Authors: Fergal Keane
Sato’s sensitivity had everything to do with the worsening predicament of the 31st Division and his conviction that, with Mutaguchi in charge, he was subordinate to a dangerous fool. On 17 April, Mutaguchi sent him an order to strip his division of three infantry battalions, roughly a third of its strength, and a mountain artillery
battalion, and to send them to Imphal. This when the British 2nd Division was clogging the roads to Kohima with reinforcements and threatening to throttle him. Still, sitting in faraway Maymyo, Mutaguchi was working on the assumption that all of the Kohima Ridge would be in Japanese hands by 29 April. The date was no coincidence. It was the emperor’s birthday and Mutaguchi intended presenting the hillside village as his personal gift. Sato initially instructed his commanders to prepare the troops for departure to Imphal at Aradura Spur, the huge ridge south of Kohima. Then he apparently thought differently and chose to ignore Mutaguchi’s order. When a reminder came, Sato replied that the order was impossible. It was finally cancelled, with unconscious irony, on 29 April. Sato had signalled his future intentions by defying the 15th Army commander.
It was now well clear to the Japanese at Kohima that they were confronting a changed British and Indian enemy. Even Mutaguchi was beginning to sense that he may have underestimated them. Not only were they better armed and equipped, but they were fighting back. ‘For this I could not help showing respect to the British leadership – they were once in a difficult situation, but seized the opportunity created by the delayed Japanese attack [on Kohima] and regrouped, which led them to a victory in the end.’ A British correspondent’s contemporary account brings home the superiority in firepower of 2nd Division. ‘Across the valley … the Japanese sit and watch the convoys roll on to Kohima. In the past few days they have seen vast lines of vehicles coming up from Dimapur to swell the British attack. Every lorry is a possible target for Japanese guns and except where the road twists behind the spurs, every mile is in shell range … From these peaks every muzzle flash can be pinpointed and on the British side at least there is a mass of guns on call to hammer back at every Jap artilleryman who dares to fire.’
The supply officer Lieutenant Masao Hirakubo remembered the arrival of 2nd Division. ‘It all changed … every five minutes they fired. We couldn’t walk in the daytime at all. Only at night we moved. I remember I said to myself “why are they making so heavy when they know we have no guns, only six shells a day for our mountain
artillery?”’ At night harassing fire continued, with men never knowing where the shells would land. Aircraft attacked Hirakubo’s kitchen area. One of his cooks was shot by cannon fire and ‘his stomach just exploded’.
But it was the appearance of tanks that made the greatest impression on the new defenders of Kohima Ridge. The intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel Iwaichi Fujiwara thought the armour of 2nd Division a graver threat to morale than the aircraft. Men formed suicide squads and attacked the tanks with magnetic mines and bombs. ‘Unfortunately these tactics involved a heavy sacrifice of our best men and could be regarded only as a temporary expedient.’ The 138th Regiment supply officer Lieutenant Chuzaburo Tomaru saw a tank shoot in his direction and thought the battle was finally lost. ‘I said to myself, “This is it!”’ By Fujiwara’s reckoning the pounding from 2nd Division’s artillery knocked out five Japanese guns, and those remaining were restricted by shell shortages to firing no more than five or six rounds each day.
For General Sato there was one more ominous portent. The river near his divisional headquarters was a slow and sleepy jungle waterway. In early May there was a succession of downpours and the general watched it muddy and swirl, fattening by the hour until it swept away a small bridge and caused a mudslide on the banks. ‘Its appearance had completely changed,’ he wrote. The season of mud and disease was nearly on him.
At Kohima the men of the 1st Royal Berkshires and the 2nd Durham Light Infantry, 6 Brigade, who had taken over the positions on Garrison Hill, fought off the last of the Japanese attacks. Number 10 company of the Japanese 124th Regiment made little packages of hair and nails to be sent back to their families. They were instructed to send all correspondence back to headquarters, ‘so the enemy can’t say, after you’re dead, that you are unmanly and sentimental, burn all your photographs and family letters’. The officer who gave the order, Captain Yoshifuku, examined his own prized keepsake. It was a photograph of his eldest son in his first year at school. The boy was smiling and thrusting his arm forward to show a badge naming him ‘Top of the
Class’. He caught himself speaking to the photograph and then spotted another officer who was doing the same thing. The two men smiled at one and other. Captain Yoshifuku was killed later that night.
The familiar pattern was repeated. On the night of 22 April screaming waves of men surged from Kuki Piquet into the British trenches; the Japanese bombardment had the fortuitous effect of igniting an ammunition dump behind the defenders. In normal circumstances this might have been a disaster, but the blast set fire to the remaining tree tops on Garrison Hill and the glow illuminated the advancing Japanese, who came under a storm of Bren and rifle fire. The newly arrived British troops were thrown into hand-to-hand fighting, with ground lost and then regained, until the position was restored. The Durhams lost about one hundred men killed and wounded, while total Japanese casualties, although uncounted, were estimated to run to several hundred. Documents captured by the British showed that there had been fifteen survivors out of one company of roughly 180 men. In all, four companies were blasted and shot out of the battle. A Japanese major on Miyazaki’s infantry group staff wrote of the ‘hornet’s nest’ of defenders and how ‘both Right and Left Attack Forces … suffered many casualties without making appreciable progress … even when he is surrounded by our forces, he will, supported by aircraft and artillery fire, resist to the bitter end’.
The tone of contempt for the British and Indian enemy was changing to one of grudging respect. The costly attacks on Garrison Hill convinced Sato to change strategy. In his own account he gives 23 April as the date he went over to the defensive, although he preferred to call it ‘waiting’. He would dig in and hope that enough supplies would come soon to enable him to last out the monsoon. Sato was helped by an interlocking system of trenches and bunkers described by Slim as being ‘as formidable a position as a British Army has ever faced’.
A medical orderly, George Senior, was swiftly immersed in the hell of Garrison Hill. Mortars came in about twenty yards away as the attack on the Durham Light Infantry began. Then groans and shrieks started. Terrified, the orderly started talking to himself: ‘Let someone else go. Yes, someone else will go in your place, you low snivelling
yellow coward … but I feel too weak to move … What would Dad say if he saw you now? … I mustn’t let him down.’ He jumped out and ran to the wounded. He had never seen so much blood. It was splattered everywhere. All over the wounded, the ground, the trees, and, soon, all over himself, as he went about his work. The following morning he sat by a stretcher case with a gaping wound in his shoulder. The man was being given a blood transfusion in a last attempt to save his life. ‘He was restless and kept asking if he could go to sleep now but what little chance he had would have gone if he did go to sleep. So I sat there, keeping him awake and watching him slowly fall in an eternal sleep.’ Nearby were the bodies of the men killed in the assault. There were not enough blankets to cover the dead and Senior saw bodies twisted grotesquely. One had a foot missing, another had half his skull blown away. Of the three Durham companies in forward positions there were only four out of fifteen officers left, while one company had shrunk from 136 men to sixty. Gordon Graham of the 1 Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders recalled how death ‘was always a surprise, followed by a flash of survivor’s guilt.’ Ninety-three Cameron ‘Jocks’ were killed at Kohima but twenty-nine of the bodies were either never found or identified; the majority were killed in fighting at Naga Village.
Within a few days the Japanese soldiers in the trenches on GPT Ridge, Jail Hill, Supply and Detail Hills, and Kuki Piquet were defending against repeated British attacks. Lance Corporal Tukuo Seki fought off two attacks on his trench in the first week of May. But a heavy machine gun was blown up and the British were able to overrun the position. Seki survived and ran back, only to see a shell destroy a mortar position. At the tennis court the Japanese were mounting the last of their all-out assaults in the first week of May. The supply officer of 3rd battalion, 58th Regiment, Lieutenant Masao Hirakubo, was summoned into action for a night attack. ‘Come with me to make a total attack,’ the company commander screamed. Masao drew his sword and followed his commander into battle. It was pitch dark and he could barely see in front of him.
There was sudden fighting as they collided with the defenders. Men were grappling with each other and striking out. ‘We dashed on them. They didn’t expect us. I couldn’t see his face so we hacked and stabbed.’ Afterwards, still filled with adrenaline, he noticed that his sword was covered in blood. ‘I killed somebody but I did not see his face. I felt nothing.’
Climbing the mound to the tennis court, Second Lieutenant Yoshiteru Hirayama, 58th Regiment, prayed that the British would not hear him coming. Hirayama did not consider himself a born warrior. He had been brought up in the calm of the Buddhist monastery in which his father and grandfather had been abbots. Now he found himself leading a ten-man section into the teeth of the British guns, fighting hand to hand with strangers and knowing death could come at any second. For weeks the same tactic had been tried. Men formed up on the mound and raced upwards to try and seize the British trenches. But so often the artillery had come down and ripped them to pieces before the attack could even begin. If that didn’t do the job, they were cut down by the men in the trenches.
Hirayama’s orders were to seize the first British trench on the opposite side of the tennis court. He ran with his section and jumped into an empty trench. The air around him exploded with machine-gun fire. ‘One man got shot but we managed to get cover near a water supply tank on the British side. There was nothing there except bodies.’ Hirayama could see that the situation was hopeless and withdrew. A few days later he was sent back and this time they managed to cross the tennis court. But again the British drove them back. As he ran, Hirayama was shot in the thigh. Blood spurted from the wound as he crouched and tried to run on. His rifle gone, he clutched a knife and hoped he would not encounter the enemy. Collapsing back into his own trench, Hirayama felt his life slipping away. ‘It was very heavy blood. Another medic came with an emergency medical kit captured from the British.’ The medic was Lance Corporal Tokuo Seki, who had heard a colleague shouting to him above the shooting, ‘Please come and stop [the] bleeding.’ Seki jumped out of his trench and raced to where Hirayama was lying. ‘In his trench, there were
seven or eight injured soldiers lying in line. The trench was so smelly.’ Two younger medics were trying to stem the bleeding from his thigh but lacked the proper experience. Seki found some pebbles and wrapped each one in cotton wool to make a pressure compact which he strapped into the wound. Hirayama’s bleeding stopped for the time being. He was eventually brought to a field hospital, a filthy and overcrowded hut where he watched the flies lay eggs in his wounds. Seki looked around at the other wounded men in the trench. None had had their bandages changed for days. Pus was flowing out of wounds. The medics were boiling filthy uniforms to make into dressings but could not keep up with the demand. To Japanese new to the battlefield the sights were no less horrifying than they were to the men of the Durham Light Infantry and the Royal Berkshires on the other side. Sergeant Satoru Yanagi, 124th Regiment, arrived from the rear area to Jail Hill around 5 May to reinforce the ravaged ranks of the 58th Regiment, which had been fighting for three weeks. ‘I saw all dead soldiers, from both sides. Six hundred dead bodies I saw in that single Jail Hill.’
Food became an obsessive preoccupation for the Japanese in the trenches. A fortnight before, they had been able to convince themselves that supplies would come soon. But by the anniversary of their first month at Kohima not a single grain of rice had arrived from 15th Army. Some of the supply officers were overcome with shame at their failure to provide more than a single rice ball to each man. As Masao Hirakubo of the 58th Regiment recalled: ‘Mr Ito who worked with the Mountain Artillery couldn’t get food and was blamed by the soldiers and he decided to kill himself. I don’t know how he did it. At least five times I met him and I said I could retain some food for two or three days, and he had only food for tomorrow and he was so busy trying to find it from somewhere.’ A Lieutenant Nagashima of the 58th Regiment could not stand the deteriorating food and refused to eat it, starving himself to death. Another officer who had malaria, beri-beri and dysentery killed himself with a grenade when his batman went to go to the toilet. The man thought he was a burden to his servant.
According to the war correspondent Yukihiko Imai, some of the Japanese night raids were made purely to get food. He was lying on the floor of Miyazaki’s headquarters, a captured barracks on GPT Ridge, when he heard the cries of the night attackers. It was about two in the morning and the darkness was filled with the sound of shooting and shells. Imai knew the men were from the 58th Regiment, ‘born in snowy Niigata … [a] tenacious and steady charactered district’. He wrote: ‘They were so hungry and sometimes they got the Churchill issue from the enemy base.’
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He noted that they did not want to share their food with others in the rear. Private Manabu Wada managed to scavenge some bully beef and biscuits but was weak from hunger. ‘How could he be expected to fight in these circumstances?’ A perfect illustration of the supply gap between the two sides was found by the medic George Senior, who was full of praise for the quality of the bunker he occupied on Garrison Hill. It was covered with wonderfully blast-absorbent material: sacks of rice for which the British and Indians had no need.