ali touched Wright’s arm and pointed back to the hospital spur: eight Lee-Grant tanks were coming up the road, covering a platoon of the 1/1st Punjab and a detail of Bengal Sappers.
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br /> Bobby worked his way up the road more slowly, pothole by pothole. Now and then he scooped out gravel and lifted out a Japanese landmine. The enemy guns had been redirected onto the road to halt the relief column, and the tarmac bounced with each explosion up ahead. The sweat rolled hot off his scalp and left tracks on his dusty forearms and the scuffed, tea-plate sized munitions.
On 15 April, the tanks of the 2nd British Division had finally forced open the Japanese vice around Jotsoma. By then, Bobby’s brigade had held off attacks that cost the Japanese as many casualties as the attacks on Garrison Hill. The Jotsoma box was now suddenly filled with boys from Dorset, Norfolk and Berkshire, allowing the 1/1st Punjab to turn at once and hurl its full weight in the direction of Kohima. The sappers were needed as well, ducking under tank turrets and the Punjabis’ machine guns to ‘de-louse’ the road for the main force behind them.
At 7a.m. on 18 April, the relief column broke through to Kohima. The battle was anything but finished: the Japanese were still barely yards away on every side, and the rest of the ridge and the peaks looming over it still bristled with bayonets and deep-set bunkers. The Japanese shelling pursued the wounded even as they were carried to the trucks waiting at the Hospital Ridge. It would be two more days before ‘A’ Platoon could follow them out and Bobby arrived at Garrison Hill to escort them.
It poured all that morning, slowing the evacuation, but at least the rain parted the caul of smoke above the ridge. Nearer Jotsoma, the leaves and air shivered in the gleam of the silver cloud cover, but Garrison Hill was a different, deformed world. Veteran officers, including General Slim, would invariably recall the Somme in 1916: every yard of ground was gored by the shelling, leaving a black and trampled mire of soot, rainwater, debris and faeces. Just the smell that came off it was enough to break a man. Corpses rotted in the noon heat, with only flies to pay them any attention. Pale parachutes hung from the blackened trees, trailing their lines in the mud, ghoulish fungi sucking at the decay.
Bobby retched as he climbed the hill toward ‘A’ Platoon. They were an amazing sight – filthy as Bombay beggars, looking ready to cough once and dissolve into a heap of rags. Here came Wright, ever the hero that Bobby dreamt of being, to stand by the lorry wobbling slightly, his bandaged hands raised in an ironic pose of surrender. Here was grinning Sirajuddin, who had attempted to flee with the Nepalis on the first day of the siege, but crept back in on the second. In the last war, his commanding officer would have pushed him against a wall and shot him; instead Wright let the fugitive be redeemed through non-stop latrine-digging duty.
Here came Havildar Mohammad Vilayat, who had managed the miracle of cooking the platoon’s dal and roti through the siege. ‘You know, sa’ab …’ said the havildar, never a man too fastidious about prayer, ‘five times a day from now on.’ One by one they clambered into the lorry, and Bobby hoisted Wright in last of all.
The fear fell away as they fell back toward Dimapur, and while Wright shut his eyes to elated oblivion, Bobby felt another ache rise and overwhelm his relief, from knowing that his English friend was a hero – surely slated for a Military Cross – and was alive, while Ganny and Manek were dead, and already taking their leave from Bobby’s own mind. They were no heroes. Nobody would know them, not even Ganny’s own daughter. And the sharp, exquisite pity Bobby felt extended not only to them, but to himself.
A drum of tea was brewing at the military hospital in Dimapur. The nurses cleaned the dressings on Wright’s hands, and took him to a bed with white sheets fresh from the depot. Before he could lie down, he was led out onto the sun-warmed stones of the hospital compound, through a hooting, splashing, sudsy mass of black and pink skin, to where soldiers sat in rows of improvised bathtubs, each one an oil drum sawn lengthwise in half. Wright sank his body into the water, his eyes closed and his arms motionless; and Bobby bathed him like a child.
19
The Elephant
Tiddim Road, June–October 1944
They opened the roads from Kohima like roots open stone, slowly, and with an anguish inaudible to the rest of the world. The Japanese were as rugged in defence as they were reckless in attack. They had soldered themselves into deep bunkers, and they held them to the last man. More Allied soldiers died prising the Japanese from the Kohima Ridge than had died already in halting them there. The gruelling melee was led by tanks – ‘tin elephants’ to the Nagas – which were led in turn by sappers firming the tracks, to keep the tanks from sliding away down hillsides unlaced by rain. Then there was more killing, with pole-charge and bayonet,1 and inside the sodden bunkers troops ate K-rations off handkerchiefs spread over the enemy’s corpses.2
The grisly attrition lasted the summer, and then the monsoon arrived to kneel on the Naga Hills. Second Field Company moved east, scraping open the road and clearing mines ahead of the infantry, pushing the Japanese back the way they had come. On bamboo poles they raised high screens of camouflage net, the only protection from enemy snipers – apart from the funereal light and the torrential rain. Laying a Bailey bridge on the Jessami track on 17 June, the unit diary recorded ‘24 hours of continuous work in knee-deep mud’. At the end of each day, Bobby returned to his one-man bivouac tent, dragged his uniform off his body, dumped it outside, and slithered under the canvas to towel off and sleep. At dawn he crawled back into the rain to pull the same sodden clothes on again.
They passed through the villages of the Nagas, still staunch but bewildered, as their hermit hills were ground under the millstone of modern war. Every jawan had heard of, or seen first-hand, the Nagas’ loyalty: their willingness to scout, to bear the wounded, and even to attack Japanese patrols with cast-off guns and tribal swords. At Jotsoma the Nagas had led the Indians to fresh water, moving bravely ahead onto the stream banks in case they were under enemy observation. Now, with nothing to hunt or harvest, the Nagas were going hungry or being poisoned by scavenged army rations.
Still, they were spared the real famine in the hills, which befell the Japanese as they struggled back toward the Chindwin. They had come unburdened by provisions, as in the Arakan, counting on the capture of Chachiru kyuyo – ‘Churchill supplies’ – in battle and at Dimapur. It was a bad wager, for which the men would pay an unspeakable price. The Japanese 31st Division was already short of food by the time it encircled Garrison Hill. When the siege was broken, its troops were ordered to cling to the ridge, first eating their mules and then their horses. Only when one general broke the chain of command, and pleaded with the Emperor directly, were they allowed to retreat. By then it was too late.
The supermen of the jungle had fallen, further than anyone could have imagined. As the 161st Brigade pursued the Japanese to Jessami, they found the tracks and villages littered with bodies. In the bamboo biers of the forest, the Emperor’s men lay in groups of two or three, craving company as they chose between suicide and starvation. The insides of their helmets were dusted grey from when they had ground rice chaff in search of the last grains. There were silent field hospitals where the wounded had been laid out in rows and shot, one by one, through the head. Those gave way to sites of more desperate self-annihilation, where groups had huddled over a single grenade, leaving corpses petalled in rough circles.
Each week, a patrol would net a brace of JIFs with their hands above their heads. The enemy propaganda rained onto Indian troops in Burma was now being repaid, with interest. Amnesty notes offered food and repatriation, and the JIFs, hungry or half dead from malaria, were ready to accept. The regular jawans of the brigade had curdled with contempt, for now the JIFs were losers as well as turncoats. Officers had to intervene to let them surrender, sometimes without success.
On 22 June, troops fighting southward from Kohima met the 5th Indian Division pushing north out of Imphal, and the road into the valley was opened. The town of Imphal was unmolested, and remarkably, had not gone hungry – it was kept supplied through its three-month siege by air drops on a magnificent scale. With relief, the brigade turned off the road of
bones and onto the southern route to Imphal. In Imphal, it was reunited with its division, and the sappers spent their first night since Dimapur billeted under a roof. For a week they had dry floors and hot food, and awaited the order suspending operations till the end of the monsoon.
In the week of respite, Bobby had time to brood over what had passed. He had seen India racked by three ersatz wars: in Madras, an invasion that never came; at Roorkee, an eruption from within; in Bengal, a circumstantial holocaust that killed only the most innocent. The war had rippled constantly over India, but the stone never struck it direct.
If Kohima had fallen, though … That fate was spelled out in a Japanese order, intercepted and passed down as brigade intelligence. ‘The prestige of the Empire will spread over the whole world,’ the order concluded. ‘Our glorious colours will fly bravely over the great plains of India, and 400 million Indians will realise their hopes when we enable them to live under Imperial influence. That day, I am confident, is not far off.’
Instead Bobby’s army had defended its own border, and dealt the Japanese land army the greatest defeat in its history. For once, they fought not to preserve a foreign empire, but to preserve India itself. The victory of the Fourteenth Army would belong to soldiers and pilots from five continents and many nations: Britain, Nigeria, Gambia and the Gold Coast, East Africa, the United States, Canada and China. Yet more were Indians than were from all the other Allied nations taken together.
Theirs was more than a victory. It was a baptism. Bobby realised he had seen in the smoking kiln of Kohima the hardening of a new army of Indians. For those few days in April, the jawan stood in a new light – a light that passed through his mercenary colours and made him visible as a hero defending his homeland. But the light had closed like a monsoon beam and passed unnoticed. Back home, news of the siege of Kohima was suppressed in the papers, at least for its actual duration.3 Churchill made no speeches about it. By the time the news came out the crisis had receded, and its drama was dwarfed by the Allied landings in north-west Europe. Radiant new heroes at Normandy ensured that no one need glance for any length at the Naga Hills.
Farthest Field Page 19