Authors: Fergal Keane
An officer of the 138th Infantry Regiment who served with Sato at Kohima wrote an affectionate account of his commander. ‘It is evident that My Lord Sato’s face is round. His nose is like rice dumpling. His eyes are slightly sharp. Due to such a facial feature, you may imagine that he laughs in such a large-hearted way but the truth is that he giggles with pipe in his mouth. It was one of his uniquenesses to giggle when he made the other person puzzle and face a predicament. When it is funny, he lets his body roll back and laughs “Ha, Ha, Ha” shaking his big belly. My Lord Sato was a funny person.’
In September 1943 General Sato and his headquarters staff flew from Bangkok to Rangoon before moving to the town of Pegu. Here 31st Division aroused the animosity of the locals. As a Japanese civilian, Shudo Akiyama bore the brunt of people’s anger. They came to his language school every day to complain. The soldiers beat the population and took their food at gunpoint. Women reported being attacked after nightfall.
Akiyama had been sent to Pegu by the ministry of education in April 1942 and found it a quiet, pleasant town with a ‘mild environment’. There were shady, tree-lined streets, a lake to sit by in his spare time, and the statues of the Buddha, reclining and four-faced, which were famous across Asia. The only Japanese there when he arrived were the stationmaster, four military policemen and a handful of businessmen. Now, in May 1943, the place was crammed with troublesome soldiers. ‘The number of cases grew and it was so frequent it was beyond my capacity,’ he wrote. Akiyama decided to go to the aide-de-camp of the divisional commander and seek a meeting with his boss. ‘In those days I was a hot-blooded young man. I left with a determination to meet and have a fight with the aide if that was necessary.’
He arrived at the commander’s residence and managed to get to speak with the general himself. He remembered him as heavy-set and
pale, with short-cropped hair and, at first, a stern expression; his face and physique reminded Akiyama of the statue of the last of the great samurai, Saigo Takamori, in far-off Ueno Park in Tokyo. The general listened impassively to Akiyama as he listed the complaints against the division. ‘Burma was not the enemy land and I appealed upfront that it is important to maintain rapport with Burmese people and respect their customs.’ When he had finished the general exclaimed in a loud voice, ‘Understood. I issue an order immediately today.’ It is easy to imagine the general’s anger. Had he not made a point of taking his officers round the villages to point out the similarities between the Burmese and Japanese? As far back as the 1930s, when he had been stationed in Korea, he had drummed into his own son the importance of winning over the local population. When Goro Sato was in his second year at elementary school, and living in barracks with his parents, he had teased a Korean woman who cut the grass in their garden. ‘That woman got really mad at me and she chased me with the grass clippers. That night my father heard what happened. He said to me: “Don’t tease these people. Now you go back to the woman’s place and apologise to her.” I was sent with my mother and a lieutenant to go and apologise. My father hated the idea of racism or the division between rich and poor. He didn’t have that kind of feeling. It was the kind of thing that really made him mad.’
The day after Akiyama had made his complaint a young officer arrived at the language school to apologise for the failure to maintain discipline among the troops. Later the general himself arrived, wearing an artificial cherry blossom on his chest where his badge of rank would normally be. ‘“I am General Cherry,” said he, bursting into laughter as soon as he saw me. “Please refer to me as so to your students to keep military secret,” he said. That day I had my students sing Japanese school songs in choir. He was charmed by their singing.’ Akiyama was to become Sato’s friend and the chronicler of the events that unfolded in the spring of 1944.
The previous December, Lieutenant Susumu Nishida of the 58th Regiment led a scouting party into the Naga Hills to map routes to Kohima. The spies noted trails and found a sizeable track that the British had cut from the banks of the Chindwin leading to the village of Jessami, one of the advance posts of the garrison at Kohima. The British had been working on the track in preparation for their own offensive. The reconaissance showed that even if they did manage to get help from the local tribes, Sato’s division would need to show extraordinary resilience until they reached the vast stocks of British food which, Mutaguchi promised, were waiting to be snatched.
The 31st Division infantry group was made up of three regiments: the 58th and 138th had both seen action in China and then spent several months on garrison duty in Malaya; the 124th had fought against the Americans at Guadalcanal in 1942–43, in fierce battles which ultimately claimed 24,000 Japanese casualties.
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Supporting the infantry group was a mountain artillery regiment. The group was commanded by Sato’s best officer, the diminutive and plump Major General Shigesaburo Miyazaki, another member of the league of non-flatterers, respected by the troops for his personal bravery, and a loyal subordinate to Sato. His one eccentricity was to ride into battle with a pet monkey called Chibi perched on his shoulder.
Sato lacked heavy artillery and tanks, and even if the latter had been available they could never have traversed the steep mountain tracks into the Naga Hills. The whole of 15th Army was hamstrung by chronic deficiencies in air support, weaponry and ammunition. The artillery units of the 31st Division carried only 100–150 rounds per gun, compared with 1,000 rounds per piece for the 33rd Division heading towards Imphal. This was a reflection of chronic shortages throughout the Imperial Japanese Army. One senior officer reckoned there was a ‘difference of a century’ between the equipment and weapons of the British and the Japanese at this point in the war.
Beyond a generalised picture of a British build-up on the Imphal plain, Mutaguchi’s headquarters was miserably short, too, of reliable intelligence on the enemy’s capabilities. Lieutenant Colonel Iwaichi Fujiwara was furious at the low priority given to intelligence. The problem was systemic. ‘In every Japanese HQ, intelligence officers are regarded as subordinate to planning and operations officers and are given poor facilities for intelligence work.’ The Japanese struggled and failed to break British codes, while forward British units like V Force could operate ‘without [our] ever being able to discover details of their organization and methods’.
American pressure in the Pacific had dramatically reduced the numbers of aircraft and pilots available for Burma. Aerial reconnaissance was negligible. The deficit of fighters also meant that there were no escorts for supply-dropping transports, although these aircraft, too, were in pitifully short supply. Mutaguchi ordered his supply dumps to be carefully concealed in thick forest, but estimated that up to 20 per cent of the stocks were destroyed in allied bombing raids. The great hopes of resupply for Mutaguchi’s army rested with the new Thailand – Burma railway, and yet allied aircraft constantly harassed that line.
Only half of the 48,000 tons of supplies promised to Mutaguchi by Southern Area Army headquarters in Singapore had arrived in Burma by the end of January 1944, and the plan to move up to 3,000 tons per day to the front was stillborn. Throughout the period of Mutaguchi’s offensive only four hundred tons per day were ever transported, and most of this would go to the divisions advancing towards Imphal.
Lieutenant Yoshiteru Hirayama of 58th Regiment experienced constant pressure from allied air raids on his journey north to the invasion launching point. Along with the problems of supply, they made him doubt the invasion plan. ‘From Rangoon we went to Mandalay and from there to Sangin. That journey was my first experience of seeing bombs fall from a plane. The allied air power was very strong and this added to my doubts. But this was not the kind of thing you said openly, for two reasons: if the
Kempeitai
[military
police] heard that you were saying such things you could get your head chopped off! Also it would only reduce the men’s morale.’ He remembered back to an incident in officer training school when a cadet who had been to university in America was asked to talk about his experiences. What was the country like? How many people were there? What kind of cars and machines did they have? The cadet stood and started to mutter his answer. ‘It was like he was not speaking the full truth, as if he didn’t want to tell us how powerful it was.’ The young man was killed serving in New Guinea later in the war.
The 31st Division would have to cross the Chindwin river and face an obstacle course where mountains soared up to 8,000 feet and plunged into humid jungle valleys. Mutaguchi and his planners estimated it would take the division twenty days to reach Kohima. Each soldier was given twenty-five kilograms of rice and a salt ration to last until they could capture British supplies. The supply clerks carried Indian currency to buy food in the villages. Japanese problems with food supply pre-dated the invasion. A secret memorandum sent by a V Force officer in January 1944 had given early warning of the crisis that would face the Japanese, and of British plans to reduce the amount of food available to be captured. ‘As the Japs are so very short of food in their forward areas, rice dumps would be one of the most valuable things for them to capture. I am therefore keeping our stocks well back and draining border villages of their stocks so that if the Japs effected a sudden advance they would obtain no additional food. I am aided in this by the fact that the villages in the S.E. corner of North Lushai have had similar crop failures to the Chin Hills. I am further reducing their stocks by borrowing rice to feed the Punjab Coy and “V” Force troops and porters. I give a receipt in return for the rice and the chief can either have payment in cash or rice returned from our near stocks within 3 months. This also relieves patrols and porters from carrying their rice rations on long trips, and rice eaters can live off the country.’
Mutaguchi could not claim ignorance of the situation. Sato and his fellow commanders all complained about the supply situation before the offensive began. The 31st Division commander recalled
that they ‘expressed huge concern and each division offered its opinion … and tried to spur the senior staff’. A senior air force officer, Lieutenant General Tazoe, commander of the 5th Air Division, who watched the build-up of allied air strength, and the fly-in of Wingate’s Chindits, warned Mutaguchi he was facing a very different enemy. ‘The Allied power to bring in transport, troops, guns, tanks, and equipment is beyond anything you have visualised.’
The army commander, however, ignored the warnings and put his faith in captured stocks. It had worked before in China and Malaya, why not in India? He clearly preferred not to think about what had just happened in the Arakan, or to dwell upon the disastrous experience of the Japanese in New Guinea in 1942, where some troops had resorted to cannibalism when supplies failed to reach them. To bolster his supplies, Mutaguchi looked to the example of Genghis Khan who fed his Golden Horde with cattle on the hoof. Orders were sent out to conduct an experiment to find out how far cattle could march in a day. Some cows were duly selected and taken on a daylong forced march. The beasts managed thirteen kilometres. What Mutaguchi had failed to take into account – or had decided to ignore – was that the cattle had been marched along roads in the Burmese staging areas and not up steep mountains like those on the Indian frontier. And they had only been tested on their endurance over a day’s march, whereas they would be expected to keep moving for nearly three weeks to pass through the Naga Hills. Fifteen thousand cattle were assembled. Mutaguchi also ordered that each division be given ten thousand sheep and goats.
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The divisional supply officers were less sanguine about the prospect of living off the land. Lieutenant Masao Hirakubo was a supply officer with the 58th Regiment and arrived in Rangoon to a bleak message from the divisional accountant. ‘He said to me: “We know this campaign cannot be carried out but GHQ ordered us and
we should do this. That is a soldier’s destiny. I cannot expect to see you again.”’ With this gloomy forecast, Hirakubo learned that he was responsible for feeding a thousand men. He remembered back to the arguments he had had with his father in the lead-up to the war. Hirakubo senior had opposed the conflict and told his son that Japan would survive only by building up her trade. ‘I was very young and militarised. Always I was shouting at him while he spoke of negotiations and compromise. Now I felt that my father was right. Japan had got the politics all wrong.’
Preparations were dealt a further blow when Mutaguchi was faced with having to delay his offensive. The main infantry strength of 15th Division had been held back in Thailand for a mixture of road-building and security duties, amid rising tension in the kingdom. The intelligence officer Fujiwara was sure that this made a significant difference to the invasion plan. ‘When a decision was finally made to send this Division most of them moved on foot [and] the main battle strength … was still on the way by the middle of March.’ But Mutaguchi forged on, convinced that the British and Indians on the other side of the Chindwin would fold and run as their comrades had done before.
Our view of the Japanese fighting man has been conditioned by accounts of savagery and unyielding fanaticism. The massacre at Nanking, the slaughter of ethnic Chinese at Singapore, the devastation inflicted on Manila, and the merciless treatment of POWs, all earned the Japanese soldier a reputation for barbarism in modern warfare outdone only by the SS divisions in eastern Europe. Yet if the Imperial Army acted in a manner that confounded the capacity for understanding, its soldiers were no less varied as individuals than their British, Indian, Chinese and American enemies.