Road of Bones (2 page)

As for the Japanese, they had crossed into India proclaiming their desire to free the oppressed peoples of the Raj, yet they ruled over an empire brutalised by massacre and enslavement. They brought with them Indian rebels who, they hoped, would raise the population against the British, but were defeated by an army whose component parts reflected the greatest empire the world had ever seen. The battle was fought on the territory of a tribal people loyal to the Raj, but whose fate is one of the most haunting strands of this narrative.

There was a third power in this great struggle and its influence would be decisive. American aircraft would help ensure the survival and ultimate victory of the British and Indian forces, but beyond a shared desire to defeat Japan the war aims and strategies of the United States and Britain diverged sharply. President Roosevelt was determined that victory in the Far East would not lead to a reimposition of the colonial status quo. The influential American commentator Walter Lipmann wrote that ‘there is a strong feeling that Britain east of Suez is quite different from Britain at home, that the war in Europe is a war of liberation and the war in Asia is for the defence of archaic privilege … the Asiatic war has revived the profound anti-imperialism of the American tradition.’ The American view was reflected in prolonged arguments over war strategy: Roosevelt believed the Burma campaign should be fought to aid his Chinese allies in the north and not as a battle of territorial redemption for the empire. The divisions over strategy were not a purely Anglo-American affair. The conduct of the campaign also produced the greatest rupture in Churchill’s cabinet of the entire war, with the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), General Sir Alan Brooke, and his colleagues threatening mass resignation over the prime minister’s plans for ambitious, and logistically impossible, sea-borne operations. These high-level arguments form an insistent drum beat in the narrative of Kohima.

This book does not attempt to tell the story of every unit that fought at Kohima, nor does it describe in any detail the parallel battles fought ninety miles away at Imphal. The Imphal struggle, the adventures of Wingate’s Chindits and General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell’s Chinese divisions, and the interventions of Subhas Chandra Bose’s rebel Indian National Army are discussed only as they relate directly to events at Kohima. In telling the story of the British 2nd Division, which led the ousting of the Japanese from Kohima in the second phase of the battle, I have concentrated my particular attention on the remorseless politics of war. The division’s popular commander, Major General John Grover, was sacked from his job at the very moment of his triumph. A recommendation for a detailed account of the fighting exploits of the division is found at the end of chapter twenty-three.

In a story where epic courage and remorseless savagery are constant companions the narrative cannot avoid becoming, at least in part, a meditation on the nature of man. As a war correspondent of nearly thirty years’ experience, and an ardent reader of history, I came to the story of Kohima believing I knew the extremes of human behaviour in war. But, for me, Kohima belonged in new territory entirely. It was not just the exceptional nature of the hand-to-hand fighting, but the other story that emerged, the long human aftermath of Kohima, an unlikely narrative of reconciliation between old enemies, but also of bitter enmity between men who once fought side by side, a story that reached its extraordinary denouement, in one case, at the funeral of a Japanese general.

I came to Kohima entirely by accident. Several years ago a good friend telephoned and asked if I would interview his father for a private memoir. ‘We think he might open up more to somebody outside the family,’ he said. Over several weekends I interviewed Colonel John Shipster at his son Michael’s home in Hampshire. John had joined the Indian Army directly from public school at the age of eighteen and was commissioned into the Punjab Regiment. He arrived in Kohima after the siege but while the battle to retake the ridge from the Japanese was still at its height. At the outset I asked him what had been his proudest achievement of the war, a naive question in retrospect. ‘My proudest achievement of the war?’ he asked, a little bewildered. ‘The fact that I survived it!’ Only after he had detailed what had happened in the jungles and mountains could I say that I understood his answer. Towards the end of his life, memories of the war came back to haunt him, and he would frequently be woken by dreams of night fighting in the jungle.

This book is my account of the siege and relief of Kohima and is necessarily subject to one author’s idea of what was compelling and significant. There may be those who disagree with my emphasis on this or that event, or my judgements of different characters, but I hope they will recognise in this work a sense of awe at what men endured on that forgotten Asian battlefield.

Stepping inside from the breathless slump of the afternoon, Captain Thomas Pardoe found the grand lobby of the Strand Hotel a sanctuary of unimagined proportions. Gone, suddenly, the noise of the Burmese street, the call of the shoeshine boys and the rickshaw wallahs, and the air heavy with the smell of damp and river water. Rangoon in those days was a city aspiring to stature, made prosperous as the port through which Burma’s vast rice crop was exported, but still only a minor eminence on the fringes of the eastern empire. Visitors from India found Rangoon lush with gardens that ‘bloomed with tropical profusion – bougainvillea, poinsettas, laburnum and tall delphiniums of piercing blue. The Golden Mohur trees flamed like candles against the green foliage …’ They might stop to admire the great pagodas of Sule and Shwedagon whose golden domes rose above the city, or enjoy a night at an English-language theatre and dinner at the Strand, before moving on to Singapore and Malaya or westward to India. With its high ceilings, roomy corridors and floors of teak, the Strand was built for an age before air conditioning. Its founders, the four Sarkies brothers, were Armenians who had emigrated to the Far East from Persia and established a chain of luxury hotels which included the Strand’s more famous relation, Raffles Hotel in Singapore. The white-jacketed porters at the Strand would have taken Captain Pardoe’s bags without fuss while he signed his name in the guests’ register, a book that had in times past recorded the signatures of Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling and the future king of England, Edward VIII, who had stopped there in
1922 while on a royal tour with his cousin, ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten. On that occasion a sumptuous barge, decorated with the Burmese symbol of royalty, four golden peacocks’ heads, and topped by three model pagodas, was provided for the prince. Oarsmen in long, flowing robes steered the royal barge while the future king relaxed in the pavilion, sheltered from prying eyes by shimmering white curtains which billowed gently as the boat moved across the royal lake near the centre of the city. Later on his journey the prince played polo at Mandalay, the former home of the Burmese kings, and ‘was entertained by dancing girls at a lavish reception’.

The city encountered by Captain Pardoe nearly twenty years later had grown outwards to accommodate the Indian migrant labourers working in the city’s docks and factories. Daily they unloaded tons of supplies destined for the Chinese Nationalist armies fighting the Japanese across the border far to the north. A correspondent for the
Manchester Guardian
reported on 2 February 1942 that 5,000 lorries carrying 30,000 tons were using the 712 mile route every day.
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As Pardoe settled into his airy room at the Strand he must have relished the prospect of some time, no matter how brief, in Rangoon, an altogether different prospect from the central Chinese city of Chungking to which he was normally confined. That overcrowded, filthy city served as the temporary capital of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. As a liaison officer to the Chinese military headquarters, Pardoe was obliged to live there among hundreds of thousands of refugees, soldiers and a vast assortment of carpetbaggers and chancers. The American newspaper correspondent Theodore White described the streets as ‘full of squealing pigs, bawling babies, yelling men and the singsong chant of coolies carrying loads from up the river’. The generalissimo’s court was riven by relentless intrigue, spurred by the insatiable ambition of Chiang’s relatives to enrich themselves and by regional warlords who pleaded and menaced for favour.

Pardoe arrived in Rangoon on 8 February 1941, but was given just a day to refresh himself before embarking on a mission to tour the country’s borders with Thailand and China. It was to be a journey by road, rail, boat and air, to investigate the local defences and to coordinate possible future action with the Chinese. Pardoe met up with a Chinese military delegation a week into his tour at the town of Kyukok on the border of the Chinese province of Yunnan. With an air suggesting a weary familiarity with the ways of his allies, he noted that while the visit was ‘supposed to have been strictly confidential, I am told its formation and proposed tour had already been announced over the TOKYO wireless’. Chiang’s court was riddled with informers.

At this time, February 1941, the Japanese had not yet occupied Thailand, although there were numerous reports of fifth-column activities. Pardoe recorded the activities of suspected spies and Japanese attempts to subvert the local population in Burma.

At Lilem, on the border with Thailand, he reported a rumour that eight hundred Japanese wearing Thai uniforms had been spotted just across the frontier; while a postmaster at Tachilek, who was being paid ten rupees a month to spy for the British, gave news that as many as 5,000 Japanese had arrived in Bangkok. The information seems to have been exaggerated, possibly by a spy anxious to please his paymasters. Further north, Pardoe worried over the role of Italian priests in the Shan states bordering China, whose influence ‘over some of their Asiatic converts is so strong, fifth column activities would be a possibility’. At Maungmagan on the Tenasserim coast he heard suspicions about a Mrs Leal, the Austrian wife of an Irish tin-mine owner. ‘She also owns a mine in the Thai frontier area. She set off to visit this mine in early April, taking with her a portable wireless set. Up till the war she was admittedly strongly pro-Nazi. I saw a copy of her dossier … She is being watched. Mr Ruddy [Burma Auxiliary Force], who has known her a long time, considers she is either extremely clever or else entirely innocent.’ Some official reader of this document in Rangoon has scribbled the words ‘A remarkable statement!’ next to this assessment of the curious Mrs Leal.

Another foreigner to arouse suspicion was a Mr G. R. Powell of the Watchtower Society of Australia. This representative of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was placed under surveillance by the Burma police in a classic case of mistaken priorities. Mr Powell represented a religious faith that customarily excited the suspicion of colonial officials, yet the Jehovah’s Witnesses were among the groups enthusiastically persecuted by Hitler’s Reich and would have offered little threat to the security of Burma.
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