Authors: Fergal Keane
John was the firstborn of his family and had the same wayward spirit that had carried his father through many adventures; they were alike in their romantic readiness and Harman senior had never once
tried to dampen his boy’s wilder ambitions. He had encouraged and helped to pay for his prospecting schemes and for the travels to Europe and New Zealand. After John’s death his father never spoke of him to the other children. But he carried his son’s Victoria Cross with him for years after the war and, as his daughter Diana recalled, would take it out and show it to strangers. ‘Wherever he was he would say “Have you ever seen this? Well, you probably won’t see another. Take a good look.”’
It would be tempting to believe that the experience of Kohima gave all those who went through it a common bond. And it is true that the majority of General Slim’s men – British, Indian, Nepalese and Burmese – felt that they had shared an extraordinary trial. But there was in the decades after the war an angry distance between the two men who had held together the defence of Kohima during those sixteen days in April 1944. The earlier writers on the subject, most of them former soldiers, mention the ill feeling between John Laverty and Hugh Richards, but either did not know of its scale or else decided against making it public. Given the fact that both men were still alive, their discretion is understandable. It began on the battlefield, with Laverty’s curt dismissal of the senior man on the day he arrived. His refusal to engage with Richards beyond the four-word question ‘Where is Kuki Piquet?’ left the garrison commander feeling diminished in front of his subordinates. None of the danger the two men shared in the following fortnight altered Laverty’s attitude.
It was Richards, as garrison commander, who nominated Laverty for his DSO, praising ‘his personal tenacity and leadership [which] … was responsible for the defeat of attack after attack by the Japanese … Lt. Col Laverty was quite tireless and displayed powers of leadership and command of the highest order.’ It could be said that Richards had no choice but to make the recommendation. But his post-war record was always one of public praise for the actions of the Royal West Kents. They had been magnificent, he said. So it is not hard to imagine Richards’s hurt when two West Kent officers, neither of whom had served at Kohima, produced a book of 4th battalion’s
war experiences that undermined the garrison. Published in 1951,
From Kent to Kohima
by Major E. B. Stanley Clarke and Major A. T. Tillott declared boldly that ‘The command and staff of the garrison of Kohima before the arrival of the battalion were not equal or willing to take the task of commanding the 4th Royal West Kents … command throughout the battle was virtually operated from the Headquarters of the 4th Royal West Kents.’
There was worse to come. In 1956 another serving army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Campbell, published a fictionalized account of the siege based on the experiences of an anonymous West Kent intelligence officer. In Campbell’s book Richards’s bunker floor is described as being made from upturned rum and brandy bottles, while the picture of the garrison and its command is strikingly familiar to any reader of the 4th West Kents’ War Diary. The impression is of a bunch of incompetents rescued by the 4th West Kents. Certainly Laverty thought Richards was out of his depth. In one of his very rare talks with his son Patrick about the war, John Laverty gave the impression that Hugh Richards was a ‘complete idiot, should never have been there, and did not know what he was doing. Perhaps not the words but that was the impression. When he came in to Kohima he rated it a complete shambles, and that any junior military man worth his salt would have done better.’
This was the view communicated to Arthur Campbell by Laverty when the two met in 1956. Over a fortnight’s holiday spent together in the West Country, the 4th battalion commander gave the writer his detailed account of the siege.
Hugh Richards was horrified when it was published. At first his friends, including the garrison second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Borrowman, demanded an apology from Campbell. In August 1956 Borrowman wrote to Campbell accusing him of doing a ‘grave injustice’ in a story ‘that was wildly inaccurate … definitely libellous and untrue’. It was Richards and not Laverty who had been in control, and it was Richards who went to see the men in the
trenches ‘when the going got sticky’. There was only one issue on which Borrowman agreed with Campbell. ‘What surprised me chiefly was the patience which Richards showed towards Laverty who was incredibly offensive. You have yourself given a perfect description of him as a “bloodyminded Irishman”.’ Campbell wrote back ten days later from his address at the Army Staff College in Camberley, Surrey. Campbell claimed that, as a serving soldier, he could not present the two sides of the story. This seems to suggest that he did not want to publicise the breach between the two commanders at Kohima. ‘I therefore chose to tell the story of the battle as the RWK saw it and lived it … if anyone wants to publish the other side of the story they are at liberty to do so.’ Borrowman was being given the brush-off but he refused to let it drop. In his communications with Hugh Richards he spoke of how he ‘would like to rub Laverty’s face in the dirt!’
Borrowman wrote to Campbell again on 24 August, with a renewed demand for an apology ‘to the garrison in general and Brigadier Richards in particular’, under threat of legal action. As for Campbell’s assertion that as a serving soldier he could not tell both sides of the story, he wrote: ‘[I] would have thought that that fact should have made you even more careful not to blackguard another officer and other “serving soldiers” without even trying to learn the true facts.’ Borrowman wrote to the official historian at the Cabinet Office, Brigadier M. R. Roberts, who reassured him, ‘I also feel that the story is merely a glorification of Laverty.’ The official version would support Richards. The row percolated to the very top of the old 14th Army command. Borrowman wrote to General Slim, who was by then serving as Governor General of Australia. The letter is intriguing, for it suggests that Slim had acted once before to redress the balance in Richards’s favour. ‘You will remember after the Kohima show in 1944’, Borrowman wrote, ‘that Laverty of the R.W.K. went about boasting that he had done everything and that Hugh Richards had done nothing – you and Sir George Gifford [
sic
] dealt with that at the time, but that did not stop Laverty.’ Borrowman may have been referring to the lecture tour given by
Laverty in the wake of the siege and the publicity accorded to the West Kents.
Giffard had written the citation for Richard’s award of the DSO and described his old comrade from Africa days as ‘solely responsible for this fine defence’. Slim wrote to Borrowman that he had never doubted that it was Hugh Richards who conducted the defence of Kohima, and he confirmed this in his celebrated account of the war,
Defeat into Victory. ‘
I am sorry that Laverty has been so unjust and so unpleasant about Hugh Richards,’ wrote Slim. ‘I hate these public stinks but I can quite understand how Richards feels about it all.’
Eventually Richards himself put pen to paper. He was a man constitutionally averse to any kind of row, least of all a public spat with a fellow officer. But the absence of a personal apology from Campbell spurred him to action. Writing in October 1956, Richards praised his Indian troops and pointed out that it was the men of the Assam Regiment who had held the tennis court longer than any other unit. As for himself, he told Campbell that he had done him ‘as grave an injury as it is possible for one man to do another’. This settled the matter for Campbell. Richards’s words and the outrage of other senior officers had cut home. He wrote to Hugh Richards a fortnight later. ‘I am glad to have heard from you personally on this matter. I do confirm most sincerely, that I regret the hurt I have done you personally in
The Siege.
I have tried to explain in my letters to Borrowman how it came about so I won’t repeat it here. I will only say that I am truly sorry.’ He suggested that a film of the book was being considered and hoped it could undo the hurt that had been done. Richards had won the battle of the books. In every subsequent account, all written by former military men, he was given due credit for the defence of Kohima.
What was the truth of the matter? As this book suggests, the picture at Kohima was complicated. Richards arrived to find a garrison pitifully unprepared for war. His second-in-command, Borrowman, was only just out of hospital after a three-week stay and missed the build-up to the Japanese invasion. There was no proper planning in his absence. Five days after he arrived the Kohima area
was placed under the control of an administrative officer, General Ranking, who was unqualified for such a big task. The mess could be traced to the first three months of 1944 and the failure of the Army Command to properly garrison either Dimapur or Kohima, but they in turn faced the immense challenge of planning offensives in the Arakan and the north-east with the most limited resources. Richards and his staff struggled to make the best of a messy situation, evacuating as many non-combatants as possible and desperately trying to improve the defences before the enemy arrived. What Laverty saw when he arrived was undoubtedly a sorry spectacle to an efficient soldier from a battle-hardened regiment. But his mistake was to blame Richards for the mistakes of others. In the heat of battle his assumptions might have been understandable. But not afterwards when the true facts were there to be discovered. It is equally true that without the professionalism of the Royal West Kents, and Laverty’s calm leadership, and unerring ability to spot and reinforce gaps, the garrison would have collapsed within days. The ‘bloody-minded Irishman’ inserted steel into the backbone of every man of the 4th West Kents. What came to pass between the two commanders was tragic, not least because both were fine soldiers and decent men who in their very different styles of leadership complemented each other.
After the war Hugh Richards took up poultry farming and lived in Haywards Heath in Sussex. He was short of money and hindered by severe arthritis, but content that his reputation had been vindicated. He remained in contact with many of the old garrison staff and was an honoured guest at reunions of the Assam Regiment and his old favourites the West African Brigade, with whom he had spent the happiest days of his life. He spoke very little about Kohima to his only child, Roger, except to say that it had been ‘a very close thing’. In old age he moved with his second wife to the sunshine of Malta, where he died in 1983. His son followed him into the Worcestershire Regiment and two of his grandsons joined the army as well.
John Laverty became head of the Infantry Training Centre at Colchester and then took a job in the War Office. His wife, Renee, spoke of the post-war years being ‘an awful sort of let-down’, in a job
he hated. The War Office years were no more than a countdown to a pension, working among desk soldiers and civil servants, with whom he had nothing in common. At home he was a distant father, certainly in the memory of his son, Patrick. The war was not discussed. ‘I tried to raise it with him but I got nowhere at all. You just got slapped around the choppers and told to mind your own business.’ The marriage never recovered from the separation brought about by the war, and his drinking increased, though he only drank after six o’clock in the evening, his son recalled. ‘We had been apart for so long. It was not easy,’ his wife remembered. ‘He liked a drop of whisky and it got a bit worse after the war. That’s the way it went.’ The couple split up some time in the late fifties. As his son Patrick put it, ‘there wasn’t a family to belong to after that’.
After retiring from the War Office John Laverty’s life centred on the officers’ club and Colchester Golf Club. A very different figure to the stern and forbidding colonel emerges in the description given by one of his golfing partners, a teenage boy. Chris Booth remembered Laverty playing regularly with his father and a retired RAF chaplain, Monsignor John Roach, an Irish catholic priest. ‘Up to twenty or so golfers would turn up on a Saturday lunchtime and John, with military efficiency aided by several pink gins, would make up the four ball matches for the afternoon … John was a neat, efficient and busy type of man but had the charm of the Irish … but he had a very determined streak evident when he played golf.’ Both Booth and his father had a keen interest in military history and were aware of Kohima but Laverty ‘would not be drawn on the subject, at least not to me or my father’. He went to reunions of his old regiment, the Essex, but kept in touch with very few of the West Kents. In 1960 John Laverty’s youngest daughter, Maureen, died of cancer. She was the child closest to him and her death left him devastated. By that time he was living alone. Patrick remembered a happy trip they made together. It was after Patrick had married and had children of his own, and was working in the west of Ireland. John Laverty travelled across to Connemara to see his son and grandchildren. It was the first time he had visited the land of his birth since he left it in 1918. Father
and son played golf together and went to the pub in the village of Spiddal, overlooking the Atlantic. They talked about Ireland, about golf, about the grandchildren, but the war remained a closed book. Still, it was as close as they had ever been or would be again. When John Laverty died of cancer a year later there were many men of the West Kents among the funeral crowd.
Of all the characters who dominated the story of Kohima, only one remained with the place from the beginning to the end of the war. He knew it as a peaceful home and land of lost content. Long after the armies had moved on into Burma, Charles Ridley Pawsey was dealing with the cost of the battle. There was all his work trying to rebuild the fabric of Naga life battered by war, the business of reestablishing markets and courts; and there were the requests, coming every few days by the mail from Dimapur, for information about men whose bodies lay under the soil of Garrison Hill. On 9 September 1944, long after Grover’s 2nd Division had chased the Japanese out of Kohima, Pawsey was looking for the grave of a Captain A. N. Lunn who had died on Jail Hill. ‘So far the Graves Reg. Officer has not found his body,’ he wrote. ‘I am told he was with a V Force officer called Gould and his body has not been found. The latter’s mother is continually enquiring about his grave and I’ve not been able to find anyone who knows where it is.’