Road of Bones (28 page)

When the telegram came on 20 March, Colonel Hugh Richards might have wondered what fresh misfortune was about to befall him. The colonel had set his heart on fighting with Wingate’s Chindits but, having completed the rigorous training, he was told that at the age of forty-nine he was too old for the jungle. Those who had served with Richards in West Africa, where he had commanded 3 West African Infantry Brigade, thought Wingate’s decision ‘total nonsense’ and an injustice to ‘an enormously popular commander’. He had spent the war until that point on the sun-withered northern border of Nigeria preparing to attack the neighbouring Vichy colonies. But when the French declined to resist the allied occupation of Timbuktu the West Africans were sent to India and given to Wingate. The Army Group Commander, General Sir George Giffard, was a fellow veteran of West Africa and had known Richards for years. He gave the unhappy colonel a job as commander of the Delhi area, an unappealing sideshow in which a man might languish indefinitely in boredom. The March telegram from General Giffard brought what appeared to be good news. Richards was to leave Delhi immediately and fly to Imphal. From there he would travel up to Kohima and take command of the garrison. There is no trace in the military records of an explanation as to why the commander of a West African brigade, recently rejected by Wingate, had been chosen for this task; Richards had no experience of commanding Indian and Burmese troops, who provided the majority of the garrison, and he had never fought the Japanese.

The appointment might have had a lot to do with the exigencies of war when the British were still scrambling to catch up with the pace of the Japanese advance. Richards’s African bond with Giffard may also have helped push him to the forefront. But the appointment also had something to do with the personality of Hugh Richards himself. He had a reputation for being steady. When Giffard was told to send an officer to hold Kohima, he replied, ‘I will send you someone who will do that.’ Tall and strongly built, Hugh Upton Richards wore a slim moustache and an expression of calm. He was not a fire-eater or a martinet. Like the man who would become his great friend, Charles Pawsey, Richards had been tested in the fire of the Western Front, and was another of the few who had survived from 1914 through to 1918. Like Pawsey, he had also been taken prisoner.

Richards came from a middle-class family in Worcestershire and joined up as a private before being commissioned in the field in 1915. His experience in the ranks gave him a sympathy for the ordinary soldier that would prove invaluable when it came to the desperate onslaughts on the trenches at Kohima. Between the wars in Nigeria he befriended an Australian oil engineer, a man of some wealth, who helped the eternally penurious Richards with funds to educate his son. ‘This man was a truly generous person. I think he admired my father who was a kind and upright person,’ his son recalled. ‘My father loved that life in Africa. He could live properly there and not constantly worry about money the way he had to at home.’ Between the wars he also served in Palestine.

Hugh Richards’s orders were clear on the issue of command: ‘You will be in operational control of
all
[author’s italics] the troops in KOHIMA and of 1 Assam Regiment.’ This would assume great importance for Richards as the battle developed and he came to appreciate the challenge of working with a man as tough and self-contained as the CO of 4th battalion, the Royal West Kents, Lieutenant Colonel John Laverty.

On 22 March Richards flew to Imphal and the following day he boarded a two-seater plane for the short flight to Dimapur, ‘touching down on a rough airstrip which seemed to be in the middle of
nowhere … nothing but jungle was visible from the airstrip’. Richards was taken to Charles Pawsey’s bungalow where Pawsey immediately gave permission for him to establish a garrison headquarters at the residence. Captain Walter Greenwood, who acted as Richards’s staff captain, remembered that it was ridiculously overcrowded. At any time there could be up to fifteen staff officers working in the small building, along ‘with any visitor who happened to drop in’.

Richards toured the defences and was shaken. ‘I had been told there were no defences, but even so, I was appalled at what I found.’ Part of the problem was that the existing commander had only recently emerged from a three-week hospital stay. Those who had been charged with building defences in his absence had been tardy. Richards noted: ‘Trenches had in many cases not been dug by men who had a knowledge of what was required to provide protection against high explosive. They were too wide and few had any head cover.’ Hugh Richards, veteran of the Western Front, understood the necessity for strong trenches. The digging had been done by Naga labourers and not by soldiers. He also noticed that the troops were organised into small box formations, placed near the main installations such as hospitals and stores. But they were too widely dispersed and could easily be picked off by the enemy. Astonishingly there was no barbed wire.
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Of equal concern was the constant change in overall garrison strength. Lorries were leaving and arriving at a dizzying rate. Some carried supplies and ammunition, others came to bring men from the hospital down to Dimapur. As an official account put it: ‘The[re was] constant fluctuation of the Garrison. Many units were moved without reference to Garrison HQ, and the size of the Box and the number of troops available to man it were therefore almost impossible to compute.’ An Indian Army officer, Lieutenant Dennis Dawson, one of the logistics officers based at Kohima, felt sorry for Richards.
‘Nobody took any notice of him, because we came under 253 sub area administratively, and whatever he said, we said, “well you’ll have to go through district.” He didn’t know from one day to another how many troops he had in Kohima at all. Nobody could tell him. We were in a terrible position.’

When he looked at the quality of the soldiery available to him, Richards was apprehensive. The best unit, 1st battalion, Assam Regiment, had been deployed to Jessami and Kharasom to delay any Japanese advance. Among the assortment of troops at Kohima there was a battalion from the Royal Nepalese Army, a detachment of Assam Rifles, two companies of Burmese troops, and two platoons of Mahratta Light Infantry. In addition, there were several hundred line of communications troops – signallers, construction teams, cattle controllers – and about two hundred British troops at the reinforcement camp, mostly older soldiers or men recovering from tropical illnesses. Walter Greenwood, a survivor of the fall of Singapore, arrived in Kohima to find the place full of a ‘motley crew of useless mouths and hangers on’ with ‘no real competent soldiers in charge’. Some of the ancillary units such as canteens, rest camps and field hygiene sections were sent back to Dimapur. Greenwood estimated that by the time some 3,000 non-combatants had been evacuated, there were 2,500 men left, but more than half were ancillary troops. The total number of riflemen numbered around a thousand, pulled together from ‘all sorts and services’. Richards was inclined to be generous when speaking of his eclectic band of warriors, reaching back to a memory from the First World War. ‘It struck me that the composition bore some similarity to the line as it was composed in front of Hazebrouck in 1918 when the cooks and the bakers and the butchers turned to [soldiering].’

Lieutenant Pieter Steyn, a South African serving with the 1st Assam, described the mess. ‘In spite of the deplorable military situation,’ Steyn wrote, ‘a clear plan had not been formulated for the defence of Kohima. Administrative arrangements had been completely disrupted and telephonic communication was chaotic.’ There were three separate telephone exchanges in the town and nobody seemed
to know which military sector each was supposed to serve. With such inadequate communications between headquarters and the other sectors, ‘command therefore devolved almost entirely on local commanders, for the most part inexperienced junior officers, who were called on to exercise and assume unexpected responsibilities often beyond their rank’.

Kohima had been the responsibility of General Scoones at Imphal until 28 March but under mounting pressure himself he was incapable of preparing the defence of the ridge. As Scoones was about to be cut off at Imphal, and with Stopford still on his way, Slim ordered General R.P.L. Ranking, who commanded the rear area and line of communication, to prepare to defend both Dimapur and Kohima. Slim described the appointment as ‘a sudden plunge from administrative duties in a peaceful area into the alarms and stresses of savage battle’. It was a considerable understatement. Ranking was an Indian Army man who was awarded a Military Cross on the Somme before returning to Regimental Headquarters in Uttar Pradesh, but he was not a battlefield general and with the fews day left to him he could only hope that his garrison commander, Hugh Richards, could hold Kohima until reinforcements arrived.
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As late as 23 March, Richards was being told by his superiors that the narrow jungle paths could not be passed by any force larger than a regiment and that there would certainly be no artillery. The intelligence
showed the nearest Japanese were some thirty-five miles east of Kohima. There was one shaft of light. On 24 March Richards looked down the road to see a convoy of trucks grinding up from Dimapur. They were carrying some old friends. The British troops who arrived in Kohima that afternoon were from the 2nd battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment, with whom Hugh Richards had served as second-in-command for three years in Palestine. Since then, they had fought in North Africa and Burma. With new hope, he wrote, ‘I felt reasonably happy about our ability to hold the enemy.’

In the last days of March General Slim toured the defences at Dimapur with customary cheer, not betraying his unease for a second. ‘As I walked around, inspecting bunkers and rifle pits, dug by non-combatant labour under the direction of storemen and clerks, and as I looked into the faces of the willing but untried garrison, I could only hope that I imparted more confidence than I felt.’

Throughout India a vast war machine was on the move. General John Grover’s British 2nd Division was crammed into trains heading to Dimapur, and the entire 5th Indian Division, which included the 161 Indian Brigade of which the West Kents were part, was being airlifted. The commander of 161 Indian Brigade, D. F. W. Warren, arrived at Dimapur ahead of the main body of his troops. He was an avuncular figure, an old India hand, well liked by the men, who nicknamed him ‘Daddy’. Warren was acutely conscious of the human cost of his decisions. His son was serving as a company commander in the Arakan.

At a meeting in Dimapur, Slim gave Warren and the local commander, Ranking, three tasks: prepare the defence of Dimapur and hold it; reinforce Kohima and ‘hold that to the last’; and prepare to receive the large reinforcements that were coming. Slim called Warren outside and walked up and down the path with him. He outlined ‘without any attempt to minimise the hazardous task he was being set, a fuller view of the situation, and especially of the time factor’. In plain language Warren was told to get his troops moving up the road fast. If there were a breakthrough at Kohima, the battle would be lost. Slim’s instinct was to make a stand at Kohima. It
offered the best defensive position on the approach to Dimapur. The ridge dominated the road and whoever held it had a huge tactical advantage. But everything was predicated on the defenders holding out until reinforcements arrived from the British 2nd Division.

General Grover’s 2nd Division was made up entirely of troops from English, Scottish and Welsh regiments. Among the reinforcements was Captain Arthur Swinson of the 7th Worcestershire Regiment, who found his train ‘packed so tight we can hardly move’. At Calcutta on 31 March he bought a copy of the
Statesman
newspaper, which reported that three Japanese columns were advancing over the frontier. The following morning his train reached the Brahmaputra river in the early mist and the troops transferred to a ferry; he saw from the deck the green hills of Assam and away to the north the mountains of Tibet. They boarded another train and moved through the wet jungle. At lunchtime the war intruded in an unexpected way. Wounded from the Imphal battles appeared. ‘We were having lunch when an ambulance train passed. The tail end of it stopped opposite us for a few minutes and I looked at the rows of weary men. Some sitting up smoking, others lying quite still, but all with a glazed hollow look in their eyes. It does you no good seeing ambulance trains, not when you’re on your way to the front, it doesn’t.’

Swinson was attached to the staff of 5th Brigade, whose commander, Brigadier Victor Hawkins, was a tall, spare figure, explosive when annoyed and inclined to hound his younger officers into joining him in ostentatious displays of fitness. However, Hawkins was a brave and thoughtful soldier. Although Swinson suffered the lash of his tongue, he wrote, ‘the whole brigade had a great affection for him’, not least because ‘he detested the waste of a single life’.

Hawkins’s progress to the front had been frustrating and emblematic of the chaos induced by the Japanese advance. When he arrived at Stopford’s headquarters as ordered he ran into a senior officer, who was puzzled by his presence. ‘Hallo, what are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘We were told to report here,’ Hawkins replied.

‘Oh, we cancelled that last night,’ he was told. Hawkins was to go directly to Dimapur. After a rough night’s sleep in an improvised
mess, he went down to the airstrip for his promised flight to Dimapur. Again, there was nobody to meet him. There followed a search of various buildings until he found the aircrew. His temper was not improved by the situation he found at Dimapur. ‘The local situation was staggering. There was no appreciation of the seriousness of the situation, or even of the situation itself … There were some 80,000 unarmed coolies in the base depots liable to stampede at the first shot. There were no immediate defence plans. There were two transit camps full of troops from IV Corps who had now been cut off from their units and could not get back. None of these were organised in any way … discipline seemed to be conspicuous by its absence. In fact, complacency was the chief order of the day, and plans were completely lacking.’