Road of Bones (35 page)

The following day, 4 April, the Japanese offered something more than sniper fire. At 1600 hours they opened up with mortars and machine guns on the GPT Ridge position. It was not a heavy bombardment – most likely these early arrivals were simply probing the defence – but it drew another exasperating and, for Hugh Richards, profoundly worrying response from the defenders. ‘This was answered by our own troops again [firing] wildly and in all directions for most of the night and was only stopped by B.O.s [British officers] going round positions.’

On GPT Ridge a potential disaster was unfolding. Troops were starting to abandon their positions. By 2300 hours, the 1st Assam’s war diary records, a platoon of Sikhs, a mortar detachment of the Shere Regiment, a mixed infantry company, and a number of Indian officers had abandoned their trenches. ‘These positions were in the centre of the defences. These officers and men were not seen again,’ the diary records. In one episode a Sikh officer reported that 120 of his 140 men had bolted. This, in turn, exposed a Gurkha company to enfilading fire. When the order to send in the reserve was given, the word came back that a commander and his forty men ‘could not be found’. It was later discovered that these men, too, had vanished. The panicked soldiers were making for Dimapur as fast as they could run. Further back on Supply Hill and Kuki Piquet, officers stepped forward with pistols drawn to stop the fleeing men from crowding their trenches.

The men who remained could hear Japanese and Indian voices shouting at them to surrender. The propagandists of Bose’s Indian National Army were at work and Lieutenant Bruce Hayllar, commanding a composite group of Indian troops, found them frightening.
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‘Sometimes they would shout to our soldiers, “Kill your officers.” If it was your own men you could be sure of them. But I was
put in charge of people I had never seen before … It was a horrible situation.’ Hayllar threatened to shoot wavering men. They in turn threatened to shoot him. His bluff worked. There was no shooting and the majority stayed loyal. Early on 5 April, Hugh Richards was alerted to an unusual sighting on the track at the other end of the perimeter from Jail Hill. It was around 0200 hours and there were flickering lights to be seen moving towards the Naga Village across the valley. The number of lights indicated an enemy force much larger than that which was probing the defences of GPT Ridge at the other end. There was a company of the notoriously jumpy Shere Regiment on picqet duty at the Naga Village and Richards can have had few illusions about what would occur when the flickering lights materialised into enemy soldiers.

After Sangshak, Miyazaki drove them even harder. There was time to be made up. The supply officer Lieutenant Masao Hirakubo felt tougher now. He could keep pace on the all-night marches. But he still hated the mud of the jungle tracks and the endless leeches dropping into his clothes. Now, as he emerged from the jungle, his feet were marching on asphalt. There was something beautiful about the feeling of the road underfoot. The soldiers felt lighter, listening to the sounds of their comrades scuffing along beside them. The 1st battalion had gone ahead of them and cleared the opposition away, ambushing some British who were having lunch at a hilltop village. The surprised defenders were shot at and attacked with grenades where they sat.

Hirakubo was told to stay behind with three others and gather food from the villagers. His battalion commander was terse. ‘He told me that in one day we arrive at Kohima and everybody’s rice will be gone.’ The local chief was told to produce a large consignment of rice for purchase by four in the afternoon. The Japanese were lounging in the shade of a basha when they heard aircraft approaching; two British planes flew around the village twice and then disappeared. ‘Has it ever happened in the past?’ Hirakubo asked a villager. The man said no. At four, people began to pile rice in the middle of the village. Standing with his bag of Indian currency, Hirakubo paid a rupee for each bag of rice. Then suddenly the planes reappeared. This time they came straight in for the attack. There were four of them, machine-gunning and bombing. Village houses erupted in flames
and people ran screaming in all directions. By nightfall the village was an empty, smouldering ruin. But the rice had not been damaged. Twenty men were recruited from a neighbouring village to carry the vital food to Kohima.

A captured notebook belonging to a Major Yamaguchi, a staff officer with the 31st Division, painted an interesting picture of relations with the local Nagas. For Miyazaki’s 58th Regiment, ‘the attitude of local inhabitants was favourable, because it was strictly laid down that no troops except administrative personnel specially detailed were to go into villages. Purchase of food was easy.’ This is disingenuous. The Nagas had little choice when confronted with heavily armed Japanese, who would have seized the food had it not been given up. The major’s notebook noted mournfully that the ‘purchase of food became more and more difficult as the villages were abandoned owing to our artillery fire’. Even Charles Pawsey acknowledged that the Japanese behaved comparatively well at this stage. ‘In some cases the first thing the Naga knew was their village was full of Japs when they woke up in the morning,’ he wrote. ‘The Japs did not treat the local population badly to start with. They wanted to win them over, to make them supply rations to help the invasion.’ A twelve-year-old boy, B. K. Sachu Angami, from Kohima, met Japanese who ‘did not behave like strangers. They came and talked to the villagers as brothers. They said to us “we are from the same race.” Of course we were also afraid of them when they came. But they were so friendly that the fear slowly went away.’ A note sent to Pawsey by ‘Levi’, the head clerk of Khonoma village, reported the ‘behaviour of the Japs in this area was not so cruel as expected. Their dealings with women and children were fairly good.’ However, villagers who protested against the taking of cattle and rice were assaulted and men at Khonoma were forced to act as labour for the Japanese. Miekonu Angami was a thirty-two-year-old farmer and hunter recruited into Japanese service at Khonoma. His recollection is of being ordered to carry ammunition and food supplies towards Aradura Spur and its bigger neighbour Mount Pulebadze, where the Japanese had first engaged Lieutenant Bruce Hayllar and his patrol. ‘On the first day
they gave us no food. We stayed a few days but still we got no food. The only supply we could get was from villagers there. When there was no food coming we left and came back to Khonoma.’ Soon he would volunteer his services to the British.

In spite of the delay at Sangshak, the 58th Regiment was still the first to arrive at Kohima. The other 31st Division formations were also moving rapidly towards Kohima. General Sato himself arrived within a day of Miyazaki and set up his headquarters in the jungle about four miles behind the front line. It was a spartan affair, made of bamboo poles and leaves, camouflaged to blend in with the jungle and avoid the eyes of the RAF, but within earshot of a river, the soothing noise of which was like the waterway where the general fished near his home in Amarume.

For Sato’s boss, Lieutenant-General Mutaguchi, Kohima offered the potential of breakthrough in an offensive that was elsewhere grinding towards attrition in the face of determined defence. The 4th Corps had recovered from the crisis caused by the late orders to withdraw towards the Imphal Plain. The 33rd Division commander, General Yanagida, cloaked in pessimism, recommended to Mutaguchi that the battle be abandoned. ‘My goodness, I was troubled,’ Mutaguchi wrote. ‘Yanagida thought, “this is not good” and became a bit weak-kneed, saying that, “it was impossible to go all the way to Imphal with so little preparation.” The momentum to progress was completely killed.’

The intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel Iwaichi Fujiwara, who observed the crisis at 33rd Division headquarters, remembered the course of events differently. General Yanagida needed more artillery, tanks and ammunition as his men battered away at the British and Indian forces. When the required supplies were not forthcoming, there were ‘exchanges of violent and angry signals … great ill feeling between the Army commander and the Division Commander’.

The 15th Division, under its ailing commander Lieutenant General Yamauchi, fought past Sangshak and succeeded in cutting the road to Imphal on 29 March. Another column took up position in the mountains overlooking the British headquarters at Imphal.
The garrison was now cut off by land, but the same airlift that had brought the West Kents to Dimapur was also flying troops and supplies into Imphal. What surprised the Japanese was not only the material superiority of the British and Indian forces, but their fighting quality. The scared soldiers of the first Arakan campaign were gone; in their place were men whose determination to resist was as fierce as that of the Japanese themselves.

With the Imphal operation stumbling, Mutaguchi waited anxiously for good news from Kohima.

Lieutenant Naoji Kobayashi of 11 company, 58th Regiment, led the first platoon. They could see the Naga Village on the edge of Kohima, but dawn was about to break and the men were exhausted. The order was given to sleep. Kobayashi was tense and unable to rest. As the light came up, he saw figures moving on the hill opposite. ‘It was the enemy all right. But they seemed to be unaware of our presence.’ He roused his men. Word was sent to the other platoon commanders in the company. The whisper to get ready ran like an electric current through the dozing men. They were to prepare to attack. Only a handful of Nagas had remained behind in the village. Twelve-year-old B. K. Sachu Angami saw Kobayashi arrive. ‘When he came to the gate of the village he said, “Open it, Kobayashi has come.” Out of fear the old people near the gate opened it and let the Japanese enter the village. After that they started asking, “Did you see the Gurkhali?” That was all they asked, not about the Britishers.’ The troops’ uniforms were covered in grass camouflage and they came from all directions, he remembered. Another villager, Rushukhrie Angami, looked out of his home to see two Japanese attempting to disguise themselves in Naga shawls. They then surprised and killed two sentries from the Shere Regiment. These unknown Nepalis were the first casualties of the siege of Kohima.