Authors: Fergal Keane
Every time they formed up for an attack, units were targeted by the distant guns. Lieutenant Hiroshi Yamagami lay flat on his stomach, face in the mud, as the shells landed. ‘At the same time, the trench swung like an earthquake.’ He and his battalion commander had been lying in the trench since the previous evening, pinned down by the guns. Yamagami poked his head up and looked with his field-glasses at the British lines. Some troops he took to be Gurkhas
were firing at the Japanese trenches. In that instant Yamagami felt a flash of hatred for the men trying to kill him. ‘The battle of Kohima, life in a trench for forty days, had begun.’
During one night attack the company commander was looking for an enemy trench to attack. He made the mistake of firing a flare. The British spotted the light and within minutes shells were landing, gradually ranging in on the attacking group. ‘It came to us step by step and subconsciously I jumped into a nearby trench. I did really well because it was so small!’ Yamagami was amazed by the accuracy of the artillery and despaired of the slaughter. ‘One group would attack and be targeted and be annihilated. Then another one would come up and the same thing would happen. Gradually in a single night an entire company would be gone.’
The supply officer from the 138th Regiment, Chuzaburo Tomaru, who had refused to behead a civilian during the war in China, was never the keenest of warriors; he was sure that if he moved from his trench the British would get him. Tomaru had already succeeded in obtaining a transfer out of a machine-gun company, because ‘I had heard the rumour that soldiers in Machine Gun Company are easily targeted in the battle.’ The artillery was like ‘thunder and it felt as if one hundred of the guns were firing all at once’, but Tomaru still had to deliver food to the forward trenches. At this point there was still rice to make into a ball for each man, and ‘water dropwort’ from the river instead of vegetables.
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Tomaru felt anguish for the infantry. ‘The men were so brave and patient. At one point I was hiding behind rocks with members of battalion HQ and I saw them go out in wave after wave and being killed again and again. Eventually I had no intention of fighting myself at all.’
Tomaru was an exception. Most of Lieutenant General Kotuku Sato’s troops were still willing to die for their general and emperor on the slopes of Kohima. Dr Takahide Kuwaki, a medical officer with 124th Infantry Regiment, looked out across the desolate battlefield
and felt his death would come soon. ‘When I arrived there I thought “this is the place where I will do my best and I will give my life.”’ Unlike the 58th Regiment, which had fought a brutal battle at Sangshak, Kuwaki’s 124th had had a comparatively easy progress to Kohima, although the hell of Guadalcanal was still vivid in the memories of veterans. For Kuwaki, entering battle for the first time, the regiment was the vanguard of an army dedicated to Japan’s imperial expansion, a cause for which he would gladly be martyred. Yet visions of dying a glorious death for the empire were punctuated by the mundane business of pulling lice from his clothes. In quiet moments he would set the vermin to fight each other, a pastime the dark resonance of which evaded Kuwaki at the time. Expecting his death to come at any moment, the doctor wrote some death songs to be passed on to his children, imagining that his dynasty would endure forever, in prosperity.
Children and grandchildren
taking thousands of years
to die in prosperity
that is my eternal wish.
He believed that the Japanese only needed to hold on and keep the road closed between Imphal and Dimapur and the British would be starved out. The power of British air supply, and growing hunger in the Japanese lines, would eventually disabuse him of that notion.
Kawaki regarded the British as careful. There were no rash charges. ‘They first fired the guns, then they sent observers, and only then did they attack.’ For the men leading the attacks on the British trenches in the second week of April, the easy successes against the Nepalese Shere Regiment and other rear-section troops were forgotten in the face of fierce hand-to-hand fighting with the likes of the West Kents and the Assam Regiment. Lieutenant Togawa, a section commander with the 58th Regiment, was caught with his men in no-man’s-land and decided to make a rush attack in the middle of the night. In the darkness he fell into a trench where he was set upon by
several defenders. ‘I hurried to draw off my sabre, but they gripped both my arms. One enemy [struck] my head, but I felt almost none for the sake of my iron hat.’ Outnumbered in the trench, he thought that if he surrendered he would be made a prisoner of war. That would be far worse than death. Togawa managed to draw his sabre, which ‘glittered in the moon’, and all the defenders except one ran away. ‘One so brave grappled with me,’ he recalled. The men rolled ‘up and down, again and again’, with Togawa trying to drive home his blade. The Japanese proved stronger and he stabbed his opponent, who ‘ceased to move and lay on his face’. The incident shocked Togawa, for he wrote of having to ‘recover’ his mind immediately afterwards. When he did, he realised shells were falling. One exploded nearby and sprayed him with searing metal fragments.
The man who had launched the 15th Army into India was still at his headquarters in Maymyo, replete with geishas and sake, and increasingly convinced of the uselessness of his generals on the distant battlefields. The commander of the 33rd Division, General Yanagida, would soon be sacked for his supposed faint-heartedness at Imphal; the ailing General Yamauchi, commander of 15th Division, was also bogged down outside the town and being cursed for his lack of vigour. Lieutenant Colonel Iwaichi Fujiwara, the intelligence officer who had done so much to prepare the way for the invasion, was piecing together a portrait of disunity which induced despair. ‘The Army Comdr did NOT command the complete obedience of the 3 Comdrs of the Divs he had under his command.’ Fujiwara had no idea how much worse things would get.
Years later, Mutaguchi would concede that his temper had been a problem. The staff officers were too afraid to speak their minds. But typically the general excused himself. ‘In a long campaign when it was not working out well, a burst of my temper from time to time is inevitable.’ Of his divisional commanders, Mutaguchi had scarcely a good word to say. Only the Kohima battle still held promise, but even here Mutaguchi had been stymied. The 58th Regiment had just arrived in Kohima when Mutaguchi signalled General Sato to strike
on for Dimapur and capture the British supply base. In this, Mutaguchi’s aggressive instincts were correct: he wanted Sato to do what Slim and Stopford feared most. ‘I then gave the order to the 31st division leader by saying “Chase the withdrawing enemy immediately and move through to Dimapur.” … I thought that the necessary food for the division’s soldiers and horses would be obtained by the attack of Dimapur.’ But such a move would mean eventually coming into the open, where British air superiority would count. Mutaguchi signalled Lieutenant General Kawabe, commander of the Burma Area Army, for air support. Kawabe was horrified, as ‘Dimapur was not within the strategic objectives of the 15 Army’. Mutaguchi was told, ‘this is not good! Considering the overall situation please stop it.’ Had Sato headed straight for Dimapur on 4 April he would have found the base still in a shambles with troops arriving by rail and air.
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From his office in Rangoon, the Burma Area Army chief could feel the Imphal campaign slipping away. The weather reports indicated that the monsoon might come earlier, raising the prospect of 15th Army being swamped and unable to receive supplies, even if sufficient food and ammunition could be found – a doubtful prospect, as Kawabe knew, with matters in the Pacific getting worse. Since the start of the year the Americans had dislodged the Japanese from island after island. The Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana islands had all been assaulted and the big Japanese base at Rabaul destroyed. There was no question of Kawabe persuading Tokyo to release aircraft to support the troops in India.
Kawabe had sent Mutaguchi into the mountains with instructions to get the campaign wrapped up before the monsoon. From the outset, Kawabe had always recognised the invasion as a gamble, but he counted on Mutaguchi’s track record of energy, and luck and British ineptitude to see the enemy beaten before the rains. Now it was not only the weather that filled him with foreboding. The British were not fleeing, and their air superiority had astonished the Japanese infantry. Had
Kawabe paid more attention to the fighting in the Arakan that had preceded the invasion of India, he would not have been so surprised.
Communications between 31st Division and 15th Army headquarters were becoming increasingly difficult. Lieutenant General Sato’s infantry commander, General Miyazaki, found that most of his wireless batteries became useless in the damp. Even without the monsoon, men were dying of disease and hunger-related illness, and ‘heavy casualties – caused mostly by artillery’ had depleted his ranks at Sangshak. Yet Miyazaki remained full of vim and would have struck for Dimapur had Kawabe not cancelled the orders. General Sato, however, remained convinced that he had been sent in the wrong direction from the start. Mutaguchi should have thrown all three divisions against Imphal to strike a crushing blow against 4th Corps. ‘It was a huge mistake to have directed the force to Kohima.’
Still, at that early stage, on 6 April, Sato seems to have been ready to obey the order to go forward to Dimapur, in spite of his opposition in the past. Perhaps the prospect of capturing supplies for his men had changed his mind. For all his growing misgivings about the operation, Sato felt pride in his men’s achievement in getting as far as Kohima, traversing a mountain wilderness the British did not believe could be crossed by a division. ‘I believe that is something that is worth a special mention in the military history … Its achievement is great and gave the enemy the damage and casualties.’
After the first week of fighting at Kohima what worried Sato most was hunger. Already men were sick. Too little nourishment had reduced their resistance to disease. The doctors were treating endless cases of dysentery. As he had feared from the outset, Mutaguchi’s promise of ten tons of supplies per day had not materialised. Fewer than a fifth of the cattle that crossed the Chindwin had reached the front line and mules were being consumed in their stead. This had a knock-on effect. Fewer mules meant delays in bringing ammunition and food up from supply dumps to front-line positions. Yet, by the second week of April, Sato still believed a victory at Kohima was possible. At any moment the garrison could be overrun by his troops. Once Kohima Ridge was entirely his, the British would have an
almighty job pushing him off. He banked on capturing the remaining supply stores in Kohima and digging in for a long fight.
Sato could not have known the size of the British and Indian reinforcements coming up to meet him, nor could he have fully appreciated their superiority in firepower and supplies. Slim dismissed Sato as ‘without exception, the most unenterprising of all the Japanese generals I encountered. His bullet head was filled with one idea only – to take Kohima … he could by the 5th April, have struck the railway with the bulk of his division.’ Slim told of how he had to dissuade some enthusiastic RAF officers from launching an air strike on Sato’s headquarters. ‘They were astonished when I suggested they abandon the project as I regarded their intended victim as one of my most helpful generals!’ Slim was wrong. When he wrote those words after the war he could not have been aware of Kawabe’s orders not to move on Dimapur. Nor did he understand the true nature of his adversary. Sato was not stupid. His reluctance to gamble was based on care for the men under his command. ‘The priority is not to make impossible demands of the men,’ he wrote. ‘If you do … each unit will get exhausted.’ It was a fine aspiration but, as Sato himself knew by now, what was being asked of his men at Kohima was entering the realm of the impossible.
Kohima was the furious heart of the battle and on both sides men were enduring unimaginable privation. But beyond Kohima, among the hills and jungles, the war had also swept through the lives of the Naga tribespeople with the force of a monsoon storm. Several thousand had been driven from their villages and fled to refugee camps in Assam, but the flood of refugees and retreating troops from the Imphal plain posed an even greater problem. As many as 29,000 Manipuris had fled their homes in April 1944 to cross the hills and seek safety in Assam.
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Among them were the flotsam and jetsam of various Indian and Burmese units overrun by the Japanese. The guerrilla leader Ursula Graham Bower deployed her twenty-strong unit of Naga scouts, equipped with muzzle-loading rifles, to protect villages threatened by looters and army deserters. Villagers were being beaten, their women attacked and food stolen. ‘Though the Nagas were giving every assistance, their only rewards were assaults and lootings. Villagers took to the woods, normal life came to a standstill; and as the tide spread westwards and reached us, it became increasingly hard to maintain order – the whole intelligence network was threatened.’ Augmented by a patrol of Gurkhas and a V Force officer, Graham Bower set off for one village just occupied by thirty of these marauders. In less than an hour her force had successfully surrounded and captured the deserters. ‘They went off under escort in a depressed file, elated Gurkhas marched ahead and behind and Zemi porters carrying the collected weapons in firewood-baskets.’
The V Force screen along the Chindwin had vanished with the Japanese advance. She had no wireless and therefore was dependent on a series of beacons that ran from the front and could be seen from different high points in her patrol area. If they were fired it meant trouble was coming. In the jungle, her scouts cut holes in the vegetation in which to sleep. ‘We honey-combed the scrub with tunnels and little chambers beaten and cut out … no outsider ever knew where exactly in the wide spread of bushes we were hidden.’