Kohima

by Arthur Swinson

  The withdrawal continued; and Kunomura returned to 15th Army Headquarters. Later he was censured for having failed to convey Mutaguchi’s order as strongly as he should have done; but having seen the plight of the retreating soldiers, he probably realized that the order was quite pointless.

  Miyazaki fought on, but with diminishing results. The troops at Maram were given orders to hold it for ten days, but after a brilliant action laid on by Michael West and executed by the Worcestershire Regiment, this formidable position fell in a matter of hours. By the night of the 19th the vanguard had reached milestone 80, and by the next day, milestone 88. Small pockets of resistance were encountered for the next eleven miles but were soon brushed aside. On the morning of the 22nd, men of the Durham Light Infantry moved forward with the tanks of the vanguard, which after two miles came under fire. The enemy troops were small in number, and consisted of walking wounded from a Japanese hospital which had now closed down, pathetic, emaciated creatures, whose orders were to go on fighting till every man was killed. These they faithfully carried out. The vanguard pushed on again, brushed aside another small party, fired at some Japs retreating across the hills to the east, then advanced to milestone 108. Here, according to Sean Kelly of the Durhams, ‘the tanks spotted more movement away forward where elephant grass gave way to trees and began to brass it up properly. Soon they stopped. A plaintive message relayed through many sets had reached them: we were brassing up the advance elements of the 5th Indian Division of the beleaguered 4th Corps. Imphal was relieved. We sat alone in the sunshine and smoked and ate. Soon the staff cars came purring both ways. The road was open. It was a lovely day.’

  It was a lovely day in many ways. The rain had stopped and the sunlight was again dancing across the mountains. Miraculously, Assam had turned from a soaking, muddy hell into a wild paradise.

  That night the trucks rolled into Imphal, and soon afterwards the troops had their first glass of beer for many weeks.

  From a tactical viewpoint the opening of the road meant that the 14th Army could now reap the fruits of victory at Kohima, as Imphal was transformed from a beleaguered fortress into a base for offensive operations. The ‘twin battles’ (to use Slim’s phrase) had yielded a double triumph; and the moment had arrived when, as he has said, ‘we would pay back all we owed—with interest’.

  Four days later, even Mutaguchi had to recognize that the game was up and recommended to Kawabe that his Army should withdraw to a line from the Yu River to Tiddim. Cautiously, however, Kawabe refused to signal his agreement until permission had been obtained from Southern Army Commander, Field-Marshal Count Terauchi, whose headquarters was in Singapore. He therefore ordered Mutaguchi to fight on, and meanwhile despatched an officer to Singapore. Owing to bad weather, the latter couldn’t fly out till the 3rd July, so the hopeless struggle went on. On the 4th, however, Kawabe received the necessary permission to prepare to withdraw, but meanwhile was told to continue his action against Palel. Mutaguchi by now seems to have lost all touch with reality and, with his Army breaking up fast, ordered yet another offensive by the 15th and 31st Divisions. Nothing happened; nothing could happen. And on the 8th July Mutaguchi ordered his battered troops to withdraw east towards the Chindwin. At Kohima and Imphal they had suffered the greatest defeat in the history of the Japanese Army; a Japanese writer, Kase Toshikazu, has even called it: ‘the worst of its kind yet chronicled in the annals of war’. The latter is probably an exaggeration; but, surely, not even on Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow has a beaten army gone back under such terrible conditions. According to Toshikazu, ‘the ranks thinned down daily as thirst and hunger overtook the retreating column… sick and wounded had to be abandoned by the hundreds. In order to avoid capture these men were usually forced to seek death at their own hands.’

  Lieutenant Hirobumi Daimats (who has since become famous in Japan as trainer of the Olympic volley-ball team) was a transport officer in 31st Division, and has written of the retreat: ‘Most of us were suffering from malaria or malnutrition or both.… If a horse was found wandering it was shot immediately and cooked and eaten, even though we had no salt. Every day we dug up bamboo roots and ate them raw, and they kept us alive for six weeks till we reached the Chindwin.… There were very few of us left then.’

  Shizuo Marayama, a war correspondent, has written: ‘At Kohima we were starved and then crushed… discipline went, then the troops wavered and we fell into disorder. The regimental officers, N.C.O.s and men trusted each other but they were lied to… then there was that ugly struggle between Sato and Mutaguchi. In the end we had no ammunition, no clothes, no food, no guns… the men were barefoot and ragged, and threw away everything except canes to help them walk. Their eyes blazed in their lean bodies… all they had to keep them going was grass and water. And there were jungles, great mountains, and flooded rivers barring their way.… At Kohima we and the enemy were close together for over fifty days, and could watch each other’s movement; but while they got food, we starved.’

  Apart from starvation and dysentery, there was the malaria which struck through the ranks. A soldier of the 58th has written: ‘The malaria was worse than anyone had expected… it drove some men mad. Usually it was accompanied with diarrhoea, and men would be going forty or fifty times a day, most of them with blood.’

  The longer the retreat went on the more the wounded suffered. An N.C.O. has written: ‘A soldier who was wounded in the right leg said he could not go on any further, and asked his friends to leave him to die. But they said, “With our wounds and malaria, we’ll never reach the Chindwin either,” so stayed with him… they thought it better to die with their friend.’ Another soldier said after his return to Japan: ‘Some badly wounded soldiers put a grenade to their chest and committed suicide…. Sometimes an officer, seeing men suffering, would put them out of their misery with an injection.’ This observation comes from a private soldier who survived the retreat: ‘The curious thing was that when a man decided to commit suicide he always lay down by the body of another man, or of a group. Men seem to need company, even in death.’

  Many of the troops were buoyed up by the hope that once they reached Sittaung they would receive food and proper medical care, but their hopes again were dashed; to quote Marayama again: ‘The field hospital on the way to Sittaung was terrible. Patients kept flowing into it before others could be transported to the rear. Only a few men were under cover… most of them were lying outside in the jungle, or slung in hammocks from the trees. All the men had to cover them were overcoats and they would shiver with the cold… many of the men whose arms or legs had been amputated were so far gone that you could not tell whether they were alive or dead.’

  Of the 750 men in Miyazaki’s rearguard just over 400 survived.

  Some years later, a Burmese villager told how he watched group after group of Japanese soldiers as they filtered back through his village. Usually in the evening, having scrounged what food they could for a meal, they would squat in circles and talk. The villager noticed, however, that if a certain word was uttered the soldiers would immediately break off the conversation, and hang their heads in silence. He had no idea what the word meant, and naturally assumed it must be Japanese. Some time later, however, he learned that it wasn’t Japanese at all but an Assam place-name. Kohima.

  Even as recently as June 1965, when a journalist approached Colonel Kuniji Kato, Sato’s Chief Staff Officer, for an account of his experiences, he refused, courteously but firmly: ‘Not Kohima…’ he said. ‘Not that great bitter battle.’ Kato had spent most of his time at the main Divisional headquarters, some miles from the action, but even there the bitterness of defeat had so impressed itself upon him that twenty-one years later he still could not bear to talk about it.

  General Sato left the 31st Division on the 5th July, having received orders to report to 15th Army Headquarters. In a farewell speech to his staff, he said:

  ‘It is clear that this operation was scheduled by the foolish desire of one man: Lie
ut.-General Mutaguchi, commander of the 15th Army. I do not intend to be censured by anyone. Our 3 1st Division has done its duty. For two months we have defended our positions against strong enemy forces: and not one of their men during that time passed down the Imphal Road.

  Before God, I am not ashamed.

  Now I must say good-bye to you. I remember the hard time we had at Kohima and how you helped me do my duty there. I thank you all sincerely.

  I ask the forgiveness of those who lie dead at Kohima because of my poor talent. Though my body is parted from them, I shall always remain with them in spirit. Nothing can separate those of us who were tried in the fire at Kohima. Now the moment has come when I cease to be your commander; but I hope we shall meet again at the Yasakuni Shrine. I pray for your health and happiness. Good-bye.’

  After making this speech he left immediately for the Chindwin, accompanied solely by his batman. Despite these humiliating circumstances, his feelings were not of self-pity but of rage against Mutaguchi. In his luggage he carried a detailed statement justifying his actions and condemning the inefficiency of the 15th Army. Now he could no longer fight with guns, he intended to start fighting with words. Whether or not one admires Sato as a soldier, it is difficult not to admire him as a man.

  13

  Postscript and Post Mortem

  ‘Only those who have seen the terrific nature of the country under these conditions will be able to appreciate your achievements and especially those of the infantry.’

  This sentence is taken from a message written by Mountbatten for issue ‘to all ranks on the Manipur Road’. In a few words it sums up a great truth about the battle of Kohima, and explains why the magnitude of the victory bought at such great cost by the 2nd British Division, the 161st Indian Brigade, and the 33rd Indian Brigade, was underrated at the time in Delhi, in London, and in Washington. It does not explain, however, why the role played by Grover’s Division should have been so criticized, and even denigrated, both at the time and since. The reasons for this are many and complex; and they are well worth examining.

  To begin with, political considerations demanded that the existence of the 2nd Division in the Indian theatre should be publicized as little as possible. (As already mentioned, Congress politicians had been complaining about the expense of maintaining a British formation since 1942.) The result was that British troops reading newspaper accounts of actions they had taken part in were dismayed to find that reference was made solely to ‘Indian troops’. The omission was particularly distressing to officers and men in hospital, many of them badly wounded and having suffered great privation during their long journey from the front. Even the victory of the Royal Norfolk on G.P.T. Ridge was allocated to Indian troops in one account. This and other injustices led to a flare-up of all the old jealousies and suspicions between the British and Indian Armies, which had completely died down under fire. In hospitals and convalescent depots, in cafés and clubs and bars, there would be violent arguments and recrimination. Many Indian Army officers—misled by the newspaper accounts and the rumours generated by them—were heard declaring that the British troops of 2nd Division had not captured a single objective; that their abject failure had been covered by the two Indian Army brigades. Arguments concerning the respective merits of various formations have existed since armies began—even Caesar’s Tenth Legion excited jealousy as well as admiration—and normally one should not take them so seriously. But in this case one must do so, as ill-informed and biased criticisms of 2nd Division’s conduct at Kohima have found their way into books and even the official histories.

  Slim called the division ‘brave, but inexperienced’, adding ‘its very dash rendered it liable to heavy casualties’. It has also been called slow, road-bound, and unimaginative; and Colonel Barker has suggested that the root of its troubles ‘lay in lack of patrolling experience which was essential to pinpoint Jap bunkers, and also in lack of administrative experience. Nor did they have much experience of working with the Indian Army… whom they looked down on—largely because their experience of Indians was limited to that with Indians in the bazaars.’

  These are sweeping criticisms which demand separate consideration.

  First, perhaps, one may take the charge that the division was ‘road-bound’. At once one must admit that it had a vast number of vehicles—far too many for the line of communications to absorb. As Slim points out: ‘…its lorries, parked nose to tail, threatened to turn the two-way main road into a one-way track.’ But this is not to say that the division stayed tethered to its vehicles, either mentally or physically. Once mule companies and Naga coolies had been allocated, the units moved off the road immediately; the Camerons carried out a flanking march to gain the first objective, Bunker Hill; 5th Brigade were supplied for weeks on end on Merema Ridge and in Naga Village by mule column, Nagas, and air-drops; 4th Brigade were away from the road for weeks during their march round Pulebadze and their subsequent ordeal on G.P.T. Ridge; the Recce Regiment was on Pulebadze for nineteen days; and in the final phase of the battle, 5th Brigade were again away from the road in their hook on Pfuchama and Phesema. Altogether it is true to say that most of the troops, for most of the time, were away from the road and their vehicles; they traversed some of the most difficult country ever traversed in the history of warfare, climbed mountains, scaled cliffs, cut through virgin jungle, and forded rivers. Not until 7th Division were out on their left flank and the advance on Imphal began was the whole division supplied along the road.

  The second criticism is that the division was inexperienced. It was certainly inexperienced in the form of warfare that it encountered at Kohima; but one might ask what other troops in the world had experience in such terrain? Brigadier Stevens, the C.C.R.A. to 33rd Corps, wrote after the battle: ‘If I was asked what sort of warfare 2 Div have been doing I should quite candidly say that I do not know. It is certainly not jungle warfare as the term implies; it is certainly not mountain warfare, although the hills are very high; it is certainly not ordinary warfare.…’ It can be argued that the problems faced at Kohima would have come fresh to any formation in any army. It is not true to say either that the division had not been into action; it had fought in Europe in 1940 and been evacuated through Dunkirk, and four battalions had fought in the Arakan in 1943. A large percentage of its officers and men had therefore been in action before. Admittedly the division as a whole had not fought in Burma; but it was highly trained, and its technical services at least had reached a stage of perfection probably unequalled by any formation in the Far Eastern theatre. Even the Indian troops of 33rd Brigade said they had never been so well fed and supplied as when attached to the Division. What is true is that as a Combined Operations Assault Division the formation was wrongly equipped for the battle it was asked to undertake. But that was merely one of the chances of war.

  The next criticism is ‘lack of patrolling experience’. First it must be pointed out that the division was not seeing jungle for the first time, but had just completed several months’ intensive jungle training south of Belgaum. Admittedly there is no substitute for patrolling in contact with the enemy and because of this at least two major mistakes were made. Patrols reported ridges clear, having failed to find the top of them, or being deceived by false crests, and their units later paid the price. But these are merely two examples from thousands of patrols; and there are many examples of brilliant patrolling to counter them. Phillips of the Worcestershires, Cameron and White of the Camerons, Highett of the Dorsets, and many other young officers built up tremendous reputations as patrol leaders. It was brilliant patrolling which led to 5th Brigade’s astonishing march on Naga Village, and many other operations. As the casualties among junior officers began to mount, there is no doubt that the standard of patrolling declined somewhat, but, even to the end, there were some outstanding exceptions. The patrols by the Camerons and Worcestershires led to the last and most brilliant victory in the whole campaign, at Maram. On the whole it is difficult to condemn th
e Division’s patrolling.

  The charge that the Division’s tactics were unimaginative is hard to maintain also. Its moves were often unorthodox; its brigadiers often took great risks. Victor Hawkins twice risked his brigade and twice brought off a brilliant coup. Tanks were used in terrain where no one, not even the tank commanders and the sappers, had believed they could penetrate. Major-General R. P. Pakenham Walsh, in his History of the Royal Engineers, pays special tribute to these efforts. And where, it might be asked, in the whole history of warfare has a brigade buried its boots, got into gym shoes, and moved silently by night across the enemy’s front? It must be admitted, of course, that many frontal attacks were made, most of them costly; but until one has examined the terrain and explored the alternatives it is useless to condemn the frontal attack per se. Sometimes it is unavoidable.

  The charge of bad administration is an easy one to make from a distance. Certainly the Division was entirely ignorant of mules as a method of supply; it had never received air-drops; it had never worked with Nagas or coolies. From the start its staff officers had to improvise. But it is difficult to maintain that the tactical course of the battle was affected by any administrative or supply failure, except in one respect: the shortage of 25-pounder ammunition, especially smoke, and the complete failure of 3.7 howitzer ammunition. This matter has been glossed over by professional historians, but as Grover has written: ‘This shortage naturally had a definite bearing (and a restrictive effect) on our operations… we were never able to give any operation the full support of the Divisional Artillery, and it was only at the end that we had more than two medium guns. By European ideas, one would hesitate to lay on a set-piece brigade operation with less than the Div. R.A. to support it, some Corps Artillery, and probably an Army Group R.A. (or part of one) thrown in…. The Gunner problem certainly made our task of giving adequate support to the attacking troops, and of neutralizing areas from which they could be enfiladed by hidden Jap M.G.s, more difficult; also that of knocking out bunkers, even when located.’ Grover also emphasizes that close air support as laid on in Europe was also impossible because of the time-lag.