Road of Bones (22 page)

Up on the hill Major Winstanley got on the wireless to call in the artillery which would precede his attack. As he was doing so, Tom Hogg noticed a large gash in a nearby tree trunk. It looked very like shell damage, as if a lump of shrapnel had gouged away part of the tree. Immediately Hogg thought to himself that the artillery had been firing on the point earlier to find its range and had decided that this was a Japanese position. Somebody had misread a map. Before he could warn Winstanley he heard the rumble of the guns, followed by the high scream of shells coming into B company’s position. The explosions tore through the ranks, spraying the hillside with flesh and blood, a terrifying eruption of fire and steel which killed the company’s signallers with the first salvo, so that the survivors were reduced to shouting down the hillside for the firing to stop. The stretcher bearers were killed too. Forty-eight rounds struck B
company, a devastating concentration in a small space. Back at the starting point, Company Sergeant Major Bert Harwood and the rest of C company could hear the shells going over. ‘All of a sudden I heard somebody shout “stop them bloody guns, they’re only shelling B company.”’

The Japanese quickly realised what was going on and added to the nightmare by firing smoke shells from their mortars and setting alight the dry jungle around B company. As the fire crept closer to the bodies of the dead and wounded, the flames ignited ammunition and grenades in the men’s webbing pouches. Men wounded in the initial shelling now saw the flames sweeping towards them. Bodies exploded as grenades went up in the inferno. The screams of the dying and wounded mingled with the bangs and the static crackle of the fire.

A runner was dispatched to race through the burning jungle and fetch help. But it was nightfall before Frank Infanti and the other medics were able to reach the position and start bringing men down. ‘We went to pick up the bits and pieces,’ he recalled. His abiding memory is of John Winstanley, ‘a very brave man, calm as a cucumber’, giving orders and taking care of his men. Word came through from Lieutenant Colonel Laverty that the survivors were to dig in for the night and hold out until a relieving force could get through. As the medics made their way back down the hill with the wounded they came under Japanese sniper fire. Another Japanese group attacked the survivors, but was driven off after throwing a few grenades. Seventeen men were killed and forty-one wounded. Winstanley had lost roughly half his company strength. CSM Harwood and C company moved in to replace Winstanley’s ravaged group. ‘We moved through them and I’ve never seen anything like it. Bodies … arms hanging in the trees and what have you.’ Captain Harry Smith, the schoolteacher from Suffolk, went forward with the pioneer platoon to bury the dead. They dug a communal grave and ‘buried the sad, shell-torn victims’ under continuing mortar fire.

That night at battalion headquarters Laverty called in the artillerymen and demanded an explanation. It turned out that the
hill positions had been wrongly mapped – an ever-present danger in such thick jungle country – with the Japanese placed where B company were lying in wait to attack. It had been a devastating experience not only for B company but the entire battalion.

On the road in front of the western tunnel the battle continued for Donald Easten and D company. After reaching the western tunnel, Easten positioned a platoon on one side of the road and two platoons on the other, with company headquarters in a gully close by. The fire from the Japanese positions was intense. Two of Easten’s men were killed on the road, the bodies lying there until after dark because it was too dangerous to retrieve them in daylight. Lance Corporal John Harman was close by and volunteered to creep up towards the Japanese positions. But Easten did not want to lose any more men to the machine guns.

After several failed attempts by the infantry to gain ground, the battalion called up tanks. Easten had pinpointed the Japanese firing points and volunteered to climb aboard a tank and direct the gunner. But there was insufficient room inside and he was forced to sit outside behind the turret, shouting instructions through a telephone. The Japanese fired at him constantly, the bullets zipping past as he tried to give accurate directions to the gunner. ‘It was most unpleasant,’ he recalled.

A few days later the West Kents were relieved and sent to the rear to clean up and, they hoped, enjoy a proper rest, the first in several months. The battalion was exhausted. The men had suffered the catastrophe of being shelled by their own artillery, and many had seen death for the first time. But they would never forget that throughout the Arakan fighting the battalion had never been forced to retreat. When they did meet the Japanese the enemy proved tough, but not superhuman. They could be beaten.

Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi understood that he had better be quick about crossing the Chindwin and beating the British. He had succeeded in diverting British attention towards the Arakan, but the monsoon loomed in a couple of months, with rains that would end all hope of supplying his divisions. Imperial headquarters had given him just fifty days to complete his operations. Three divisions would be sent across the Chindwin into India from early March. The 15th and 33rd were to move against the British and Indian 4 Corps at Imphal, while 31st Division would climb into the Naga Hills and cut the British line of communication at Kohima. The British and Indian positions certainly looked vulnerable on paper. The forces around Imphal were widely dispersed over terrain that made quick reinforcement difficult. The defensive line straggled for two hundred miles and the two main forward elements, the Indian 20th and 17th Divisions, were separated from each other by mountains. The small garrison at Kohima represented no significant threat, Mutaguchi believed, and could be rolled up within a few days, removing any British threat to his flanks and rear and allowing him to strike against the 14th Army supply base at Dimapur.

The task of implementing Mutaguchi’s ‘modest plan’ fell to his three division commanders. The 15th Division, led by the old aristocrat Lieutenant General Masafumi Yamauchi, a former military attaché to Washington, would cross the Chindwin and advance westwards to cut the Dimapur – Imphal road, before turning to attack Imphal from the north. The 15th was the weakest of the divisions,
with its three infantry regiments below full strength and one regiment each of field artillery and engineers. By the time the offensive began, 15th Division troops were still arriving from road-building duties in Thailand. Lieutenant General Yamauchi was chronically ill with tuberculosis and enveloped in a mood of gloom about the operation. One of the few comforts for this ageing warrior on the long road to Imphal was his ‘thunderbox’ – the Western-style pedestal lavatory carried in the general’s baggage train.

The 33rd Division, under Lieutenant General Genzo Yanagida, was the best armed, with attached tank, engineer and medium artillery regiments. Yanagida was to make a two-pronged advance towards the Imphal plain. The main force would march up the Kabaw valley, where so many refugees had perished on the escape from Burma, and emerge to destroy the 20th Indian Division at Tamu, near the Chindwin, before seizing the airfields on the northeast of the Imphal plain. The other column would destroy 17th Indian Division before marching on Imphal from the south.

The third element, 31st Division, was led by a man whose character is central to understanding the crisis into which the Imperial Japanese Army was propelled during the spring and summer of 1944, and whose personal battle with Renya Mutaguchi would ultimately destroy the careers of both men. Lieutenant General Kotuku Sato had been an adversary of Mutaguchi’s from the army’s pre-war factional fighting and the mutual animosity lingered. He mistrusted Mutagushi’s bluster and his belief that will alone could conquer all difficulties – the fatal conceit at the core of Japanese military thinking. The words ‘moron’ and ‘blockhead’ were liberally used by Mutaguchi’s divisional commanders, but only Sato would ultimately be willing to openly confront the army commander.

In both background and character they were very different men. Kotuku Sato was born in Amarume, in Yamagata prefecture, in 1893 into a family of twelve children – five boys and seven girls – who were all encouraged to compete with each other. The general’s mother, Haruyo, was the dominant figure. His grand-nephew, Shigehiko Sato, recalled her as a ‘very strict woman’ who pushed her children to
achieve. ‘They said she was strong like a man. She urged them to be the best.’ Haruyo Sato also believed in the further education of women, an untypical view in the Japan of the early twentieth-century. One of her daughters became the first woman from Amarume to go to university.

The Sato family had traded in the town for over three hundred years, running a kimono factory and a pharmacy. They were well respected, and the young Kotuku was treated with deference by the townspeople. Hakuho Abe, now a revered Buddhist monk in Amarume, remembered that the family was one of the richest in the area. ‘They were upper middle class. I came from the poor temple and he was from a rich family, so there was a bit of a distance. I got the impression he was a bit proud.’

Kotuku was the first in his family to join the army, after hearing Admiral Tetsutaro Sato, a much garlanded veteran of the Russo-Japanese war, speak at his school. ‘That meeting really touched him and it made up his mind to be a soldier,’ Sato’s grand-nephew recalled. The admiral was an advocate of the expansion of Japan’s naval power and one of the architects of the pre-emptive strategy that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The admiral took a keen interest in Kotuku’s military career and remained a mentor until his death in 1942. His influence on Kotuku Sato’s future path is best expressed in one of the admiral’s favourite sayings, uttered by the military commander he most revered, the sixteenth-century Korean warrior Yi Sun-sin: ‘If I pursue honour by flattering people in power, it will be a tremendous shame.’
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Throughout his lifetime, and despite the devastating personal consequences, Kotuku Sato adhered to this precept.

Sato had been one of the outstanding students of his class at the military academy and by the age of forty-four he was commanding the 75th Regiment in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. He
was an ardent supporter of imperial expansion and was friendly with Tojo. His son Goro Sato remembered being taken to General Tojo’s house in Tokyo where the future prime minister patted him on the head while he discussed politics with his father.

Sato fought the Russians as a brigade commander at Lake Khasan on the Soviet – Korean frontier in July 1938, a battle that saw the Soviet commander, Vasily Blucher, executed afterwards by the NKVD for incompetence and where Sato led successful assaults against Soviet fortifications. He faced the Soviets again in 1941 at the battle of Nomonhan on the Mongolian border. The catastrophe there led to Japanese casualties of more than 50,000 killed, wounded or captured in the largest tank battle the world had ever seen.
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At one point in the battle there was just one pontoon bridge to bring supplies to the front line, hopelessly slowing the logistical effort. An army whose supply lines were so precarious could not hope for victory. It was a lesson Sato would remember well.

General Sato was married young, to Fumiko, the daughter of a wealthy aristocratic family in Sendai, the largest city in north-eastern Japan. Her life with Kotuku, like that of any military officer’s wife, was entirely subordinate to the army’s demands. She moved from Japan to Korea and Manchuria with him, transferring her son through four different elementary schools and three high schools. She also endured the boorish drinking parties that were part of the ritual of barracks life. The general would dance for his men and sing. On one occasion he arrived home speechless with drink and wearing a flowerpot on his head. His son Goro remembered dinners at which his father would fall asleep drunk while his subordinates carried on carousing around him. ‘He was always saying: “Come to my house and drink.” My mother understood the situation. He would just tell her: “You’ve got to take care of them.” She accepted it. I really never
saw her complain.’ At the that time Sato probably drank in the same manner as the majority of Japanese officers; it was a culture of alcohol-soaked machismo, but it was not allowed to interfere with his daily work. It was only later, after the disaster, that alcohol became the destroyer.