Authors: Fergal Keane
When Stopford arrived to see the situation for himself he was challenged by Hawkins, and ‘things began to alter for the better’. The first of Hawkins’s troops reached Dimapur on the evening of 1 April, and Arthur Swinson had his first brush with death. A soldier clearing his rifle discharged a shot which whizzed past his ear. The Dimapur base was ‘in one big flap’ and what Swinson called the ‘chairborne troops in the L of C area’ were digging trenches and rolling out wire. Wild-eyed Indian drivers were speeding north with only six inches between the trucks, and haggard-looking porters staggered around with huge loads. Refugees were also flooding in, ‘with their whole world on their heads’. Some collapsed and blocked the traffic, but nobody made an effort to assist them. Rumours were flying. There was a story that there were only 10,000 rifles for the 80,000 men in the place; one sentry was allegedly seen with a wooden gun.
Slim later wrote that he had asked the brigadier commanding the base how many men he was feeding. ‘Forty-five thousand near enough,’ he told the army commander. ‘And how many soldiers can you scrape out of that lot?’ I inquired. He smiled wryly. ‘I might get five hundred who know how to fire a rifle.’ This puts Slim’s nervousness about facing even a regiment of Japanese at this early stage into perspective.
At dinner Swinson met a Royal Army Medical Corps officer who had been up the road to Kohima and was pessimistic. ‘He didn’t like
the look of things and thought the lack of plans was pitiful.’ Swinson went to bed soon afterwards but could not sleep. His nerves were on edge. That night he wrote in his diary: ‘Lord, give us time and we’ll ask nothing else.’
Lieutenant Bruce Hayllar of the Indian Armoured Corps arrived in Dimapur a day later. He had been pottering about in Secunderabad, where his regiment was training with tanks and troop-carriers, when orders came to go to Dimapur. Before he left there had been a big party. ‘Very, very merry. Played tiger – tossed in the blanket – I got debagged.’ He discovered his trousers up a tree, before staggering to bed at 2 a.m. On his way to Dimapur with fellow officers, Hayllar stopped in Calcutta for four days, waiting for transport to the front. Writing home to his parents on 31 March, his voice is that of the eager public schoolboy, still astonished that he has been given charge of the lives of other men. ‘We had breakfast in bed at 10. We joined the Saturday Club and bathed there daily. We dined at Firpo’s (price about 10/-), we ate luscious cream cakes at a Swiss Café, we sat in the best seats in the best cinemas and saw lovely films. We drank Scotch Whiskey at 2/6 the glass and Indian hooch at 1/- the glass … Everyone there has some sort of story to tell. It was quite the most romantic place I have ever been to. And all of this was heightened because the Japs had started advancing into India and the news wasn’t good.’
Boarding a train for Dimapur, Hayllar saw some Indian and West African troops squaring up to each other with knives. He put this down to persistent stories of the West Africans bullying the Indians and stealing their women. He finished his letter with an unusual apology. ‘This ending is very bad, sorry, but really can’t write a dramatic sob-stuff ending because I may go nowhere near the fighting. Just assume everything is allright. It always is.’
Hayllar arrived at Dimapur on 1 April. That night he wrote in his diary, ‘March in circle to rest camp. The biggest shambles you ever saw … the flap on. Raining. Air raid alarm.’ A call went out for officers to volunteer to go up to Kohima and help with the defence. Bored and desperate to see action, Bruce Hayllar immediately
stepped forward. ‘I volunteer,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Up the Hayllars!’
There were also troops pushing through Kohima to help the defence of Imphal. The journey to Kohima was a stomach-churning progress along the steep, winding road. Lieutenant John Hudson, a sapper with 91 Royal Bombay Field Company, experienced constant hold-ups as lorries overheated. His column never went more than 10 miles per hour. Men were thrown from side to side as the trucks lurched around hairpin bends. Worse, there was ‘Burma Road Sickness’, caused by a combination of engine fumes, dust, tobacco smoke, rising heat, a constant backward view and gut-wrenching potholes. ‘Man after man vomited over the stern gate and collapsed into stupor.’ Passing through Kohima, he glimpsed the village ‘set like a jewel on the rim between Assam and Manipur. Whitewashed buildings gleam amongst rich foliage, the red splash of the corrugated tin roof over the Mission Chapel and the mown precision of the tennis court contrasted with the tumbled savagery of the blue-green mountain backdrop.’ It would be one of the last occasions a traveller would ever have such a view of Kohima.
In the Naga Hills British and local scouts were retreating fast ahead of the Japanese advance. Ursula Graham Bower in remote Cachar was one of the last Europeans to get news of the Japanese attack. On 28 March she heard a radio announcement about the Japanese advancing on a wide front. For the previous eighteen months she had done little soldiering but a great deal of relief work dealing with victims of hunger and disease. On the same day as the broadcast her assistant Namkia announced the arrival of two British soldiers. The sergeants told her that fifty Japanese had been seen in the vicinity. ‘They said “Please Miss have you seen any Japs?” … This was a little startling … Things were looking a little nasty.’ Worse still, she learned that the frontier had been rolled back so that the only British-occupied areas were Imphal, Kohima and the handful of posts held by the Assam Regiment at Jessami and Kharasom. The V Force detachments nearer the Chindwin had either been overrun or had fled. ‘I woke up one
morning to find out we were twenty miles behind the front line … we had no troops at that moment and 150 Nagas armed with muzzle-loaders who were supposed to be watching the tracks for agents filtering through.’ Her darkest moment came when Namkia and the other leaders in the group asked for permission to go back to their villages. ‘This is it,’ she thought to herself. She was alone with the Japanese army heading towards her. Twenty-four hours later the Nagas were back. They had gone home to make their wills, say goodbye to their families, and to dress for battle, leaving the sacred heirloom necklaces behind for their sons to inherit. ‘After all,’ Namkia said to Graham Bower, ‘which was the better thing? To desert and live, and hear our children curse us for the shame we put on them; or to die with you, and leave them proud of us for ever?’
A telegram was sent from V Force telling her to get out of the Cachar district immediately. It crossed with her own cable to headquarters: ‘Going forward to look for enemy. Kindly send weapons and ammunition soonest.’ Graham Bower set about posting her men into the jungle so that they could warn of any Japanese approach. Runners were sent into the hills to call the scouts in from their labour and hunting, and within two days a line of sentries had been established. Graham Bower herself kept to a normal routine, staying in the village even though she knew it would be the first target of any advancing enemy. To sleep in the jungle would have given the impression of panic to the locals. Code words were established. ‘One Elephant’ meant ten Japanese. This had unintended consequences, as Graham Bower later wrote: ‘Somebody caused confusion left and right by turning up on the Silchar border with forty genuine elephants.’
As the leader of a guerrilla band, Graham Bower could have expected no mercy if captured. A Mr Sharp of the Indian Civil Service had been appointed to the temporary rank of major in V Force and was captured by the Japanese five days later. He was never heard of again. Patrolling in the thick jungle terrified Graham Bower. She watched the faces of the experienced scouts, learned from the way they moved and from the manner in which they listened to the
jungle. Without the skill and knowledge of those born to the forest she would not have lasted a day at war. This she always cheerfully acknowledged. She told a story of how a Naga was taking a patrol through particularly dense jungle, walking point ahead of the main group, when he walked straight into a Japanese patrol. Had he doubled back the Japanese would have caught the patrol unawares, so the man stood and fought, killing the leading Japanese before the others riddled him with bullets. Another stayed behind in his village when the Japanese approached, because ‘he was a subject of the king and he was going to do his bit’. The warrior attacked with his spear, sword and shield and killed five Japanese before they shot him.
Many V Force officers fleeing from the advance owed their survival to the Nagas. Captain Tim Betts, a tea-planter in civilian life, was with a small party of Indian troops when his post was overrun. Betts was seventy miles from Kohima in a direct line but the steep mountains, thick jungles and absence of any road meant the journey was nearly three times that distance. It was Betts’s initial bad fortune to have Kuki tribesmen as scouts. This was the same tribe that had experienced brutal repression at the hands of the British in the 1920 rebellion, with the loss of their harvest and livestock and the destruction of their villages. The scouts rapidly deserted to the Japanese once they arrived.
Betts kept a diary of his extraordinary escape. On 25 March he recorded: ‘I can’t go on with this cross-country mountaineering. My only chance is the river and the main tracks, and that is the only way we will make progress. If the men won’t come with me we shall soon have to part. I was for getting down to the river again where we could at least get fish and flat going and not this appalling hillside clambering among slipping precipices and gulf-like nullahs.’ He then met some Nagas who gave the group food. But it became clear to Betts that his men were losing the will to keep going. He gave the order to move and began to march himself. After half a mile he stopped and looked around. There was no sign of the troops.
On 27 March he wrote that he ‘felt no compunction [about leaving]. They had a day’s rice and knew where they were, and [had] the
only blanket, cooking pot and kukris. I had a map and compass and a tin of bully and one of sardines and half a dozen K biscuits.’ Betts kept moving through jungle and up steep ridges, bypassing a village full of Japanese, their fires blazing and torches casting beams of light across the darkness. Clambering up an 8,000 foot ridge he attempted to sleep, covering himself in grass for warmth. Weary and disorientated from thirst and hunger, he found himself wandering along a dry river bed where the sharp stones sliced through what remained of his boots. At several points along the way Nagas had given him food and pointed him in the direction of Kohima. Using dynamite he had brought with him, Betts caught fish, and in abandoned huts he found firewood, rice and sweet potatoes. Ursula Graham Bower, who would later meet the young officer in her jungle stronghold, told how Betts met an old Naga lady who burst into tears on seeing his condition. ‘[She] gave him her only food … some pork … with that he carried on for another two days.’
Tim Betts reached Kohima on 2 April, having walked across some of the most forbidding territory in the world. ‘Flat out with violent diarrhoea, feet like footballs,’ he wrote, ‘and so weak I could hardly stand.’ His normal weight was 11 stone 7 pounds. He now weighed just six stone.
Through the hills from north to south, indications were mounting that the Japanese were coming. Nagas ran to alert British outposts. The V Force officer Lieutenant Colonel E. D. ‘Moke’ Murray managed to send a last message on his high-powered radio transmitter before he escaped into the jungle. Murray eventually ran into an Indian patrol on 16 March and gave them a note for their headquarters warning that he believed a full-scale offensive was under way. The patrol passed the message on to headquarters, where it was somehow mislaid and never passed up the chain of command. A patrol from the 1st Assam was settling down in a V Force stockade when they heard that three hundred Japanese were heading towards them. That night the Japanese attacked the stockade and found it empty.
The only formations now standing between Sato’s advance and Kohima were the 1st Assam troops at Jessami and Kharasom and elements of 50 Indian Parachute Brigade, which arrived in the mountain-top village of Sangshak on 21 March. The CO, Brigadier M. R. J. ‘Tim’ Hope-Thomson, was a veteran of Palestine, where he had won the Military Cross, but had spent his time in India preparing the first ever Indian Army airborne unit for battle. The 50 Indian Parachute Brigade was carrying out training and patrolling around Kohima when news came of the first Japanese crossings of the Chindwin. Sangshak was crucial because it occupied a position astride routes leading to both Kohima and Imphal.
Because much of the available transport was being used to ferry non-combatants out of Imphal, Hope-Thomson was short one company when his two battalions arrived in the area. They found themselves short of entrenching tools and barbed wire, and with a chronic lack of access to fresh water. The spiny ridges of the border area were notably short of water sources. Everything would depend on supply from the air. In the recriminations that followed the disaster, much was made of Hope-Thomson’s decision to make a stand at Sangshak. It was a barren hilltop, around which the perimeter stretched ‘about 600 hundred yards long and 300 yards at its widest, shaped like an hourglass’. With the exception of a small area in the middle, the ground was too rocky to be able to dig defensive positions deeper than three feet. ‘It was volcanic glass, or obsidian, as immovable as granite,’ recalled Lieutenant Harry Seaman, a platoon commander at Sangshak. Once the Japanese began to pour in mortar and artillery fire they could not fail to hit the defenders.
The great chronicler of the Burma war, Louis Allen, chided Hope-Thomson for choosing his perimeter ‘without regard to its lack of water’, a serious problem in a siege. But Hope-Thomson had not chosen the position. He came to take over from an existing force and, his defenders argue, never had the time to construct a new base. Frequent requests to headquarters for more barbed wire elicited no response.
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Wire is the infantryman’s first line of defence. It slows the enemy within killing range and prevents the kind of creep-and-rush tactics the Japanese used to terrifying effect in the darkness. A well-wired perimeter also allows defenders the possibility of some sleep during the day. Later, the survivors of Sanghsak would react with angry disbelief when they struggled into Imphal to find headquarters buildings surrounded by triple lines of barbed wire.