ROAD OF BONES
THE SIEGE OF KOHIMA 1944
THE EPIC STORY OF THE LAST
GREAT STAND OF EMPIRE

FERGAL KEANE

COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2010

Copyright © Fergal Keane 2010

Fergal Keane asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

Maps by Hugh Bicheno

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DEDICATION

In memory of John Shipster, soldier.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

List of Maps

Epigraph

Prologue

1 An Empire at Bay

2 The Longest Road

3 At the Edge of the Raj

4 The King Emperor’s Spear

5 Kentish Men

6 Fighting Back

7 Jungle Wallahs

8 The Master of the Mountains

9 The Hour of the Warrior

10 Sato San

11 Into the Mountains

12 Flap

13 Onslaught

14 To the Last Man

15 Siege

16 ‘Hey! Johnny, Let Me Through’

17 Over the Mountain

18 Dreams Dying

19 The Black Thirteenth

20 A Question of Time

21 The Last Hill

22 Attrition

23 The Trials of Victory, and Defeat

24 The Road of Bones

25 When the War Is Over

26 The Quiet Fathers

Epilogue: After Hatred

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Notes and Sources

Chronology

Dramatis Personae

Copyright

About the Publisher

LIST OF MAPS

India 1942–1945

Burma Theatre 1943

Kohima District

Arakan Battles 1944

U-Go Offensive, March – April 1944

Kohima, 5 April 1944, Kohima Defence and Japanese Attacks

Kohima Ridge

Final Stand and Grover’s Advance on Kohima

The Road of Bones, June – December 1944

Final Offensive 1945

EPIGRAPH

‘The dreams of empire lure the hearts of kings – and so men die’

CORPORAL G. W. DRISCOLL, BURMA, 1944

PROLOGUE

In the morning the general left his house after breakfast and walked into the country. He did this for two years. In the heat of summer the old soldier found the going harder. He sweated heavily and his bones hurt in the evenings. When the winter came he wore an old army greatcoat and walked along the ridges of the frozen rice paddies. He did not stop when the snows came and might amuse himself by trying to count the white geese in the fields. It was hard to tell where the snow ended and the birds began. The general was born here in Yamagata, among fishermen and farmers on the north-east coast of Japan. Here, in the town that lay between the mountains and the sea, he would atone for the great disaster. Every time a soldier’s bones came home from the front he would set out on his travels. ‘I will finish this before I die,’ he told his son.

Kohima. It lived with him every day of his life. All of the men who had followed him lying in unmarked graves, lost along the mountain tracks, or drowned in the Chindwin river. At every house he bowed and introduced himself and having been invited in he would remove his shoes and sit with the family. Sometimes it would be a woman with young children, at other times a widow alone, or elderly parents. But all of them were linked to the general by the most immutable of bonds. He had taken their sons, husbands, fathers, over the mountains to India and they had not come back. At times they showed him photographs and letters. Many expressed surprise at his visit. The generals of the Imperial Japanese Army were not usually to be found calling on the homes of ordinary soldiers. The general carried a candle in his pocket and he would light this and read a poem for the dead. Its exact words have been lost with time, but he spoke of the soldiers’ courage and how sorry he felt that they had lost their lives. His son, Goro, believed Lieutenant General Kotuku Sato wished he had died with them. ‘I had the impression that he had very strong feelings of loss over what happened to his men on the battlefield,’ he said. The general knew there were many officers who believed he should have killed himself. How could he live with the shame of such a defeat?

I listen to the story in Goro Sato’s home in Ibaraki. He produces photo albums, a whole bundle of them, devoted to his father’s memory. There are pictures of Kotuku Sato in cadet’s uniform which date from the beginning of his career in the early 1920s. Later, in the 1930s, he is photographed standing next to Emperor Hirohito at a military exercise. There are images of the rising young officer dressed in furs and heavy boots on the Chinese border, and one of him relaxing in a kimono with a glass of sake and a broad smile on his face. There is one intriguing image. The general is dressed in a white linen suit, standing next to an American-made car. The photograph was taken outside a pagoda somewhere in South-East Asia. The general looks much older. There is a wariness in his expression that was not present in the earlier images.

‘Where is that?’ I ask.

‘That is in Java, after he was relieved of his command,’ Goro responds. He then tells me that a more senior general tried to have his father declared insane. He sent a medical team to Java to examine him. ‘The rumour was that he was crazy. How else could they explain what he had done?’ he says. But the doctors found that Sato was entirely sane. It is easy to see how his superiors might have thought him mad. A Japanese commander did not disobey orders to stand firm, he fought to the death. ‘You must never forget that the men who survived loved him,’ said Goro. ‘They were only alive because of him.’

By the Japanese account nearly half of the 84,000 men of the 15th Army who marched into India were killed or died of starvation and disease. It was a disaster without parallel in the history of the Imperial Army. General Sato’s 31st was one of three divisions of the 15th Army which crossed the Chindwin river in March 1944. Of his 15,000 strong force, almost half would never return, and those who did were emaciated fever-ridden ghosts. Yet Sato’s march into India had started with victory. The 31st Division had annihilated every outpost in their way until they came to the small town of Kohima in the Naga Hills. Over two weeks of savage fighting they were held off by a British and Indian garrison which they outnumbered by ten to one.* The defenders were a mix of battle-hardened veterans and novices, thrown together in the last hours before the Japanese arrived. By the end, the defenders’ perimeter was down to a circumference of just three hundred yards, into which the Japanese fired shell after shell, blasting the wounded as they lay in open pits. In the trenches men fought with guns, knives, spades, anything they could lay their hands on. A British infantryman, Mark Lambert of 4th battalion, Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, recalled, ‘We were being shot at and shooting, we were kicking, using our rifles as hammers, using the butts of our rifles if they got close. From both sides we were animals.’ In one action a British subaltern sent his Indian troops to safety and faced the Japanese alone, a pile of grenades by his side and a gun in each hand. Another strangled a Japanese soldier, having woken next to him in a trench. Japanese officers charged with swords drawn into the teeth of British machine-gun fire.

Much of the fighting centred on a tennis court where men pitched grenades back and forth. Above all, the defenders were determined not to be taken alive by an enemy with a well-deserved reputation for cruelty. There were legion well-documented stories of prisoners being cruelly mutilated while still alive, or tied to trees for bayonet practice. ‘They had murdered people in the dressing stations and we just thought they were animals. We thought they had forfeited their right to be treated as humans because they didn’t behave like humans,’ recalled Major John Winstanley of 4th battalion, the Royal West Kents.

Both sides fought and died among the rotting corpses of their comrades. For Sepoy Mukom Khiamniungan of the Assam Regiment the battlefield remains a haunted place to this day. ‘I find Kohima appalling. By that I mean it’s a place where airplanes and bombs had mixed flesh and earth. That’s why I don’t like staying there. I don’t even have tea when I pass there.’

The defeat at Kohima precipitated the collapse of Japanese power in Burma and destroyed forever the Japanese soldier’s belief in his invincibility. A song written by a survivor from the Japanese 58th Regiment described how their positions were bombed by allied aircraft:

In the jungle, covered with green

Afternoon showers of bombing

Vegetation scattered, turning to empty field

Not a bird song to be heard.

To the Japanese the retreat was ‘the road of the bones’. Starving men begged their comrades to shoot them or blew themselves up with grenades. Lieutenant Yoshiteru Hirayama, a machine-gunner with 58th Regiment, saw dead soldiers lying along the river bank and others pleaded with him for scraps. ‘Most were too weak even to do that,’ he recalled, ‘I didn’t have food to give them.’

For the British it was a close affair. The defenders of Kohima and its smaller outposts bought vital time to bring in reinforcements. Even so it took another six weeks of bitter fighting for British and Indian troops to drive the Japanese from their well entrenched positions at Kohima. The story of the two week siege provides the core of this narrative not only because it describes an extraordinary struggle against great odds but because it offers a vivid portrait of a defining moment in the fortunes of two imperial powers. Both were in decline, and both desperately needed victory. It was the stand of the Kohima garrison which denied the Japanese a swift triumph and gave General William Slim’s 14th Army the platform on which to launch his campaign to rout a battle hardened enemy. Kohima is a story of empires colliding in a world where high imperialism was already an anachronism, and where defeat might have profoundly altered the story of the end of the British Raj. The India that the men of 14th Army fought to defend was struggling to free itself from British control. As the battle of Kohima was taking place the country’s main political leaders languished in colonial jails. Britain had brought India into the war without any reference to her people. The Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared the war a fight for freedom and democracy, prompting the Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru to ask, ‘Whose freedom?’ But Nehru also knew that the war represented the last stand of British rule in India, and that defeat by Japan could change the political dynamic in ways that neither he nor any other Indian leader could predict or be certain of controlling.

As for the Japanese, they had crossed into India proclaiming their desire to free the oppressed peoples of the Raj, yet they ruled over an empire brutalised by massacre and enslavement. They brought with them Indian rebels who, they hoped, would raise the population against the British, but were defeated by an army whose component parts reflected the greatest empire the world had ever seen. The battle was fought on the territory of a tribal people loyal to the Raj, but whose fate is one of the most haunting strands of this narrative.

There was a third power in this great struggle and its influence would be decisive. American aircraft would help ensure the survival and ultimate victory of the British and Indian forces, but beyond a shared desire to defeat Japan the war aims and strategies of the United States and Britain diverged sharply. President Roosevelt was determined that victory in the Far East would not lead to a reimposition of the colonial status quo. The influential American commentator Walter Lipmann wrote that ‘there is a strong feeling that Britain east of Suez is quite different from Britain at home, that the war in Europe is a war of liberation and the war in Asia is for the defence of archaic privilege … the Asiatic war has revived the profound anti-imperialism of the American tradition.’ The American view was reflected in prolonged arguments over war strategy: Roosevelt believed the Burma campaign should be fought to aid his Chinese allies in the north and not as a battle of territorial redemption for the empire. The divisions over strategy were not a purely Anglo-American affair. The conduct of the campaign also produced the greatest rupture in Churchill’s cabinet of the entire war, with the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), General Sir Alan Brooke, and his colleagues threatening mass resignation over the prime minister’s plans for ambitious, and logistically impossible, sea-borne operations. These high-level arguments form an insistent drum beat in the narrative of Kohima.

This book does not attempt to tell the story of every unit that fought at Kohima, nor does it describe in any detail the parallel battles fought ninety miles away at Imphal. The Imphal struggle, the adventures of Wingate’s Chindits and General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell’s Chinese divisions, and the interventions of Subhas Chandra Bose’s rebel Indian National Army are discussed only as they relate directly to events at Kohima. In telling the story of the British 2nd Division, which led the ousting of the Japanese from Kohima in the second phase of the battle, I have concentrated my particular attention on the remorseless politics of war. The division’s popular commander, Major General John Grover, was sacked from his job at the very moment of his triumph. A recommendation for a detailed account of the fighting exploits of the division is found at the end of chapter twenty-three.

In a story where epic courage and remorseless savagery are constant companions the narrative cannot avoid becoming, at least in part, a meditation on the nature of man. As a war correspondent of nearly thirty years’ experience, and an ardent reader of history, I came to the story of Kohima believing I knew the extremes of human behaviour in war. But, for me, Kohima belonged in new territory entirely. It was not just the exceptional nature of the hand-to-hand fighting, but the other story that emerged, the long human aftermath of Kohima, an unlikely narrative of reconciliation between old enemies, but also of bitter enmity between men who once fought side by side, a story that reached its extraordinary denouement, in one case, at the funeral of a Japanese general.

I came to Kohima entirely by accident. Several years ago a good friend telephoned and asked if I would interview his father for a private memoir. ‘We think he might open up more to somebody outside the family,’ he said. Over several weekends I interviewed Colonel John Shipster at his son Michael’s home in Hampshire. John had joined the Indian Army directly from public school at the age of eighteen and was commissioned into the Punjab Regiment. He arrived in Kohima after the siege but while the battle to retake the ridge from the Japanese was still at its height. At the outset I asked him what had been his proudest achievement of the war, a naive question in retrospect. ‘My proudest achievement of the war?’ he asked, a little bewildered. ‘The fact that I survived it!’ Only after he had detailed what had happened in the jungles and mountains could I say that I understood his answer. Towards the end of his life, memories of the war came back to haunt him, and he would frequently be woken by dreams of night fighting in the jungle.

This book is my account of the siege and relief of Kohima and is necessarily subject to one author’s idea of what was compelling and significant. There may be those who disagree with my emphasis on this or that event, or my judgements of different characters, but I hope they will recognise in this work a sense of awe at what men endured on that forgotten Asian battlefield.

* Sato’s estimated strength of around 15,000 men in 31st Division was set against a garrison force of around 2,500. But of this number only 1,500 were fighting troops. (Japanese Monograph 134, p. 164. US Army Dept. of History.)

ONE
An Empire at Bay

Stepping inside from the breathless slump of the afternoon, Captain Thomas Pardoe found the grand lobby of the Strand Hotel a sanctuary of unimagined proportions. Gone, suddenly, the noise of the Burmese street, the call of the shoeshine boys and the rickshaw wallahs, and the air heavy with the smell of damp and river water. Rangoon in those days was a city aspiring to stature, made prosperous as the port through which Burma’s vast rice crop was exported, but still only a minor eminence on the fringes of the eastern empire. Visitors from India found Rangoon lush with gardens that ‘bloomed with tropical profusion – bougainvillea, poinsettas, laburnum and tall delphiniums of piercing blue. The Golden Mohur trees flamed like candles against the green foliage …’ They might stop to admire the great pagodas of Sule and Shwedagon whose golden domes rose above the city, or enjoy a night at an English-language theatre and dinner at the Strand, before moving on to Singapore and Malaya or westward to India. With its high ceilings, roomy corridors and floors of teak, the Strand was built for an age before air conditioning. Its founders, the four Sarkies brothers, were Armenians who had emigrated to the Far East from Persia and established a chain of luxury hotels which included the Strand’s more famous relation, Raffles Hotel in Singapore. The white-jacketed porters at the Strand would have taken Captain Pardoe’s bags without fuss while he signed his name in the guests’ register, a book that had in times past recorded the signatures of Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling and the future king of England, Edward VIII, who had stopped there in 1922 while on a royal tour with his cousin, ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten. On that occasion a sumptuous barge, decorated with the Burmese symbol of royalty, four golden peacocks’ heads, and topped by three model pagodas, was provided for the prince. Oarsmen in long, flowing robes steered the royal barge while the future king relaxed in the pavilion, sheltered from prying eyes by shimmering white curtains which billowed gently as the boat moved across the royal lake near the centre of the city. Later on his journey the prince played polo at Mandalay, the former home of the Burmese kings, and ‘was entertained by dancing girls at a lavish reception’.

The city encountered by Captain Pardoe nearly twenty years later had grown outwards to accommodate the Indian migrant labourers working in the city’s docks and factories. Daily they unloaded tons of supplies destined for the Chinese Nationalist armies fighting the Japanese across the border far to the north. A correspondent for the Manchester Guardian reported on 2 February 1942 that 5,000 lorries carrying 30,000 tons were using the 712 mile route every day.* As Pardoe settled into his airy room at the Strand he must have relished the prospect of some time, no matter how brief, in Rangoon, an altogether different prospect from the central Chinese city of Chungking to which he was normally confined. That overcrowded, filthy city served as the temporary capital of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. As a liaison officer to the Chinese military headquarters, Pardoe was obliged to live there among hundreds of thousands of refugees, soldiers and a vast assortment of carpetbaggers and chancers. The American newspaper correspondent Theodore White described the streets as ‘full of squealing pigs, bawling babies, yelling men and the singsong chant of coolies carrying loads from up the river’. The generalissimo’s court was riven by relentless intrigue, spurred by the insatiable ambition of Chiang’s relatives to enrich themselves and by regional warlords who pleaded and menaced for favour.

Pardoe arrived in Rangoon on 8 February 1941, but was given just a day to refresh himself before embarking on a mission to tour the country’s borders with Thailand and China. It was to be a journey by road, rail, boat and air, to investigate the local defences and to coordinate possible future action with the Chinese. Pardoe met up with a Chinese military delegation a week into his tour at the town of Kyukok on the border of the Chinese province of Yunnan. With an air suggesting a weary familiarity with the ways of his allies, he noted that while the visit was ‘supposed to have been strictly confidential, I am told its formation and proposed tour had already been announced over the TOKYO wireless’. Chiang’s court was riddled with informers.

At this time, February 1941, the Japanese had not yet occupied Thailand, although there were numerous reports of fifth-column activities. Pardoe recorded the activities of suspected spies and Japanese attempts to subvert the local population in Burma.

At Lilem, on the border with Thailand, he reported a rumour that eight hundred Japanese wearing Thai uniforms had been spotted just across the frontier; while a postmaster at Tachilek, who was being paid ten rupees a month to spy for the British, gave news that as many as 5,000 Japanese had arrived in Bangkok. The information seems to have been exaggerated, possibly by a spy anxious to please his paymasters. Further north, Pardoe worried over the role of Italian priests in the Shan states bordering China, whose influence ‘over some of their Asiatic converts is so strong, fifth column activities would be a possibility’. At Maungmagan on the Tenasserim coast he heard suspicions about a Mrs Leal, the Austrian wife of an Irish tin-mine owner. ‘She also owns a mine in the Thai frontier area. She set off to visit this mine in early April, taking with her a portable wireless set. Up till the war she was admittedly strongly pro-Nazi. I saw a copy of her dossier … She is being watched. Mr Ruddy [Burma Auxiliary Force], who has known her a long time, considers she is either extremely clever or else entirely innocent.’ Some official reader of this document in Rangoon has scribbled the words ‘A remarkable statement!’ next to this assessment of the curious Mrs Leal.

Another foreigner to arouse suspicion was a Mr G. R. Powell of the Watchtower Society of Australia. This representative of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was placed under surveillance by the Burma police in a classic case of mistaken priorities. Mr Powell represented a religious faith that customarily excited the suspicion of colonial officials, yet the Jehovah’s Witnesses were among the groups enthusiastically persecuted by Hitler’s Reich and would have offered little threat to the security of Burma.*

The captain made detailed notes on roads and beaches that would make suitable invasion points. But for all the impressive detail on local military dispositions and possible enemy spies, Pardoe’s report did not contain a single line about possible evacuation routes for a retreating army or for tens of thousands of refugees. In those becalmed days before Japan entered the war, he could hardly have foreseen such a necessity. At the end of the report an unnamed intelligence officer wrote, ‘A very good report – may be very useful if fighting breaks out in Burma’. If – the conditional that masked a vast failure of intelligence, planning and, perhaps above all, imagination. The defence of Burma was left to a small garrison consisting of two British battalions and the eight battalions of local troops and military police that comprised the Burma Rifles and the Burma Frontier Force, as well as the part-timers of the Burma Auxiliary Force, all dispersed throughout the country’s three military regions – upper, middle and lower Burma. It was a force useful for colonial missions of chastisement but utterly unfit for defending a country larger than France against invasion by a modern army supported by armour and aircraft.

From Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff in London to the GOC Burma, Major General D. K. McLeod, and the Governor, Sir Reginald Dorman Smith, nobody had allocated the resources needed to defend Burma against an invasion from Thailand. They simply had not visualised Japan occupying Thailand and then sweeping Britain aside. Forget the evidence of Japan’s victory over the Russians four decades before, the abundant intelligence on Tokyo’s new ships, aircraft and artillery, or the defeats inflicted on the Chinese over the past decade. The Japanese were still little yellow men, myopic and bandy-legged, and could never pose a mortal threat to the greatest empire the world had ever seen. As Corporal Fred Millem of the Burma Auxiliary Force, the local equivalent of the Territorial Army, ruefully put it after the disaster: ‘China had exhausted Japan – she could not last more than three months. Japan’s air force was no good, her pilots all had bad eyesight and could not fly by night … Etc, etc, etc, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah!’ When war came, the Japanese 15th Army would deploy four divisions against one and a half divisions of British, Burmese and Indians.

The overall responsibility for the defence of Burma was given to the Commander-in-Chief Far East, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, who spent a year pleading in vain for more resources. Four days before Pearl Harbor, the prime minister described the threat of Japanese action as a ‘remote contingency’. Fighting alone in the years before America joined the war, he had understandably avoided confrontation with the Japanese. At one point the great enemy of appeasement was forced to kowtow in the face of Japanese insistence that he close the Burma Road, along which America shipped its war materiel north from Rangoon to the Chinese Nationalists. Shutting this lifeline would strangle the Chinese war effort and allow Japan to redeploy thousands of troops for use against America in the event of war. The closure of the road in July 1940 amounted, according to the old Burma hand George Orwell, to ‘a semi-surrender to Japan’. From July to October 1940 Churchill closed the road, until American pressure forced him to change his mind. However limited Churchill’s choices, the episode should have illustrated to the British just how much Burma mattered to the Japanese.

It is not known what ultimately happened to the report submitted by Captain Pardoe. It was certainly seen by the intelligence department in Rangoon, but whether it went higher than that we will never know. As for Pardoe, he would not survive the war. He was killed eight months later, fighting the Japanese in Hong Kong.

For Emile Charles Foucar, barrister-at-law, Saturday, 6 December 1941, was one of the most important days in the social calendar. He was not alone in waking with great excitement. That afternoon the finest ponies in Burma would race for the Governor’s Cup at the Rangoon Turf Club. It was an event that would draw virtually the entire European population and, as the only club that allowed non-white members, it would also attract Burmese and Indians of good social standing. Sadly for Foucar, he would be without his wife Mollie. She and the couple’s two children, a boy and a girl, had been shipped to England as a precautionary measure a few weeks before. Official Burma might play down the danger of invasion, but to Foucar the evacuation made good sense in view of the threatening noises coming from Japan. Emile Foucar was, above all, a man of common sense. He had been born in Burma, the son of a businessman who had come out from Britain in the late nineteenth century, a man swept eastward by the imperial dream at the very moment it was approaching its zenith. In the language of the colonial guide-books, the Burma he found was wreathed in the exotic: ‘Should Burma be visited after a tour in India, the traveller cannot fail to be struck with the great difference in the people and the scenery of the two countries. The merry, indolent, brightly-clothed Burmese have no counterpart in Hindustan, and the richness of the soil and exuberance of the vegetation will be at once remarked.’

Emile Foucar’s father and uncle began a timber business, exporting Burmese teak all over the world from their mills in the coastal city of Moulmein. Here Foucar senior did his patriotic duty by joining the Moulmein Volunteer Artillery. Like most of the white community, he sent his son Emile to England to be educated. There the young Foucar left school just in time to fight as an officer in Flanders. After the war he studied law in London but, finding the pickings slim, decided to return home and set up in practice in the country of his birth. Foucar gathered a substantial clientele from across the country’s racial mix. He could find himself representing a monk demanding the right to succeed to a monastery, investigating an insurance fraud by Chinese businessmen, or acting as counsel for a British plantation owner involved in a legal wrangle with the government.

When Emile Foucar arrived at the races on that humid December day he heard the band of 1st battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment (the 1st Glosters), playing and saw green lawns ‘ablaze with flowers and brilliant costumes’. The Governor, Sir Reginald Dorman Smith, made a grand entrance, driven down the course to the members’ enclosure, acknowledging the applause of the crowd with a gracious wave. It was, Foucar remembered, a golden afternoon.

He moved easily among the crowds, European and Asian, nodding to clients as he went. As an observer of his own society Foucar was sharp-witted and fair-minded, pushing at the limitations of his age and background. In a memoir published a decade after the war, he recalled how the Burmese were systematically excluded from British, and therefore influential, social circles, denied control over their country’s resources, and encouraged in subservience and servility. They were barred from European strongholds such as the Pegu Club and the Rangoon Gymkhana Club, where much of the real business of money and politics was conducted. On the trains European passengers like Foucar’s friend Bellows could make a scene if asked to share a carriage with a non-white. Bellows, who had been forty years in Burma, ‘insisted to the stationmaster that his fellow traveller be removed … so the merchant was put elsewhere’. Foucar also had an eye for the hypocrisies of late imperial life. It was well known, he wrote, that Bellows had a Burmese wife.

On the journey back east from England after the First World War, Foucar heard his travelling companions agree that the old days were gone. ‘Things aren’t what they were,’ an anonymous passenger told him. ‘The young Burman considers himself as good as his master.’ But this was still the colonial Burma of George Orwell’s Burmese Days, torpid, self-satisfied, a haven for mediocrities who would have struggled in a more dynamic or egalitarian setting. Although Burmese politicians sat in a legislative assembly and there was a Burmese prime minister, real power remained in the hands of the Governor, who controlled foreign affairs and security.

The C-in-C Far East, Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, offered an acerbic view of the colonial Englishman in Burma, all the more surprising because Brooke-Popham had been a stout defender of the rights of white settlers in Kenya when he was Governor there in the late 1930s. There was, he wrote, ‘a tendency among Englishmen to regard themselves as naturally superior in every way to any coloured race, without taking steps to ensure that this is always a fact … a failure to develop a sympathetic understanding with the Burmese … the majority of non-official Englishmen in Burma were more concerned making money and getting high dividends from their investments than of benefiting the native population.’

At the start of the 1930s an uprising led by the rustic monk and necromancer, Saya San, shook British rule. But it was the Indian minority rather than the British who suffered most. A colonial report noted that the Indians had ‘driven the more apathetic Burman out of the more profitable means of employment’. When violence erupted the Indians were the first to be attacked. A prominent nationalist leader denounced them as ‘birds of passage who have come to this land to exploit by fair means or foul in the fields of labour, industry or commerce’. Despite superior British firepower it took eighteen months to subdue a revolt that shook the British and inspired young nationalists to escalate their agitation against colonial rule. As Emile Foucar noted, ‘The indications were plain to those who would read them; yet when manifested amongst students and the educated classes they were brushed aside as the complaints of disappointed office-seekers envious of the white man. This attitude of self-complacency was comforting to those of us who saw a long continuance of British domination.’

At the same time, Burmese intellectuals were absorbing ideas and theories spreading from Britain. One Rangoon writer observed that ‘in the 1930s, so many of our students read the books which came out to us from Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club in London. The ideas of Marx reached Burma not from Russia but by way of England.’ The generation of urban Burmese that came of age in the 1930s was educated and politically aware, and some of its leading figures were already in contact with the intelligence officers of a new imperial force.

The Japanese dressed their intervention in the clothes of Asian brotherhood. By the late 1930s Japanese spies were busy recruiting agents and attempting to create a pro-Tokyo army which would act as a fifth column on the outbreak of war. Several of the nationalist leaders went to Japan for military training, among them Aung San, the father of future pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. This was the simmering Burma that lay beyond the European clubs and garden parties of Rangoon on the eve of war with Japan, and which thousands of British, Indian and Burmese troops would be asked to give their lives to defend.

The weekend of the Governor’s Cup race meeting in December 1941 was the last great gala of imperial Burma, although few, if any, of those who were there would have sensed the imminence of its demise. The dancers who packed into the ballroom of the Strand Hotel on race night were confident that Britannia still ruled the East and would continue to do so for a long time to come. For Emile Foucar the highlight of the evening was when a ‘stout lady, popular with local audiences … sang a comic song, concluding it by throwing up her skirt to show us the seat of her panties emblazoned with the Union Jack. How we cheered!’ The only irritant was the absence of fresh air, brought about by a practice blackout ordered by the military authorities. Not that most people in that cheery crowd believed a blackout was necessary. As the racegoers made their way home in the muggy early hours, the Japanese seemed a very long way away.

Twenty-four hours later, on 8 December 1941, Emile Foucar woke up to the news of the Japanese attack on the Americans at Pearl Harbor and the landings in Malaya, some five hundred kilometres from Burma. More worrying still, Japanese troops were also moving into Thailand. An agreement had been reached with the Thai government to allow Japanese forces free passage to the Burmese border. There was fierce fighting with some Thai troops, unaware of the agreement, who opposed the Japanese landings in the south. Yet Rangoon was quiet that morning. To Corporal Fred Millem the news came as a relief. Rumours of war had been incessant. ‘The suspense had been snapped and we knew where we stood. To me it was no surprise … when it came we were almost joyful, for it seemed certain suicide for Japan – her last desperate throw … Singapore, utterly and completely impregnable, still stood between the Japs and Burma.’

Emile Foucar immediately joined up to do his bit for the defence of the empire. As a former officer he was given the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel, working on intelligence and propaganda. On 10 December he went into the radio room at headquarters and found an operator anxiously trying to restore a connection. The man had heard something about the ships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, which had been dispatched east the previous autumn to deter the Japanese, but he could gather no details apart from the fact that the voice on the wireless was referring to them in the past tense. It was only the following day that Foucar learned that more than eight hundred men had been killed, and British naval power humbled, when Japanese bombers sank the ships off the coast of Malaya.

By the middle of December a Japanese force had crossed from Thailand and seized the strategically important Victoria Point airfield, vital to the RAF if it was to bring in reinforcements. Two days before Christmas 1941, with Hong Kong about to fall and Singapore threatened, Foucar was entering his office when somebody shouted out to look in the direction of Mingaladon airfield, to the north of the city. He saw bombers approaching, flying in a V-shaped formation – twenty-seven of them, pursued by a few British fighters.

The streets of Rangoon filled with crowds who cheered and clapped when they saw a bomber burst into flames and fall from the sky. But then the explosions began and thick smoke floated up from the centre of the city and the docks area. Shocked silence followed and then the sounds of terror, the screams of the dying and the noise of hundreds of feet stampeding along narrow streets. When the dead were counted there were more than 1,600 bodies, while many more were badly wounded.* The city began to empty.

Seventeen-year-old Donald Mellican was manning a Burma Auxiliary Force anti-aircraft position at Mingaladon airfield when it was attacked. Not a man among his crew knew the feeling of utter vulnerability that comes with being caught in the open by air attack, the sense of being like an insect racing for protection as giant boots come down to crush it, nor did they know the blinding panic of the sudden arrival of shells. A man under shellfire for the first time learns the ruthless capriciousness of shrapnel, how the tiniest sliver of scorching metal can bring death, and will come to dread the extravagant mutilations of flesh caused by close proximity to the shock waves of a blast. Mellican’s only experience of violence up until then had been the canings meted out at his school in Moulmein when boys were caught whistling at the girls playing hockey in the neighbouring academy. When the alarm was sounded at the airfield he assumed it was an exercise. Then, as the silver shapes in the sky came closer, he heard an officer shout to him to take cover. Bombs began to fall. After a few minutes of confusion Mellican climbed on to the anti-aircraft gun to shouts of ‘Traverse right’ and ‘Traverse left’, followed by ‘Fire!’. His fear left him as he blasted at the Japanese.

The drama lasted for an hour and when the Japanese had gone Mellican looked around at a scene of carnage. There were fires and delayed explosions. Wounded men were crying out for help. One Bofors gun had taken a direct hit. Mellican was called out later that night to help remove the dead. ‘The bodies were mangled, heads, limbs sprawled all over, and even the gun was splashed with flesh and brains sticking on metal.’ They were all boys Mellican had known. An officer ordered that nobody was to leave until the mess had been cleaned up.

‘We made makeshift stretchers from bits of wood, e.g. damaged furniture and doors. “Have you got an arm or a leg?” calls were made and eventually we had six figures ready. I recognised only two of them, “F. B.” and “J. K.”’ Both were boys Mellican had known from his schooldays. As he helped carry a stretcher away it became tangled in a hedge. When he looked back he saw that the intestines of the dead boy had caught in the hedge and unravelled. With his hands he freed the spilling guts and placed them gently back under the blanket. That night he slept in a bunkhouse that was quiet with the shock of war.

The crisis was compounded by problems of command at every level. Brooke-Popham, the C-in-C Far East, whose responsibilities included Malaya, Singapore and Burma, succumbed to the pressure of events and was replaced. In late December a new commander, General Sir Archibald Wavell, was sent to establish the short-lived ABDACOM,* a unified allied command based in Java, which was described by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), General Sir Alan Brooke, as a ‘wild and half-baked’ scheme. In the space of a few months, responsibility for operations in Burma shifted first to India, then to ABDACOM, and finally back to India. In Rangoon there was similar confusion. The GOC Burma, Lieutenant General D. K. McLeod, who had spent much of his life as a staff officer, was replaced on 27 December by Lieutenant General T. J. Hutton, who was himself sacked two months later. An Associated Press report from London had welcomed Hutton’s appointment and spoke of how ‘much has been done to strengthen the land forces which Lt. Gen. Hutton now takes over’. It was the propaganda of illusion, as the defenders would soon discover.

The Japanese launched their ground offensive from Thailand on 8 January. They sent two divisions against one and half British and Indian divisions.† But it was the quality of troops and command, not the numbers, that really mattered. When General Hutton failed to stem the advance he was replaced, on 5 March, by General Harold Alexander, a favourite of Churchill’s, who acknowledged that never had he ‘taken the responsibility of sending a general on a more forlorn hope’.

The official verdict on the failure to protect Burma would not emerge for another decade. But the conclusion was damning: ‘The effect that the loss of Rangoon would have on the British war effort was well known to the War Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff and to all commanders in the Far East … Yet, despite the breathing space of six weeks between the outbreak of war and the start of the Japanese drive into southern Burma, no adequate steps were taken to build up the forces required … Burma still remained practically defenceless.’

An Irish engineer, Professor W. H. Prendergast, working for the Indian Railways, was sent to Rangoon to see what help was needed by his counterparts on the Burma Railways, who were struggling to keep their locomotives running. ‘In the streets of this great thriving city nothing was to be seen but the scurrying jeeps, the criminals, the looters and the insane. No one was left except a small band of “Last Ditchers” and garrison troops who had volunteered to remain until the end.’ British troops and police shot looters. ‘Others, both soldiers and civilians, were punished by caning.’ The official history of the Indian Army described how ‘the deserted city and oil refineries and shattered storage tanks along the river presented an awe-inspiring spectacle as huge columns of flame leapt skyward beneath a vast canopy of smoke.’

Prendergast witnessed the last train departing Rangoon steaming slowly away and noted how ‘behind it pathetically followed, the spaniels, the Airedales, the terriers, all the big and little pets with their appealing eyes saying “Surely you cannot abandon US”.’ He travelled from one bombed station to another, helping with repair work. One morning he found the bodies of eighteen people who had died from cholera during the night. The American war correspondent Clare Boothe described the destruction by fire of part of the ancient royal capital of Mandalay in a dispatch for Life magazine. ‘It was to me a smell not unfamiliar. I remember, one hot summer, when I was a child, a dog died under our veranda porch … It was that smell. But a thousand times magnified until it seemed, as we whirled through the streets, all creation stank of rotting flesh … Here and there on the side of the streets lay a charred and blackened form swaddled in bloody rags, all its human lineaments grotesquely foreshortened by that terrible etcher – fire.’

Japanese air raids on the cities drove people into the countryside. Gripped by panic, the large Indian population of Burma, many of them labourers who worked in the mines or in the fields, headed towards the border with India. Some of the wealthier and more influential sought a passage by air or boat, but with limited space, and with priority given to whites, money was no guarantee of a seat. Nor was it always safe to attempt escape by air, as the Japanese enjoyed command of the skies. For the majority who set out on foot the journey meant navigating a mixture of terrain that exhausted even the strongest among them. The route north to safety lay over nine hundred miles of jungle, scrub, swamps and high mountain passes. It meant trying to ford raging rivers and struggling to gain a footing on liquid mud paths over mountains that rose to more than 8,000 feet.

The refugee columns were shadowed by flocks of vultures. The carrion-feeders settled in the trees over temporary camps or waited on the fringes of small groups whose members were too exhausted to move any further. It is the sound, rather than the sight, of vultures feasting that stays in the mind, an obscene cracking and tearing, which rose from countless roadside encampments on the retreat. There were anguished scenes as the elderly, so often the first to fall sick, urged younger family members to go on without them. A British eyewitness recalled seeing children with ‘distended bellies supported on sticks of legs, and all of them moved slowly, dragging along with expressionless faces, eyes on the ground and bodies wasted to the bone’. Of the more than half a million people who fled across the border to India over five months of the retreat, an estimated 80,000 died from a catalogue of diseases – cholera, dysentery, scrub typhus and malaria – and from the effects of malnutrition and exhaustion.* The dead lay all along the routes towards India. A British army officer carrying out a reconnaissance of the route north described a clearing where a band of refugees had expired: ‘I found the bodies of a mother and child locked in each other’s arms. In another hut were the remains of another mother who had died in childbirth, with the child only half born … A soldier had expired wearing his side cap, all his cotton clothing had rotted away, but the woollen cap sat smartly on the grinning skull. Already the ever destroying jungle had overgrown some of the older huts, covering up the skeletons and reducing them to dust or mould.’ The Scotsman, George Rodger, who would become a famous war cameraman, encountered a constant stream of fleeing people and was struck by ‘the incongruity of the items they had chosen to salvage from their homes … One man carried a cross-cut saw over his shoulder, another lugged along a large tom-tom, several had umbrellas, and one carried a bicycle with the back wheel missing …’

Most reports suggest the Japanese did not attack refugees. But they were preyed upon by Burmese dacoits and frequently attacked by villagers resentful of the Indian presence in Burma. As is so often the way when war causes a vacuum in authority, the meanest elements of society emerged to terrorise, pillage and resurrect old hatreds. The Burmans also attacked minorities like the Karen and the Chin, both of which had remained largely loyal to the British.

Troops frequently encountered the bodies of Indian families butchered by the Burmans. A British officer, Captain James Lunt, remembered seeing a beautiful Indian woman ‘striding along like a Rajput princess, her child clasped to her left hip … her pleated dark red skirt swinging like a kilt at every stride. Bangles at her wrists and ankles tinkled as she passed, her kohl-rimmed eyes meeting mine for a brief moment.’ He would see her again. One evening he was driving past a line of refugees and noticed corpses by the roadside. ‘A bright red skirt caught my eye and we stopped the jeep. She lay there, her long black hair streaming out into a pool of fast-congealing blood, her throat cut from ear to ear … the bright red skirt had been pulled up above her waist in a final obscene gesture. The child, a little way apart, lay with its brains spilling on to the tarmac.’

The teenager Donald Mellican, of the Burma Auxilliary Force, was manning a barricade outside Rangoon when he saw the Governor come past with his entourage en route to an airfield in the north of the country. The most senior British official in Burma urged the troops to fight on, but left too quickly to hear the men shout curses after him. Governor Dorman Smith had been given strict orders by Churchill to get out of Burma before he could be captured by the Japanese. Mellican trudged out of Burma in a long procession of soldiers and civilians, keeping despair at bay by reciting times tables and nursery rhymes. At one point he saw an Indian woman and two small children standing by a steep drop on a hairpin bend. ‘Before the next bend I turned to look back and only two children were to be seen.’

Mellican reached India after walking for three weeks. Only later would he find out that his mother and five siblings had died crossing the Hukwang Valley. One of them, Patrick, suffered an infected toe which quickly swarmed with maggots. They soon covered his entire body, ‘which made him go off his head before he died’. His father and his youngest brother, Reggie, struggled on until they met a Gurkha family. By this time the father was too weak to care for the child. Leaving him with the Gurkhas, he trudged on towards India, where he died soon after arriving.

An American missionary doctor retreating with refugees and Chinese troops recorded the primitive conditions in which he had to operate. ‘No sooner had we finished lunch than the Friends brought in another thirty-five patients,’ wrote Dr Gordon Seagrave. ‘One of them had his englarged spleen shattered by a shell fragment. Insects were so numerous that they kept dropping into the wounds of the abdominal cases … We have been burning up the bloody remnants of clothes we have had to cut off our patients and cleaning up the grounds … My, what a stink!’

The locally recruited forces deserted the British in droves. According to one official estimate, by the end of the retreat only just over 6,000 remained out of a pre-war total of 20,000. Most were probably driven by the understandable desire to get back to their villages to protect their families, unwilling to risk a long exile in alien India or death for a cause they did not believe in. Some were also subject to political pressure from nationalists. Desertions among Indian troops in the Burmese army were prompted less by political considerations than by a desire to join their families who were fleeing the country.

The families of British officers in Burma joined the exodus. In most cases their men had already been called to duty. Mollie Birch set off with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter for India a few weeks after her husband was sent into action. She passed from train to refugee camp and then on again before arriving at the Chittagong Social Golf Club in Bengal on the evening of its annual dinner-dance. ‘They had heard evacuees were expected, had arranged for us to be taken to the club and to be given their dinner. As soon as we appeared the music stopped and everyone looked our way, we must have looked a very sorry sight, talk about chalk and cheese, here we were about thirty, dirty, smelly women and children – they were immaculate.’

Captain James Lunt, a Staff Officer with 2 Burma Brigade, was astonished by the behaviour of some of the British civilians he met along the route. ‘One man, a civilian whom I had known in happier times, sat down on my stretcher weeping copiously as he estimated his chances of obtaining some priority for the air trip to India. Another, a woman whom I had met in Mandalay, beseeched me to take her fur coat with me. She was wearing it at the time. Since I could barely stand, let alone walk, a fur coat was the last thing I wanted to be encumbered with.’

With the fall of Malaya and Singapore in the preceding months, the loss of Burma in May 1942 completed the trampling of imperial prestige. Emboldened by the Japanese successes Burmese nationalists lit large fires close to British positions to help guide Japanese bombers, while small groups of British troops had to be wary of attack from guerrillas. Across the newly taken Japanese possessions the first phase was underway in one of history’s epic movements: in Malaya and Burma, across French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, putative nation states, rival political groups, competing ideologies and numerous ethnic minorities, would emerge to stake their claims to power. Writing as the retreat north was gathering pace and a fortnight before he became deputy Prime Minister the Labour Party leader, Clement Attlee, put the matter succinctly. What was taking place was a continuation of European decline in Asia that had begun with the defeat of Russia by Japan in 1905. ‘The hitherto axiomatic acceptance of the innate superiority of the European over the Asiatic sustained a severe blow. The balance of prestige, always so important in the East, changed. The reverses which we and the Americans are sustaining from the Japanese at the present time will continue this process.’

Many were nervous of Japanese intentions. Sometimes they were the victims of savage Japanese repression. In Burma looters were shot on sight and their bodies publicly displayed as a warning. Drunks were tied up at traffic islands and made to stand for twenty-four hours without food or water. Ramesh S. Benegal, an Indian living in Rangoon, walked to Soortie Bara Bazaar, one of the city’s main shopping areas, and was confronted by a grotesque vision. At each of the four corners of the bazaar a severed head had been mounted on a pole. A note told passers-by that this fate awaited any who transgressed the law. But whether they were nationalists who welcomed the Japanese, or were simply cowed by the new occupiers, all were conscious that the age of the white master had gone.

Some officials certainly sensed the larger historical implications of the catastrophe. ‘We will never be able to hold up our heads again in Burma,’ said F. H. Yarnold, a deputy commissioner in the district of Mergui. For the fighting men retreating towards India there was little time to reflect on the great sweep of history. As the Japanese advanced from the east and south, the soldiers of the British, Indian and Burmese armies fought to escape a gigantic trap.

* Manchester Guardian, 2 February 1942. Up to quarter of a million Chinese worked to build the road between 1937 and 1938, an epic feat of engineering and labour.

* The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ opposition to conscription may have been a factor.

* The final death toll from the first day of Japanese bombing was more than 2,000.

* Wavell took over the American-British-Dutch-Australian Command (ABDACOM) on 30 December 1941. It was disbanded a week after the fall of Singapore.

† This would later increase to four divisions against two British and Indian divisions and eight, inferior, Chinese divisions based in the north.

* Estimates vary between 10,000 and 100,000. The figure of 80,000 is regarded as being the most accurate. See Christopher Bailey and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–45 (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2004), p. 167.

TWO
The Longest Road

They were walking through elephant grass near the Sittang river, some 66 miles from Rangoon and the last great natural barrier before the Burmese capital. Private Bill Norman of 2nd battalion, Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, heard planes approaching and thought it was Hurricanes or Tomahawks, until he heard the sergeant blow his whistle. After that, the air erupted with noise. Machine-gun bullets, the kind that could take a man’s arm off, smashed into the ground beside Private Norman. He ran into a rubber plantation and dived under some trees. Looking up, he saw an Indian soldier, with thin legs resembling ‘worn army leather bootlaces’, standing in the open and aiming his rifle at the Japanese planes. ‘I shouted at him in my very best barrack-room Hindustani to stop firing and take cover. With the greatest of smiles, with his beautiful white teeth, he held out his handspan and in the best of his barrack-room English said, “Twenty-one degrees, Sahib.” Telling him how well he was doing I let him get on with a fine bit of soldiering.’

The Japanese invasion had started three weeks before and, advancing from the east, had pushed the British and Indian forces back to the bridge over the Sittang. The heat, the lack of water, and the relentless movement took a heavy toll. Men began to fall out exhausted, unable to move another yard. Norman saw a sergeant go to one man and kick him as he lay on the ground. ‘Get on your feet and march or we will leave you to die,’ he said. The man did not get up, and was left to his fate. As the British retreated, the Japanese would emerge to attack from the surrounding jungle and then disappear.

In a few short days Private Norman became accustomed to the sight of dead bodies, many of them his comrades. By night the troops shivered in shirts that had been soaked by the day’s perspiration, hiding up in the jungle and hoping that the Japanese would not discover their position. Then, in the depths of the night, the calling would start, high-pitched Japanese voices that made Norman wish he could get even closer to the man beside him. Many soldiers found themselves torn between the fear of discovery by the probing Japanese and the urge to respond by firing off a few rounds. An official narrative of the battle described how the Japanese, ‘using coloured tracer ammunition, uttering war cries … succeeded in creating confusion in the darkness … [which] led to indiscriminate firing by certain units … the uncontrolled fire caused some casualties amongst our own troops’. Some of the troops retreating in the direction of the bridge were machine-gunned in error by the RAF. In the early hours of 23 February Private Norman heard a huge explosion in the distance. The bridge over the Sittang had been blown in order to stall the Japanese advance, but the result was that the bulk of a division, including Norman and his comrades, were trapped on the wrong side of the river. For years afterwards the timing of the demolition would be the source of bitter debate and recrimination. The troops left on the Japanese side, many of them Indian and Burmese, were both scared and furious, convinced their British commanders had abandoned them.

Silence descended over the area after the explosion, followed after a few minutes by the sound of the encircling Japanese chattering and screaming. Some of the stranded men worked frantically to make rafts from timber huts and bamboo, while hundreds threw away their guns, equipment and clothes, and plunged into the water. ‘As we crossed, the river was a mass of bobbing heads. We were attacked from the air, sniped at from the opposite bank.’ Many men drowned in the treacherous currents as they struggled to cross the mile-wide river. Lance Corporal Frost, 2nd battalion, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (2/KOYLI), hurled himself into the water even though he could not swim. It was a measure of the terror the Japanese inspired. Strong swimmers went to the aid of men in difficulty, some even making two or three trips to drag across the wounded. A major and two corporals went to the broken span of the bridge and looped ropes across to create a lifeline which enabled around four hundred troops, mostly Gurkhas, to reach safety.

The Japanese harried the retreating army. Private Yoshizo Abe, a sapper with 33rd Engineer Regiment, was advancing through a town near the river when British armoured vehicles came racing through. ‘The houses in the town were all burning and British armoured cars came bursting through the flames,’ he remembered. ‘We threw grenades and mines into the cars passing through the town. I did not take note of how long it lasted. I was euphoric and did not remember what I had done.’ Six or so British vehicles had stalled in the road, their occupants blown apart and burned as they tried to escape. Outside the town, Abe saw Indian soldiers advancing and firing from the waist. Each time the Japanese tried to advance they were beaten back by a hail of fire. Eventually Japanese firepower drove the Indians back. The Indians could only flee into the jungle and hope to avoid being caught.

Another Japanese private, Shiro Tokita, an infantryman with 33rd Division, remembered looking down on the Sittang bridge after it had been blown. ‘There were many fish floating in the water, killed by the explosion. On the river bank I saw a lot of shoes, and clothing scattered here and there.’ Tokita witnessed the surrender of a small British unit at a pagoda that was being used as a field hospital. The doctor of his battalion had the extraordinary experience of meeting a British doctor with whom he had studied in Germany. They tended the wounded together. At Shwedaung, later in the retreat, a Japanese officer, Major Misao Sato, encountered a dying British soldier lying under a tree. He was young, perhaps eighteen years old, and had been sniping at the Japanese from behind a bush. ‘I asked him in my broken English, “Where are your father and mother?” He said just a word, but clearly, “England”, and as I asked, “Painful?”, he again said a word, “No.” I knew that he must be suffering great pain.’ A stream of tears ran down the dying soldier’s face. Sato held his hand and found himself crying. The soldier died a few minutes later.

Such moments of chivalry were rare. In the 2/KOYLI missing personnel file there are many heart-rending accounts from soldiers who saw their comrades killed at Sittang. In the middle of one close-quarter fight, Lance Corporal W. Smith saw a wounded private pick up a Tommy gun and stand up, shouting at the Japanese to come out in the open and fight. He was shot in the head. Men struggled desperately to help one another under fire. Smith and a comrade tried to rescue a Lance Corporal McDonald who was wounded in the legs: ‘he told us to go and get out of it for he said there was no hope for him getting out of hear [sic] alive. And I told [him] that when we could get to the hospital we would send somebody for him, and then I felt somebody pull on my shirt and it was L/Cpl Rowley, and he said he was [dead], so with not having any spades with [us] we put him in a hole and covered him over with some wood.’

Corporal E. Rylah, despite being fully fit himself, volunteered to stay with a wounded comrade, although this meant trusting his fate to the Japanese. Private W. Hewitt was seen going in the opposite direction to his retreating company, because ‘the sound of the machine guns had temporarily unhinged his mind and he did not know where he was going’. One party of men ‘flatly refused to attempt the crossing and collected Tommy guns and disappeared in the direction of the Japanese lines’.

Private Bill Norman reached the river after the main crossing had taken place, finding only a handful of men still trying to get away. Like the others making the crossing, he abandoned his weapon. With a friend, he grabbed a thick bamboo pole for buoyancy, and the two of them set off across the river. With physical exhaustion setting in and the pole waterlogged, out of nowhere, it seemed, another figure joined the struggling pair, a big man and a strong swimmer who grabbed the pole and pulled them across.

The Cabinet papers for February 1942 described how ‘our troops have fought well and inflicted heavy casualties’, but acknowledged that the ‘Japanese attack has been remarkable for the excellence of its ground to air communications and for the coordination of air with land forces’. The RAF and pilots of the American Volunteer Group challenged the Japanese but were eventually overwhelmed by superior numbers.*

Rangoon was abandoned on 7 March 1942 and occupied by the Japanese the following day. The British managed to evacuate sufficient supplies of food and petrol to maintain their forces on the retreat, saving the army from starvation as it trudged towards India. Units fought through Japanese roadblocks, battered and demoralised by the enemy’s constant outflanking movements and encirclements; men with no aim but escape.

Almost a fortnight after the fall of Rangoon, General Alexander appointed a new commander to lead the forces in the field. Major General William Slim, a former officer of a Gurkha regiment, was serving in the Middle East when he was appointed to take command of the newly constituted Burma Corps on 19 March. He would become arguably the finest British general of the Second World War and a man loved by his multi-racial army. But with Rangoon gone and Japanese forces attempting the encirclement of the British and Indian forces retreating north, it was too late for Alexander or Slim to do much but try to save as many men as possible to fight another day from the two divisions and armoured brigade of Burma Corps.

Watching the rout of an army is always a salutary lesson, but Slim’s gift was to be able to watch and learn. He was a rare kind of soldier: quick-witted and daring; loved by his men because they knew he would not spend their lives cheaply; and possessed of a moral courage that allowed him to acknowledge his own errors. The lessons Slim learned in those terrible months from March to June 1942 would be embedded in his consciousness forever and would be used to weld troops from the British and Indian armies into one of the finest fighting units of the war, 14th Army.

Slim had grown up in a lower-middle-class family in Birmingham, the son of a failed small businessman and a devoutly Catholic mother, whose strong personality seems to have been inherited by her son. After leaving school he went to work as a teacher among some of the poorest and toughest boys in Birmingham, an experience that later gave him an invaluable insight into the minds of the men he would lead into battle. There were other jobs, including a periodic recourse to writing stories for magazines, but a childhood passion for military history found an outlet in the Officer Training Corps at his brother’s university. At the outbreak of the First World War, Slim was commissioned as a second lieutenant and was wounded at Gallipoli. During the early stages of the Second World War he was wounded again, while fighting the Italians in Eritrea. To his men he would always be ‘Uncle Bill’, a man of imposing physical build, with a protruding jaw that emphasised an air of resolution and command.

Slim conducted a skilful fighting retreat, buying time to allow the bulk of his army, and tens of thousands of their Chinese allies, to escape destruction or capture. When the monsoon broke in early May the principal routes of retreat became mires in which men slipped and fell as they trudged towards India. Slim watched troops shiver with fever as they lay on ‘the sodden ground under the dripping trees, without even a blanket to cover them’. In May, Lance Corporal W. Long of 2/KOYLI was retreating north from the town of Kalewa when his group was joined by a private suffering from cholera. The man had been in hospital but had decided to try to escape with his comrades rather than trust his life to the advancing Japanese. The seriously ill soldier lasted for eight miles of marching and then fell out. Lance Corporal Long reported, ‘We carried on marching. Two days later another party who set off marching after us caught us up and told us that they had passed Pte Powell lying dead on the side of the road.’

In one instance rough justice was meted out to a soldier accused of abandoning his post. Sergeant W. Butcher, 2/KOYLI, described how a private in his platoon deserted in the early hours. Private Ramsden was arrested three hours later and brought before the commanding officer, Major Mike Calvert. Calvert would go on to become the most successful of the Chindit commanders and one of the founders of the SAS. In the case of Private Ramsden he showed no mercy and ordered him to be shot.* Sergeant Butcher was given the job of carrying out the execution. ‘I tied him to a tree with his back to me. I placed a pistol between his shoulders and shot him at point-blank range. He was definitely dead before I left him.’ Private Ramsden had fallen in love with and married a Burmese woman.† The statement by his executioner refers to her as a suspected fifth columnist who was later arrested.

Burmese found aiding the Japanese could also be subjected to summary justice. Lieutenant Colonel C. E. K. Bagot of the 1st Glosters described an encounter on 3 May 1942: ‘At 1930 hrs signalling was observed on our right front and a patrol stalked 3 Burmans who were caught in the act. One man carried weapons and Japanese money. He was shot, the remainder were taken back 25 miles under escort of the Burma Frontier Force and dispersed, after they had been made to witness the execution.’

The final stage of the journey brought the troops through the Kabaw Valley. Captain Gerald Fitzpatrick and the survivors of 2/KOYLI encountered a scene of horror there that spurred them onwards. The rotting bodies of numerous refugees lay in the sun being devoured by vultures, while countless flies swarmed around the troops. ‘The impact of witnessing the vulturine disposal of the unfortunates, on our sick and wounded men, was quite miraculous. It was like a Lourdes cure; the pace quickened, backs straightened, men simply dare not fall back and die in this place.’ The jungle was endlessly strange. Ralph Tanner was ill with dysentery and had to briefly drop out of the column near the top of a hill. While he squatted, he saw ‘swallow tail butterflies drinking the salt on someone’s knees when there was a halt near the summit’. Volunteers from the Society of Friends (Quakers) were operating ambulances caring for wounded soldiers and civilians.* Doctor Handley Laycock was attached to the British forces and recalled a strange combination of cheerfulness and horror along the route to the border. ‘During these days we saw many scenes of intense horror. A man dying on this path usually remains until the rapid assaults of ants and other insects have reduced him to a skeleton. In the process he blocks the path and his presence there is exceedingly unpleasant. In some camps we found the dead and dying together, the latter too feeble to crawl away from the former. On the whole the morale of the men we met was high and they usually returned our greeting with a broad grin, and expressed embarrassingly profuse gratitude for anything that we could do to help them …’

As he tramped the last yards into India, Captain Fitzpatrick of 2/KOYLI looked up and saw two figures in uniform standing on a mound of earth just above him. One of them was General Sir Harold Alexander, GOC Burma, and the other was ‘a less flashy officer’, General William ‘Bill’ Slim.

Watching the retreating army, Slim felt a mixture of pride and anger. They looked like scarecrows dragging themselves across the border. But Slim noted that they still carried their weapons and looked like fighting units. ‘They might look like scarecrows but they looked like soldiers too.’ His anger arose from the reception accorded to his men by the military in India, where commanders and staff officers who had sat out the fighting in safety stood at the border hectoring the arriving troops. Sarcastic comments and parade-ground bellowing were directed at men who were on the verge of collapse. Ralph Tanner remembered being asked for his identity card by a corporal before finding his way to a train and eventually to hospital. On the way he used his penknife, sterilised with a match, to lance a wound on the arm of a soldier. ‘This let the pus out and the arm got better during the trip.’

In Slim’s view, his troops were received as if they were in disgrace. He acknowledged that to some extent they were paying the price for the ‘rabble’ of deserters, refugees and non-combatants that had crossed the border ahead of them over the previous weeks, but he could not excuse their treatment. According to official figures, 13,000 men were killed, wounded or missing on the retreat, not counting those who would die later from disease.

As the troops made their way into the main British base at Imphal, they were sent to camp on steep jungle hillsides, where there was no shelter apart from the trees and scant clothing, blankets, water or medicine. The psychological effect was devastating. Men lost the will to carry on. By Slim’s estimate, as many as 8 per cent of those he watched come out of Burma died from illness. Yet when he said goodbye to them he was cheered by the men, an experience he found ‘infinitely moving – and humbling’. Leaving Imphal he did not even have a jeep and it was left to his ‘faithful Cameronian bodyguard’ to coax back into life an abandoned refugee car that would carry them towards a small hill town called Kohima. Here the engine gave out. This town, with its small garrison of local troops and a military hospital and engineering works, was one of the furthest outposts of British power in India, an insignificant and sleepy place which had, in recent months, found itself directly in the path of a mass flow of refugees from Burma. Slim did not stay long. Together with his bodyguard he pushed the car out of Kohima until they reached a steep descent. From there they coasted downhill towards the railhead at Dimapur until a rise in the road stopped them. After that, they hitched a ride in a lorry and then found their way onto a crowded train. Slim would not see Kohima again for more than two years, but when he did it would be in vastly changed circumstances, and the little village he had passed through without fanfare would be associated forever with the fortunes of his army.

Many of the sick from Burma Corps were sent to hospitals in Ranchi in Bihar, where Slim went to visit them and argue for better conditions. He saw officers and men dying in squalor, the wounded lying on verandas and under trees waiting for admission, while overworked medical teams laboured relentlessly with the bare minimum of supplies.

But it was also at Ranchi that Slim began what was probably the most painstaking analysis of defeat undertaken by any British general of the war. In his account of the campaign Slim wrote of the despair that can descend on a defeated general. ‘In a dark hour he will turn in upon himself and question the very foundations of his leadership and his manhood. And then he must stop! For, if he is ever to command in battle again, he must shake off these regrets, and stamp on them, as they claw at his will and his self-confidence. He must beat off these attacks he delivers against himself, and cast out the doubts born of failure. Forget them, and remember only the lessons to be learnt from defeat – they are more than from victory.’ Although there were many more setbacks ahead, Slim was already preparing to take the war to the Japanese.

* The American Volunteer Group, or ‘Flying Tigers’, was a clandestine unit of American pilots operating in support of the Chinese Nationalists. Established in 1941, it became part of the United States Army Air Force in July 1942.

* Calvert wrote in his autobiography of being threatened with court martial because of allegations that he had shot deserters during the retreat. He vigorously denied the claims but asserted that Slim’s intervention had saved him from court martial. ‘I thought back to Wingate’s approval of Slim and silently added mine to it.’ Michael Calvert, Fighting Mad (Pen and Sword, 2004), p. 105. The account of Sergeant Butcher appears to contradict his denial.

† The Commonwealth War Graves Commission register of men killed in action during World War Two lists a Private Benjamin Ramsden, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, as having died on 26/04/1942. He is named on the Rangoon War Memorial alongside soldiers of 2/KOYLI who died in battle.

* The Friends Ambulance Unit on the China – Burma front was staffed by Quakers from America, Britain, New Zealand, Canada and China. The FAU was originally established during the Great War as a form of service for conscientious objectors. About 170 were active on the Burma front. (Source: Anthony Reynolds, ‘Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding.)

THREE
At the Edge of the Raj

In the hottest or wettest of weather the deputy commissioner wore a jacket and tie. Tall and with a face that invited confidence, he seemed like a Victorian housemaster remoulded as a servant of the Raj on its most remote frontier. But those who stayed longer than a few hours in his company found a man whose stiffness was in fact shyness, and when his reticence faded with acquaintance Charles Pawsey was a kind companion. Advice on the Naga Hills was freely offered, once he was sure the visitor would do nothing to disrupt the calm.

By early 1942 the peace of the hills had been disrupted. Charles Pawsey was standing on the Imphal road just outside Kohima when the first refugees from Burma came trudging in. The early arrivals seemed to be in good health and had some money. But in February Pawsey began to report the arrival of destitute groups of soldiers. A camp was established at the Middle School in Kohima to provide shelter. Soon the passage of exhausted, starving people had become ‘out of control’. An English volunteer who helped in the relief effort remembered these destitute thousands ‘hungry, thirsty, exhausted, numbed with shock … One’s taskmaster … is the crying need of hundreds of fellow beings displayed daily in all its nakedness.’ There were separate canteens for Europeans and Indians, with sandwiches for the former and rice for the latter.

The Daily Refugee Report from the Governor of Assam to the Viceroy of India for 14 May 1942 reported large parties of refugees trying to reach the railhead at Dimapur, about forty-six miles north-west of Kohima. They were being joined by Chinese troops fleeing the front. It was in this chaotic phase that the army staff formed their grim impression of the retreat. ‘Binns reports [the Chinese] Army [is] mere rabble who will reduce refugees behind them to pitiful condition … disarm and control Chinese if possible as otherwise will consume all food … including dumps and will become embroiled with hillmen whose loyalty will be seriously shaken if they are looted by our allies.’ Four days later, on 18 May, the Governor was reporting that approximately 3,000 refugees a day were on their way to Dimapur, and that the maharajah of neighbouring Manipur had abandoned his administration and vanished. In the middle of this Charles Pawsey was trying to provide assistance for the multitudes arriving in Kohima, and was becoming angry about the government’s failure to help him. Delhi had never planned for a retreat. Amid the stink of the refugee camps, Pawsey struggled to acquire adequate supplies of rice and to find labourers who could construct shelters or improve the tracks along which supplies would have to come. ‘There was no equipment of any kind,’ he wrote. ‘Supplies were a nightmare. So was lack of transport.’ With the help of civilian volunteers, many from tea-planting families, Pawsey was able to establish a system to feed and then transfer the refugees deeper into India.*

By July the flood of refugees had diminished to a trickle, and once the influx had come to an end Kohima and the Naga Hills settled into a nervous peace. The Japanese 15th Army was sitting on the other side of the Chindwin river, about seventy miles away at the nearest point. But they had halted for now. The Indian official history recorded that, by June 1942, ‘the onset of monsoon, long lines of communication in the rear, the need for reorganising forces for a major venture and opposition [in India] to any external aggression, prevented the Japanese from extending their conquests beyond Burma.’ The physical barriers to an attack were considerable. Between Kohima and the Japanese lay the Chindwin river and a mountain range, whose 8,000 foot peaks and steep jungled valleys were thought to be impassable by large military formations. If there was to be an invasion of India, the British believed it would come further south, via the Imphal plain or through the Burmese province of Arakan into Bengal. For now, Charles Pawsey could concentrate on re-establishing the normal routines of colonial administration.

By the time he became deputy commissioner at Kohima, Charles Pawsey was thirty-five years old and he had already exceeded his own life expectancy by many years. He was one of those rare creatures who had enlisted in 1914 as a teenage officer and survived to see the armistice in 1918. Educated at Berkhamsted, where he was briefly a contemporary of Graham Greene, Pawsey was an enthusiastic cadet and was praised in the school magazine for his ‘doggedness’ on the athletics track. He went on to study classics at Oxford, but when the First World War broke out Pawsey joined the Territorial Army and was commissioned in time to join the 1/8 Worcestershire Regiment in France in April 1915. More than two decades later, at Kohima, in the midst of another terrible battle, Pawsey would remember the experience of clearing the dead from the trenches at Serre on the Somme. The rotting corpses lay everywhere and ‘those trenches remained long in the memories of the officers and men, as their worst experience of the horrors of the field of a great battle’. Pawsey distinguished himself by going out repeatedly into no-man’s-land in daylight to rescue wounded men, until he was caught in a German gas attack and invalided away from the front. He was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery on the Somme, before being transferred to the Italian front in 1917. There he was captured during hand-to-hand fighting on the Asiago plateau, some 4,000 feet up in the mountains above Lake Garda. Captain Pawsey was a prisoner of the Austro-Hungarian empire until the armistice in November. Then he and a few other British prisoners commandeered a train with a wood-burning engine and rode south to freedom.

Discharged from the army in 1919, he might have chosen to return to Oxford to continue his studies. But Charles Pawsey decided instead to go to India, where he had family connections. His uncle Roger had served as a government collector in east Bengal. He successfully sat the exams for the Indian Civil Service and was assigned to work as an assistant commissioner in the province of Assam in the north-east. It was a job that would involve extensive travel in remote districts, with considerable risk from malaria and the potential for encounters with hostile tribes. Yet to a young man who had survived the horrors of the First World War the journey to Assam must have held fantastic promise. With its vast tea estates, trackless jungles and tribes of headhunters, it was unimaginably far from the desolation of post-war Europe.

Pawsey rose steadily through the ranks of the Indian Civil Service, spending much of his time engaged in resolving land disputes, and eventually reaching the rank of deputy commissioner of the Naga Hills, in which role he acted as de facto ruler of more than 40,000 tribespeople in an area that covered 6,400 square miles of some of the most remote territory on the planet. On clear nights Charles Pawsey would stand on his veranda and look out over the valley to see shoals of stars splashed across the Naga Hills. To the east this silvered horizon dropped behind the mountains into Burma, and westwards it stretched towards the plains of Assam and the distant India of cities and crowds. Situated at 4,137 feet, and with no swampland nearby, Kohima was regarded as the healthiest settlement in the area. The air was clear and mountain streams provided a continuous supply of fresh water flowing into a tank in Pawsey’s garden. Although temperatures could soar to 90° Fahrenheit in the middle of July, the weather was cool for most of the year. Like the rest of the region, Kohima was washed by the annual monsoon, when annual rainfall of as much as one hundred inches could bring movement along the local tracks to a halt.

The settlement was spread out along a ridge made up of a series of hills. Charles Pawsey and the local police commander had their bungalows on Summerhouse Hill at the northern end of the ridge. On the adjacent hills stretching southwards were the stores, workshops, clinics, barracks and jail of the colonial administration. Beyond these were the heights of Aradura Spur, which in turn led on to the dark and jungled form of Mount Pulebadze, towering over Kohima at 7,500 feet above sea level. On the other side of the valley, across the road linking Kohima with Dimapur to the north and Imphal to the south, lay the so-called Naga Village, where the huts of the tribespeople had gradually agglomerated to form a settlement of several hundred dwellings.

European visitors to Kohima first noticed the clear mountain air and the profusion of flowers. There was a famed local orchid called Vanda coerulea, its colour a striking blend of turquoise and maroon stippled with tiny squares, as well as rhododendron trees which could grow to over a hundred feet. The young English traveller Ursula Graham Bower first saw Kohima while on a visit to India in the winter of 1937. Entering Mr Pawsey’s domain she was first struck by the tidy appearance of the place, with its red-roofed bungalows and official buildings stretched across the mountain ridges; gazing further afield, she saw on each ridge a ‘shaggy village, its thatched roofs smoke-stained and weathered’. She was only twenty-three when she stood on the ridge and looked out over the valleys, but she felt irrevocably changed by that moment and in her writing we find a young woman faced with something that challenged her capacity for awe: ‘One behind the other the hills stretched away as far as the eye could see, in an ocean of peaks, a wilderness of steep fields and untouched forest, of clefts and gulfs and razorbacks which merged at last into a grey infinity. That landscape drew me as I had never known anything do before, with a power transcending the body, a force not of this world at all.’

Charles Pawsey’s bungalow stood above the road linking Kohima with Imphal. It was built of wood with a red tin roof and a spacious veranda; it was pretty and spacious, surrounded by pale pink cannas and scarlet rhododendrons, but not lavish. When a small road had to be cut to the bungalow, Pawsey, following the service rules, paid for it himself. Above the bungalow, reached via a terraced hill, was a tennis court upon which Pawsey’s occasional visitors could enjoy an hour or two of civilised sport. His life there was comfortable but not luxurious, for he was a man of ascetic temperament, driven by his work and a conviction that the welfare of the Naga people was his life’s mission. That he was a paternalist is beyond doubt – those who knew him remembered how he spoke of the Naga as ‘my children’. But that is not to cast him as a cartoon figure, the dutiful imperialist shepherding the childlike natives. He was driven by a sense of imperial duty but also by a deep, empathetic humanity, a quality that the horror of his experiences in the First World War had only served to deepen. Sachu Angami, a Naga born and brought up in Kohima, remembered seeing Pawsey walk around his bungalow garden every morning. ‘He was always calm and he would smile when he saw us children. But we were too scared to talk to this white man, of course. This was a man who, when he spoke, the words turned into orders that would be carried out.’

Pawsey rode out by mule on his visits to the villages, sometimes accompanied by an escort of police and stopping off for the night in government bungalows or huts, or at the homes of the handful of British residents. Pat Whyte was a young girl living at a coal-mining works in the hills and recalls Pawsey coming to stay with her family. She was about seven or eight years old when she walked in on him while he was reclining in the bath, causing the deputy commissioner considerable embarrassment. ‘I remember him calling to “get this child out of the bathroom”. He wasn’t very happy!’ Pawsey also acted as magistrate for the Naga Hills and would set up his court on the veranda of the Whytes’ bungalow where, surrounded by magnificently adorned warriors – Pat Whyte saw one man wear an entire bird as an earring – the deputy commissioner would consider the complaints of one clan against another. There were arguments over boundaries which could easily end in a blood feud if not handled with tact. Once, when Pawsey was hearing a case of murder after a headhunting expedition, a policeman emptied out an entire sack of heads in front of him as evidence. The deputy commissioner’s reaction is not recorded. It was also the magistrate’s duty – although this was usually carried out by Pat Whyte’s father – to disburse the opium ration to registered dealers. The supply, which smelt ‘sort of sickly sweet’, was meticulously weighed out before being hidden away again under lock and key.

Until the arrival of the railhead at Dimapur, about forty-six miles from Kohima, in the early 1930s, the European residents of the Naga Hills largely depended on the land to feed them. With water drawn from wells and springs, and using local labour, they grew vegetables, and what could not be grown they bought or bartered for: rice, goat meat and fruit. The cooking was European; only on Saturdays did they eat curry, and then it was a bland concoction.

The railway engineer W. H. Prendergast, who arrived in the area around the same time as Charles Pawsey, recalled nights in the government bungalows deep in the forest where a ‘fiendish shriek … made every nerve tingle, as some animal was chased to death’. Prendergast’s work on the railway line near Dimapur was hindered by the effects of earthquakes and by elephants which were in the habit of tearing up the wooden sleepers. For anybody travelling in the forests the tiger was the most dangerous enemy, stalking its prey through the thick foliage, a silent springing killer that could drag a man down from the back of an elephant. One man-eating tigress killed eleven people, including a soldier, before a Kuki tribesman, armed with an ancient muzzle-loading rifle, managed to kill her. By day the hills pulsated with the noise of wildlife. Gibbons and rhesus monkeys screeched in the canopy, while brilliantly coloured birds flashed through the trees – hornbills, the symbol of the Naga people, rare Burmese peafowl, and the bar-backed pheasant.

In the monsoon months Pawsey could find himself severely restricted. The rain swamped the jungle tracks and whole hillsides would come crashing down, a wall of rock and mud blocking the paths, forcing diversions through the jungle with its abundant leeches and the danger of malaria. Pawsey’s friend, the anthropologist Henry Balfour, curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, described a typical day travelling in the Naga Hills during the 1920s: ‘The going was appallingly slippery and it was not easy to keep the horses on their legs on the narrow ledge-like track … Most of the way it is rather “trick-riding” along a ledge track with a nearly sheer fall on one side.’ Conditions had changed little twenty years later when British and Japanese troops operating in the hills would see animals and men plunge to their deaths over these sheer drops.

When the Second World War broke out few in Delhi believed they would find Japanese armies sitting on the Burmese border. Once this situation presented itself, Charles Pawsey understood that it would fall to him to ensure that the Naga people and the other tribes of the Naga Hills did not go over to the Japanese. Given their history with the British they might have been tempted.

The story of rebellion in the Naga Hills is one of the least known of the colonial wars of conquest, but, once the extent of the bloodshed and the repression meted out to the tribespeople is understood, the magnitude of Pawsey’s task not only in maintaining peace but in recruiting the Naga into the formidable network of fighters, spies, scouts and porters who would help save the British at Kohima becomes all the more remarkable.

The British called them ‘barbarous tribes of independent savages’. Caught as they were between the advance of British imperialism and the equally ambitious kings of neighbouring Burma, the tribes of the Naga Hills could be forgiven for employing ‘savagery’ in defence of their independence. British interest in the Hills dated to the first Anglo-Burmese war of 1826 but the first military expedition was not launched until 1839 to punish villages that had raided into Assam. In the fighting that followed the invaders discovered that although ‘armed with only with spears, daos and a very few old muskets, [they] were a foe by no means to be despised’.

Closer in appearance to the people of Tibet and Nepal than to the Indian people of the plains, the Naga people are believed to be descended from tribes of hunter-gatherers who roamed out of the Pacific region and settled across the central Asian plateau. The Nagas encountered by early British explorers were tough warriors, divided into clans and sub-clans, which might share a village but have separate allegiances. They were led by elders who debated important issues around a ceremonial fire. The Naga martial culture, and that of other mountain tribes like the Kuki, centred around the taking of heads. A Naga male could not consider himself a true man until he had taken his first head, and the greater the number of heads taken in battle, the greater the prestige of the warrior. It was believed that in capturing the head a warrior seized the spirit and vitality of his enemy. The rotting heads would decorate the eaves of the Nagas’ bamboo and thatch homes, or would be hung from ceremonial poles in the villages. When it came to warfare, men, women and children were all considered fair game. A British military observer in 1879 cited one witness: ‘A party from one village attacked one of the clans of another large village in pursuance of a blood feud while the men were all away in the fields, and massacred the whole of the women and children … One of the onlookers told me … that he never saw such “fine sport: it was just like killing fowls”.’

Miekonu Angami grew up in the powerful village of Khonoma, which contained no fewer than three stone ‘khels’, or forts. As a child he saw the warriors returning home with the heads of their enemies. ‘They would cut close to the chin and catch the hair and carry the head that way … sometimes they brought the ears only. They put the heads and ears at the gate and everybody would come and touch the head and then could pass into the village. It was like saying a prayer. After that they would make a party and only the men could come to that.’ He could remember, too, a time between the wars when the British killed some warriors and dumped the bodies outside the village, laughing and shouting at the villagers. ‘Before, the British did not control us: there were brave men and great headhunters who were our leaders.’ Despite his feelings about the British, Miekonu would learn to prefer them to the Japanese.

The Nagas were gifted craftsmen and created a rich culture of visual art, exemplified in clothing, carving and body tattoos. A Naga warrior would cut his hair in a pudding-bowl shape and decorate it with the bright feathers of a forest bird and the tusks of a wild boar; he would garland his ears with shells and feathers or with the tresses of one of his victims; while around his neck he would string numerous strands of brightly coloured beads. The shawls they wore varied according to sex, age and marital status. For the warriors they could be red, or a mix of red and yellow stripes against a black background, often adorned with symbols denoting wealth and martial prowess. The warriors’ shields were frequently adorned with the hair of those they had slain in battle.

Until the First Anglo-Burmese war, the Naga Hills were nominally under the control of the Burmese kings of Ava. Under the Treaty of Yandaboo the lands were ceded to the British, who, like the previous rulers, exercised nominal control, certainly for the first fifty years of their administration.* The outsider presence was restricted to groups of missionaries, occasional explorers and anthropologists, and the more intrepid traders from the Assam plains.

By the 1870s, however, a combination of Naga raids into British-administered territory and the expansionist designs of the Raj towards neighbouring Burma made a more comprehensive imperial intervention inevitable. Another factor intervened, too: the discovery of wild tea growing in the jungles of Assam had led to a massive programme of plantation along the frontiers of the Naga territory and the importation of hundreds of thousands of indentured labourers. The presence of unruly tribes who could threaten the future of this lucrative enterprise was not to be tolerated. The Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, Sir Cecil Beadon, a man of notably dubious judgment, was concerned that, ‘exposed as Assam is on every side, if petty outrages are to be followed up by withdrawal of our frontier, we should very speedily find ourselves driven out of the province’.† Contemporary accounts of the fighting that followed are full of references to ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’. It is the language of a particular time, when the unassimilated native, whether on the North-West Frontier or in the jungles of the Naga Hills, was viewed by the imperial warrior with a mixture of fear, bemusement and condescension.

In November 1878 the Raj extended its administrative reach to what was then the native village of Kohima, at the centre of the most troublesome of the Naga districts and lying along a mountain track that led to the plains of Manipur, a princely state whose maharajah gave his allegiance to the British.* The British appointed a political officer, G. H. Damant, to Kohima in 1878, and when he set out for some mutinous Naga villages with only a small escort, the inevitable occurred. Despite being warned by friendly villagers not to continue on his way, Damant rode at the head of the column, straight into an ambush at Khonoma. Thirty-nine men were killed, including Damant, whose headless and handless corpse was found months later by a British patrol. The official inquiry noted, with characteristic understatement, that his preparations ‘had not in all respects been well judged’. A general rebellion followed the killing of Damant and the Naga advanced on the British fort at Kohima where 414 people, including women and children, had sought shelter. The first siege of Kohima began on 16 October 1879. There were just over 130 men under arms inside the stockade, but many of them were raw recruits, and the water situation was perilous. Attackers could easily cut off the spring that flowed into the fort.

Water rations were reduced to a quarter and food began to run low. A contemporary account described what a ‘pitiful sight it was to see the poor little creatures [children] crowding together, holding out their cups’. The siege was eventually lifted when a British officer leading Manipuri state troops rode through the mountains and scattered the Nagas. The retribution was savage. A punishment force of 1,300 troops, all of them Indians under British officers, along with mountain artillery and rocket units, was sent into the Naga territory in November 1879. As they advanced the British burned villages and destroyed the Nagas’ crops and livestock, rendering thousands of people destitute. The less militant villages were fined in rice and made to provide labour for the army. Villages that failed to supply the number of coolies demanded as forced labour were warned with the firing of shells and rockets around the settlement. ‘This had the desired effect and the coolies were speedily produced,’ the commanding officer reported.

In his telegram to the government of India at the end of the campaign the expedition commander, General Nation, was exultant, taking particular pride in the punishment meted out to the Khonoma Nagas, the most troublesome of the clans. ‘Their lands have all been confiscated and themselves broken up as a village community forever … The occupation of the country for so long by such a large body of troops has inflicted serious punishment, as we have drawn largely on their supplies of grain and labour … their fortified village [has been] levelled with the ground, and their magnificent stone-faced, terraced rice land, the work of generations, has been confiscated.’ In this manner was the Pax Britannica brought to the Naga Hills.

In Parliament the following year the Irish Home Rule MP, Frank Hugh O’Donnell, asked, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, whether ‘the Nagas have asked for annexation to the British Dominions’. The British then dispatched a deputy commissioner to Kohima, as well as political officers working under his direction. Together, they acted as a mix of spy, liaison officer, magistrate and mediator, and above all they provided an early warning system to ensure that Delhi was never again surprised by an uprising. Peace of a kind settled on the hills.

In 1918, when Charles Pawsey was fighting on the Italian front, the territory was again convulsed by violence. This time it was not the Nagas but a neighbouring tribe, the Kukis, who rebelled against the British, an uprising partly motivated by fear that men were about to be forcibly recruited to serve in the Labour Corps on the Western Front. The British achieved their declared aim of ‘break[ing] the Kuki spirit’ by blockading their fields. ‘For had they not surrendered … they would have been too late to prepare the ground for the next harvest, and would in consequence have been faced with famine.’ A total of 126 villages were burned. The official report noted that a policy of search and destroy ‘energetically carried out’ and ‘giving them no rest at all … has always subdued rebellious savages and semi-civilised races’.

The last uprising of any significance took place in 1931, before Charles Pawsey became deputy commissioner but at a time when he would have been working in the Naga Hills. A Naga religious visionary rose against the British and proclaimed a sixteen-year-old girl named Gaidiliu to be his priestess. She told her people to destroy their grain because the end of the British time was coming and they would inherit a new world. The priestess also promised the warriors that by sprinkling them with holy water she would protect them from the bullets of the enemy. When they charged a section of Gurkhas at Hangrum village eleven warriors were killed and many more wounded. Gaidiliu was eventually captured and imprisoned for fourteen years.*

Four years later, a statutory commission, which included Labour’s Clement Attlee and the Tory MP Stuart Cadogan, visited the Naga Hills to investigate the opinions of the local tribes. Cadogan referred to the Naga as ‘little headhunters’ who met the British for a palaver. ‘Presumably the District Commissioner had informed the tribal chieftain that my head was of no intrinsic value as he evinced no disposition to transfer it from my shoulders to his headhunter’s basket which was slung over his back and was, I think, the only garment he affected.’ Cadogan listened while the Nagas spoke of their fears about the future. Rumours about the protests led by Mr Gandhi and his Congress Party had reached the Naga Hills. The British politicians were told that the tribespeople feared the arrival of a ‘Black King’ who would replace the Raj. It is a measure of the isolation in which they had been kept that they told the delegation they preferred to have Queen Victoria as their ruler. Cadogan told the House of Commons: ‘they are an extremely moral people and live apparently decent lives, and … if we leave them alone, they will leave us alone.’ Clement Attlee, who as prime minister would eventually have to decide on the future of India and the Nagas, agreed with Cadogan: ‘There was overwhelming evidence that these people must be protected, and that they are far more liable to exploitation.’

Another British visitor was RAF Sergeant Fred Hill who spent a week living among the Naga as part of a survival course. Hill’s memories are not those of an anthropologist or a politician but of a working-class boy from Birmingham entranced by an alien world. From the Nagas he learned how water could be found in bamboo stalks and how to watch what the monkeys ate because ‘whatever they eat you can eat because if it kills the monkeys then it will kill you’. But he also recorded the deaths of Nagas from food poisoning as a result of eating rotting rations abandoned by the British. ‘Civilisation was no good to them, not our type of civilisation.’

Charles Pawsey saw his mission as one of protection. To achieve this he enforced the doctrine of Naga separateness laid down by the Raj. Visitors to the Naga Hills had to have a permit, and these were given out sparingly. Except in isolated cases, the planting of land for commercial purposes was forbidden. The same prohibition applied to private industry, with a handful of exceptions. Within the constraints of the imperial imagination this policy was benign and it ensured relative peace in the region, but its effect was to preserve Naga life in a political vacuum. As one Indian writer has put it, ‘Any observer of the North-East Indian situation may conclude that the tribal people there were purposely kept in isolation from the Indian nationhood.’ The logic of Naga separateness, codified under imperial rule, was to have devastating consequences when the Raj retreated.

Pawsey, like so many other servants of the Raj, could hardly have foreseen what war and the rising tide of nationalism would do to this world within a very short space of time. But the Japanese conquests in 1941–42 had an electrifying effect in India. By the summer of 1942 Gandhi and his supporters in the Congress Party had launched the Quit India campaign, demanding an immediate British withdrawal.* In the tea country of Assam next to the Naga Hills there were anti-British protests. In September 1942 thirteen people were shot dead in demonstrations at police stations. The following month Congress activists derailed a train carrying British troops into Assam, causing several deaths and widespread injuries. A militant was hanged and many others were sentenced to long prison terms. British troops arriving in India that year cound find themselves confronting angry crowds. Captain Gordon Graham of the Cameron Highlanders arrived with the British 2nd Division in June 1942 and recalled asking a Sikh man for directions to the police station: ‘My friend,’ the Sikh told him, ‘you will learn that the police in India are not here to help people. And neither are you.’

But among the Naga population, mistrustful of the Indians from the plains, there was negligible support for the Congress protests. If anything, Naga opinion had been radicalised in support of the British by the behaviour of some Indian troops retreating through the Naga Hills from Burma earlier in 1942. Rape and looting were reported from several areas as gangs of deserters moved towards Assam. To the Nagas, Charles Pawsey and his colonial administration seemed a far safer bet than the unknown quantity of an Indian liberation movement.

Still, the world of genteel drinks parties at Pawsey’s bungalow, of long treks into the interior by visiting anthropologists and botanists, of illiterate tribesmen living by the fiat of British officials, was slipping towards its twilight. Its last hurrah would be glorious and tragic, a drama of war that was both modern and inescapably Victorian, replete with outnumbered garrison, fanatical enemy, heroic last stands, and a cast of characters whose diversity and eccentricity belonged to the age of high empire.

* The Indian Tea Association (ITA) established a ‘Refugee Organisation’ to help deal with the influx of people into Assam. It was an early example of a civilian administered aid effort that would become so common in the later years of the 20th century.

* The Treaty of Yandaboo was signed in February 1826 and brought to an end the First Anglo-Burmese War. The treaty was a humiliation for the Burmese monarchy, which lost control over vast tracts of territory. Fifteen thousand British and Indian troops died in the war and many more on the Burmese side.

† Sir Cecil Beadon (1816–80) was criticised in an official report and in the House of Commons for his administrative failures during the Bengal famine of 1866–67 and ended his career in ignominy. He also told a House of Commons committee on the opium trade that the government was motivated solely by considerations of revenue, and that it would ‘probably not’ be moved by concerns about the ill effects of opium on those who bought it. Frederick Storrs Turner, British Opium Policy and its Results to India and China (Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1876), p. 256.

* This loyalty lasted only until 1891 when palace intrigues deposed the maharajah and installed a regent. On arriving to punish the usurper, the British were greeted by a band playing ‘God Save the Queen’. After a good dinner at the residency the British retired to bed, and were promptly attacked and their forces routed. NA, WO 32/8400, Proceedings of the Court of Inquiry assembled at Manipur on the 30th April 1891 and following days to investigate the circumstances connected with recent events in Manipur.

* Rani Gaidiliu survived the Second World War and was declared an honoured freedom fighter by the government of Jawaharlal Nehru. She went underground again in the 1960s when she led her followers against the dominant Naga political group in a brief civil war.

* The Quit India campaign was launched on 8 August 1942 after the failure of the mission by Sir Stafford Cripps to persuade Congress to support the war in return for a gradual devolution of power and the promise of dominion status. Gandhi called for immediate independence and was immediately arrested along with Nehru and the rest of the senior leadership of Congress, who would spend the next three years of the war in jail. There were an estimated 100,000 arrests and several hundred deaths in the rioting and crackdown that followed. By March 1943 the campaign had been suppressed, although the British had to devote fifty-seven battalions to maintaining internal security. The British official history of the war estimated that the training of a number of army formations and reinforcements was set back by up to two months and ‘there was a general loss of production in all factories turning out arms, clothing and equipment’. S. Woodburn Kirby, The War Against Japan, vol. 2: India’s Most Dangerous Hour (HMSO, 1958), p. 247.

FOUR
The King Emperor’s Spear

On their way to Kohima from Burma, refugees would occasionally encounter Japanese units. They were not prevented from leaving Burma by the patrols and were usually able to carry the news of their encounters to Pawsey and the tea-planters who were organizing the relief effort. ‘Some of them gave us the grim information,’ wrote a planter, ‘that the Japs did not intend to bomb the road too badly as they looked forward to making full use of it themselves.’ The British and Indian forces were in no state to face a serious Japanese offensive. The 1st Glosters were stationed in Kohima as part of 17th Indian Division from August 1942 but were still suffering the effects of the retreat. As well as sick and wounded, a high proportion of troops were on leave. The battalion had left most of its equipment behind in Burma and supplies of food were short because of transport problems. As Captain H. L. T. Radice recalled, the road was constantly disintegrating because of heavy rain. ‘As a result, the battalion was on half rations.’ A Japanese reconnaissance plane came over frequently, but to the intense relief of the Kohima garrison it was never followed up by an air raid. As the refugees left, the village returned to its usual function as supply depot, a convalescent centre for sick and wounded troops, and the administrative headquarters of the Raj in the Naga Hills. Soon the officers were enjoying a social life once more. Lieutenant Dennis Dawson of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps described a bucolic existence: ‘It [was] a lovely place, a sleepy place. We had parties. There were three hospitals. Plenty of nurses and we thought “well this is a lovely life up here”.’

The autumn of 1942 was taken up with training exercises. The most excitement was a series of mock attacks on each other’s camps. Patrols were sent out to gain knowledge of the country and its people. ‘Everywhere these patrols went,’ said Captain Radice of the 1st Glosters, ‘the local Naga tribesmen showed themselves to be friendly and hospitable.’ From his experience of the terrain, Charles Pawsey understood that the first line of defence against any potential Japanese incursion into the area, large or small, should be an ‘invisible’ intelligence screen. Regular formations marching in long columns could not provide this. Only the Nagas could pass through the jungle as ghosts, moving between India and Burma to spy on Japanese troop concentrations, ingratiating themselves with Japanese officers by pretending to support the overthrow of the British and hanging around Japanese camps to pick up intelligence while playing the role of simple-minded rustics. One of the more exotic snippets that later reached army intelligence came from a Naga who reported the presence of a Japanese commander ‘living with two wives and a maid and … having two monkeys with him trained to hurl grenades’. The unnamed officer who wrote down this story added a coda that speaks loudly of contemporary attitudes: the information had come, he wrote, ‘from a Naga who may not have known the difference between a Jap and a monkey’.

The dilemma for the planners in military intelligence was how to use the Nagas and other tribal groups in a way that imposed some kind of order on operations but allowed them the freedom to range behind enemy lines. By the standards of contemporary military thinking the answer was unusually flexible. Lieutenant Barry Bowman, commander of a Chindit reconnaissance platoon later in the war, was standing in a jungle clearing one day when he heard a clanking noise coming down the track. The platoon took cover and waited to open fire, convinced it was a Japanese unit. ‘To our great relief and surprise an elephant hove into view. On its back was a crude bamboo howdah and perched half-in and half-out of it was an eccentrically clad British officer who waved to us cheerily … A quick cup of tea and he was on his way … he was a tall, biblically bearded fellow in flowing white robes, striding along at a great pace holding up a large black umbrella against the sun … His personal servant close behind him carrying a 12 bore shotgun.’ Bowman had met an officer of V Force, one of the more esoteric units of the entire war, a combination of tea-planters, adventurers, regular officers, old soldiers, former headhunters and Indian troops. In the Naga Hills the local tribes would act as guides, spies and soldiers in the ranks of V Force.*

The founder of V Force was Brigadier A. Felix Williams who, at forty-seven, had already spent fifteen years learning the art of guerrilla warfare on the North-West Frontier. As commander of the Tochi Scouts,† he had pursued the Fakir of Ipi up and down the mountains and gullies of Waziristan. To establish V Force, Williams was given £100,000 and a headquarters staff, and promised a delivery of 6,000 rifles. The guns never turned up, so the brigadier embarked on an extraordinary gun-running operation. He sent his men into the bazaars of India’s great cities to buy up what weapons they could. Then he turned to the most reliable suppliers in the entire subcontinent, the arms dealers of the North-West Frontier. Under the direction of local police, the gunsmiths of Peshawar turned out thousands of rifles which were shipped to Assam in a first-class carriage. Some of the money given to Williams was spent on enticements for the Naga Hill tribes: red blankets, beads, osprey feathers, opium and elephant tusks were among the cargo carried into the villages where men would be recruited into V Force. Many of the V Force officers were planters or policemen, whose local knowledge and years of experience with the hill tribes were thought to make them better suited to clandestine operations than regular soldiers. The truth was that it depended almost entirely on the individual: some V Force officers took to the life with gusto while others became sick and dispirited, discovering that weeks of trekking in thick jungle were a different prospect altogether from walking the hills of a tea plantation.

In its early days V Force enjoyed considerable freedom. It was supplied by the army but operated according to the instincts of its officers, many of them characters who would never have fitted into normal military routines. Operating in the Naga Hills later in the war, Lieutenant Bowman discovered that patrolling in the tribal areas could be a source of both trial and astonishment. Like almost every other officer engaged in special operations, he was impressed by the Nagas’ loyalty to the British. This was the outer limit of empire and yet echoes of home could be found in the most unlikely places. Entering a village one evening, Bowman’s patrol was greeted heartily by the headman. ‘The Pahok headman was extremely pro-British and insisted on us having dinner in his big long hut. It was all very claustrophobic, full of smoke and very dark with just one or two primitive oil lamps. However, the chicken and rice and rice beer were extremely welcome. The headman rounded off the evening by producing a battered old HMV gramophone on which he played his only record – it was Harry Lauder singing his old music hall song “Keep right on to the end of the road”. Highly appropriate.’ In another village the headman saved the lives of Bowman and his colleagues by alerting them to the presence of Japanese in a nearby hut. Having sprinted into the jungle, Bowman then regrouped with his unit and worked back to cover near the hut. ‘I decided not to hang around any longer and we opened fire. The Japs leapt and fell back under the hut and we raked the hut for a few rounds more and then hightailed back up the hill.’

Each of the six V Force areas was covered by at least two cells operating independently of each other, so that information could be cross-checked in case the Japanese tried to spread false intelligence. But the idea of using the V Force units as proper guerrillas gradually faded away because they could never muster enough firepower or trained men to challenge the Japanese in battle. The jungle also took a heavy toll. As one V Force commander, Colonel R. A. W. Binny, wrote, ‘Experienced officers were wounded, went sick or were relieved and their places filled by young officers from units in India. Though keen enough they could not quite keep up the patrolling standards or endure the same hardships as the earlier ones.’ The hardships were considerable, particularly for young men fresh from barracks in India. Lieutenant Colonel Ord, who commanded 5 V Ops Area, wrote that all the men under his command had to be able to march an average of thirty miles a day across the hills, unencumbered by heavy baggage. ‘A heavily loaded man is not a guerrilla.’

There were other, more esoteric elements to their jungle education. Edward Lewis was a V Force officer operating inside Burma, where local Chin tribesmen instructed him in the traditional means of body disposal. ‘When somebody died they put the body into a tree and let the ants eat the flesh. They would then go and collect the bones and put them in a hole.’ An official document noted that the Chins operating with V Force were ‘very fond of biting each other which is considered more satisfying than a mere brawl with knives’.

The V Force experiment was far from perfect: sectarian feuding among local tribes in the Arakan compromised its operations; and the lack of experienced officers inevitably reduced efficiency. An attempt to introduce fiercely warlike Afridi tribesmen from the arid North-West Frontier into the jungles under V Force command ended in mutiny and the disbandment of the Afridi Legion. A few senior generals viewed V Force, and all similar secret organisations, with disdain, believing they absorbed considerable resources for minimal gain. Some of this was undoubtedly based on genuine concerns, but there was also a strong element of prejudice. General Slim was more generous. ‘Later, along the whole front,’ he wrote, ‘V Force became an important and very valuable part of the whole intelligence framework.’ The Commander-in-Chief India, Sir Archibald Wavell, visited V Force headquarters at Imphal, nearly ninety miles from Kohima, where, having listened to an officer outline plans, he gave his blessing in a few brief sentences: ‘Good. Remember I back you. Make and commission your own officers. If you want help let me know. Good night.’

At the age of twenty-four she had made her first solo journey into the jungle. ‘There was a great deal of tut-tutting and a firm belief that at the end of three days I would be borne home in a fainting fit.’ Instead, Ursula Graham Bower stayed out for several weeks and came back ‘happy as a sandboy’, clutching specimens of Naga art. Her second trip took her to the Ukhrul district, on the border with Manipur, an area where the Nagas still practised headhunting and where three unfortunate Manipuri traders had been decapitated a short time previously. Ursula Graham Bower rationalised the practice: ‘If you come home with the head then you know that the rest of the gentleman is not looking for you.’

Within three years of that first jungle excursion, Ursula Graham Bower was commanding her own unit of V Force in the Naga Hills. The story of her conversion from Roedean debutante to commander of a tribal force is one of the most extraordinary of the war. The creation of V Force had led to a demand for officers who had lived among and were trusted by the Nagas. In the febrile atmosphere of 1942 this meant sweeping away the normal conventions of recruitment and opening the way for mavericks like Graham Bower.

She first visited the Naga Hills in 1937 when her ambition to study archaeology at Oxford was thwarted by a slump in the family fortunes. That summer a schoolfriend, Alexa McDonald, invited Ursula to accompany her to India, to visit her brother who was a civil servant in Manipur. The two women went by ship, train, river steamer, train again, car, foot and bamboo river raft. Travelling by raft, they knitted to while away the hours drifting down long rivers. Stopping to explore a small island, they had to run for their lives after a guide spotted tiger prints in the mud. After her adventure Ursula would never feel at ease in London again. Back home she began to cultivate senior fellows of the Royal Geographical Society, impressing them with her knowledge of Naga life and her enthusiasm for research. She made a second visit to Naga country before returning home in April 1939 to join the London Ambulance Service as war approached. The boredom of the phoney war, ‘knitting interminable jumpers and waiting for a siren that never came’, and her longing for the Naga Hills got the better of her and she announced to her family that she was going back to India. They responded with shock, suspecting that she had ‘gone completely off her rocker’, but hoping that she might meet a nice young officer in India – somebody who might prove more capable than they had been of taming her adventurous spirit.

She reached Kohima in November 1939, only to be told that a permit to travel out into the hills could not be granted yet. For reasons that were probably to do with the outbreak of war, the Naga Hills were strictly off-limits on the orders of the political agent. Frustrated in her ambition, Ursula Graham Bower suffered a nervous breakdown. ‘I hadn’t realised that a shock of this sort could stun one physically,’ she wrote. ‘I remember almost nothing of the next twenty-four hours.’ She went to see the political agent in person at Manipur, but he would not change his decision. Afterwards Ursula wandered alone in the dusk for hours. Her nervous collapse lasted a fortnight, during which time she put away or locked up anything that might be used as a suicide weapon. ‘It was a giddy path. The holds were so small; one clung hand by hand, a finger.’

Eventually permission was granted and she set off for the Cachar Hills, some eighty miles, as the crow flies, from Kohima. This was a district adjoining the Naga Hills, where the sixteen-year-old priestess-cum-rebel Gaidiliu had been active against the British. Gaidiliu had told her followers that even in prison the British could not kill her spirit, and that she would return in a form that her enemies would be unable to recognise.

When Ursula Graham Bower arrived she was surrounded by adoring locals who clearly believed she was the vanished priestess. The impression was reinforced by her physical appearance: the Englishwoman was tall and statuesque. ‘She [Gaidiliu] was tall and rather strongly built and one of her more lunatic followers decided I was the reincarnation … half the population appeared to go stark staring mad … they were rushing at me clawing at me and calling me Goddess.’ Warriors who had fought under Gaidiliu came in from their villages to see the reincarnation. Privacy became impossible. At one point she was having a bath when an elderly man carrying a gift of a chicken walked into her hut. She had no towel and only a bar of soap with which to cover herself. She screamed and a bodyguard rushed in to hustle the old man out. When she reported back to the government an official told her, with the ingrained cynicism of his species, that ‘if they must have a goddess they might as well have a government one’.

Ursula’s parents had nurtured visions of her attending glittering balls in Delhi or taking afternoon tea in Simla, but by the middle of 1942 their debutante daughter was about to become the first female guerrilla commander in the history of British arms. Although her only experience of war thus far had been taking care of refugees and wounded soldiers coming out of Burma, the fact that she lived in the hills and was respected by the local Nagas made Ursula Graham Bower a logical choice for command.

After consulting with Charles Pawsey and other officials, the head of V Force dispatched an elderly officer to bring her the news of her appointment. The man he sent, Colonel Douglas Rawdon Wright, was an old India hand who had ridden with the Deccan Horse on the Somme in one of the last great cavalry charges of British arms. He had also spent several years as an officer with the Assam Rifles. Although badly wounded in the leg on the Western Front and forced to retire to England, he yearned to return to the India where he had soldiered as a young man. Colonel Rawdon Wright badgered the military authorities for a job. Eventually they sent him out to Assam to a desk job with V Force. Rawdon Wright soon tired of the inertia of headquarters and the nagging sense that younger men were laughing at the desk-bound old warrior with the pronounced limp. When asked to go into the Cachar Hills and give Ursula Graham Bower news of her command he seized the opportunity with enthusiasm.

Looking out of her bungalow one August lunchtime, Graham Bower saw an elderly white man limping down the narrow path to the village. She immediately sent a man with a note to invite the visitor to lunch. A reply came a few minutes later: ‘So sorry but I’ve got a gammy leg. I’d better go straight on down to the rest-house.’ Later in the afternoon she made her way down to meet the colonel and saw that he was unable to bend his leg. But when they set out to explore the district he refused all offers of help from the Nagas: he would not be carried about ‘like a woman’ or some effete civil servant from Delhi. And so the group traversed steep inclines over several miles while Rawdon Wright struggled along, sometimes going down on all fours to force his way upwards, and all the time chatting with Graham Bower about the quality of the fishing in the hills or about people they knew in common in Kohima and Imphal. ‘He was superb,’ she wrote later. ‘We might have been sitting in a club veranda.’ On his way back down from the hills the Naga offered to provide a litter on which he could be comfortably carried. Again he refused. Graham Bower’s account of his departure can be read as an elegy not only for an old soldier, but for an ideal of imperial duty that was entering its twilight. She stood with the village headman and watched the colonel climb over the rocks and over the slippery ground, leaning on the shoulder of his guide until he reached the turn of the road that would take him out of view. He stopped and turned back to wave. ‘We waved back. Then the white shirt was gone. Nobody said anything, because there was too much to say.’ On his way down to the plains he fell over three times. The journey ruined his health and he was dead before the end of the year.

Ursula Graham Bower lived in the Cachar Hills among terraced rice paddies whose surfaces glistened like signalling mirrors whenever the sun broke through the monsoon clouds. The area had recently experienced severe hunger, the consequence of decades of competition over land, and the destruction of the rice crop by grasshoppers. Graham Bower believed the area, which lay outside Charles Pawsey’s bailiwick, had been neglected and mismanaged by officials ‘not always of the best type’, men who regarded Cachar as merely a way station on the road to a better job. The government was not loved here; there was an awareness of neglect, and lingering bitterness over the suppression of the Gaidiliu rebellion, which would test Graham Bower’s political skills to the utmost. Colonel Rawdon Wright had told her to recruit from all the villages of the area. Recruit first, he said, and the guns and ammunition would follow. But then what? By now the stories of what the Japanese did to anybody they captured were well known. Death from a bullet would be a highly desirable outcome for a young woman caught with a weapon in the Naga Hills. A V Force patrol that had infiltrated back into Burma at the end of the previous May had been captured by the Japanese near the Chindwin river. An Indian officer had had his eyes gouged out before being killed, while two tribal scouts had been tied to a tree and executed.

Ursula Graham Bower would never have recruited her little army, or found the confidence to lead operations, without the help of Namkiabuing, a warrior of the Zemi Naga group, who became her bodyguard and assistant. She wrote of him in terms that rose above the contemporary European discourse of the ‘good native’. ‘He had an intense, a vivid sense of right and wrong. They were to him a personal responsibility. He could no more compromise with wrong than he could stop breathing.’ From the start Namkia made it clear that he was no pliant instrument of European rule. The two argued regularly and he submitted frequent resignations before returning to work. His granddaughter, Azwala, thought Namkia regarded Ursula more as a younger sister than as his employer: ‘He was very protective to her … because … they do not have a sister. So Ursula Graham Bower was a very beloved sister of the family.’

It was in the villages that Namkia proved his gift for debate. There were many in the area with bad memories of recruitment during the First World War, when labour battalions were raised for the Western Front. The men who returned brought back tales of horror. Graham Bower recorded a typical argument during one of her recruitment drives:

A Hangrum man [stood] up: ‘You’ll take us away! It’s a trap!’

Namkia [stood] up in an answer: ‘No! It’s an honest offer!’

‘Why should we fight for the Sahibs? We didn’t fight for the Kacharis, we didn’t fight for the Manipuris – why should we fight for the British?’

Namkia again: ‘Why shouldn’t we? Did the Kacharis or the Manipuris stop the Angamis raiding? Haven’t the Sahibs done that? Haven’t they given us roads and salt markets? Haven’t they given us protection and peace? Don’t we owe them something for that?’

And so it went on. Recruits were eventually offered but they were not warriors. Graham Bower noted that the village had offered up ‘the lame, the halt and blind’. Eventually, after she had sworn an oath that the men would not be taken away from the hills, the village relented and offered fitter specimens.

Next, the problem was to arm the recruits from the different villages. It was government policy to keep arms out of the hands of the Nagas and other tribes in order to stop them raiding each other or turning the weapons on the British. The arrival of the Japanese on the border removed this restraint. Graham Bower’s men were issued with guns, ninety ancient muzzle-loaders, which were probably as much a danger to themselves as to the Japanese. Still, they boosted the recruits’ self-esteem and their confidence in Graham Bower. They patrolled the hills with knowledge of the terrain and of concealment that no European could have matched. V Force headquarters gave orders that they were to avoid engagement with the enemy. Intelligence gathering was the priority.

A British soldier sent to learn jungle warfare skills with Graham Bower remembered her effect on both the Nagas and his British comrades. ‘When she spoke she had the most beautifully cultured voice and when she spoke we were captivated. Everyone of us said later that if she said “I want you to hang yourself by the neck from the nearest tree,” I am sure we would have done it. And these Nagas worshipped her.’

Closer to Kohima, Charles Pawsey had his own Naga intelligence network constantly bringing updates from the border area. In early September 1943 he received a message from a village reporting a suspicious-looking man claiming to be local but believed to be Japanese or Chinese. A fortnight later Pawsey was reporting to his deputy that ‘Japanese in great numbers had entered the hills … three villages have been bombed and burned for disobeying their orders and five people killed’. There were worrying reports, too, about some village chiefs offering their services as guides to the Japanese in return for gifts of salt. The Naga Hills were tense and expectant.

Perhaps because of wartime tension, the sense of the prevailing order being threatened, the hills experienced a brief revival of headhunting in late 1943. The Governor’s Fortnightly Report for the first half of December recorded that two villages had joined with a Burmese village in a major raid across the border. A second report to the Governor evoked the tense nature of affairs: ‘In the Naga Hills Tribal Area the powerful Konyak village of Sangnyu is reported to be threatening to interfere with the carriage of supplies for us by Zangkam who are their hereditary enemies.’

There were less threatening annoyances. Ursula Graham Bower was disturbed one morning by the arrival of an officer with a large retinue of porters. He had made his way to her post by claiming that he was a V Force officer. The lieutenant was in fact attached to an engineering unit and had been sent to look at the wreckage of a crashed American aircraft. Graham Bower was suspicious of the empty litter being carried by his men. When questioned, he told her it was for a sick subordinate. But the Nagas discovered that it had been used to carry the lieutenant through the hills, ‘making him the laughing stock of several villages in the process’. He told the Naga headman that because he was over forty he could not walk the difficult terrain. The headman was himself over sixty. It was an image of simpering weakness that could undermine the image of V Force among the local tribes. Remembering poor old Rawdon Wright and his brave progress across the hills, Graham Bower was furious and decided to teach the newcomer a lesson. ‘We had not been so bitter or angry for years,’ she wrote. Having learned that the lieutenant was also terrified of the ghosts that were reputed to stalk the hills, she arranged for two Nagas to terrorise him with fearful noises throughout the night. He left the following morning, whey-faced with exhaustion and fear.

Both Ursula Graham Bower and Charles Pawsey decided to stay on the wild frontier and take whatever the war might bring. Although as different in personality as it was possible to be – she the feisty extrovert, he the eternal reticent – they were driven by something more than duty to the empire. One could describe what they came to feel for the Nagas as loyalty, except that it was more intimate than that. By different paths they had come to love the Naga people and would stand or fall with them when the hurricane struck. It was a love that would be reciprocated at Kohima in courage and blood.

* Set up in 1942, the plan was for V Force to operate in six areas along the 800 mile frontier between India and Burma, with headquarters at Cinnamara in Assam. Its existence was predicated on the assumption that the Japanese would eventually attack. In the event, V Force was to remain behind and carry out hit-and-run operations. Several other clandestine groups, including Z Force and Force 136, as well as the Special Operations Executive, also operated in the frontier area.

† The Tochi Scouts were made up of around twenty white officers and 2,000 native troops. The Canadian correspondent Gordon Sinclair wrote in his book Khyber Caravan (reissued by Long Riders’ Guild Press, 2001) that they were ‘the only branch of the service who did, and do, wheel into action on their own responsibility without the okay of politicians’.

FIVE
Kentish Men

In old age it could still fill them with pride and reduce them to an agonising grief. Only in the company of those who had been with them could they hope for true understanding. That would be the nature of Kohima for the survivors of 4th battalion, Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment. Yet at the time they joined up not one among them could have imagined fighting a war in the jungles of north-eastern India. Germany and Italy were the only enemies then and the war was just a few miles away on the other side of the Channel.

Citizen soldiers. It is an overused phrase, but it is hard to think of another that could properly describe the men of 4th battalion, a Territorial Army formation made up of men who had joined up before the war, and others who had been transferred from local militia after limited conscription was introduced in April 1939. The formation of which they were a part traced its roots to the eighteenth century, when it was raised as a regiment of foot during the Seven Years War. In time, and with the depredations of war, the battalion would absorb fresh drafts of men from all over Britain, but at the outset it was overwhelmingly Kentish in character, and most of its officers and men amateur soldiers.

The coastline of their county, with its long sandy beaches, towering cliffs and sheltered coves, had witnessed the landing of the Roman conquerors and now beckoned to Hitler’s armies a few hours’ sail away in France. The officers and men of the 4th West Kents shared an attachment to this landscape, a county still dominated by green fields and hop farms with the conical towers of brewers’ oast houses. According to tradition, men from the west of the county were called Kentish Men, while those from the east were Men of Kent. The division between them followed the contours of the River Medway, which bisects the county on its way to the sea. As the county boundary blurred with that of Greater London, growing numbers of city dwellers gravitated towards the ranks of the Royal West Kents. The regimental history, written in the stolid prose of a different age, describes the qualities of the West Kent soldier: ‘The stubborn alertness of the Londoner is thus merged with the slower solidity of the worker in the Garden of England.’ In more prosaic terms, they might have been described as an intimidating concoction of hardy yokels and urban wide-boys.

They formed their first bonds in the small drill halls of rural Kent. The shared sense of place provided essential glue in the 4th West Kents until the normal regimental allegiances could be forged through training and combat. As one recruit put it, ‘the Drill Hall proved to be a great social club for the young men of the town, and I remembered how good it felt to have left the Church Choir and Boy Scouts … to become one of the men!’

Private Ivan Daunt, from Chatham, where the naval dockyards were accelerating production to meet the German threat, was one of the battalion’s notable characters. Conceived when his father was on leave from the First World War, he was one of nine children and was blessed from an early age with a gift for getting into trouble. Constantly playing truant, he eventually left school aged thirteen and became an apprentice carpenter. On the day his apprenticeship finished Daunt was called up. He resented the blow this represented to his earnings: ‘I was getting one shilling sixpence ha’penny an hour as a carpenter which was good money and I was doing quite well. And then I go into the army on one shilling and sixpence per day! And then they took sixpence of that for barrack damages.’ But Daunt surprised himself and took well to the army life, helped by the fact that most of his comrades were of the same age and from the same part of Kent. The private’s mood was further improved on discovering that his wages would go up to two shillings on the outbreak of war.

The officers were the sons of lawyers, stockbrokers, wealthy farmers and teachers. The men of the ranks came from the same great pool that had filled the ranks of the British army for hundreds of years: factory workers, farm labourers, apprentice tradesmen, but also, now, the sons of an aspirant working class, boys who looked to white-collar jobs or even to go on to university.

John Winstanley was beginning his studies as a trainee doctor at St Thomas’s Hospital in London when war broke out, ‘and I was happy because I thought I’d much rather be with my army chums than studying for medical school … and I had another two and half years before I could qualify’. He took well to military life. ‘I loved the Territorial Army, and the whole way of life; we were in the outdoors and I loved the marching and the comradeship.’ The First World War had been a brooding presence in the lives of many of the troops. In the town of Tonbridge an editorial in a school magazine in 1917 had included the following wry comment: ‘Lack of literacy may surely be pleaded by the editors this term – the literary half of them have suddenly been called up for military service!’ Fifty-three pupils and seven masters from Tonbridge School were to be killed in France.

Private Peter Goodwin saw his father descend into the torment of severe shell shock. Goodwin was born in Tonbridge two years after the end of the war, one of three brothers in a working-class family. ‘There was a place outside Tonbridge … where there was a colony of shell shock victims. Once a weekend they would bring a party in to go to the cinema and they would walk … in all sorts of weather. It was terrible to see them, but to some extent it was also accepted as the normal order of things.’ His father ended his days in a psychiatric hospital. The generation of young men who joined 4th battalion at the outbreak of the Second World War did not set out with illusions of glory. This would be important in the trials to come.

By the time the 4th West Kents made their stand at Kohima in April 1944 they were a battle-hardened outfit that had fought the Germans, Italians and Japanese, suffering exceptional losses. It was the fierce nature of what they had endured during the fall of France and later in North Africa that gave this battalion its formidable character, a self-belief that would carry them to war in Burma convinced that they could live up to their regimental motto of ‘Invicta’: the Unconquered.

More than half of 4th battalion were either captured or killed during the last weeks of May 1940. In battle Ivan Daunt found a courage and resourcefulness that civilian life would never have demanded of him. Retreating to Dunkirk, he was trapped behind German lines. ‘Our whole bloody battalion had gone … not a word mate, not a word,’ he recalled. Daunt made a hazardous cross-country hike with a few other men to reach Dunkirk. The beaches were packed with waiting troops. Captain John Winstanley spent two to three days on the beach, with Stukas making regular bombing runs. Unless there was a direct hit on your position, he remembered, the sand tended to deflect the explosions upwards, a small mercy in the circumstances.

The men marched in an orderly line along the beach until they were directed to a point where small boats would take them to a waiting ship. ‘We were like sheep … we had to stand there and hope for the best,’ recalled Ivan Daunt. On board, the decks were crowded with exhausted soldiers and their gear. Daunt eventually found a space where he, and the new silver cutlery service he had ‘liberated’ from an abandoned house, would be comfortable. Sadly for him, a sailor came and told the men to hand over any heavy material in their possession. Every last inch of space was needed and every ounce of excess weight had to go. His rifle and cutlery went over the side. The men on the decks could see the German aircraft screaming down to bomb the waiting ships. A hospital ship and a destroyer received direct hits while the 4th West Kents were waiting to sail.

Their first taste of war had been of defeat and chaos. Half of their comrades lay dead, dying, or on their way to German prison camps. But the rescue at Dunkirk had salvaged some self-respect. More than 300,000 men had been evacuated and the 4th West Kents shared in the pride of that achievement. Private Wally Jenner knew he would live to fight another day. On a personal level, he was proud he had managed to hold on to his rifle. It made him feel, as he put it, ‘like a proper soldier’.

On 31 May 1942, the 4th West Kents, supplemented with a fresh draft of troops to replace the dead and missing, boarded a train for Liverpool where the SS Laconia was waiting to ship them to the desert battlefields of North Africa. The officers were wedged five and six to a cabin, and more than 3,000 men were crammed on to the lower decks. There was a blackout in force at night to ensure that no enemy aircraft or U-boats could spot the ship’s lights twinkling in the darkness. The floors and walkways were awash with vomit, the air filled with the smell of sick and sweat, and all of it accompanied by the constant thrum of the engines and the groans of sick men. There were submarine alarms that produced a ‘nerve-wracking uncertainty’.* Because of U-boat activity in the Mediterranean, the Laconia was forced to take the long way round to Egypt, down the West African coast and up the other side. There was a stop at Freetown in Sierra Leone to take on supplies and from there the ship ploughed on to Cape Town, arriving on 1 July. Here there was a four-day stop for some shore leave, bars and girls for the men, lunches in the homes of respectable locals for the officers. It was here that the West Kents received the news that the British base at Tobruk in Libya had finally fallen to Rommel’s Afrika Korps, with 35,000 Allied troops marching into captivity.

One of the new officers was Lieutenant Donald Easten, from the leafy town of Chislehurst. Easten was an English countryman, the son of a solicitor, who lived for shooting and fishing whenever he found time away from his work as a clerk in the City of London. After Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938 a friend of his father’s had asked if he had joined the Territorial Army yet. ‘And when I said no he said: “Why the bloody hell aren’t you?”’ He joined up and was sent to the 4th West Kents in time for the journey east. On the long sea journey he thought often of his bride, Billie, who was serving with an anti-aircraft battery in London. ‘We were all bloody miserable … There was a grim silence. Everybody alone with their memories wondering, am I ever going to see her again?’

On 24 July 1942, nearly two months after they had set out from England, the 4th West Kents arrived in the Gulf of Suez and disembarked at Port Tewfik, where they prepared to join the allied counter-offensive against Rommel. The German general’s aim was to break through the allied defensive line stretching from El Alamein into the desert and open the way for an assault on Cairo, the last step needed to drive the allies out of North Africa. If he moved quickly enough, and if his enemy stumbled, there was a chance the Desert Fox could steal victory before the continuing build-up of British men and armour would make his task impossible.

The 4th West Kents spent a fortnight doing ‘toughening up marches’, without water, conducting mock attacks and practising night manoeuvres in the desert. The war diary for this period describes a battalion rapidly preparing itself for action, but the only incident of note was the death of a soldier who was accidentally shot.

One night Private Ivan Daunt was sitting with a few friends when he heard his name called out. An officer came over carrying a telegram from home. ‘I got down, put a sheet over my head and lit a match and it says: “A son is born.” I wouldn’t see him for another three years.’ In the desert night he felt a combination of joy and unspeakable sadness.

On 20 August a distinguished visitor arrived at 8th Army headquarters. The prime minister was on his way back from Moscow where he and President Roosevelt had met with Stalin, ‘the old Bear’, as Churchill described him to the welcoming party of officers. Now promoted to captain, Donald Easten was serving as a liaison officer between 132 Brigade, of which the 4th West Kents were part, and 8th Army headquarters. He suddenly found himself called upon to act as scout for the prime minister’s visit to front-line positions, a journey that would involve traversing a minefield. He practised the route several times in advance. ‘I was thinking I was going to meet the General and Churchill and two or three other people in vehicles. I found that I was leading something that looked like an armoured division! There were so many newspaper people, reporters and armoured cars and heaven knows what else.’ Easten led the convoy through the desert, found the gap, and made his way through to the other side. There he handed over to another officer and Churchill waved him goodbye with a shout of thanks. When he got back to the division headquarters he was immediately summoned and given ‘the most tremendous rocket’. He had apparently taken a fifty-yard detour off the safe route without knowing it. ‘However I didn’t blow the old man up,’ he recalled, still with an expression of considerable relief more than fifty years later.

Orders came down for the 4th West Kents to prepare to move off and mount an operation to interdict Rommel’s supply lines in the area of Alam Halfa. The troops moved out into the darkness at 2300 hours on 3 September, but German planes had spotted them forming up in the early evening and the sound of their vehicles was already attracting enemy mortar fire. Captain John Winstanley moved forward with B company on a ‘wonderful moonlight night’, but from the outset things went wrong. As the New Zealand official history describes it, the 4th West Kents ‘became considerably disorganised, with trucks on the wrong routes and often, in losing the way, becoming stuck in the soft sand or in the minefields … there was a confused mass of men and trucks’. Unbeknown to the battalion one of the few truly effective elements in the Italian army was waiting for them, holding fire in trenches that lay right across the line of advance.

The Folgore Division was an elite formation of paratroopers who could be depended on to stand and fight. As the advance eventually got under way, Winstanley heard the sound of men moving along on either side of him in silence. And then fury was unleashed. ‘The silence was shattered by a roar of automatic fire, and showers of Italian grenades burst among the forward companies. Many of the men were hit but the leading platoons charged the enemy positions.’ Enemy mortars crashed into the battalion’s vehicles and fires lit the sky, silhouetting the advancing men and making them an easier target for the machine-gunners. John Winstanley was firing his rifle lying flat on the ground when a bullet pierced his arm. He screamed in pain but maintained his position, urging his men to fight while trying to return fire himself.

Enemy aircraft now appeared and dropped parachute flares to illuminate their targets. Caught in the open desert, the majority of the 4th West Kents could only lie flat on their faces and pray. Most of their entrenching tools were in the burning vehicles and in any case it would have taken hours to dig proper foxholes in the flint-hard ground. The strafing and bombing by Stukas and the mortar and machine-gun fire from the Italians pulverised the battalion. Some men did make it into the Italian trenches and fought hand to hand with the defenders; they even managed to take some prisoners. But the battle was going badly and by 3 a.m. the order was given to withdraw. Carrying the severely wounded with them, the 4th West Kents, including an exhausted John Winstanley, eventually found some cover at a ridge several thousand yards back from the scene of the battle. Winstanley was evacuated to a military hospital, where he spent several weeks recovering from his wound. Private Ivan Daunt reflected bitterly on the experience of Alam Halfa: ‘The intelligence wasn’t thorough … we weren’t there long enough to know.’ The battalion lost 250 men killed, wounded or missing, more than half its strength. It was an agonising reminder of the catastrophe of France in 1940.

The regimental history recorded that the 4th West Kents were ‘thrown away in a suicidal attempt to cut off the retreat of the enemy’. It was, as twenty-two-year-old Peter Goodwin put it, ‘a complete cock-up. That was when morale reached its lowest point in the war. Everyone knew that it was a wasted effort and we lost a lot of people.’ Ivan Daunt felt changed by the desert, older and wiser, and determined that the war was something he would survive and see through to the end. Twice he had been caught up in disaster. He swore it would not happen again.

As had happened after France, new men and officers arrived to make up for the losses suffered at Alam Halfa. Among them was Lieutenant Tom Hogg, a transport officer who had grown up on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales. He had already survived death once by the time he joined the army: a motorcyclist had knocked him down when he was ten and left him with a fractured skull and broken leg. In those days the cost of the operations he needed ran to the price of ‘ten good milk cows by my father’s reckoning, and therefore a considerable loss to him’. At Giggleswick village school he was written off as a plodder and ‘suffered terribly from the impatience of teachers who clearly thought me too dim to be worthy of their time’. On leaving school in 1939 he joined the Territorial Army in Yorkshire, becoming, according to the Daily Mirror, the youngest sergeant in the British army at the outbreak of war. He found his way to the 4th West Kents after escaping from German captivity near Tobruk. To Ivan Daunt, the new members of the battalion like Tom Hogg were a source of strength: ‘A lot of them had been in other battles. They had been elsewhere. They weren’t rookies … And the NCOs … we got hardened ones coming in. And that made a lot of difference. Especially at Kohima.’

Hogg remembered some of his early experiences with particular distaste. On several occasions the 4th West Kents would see a group of Italians waiting to surrender and approach them. All of a sudden there would be a shout in German and the would-be prisoners would throw themselves down, revealing a German machine-gun crew who would open up on the British. The idea was to capture the transport. ‘This particular trick caused “bad blood” among our men, and I recall seeing one of our Red Caps … roll a live grenade into a trench full of prisoners who had already surrendered. I wondered how he would have felt if the roles had been reversed.’

A new commanding officer arrived at the battalion that autumn. Lieutenant Colonel H. W. Lambert was a pious man with a fascination for the holy places of the Middle East. He was liked by the men. Lambert began his command with inspections ‘in detail’ of all the battalion companies; drill routines, bathing procedures, battle training and leave procedures were all examined rigorously. Company commanders referred men they did not regard as physically or mentally fit to the medical officers for regrading. Lambert was restoring morale in the most sensible way possible, by ensuring that normal battalion life was resumed.

In December 1942 the 4th West Kents became part of 161 Brigade, 5th Indian Division, with which they would serve until the end of the war. As part of 161 Indian Brigade they would fight alongside two Indian battalions, the 1/1 Punjab and 4/7 Rajput. The practice of brigading two Indian battalions with one British battalion dated back to the fear-filled aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

The West Kents were to be sent to Iraq to counter the possibility of a German thrust from the Caucasus against the Iraqi oilfields. Lieutenant Hogg found himself leading the column and navigating by the sun. ‘I was supplied with a jeep with a sun-compass on the bonnet and by keeping a careful watch on the sun’s relative movement we were able to arrive within sight of the bridge superstructure at Fallujah, after 700 miles of desert-driving, which was not bad!’ The journey was punctuated by numerous stops ordered by the devout Colonel Lambert. Captain Donald Easten remembered, ‘We had to stop and get the soldiers out of their vehicles to listen to the CO talk about the holy places. I remember hearing the sergeant major telling the lads to get out of the trucks: “Out ye get lads, more Jesus stuff.”’ Ivan Daunt and his comrades would mutter and dutifully dismount for another wholesome lecture.

Wintering in Baghdad, Captain Harry Smith remembered the sullenness of the locals, the dust storms that whipped grit into the most well-covered orifices, and the endless waiting for a German thrust which every man of them sensed would never come. Smith was a schoolmaster and had married on the eve of the war. The school magazine printed the usual congratulations, but with a poignant coda: ‘Congratulations to Mr. H. Crispin Smith on his marriage on 13th November to Miss Iris Reaves … Though we miss him greatly, we know he is giving another kind of service, and we hope that later, in a war-free world, he will resume his normal work with us.’ He had been wounded at the battle of El Alamein and spent most nights in Baghdad in a state of semi-wakefulness. Shortly after arriving he awoke to find a pack of wild dogs, the snarling and mange-ridden brutes that haunted Baghdad’s alleys, rooting through his belongings. He froze and feigned sleep until the pack moved on. Not only were there dogs and jackals for the men to fear at night, but also the rifle snatchers, some of the best and most ruthless thieves in all of Iraq, ‘who wouldn’t think twice about using a knife if they were cornered’.

The battalion made route marches of more than twenty miles and conducted repeated mock attacks. But any danger of a German attack from the Caucasus vanished with the defeat of von Paulus’s German 6th Army at Stalingrad in early February 1943. Soon afterwards a new commanding officer arrived to replace Lieutenant Colonel Lambert. The devout and steady leader was replaced by Lieutenant Colonel F. S. Saville, a man of genial nature but with no experience of battle. At the end of May the 4th West Kents were given fresh orders. They were to sail for India where a new army was being readied for war with the Japanese. For Captain John Winstanley it was exciting news, for he had strong family connections with the East. His parents had lived in the Burmese jungle, where his father had worked as an officer for the Burma Forest Service. When his mother became pregnant with John it was decided that she should return to England for the birth. Her husband stayed behind to join the Burma Sappers and Miners, and was eventually posted to the North-West Frontier. He died there of typhoid in 1919. The telegram announcing his death reached Winstanley’s mother just as she prepared to rejoin her husband. She would never see India or Burma again.

The new CO, Lieutenant Colonel Saville, regaled his officers with the joys awaiting them in India. Donald Easten recalled, ‘When he heard we were going to India he said, “You will all have three or four servants and you will have to play polo. The problem for some of you will be that you will only be able to afford one pony, but the rest of you should be able to afford two or three.” We were all saying to one another, “Perhaps we ought to tell him we’re at war!”’ Before long his enthusiastic word pictures of life on the subcontinent earned the unfortunate lieutenant colonel the nickname ‘Playboy of India’. Saville had not been with the battalion in the crucible of the Western Desert and it would have taken a personality of considerable force to impress the battle-hardened troops. Lieutenant Colonel Saville was not that man.

Camp was struck swiftly in Baghdad and the men boarded trucks for the start of their journey south to the port of Basra, passing on the way the walls of Kut al Amara, where thousands of British and Indian troops, among them men of the Royal West Kents, had been killed or else died in Turkish captivity in April 1916. From Basra they steamed slowly down the palm-lined fringes of the Shatt al-Arab, passing the dhows of fishermen and little inlets where women washed clothes and children swam and splashed in the muddy water. The landscape beyond the waterway was an immense plateau of reeds, braided through with little canals along which the fishermen constructed their huts of dried reeds. The children waved to the men on deck as the ship glided down towards the open sea.

Approaching Bombay on the morning of 20 June 1943, the battalion heard the sound of a brass band as they came into the harbour. The triumphal reception was being granted because of their part in the victory at El Alamein. It was, no doubt, also intended as a reminder to the more mutinous subjects of the Raj that British fortunes were improving. One officer recorded that ‘there was a faint hint of comic opera about our arrival. Bombay greeted us with a brass band and grave warnings to the effect that irresponsible talk about Japanese fighting ability was liable to have a bad effect on the morale of British troops.’ He also noted, almost as an afterthought, that Burma was to be their destination.

Bombay occupied a special place in the history of the Indian national liberation movement, for it was there that the Congress Party had been founded nearly sixty years before, and there that Mohandas K. Gandhi had launched the Quit India movement. By the time the 4th West Kents arrived, Gandhi, Nehru and the other main leaders of the Congress were in prison. The troops knew little of this state of affairs. What information they had came from a handful of old soldiers who had served in Bombay before the war, when the Raj had guaranteed that the humblest of white men could feel themselves among the earth’s chosen. The old soldiers painted a glorious picture of life in the army camp for Private Ivan Daunt and his comrades as they crowded on the gangways to disembark. There were servants to take care of every need. Best of all, Daunt was told, were the punkah-wallahs, who fanned the soldiers while they took their nap during the hot afternoons, operating the overhead fans with their toes until they too, invariably, nodded off. Daunt was advised to keep a boot ready to throw at any punkah-wallah sleeping on duty.

Of all the cities of the eastern empire, Bombay was the most self-consciously striking in the first impressions it gave: a jumble of architectural styles which could have appeared as a grandiloquent folly but invariably inspired the admiration of visitors arriving by sea. Its buildings were not only a fusion of the impulses that drove the dream of empire but a tribute to the enduring power of its institutions, from the government secretariat to the law courts to the university, all facing towards the great bay on the Arabian Sea. Waiting at the docks to greet the West Kents, dressed in distinctive red dhotis, was an army of coolies, the carriers and bearers of the Raj, kept in order by supervisors swirling their long lathis.*

Wartime disembarkation in Bombay could be a lengthy and frustrating process. Men, weapons, vehicles and supplies had to be unloaded on to the quayside. Robert Kay, a gunner with the Royal Artillery, remembered being woken at 4.30 in the morning to start the process: ‘The whole operation took place in the cramped spaces of a troopship, with on-board temperatures exceeding 95 degrees Fahrenheit, with men all dressed in battle equipment, sweating and swearing and carrying kit bags and everything else they owned.’ Others would curse the bureaucracy of the Colonel Blimps who charged a West Kents officer two shillings customs duty on his double-barrelled shotgun. Irritation and impatience were mixed with awe. An officer remembered the shock of the exotic when he looked out over the side of the ship to see a giant sea snake, twelve feet long and highly venomous.

In the streets that day the West Kents saw snake charmers and acrobats, and a man who could put a meat hook through his nose and pull it out through his mouth. They were assailed by the pungency of the great port city, the smell of spices piled high in the small shops and curried food being cooked on the footpaths, the reek of open drains and piled garbage and the constant raucous hymn of supplication: ‘Baksheesh, baksheesh.’ Ivan Daunt remembered that the beggars called him ‘Rajah’ and that he saw two men carrying a pole on which was hung a beggar-man, ‘all mangled and his legs, arms all bent’.

The rise in nationalist sentiment had not inhibited the famed entrepreneurial spirit of Bombay. Taxis ferrying officers to the Taj Hotel, right next to the Gateway of India, bore the Union flag on their radiators and the drivers made the appropriate patriotic noises. The hotel had been converted into an officers’ club where five- or six-course meals, followed by cabaret and dancing, could be enjoyed. Walking outside at dusk, one group of newly arrived officers saw a profusion of street sleepers. They were ‘staggered to see Indian bodies lying there on the pavement, pedestrian islands and almost anywhere; they all looked quite dead, and the more so as their faces were covered with a shroud’.

The 4th West Kents marched to the railway station and set off on a 1,000 mile train journey across India to the training base at Ranchi, where General Slim’s 14th Army was being readied for war. The men were loaded into third-class carriages with hard wooden seats and the officers dispatched to overcrowded sleeper compartments. Diaries of those wartime journeys recall heat, dust, discomfort, and the excitement of traversing the subcontinent. Captain Arthur Swinson, a staff captain with the British 2nd Division, who would later encounter the West Kents at Kohima, was a budding writer who kept a careful account of the sights of India. ‘Every station brought its new quota of ragged half-starved children demanding “bukshees”, some on their own and some egged on by their equally ragged parents. I hardened my heart against them but “Boggie” (who is to take holy orders after the war) feels he must go about doing good and so gives them annas.* This causes their wails to increase tenfold. The persistence of the Indian beggar is equalled only by his ingratitude.’

But for all his irritation with the beggars, Swinson was not immune to the magic of India, the immensity of the visions it offered, temporal and divine, or the ingenuity of its cultures. When the train stopped on the banks of the Ganges he noticed groups of Indians bathing themselves and their water buffalo. A woman among the crowd changed her dirty sari for a clean one, ‘without exposing one square inch of flesh that she shouldn’t’. The troops on board cheered her when she had finished, but ‘she was a lady … and made pretend she didn’t hear a thing’. A friend of Swinson’s, Captain Keith Halnan, recalled that when they stopped for lunch, ‘there would be tables laid out on the platform for the sahibs and we would sit and have lunch and the train waited until we were finished. What a life!’

For the other ranks experiencing India for the first time, the journey was a blend of chronic physical discomfort, appalling tedium and moments of wonder. Ray Street, who would become a battlefield runner for the 4th West Kents, believed he was witnessing scenes from a Bible story when he paused at some of the bigger stations and huge crowds ‘swept towards the train, dressed in their white flowing garments’. A platform guard gave the signal for departure by striking a length of old railway track with a piece of wood and this precipitated a final rush of hopeful travellers, clinging to doors and windows and the roof. Wary of the onrush, the troops stored their rifles under the wooden seats, having been warned that they would fetch a price of £100 on the North-West Frontier. Street remembered seeing a band of dacoits chained together and led along the platform by a policeman at one of the stations.* They were, he reckoned, the roughest-looking bunch of individuals he had ever seen. His friend, Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes, felt unnerved passing a building where vultures feasted on human corpses. The building had no windows, doors or roof. The bodies were laid out on metal bars and when the bones had been picked bare they would fall through the bars to the ground. ‘It was so strange to me, coming from England like,’ he remembered. What Wykes saw was a Zoroastrian ‘Tower of Silence’, where the body is left to be eaten by vultures so that it does not pollute the earth.

Later on he would become, if not exactly blasé about seeing corpses, then certainly less inclined to worry about them. The train crossed central India on its journey towards Ranchi, through dry scrub and forest, across great rivers and mountains, a five-day journey moving steadily eastwards towards western Bengal, where the high summer temperatures were rendered more tolerable than in the furnace of the plains by the monsoon rains. The schoolmaster Captain Harry Smith was transfixed by the world unfolding outside his carriage. He would remember the light fading to deep blue on the plains as evening came on, the sound of langur monkeys squabbling in the forest by the track, and the fires of wood and animal dung which produced a sweet acrid smell – ‘for me always the smell of India’ – when the train passed near villages.

In the cool of dusk the train would stop and cooks would alight to prepare the evening meal, invariably a concoction that involved bully beef or soya-link sausages and whatever else they had been able to scavenge. Tinned food was favoured, not for its flavour but because it reduced the chance of stomach upsets. Dinner was eaten on the ground in the shade of the carriages and washed down with tea made from water drawn from the engine’s boiler. As Harry Smith recalled, ‘it was tea made with lashings of sugar, condensed milk and water that tasted of engine oil. Delicious!’

Many who took the troop train to Ranchi that June would not come back; others would return without limbs, or brutally disfigured in other ways; some would be wounded in the spirit by the loss of friends or the memories of what they had endured and seen. As the West Kents rattled slowly across India, the generals, British and Japanese, were laying plans to change the face of the Asian war.

* There was a tragic postscript. On the return journey, loaded with over 3,000 people, among them many Italian prisoners of war, the Laconia was torpedoed off the West African coast. Over two thirds of those on board lost their lives.

* A long bamboo rod still used by police to keep public order in India.

* A unit of currency in British-ruled India, roughly equivalent to one sixteenth of a rupee.

* Dacoits are bandits or outlaws frequently operating in large groups.

SIX
Fighting Back

By the middle of 1943 General Slim knew his enemy well and was certain that the fight to retake Burma would be hard and bloody. Of the Japanese soldier he wrote: ‘He fought and marched till he died. If five hundred Japanese were ordered to hold a position we had to kill four hundred and ninety-five before it was ours – and then the last five killed themselves. It was this combination of obedience and ferocity that made that Japanese Army, whatever its condition, so formidable, and which would make any army formidable.’ The previous November, British and Indian forces had stumbled to disaster in the Burmese province of Arakan in a vain attempt to drive the Japanese back and begin the recapture of Burma. After an initial advance, the Japanese had driven the British and Indian forces back. No ground had been gained despite a casualty toll of 5,057 killed, wounded or missing.*

The Japanese used the tactics of outflanking and encirclement that had caused Slim’s troops such anguish on the retreat from Burma. The terrain on which they fought was ribboned by rivers and streams, harboured numerous swamps, and was bordered to the west by the sea and to the east by the Mayu range of hills. These rose to 2,000 feet at their highest and were covered in dense forest. It was, recalled one British officer, ‘the sort of jungle country in which there could be no front line’, covered in thick primary forest, full of exotic plants and animals, and providing awe-inspiring views, and one of the very last places on earth you would choose to fight a war. When the south-west monsoon arrived, rainfall could reach as much as two hundred inches. The tracks became impassable and the waterways were the only practical means of movement. Even these, swollen with new rain, became, in the words of a senior British commander, ‘very formidable obstacles, all of which have to be bridged to allow passage of troops and transport … Indeed campaigning in the monsoon in Burma may be said to be one of the most arduous operations anywhere in the world today.’ A staff officer sent to investigate wrote: ‘our troops were either exhausted, browned off or both, and both Indian and British troops did not have their hearts in the campaign. The former were obviously scared of the Jap and demoralised by the nature of the campaign i.e. the thick jungle and the subsequent blindness of movement, the multiple noises of the jungle at night, the terror stories of Jap brutality … the undermining influence of fever, and the mounting list of failures.’ Just as had happened on the retreat the previous year, Slim found himself dispatched to lead the ground operations when it was already too late to effect change. Yet it was here in the Arakan that Slim was now planning his first offensive against the Japanese.

The failure of the first Arakan campaign was rooted in practical and political problems. The battle readiness of the troops was paramount. Over the previous eighteen months the Indian Army had recruited massively. At one point recruits were being dispatched to training centres at a rate of 50,000 per month. There had been too little time to turn these raw recruits into soldiers ready for the challenge of the Arakan, or to prepare the British troops fighting alongside them for jungle warfare. The cream of the Indian Army was fighting overseas, where resources were being devoted overwhelmingly towards the fighting in North Africa.

Looming over it all were the politics of the Grand Alliance. Since the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the loss of the Philippines the following April, American ships and planes had routed Japan’s carrier fleet at the Battle of Midway on 4 and 5 June 1942. Four carriers, several battleships, around 275 planes, and nearly 5,000 men were lost. Yet the British were still sitting in the positions to which they had retreated after the fall of Burma. There were many in Washington only too keen to accuse London of lassitude. A song doing the rounds of senior American military figures after the fall of Malaya and Singapore that gave an indication of American attitudes to the officer class of the British empire:

To lunch they go at half past one –

Blast me, old chap, the day’s half done.

They lunch and talk and fight Jap,

And now it’s time to take a nap.

The British in Asia were widely caricatured as blimps and buffoons, selfish and self-satisfied, borne aloft on the suffering of millions of brown and yellow subjects. Roosevelt himself was determined that victory in the Far East would not lead to a reimposition of the colonial status quo. The Atlantic Charter, which was signed at the Arcadia conference held by Churchill and Roosevelt in December 1941–January 1942, committed the allies to ensuring ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’. The Americans believed this included India and the rest of the British empire, as well as the French and Dutch colonial possessions occupied by the Japanese. Churchill emphatically did not.*

An aggravated Churchill wired his deputy, Clement Attlee, in London about ‘the danger of raising the constitutional issue in India at a moment when the enemy is on the frontier’. But he was a shrewd enough politician to realise that preserving the Raj in the face of American opposition demanded a serious military effort in South-East Asia. Limited resources would always make Europe the priority and would ensure that Britain was the junior partner in the Far East. But if the British possessions in South-East Asia were still in enemy hands by the time the Americans defeated Japan, as they surely would be, how could Churchill make any claims for the recovery of territory in the post-war negotiations?* Fighting and defeating the Japanese in Burma would not alter the outcome of the world war, but it would give Churchill valuable political capital.

The British and Americans also had very different strategic aims. Churchill believed British and Indian forces should aim at driving the Japanese out of Rangoon as an initial step towards the recovery of British territory in Singapore and Malaya. The Americans saw the campaign in markedly different terms. China was the priority and British resources should be used to drive the Japanese out of northern Burma in order to secure the supply route to Chiang Kai-shek.† Defeat the Japanese in China, the Americans reasoned, and they would gain a ‘back door’ to Tokyo, airfields from which to launch bombing raids against the home islands of Japan. For a man of ruthless political calculation in so many other regards, Roosevelt was obstinately myopic when it came to China. The China he imagined bore no relation to the corrupt and chaotic world of reality. In November 1943 he wrote of the ‘triumph of having got the four hundred and twenty million Chinese in on the Allied side. This will be very useful twenty-five or fifty years hence, even though China cannot contribute much military or naval support at the moment.’

General Slim would wrestle with the pressures caused by high-level disagreements as he planned his campaign to retake Burma and throughout the battles to come. But his task would be made infinitely easier by the creation of a new command structure, and notably by his new superior, a charismatic and controversial aristocrat. The initial omens were not good. Lord Louis Mountbatten had planned only one military operation of note, two years before, and it had ended in disaster. As Chief of Combined Operations, he had directed the disastrous Dieppe raid of 1942 in which 3,623 Canadian troops were killed, wounded or captured. In August 1943 he was appointed to head the new South-East Asia Command (SEAC). Mountbatten was only forty-three years old, a Navy captain with the acting rank of admiral, and first cousin to the king. He was regarded by many senior military figures as a self-promoting dilettante who had won his position through Churchill’s weakness for those who promised dashing victories, and through his royal connections. The CIGS, General Alan Brooke, wrote of being driven ‘completely to desperation’ by Mountbatten, who was ‘quite irresponsible, suffers from the most desperate illogical brain, always producing red herrings’.

But as supreme commander Mountbatten would prove a success. He brought the glamour of royalty to the forlorn front lines of South-East Asia, even if that meant shipping in a barber from London to take care of his tonsorial needs, and he infused the troops with a sense that their battles mattered. His skill in negotiating the often fractious relationship with the Americans helped Slim beyond measure. The American president addressed Mountbatten with the familiar ‘Dickie’, a habit formed when Mountbatten and Edwina stayed with the Roosevelts a few months before Pearl Harbor. After Mountbatten’s accession to SEAC, Roosevelt had gushed to him, ‘for the first time in two years I have confidence in the personality problems in the China and Burma fields – and you personally are largely responsible for this’. He added affectionately, and perhaps with a wary sense of Dickie’s fondness for the limelight, ‘Be a good boy.’

What emerged in South-East Asia was one of the most important partnerships of the war: in Mountbatten, an aristocratic supreme commander who navigated Anglo-American rivalry with skill; and in Slim, the down-to-earth son of a Birmingham shopkeeper, who made war according to a gospel of patience, shrewdness and relentless attention to detail.

A massive reorganisation of the supply, training and medical systems was set in motion. With half a million men under arms in the subcontinent the demands for food and equipment – everything from fresh vegetables to .303 bullets for rifles – had placed an impossible strain on the pre-war colonial infrastructure. Ports, roads and airfields were all upgraded. More than 50,000 labourers were sent to improve the main road to Burma, which passed through Kohima to Imphal.* The tea-planters of Assam provided half of the labour force. By 1943 Indian factories and farmers were producing more goods for the war effort than Australia, New Zealand and Canada put together.

Rations had been a constant source of complaint from the men, with the ‘staple meal … a bar of dehydrated goat meat looking like a bar of tobacco and when boiled up smelling like an ancient billy-goat’. Now Slim’s head of administration, the aptly nicknamed Major General Alf ‘The Grocer’ Snelling, set out to revolutionise the quality and delivery of the food. He flew in some Chinese to start a duck farm which would produce eggs and he sent his men to India to procure live goats and sheep. Later Snelling would establish a jungle farm to keep up a steady supply of fresh food to the front-line forces, and he would perfect the art of dropping supplies to surrounded troops, painstakingly calculating and packing the supply needs of an entire division. When Slim was told that he could not get adequate supplies of parachutes in India he decided it was ‘useless to hope for supplies from home. We were bottom of the priority list there, for parachutes as for everything else.’ So he called in the ever-dependable Snelling and a few of his officers and told them that if proper silk parachutes were not available they should find a substitute. They began a search of the paper mills and jute factories of Calcutta, which ended with the development of a ‘parajute’, made entirely of jute, which was 85 per cent as effective as the normal parachutes. They were not about to drop men or fragile equipment from the air with them, but for food and ammunition they would be invaluable. Slim picked Colonel ‘Atte’ Persse, a man with a reputation for ‘making himself a nuisance to all and sundry until he got what he wanted’, to make sure tanks reached the Arakan in time for his offensive. Stone was shipped in from Madras to turn some of the jungle tracks into routes along which tanks could operate.

The most important change took place in the air. At the height of the retreat in 1942 the army could call on only four airfields with all-weather runways and up-to-date facilities. By the following November, thanks to a massive programme of American-sponsored construction, that number had increased tenfold.* The existing fleet of Mohawk fighters was reinforced with Hurricanes, Beaufighters and Spitfires. From the point of view of the fighting man on the ground, one of the fighters’ most important roles was to protect the transport planes that brought him food and ammunition.

The health of 14th Army was one of Slim’s gravest preoccupations. In the retreat of 1942 around 80 per cent of the British and Indian troops fell ill because of disease. British 6 Brigade lost half its strength in the Arakan, a staggering dissolution of fighting capacity. The official account stated that the ‘incidence of malaria during this campaign reached unimagined proportions’.

It struck British and Indian troops with equal force. Major David Atkins commanded a transport unit travelling the road between Dimapur and Imphal and watched his Madrassi drivers falter with fever, one by one. ‘The Havildar clerks and the senior NCOs were changing so frequently because of fever, that orders given to one man were not passed on before the man you had given them to went sick. If you spoke to the new man, he would be replaced the next day by the former one.’

Strict discipline on the taking of medication was enforced in 14th Army: if men started to come down with malaria their officers could be cashiered. It took the sacking of three commanders to drive the point home. Hospital admissions for disease dropped from 185 per thousand troops in 1942 to 100 per thousand in 1944.

There were also changes in surgical practice. Treating wounds sustained in jungle fighting was a different prospect from treatment in Europe or the desert. The humidity, the frequently filthy conditions, the difficulty in finding clean water supplies, all presented an immense challenge to the many young and inexperienced surgeons of 14th Army. Wounds had to be cleaned out thoroughly and quickly, the medical chiefs warned. ‘The Japanese missiles have a habit of carrying not only clothing and equipment, but also jungle debris, leaves and dirt into the deeper parts of the wound.’ In such conditions a man with a minor wound could die from blood poisoning within twenty-four hours. Men were drilled in the importance of field hygiene. As one West Kent put it, ‘You learned to bury your crap and above all keep it away from the water source.’

Slim also recognised that the battle for men’s minds would be central in the fighting to come. In 1943 the C-in-C India, Sir Archibald Wavell, agreed to appoint a psychiatrist to every division in India. Captain Paul Davis was sent to 2nd Division, which would fight at Kohima the following year. He set about weeding out unsuitable men. ‘As a result of this large numbers of dullards, psychoneurotics, and a few psychopaths and psychotics were unearthed. Combatant officers proved to be extremely enthusiastic at the idea of getting rid of these men.’ Davis found most of the commanders he encountered helpful. There had been a shift in military attitudes since the First World War, when shell-shock victims could be regarded as cowards, although there was one battalion commander who asked him, ‘Why should I send these men to you so that they will survive the war and go home and breed like rabbits, whilst all my finest men are going to risk being killed?’ During the battle of Kohima Davis set up a small psychiatric clinic just sixteen miles behind the front.

Slim was aware that neither Churchill nor the CIGS, General Sir Alan Brooke, had much faith in the British and Indian soldier ever being able to meet the Japanese on equal terms in the jungle. Churchill believed that going into the jungle to fight the Japanese was ‘like going into the water to fight a shark’. But the Japanese did not come from a land of jungles and swamps. The jungle was no more a natural environment for them than it was for the British. The Japanese had trained and adapted. Slim’s 14th Army would do the same. An Infantry Committee set up after the Arakan debacle reported that troops needed to be fit and to be led by officers experienced in the jungle; they needed to avoid roads and learn how to use jungle tracks, and to be trained in concealment and jungle hygiene. One of the most prescient recommendations related to leadership: ‘command must be decentralised so that junior leaders will be confronted with situations in which they must make decisions and act without delay on their own responsibility’. To this, Slim added his own developing philosophy of jungle warfare. If encircled, stand fast and hold your ground, rely on air support for resupply and trust in the reserves to come up and hit the Japanese. They would outflank the enemy and cut their line of communication. Tens of thousands of men passed through the jungle training courses, where they were drilled in the basic dogma of encircle and outflank. Above all they learned to live with the strangeness of the jungle.

As he planned his reconquest of Burma, Slim recognised that ultimate victory would depend on the soldiers of the Indian Army. More than two thirds of his 14th Army were drawn from the immense hinterlands of the empire, the majority from India itself. In the British mythology of the Raj few figures were more warmly drawn than that of the faithful native. In novels like Talbot Mundy’s For the Salt He Had Eaten, the Indian soldier risking, and often giving, his life for the white sahib is eulogised: ‘Proud as a Royal Rajput – and there is nothing else on God’s green earth that is even half as proud – true to his salt and stout of heart.’

By the end of 1943 the Indian Army had experienced surrender in Singapore, retreat in Burma, defeat in the Arakan, and the convulsions caused by the Quit India movement.* Yet it had not risen as a body in mutiny or experienced mass desertions. There were more than two million men serving the allied cause in North Africa and India, the largest volunteer army in history. In spite of this, Churchill frequently expressed his mistrust. Wavell noted in his journal in 1943 that the prime minister feared the army could rise at any moment, ‘and he accused me of creating a Frankenstein by putting modern weapons in the hands of sepoys, spoke of 1857, and was really childish about it. I tried to reassure him, both verbally and by a written note, but he has a curious complex about India and is always loath to hear good of it and apt to believe the worst.’

The events that followed the fall of Singapore had done much to stoke the prime minister’s paranoia. On their surrender, between 40,000 and 60,000 Indian prisoners of war had joined the new pro-Japanese Indian National Army (INA).* The INA, under the leadership of the charismatic former Congress politician Subhas Chandra Bose, would play only a minor role in the fighting to come. But Bose’s promise that India would rise once his men had crossed the border encouraged the Japanese and worried the British.

One of Slim’s most able commanders, General Sir Philip Christison, found himself being teased about army loyalty at the birthday party of the Maharajah of Mysore, Jayachamaraja Bahadur, in Krishnarajasagara. The general’s host was one of the most sophisticated men in the East, a philosopher and musicologist who once sponsored a concert for Richard Strauss at the Royal Albert Hall. He was also regarded as a friend of the British. ‘This was a great occasion,’ recalled Christison, ‘and not affected by any wartime restrictions.’ On the night of the party the palace was lit with 30,000 light bulbs and fireworks banged and whizzed across the sky. At the top of the palace steps Christison was greeted by the genial figure of the maharajah, who was standing between two huge stuffed bison. There was a grand procession into the dining hall and after a lavish banquet the ruler decided to take the general into his confidence. ‘He told me he had two sons. When Japan entered the war he sent one to Japan … the other to serve in the British Army. “Who knows who will win?” he said.’

The Japanese intelligence officer Lt.-Colonel Iwaichi Fujiwara, who worked closely with Bose, learned to be circumspect about the INA’s military capabilities, writing of Bose that ‘the standard of his operational tactics was, it must be said with regret, low. He was inclined to be idealistic and not realistic.’ However, the British were certainly alert to the political and intelligence danger posed by the INA. During the Bengal famine of 1942–43, when between one and a half and three million people died, Bose had announced that he would send Burmese rice to feed the starving, and INA broadcasts placed the blame for the catastrophe on British indifference and incompetence.* The Japanese war leader, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, fanned the flames assiduously, declaring in the Diet on 16 June 1943: ‘We are indignant about the fact that India is still under the ruthless suppression of Britain … we are determined to extend every possible assistance to the cause of India’s independence.’

Between 1942 and 1943 there had been several failed INA probes into British territory.† As 1943 drew to a close Mountbatten asked for an intelligence assessment of the INA. It was delivered to him on 13 November, with the instruction that henceforth the INA should, for ‘counter propaganda purposes’, be called JIFS – for ‘Japanese Inspired Fifth Columnists’ – an acronym designed to strip away the nationalist image of Bose’s army. The British also set up ‘josh’, or ‘enthusiasm or verve’, units to boost troop morale. The 750 josh groups were intended to ‘inculcate the doctrine that India must destroy the Japanese or be destroyed by them and to prepare Indian units for possible encounter with armed JIFS in the field’.

Propaganda broadcasts and leaflet drops were also stepped up, urging INA men to return to British lines where they would be treated fairly. But troops were told that if they encountered former comrades in the field they were to be shot if they did not surrender. General Slim would later say that some Indian units had to be restrained from shooting surrendering INA troops. Sepoy Gian Singh of 7th Indian Division heard Bose’s passionate calls for an uprising but was unmoved. ‘He promised to liberate India and said the Japanese were the friends of India. Not many truly believed him. Least of all us who saw the Japanese in their true colours. Much as we felt sorry for our brothers who had taken the salt but turned traitor even though they had an excuse. We often gave them no mercy.’

But the question of loyalty was nuanced. Soldiers of the 1st battalion, Assam Regiment were reminded of their duty of loyalty at josh sessions. Sohevu Angami, from the Naga village of Phek, listened to the propaganda about the INA and resolved to kill any of Bose’s men he came across. ‘We did what our officers told us to do and followed them. The Japanese and the INA were against the British and that made them our enemies. Did I really know what I was fighting for? No.’ Yet he had a sneaking regard for the INA leader. ‘I think his ideas were good. Even though we were opponents I came to respect him and what he was fighting for.’

In the case of many – perhaps most – soldiers, their loyalty was to their unit and not to the Viceroy or King Emperor. Indian officers did not as a rule feel that they were defending British overlordship, or that serving the Raj meant rejecting the ideals of Gandhi or Bose. A senior British civil servant at the War Department in Delhi wrote that ‘even those who were most convinced they had been right to go to Sandhurst and enter the King’s service saw it as a way to serve the independent India of the future … at the end of the war when the whole truth was known, many of the loyal Indian officers who would be the backbone of India’s new army felt some sympathy with those who had followed Bose.’ The growing realisation among officers and men that independence must come after the war tended to act as a brake on discontent. Major Ian Lyall Grant of King George V’s Own Bengal Sappers and Miners had fought alongside Indian officers since the retreat from Burma and was confident of their loyalty. ‘I remember saying that Independence was inevitably coming … I think it was generally known that we were on the way out … which made it much more difficult for them to hazard their lives on our behalf but they gave absolutely no sign of that to me.’

The Indian Army had also embarked on a transformation of its officer corps.* Discrimination in pay between Indian and British officers had been ended and, having started the war with only a thousand Indian officers, there were more than 6,566 by 1944. Although senior command positions were still overwhelmingly the domain of British officers, there were now Indian battalion and company commanders who gave orders to white subordinates.

Slim was an influential advocate of reform. ‘The fair deal meant’, he wrote, ‘no distinction between races or castes in treatment. The wants and needs of the Indian, African, and Gurkha soldier had to be looked after as keenly as those of his British comrade.’ However, Slim acknowledged that some of the newer British officers thought that all an Indian or African required was a ‘bush to lie under and a handful of rice to eat’. If paternalism had dominated the Indian Army of old, ignorance of culture and environment could be a hallmark of the younger officer class. Sepoy Gian Singh was crouching behind a small bush during a training exercise when he heard a hiss. A snake was lurking somewhere very close. Singh carefully backed away, only to see a deadly krait sitting where his head had just been. The training officer came up and began to harangue Singh:

‘What the hell are you up to,’ shouted the Captain coming up to me.

‘What’s all the fuss about such a small snake!’

‘That, Sir, is a krait,’ I replied.

He had to be told by a Subhadar that it was just as deadly as a .303 bullet. He shook his head in disbelief. That man had a lot to learn and little time to do so.

To many young British officers arriving in India the daily routines of Indian Army barracks life could seem little changed from a century before. On his first morning with 7/2 Punjab Regiment, Lieutenant John Shipster was woken by his bearer with a mug of sweet tea and a banana, and the salutation ‘Sahib, bahadur ji jagao’ – ‘Mighty Warrior, arise’. ‘Servants were plentiful and one could live like a king on a pittance … For those in the army it was a sportsman’s paradise,’ he recalled. Shipster had arrived in India aged nineteen and fresh from Marlborough College. He was based at Meerut, headquarters of India’s most prestigious pig-stickers, the Meerut Tent Club, although Lieutenant Shipster’s forays on horseback were confined to the Ootacamund Foxhounds, chasing the indigenous jackal. The young officers wore tweed jackets and jodhpurs while the master and whips besported themselves in hunting pink. But Shipster was far from the stereotype of the ‘pukka’ young sahib. He walked the lanes of the poorer districts to practise his Urdu and on his first leave he went with his orderly, Khaddam Hussein, to stay at the man’s home. The two men hired a camel to carry their bags and walked to the village. ‘I wanted to see how they lived, and I liked my orderly, and I knew that there were some distinguished Indian Army officers living in the area, and I called on them and they all, without hesitation, invited us to a meal, usually a curried chicken or this or that, and I enjoyed the friendship.’

In late 1943 Shipster’s 7/2 Punjab were ordered to the Arakan as part of General Sir Philip Christison’s 15 Corps. By now Shipster was a captain with the temporary rank of major. Before they left, the officers were gathered together in an old cinema in Ranchi and given a rousing talk by their divisional commander. ‘It was nothing short of a call to war. It was brief, with flashes of humour and full of confidence … exciting and uplifting, but … it left me feeling apprehensive about the future.’

The Commander of 15 Corps was an old colleague of Slim’s, with whom he had taught at the Army Staff College between the wars. During the First World War Christison had been badly wounded at Loos and awarded the Military Cross. A keen shooting and fishing man, with a countryman’s eye for landscape and fauna, Christison revelled in the fecundity of the natural world in the Arakan. ‘Monkeys, gibbons, hornbills, woodpeckers and Scops owls were common and their eerie cries frightened many a Madrasi soldier and were extensively used by the Japs to communicate with each other. There were few snakes but one day a large python was brought into my headquarters. Inside was a barking deer which, contrary to belief, had been swallowed head-first.’ On occasion, clouds of butterflies appeared so that the ground seemed ‘as if it was shimmering’. Christison was particularly taken with the sight of wild orchids growing on rotting tree stumps. The general had a dangerous encounter with an elephant that pushed his jeep into a ravine when they met along a jungle track. Other soldiers could retell the cautionary tale of the young RAF officer who set off with a machine gun ‘to bag a “Tusker”’ but was found trampled to death.

Christison’s immediate priority was to restore the morale of the men under his command. He decided that worms might be a factor contributing to poor morale. He set about removing men from the line, giving them a de-worming treatment and a fortnight’s rest at the coast playing games on the sand. At the end of this, he reported, ‘they were raring to have a go at the Japs’.

As the end of 1943 approached, Slim and Christison made final plans for an offensive in the Arakan. The main target was the island port of Akyab, 120 miles south of the Indian frontier on the Bay of Bengal. Akyab offered strategic airfields and access to the main waterways of the Arakan. Whether the allies ultimately decided to try and retake Burma by land or by sea, or a combination of both, they were going to need air cover all the way to Rangoon. Akyab offered the best facilities. The operation would also pre-empt any Japanese attempt to use Akyab as a base to encroach into India.

There was also another, more directly political, reason for an assault towards Akyab. The airfields had been used to launch Japanese raids on Calcutta at the end of the previous year, a strike that had little military importance but had sent thousands of refugees flooding into the countryside where there had already been massive displacement due to the famine of the previous year. There were five hundred civilian casualties and only a tenth of the normal workforce remained at work on the docks. The 5 December raid also saw fear-stricken merchants close down their grain shops, forcing the government to requisition stocks in order to avoid civil unrest. ‘A false alert the following day did nothing to improve morale in the city,’ the official history noted. Any suggestion of Japanese strength undermined attempts to project to the Indian population the image of an unruffled Raj.

The original plan was to mount a joint sea and land operation but at the last moment the landing craft were taken away for use in Europe. General Christison’s 15 Corps would have to do it the hard way, advancing overland in a three-pronged attack on Japanese positions on both sides of the Mayu range. To blast them out, Slim’s artillerymen would use their 5.5 inch guns, although the armchair generals in Delhi feared they would never succeed in hauling them into the mountains. ‘Stroking their “Poona” moustaches,’ a young officer wrote, ‘they remarked that these pieces would never get over the trails and through the jungle of Burma.’ As in so much else, Slim’s soldiers would prove the doubters wrong.

* The official breakdown of these figures is 916 killed, 2,889 wounded, and 1,252 missing, including prisoners of war. S. Woodburn Kirby, The War Against Japan, vol. 2: India’s Most Dangerous Hour (HMSO, 1958).

* What American opinion tended to ignore was the human cost of the USA’s own expansion. The conquest of the West had been achieved only at the expense of the native tribes. The inhabitants of Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, where America had fought a savage war of conquest, had been given no say over the annexation of their lands. The racist segregation within the American army, to say nothing of the discrimination practised in the Southern states of the USA, suggest a convenient myopia on the part of those who condemned Churchill for his imperial revanchism. Roosevelt could himself adopt a tone of condescension towards Asians which would have resonated with the most reactionary of British imperialists. Writing to Churchill on 16th April, 1942 he declared: ‘I have never liked Burma or the Burmese and you people must have had a terrible time with them for the last fifty years. Thank the Lord you have HE-SAW, WE-SAW, YOU-SAW under lock and key. I wish you could out the whole bunch of them into a frying pan with a wall around it and let them stew in their own juice.’ (PSF/BOX37/A333EE01, Franklin D.Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.)

* In such circumstances, Churchill wrote, ‘the United States Government would after the victory feel greatly strengthened in its view that all possessions in the East Indian Archipelago should be placed under some international body upon which the United States would exercise decisive control.’ (Winston Churchill memo, 29 February 1944, cited p. 412, Allies of A Kind, Christopher Thorne, Oxford University Press, 1978.)

† With this aim in mind work began in late 1942 to build a 400-mile-long road across mountains and through jungles to connect the railhead at Ledo in Assam with the 717-mile road that ran from Lashio in Burma to Kunming in China. The new road would bypass the part of the old ‘Burma Road’ now in Japanese hands. This immense project was driven forward by the American general Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. It involved 17,000 American engineers and around 50,000 Indian labourers and huge numbers of Chinese troops. From the outset Slim was sceptical, writing that ‘if it were left to me I would have used the immense resources required for this road, not to build a highway to China, but to bring forward the largest possible combat forces to destroy the Japanese army in Burma.’ (p. 249, Defeat Into Victory, Field Marshal Sir William Slim, Cassell, and Company Ltd, 1956.) Completed in January 1945, the ‘Ledo Road’ contributed little to the defeat of Japan. The airlift on the ‘Hump’ route across the Himalayas delivered more than four times the amount of war materiel to the Chinese Nationalists than the ‘Ledo Road’. The plan to use bases in China to attack Japan proved a failure. When American raids were launched from bases in Eastern China in May 1944 the Japanese counter-attacked furiously and by January 1945 forced the removal of the bombers to India and thence to the Mariana Islands where the major bombing effort against Japan was based. A US Army historical analysis concluded that ‘the air effort in China without the protection of an efficient Chinese Army fulfilled few of the goals proclaimed for it.’ (‘World War II: The War Against Japan’, Robert W. Coakley, American Military History, Army Historical Series, Office of the Chief of Military History, United States Army, Washington, 1989.)

* Eight million Indians were employed on war-related work during this period.

* The Official History, vol. 111, p. 317, gives a total of 41 for Assam, Manipur, Eastern Bengal and Calcutta.

* Even before war broke out there had been problems. As early as August 1939 a Sikh platoon in the Punjab Regiment deserted after a religious leader ‘so lowered their spirit that they deserted rather than face the dangers of war’. Later that year a group of Sikhs in Egypt rebelled when asked to load lorries, believing such coolie work was beneath them. A year after the first outbreak in the Punjab a squadron of the Central India Horse refused to board ship in Bombay. A mutiny and hunger strike among Sikhs of the Hong Kong and Singapore Royal Artillery in 1940 was provoked by orders that the men should wear solar topis. The investigators sent from India blamed the ‘faulty administration’ and told the regiment to back down on the helmet order. The troubles prompted one far-seeing intelligence officer, Colonel Wren, to write in 1940: ‘We have by our policies towards India, bred a new class of [Indian] officer who may be loyal to India and perhaps to Congress but is not necessarily loyal to us … The army would be helped by a more positive policy on the part of His Majesty’s Government … which will transform our promises of independence for India into reality in the minds of the politically minded younger generations.’

* The desire to escape the hellish conditions of Japanese prisoner of war camps was a decisive factor for many. Among the officers there were undoubtedly substantial numbers who had been alienated by the racist treatment they received at the hands of colonial officials in pre-war Malaya. This could range from being forced to sit in separate compartments from Europeans on trains and excluded from clubs where a colour bar operated. The INA also drew thousands of recruits from Indian communities in South-East Asia, many of them from the rubber plantations of Malaya and drawn by Bose’s promise of a new India in which the restrictions of caste would be overturned.

* The famine was caused by a complex interplay of factors: a cyclone that devastated huge areas of rice cultivation; the loss of Burmese rice imports after the Japanese occupation; rumours about shortages and subsequent hoarding of food; incompetence and corruption in the regional government; and the failure of the British and Indian governments to act speedily. Food was being shipped out of Bengal to support the war effort while the population starved. As the historian of the famine, Richard Stevenson, writes: ‘The famine in Bengal was caused by a lack of money, not by a lack of food. A hyperinflation was created in Bengal in 1942 as a result of the war and as a result of government policies. A part of the population, British and Indians connected with the war industries, was protected … the other part, the cultivators and the fishermen, was not protected … The economy of rural Bengal was too simple and impoverished to withstand the profound and prolonged disruptions applied to it by the government, a British government, in pursuit of its war goals.’ Richard Stevenson, Bengal Tiger and British Lion (iUniverse, 2005), p. viii.

† Twenty out of twenty-four INA soldiers trained in espionage and parachuted behind allied lines were captured; two raiding parties landed by submarine were also arrested.

* The transformation was directed by General Sir Claude Auchinleck who replaced Wavell as C-in-C India in 1943. Auchinleck began his career in the Punjab Regiment before rising to become one of the most senior British generals. He was immensely popular with the Indian troops.

SEVEN
Jungle Wallahs

By the time they reached the training camp at Ranchi, the officers and men of the 4th West Kents were an exhausted mass. Stiff and sore, they climbed on to waiting trucks which took them to the base where Colonel Saville had imagined his subalterns playing polo and the old soldiers in the ranks had spoken of armies of punkah-wallahs cooling their afternoon naps. The shock of the Ranchi base was profound. It was desolate and dusty and they would live in tents; the place was generously populated with snakes and scorpions, one of the latter giving a painful sting to Ivan Daunt as he worked on repairing a storage building. Daunt recovered after a few days but found little of the Ranchi experience to his taste, although with considerable sangfroid he went on to help his company win the weekly snake-finding contest, organised to entertain the men and keep the serpent population at bay.

One of the first challenges for the West Kents was to get used to living and working with the great and unsung hero of the Burma campaign – the mule. During the misery of the retreat from Burma in 1942, General Slim had realised the imperative of creating armies that could move swiftly, unencumbered by dependence on ‘the tincan of mechanical transport tied to our tail’. The immediate answer to this problem was the mule, a crossbreed of horse and donkey with greater intelligence and endurance than either. Without these beasts the armies would never have been able to fight in the trackless expanses of the jungle, where trees barred the way to jeeps and the ground became a sucking swamp in the monsoon. As John Winstanley recalled, ‘The mules, of course, were with us all the time. They were our lifeline. We were now an animal borne infantry battalion.’ The search for sufficient mules for Slim’s army ranged far and wide. In one instance 650 mules were transported from Bolivia by an Anglo-Argentine cattle-rancher, Robin Begg, who brought a team of Argentine gauchos with him on the ship to India. The animals were so well cared for that all but three survived the rigorous journey.

Lieutenant Tom Hogg was allocated five chargers and sixty-five mules. As the son of a farmer, he was judged the right man for converting the 4th West Kents to animal transport. There were several London bus and taxi drivers among his men and he wondered how they would make the transition. There was no need to worry. ‘Many became so attached to their particular mule that they would not allow anyone else to touch them, and later on, grieved terribly when some of the animals unavoidably got wounded or killed in the fighting.’ But Ivan Daunt remembered how the mules learned to regard the approach of a soldier with foreboding. ‘Oh dear, oh dear … as soon as the mule sees you coming towards him … Cor blimey, poor buggers, I felt sorry for ’em. Some of the climbin’ they had to do.’ A mule could take loads of up to 80 pounds on each of its flanks, and in the case of mountain artillery mules more than twice that amount. The mules had one major disadvantage, though. In the still of the jungle, their braying carried long distances and alerted the enemy. The 14th Army solution was to cut out the vocal chords of the unfortunate beasts. A Chindit remembered one mass de-braying: ‘Round came the doctor with a chloroform rag, put over the mule’s mouth or it may have been an injection, I don’t remember. However, one soldier had to sit on the mule’s head with a thing like a dunce’s hat as soon as the doctor cut into the mule’s sound box! The chloroform and blood was so unbearable that the bloke on its head could only stop for a few minutes as it nearly put the soldier to sleep; so all had to take turns. It was horrible – I took my turn!! … When the operation was completed [we were] told to undo our ropes and await the water-man … After one or two splashes the poor animal looked up, all glass eyed, struggled to its feet and tried to use its voice … with no sound coming out!’

The men learned to move silently through the jungle, and learned how to react if they made a noise or heard a noise. As one British officer remembered, ‘the answer to noise was silence; this was particularly important at night – to freeze for as long as it takes and let the enemy make the mistake and make a noise – although it could have been a monkey following us through the trees.’ The troops were taught how to prepare panji pits as booby traps for the Japanese: these were staves of sharpened bamboo placed in and around concealed pits. They could be smeared with dirt or excrement to ensure the wound inflicted would become poisonous. They learned, too, how to remove leeches by burning them with a cigarette: simply pulling them out with your fingers left the head embedded in the skin and caused blood poisoning. To their disgust, the leeches proved adept at finding their way into the most intimate corners of the anatomy. In return for gifts of cigarettes and salt Indian labourers showed them how to make shelters and beds from bamboo, and which plants were edible and which to avoid. Men from the pioneers, like Ivan Daunt, learned to construct bridges for fording jungle streams and small rivers. Daunt also recalled that they were introduced to American K rations, which included such treats as chopped ham and eggs, veal loaf, instant coffee, cigarettes and chewing gum. All the 4th battalion men regarded them as infinitely superior to the British diet.

Troops heading into the jungle for the first time learned how easy it was to become lost and to miss a target by a wide distance. An officer later recalled, ‘It was often proved that some soldiers would nearly always move to the right around an obstacle in their path, others would always go round to the left of it. If one continued moving this way for, say, 1,000 yards the objective could be missed by a large margin. The soldier had to bear this in mind and make corresponding corrections as he moved.’ Above all, no one wanted to find himself alone in hostile jungle.

They carried out mock attacks. Ivan Daunt was lying in a ditch when a senior officer appeared and said, ‘bang bang bang … I am a machine-gunner.’ The men in the ditch were supposed to consider themselves dead. But one of the 4th battalion wags replied, ‘Yes, sir, and I’m an anti-tank gun.’ As Private Daunt recalled, ‘It cracked us up.’ On another occasion, during a night exercise, a patrol surrounded a group of officers sitting in the dark and talking, a habit that might cost their lives fighting the Japanese. The men captured them with a shout of ‘Gotcha!’

There was a growing feeling among company commanders like John Winstanley and Donald Easten that the exercises were exposing the inadequacy of their commanding officer. After talking it over, the younger officers went in a delegation to see Lieutenant Colonel Saville. Donald Easten described what happened next. ‘We went to see him and each of us told him in turn that we had no absolutely no confidence in him. So he turned to us and said: “Do you realise this is mutiny?” And we said: “It might be, we don’t know. But we have no confidence in you, in putting the lives of our men in your hands in action in Burma.”’ The 4th West Kents were by now part of 161 Brigade, whose commander was the avuncular, if occasionally fiery, Brigadier Frederick ‘Daddy’ Warren. As the senior officer among the group John Winstanley was nominated to take the matter to Warren. ‘He gave me absolute stick … for this mutiny really … to go and say that you are not going to go and work under this man! … and I was sent packing, and the man was removed because as the brigadier said, “Well, you’ve made it impossible for him to command anyhow.”’ Lieutenant Colonel Saville was sent to a staff appointment in Delhi. The man who replaced him would make a profound mark on the 4th West Kents and the whole story of Kohima: he could inspire devotion among his men and the contempt of those he crossed, and he would carry the 4th West Kents through their darkest days.

He did not at first sight cut an intimidating figure. The new CO was about five foot nine and not heavily built. But Lieutenant Colonel John Laverty had a presence that could cow the toughest of the battalion’s hard men. He was forty-four when he came to lead 4th battalion, still a comparatively young man but nearly two decades older than most of those under his command. Laverty was variously known as ‘Texas Dan’, because of the cowboy-style military hat he wore, or ‘Colonel Lavatory’, the latter nickname apparently derived from a rugby song the precise lyrics of which have been lost to history. Neither men nor officers ever dared to use the nicknames to his face. Laverty carried a long bamboo rod to use as a climbing stick; it could also give him the appearance of a prophet descending from the heavens with the judgement of God.

John Laverty did not tolerate muttering from his officers. When Lieutenant Tom Hogg went to him to complain about problems created by a soldier in his platoon, Laverty immediately asked him which rifle company he wanted to join. ‘By those who understood the situation this amounted to a “slap across the face” for me,’ recalled Hogg. ‘In fact, that aspect of it went completely over my head at the time, and I enjoyed the prospect of doing some real fighting.’

One of the battalion medical orderlies, Lance Corporal Frank Infanti, gave a different picture of Laverty. Infanti had a troubled history with the battalion. Both his parents were Italian and this had led to his brother being interned in the opening months of the war, ironically while Frank himself was being evacuated with the West Kents from Dunkirk. When he was refused permission to visit his brother in the internment camp Infanti said he would no longer carry a rifle. In a moment of compassion the then CO decided against disciplinary action and made Infanti a medical orderly. ‘I got on extremely well with Laverty because I’m a little fella. I would never have got in the army normally because I’m too short. And he sort of respected me because I kept up with everybody! On the marches and all that. He was an unusual bloke, Laverty. He used to call me “Doc” Infanti which was a great compliment to an orderly … he spoke in a very cultivated voice … almost as if he had had elocution lessons.’

John Laverty was born Henry Jarvis Laverty in Londonderry on 8 October 1900 to a prominent family in the building trade. His father Henry built the Protestant cathedral of St Anne’s in Belfast and had a large brickyard in Carrickfergus, which one employee reckoned had ‘made the mortar for half the houses in Carrick in those days’. He went to school at Foyle College, which numbered a Lord Chancellor of Ireland, numerous rugby internationals and a Viceroy of India among its alumni. A month before the end of the First World War, John Laverty applied to Sandhurst, from where he was commissioned into the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in 1921. These were bad years in his home country. Ireland was convulsed by war between the IRA and the forces of the crown. As a member of a prominent Protestant family who had decided to join the British army, it is safe to surmise that John Laverty would have had little sympathy with Irish rebels.

What Laverty retained of that Ulster Protestant upbringing was the flinty outward manner of a man raised among righteous but unyielding citizens. His son Patrick, who saw his father only once during the war, thought him a soldier to the core. ‘Pure and simple he was a warrior. That is what he was good at … He was pretty tough. They called him bloody-minded and I think he probably was. You didn’t get anywhere. I mean once he made up his mind he couldn’t be varied at all. He was absolutely pig-headed in that regard.’

After three years in the Inniskilling Fusiliers, Laverty joined the Essex Regiment, where his index card referred to him as ‘Mad Jack’, possibly a reflection of the bloody-minded personality described by his son and some of his junior officers. His war-fighting experience was gained in the small colonial police actions of the inter-war period, firstly in Kurdistan and later in Sudan. He was awarded a Military Cross during the suppression of the Kurds in 1932 and was later promoted to be Inspector of Signals for the British-controlled Iraqi army. By the time the Second World War broke out John Laverty was back with the Essex Regiment, with the rank of major, and had married Renee Stagg, a doctor’s daughter from Southend, whom he had met while playing golf. Within a few months of their wedding she was pregnant with the first of three children. On the outbreak of war Laverty was posted to the East End of London on ‘anti-panic’ duty, while Renee and her baby were sent to Shropshire to escape the Blitz. ‘There was a big parting of the ways. Everybody was going through those kind of separations,’ Renee recalled. John Laverty was eventually posted to serve with the Essex Regiment in India in 1942. By the following year he had been promoted from major to the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel and sent to lead 4th battalion, Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, into battle.

Captain Donald Easten remembered his arrival. ‘I thought to myself, “Thank God, at last we have someone who knows what he is talking about.” He was not the kind of person you would say, “I would do anything for this chap,” but at least he was competent. You knew his decisions would be properly thought out. I didn’t love him. I don’t think any of us did. We respected him.’ Respect would have been enough for John Laverty.

The men were coming to the end of their training period and could properly call themselves ‘jungle wallahs’. Ray Street was one of the smaller men in the battalion and weighed only eight and a half stone, but he was quick on his feet and brave, ideal material for a battlefield messenger who would have to run quickly between positions under fire. He had started the war as a soldier in the Worcester Regiment but after undergoing his jungle training in India was sent off to 4th battalion to help bring them up to full strength for the fighting ahead. Street had not seen combat yet, but had heard his father’s stories of the fighting at Gallipoli and the throat wound that had nearly ended his life. His experience of war on the home front had been eventful. Having enlisted first into the Home Guard, Street was allocated to Birmingham city centre and found himself there during a German bombing raid. A stick of bombs hit the street next to where he was standing. Running to the scene he saw that a cinema had been hit and the street was full of screaming, wounded people. He rushed inside to help evacuate the survivors. A woman sat with her arms folded serenely in the seat where she had been watching the film. But her head had been sliced cleanly off by a piece of flying metal.

By now the old Kentish character of 4th battalion had changed. There was still a core of men like John Winstanley, Ivan Daunt and Donald Easten who had been through France and North Africa together, and who came from within a few miles of each other at home in England. But Ray Street was a Brummie and his mate Dennis Wykes came from Coventry; the new CO was an Irishman; and there were Welsh and Scottish voices to be heard too. The Kentish component had gradually come to accept Dennis Wykes and the other replacements, although he was still some way from being able to call any of them his friends. ‘They looked at us warily as if to say “you haven’t seen any action and we wonder what you’re going to be like.”’

The oddest of the newcomers to join them in India was the posh boy. Of all the men in the ranks of 4th battalion, John Harman was the most enigmatic, not only because of the extraordinary nature of what he would do, but also because his background was so different and his personality so resistant to easy definition. He must have been one of the most unlikely candidates to win the Victoria Cross of the whole war. John Pennington Harman, known to his friends as plain ‘Jack’, was the eldest son of a millionaire. His sister Diana, one of three siblings, said, ‘Although he seemed to disregard society right through his life he wasn’t at all insensitive. It’s just that he didn’t play by the same rules. He found that they led you up blank ways. He didn’t find that he was pursuing the things he was interested in if he conformed.’ At prep school in Bristol he was unhappy; it was not just the normal pain of a child removed to a boarding school at seven years of age, but also the sense of being forced into a straitjacket of discipline and expectation for which he had no sympathy. There was an added complication. John’s dormitory was close to the Bristol Zoo in Clifton and at nights he was distressed by the sounds of animals. They represented, according to his sister, ‘unwelcome captivity and restraint’. He ran away from school twice before his parents brought him home.

He was then sent to the famous Bedales School in rural Hampshire. Founded by J. H. Badley in 1893, Bedales was a revolutionary establishment by the standards of its day. Stressing that each child needed to be treated as an individual human being, Badley saw the era after the First World War as ‘a great opportunity, one of the greatest in our history, if only it can be realised and utilised to the full’. The school was a haven for nonconformists and while John never focused on his academic work, lacking ‘concentration in things which did not interest him’, he was allowed to indulge his love of nature in the school’s ample grounds. As his sister Diana saw it, ‘he seldom wanted to finish something he had embarked upon – it didn’t seem quite important enough to engage him’.

John’s father, Martin Coles Harman, owned Lundy Island, a craggy and beautiful piece of land off the Devon coast. Harman senior was prone to eccentricity. He liked to consider Lundy his private fiefdom, even going so far as to mint his own coins, a presumption of sovereignty that saw him prosecuted and fined. Lundy became for his son the one place where he could live according to his own designs. The cliffs and coves, the old granite quarry, were places where dreams could be fashioned without disturbance from the mundane demands of everyday life. John dreamt of finding precious metals on Lundy and engaged in a prolonged correspondence with a Spanish mineral ‘diviner’ who claimed extraordinary powers of underground perception. Boreholes were drilled but nothing was found. The family’s retainer on Lundy, Felix Gade, wrote that John ‘seemed to feel that it only needed a stroke of genius for him to be provided with a fortune, without grinding work!’ The two shared an interest in the island’s bees and worked together on the hives, with occasional advice from John’s father. John’s friends from Bedales would visit Lundy in the summer holidays and were, according to his sister, ‘all oddities, people like himself, who didn’t quite conform’. There was a chaste romance with a girl called Denny, one of six children who formed a large gang with the Harmans. They swam, fished and chased all over the island, and in the evenings read Dickens by lamplight. His sister remembered John’s body shaking with laughter.

His diaries of life on Lundy reveal a boy who was a careful observer of weather, wildlife and landscapes, but not remotely sentimental about the harsher aspects of the natural world. Entries for February 1932 describe shooting a cock sparrow with his catapult at twenty yards and witnessing a staged fight between a ferret and a rat. ‘The ferret killed the rat in about 30 seconds.’ Yet a week later he was describing how he heard a thrush and a lark singing in the morning and was nursing a chaffinch with a broken leg given to him by Felix Gade. ‘Thurs. 31st … Heard Chaffinch singing in Millcombe. My chaffinch is still all right and ought to be singing soon.’

But to understand John Harman and the exceptional figure he later became at Kohima, it is necessary to examine what happened to his world at the beginning of the 1930s. His mother, Amy Ruth Harman, was a beautiful and vivacious woman who enjoyed the social whirl of London far more than the countryside but who, by the close of the 1920s, had become seriously ill with kidney failure. She was given morphine to ease the excruciating pain but died in 1931 at the age of forty-seven. John Harman was deeply distressed by the early death of his mother, in the same year that he was due to leave school. And the family’s troubles were set to deepen.

Martin Coles Harman had made his fortune in corporate finance, quitting school at sixteen to join Lazard’s as a clerk on £48 per year and eventually accumulating a portfolio of companies worth an estimated £12 million – a vast sum in the 1930s. The Daily Sketch described him as the ‘pre-war City’s wonder man’. ‘Bushy-browed Martin Harman always did things the big way … Veteran financiers clucked their tongues as Harman zoomed from a bank clerk’s high chair to the chairman’s swivel chair in a dozen different board rooms – all this between 1923 and 1933.’ Yet a year after the death of his wife he was declared bankrupt, with liabilities of £550,000 and assets of just £10,000. The precise source of Harman’s financial catastrophe is hard to ascertain; family members suggest he got into difficulty during the Great Depression. Worse was to follow. In 1933 Harman senior was convicted of embezzlement and sent to Wormwood Scrubs prison for eighteen months. According to Diana Keast, her brother was devastated. ‘He so looked up to his father. They really were very close. I know that it hurt him a great deal to see that happen to his father. Of course he never doubted his father, never.’ Throughout this grim period Lundy Island remained the beacon of stability. Martin Coles Harman had placed the island in trust so that it could not be seized by his creditors.

It was at this time, when he would have been about eighteen years of age, that John set off on his travels. His journey would take him the best part of four years, from Spain to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. He worked on sheep farms, cut timber in forests and tried his hand at gold prospecting, always eventually moving on. The only note of any romantic involvement was with a woman in New Zealand who shared with him an interest in the paranormal. Throughout his life John Harman would seek out clairvoyants and soothsayers. After returning from his travels he went to Lundy and worked again with Felix Gade and the bees. But in November 1941, with the tide of war still running against Britain, John decided to enlist in the Household Cavalry, believing he would be working with animals. Almost immediately, and predictably, he found that military life was not to his taste. Writing to his father – now free from jail and discharged from bankruptcy – he cursed the life of the barracks. ‘Life is just bloody hell, dirty, noisy, crude and inefficient. I heartily wish I had never joined up. There is no time to do anything after the set tasks are done … how I would like to be stalking deer in NZ a free man … I learn almost nothing each day.’ In April 1942 he was thinking of running away ‘to a life of solitude … I can hardly constrain a desire to desert and damn the consequences.’

One can imagine how strange this well-spoken son of a millionaire must have appeared to his fellow soldiers, a great many of them tough working-class lads from the inner cities. There are several references in John Harman’s letters to the ‘crudeness’ of barracks life, the boredom of being a soldier and the pain caused to his feet by marching. What is perplexing is Harman’s refusal to take the commission that would have offered him a more comfortable existence. With his education and background, even allowing for the disgrace of his father’s imprisonment, Jack Harman would have been a likely candidate for officer training. In a letter to his father he explained his reluctance, in spite of the fact that he considered himself to be a ‘gentleman’. Self-doubt was at the root of his decision: ‘I have given the matter of taking a commission a lot of thought and there is no doubt that if I was an officer I would be able to resume the life I was used to, to some extent. On the other hand I am constitutionally so unsoldierly that I am filled with doubts about the whole thing … Does the status of Gentleman entitle a man to be an officer with the King’s Commission though he is not the soldier-type? I think not … well!’

By September, John was with the Worcester Regiment and having second thoughts about his status in the ranks, writing to his father that he was going to apply for a commission as soon as he could. He never did. ‘I am still a private soldier after a year in the army,’ he wrote to a friend. He was still interested in divining and considered putting up a proposal to the War Office to use his ‘special knowledge’ to help detect submarines. Nothing seems to have come of that. By the end of January 1943 he had changed regiments once more and was soldiering with 20th battalion, The Royal Fusiliers, and on his way to India. A friend, Wally Evans, who was with him on the troopship to the East saw Jack frequently gathering up ‘empty beer bottles that were laying around the ship in order to recover the deposits paid on them’. He would use the money to buy equipment that was lighter and less bulky than his own. When a call went out for volunteers to join depleted regiments, John Harman and several others put their hands up to join a draft going to 4th battalion, Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment. ‘The biggest blunder of our lives,’ remembered Evans, ‘for what we had to go through in Burma.’ But Harman was looking forward to the possibility of fighting in Burma, or at least getting himself to the jungles of South-East Asia. In August 1943, just over a month before the 4th battalion shipped out to the front line, he wrote to his father with a romanticised view of jungle warfare: ‘Four years in NZ stand me in good stead and if we ever have to fight in the Burmese Jungles it will be right down my street. Frankly, I would rather hear the noises of the jungle than the ceaseless clattering and yapping of the barrack rooms; and eating food almost entirely out of tins gets me down. In the jungle a man may “spit” a snake over a fire and eat it all himself and make a decent cup of tea.’

Harman was sent to D company, under the command of Captain Donald Easten, an assignment that was providential: he was placed under the authority of a man who wore his rank lightly but with great effect. Easten had the wisdom to look the other way at the minor indiscretions of his men, and he had the gift of showing them that he cared for their welfare. He was swift to sense the potential in John Harman. ‘He was a great countryman who found his way everywhere day or night, he understood ground as well as obviously being a very solid citizen who wasn’t going to bolt if something nasty happened. He was brave and of course in the end it was proved.’

In early October 1943 John Laverty was given orders to move out for Burma. The 4th battalion was to be shipped across the Bay of Bengal for General William Slim’s coming offensive. What Slim did not appreciate was that the Japanese were also planning an attack in the Arakan. The operation, code-named Ha-Go (literally Operation Z), was designed to draw away British resources and attention from the frontier with India, where the commander of the Japanese 15th Army was planning an audacious surprise. Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi sweeps through the story of the Burma war like a force of nature, and in late 1943 he was offering his superiors a tantalising vision of victory.

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