Road of Bones (27 page)

On the day Slim summoned Stopford to take command of the Dimapur area the 33 Corps commander wrote in his diary, ‘we are going to buy a very sticky show unless we are careful’. By 21 March
Stopford was experiencing a ‘pretty thrilling day’ organising his move to the front. At this point Stopford had only one division, the British 2nd, under his command. But when Stopford met the 2nd Division commander, General John Grover, he found him ‘completely bewildered’. Grover was hardly to be blamed. On 16 March he had met General Giffard to discuss another issue and, aware of the growing crisis, he raised the issue of reinforcements for Dimapur and Kohima. Given that Giffard was under intense pressure from both Mountbatten and Slim to get troops moving, the scene Grover describes in his diary is decidedly unusual.

Had personal discussion with General Giffard, who showed me latest situation on his Ops Map showing three Japanese Divisions having started to cross the Chindwin on 15th March, and indicating a threat to 4th Corps L. of C. I asked at once whether there was not now a possibility of 2 Div. being employed operationally as a formation. General Giffard replied that there was no such chance, and that in any case it would not be possible to maintain a British Division in the 14th Army area because of the shortage of British reinforcements. Arrangements for dispersal of 2 Division could continue.
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Grover was told to disperse his troops to barracks after the completion of training. Now, just four days later, he was being ordered to hurry them to the front as quickly as possible. Stopford was ‘more than concerned than ever that Army Group [Giffard] and S.E.A.C. have no control of the situation’.

The troops of 2nd Division had spent months training, not for warfare in the mountains and jungles, but for amphibious landings which had repeatedly been postponed because landing craft could not be spared from Europe. In fact Grover’s initial orders for Burma on 18 March were to prepare to move to Chittagong as a departure point for the Arakan. There they would relieve the 5 Indian Division which would be airlifted to Dimapur. But two days later those orders
were countermanded. Grover’s division was now to make for Dimapur. It would not be the last twirl in the dysfunctional gavotte of order and counter-order.

Major General John Malcolm Lawrence Grover was forty-seven years old when he was ordered to the Kohima front and had been with 2nd Division since 1941 knowing ‘almost everyone in it by name regardless of rank’, according to Major David Wilson, who served under Grover from 1942.
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Wilson gives an impression of a Grover as a man who was liked ‘but could frighten the life out of each of us with his elegantly phrased rockets of displeasure’. Wilson remembered that when he arrived at the Division, instead of being marched in front of Grover as was usual, he was asked to join him for dinner in the mess. The man he met there was ‘short, lithe, very smart, very precise in his speech, and blessed with very blue piercing eyes’. According to another young officer Grover was ‘highly charged with nervous energy … correct, punctilious, and a perfectionist’, the kind of general who would berate a cook with dirty fingernails. ‘Wherever the General walked the air quivered with nervous excitement and apprehension’. Yet for all that he was popular with the ranks whom he made a point of visiting frequently to discuss their food and welfare. But both Grover and his division had always visualised fighting their war against the Germans and not, according to one of his officers, ‘to defend a fading empire against Japanese aggressors’.
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They were now being called upon to save the British empire from what could be the most humiliating defeat since the fall of Singapore.

General Stopford flew to Comilla to see Slim on 23 March, arriving in a torrential downpour and after a hideous flight which had made several of his staff sick. Slim’s headquarters was situated in a spacious and elegant colonial home with a large garden, and after tea the two generals sat down to discuss the growing crisis. Slim must have been typically blunt about the continuing the threat to Imphal and the danger posed by the Japanese coming through the Naga Hills, for the meeting unsettled Stopford. Afterwards, he confided to his diary: ‘The situation in North Burma is not good and it is touch and go whether reinforcements arrive before the Japs can get to Imphal and Manipur Road.’

At Imphal a potentially disastrous sequence of events had unfolded. The order to withdraw 17th Indian Division, the key to luring Mutaguchi’s main forces onto the plain where they could be destroyed, was given too late by the 4th Corps Commander, General Geoffrey Scoones.
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Since 13 March the Indians had been fighting their way through Japanese attempts at encirclement. It took three major battles for 17th Indian Division to reach Imphal in early April.

Nearly three hundred miles away in the Arakan, Ray Street, the runner with C company, 4th battalion, the Royal West Kents, was making the most of his rest after the battle of the tunnels. Brigadier Warren addressed the men on parade and told them of his regret at the loss of so many lives. They were based in a deserted village and camped in the empty bashas. New men started to arrive as replacements for those killed at the tunnels. Most of the new faces were
Welsh and that night, over some beers, the West Kents welcomed them with a sing-song. Street and some others found a lake and waded in, only to find that it was just a foot deep. ‘We stripped off and dashed towards the lake, naked like a crowd of eager school kids … we made the most of it splashing and cooling off.’ There were parcels from home. Street received cigarettes and chocolate, and there were extra rations of beer and food. The entertainers George and Beryl Formby were flown in and Street recalled how Beryl was persuaded ‘to sit on the back of an elephant … the elephant sat down and she slid off. Of course everyone erupted with laughter.’

Street was resting in the shade of his basha when an NCO came and told him to tell the company commanders to report to battalion headquarters. His instinct told him it meant trouble. On 23 March the battalion was placed on two hours’ notice to move. Lieutenant Colonel Laverty had been told about the Japanese offensive developing along the Chindwin but he was struggling to get information on the West Kents’ exact destination. A measure of his frustration can be gleaned from an entry in the battalion war diary: ‘One formation approached for information seriously suggested reference to … [military] newspapers.’ Two days later, Laverty received his orders and briefed his officers and NCOs. The battalion was to move to the airstrip at Dohazari and would be flown from there to the front.

Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes remembered being told that the Japanese were threatening Dimapur and that if they got there it would cause serious trouble, ‘because India at the present time was still a troubled place. I didn’t think they had too much care for the British anyway and the Japanese might have had a lot of sympathy there.’

The entire 5th Indian Division of 15,000 men would be flown, along with artillery, vehicles and mules, into the battle zone over the next few days, in 748 sorties. Laverty and his headquarters staff left for Dimapur on 27 March, followed two days later by the rest of 4th battalion and their comrades in the 1/1 Punjab and 4/7 Rajput. The men were crammed on to barges for the journey to the airstrip at Taungbro. No sooner had they embarked than they were told that the troops sent to replace them in the Arakan were in trouble and that
they might have to go back and help them. Everybody climbed off the barges. The rumour proved false. The men and mules were loaded once more, amid much swearing. Arriving at the village of Taungbro, they were told they would have to march the rest of the way. There were more curses and muttering. But the men were in high spirits as they marched through the forest to the airstrip. Waiting officers saw the dust from the advancing column rise above the tree tops. The men were singing:

Japs on the hilltop
Japs in the Chaung
Japs on the Ngadkedauk
Japs in the Taung
Japs with their L. of C. far too long
As they revel in the joys of infiltration.

On arrival they were given water and fresh food. There was time to purchase chocolate, cigarettes, soap and razors from the nearby base. Private H. F. Norman spent his waiting time at the airstrip eating a large breakfast and getting a haircut and shave from the nappi wallah. At some point he got into a conversation with an American aircrew member and told him how much he wanted to visit New York. The Yank replied that, as he came from the west, he hated the city.

Lieutenant Tom Hogg was dispatched to the airstrip early by Laverty to oversee the loading of the RAF Dakotas and the larger American C-46 Commandos. The airstrip was nothing more than a clearing hacked out of the jungle. Above it hung a thin drift of mist. Along the fringes of the forest cover there were anti-aircraft positions, manned by Sikhs who had downed a Japanese fighter three days before. It was one of the few Japanese aircraft to get past the squadrons of Spitfires dominating the skies. Hogg watched the guns being dismantled, probably for the first time since North Africa, and listened to the curses of the gunners. Next came the mules, which were loaded six to a Dakota. ‘Immediately the engines roared into action,’ Hogg recalled, ‘the Mules urinated and the results leaked through the floor
and collected in the bottom of the fuselage where it sloshed about among the electrics … The tropical humidity and high temperatures created a powerful odour of which the aircrew did not approve.’

Donald Easten of D company, now promoted to major, was amused by the technique used to get the mules on board the aircraft. On either side of the aircraft doors were two rings. A rope was tied to one of the rings and then looped past the mule’s backside to the second ring to act as a pulley. ‘Then as many men as were required pulled and the poor old mule went zipping up the thing.’ The Americans were unsentimental about obstreperous mules that might endanger the aircraft. An animal that became unruly in the air was immediately shot. The jeeps, too, had to be loaded. This was done by bouncing them from the ramp through the plane’s loading door, and then bumping them by hand into the narrow interior.

After his troops had boarded, Donald Easten remembered an American crewman sticking his head through the door and barking instructions. ‘There’s a guy called “Slide Rule” is gonna be comin’ round here,’ the American said, ‘and he if tells you to move something you move it. OK?’ The careful distribution of weight was essential to keep the aircraft from crashing. ‘Slide Rule’ duly appeared and ordered ammunition to be moved here and there. Ray Street remembers how the navigator kept telling them that if they saw any Japanese they were to shoot through the windows with their Bren guns. ‘That didn’t do much for our confidence.’ Most of the men had never been on an aircraft before.

These Yanks were tired, scruffy and unshaven. They swore at the Indians loading the planes if they slowed down for a moment. A mobile canteen stood next to the line of aircraft and crew members would break off periodically to wolf down breakfast. The pressure of time on these men was enormous. While the aircrew slept for a few hours, the ground technicians worked through the night to prepare the aircraft.

The RAF account described, in typically understated fashion, the touch-and-go nature of the operation. ‘It was, in fact, a matter for speculation whether this enemy thrust would be started before the
fly-in.’ The airlift shuttled men to both Dimapur and Imphal. There were, after all, two potential sieges to worry about. The Japanese 33 and 15 Divisions were still fighting towards Imphal while Sato’s 31 was advancing into the Naga Hills. Crammed together in the sweaty interiors of the Dakotas and Commandos, the men heard the engines roar and felt the aircraft rattle as they took off across the jungle towards Dimapur. Private Ivan Daunt was sitting next to a cockney who asked the American aircrew why they had parachutes and the West Kents didn’t. ‘Because it’s our plane,’ came the reply. The cockney responded by leading his comrades in song:

We are the West Kent boys.
We are the West Kent boys.
When we are marching down the Old Kent road,
the doors and windows open wide,
then you’ll hear the people shout,
put those bloody Woodbines out,
’cos you are the West Kent boys.