The Sunday Times Book Review by Max Hastings
(Imperial War Museum) The men of Britain’s wartime 14th Army in Burma bitterly resented the fact that nobody at home took much notice of what they were doing. By 1944, Churchill knew that the Americans were heading for victory in the Pacific. The British had suffered repeated jungle defeats at Japanese hands, even in 1943 when they enjoyed superiority of numbers.
Only with the utmost reluctance did the prime minister agree to prepare for a new offensive, to meet insistent American demands to open the land route to China through north Burma. But, even as British and Indian forces assembled in northeast India, the Japanese launched three divisions on their own spoiling operation.
The armies collided at two Assamese road junctions, separated by less than 100 miles, which passed into the legend of the British Army. Between April and June 1944, Imphal and Kohima witnessed some of the fiercest fighting of the eastern war. Fergal Keane focuses on the siege of Kohima, telling a brilliant story of human endeavour and suffering from both sides.
The speed of the Japanese advance caught 14th Army’s commander, Bill Slim, by surprise. Until the last moment, the British failed to identify Kohima as the objective of General Kotuku Sato’s 31st Division. When the Japanese advance guard met Imperial army pickets outside the little town, many of the Indian soldiers fled.
Keane recognises that the Indian army’s legend is overblown. Some of its units did wonderful things, but some were poor soldiers. Though the British cherished romantic delusions about Indian loyalties, it is unsurprising that some changed sides as prisoners, joining the so-called Indian National Army to fight (unimpressively, as the book recounts) for the Japanese.
Colonel Hugh Richards, charged with commanding the defence, had to improvise positions with a ragtag garrison, of which the most coherent element was a battalion of the Royal West Kents. “Chaos and low morale reigned supreme,” in the words of a British officer. Much of Keane’s tale relates how the Kents, initially 444 men, held the low hills of Kohima with a medley of Indian soldiers through days of relentless Japanese mortaring, sniping, shelling and day and night assaults by screaming infantry. The district commissioner’s bungalow and tennis court became scenes of ghastly carnage.
The author paints a host of vivid pen portraits: of Lieutenant Colonel John Laverty, the harsh, unlovable Kents’ commanding officer, who despised Richards and sought to ignore his authority; of district commissioner Charles Pawsey, who insisted on staying through the siege to protect the interests of his beloved Naga tribesmen. Corporal John Harman was a misfit, embittered by growing up with a millionaire father who was eventually jailed for embezzlement. On the battlefield he displayed suicidal courage, seeming to think himself unkillable. When at last he was hit and lay dying in the arms of his company commander, who called for stretcher-bearers, Harman said: “Don’t bother, sir…I got the lot. It was worth it.” He received a posthumous VC.
At the outset, the British held a ridge a mile long. After nine days cut off, the West Kents had lost more than a third of their strength, and the perimeter had shrunk to a 400-yard square. The trees on Garrison Hill, where the British made their final stand, were stripped of foliage by shellfire and grenades, which both sides used in thousands. A mortally wounded Welsh soldier named Williams pleaded pathetically with Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes: “Don’t let me die!” But Wykes murmured grimly to himself: “I can’t stop you dying, mate.” Nobody could, at Kohima. Water was chronically short, and the local Naga people suffered terribly.
Keane has taken immense pains to gather accounts of the Japanese experience. Their general had recklessly overextended his supply lines, and within weeks his soldiers began to starve. Some of their attacks were designed simply to seize “Churchill supplies” (British rations), as they called them. Japanese courage was as great as ever, but the British were bemused by the manner in which Sato continued to batter headlong at Kohima, instead of bypassing it. On April 20, a relief column broke through, enabling the West Kents’ ragged, filthy, bearded survivors to withdraw amid cries from Indian soldiers they passed of “Shabash!” (“Well done!”)
Other British units thereafter endured more weeks of costly fighting to push back the Japanese. Men fought from room to room of Pawsey’s shattered bungalow. But the tide had turned. The Japanese, always short of artillery, were reduced to six rounds a gun a day. Not only were Sato’s men starving, but they were also wracked by every kind of tropical disease.
Their retreat from Kohima, which began on May 13, created the road of bones that gives Keane his title. While British and Indian forces lost about 1,200 dead and 3,000 wounded in the battle, the Japanese suffered 7,315 casualties, mostly dead.
The defence of Kohima, and the larger battle further south at Imphal, decided the campaign. Though hard fighting lay ahead when Slim, in his turn, advanced across the Chindwin river into Burma, the 1944 actions had smashed the best Japanese forces in the region. The British and Indian armies restored their self-respect, after years of failures and humiliations.
Slim won chiefly because he displayed good generalship — after some initial mistakes — and possessed formidable US air supply-dropping resources, command of the skies, armour and much more artillery than the attackers. But British infantry also performed a remarkable feat of arms, and Keane’s masterly narrative does full justice to their achievement.
Road of Bones by Fergal Keane
HarperPress £25 pp576
via The Sunday Times
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