Road of Bones (52 page)

Somehow the Japanese guns kept up their fire, with more shells falling among the wounded throughout the night. John Faulkner was directing mortar fire and watched two men ‘ramming bombs down the barrel as fast as they get ’em out again, laughing like a couple of schoolboys’. Early the following morning, Hugh Richards left his bunker and climbed towards Laverty’s position. On the way he saw West Kent trenches filled with dead from the previous night’s shelling. At 0600 hours Lieutenant Colonel Young and his orderlies went round the wounded telling them that they would be evacuated that morning. This time there would be no false dawn. Warren was on the radio from Jotsoma half an hour later to tell Young to expect relief by the 1/1 Punjab at any time. Once they arrived, the evacuation of the wounded could start. But this did not mean the relief of the garrison. Only a company of 1/1 Punjab was expected and an all-out Japanese assault was still likely at any moment. At 0700 hours the combined artillery of 2nd Division and 161 Brigade began pounding the Japanese once more; the shelling was to give the defenders respite and allow the relief troops to break through.

Events moved rapidly. At 0710 hours Young ordered that all patients be given morphine half an hour before being evacuated; ten minutes later the commander of the 1/1 Punjab appeared at the ADS. His men were through. The road was open. The Japanese roadblocks
had been blasted away. It is hard to imagine what the troops’ arrival represented to Young and the other medics. They had long passed the point at which human beings are meant to cease functioning in a logical manner. Thirteen days of siege with only snatched fragments of rest. But the newly arrived 1/1 Punjab officer found Young in complete command of the situation, punctiliously checking the arrangements for the movement of his wounded men and dispensing advice on the deployment of the fresh troops. The 1/1 Punjab had taken up positions overlooking the road from where they could help cover the evacuation. There were tanks following to give support. The combination of armour and artillery fire kept the Japanese pinned in their positions for the time being. The evacuation could begin.

At first Lieutenant Bruce Hayllar could not believe what was happening. ‘It was a marvellous moment. They started saying, “If you can walk down the hill they are sending up some lorries to take you out.” The walking wounded set off. Our reaction was “I don’t believe it.” It was wonderful when it happened. Some people were getting up and walking down to where we knew there was a road. I went with another chap. We had a stick each and walked. We met various corpses on the road. Some were ours and some were Japs.’ Down at the road there were lorries and Hayllar saw the stretcher cases being loaded. He felt jealous of them because he was afraid there would be no lorries left to take the walking wounded. Hayllar made it on to a lorry, and as he was driven down towards Dimapur they met British troops marching to Kohima. ‘They looked horrified when they saw us. We hadn’t shaved for a fortnight and had no water. They gave us cigarettes and water. We were too ill to talk about it.’ Another soldier, Mark Lambert of the West Kents, had spent the previous days at the ADS in agony from a leg wound, and from constipation. Evacuation brought sudden relief. ‘I was taken down the road in an open truck. The constipation I had just stopped. The motion of the truck was like an explosion!’

Private Harold Norman was assigned to stretcher duty. He was told to check the men lying on stretchers, ‘and if they were dead I had
to send the Indian stretcher-bearers around the back of the feature where they put the bodies in a heap to be buried later’. At around 11a.m. he was helping carry a stretcher to the main road when shells began exploding. There was screaming from newly wounded men and from others terrorised by this last-minute assault. Corporal A. E. Judges who was helping the wounded was killed, and a West Kent captain badly wounded. He would die later. Private Norman ran for cover, passing the mutilated bodies of men who, a few moments before, had been on their way to safety. ‘I saw trunks without legs and arms, and bodies with heads blown off.’ The stretcher-bearers were also under pressure from Japanese machine-gun fire. Five medical orderlies, including a major, were wounded. Eventually, four tanks arrived and put the Japanese artillery out of action. Fighter-bombers again flew in and attacked the enemy trenches.

The evacuation went on throughout the day with Lieutenant Colonel Young in the thick of things. At one point he discovered that a group of casualties seemed to be missing. Young found them near the Indian hospital where the terrified stretcher-bearers had taken cover from machine-gun fire. He gathered the men together and led them down to the road to the ambulances. Among those who left on 18 April was Charles Pawsey. By staying throughout the siege he had shown the Nagas that they would not be abandoned by the British; now there was much work for him to do with the thousands of refugees who had fled their villages. Pawsey would go to Dimapur and insert himself among the officers and officials who controlled the food and medical supplies. By 1640 hours the Advanced Dressing Station, scene of so much agony, was cleared of patients. Lieutenant Colonel Young, however, stayed on. The road was open but the main relieving forces had not yet appeared.

In Laverty’s bunker there was an urgent discussion about the tennis court position. The West Kents’ CO wanted to know if it could be let go and the Assam troops take up new positions on the edge of Garrison Hill. ‘I said it must be held,’ wrote Richards, ‘as if it were not the whole of Summerhouse [Garrison] Hill could be rolled up from
that flank.’ Laverty agreed and the 1/1 Punjab were sent to the tennis court to take over from the exhausted 1st Assam troops.

That night the Japanese artillery plastered Garrison Hill once again. Captain Harry Smith of headquarters company, 4th battalion, was struggling to get to the command post when a mortar blast knocked him over. A shell fragment lodged at the front of his skull and he lost consciousness. The 1/1 Punjab who took over the tennis court positions were heavily attacked but drove the Japanese back. There was no sign at all of an attack from Kuki Piquet. By the morning of 19 April the men in the trenches were feeling something like hope. They saw the arrival of the 1/1 Punjab as a signal of greater things to come. Later that day, Richards noted, the ‘Div artillery put down a most terrific concentration on KUKI piquet for quarter of hour. Seemed nothing could live.’ But enough Japanese survived to defend Kuki Piquet against the 1/1 Punjab’s attempted counter-attack. John Faulkner saw them charge, ‘with blood curdling yells’, but they failed to gain any ground. They may, however, have given the Japanese an undue impression of the strength of the reinforcements on Garrison Hill. Sato had to draw off men from the assault in order to deal with the reinforcements arriving on the road from Dimapur, and must have realised that he would soon be forced on to the defensive. That night, the Japanese did gain some ground after the ill-fated Shere troops once more abandoned their positions, this time about forty yards from Laverty’s headquarters. A counter-attack by A company of the West Kents drove the enemy out, killing over twenty of them, including a trenchful of men who were burned alive by exploding petrol and phosphorus grenades. Private Norman helped dispose of Japanese bodies on the perimeter. ‘We collected all the pieces and put then in a pit and burnt them.’

The defenders held on throughout 19 April thanks to artillery support and the failure of the Japanese to launch an all-out assault from Kuki Piquet. Richards was convinced that one push was all it would take to annihilate the garrison. Perhaps it would come the following morning.

On the morning of 20 April, Captain Harry Smith, still groggy with morphine, looked up to see British troops in ‘nice clean new
uniforms making their way up around the top of the hill covered by a very heavy barrage of 2 Division’s artillery’. The men were from 1st battalion, Royal Berkshire Regiment, 6 Brigade, and had come to take over the defence. Smith thanked God and then told the new arrivals to watch out for snipers.

Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes, A company, was in a weapons pit overlooking the tennis court that morning and came as close to death as he ever believed he would. He was staring out through an observation slit when a sniper opened fire. The bullet just missed his face and slammed into the rear of the trench. With his heart pounding, Wykes jumped back from the slit. Soon afterwards an unfamiliar soldier slid into the pit beside him. This man had shaved. He wore a clean uniform, and his eyes were clear. ‘He said, “I’m taking over your position now.” I said, “You’re welcome to it.” We shook hands. I warned him about the sniper. I said “Move quick, don’t show your face.” How I got off that hill I never did know.’ All day the West Kent survivors staggered down the hill in twos and threes, towards waiting lorries. Private Tommy Jackson was carrying the belongings of Sergeant Major Haines as he was evacuated, knowing that the big man was lying back among the Japanese on Kuki Piquet. ‘But you don’t talk about that. You laugh at all the little things you got away with. It’s impossible to explain,’ he said.

They were shelled and sniped at again as they formed up to leave. The tanks immediately responded. Dennis Wykes felt numb with weariness. He walked for several miles until he saw an officer standing by the roadside with a large canteen full of fruit salad. ‘He was ladling it out. He said “Well done lads, you done well.” And I thought to myself, “You ain’t done a bad job yourself here.”’

The relieving forces were shocked at the survivors’ appearance. Brigadier Victor Hawkins, commander of 5 Brigade, saw them coming down the road to Dimapur. ‘They were a sight for the gods. Long beards of all hues and their clothes fit only for scarecrows.’ The sights and smells nauseated the Royal Berkshires taking over the positions on Garrison Hill. Many doubled over and retched. An artillery officer wrote of ‘the stench of festering corpses … the earth
ploughed by shell-fire … human remains … rotting as the battle raged over them … flies swarmed everywhere and multiplied with incredible speed.’ He came across a Japanese bunker in which about twenty men had fought and lived for several days, ‘littered with their dead companions and their own excreta’. Ray Street, the C company runner, gave what advice he could to the incoming men. There was a last-minute tragedy in Ivan Daunt’s trench. Daunt had just left when a sniper opened fire on Private Horace Collins, killing him and then wounding another man. Collins’s brother Len had been killed a few days earlier. ‘He didn’t know about it,’ remembered Ray Street, ‘we were going to tell him about it when we’d got out.’ He knew two other men who were shot by snipers as the trucks were being loaded.

Donald Easten, John Winstanley, John Faulkner and the other surviving officers of 4th battalion saw their men safely on to the trucks. Lieutenant Tom Hogg led a party of around fifteen men to the road and met an incoming patrol who offered them tea and rock buns. He could not eat. John Laverty and his headquarters staff were the last of the West Kents to leave, moving like sleepwalkers until they reached the roadway and the waiting trucks. A witness described Laverty as ‘dead beat’, literally sleeping on his feet as he walked to the trucks, the strain of constantly trying to fill gaps with fewer and fewer men lifted from his shoulders at last. The West Kents’ CO had also lost many men whom he knew and upon whom he had depended; most of his senior officers were wounded or dead; the companies were shredded and existed only in name. The battalion had lost seventy-eight dead and nearly two hundred wounded, more than half of the men who first came into Kohima.

As the vehicles carrying the West Kents rolled down to Dimapur they were clapped and cheered by the advancing troops of 2nd Division, British and Indian alike. ‘
Shabash
[Well done], Royal West Kents,’ they shouted. Ten miles from Kohima, Captain Arthur Swinson saw the first of the West Kents. He found it hard to believe that they were British troops. Only their rifles indicated they were not a band of ghostly tramps. He saw men with faces caked with dry blood, many covered in filthy, blood-soaked bandages. ‘Some were
falling fast asleep but others though palpably crazed with fatigue were buoyed with excitement and a blessed relief. Their dull, haunted eyes brightened into a smile as they waved to the troops along the roadside.’

Lieutenant Colonel ‘Bruno’ Brown and the Assam Regiment, who had been in battle constantly since the end of March, walked for two miles to reach the trucks. Of an estimated 400 men who had been deployed from Kohima the previous month, the 1st Assam had lost more than half in the battles of Kharasom, Jessami and Kohima. Albert Calistan described the Assam Regiment survivors ‘marching and doubling some two miles down the main road to Dimapur … [where] we picked up transport’. They arrived at teatime and the battalion war diary records that the men ‘although very tired indeed were in excellent spirits. They were given hot tea, and a good meal. Each man had a stretcher, sheets, blankets and pillows for the night.’

The West Kents found hot baths waiting for them, lined up in the open at Dimapur. ‘They cut these drums in half,’ recalled Dennis Wykes, ‘so you had half a drum full of water and you jumped in, it felt really good.’ They scrubbed off the grime and the smell of death, and then they shaved, using several blades to get through the tangled beards. Ray Street remembered being sprayed with disinfectant and some men having their bodies shaved because of lice. ‘We slept through the next twenty-four hours, missing meals, despite being called and woken up for them.’ In his waking moments, Street was disconcerted by the silence. For two weeks he had lived with the sound of shells exploding and guns firing. ‘In a strange way,’ he wrote, ‘I missed the bombardment.’

Back up the road at Kohima, Hugh Richards watched the completion of the relief. At about four in the afternoon he got a message telling him to report to 2nd Division headquarters on the road to Dimapur. He went back to his bunker and collected his few possessions, and walked away from Garrison Hill towards the waiting trucks.