Authors: Fergal Keane
The drivers of the 2nd Division convoys rolling up to Kohima came around the final bend before the village and saw a large white noticeboard: ‘From this point on you are in view of the enemy.’ General Grover set out to alter that reality in early May by trying to drive the Japanese from Kohima Ridge and the positions they occupied in the valleys around it. The pressure from Stopford and Slim was unrelenting. They made a joint visit to 2nd Division headquarters on 2 May, with Grover noting that ‘Slim was very insistent on the need for speed, very largely for political reasons. He evidently thought we had been going rather slowly, but appeared surprised at the size of the country. He was also a little sceptical as to the strength in front of us … Later events proved that we were correct and he was wrong.’ Grover was irked at the lack of understanding and was again pressed on 5 May by Stopford, who told him his projected date of 9 May for the capture of Jail Hill was too late. He pushed Grover to agree to 7
May. As Sato had learned when he was laying siege, setting dates at Kohima was a charter for despair. The place had an awful way of destroying men’s plans.
Grover’s offensive against Kohima Ridge involved a three-pronged assault with 4 Brigade moving against GPT Ridge to the south, 5 Brigade swinging behind the Japanese and attacking the Naga Village and Treasury area to the north, while 6 Brigade would strike against the positions on Kohima Ridge in the centre. Each brigade would be supported by artillery and air strikes.
The 4 Brigade marched for four days across steep hills to get into position behind the Japanese at GPT Ridge, with an attacking force made up of 2nd battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment, the 1st Royal Scots, and machine-gunners from 2nd battalion, the Manchester Regiment. Three of the Manchester’s companies had not fired their guns in anger since the evacuation from Dunkirk. When they did open fire, an ‘observation shoot’ to see if they could flush out any hiding Japanese, the experience ‘raised the men’s spirits tremendously’. Before the battle of Kohima was over the Manchesters would fire a million rounds.
Private George Gordon, Royal Corps of Signals, remembered a miserable journey during which he was ravaged by fleas after having slept in abandoned Naga huts en route. The Naga porters accompanying the column suddenly disappeared. Later, it was found that they had gone to mourn comrades killed in a Japanese ambush. According to Private Gordon, the loss of the porters resulted in an exhausting trek back and forth. ‘As each man had a personal load of 70 pounds, it meant that the machine guns, three inch mortars, wireless sets and batteries had to be left under guard and the machine gunners, mortar men and Signals had to make the day’s march, leave their packs and return for the equipment. What a day it was! The track was wet, slippery and steep and there were places where we literally had to crawl along or pull each other up by hand.’
A Norfolks officer struggled to keep going. ‘You drag your legs upward till they seem reduced to the strength of matchsticks … Your heart pounds, so that it must burst its cage … all you can think of is
the next halt.’ They climbed for nearly two miles up the steep face of Mount Pulebadze, an 8,000 foot peak, whose razor-backed ridge would bring them within striking range of the Japanese on the rear of GPT Ridge. At dawn on 4 May they came down the mountain towards the Japanese trenches. On the way they passed the corpse of a British sentry killed the previous night, with ‘round staring eyes … scores of flies already buzzing around’. At 0700 hours the Japanese snipers opened up. The column was held up for around half an hour, with thirty casualties, while George Gordon reckoned ‘we had hardly fired a shot ourselves!’ Over the next week 4 Brigade, and the Norfolks in particular, would fire plenty as they fought from bunker to bunker to dislodge the Japanese. Captain Jack Randle, with B company of the Norfolks, was awarded Kohima’s second Victoria Cross for charging a bunker despite a shrapnel wound in the knee, and silencing a machine gun that was pinning down his company. Randle was mortally wounded as he ran, but managed to throw a grenade into the bunker and then throw his own body across the slit to ensure that the Japanese could not fire out. He was twenty-six when he died and left a wife and small son in England.
Like the West Kents, the Royal Norfolks had been through the crucible of Dunkirk, where they had suffered a grievous atrocity at the hands of the SS Death’s Head Division. Ninety-seven prisoners were machine-gunned at Le Paradis in the Pas-de-Calais on 27 May 1940. At Singapore three other battalions of the Norfolks were taken prisoner and badly used by the Japanese, some shot out of hand and others sent to work on the Death Railway into Burma.
In the battle for GPT Ridge the Norfolks fought with fierce zeal. ‘Then the “Holy Boys” shouted their battle cries until the whole ridge rang with their challenge. The line began to move,’ an officer recalled. ‘The shouted orders of officers were drowned by the battle cries as the line moved forward. It was an afternoon of terror for the Japanese. Unable to fire from their bunkers because the fire slits were facing the wrong way, they came from their holes and stood in groups, petrified by the sight of the shouting British, who advanced relentlessly. Some had left their weapons in the bunkers, the weak
quailed and fled, the braver ones put their weapons into the aim. Up to this point the “Boys” had held their fire, but now the Japs went down like corn before a sickle. Over 100 enemy dead were counted that day.’ The Japanese were driven to the north-eastern spur of GPT Ridge, where they resisted with customary ferocity, shooting dead the 4 Brigade commander, Brigadier Willie Goschen, while he directed an attack on some bunkers. His successor was killed a week later.
All along Grover’s front the rifle companies were suffering heavy losses. Company commanders were being shot down at a fearsome rate and, according to Swinson, there were virtually no platoon commanders. In one action around the Naga Village the Camerons lost thirty-eight men killed and wounded; the Royal Welch on Garrison Hill had seven officers killed or missing, thirty-three men killed and more than a hundred wounded; the Durham Light Infantry lost 175 men and two thirds of their officers. Every unit invested at Kohima Ridge in that first fortnight of May could tell a similar story of advances halted by storms of fire. Captain Gordon Graham, Cameron Highlanders, came across the corpses of four comrades while on patrol. He found himself curiously detached from the experience. ‘Looking at the corpses we found on this patrol – the first battle casualties I had seen – I felt surprisingly impersonal. Friends of mine had inhabited these bodies until a few days before, but when death is not sanitized by funeral rites you feel intiuitively that the people are still around.’
Arthur Swinson, the young 5 Brigade captain and an aspirant writer, wrote of how officers and men would ‘look at the great ring of mountains encircling them, and wonder how on earth it could be taken, how flesh and blood could possibly stand much more’. When Grover came up to see the Dorset Regiment in the bungalow sector in early May, he recognised a scene reminscent of the First World War, where he had suffered in the trenches as a young man. All the men here had beards, he noted, although he was glad to see that the water ration was now enough to give them three pints of tea each day. Supplies of water were still being dropped by the RAF.
Victor Hawkins and 5 Brigade had set off to traverse a wide valley so that they could emerge behind the Naga Village. On 1 May he received orders to take the Naga Village quickly, ‘from both a political and a military point of view’. The instruction was followed up by a personal message from Slim two days later. Hawkins pushed on and by 4 May the Camerons had captured the western tip of the position. ‘[There were] thousands of flies and filth of every description, including the innards of numerous pigs and cows to which the Japs had helped themselves,’ wrote Hawkins. ‘We not only overlooked the complete KOHIMA battlefield but right into the back of the Jap positions … we wasted no time in getting mortars on to them and disturbed them considerably.’ Hawkins had the unsettling experience of shaving for the first time in several weeks and being confronted with the face of an ‘old graybeard’. He looked over his shoulder before realising he was looking at himself.
Hawkins’s 5 Brigade were making ground, and so too were 4 Brigade on GPT Ridge, but 6 Brigade were making no impression against the Japanese positions in the centre of Kohima Ridge. The Royal Welch Fusiliers briefly seized the top of Kuki Piquet before being driven off. They lost 189 men in successive attacks and their commanding officer was eventually sacked. Stopford answered Grover’s plea for extra men by sending in 33 Brigade of the 7th Indian Division. An officer of the brigade, arriving at Kohima on 6 May, believed he was ‘watching a dozen different battles going on in front of us’. The following day, elements of 33 Brigade attacked Jail Hill and Major Michael Lowry, Queen’s Royal Regiment, witnessed the ‘closest thing to a snowball fight that could be imagined’. Grenades were hurled between both sides and the Queen’s ‘did a fair amount of damage to these little blighters’. The rain and mist came and gave respite from the sniping. When the sun appeared again Lowry saw that a friend of his, Captain John Scott, was dead. ‘In cold sweated horror I saw the contents of that clever head spread out on the ground. No grey and white matter could have been portrayed with such awful clarity.’ Scott was twenty-three years old and a lawyer in civilian life. Lowry was at a loss to comprehend the wretchedness
he saw around him. Like many other veterans of Kohima, he remembered the profusion of flies with particular disgust. They alighted on corpses, on latrines, on men’s food, on their bodies. ‘I, for one, have eaten several of the largest filthy-looking blue bottles, having settled on a bully-beef sandwich between the hand and mouth.’ The attempt to retake Jail Hill was a costly failure.
Major John Shipster, seconded to 33 Brigade from the 7/2 Punjab Regiment, arrived in mid-May. Although only twenty-two, he was a veteran of the Arakan campaign where he was awarded an immediate DSO. He saw old parachutes swaying on the blackened stumps of trees and on the road he passed the body of a Japanese soldier embedded in the soft tarmac. ‘As the days passed, his thin, wafer outline gradually disappeared.’ At Kohima he found a vast uncovered necropolis where men learned ‘to respect the dead, but did not mourn for them … it was essential for our own mental well-being’.
The battalion padres held regular religious services in the midst of this darkness. A gunner with the 99th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, took Holy Communion to the sound of a comrade calling fire orders beside him. ‘Draw near with faith, and take this Holy Sacrament to your comfort,’ came the padre’s solemn voice, ‘accompanied by the clanging of four breeches slamming shut, the thunderous bang of our four guns, the clatter of empty cartridge cases being extracted from the breeches’. Soon afterwards the gunner had the dreadful experience of watching a Royal Armoured Corps tank knocked out on the road below him. The Japanese threw an incendiary bomb and the tank was quickly engulfed in flames. Enemy machine guns covered the road on either side. The tank crew faced a choice that was no choice at all: stay and get burned alive, or run and get cut down by the machine guns. They chose the latter and all were killed.
At the tennis court the 2nd Dorsets were gaining on the Japanese. They had been fighting their way down towards Pawsey’s bungalow since their arrival on 26 April. They suffered fifteen casualties while taking over the position but gradually wore the Japanese down, advancing to Pawsey’s garden by early May. Private Tom Cattle was
an apprentice butcher in the beautiful Dorset village of Corfe Castle when he was called up for the army. By April 1944 he had travelled halfway around the world but had yet to hear a shot fired in anger. The Kohima tennis court would be his introduction to war. Lying in one of the pits originally dug by John Winstanley’s West Kents, he watched his corporal pop his head briefly out of the trench. There was an instant crack and the man fell back on top of his comrades with a single bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. ‘That shows you what you could and couldn’t do.’ There were three people in a trench that was no more than eight feet long and two feet wide. To sleep, they crouched on their heels. At one point of the perimeter the Dorsets were within two yards of the Japanese, prompting Grover to remark later that ‘the occupants must have heard everything that went on in their post’. At one stage a Japanese soldier was digging soil from a foxhole when the dirt landed in a British trench. He was killed by the prompt dispatch of a grenade.
To drive the Japanese out of the bungalow the Dorsets needed a tank, but there was a problem. The road leading up to Pawsey’s bungalow had been built at his own expense and the corners were cut rather sharply, making it slow going for a car, let alone a lumbering tank in the line of Japanese fire. The Royal Engineers came to the rescue and bulldozed a track into the garden, all the time under enemy machine-gun and sniper fire. The 2nd Dorsets’ commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel O. G. W. White, described what happened when a tank opened fire on the bungalow at point blank range. ‘It got among about two dozen Japs who ran round and round wildly. They’re apt to do that in a crisis. We got about a dozen of them and the tank shot some of them individually with its 75.’ A mountain artillery gun fired forty-eight shells into the bungalow. Forty Japanese ran from the building. ‘The gun couldn’t fire at them because it had no more ammunition, but the Sikhs manning the gun fired everything they’d got at them. I’m told some of them got so excited they even threw stones.’ Fighting raged from room to shattered room where Pawsey had entertained Richards and his staff to cocktails a few weeks before. A Japanese in the garden who waved a
yellow and white flag from his trench had his hand shot off. Pole charges were dropped down the deeply burrowed foxholes to make sure no Japanese were left alive.