Road of Bones (46 page)

‘A hell of a din arose from the tennis court.’ The forward sections went through boxes of grenades ‘like butter’ and the Bren guns sizzled. After half an hour the shooting stopped. Faulkner went forward to see what had happened. He bumped into a Sergeant Bennett, ‘coming back like a young bullock that had seen red’. The NCO was desperate. He shouted at Faulkner: ‘For Christ’s sake let me have a section quick or they’ll be through us.’ The lieutenant ran to his position, grabbed four men and led them back to the NCO, skirting around the line of fire of a Japanese machine gun. Within a few seconds one of the replacements had been shot in the neck. The wounded man was carried back to Faulkner’s bunker but immediately got up to go back into the line. ‘Where the hell are you going?’ Faulkner demanded. ‘Back with Ferguson. The poor kid’s alone with that gun and it needs two,’ he replied. Faulkner found another man to go forward.

Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes was also dug in with A company at the tennis court. In old age, his heart would still quicken as he described the Japanese attack. ‘They came howling and screaming and full of go. It was terrifying but the only good thing was the screaming let you know where they were coming from and so we got our lines of fire right and mowed them down. Wave after wave we cut them down with machine guns. I didn’t know if I was killing one or a dozen. I just swept the machine gun through ’em and that was it.’

Wykes shared his trench with a boy called Williams from Wales. He was one of a draft of about twenty Royal Welch Fusiliers brought in as replacements to augment the West Kents. One day, during a lull, they were talking about food. ‘I said to this lad Williams, “Oh, I’m hungry. I think I know where I can get some biscuits.” So he said, “Yeah, I could do with something to eat.” I’d only got about ten foot away from the trench when this shell came in.’ Wykes was blown on
to the ground. He looked up and saw a large cloud of smoke. Scrambling back to the trench he saw Williams lying on his back. He had been hit in the stomach; it was a death wound and Williams and Wykes both knew it. The boy grabbed Wykes’s arm and cried out. ‘“Don’t let me die. Don’t let me die.” And I thought, “Oh god, I can’t stop you from dying, mate.”’ Wykes kept telling him that things would be all right. He shouted for medical help, but Williams died soon after arriving at the ADS. Another Welsh soldier, Walter Williams, heard the screaming. ‘I will always remember a young Welsh boy, no more than nineteen, with his tummy hanging out calling out to his mother in Welsh. “Taffy,” he says, “Taffy,” he says, “I want my mother. I’m very lost” … with half his tummy out.’

Another soldier, Mark Lambert, who had worked as an assistant in a gentlemen’s outfitter’s store before the war, kicked and punched at the men who came for him; he used his rifle as a hammer to smash in Japanese skulls. ‘You don’t forget that kind of thing. From both sides we were animals.’ Lambert drank heavily during the siege. ‘More often than not I was tanked up with rum. I was section leader and I persuaded the men that rum was not good for them.’ He offered to do the dawn guard duty in return for the men’s rum ration. Lambert never thought of home. He mentally disowned his family because thinking about them brought too much pain. Only later would he find out that his younger brother in the navy had been killed off the Italian coast in 1942.

At the tennis court a battle of attrition had begun. Separated by only twenty yards, defender and attacker settled into sniping and throwing grenades, punctuated by Japanese wave attacks. A Japanese soldier who stood up in the early dawn light, believing he was out of sight, was promptly killed by a batman from A company. Much of the greatest damage was done by the artillery firing from Jotsoma under the direction of Yeo and his observers. The men in the forward trenches would hear the Japanese forming up for an attack on the terrace below the tennis court. It took all of Yeo’s skill to avoid disaster and bring ‘fire down on call on any sector at incredibly short distances in front of our own troops’. Everybody in the battalion
remembered what had happened to B company at the tunnels in the Arakan.

The Japanese replied in kind, as Faulkner recorded: ‘At 6 p.m. the Jap did his damndest to blow us clean off the whole spur. To use an Americanism, he threw everything at us except the kitchen stove.’ Mortar rounds and shells from the 75 millimetre guns came screaming in. Faulkner’s bunker shook from near misses. He sat with one hand on the telephone, a cigarette in the other, ‘smoking furiously and trying to think of my girlfriend at home’. Another officer was sobbing uncontrollably. Two others played cards, forcing their minds to concentrate on something other than the fear of dying. Suddenly a soldier dashed in and began to scream about people being killed, ‘completely off his rocker’. The phone was blown to pieces by the shock waves of the next blast. Faulkner was terrified. ‘No man can be brave at times like that.’ His most trusted NCO, Sergeant Deacon, stumbled into the bunker. ‘He looked awful. His face was white and he couldn’t say anything – just looked at me.’ At that moment the roof took a direct hit. Dust flooded the interior and the beams sagged. But Faulkner’s luck held. The bunker did not collapse. There was a long silence, or so it seemed to Faulkner as he watched the dust float to the ground. The sergeant spoke up. ‘George Mann’s dead. Heaney’s badly wounded. York is shell shocked, and Stuart has buggered off. His nerve went. There’s only Laver left now.’ Faulkner realised that there was now a gap to his right. The shell-shocked soldier got up and went over to the sergeant. Together they left the bunker and went back to the trench on the right. A wounded man who had been resting in the bunker followed them. In this way the gap was filled. Later, Laverty sent a message to A company. ‘Bloody good show!’ He promised they would be relieved the following day. The exhausted men fought off two more assaults before John Winstanley’s B company came to relieve them. The ground around their position was littered with broken weapons. Faulkner waited until the last of his men were gone and then raced up the hill after them, imagining the snipers taking a bead on his back. ‘I ran so fast up the track that I must have been within an ace of shitting my trousers.’

Lieutenant Tom Hogg was preparing to take over the positions vacated by A company. Hogg was one of only two remaining officers under Major John Winstanley. The others were dead or wounded. The positions at the tennis court were by now very precarious. The Japanese controlled not only the bungalow area but had infiltrated snipers into some cherry trees overlooking the West Kents’ positions above the court. The Japanese attacked three times on the night of 12 April, showering the defenders’ trenches with grenades as they came. Heavy mortar fire from B company helped drive them back. During one of the assaults Hogg had a moment of blind terror. He watched a dozen Japanese race towards his position in the centre, but when he raised his automatic rifle it jammed. A Japanese reached the edge of the trench and stabbed at him. The blade caught in Hogg’s webbing belt. There was just time to recock the weapon and empty an entire magazine into the attacker. The others swept past his trench and engaged John Winstanley’s position further back. B company held on, but casualties were mounting. Tom Hogg was saved when one of his NCOs sheltered him from a grenade, taking the full blast of shrapnel into his back. A Bren-gunner in one of the forward positions, right on the edge of the tennis court, survived repeated assaults by Japanese coming from just twenty yards away, before eventually being killed by a sniper.

Walter Williams was twenty-two years old, an apprentice plumber from Caernarvon, and already married. He was manning a Bren gun in a trench at the clubhouse. He and his partner fired into a dense mass of men coming from just a few yards away. The gun barrel glowed red in the darkness. Eventually it seized up and some Japanese who had crept around the clubhouse attacked. Williams’s partner was bayoneted and killed. Men were jabbing and striking. Williams grabbed a spade and jumped out of the trench to confront the Japanese. A soldier stabbed him with a bayonet and the blade sliced through his cheek and out of his nose. Enraged, Williams hacked at the enemy, using his spade like an axe. ‘That made me worse. Now I was very agile and tough in those days and I killed the chap that bayoneted my friend and I walloped one or two of the
others and they ran away.’ Williams threw grenades after the fleeing men. He was taken to the ADS to have the bayonet wound treated. As he was being treated, a shell came in and killed the doctor attending him. ‘I must have a cat’s life really,’ he said.

The ADS was again hit by shelling just after dawn on 14 April and two casualties on whom Young had performed amputations were killed. A dugout with ten casualties received a direct hit, blowing to pieces everybody in it. Again, the process of dressing the rewounded and freshly wounded began. By 0930 hours a new ADS had been built. This one was 10 feet long by 6 feet deep, with a ‘splinter-proof roof’, and proved its robustness by taking a direct hit with little damage. Around midday Young lost one of his doctors to what the war diary calls ‘nervous exhaustion’. In the circumstances, it is extraordinary that only one man on the medical team is recorded as having succumbed.

That same day, as he waited to be relieved, Major John Winstanley looked out at the dead piled on the tennis court. ‘Somehow we hung on. The stench was terrible. The [Kohima] perimeter even to begin with was only hundreds of yards rather than miles and day by day as more and more shrinkage took place the place was just littered with our own and Jap bodies.’ As a regimental historian put it, ‘two days in this area was thought to be long enough’, and B company was pulled out and replaced by a company of the Assam Regiment. Tom Hogg counted what was left of his platoon. Himself and two other men. On 14 April, after nine days of fighting, the Royal West Kents’ strength had been reduced from around 444 to fewer than three hundred men, while the garrison as a whole had lost four hundred. With the fall of GPT Ridge, Jail Hill and Detail Hill, and the infiltration of the bungalow sector, the perimeter had now been reduced to roughly 500 by 500 yards. Word came through on 15 April from Warren at Jotsoma that relief could be expected in two days. All the garrison needed to do was hold on for that dangerous interval and they would be saved.

Richards and Young began making plans for the evacuation of the wounded. Word leaked down to the men in the trenches. Something
like hope began to trickle through the lines. Some of the older hands were worried about the effect of raised expectations. ‘It was only snippets I heard from the Coy Commander,’ recalled CSM Bert Harwood of C company. ‘I didn’t tell the men … we were getting low in numbers anyway … it was best really to keep it to yourself … it would upset the morale … to think you might get relieved … You knew that they were so near and yet so far … You were thinking to yourself, “oh god, how much longer?”’ Private Leonard Brown, who faced the Japanese on the tennis court, recalled that there were messages from Colonel Laverty. ‘Every day Danny Laverty, the Colonel, said, “Hang on, if you let go India is falling” and day after day … we got the same reply coming back from the old man, “Hang on there [2nd Division] breaking through.”’ Major Calistan of the 1st Assam Regiment wearily noted that ‘we were continually hearing of 161 Bde coming up to relieve us, then 2 Div. being only 10 miles away, then tanks could be seen and so on, but as each day went by and still no reinforcements came up, we did not think there could be any truth in all these stories’. Havildar Sohevu Angami was among the Assam troops relieving the West Kents. As he made his way down the slope to the tennis court a sniper round whipped past. It killed Major James Askew instantly. The havildar was grimly fatalistic about the death. ‘I saw him being killed. He was giving us orders and going up and down and that is when they got him. I accepted it as the thing that will happen to you in the army. If your time will come it will come.’ Eight other Assam soldiers were killed or wounded. An officer moving into his position at the tennis court found several men leaning on the parapet in firing positions. He ordered them to move and then he pushed one. There was no response. They were all dead.

General Stopford was buoyed by the good news. On 14 April he received a report from the 2nd Division commander, General Grover, ‘who thinks it may be possible to push on quickly tomorrow to clear up the whole situation at Kohima’. Ever mindful of the political pressure to wrap up the battle, Stopford took the news at face value. But Grover’s report was a considerable overstatement and at odds with what Hawkins of 5 Brigade had told him a few days before. Was Grover attempting to placate a superior whom he knew was anxious for swift progress? It is hard to imagine that he thought a swift victory was likely in the circumstances, with 4 and 6 Brigades of 2nd Division still deploying forward from Dimapur and the Japanese invested so strongly at Kohima. All the evidence pointed to a battle of attrition.

Had Stopford spoken to the troops working their way through the thick jungle towards Kohima, he might have come to a different appreciation. Brigadier Victor Hawkins described how a column he was leading became dispersed in the mountains. ‘We were now split into four parties. I was alone with ten unarmed men. It was getting on for daylight and I hadn’t the faintest notion where I was or how much farther we had to go. There was only one alternative and that was to keep going and hope that other people would do the same and that eventually we should all join up again.’ Hawkins was lucky. His group was reunited later that day. But the going was slow for troops who had never operated in a mountain environment before. Ron Thomas, a runner with 1 Royal Welch Fusiliers, 6 Brigade, marched
for two hours through the jungle to find his unit. They were watching for Japanese trying to cut behind the advancing forces. Thomas was the son of a coal-miner from Wrexham and was working in a steel works when war broke out. He had just come from jungle training in India, but the thickness of the foliage here terrified him. ‘It is very seldom that you get a clearing and when you are walking knowing that there is some enemy in front, you are looking at every tree! You’re on pins.’