Authors: Fergal Keane
Two days after the action began the Japanese managed to break into the perimeter, where the astonished defenders saw them gorging on animal feed; the shadow of hunger followed the 138th Regiment just as it had the 58th at Sangshak. By the morning of the third day the pile of bodies in front of A company’s positions was swelling and stinking in the heat. Young sent men to clear the corpses away and to
repair breaks in the line. They were sniped at but succeeded in fixing the wire. Inside the perimeter Young’s situation was becoming impossible. He was running out of water, food and ammunition. On the morning of 30 March he saw fresh columns of Japanese arriving, and they continued to arrive throughout the day. Japanese spirits were also raised when they drove back an attempt to relieve Kharasom by Indian troops from the newly arrived 161 Brigade.
Young did not know about the failed attempt to relieve his position. Had he done so, it would surely have confirmed the painful decision he now made. Calling together his officers and NCOs, he announced that they were to evacuate under cover of darkness. However, he would not be going with them. As one of his officers, Lieutenant D. B. Gurung recalled, the captain, ‘seeing the hopelessness of the situation gave orders for the company to withdraw to Kohima’.
He told his officers he ‘could not leave the wounded’. Come nightfall, they were to filter through the lines and make for Kohima. Fifty-six men reached Kohima two days later. Young was last seen stacking grenades and Tommy-gun magazines in his bunker, where a wounded Indian soldier had joined him to man the Bren gun. The Nagas reported that the Japanese attacked at dawn. There was a short and fierce exchange of fire, followed by silence. Hugh Richards described Young in fulsome terms: ‘As an example of complete self-sacrifice nothing could be more magnificent. It is sad that such a gallant officer should have been lost.’ Despite such praise, John Young was never awarded any medal beyond those given to all who served in the Burma theatre. Had he been a cook at Dimapur he would have received the same acknowledgement. His family never complained publicly and the failure to honour him was never explained.
*
Later, the local Nagas told Charles Pawsey that the Japanese had been so moved by Young’s bravery that they had shaved
his head in the tradition of fallen heroes and buried him with full military honours.
At Jessami Brown’s force had spent their time in ‘feverish preparation’, expecting the Japanese to arrive at any moment. Scouts reported columns advancing from the east and south of the village. One of the forward positions spotted a party of about twenty-four Japanese coming up the track. The concealed Assam troops waited until they were almost on them and then scythed down the advancing men. Two crawled away into the undergrowth. ‘Spirits soared as the news spread through the garrison,’ an officer recorded. The first that Havildar Sohevu Angami knew of the Japanese arrival was when he saw a comrade from the Kuki tribe being shot down. ‘The Japanese were screaming at us and we were screaming back at them. The sound of our voices stopped us being afraid. I have to say the Japanese were effective fighters. We could tell this straight away.’ The havildar was lightly wounded by a shell fragment which struck his forehead. He kept fighting, exhorting the men of his platoon as they fired mortars into the attackers. Over the next three days the Japanese infantry threw repeated attacks against the perimeter. Some broke through but the majority fell in tangled heaps. The Bren guns did murderous work. Soldiers scorched the flesh on their hands as they replaced the red hot barrels. ‘Japanese grenades and cracker-bombs were picked up and thrown clear of the trenches with all the calmness in the world, and there did not seem to be a man in the garrison afraid to carry out any task given to him,’ the War Diary recorded. By now the Japanese were pushing five battalions of infantry, a mountain artillery regiment as well as 31st Division Headquarters along the Jessami track, the bulk of ten thousand men. Brown’s position at Jessami had been under attack for three days when Hugh Richard’s messenger finally made it through. ‘We were shooting at him until we realised it was our own man,’ remembered Havildar Sohevu.
Hugh Richards’s orders called for the Assam Regiment to leave at 0300 hours, but the pressure on the perimeter was so great that
Brown put off the move for twenty-four hours. Brown called a conference of his officers and told them the battalion would pull out at 0300 hours on the following day; they would travel in two large parties, one travelling east and the other west, both making for Kohima. The Japanese attacked throughout the day with concentrated artillery and mortar fire. Agonisingly for the defenders, an RAF plane came in low and dropped a message that fell directly into the hands of the Japanese. Brown now knew for certain that his plans for withdrawal were compromised. There was no question of waiting until 0300, when the enemy would be waiting for the move. Nor could the battalion move off in two large groups. Instead, smaller parties would filter out as soon as it was dark enough to do so. The withdrawal began at 1900 hours and continued until midnight, when the command post was evacuated and all documents destroyed. One of the last to leave was Sepoy Wellington Massar, the Khasi tribesman who had taken part as a human guinea pig in the fight to rid the hills of kala-azar. Massar had fought hard at Jessami, the pile of dead bodies outside his bunker attesting to his remorseless Bren-gun fire.
The Japanese did not strike during the evacuation. They had, however, prepared ambushes along the tracks leading away from Jessami. No sooner had the first troops moved off into the jungle than they faced Japanese attacks. As a result the battalion fragmented, with some troops heading towards Kohima, others reaching Dimapur, and some killed, wounded or captured by the Japanese. One British officer was beginning to go blind with shock and hunger but was saved by Naga villagers. He would later recall how they put him to sleep in a large double bed with the words ‘Home Sweet Home’ embroidered on the pillows. A group of sepoys and their havildar were captured by the Japanese and taken to a village where they saw a captured British officer with bleeding feet and a loose rope hung around his neck. He was kept away from the other prisoners. The group was forced to lie on the ground where the Japanese guards taunted and jabbed at them with bayonets. One of the men, Sepoy Ngulkathang, struck out in fury and used his feet to knock down a Japanese officer. It was a fateful mistake. He was forced to his knees
and beheaded. That night the havildar and other sepoys managed to undo their bonds, steal some weapons and flee into the jungle. In another incident Major Albert Calistan and a large column were leaving one end of a village as the Japanese were entering at the other. ‘Had the Japs caught up with us there is little doubt that most of my party would have been too weak to put up much resistance,’ he wrote. On arrival at Kohima Calistan and his party of 167 men were fed, clothed and given ‘a liberal issue of rum and cigarettes’. Out of an original strength of around 400 men Lieutenant Colonel Brown was able to call on 260 to help defend Kohima by the time the last of the stragglers reached the garrison on 3 April 1944.
By nightfall on 29 March, when the 1st Assam were still fighting for their lives at Jessami and Kharasom, 4th battalion, the Royal West Kents, had settled into temporary billets in Kohima. Battalion headquarters was set up in one of the hospital buildings, from which convalescing soldiers had been evacuated to Dimapur. The troops dug in around the position and the cooks got to work. In every new position the cooks played a role beyond the merely physical; they were the great normalisers, the men who kept the customary rhythms of battalion life moving. For the evening meal they served up bully beef rissoles, potatoes, carrots, plum duff and tea. As the men settled down for the night, much of the talk was about the nature of the terrain. From Dimapur the road climbed and dropped, passing into the gorge of Nichuguard, which ran for about four miles and was, according to a local tea-planter, ‘a fisherman’s paradise and a motorist’s nightmare. The road consisted of a ledge cut out of the almost perpendicular cliff. On the left the rock rose straight up to anything up to five hundred feet, on the right it fell sheer away to the river 200 feet below which flowed through the gorge in a series of rapids and tempting pools.’ The gorge offered the best position from which to defend Dimapur should the Japanese either bypass or breakthrough at Kohima. Leaving Nichuguard, the road climbed, skirting rice fields and brushing the side of steep cliffs. At Zubza, 3,000 feet above sea level, the West Kents caught their first glimpse of
Kohima Ridge, ten miles away. The road climbed sharply once more, some 1,700 feet in a space of seven miles, before reaching Kohima, from where, looking south, they could see mountains and the ghosts of mountains, the brooding heights of Mount Pulebadze and Aradura Spur, whose jungle slopes could have concealed an army. Men felt dwarfed, crowded in by the immensity of the ranges.
That night they were struck by the quiet of the high mountain world and many found it hard to believe that thousands of Japanese troops could be out there in the darkness. The oil lamps flickering in the remaining occupied buildings were a comfort to the sentries. On the road from Dimapur they had passed Nagas; the appearance of the warriors with their cloaks and elaborate headdresses, and the stories of headhunting, compounded the sense of strangeness felt by the men. The C company runner Ray Street thought the Nagas looked like ‘Red Indians … carrying old shotguns. Others had spears and bows but all wore a Gurkha style knife on their hips.’ However much the Nagas waved and smiled as the trucks rolled by, there was in those early moments at Kohima a distinctly uneasy feeling, as if they had entered a landscape whose surprises would be many.
The horrors inflicted by their own artillery at the tunnels had not broken morale; instead, these men took pride in their ability to endure. As Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes put it, ‘We were up for it. The lads moaned all the time like any soldiers would, but they had great pride in the battalion. When you get the daylights hammered out of you as many times as we did you either go to pieces or you feel you are special, and we were special.’
Lieutenant Colonel Laverty had still been given no full information on the threat faced by his men. The impression at Kohima was that there was still time to prepare proper defensive positions, although an entry in the battalion war diary foreshadowed a crucial problem. ‘Water situation is precarious,’ it noted simply. It was only a few days later that Laverty would discover quite how precarious. Lieutenant Tom Hogg was struck by the number of line of communications troops and civilians still hanging about in Kohima. He estimated there were ‘perhaps 3,000 leaderless non-combatants milling around’, a dangerously high
number of ‘useless mouths’ for a position that could soon be under attack from what was now known to be a Japanese division.
At 8.30 a.m. on 30 March, Laverty called his company commanders together and sketched out a plan for the day: they would reinforce the defences around the brigade headquarters and mount patrols along the road from Kohima towards Imphal. They spent the next two days digging and patrolling, but there was no contact with the Japanese. There was a scare on the second night in Kohima. Some Indian troops were jittery and opened fire at what they thought was a Japanese soldier. ‘It turned out to be a cow and they killed it,’ recorded Private Norman in his diary. At 0800 hours on 31 March he was sent to patrol the road for some twenty miles beyond Kohima. The West Kents who patrolled down the road towards the 1/1 Punjab positions had the eerie experience of travelling into clouds on the roller coaster of the mountain roads. Worse, the jeep driver’s cap fell off and he took his hands off the wheel as they went round a corner. Private Norman saw to his horror that there were two crashed jeeps at the bottom of the ravine. The driver seized hold of the wheel in the nick of time. That night the rain fell and the men huddled in the cold. There was still no contact with the Japanese. On the same day, Laverty accompanied his boss, Brigadier Warren, on a visit to Mao Songsang, about twenty miles from Kohima on the road to Imphal, where the 1/1 Punjab were based. He was told that the West Kents were to remain at a half-hour’s notice to move back to Dimapur.
On the morning of 1 April rumours flew around the ranks that they were to be moved back along the road to set up a new defensive position at the Nichuguard gorge, outside Dimapur. Then Private Norman heard they were to stay where they were. Finally, orders came through. ‘We got a message through the rest [of the brigade] wouldn’t be following us up,’ remembered Major Donald Easten. ‘We were to go back!’ To another young officer, Lieutenant Tom Hogg, it ‘smacked of confusion in high places – difficult for a young Lieutenant to explain away and/or for his men to accept with equanimity’. Men who had spent hours digging trenches in the rain at Kohima cursed the brass who seemed to change their minds at a
whim. Lance Corporal Wykes could not understand what was happening. ‘It was the obvious time to dig in and get ready.’ Private Norman was now nursing a severe cold and felt thoroughly ‘browned off’. His only consolation was a conversation with Laverty, whom he met walking around the position. Norman does not record what was discussed, but it is hard to think he did not give Laverty the full benefit of his views on the new orders.
For the garrison commander, Colonel Hugh Richards, and for Charles Pawsey, the order defied comprehension. They had already watched as a battalion from the West Yorkshires had been pulled in and out of Kohima, and in and out again, in the five-day period between 24 and 29 March. Now Kohima was once more being stripped of battle-hardened troops.
Captain Arthur Swinson blamed the local area commander, General Ranking, for the decision: ‘2,000 men left in Kohima and the area commander is quite confident they can hold it. By the tone of his voice the Brigadier [Warren] indicates he is not.’ The gravest problem was that the majority of the men in Kohima were a mix of various colonial, line of communications and convalescent troops, unused to fighting together and untested in the face of a substantial Japanese force. Only the men of the 1st Assam Regiment, who were struggling to get to Kohima from Jessami, could be regarded as a solid infantry formation. The deputy commissioner, Charles Pawsey, was livid. ‘With one Brigade in Kohima, and the troops already there, we should have been quite happy. To the chagrin of everybody the Brigade was taken back to the Manipur road … this was heartbreaking.’