Authors: Fergal Keane
By 10 April, the day on which the West Kents were being driven from Detail Hill, Warren was seeking permission to withdraw the garrison. Grover responded by saying the ‘garrison must stay put because withdrawal might open the road for Japs’. He also warned Warren of the ‘grave’ political and propaganda consequences of withdrawal, a nod to likely ructions in Delhi, London and Washington. Reinforcements were coming, he promised, and any move might hamper the advance of 5 Infantry Brigade who were at that moment deploying towards Kohima.
Privately, Grover suspected the garrison might not hold. On the same day that he turned Warren down he called Stopford who in turn signalled Slim for permission to order a pull-out if the situation looked impossible. Stopford was frustrated by his physical distance from 14th Army headquarters, located six hundred miles away at Comilla, and complained to his diary that Slim’s far-away staff lacked appreciation of the local realities. It was ironic that Stopford, impatient with his own commanders as they struggled with the conditions, should feel ill done-by at the hands of 14th Army.
But there is another factor which should be considered. Generals Slim, Stopford and Grover were all veterans of the attritional battles of the Great War. Each knew what it was to fight in trenches and watch the months accumulate and the casualties rise with no clear advantage gained. However subconsciously, the memory of that experience must have lingered for all three men as the armies dug in at Kohima.
Every morning the monkeys made a ‘devilish row, screaming at each other among the tree tops’. Captain Swinson also heard an elephant trumpeting in the distance before breakfast. A sentry who thought he saw a Japanese crawling up on him had wounded a tiger ‘that went howling away’. A signaller got into bed to find he was sharing it with a snake. ‘Apart from these odd incidents we have no excitement,’ Swinson reported. He walked down to the river where a prayer service was under way. ‘At the “Non Sum Dignus” the sun rose from the
hills and the golden light cascaded down the valley.’ The men recited the Hail Mary, ‘Mother of mercy, our light, our sweetness, our hope … with rather more feeling than usual’. Arthur Swinson was an aspiring writer who carried two anthologies of war poetry in his pack; for him, the close press of the jungle was not a source of terror but a repository of the exotic that helped keep the tension of war at bay.
Swinson was with the vanguard of 5 Infantry Brigade as it prepared to advance towards Kohima. The brigade was made up of three battalions – one each from the Cameron, Dorset and Worcestershire Regiments. Their first task would be to reach Warren and 161 Brigade, and then to relieve the garrison at Kohima before the Japanese could sweep through to Dimapur. Nursing a vile cold and with his brigadier, Victor Hawkins, in a bad temper, Swinson regarded the coming days with foreboding.
On 11 April, while the West Kents were regrouping after the loss of Detail Hill, Swinson was sorting out a great traffic jam on the road. Hawkins was reduced to fury by the absence of road discipline among the Indian drivers. ‘They went when and how they liked. If they didn’t like they just stopped – or tried to. They parked anyhow and anywhere and trying to get things done with them was like a nightmare.’ The brigadier told Swinson to sort out the mess before the Japanese started shelling ‘or there’d be hell to pay’. It was here that Swinson saw the first wounded men from the battles being fought up the road. These were men of the 7th battalion, Worcestershire Regiment, sent to hold the Japanese at bay while the rest of 5 Brigade deployed. Most of them were not badly wounded but in deep shock; it was their physical expressions that struck Swinson most profoundly. The men’s eyes were weary and there was an uncontrollable tremor in their voices. He was told that an officer he knew well, a man named Watkins, had been the first to be killed, and remembered back to ‘the wild days after Dunkirk when he joined the Regiment, a shy boy who never quite succeeded in coming to terms with life’. Watkins had been afraid of women and ill at ease with men, and lived aloof from his fellows. ‘Perhaps he would have found his
niche and stumbled on the happiness his rare spirit was seeking. But 25 years was not enough.’
*
The following day, 12 April, Swinson was temporarily rid of his brigadier, who had gone to establish a headquarters near Zubza, about ten miles from Kohima. Before leaving, Hawkins had addressed a gloomy gathering of his officers. He was going ahead even though the brigade was not yet ready. Troops were still arriving but the need to stop the Japanese was too urgent to wait. Kohima was encircled, Warren and 161 Indian Brigade were cut off, and the Japanese were now threatening 5 Brigade on the Dimapur road. The spectre of a swift attack on Dimapur while the British were still deploying loomed over the gathering. Battalions from the Cameron Highlanders, Worcestershire and Dorsetshire regiments were coming into the line, but there was no sure answer to the question that still haunted Slim: could they do it before the Japanese took Dimapur? When Hawkins arrived at Zubza and was able to view the terrain he quickly realised that his brigade could not hope to take Kohima on its own, as Grover had ordered. ‘I was a bit appalled at my original orders.’ He persuaded General Grover to come and see for himself. The result was a compromise. The garrison would be relieved first and then there would be a discussion about driving the Japanese out. Through the second week of April the Camerons, Dorsets and Worcesters were all involved in fighting towards Kohima.
Captain Keith Halnan of the 7th Worcesters had gone ahead with the troops trying to break through to Warren. Like Swinson, he tried to keep clear of Brigadier Hawkins. ‘He was rather stick in the mud … He disliked my background. I wasn’t regular. He probably thought I knew too much.’ Halnan was a medical student at Cambridge when the war broke out and was gifted with a precocious intelligence. It occasionally caused him trouble, and was almost certainly at the root of his problems with the brigadier. He had alienated a previous CO by producing a paper on radar and sending it off to GHQ without consulting his boss.
Halnan initially felt relieved to be out of his previous camp, littered as it was with the excrement of previous occupants. Then the shelling began. Halnan was blown to the ground. When he recovered he saw that his batman, Private Gordon Ollier, had been killed. Halnan then made the frightening discovery that a piece of shrapnel had penetrated his wallet. The wallet was sitting in a pocket directly over his heart. The shelling gave Halnan his first sight of dead bodies. That evening he had to recover the possessions of his batman and write a letter to the man’s family, a task he found far more difficult than looking at the dead. He found that he could remember nothing of the incident, not even the fact that Ollier had been standing beside him. Shock had wiped his memory clean. Nonetheless ‘everybody dug holes much more effectively and better after that’.
Brigadier Hawkins worried about the rawness of his troops. An early attack on a Japanese position had failed because ‘we had done so many exercises and always made them as real as we could that the chaps were finding it difficult to realise they were on the real thing at last’. As 5 Brigade advanced, by night the local Nagas guided a long column of men away from the road and across the hills in a flanking move. ‘We went in single file down several thousand feet at night,’ Halnan recalled. The men wore plimsolls to reduce noise and carried their boots around their necks. Halnan could hear some distant shellfire but not much else. Occasionally a shell whistled as it went overhead. Before setting out the men were issued with FS1 cards which, Halnan recalled, said, ‘I am well. I will be writing as soon as possible. Everything is alright.’ His father had been given the same card at Ypres, just before he was gassed.
CQMS Fred Weedman of C company 7th Worcestershire Regiment was following his mules along the same precarious path. To one side there was a cliff-face and on the other a soaring drop into the darkness. The mules picked their way along expertly, ‘never faltering or stumbling’. On the morning of 12 April the company took up position on a hill to the east of Zubza which offered a good view of the local countryside. Barbed wire was run around the perimeter, with tin cans attached; ledges were dug in the trenches for lining up grenades. The following
night a corporal heard movements outside the perimeter at around 2330 hours. The warning was passed via ropes which had been run from the company headquarters trench to all the others around the perimeter. A tug at the end of the rope meant ‘stand to’. Dozens of eyes stared out into the night, but with no moon they could see nothing. The darkness crowded on the lips of their trenches. They heard woodpeckers tapping in the jungle. Some men thought it might be the enemy signalling to each other. Fred Weedman sensed an attack was coming, and wondered if the enemy would be the snarling, bloodthirsty creatures he had been told about. There was a twanging noise, a wire being cut. Every heart inside the perimeter pounded. Orders were quickly whispered by section commanders and the ‘night was split asunder with deafening explosions followed by the screams of the Japanese wounded’.
Weedman heard bullets hit the trees and others ricocheted into the darkness ‘like an angry bee’. After a long exchange of fire there was silence. Nobody in the Worcesters’ trenches relaxed. A second attack came at half past two in the morning. Now the Japanese made no attempt at silence. A screaming wave attacked the right flank and ran straight into a curtain of Bren and rifle fire. Weedman heard his company commander shout to the cooks, clerks and batmen to fix bayonets and be ready in case the enemy broke through. Again the attack was beaten back. In the morning the sentries found seventeen Japanese rifles strewn about the hill, all of them outside the perimeter. A body lying about twenty yards away was seen to move. A puff of smoke rose from it. It might have been a phosphorus grenade. ‘He smouldered for the rest of the day and slowly burnt himself to death.’ Another Japanese body was dragged inside the perimeter and searched for maps or documents. When the men had finished, the corpse was placed in a shallow grave. A private composed an ‘epitaph’ which was placed on the man’s grave:
Little Jap upon the hill,
Very cold, very still,
To the top he tried to get,
He doesn’t know what hit him yet!
The trek towards the Kohima front had its bizarre moments. Fred Weedman was leading the mules, loaded with boxes of stew, up a steep trail in the jungle and saw one Japanese carrying another on his back. Weedman threw a grenade and there was a scream, quickly followed by a burst of Japanese machine-gun fire. At this point a mule named Gladys went wild and sprayed the area with boiling-hot stew. The Japanese vanished.
Far above Weedman, in the world of the Generals, Stopford was urging Grover onwards. When the latter said he worried about being cut off from water, Stopford brushed aside his concerns. ‘The relief of Kohima must be carried.’
General Slim was feeling marginally less anxious. Flying between his Comilla headquarters and the bases at Dimapur and Imphal, he was ‘beginning to see light’. At Imphal the Japanese were still battering away fruitlessly; with air supply and a continuing flow of reinforcements the risk of losing 4 Corps was rapidly receding. Like Stopford, he watched the build-up of British forces at Dimapur and read the reports of enemy losses around Imphal, Sangshak and Kohima, and concluded that the tide could soon turn. By 11 April, Grover and two of his brigades were at Dimapur with a third just arriving. In addition, Brigadier Lancelot Perowne’s 23 Long Range Penetration Brigade (Chindits) had been tasked to guard the railway line and then to move out to attack the Japanese lines of communication around Kohima.
The Japanese had Kohima in a stranglehold, but Slim knew their advance had been costly. ‘For their gains they had paid a higher price in dead and wounded, and, above all, in time, than they had calculated on
their
plan.’ Slim had an approximate parity in numbers of troops in the area, and would soon have superiority when the 7th Indian Division arrived from the Arakan; but, above all, he had the air support and supply lines essential for victory. ‘As I watched the little flags representing divisions cluster round Imphal and Kohima on my situation map, I heaved a sigh of relief. As the second week of April wore on, for all its alarms and fears I felt that our original pattern for the battle was reasserting itself.’
That was the big picture, but, as Slim acknowledged, it was by no means the complete one. Hugh Richards and the Kohima garrison were in ‘dire peril’. Warren was held up on the road outside Kohima. There was still time for Sato to overrun the garrison, or to sidestep it and keep moving towards Dimapur and the railway. Slim wanted to fight his battle not on the railway but at Kohima. If the Japanese took Kohima Ridge in its entirety, it would take months of fighting – as Pawsey and Richards had warned – to shift them, and would delay Slim’s plans for an offensive into Burma. This strategic reality was behind Slim’s original decision to make a stand at Kohima. Subsequently he had agreed with Stopford when the latter feared Dimapur would be the target. Now, after acknowledging that error, Slim resolved to make Kohima his battleground by diverting resources from Imphal; as he put it, ‘at the cost of skimping Scoones I must nourish Stopford’. There had been serious mistakes in his reading of Japanese intentions – mistakes he honourably acknowledged – but Slim was right to believe that the battle was still his to win.
Defeat at Kohima would wreck everything he had worked for since the retreat of 1942. Slim had forged a new army, despite being starved of resources and facing Churchill’s scepticism and, frequently, American hostility. He had instilled in the men of 14th Army the belief that they could win. The damage to morale of defeat would be catastrophic, let alone the ramifications for relations with the Americans and for the fragile political situation in India. Slim was always alert to the political as well as military dimensions of his battles, and at Kohima this filtered down to his subordinate commanders, who felt the pressure for swift advances in a landscape where they were frequently impossible.