It was at this key moment, on Sunday, 18 April 1944, that 161st Brigade, part of Lieutenant-General Sir Montagu Stopford’s XXXIII Indian Corps from Dimapur, managed to infiltrate a Punjabi battalion and tank detachment into Kohima, which relieved the General Hospital and the West Kents’ position facing Kuki Piquet and Pawsey’s bungalow. ‘Most of its buildings were in ruins,’ recorded Allen of the battered village of Kohima, ‘walls still standing were pockmarked with shell bursts or bullet holes, the trees were stripped of leaves and parachutes hung limply from the few branches that remained.’45 As the Punjabis took up position, ready to start the process of trying to prise the Japanese out of their immensely well-dug-in positions, they saw among the British and Indian survivors ‘little groups of grinning and bearded riflemen standing at the mouths of their bunkers and staring with blood-shot and sleep-starved eyes as the relieving troops came in. They had not had a wash for a week.’46 They had suffered over 300 casualties between 5 and 20 April 1944 – including three British brigadiers killed – but had held out.
Going on to the offensive, the next problem was how, in the words of Major Geoffrey White of the Dorsets, to ‘get a medium tank on to the tennis court or manhandle a gun into such a position as to blow the devils out of their holes at very close range in support of an infantry attack’.47 The Japanese were expert diggers and had dug themselves into the terraced ground in such a way that little could touch them from the air. Over the next two months, Shigesaburo Miyazaki’s 58th Infantry Regiment was dislodged from its positions, terrace by terrace, ridge by hard-fought ridge, holding out the longest of the division, and covering the retreat. Its commander survived to hold high office in the Japanese Army.
Meanwhile at Imphal the RAF’s Third Tactical Air Force kept the besieged town resupplied by air once Mutaguchi had cut the road to Kohima on 12 April. During the eighty-eight-day siege it moved 1 million gallons of petrol, 12,000 reinforcements and 14 million pounds of rations into the town, and flew 13,000 casualties out. Once again, Allied air superiority was the key. With weak air support and inadequate supplies, the entire Japanese offensive had stalled, and Mutaguchi’s Fifteenth Army was starting to disintegrate. His whole plan had gambled on being able to supply his forces from captured supplies, and when Slim’s 5th and 23rd Divisions broke the Japanese stranglehold, this was denied him. With Sato withdrawing from Kohima on 31 May, and the monsoon descending that month, the gamble had clearly failed. Mutaguchi was furious that Sato had committed so many troops to Kohima, rather than diverting at least one regiment to attacking Imphal, and when Sato arrived at Mutaguchi’s headquarters he was solemnly handed a revolver and a white cloth, which he indignantly refused. He explained that he had saved his men from ‘a meaningless annihilation’ but was nonetheless accused of ‘premeditated treason’.48
The first time that the Japanese abandoned a position without a fight came on 17 June at the Mao Songsan Ridge, and five days later the Imphal–Dimapur Road reopened. Some units, such as Lieutenant-General Masafumi Yamauchi’s 15th Division, had been so stripped of manpower by illness, battle-losses and dispersal that they were down to the strength of one and a half battalions. (Yamauchi consoled himself writing haiku poetry.) ‘The road dissolved into mud,’ recorded Major Fujiwara Iwaichi, the officer who had trained the Indian National Army, ‘the rivers flooded, and it was hard to move on foot, never mind in a vehicle… Almost every officer and man was suffering from malaria, while amoebic dysentery and beri-beri were commonplace.’49 The time had come for Slim to exact a terrible revenge against the U-Go offensive. The number of Commonwealth casualties at Imphal was 12,603 versus 54,879 Japanese (including 13,376 killed). Some authorities give figures as high as 65,000 for the number of Japanese killed in the whole of the U-Go campaign.50 Although miraculously the Japanese retreated in formation, keeping order throughout the ordeal and recrossing the Chindwin under constant harassment by the RAF, not one tank or heavy artillery piece could be saved, and over 17,000 mules and pack ponies perished too.
As a result of U-Go, which has been described as ‘the biggest defeat the Japanese had known in their entire history’, Mutaguchi was dismissed, along with the entire Fifteenth Army Staff, barring one officer. Hideki Tojo, the Japanese Prime Minister, resigned on 18 July 1944. Given that he was not told about the battle of Midway until six weeks after the event, he was clearly not the all-powerful dictator of popular Western mythology; power rested in the Supreme War Council. He was much more than a scapegoat, however, and was not surprisingly executed in 1948. Burma was now open for Allied reconquest, and the British Army recrossed the Chindwin on 19 November. ‘The consequences of Imphal and Kohima’, recorded their historian, ‘far transcended any British achievement in the Far East since December 1941.’51
In protecting the Indian sub-continent from the ravages of Japanese rule, whose vicious cruelties had been apparent in Manchuria and China since 1931 and which were extended to the whole of the Southern Resources Area between 1941 and 1945, the British Empire performed its greatest service to the people of India. Adolf Hitler had written in Mein Kampf: ‘If anyone imagines that England would let India go without staking her last drop of blood, it is only a sorry sign of absolute failure to learn from the World War, and of total misapprehension and ignorance on the score of Anglo-Saxon determination.’52 About this he was right, and yet only three years later the British did indeed withdraw from India without fighting for it. But there was a world of difference between granting independence to a dominion’s own people in peacetime and having it wrested away by a foreign power in time of war.
When considering the horrific cruelties inflicted on European POWs by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War, it is important to see them in the overall context of atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking.53 Whereas 6.2 per cent of British Commonwealth prisoners of the Japanese died between 1941 and 1945, the figures were 23 per cent for the Dutch, 41.6 per cent for the Americans and a monstrous 77 per cent (230,000 out of 300,000) for Indonesian forced labourers.54 As Pedro Lopez, the Philippine counsel at the Japanese War Crimes Tribunal, stated of the 131,000 documented Filipinos – the full figure was probably many times higher – murdered by the Japanese after 1941, there were ‘hundreds who suffered slow and painful death in dark, foul and lice-infested cells’.55
The literature covering what one historian has called ‘The Horror in the East’ is voluminous, and the Kachanaburi death camp on the River Kwai, Unit 731’s anthrax experiments, Changi Jail in Singapore, Korean ‘comfort’ women, the Bataan Death March and so on have particularly foul places in the long story of man’s inhumanity to man.56 There are many other, lesser-known aspects of the barbarity shown by the Imperial Japanese forces towards their captives, including that of the psychopathically sadistic behaviour of the Japanese Navy, and especially their Marines. Cold-blooded torture and the routine execution of prisoners seems to have been standard procedure. What happened to the SS Tjisalak was fairly normal practice, according to the evidence given at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.57 After the 5,787-ton Dutch merchant ship was torpedoed in the Indian Ocean on the way from Melbourne in Australia to Colombo in Ceylon on the morning of Sunday, 26 March 1944, the captain gave its seventy-six crewmen the order to abandon ship. Unbeknown to them, an official Japanese naval order of almost exactly a year earlier had authorized submarine commanders: ‘Do not stop at the sinking of enemy ships and cargoes. At the same time carry out the complete destruction of the crews of the enemy ships.’ What happened next was thus the officially condoned policy of the Japanese Admiralty.
The Japanese submarine I-8 rose to the surface and its commander, Tatsunosuke Ariizumi, ordered it to move close to the three lifeboats full of survivors, which were fired upon with machine guns. Survivors of that ordeal were ordered to come up on to the submarine’s deck, where they were disarmed and their hands tied. Within a few minutes the crowded foredeck was full of the Tjisalak’s Chinese, Indian and European crew. They then started to
behead the Europeans, one by one. ‘They’d just go up and hit a guy on the back and take him up front, and then one of the guys with a sword would cut off his head. Zhunk!’ recalled the ship’s radio operator. ‘One guy, they cut off his head halfway and let him flop around on the deck. The others I saw, they just lopped ’em off with one shot and threw ’em overboard. They were laughing.’58 Another survivor, a twenty-one-year-old British wireless operator called Blears, agreed. ‘They were having fun, and there was a cameraman taking movies of the whole thing!’ As he was led off to execution, Blears could see ‘Two Japanese officers were waiting for us, one with a sword and the other with a sledgehammer.’ Managing to free one of his bound arms, he dived into the water and swam to a raft from the wreckage of the Tjisalak, as two Japanese sitting on deckchairs fired at him. Fear of the sharks that were being attracted by the smell of blood from his comrades made him swim all the faster. Back on the submarine, the twenty-two seamen were all tied together by long ropes and the I-8 then submerged, ‘dragging the kicking and struggling men down into the depths, deliberately drowning them’. Miraculously, one Indian named Dhange managed to free himself, and also lived to bear witness alongside Blears and the radio operator.59
Sinking lifeboats was common practice among the Japanese, as was shooting survivors in the water. After the Japanese submarine I-26 torpedoed the American Liberty ship Richard Hovey in March 1943, two days out of Bombay sailing towards the Suez Canal, it surfaced and opened up its 20mm anti-aircraft cannon into her small boats and rafts, and then rammed them. Lieutenant Harry Goudy recalled that the Japanese on deck ‘were laughing and seemed to get quite a bit of sport out of our predicament’. These criminal actions were also being filmed.60
Similar treatment was meted out to the crew of the American Liberty ship Jean Nicolet on her way to Calcutta from California in July 1944. William Musser, a seventeen-year-old mess-room steward, was hauled up on to the Japanese submarine that had sunk his ship, and was ‘immediately frogmarched towards the bows between two Japanese sailors. Suddenly, one of his captors turned and struck Musser a savage blow across his skull with a length of steel pipe. The Japanese laughed as Musser staggered about concussed and terrified. Taking careful aim with a pistol, the same Japanese pulled the trigger and blew the American boy’s brains out. Musser’s body was then kicked over the side like a bag of refuse.’61 Ordinary Seaman Richard Kean, aged nineteen, was stripped of valuables and his lifejacket and had his hands tied behind his back. Before he got to the bow of the ship a Japanese sailor bayoneted him in the stomach, as another smashed a rifle butt down on the back of his head. His body was also kicked overboard. The other prisoners then had to hear a harangue from the captain, who told them, ‘Let this be a lesson to you that Americans are weak. You must realize that Japan will rule the world,’ and so on. From then on, Americans were dragged off the deck individually down the hatch into the submarine. ‘The night air was soon rent with screams of agony and the sounds of violence,’ the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal was told, ‘as the terrified survivors suffered untold mental anguish waiting to be snatched and led to an unknown fate.’ On deck, the Japanese formed two lines, whereupon the Americans were forced to run the gauntlet, being hit with metal bars, rifle butts and lengths of chain, and slashed with bayonets and knives. Anyone still alive at the end of the line faced a large sailor ‘whose job it was to lunge his bayonet deep into the bleeding and bruised Americans and heave them bodily over the side like a man heaving hay with a pitchfork’.62
Astonishingly, two men somehow survived this process. Assistant Engineer Pyle was cut with a sword but managed to fall into the sea, and Able Seaman Butler described how ‘One tried to kick me in the stomach, another hit me over the head with an iron pipe, another cut me over the eye with a sabre,’ but he too managed to release his hands and jump overboard. With thirty others tied up, the submarine’s diving klaxon then sounded and the Japanese rushed down into the bowels of the vessel, slamming the hatches shut behind them. One American sailor who had secreted a penknife managed to free several of his comrades before the submarine dived; all the rest drowned.
Yet it was the behaviour of Japan’s 17,000-strong Manila Naval Defence Force (MNDF) against innocent civilians in the capital of the Philippines in February 1945 that truly defies belief. Furious that the Americans were recapturing the islands, Vice-Admiral Denshichi Okuchi unleashed the MNDF to do anything they liked to the local population, who they (rightly) believed sympathized with the Westerners. In one incident, twenty Filipina girls were taken to an officers’ club called the Coffee Pot, and later to the nearby Bay View Hotel, where they were ‘Imprisoned in various rooms and over the next four days and nights Japanese officers and other ranks were given free access to the terrified girls, who were dragged from their rooms and repeatedly raped.’63 One written order from the High Command of the MNDF from this period reads: ‘When killing Filipinos, assemble them together in one place as far as possible, thereby saving ammunition and labour.’ The diary of a warrant officer called Yamaguchi reads: ‘All in all, our aim is extermination.’ Civilians who had taken refuge in the German Club in Manila were burnt to death when Japanese naval troops surrounded the building, poured petrol over the exits and set fire to it. According to the historian of these horrors, those who tried to escape were:
impaled on bayonets, some also were shot dead. Women who made it through were dragged screaming into nearby ruined buildings where Japanese soldiers gang-raped them. Some were carrying children, but the Japanese bayoneted these babies in their mother’s arms before assaulting the mothers. After being raped many times the Japanese soldiers often cut the women’s breasts off with bayonets; some had petrol poured on their hair and ignited.64
Such utter bestiality was repeated ‘on countless occasions’ right across the city.
On 7 February 1945, advancing American forces discovered the mutilated corpses of forty-nine Filipinos on the corner of Juan Luna and Moriones Streets in Manila. One-third of the corpses were women and another third babies and infants. All had been shot, bayoneted or beheaded, and most of the females – of almost all ages – had been raped. Pregnancy was certainly no protection, as a mountain of contemporaneous evidence proves: ‘In some cases, Japanese troops had cut the foetuses out of their mother’s bellies before killing the victim.’65 As well as bayonet wounds, some young female survivors of a separate massacre had had ‘both of their nipples amputated from their breasts, and a 2-year-old boy had had both of his arms cut off by the Japanese. Some children as young as five were nursing bayonet stab wounds and severe burns caused by sadistic Japanese naval troops for no other reason than to inflict pain and suffering on infants.’
When the MNDF entered the Philippines Red Cross hospital in Manila, further foul scenes of wholesale massacre were enacted, and one survivor, its acting manager Modesta Farolan, recorded, ‘From where we were, we could hear victims in their death agony, the shrill cries of children and the sobs of dying mothers and girls.’ On leaving her hiding place, Farolan discovered that ‘Women were raped and sliced with bayonets from groin to throat and left to bleed to death in the hot sun. Children were seized by the legs and had their heads bashed against the wall. Babies were tossed into the air and caught on bayonets. Unborn foetuses were gouged out with bayonets from pregnant women.’66
Nor was the deliberate attack on the Red Cross hospital out of character for the Japanese Navy. There were many occasions when hospital ships bearing clearly identifiable Red Cross marks were specifically targeted. Whenever doctors and nurses fell into Japanese hands, as in Hong Kong at Christmas 1941, they were particularly ill-treated, possibly because they were seen as responsible for getting wounded men back into action. The Japanese had agreed before the outbreak of war to abide by the provisions of the Geneva Convention regarding non-combatant status, which since 1907 had expressly protected the International Red Cross, but this was entirely ignored after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hospital ships were bombed in harbour,
torpedoed at sea and fired upon too often for it to be coincidental.
On occasion the Japanese Navy would go to some lengths to think up imaginative ways to murder people. At St Paul’s College in Manila in February 1945, for example, 250 hungry and thirsty civilians were herded into the school hall and told that there was food and drink under three large chandeliers in one of the buildings. The Japanese then withdrew. The prisoners rushed to the trestle tables loaded with food, but they barely had a chance to take a bite before explosives in the booby-trapped chandeliers blew up. Then the Japanese threw hand grenades into the hall to finish off the survivors.
At La Salle College, a Catholic institution in the city, the rapes and massacres wound up, as the father superior later recalled, with ‘bodies being thrown into a heap at the foot of the stairs. The dead were thrown over the living. Not many died outright, a few died within one or two hours, the rest slowly bled to death. The sailors retired and we heard them drinking outside. Frequently they returned to laugh and mock at our suffering.’ Many Japanese even raped women and girls who were bleeding to death from gunshot and stab wounds. There were many other scenes described to the War Crimes Tribunal – and not denied by the perpetrators – that are simply too disgusting to recount here. Men of the Imperial Japanese Navy were undoubtedly every bit as depraved, sadistic and ruthless as their military counterparts.
9
Midnight in the Devil’s Gardens
July 1942–May 1943
Rommel, Rommel, Rommel! What else matters but beating him?
Winston Churchill to Brigadier Ian Jacob, August 19421
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 34
