The Second World War (108 page)

Kohima was a small hill-station, 1,500 metres up in the Naga Highlands. It had white colonial bungalows and a mission chapel with a red corrugated-iron roof, all set against a backdrop of forest and blue mountains in the distance. The deputy commissioner’s bungalow on Garrison Hill boasted a clay tennis court which became no-man’s-land in the deadly battle to come.

The battle fought by the 50th Parachute Brigade had given Slim just enough time to redeploy some of his reinforcements. But on 6 April, when the Japanese arrived, Kohima was defended by only the 4th Royal West Kents, a detachment of Rajputs, the locally raised Assam Rifles, a mountain battery and some sappers. Once the Japanese encircled the town and blocked the road to Dimapur, they were cut off.

The battle for Garrison Hill and the tennis court was savage. Bizarrely, the Japanese would shout ‘Give up!’ in English before they attacked, which provided ample warning to the defenders. The British troops fought with a new vengeance. After the way the Japanese had bayoneted wounded
prisoners in the Arakan, the company commander of the West Kents said: ‘
They had renounced
any right to be regarded as human, and we thought of them as vermin to be exterminated… Our backs were to the wall, and we were going to sell our lives as expensively as we could.’

This they proceeded to do with Bren guns, grenades and rifles, exacting enormous casualties. ‘
The sheer weight of the attacks
threatened to overwhelm the battalion,’ said the headquarters company commander. ‘The outer part of the defences became piled with Japanese corpses.’ British casualties came mainly from snipers and light artillery. Their wounded were laid end to end in trenches. Many were hit a second time by shrapnel as they lay there. Water was very short and had to be parachuted down in metal jerrycans. The Japanese, on the other hand, were running out of rice due to Mutagachi’s assumption that they could easily take British supplies. Part of their desperate, even senseless bravery came from the need to capture some food.

The British 2nd Division, advancing down the road from Dimapur with the tanks of the 3rd Carabineers, began to fight through to relieve the defenders of Kohima. When they finally reached Garrison Hill, the place looked like a scene from the First World War, with smashed trees, trenches collapsed by shellfire and the stench of death. But, although the battered West Kents were relieved, the battle for Kohima continued for almost another four weeks. The monsoon was starting, however, which meant that the Japanese could expect even less from their supply lines. On 13 May they broke off the battle, and many were slaughtered as they pulled out.

Two days before, on 11 May, the Chinese divisions of Y-Force in Yunnan began to cross the Salween River to meet up with Stilwell’s X-Force. The
Japanese 56th Division
, defending the line of the Salween, was well aware of their plans. It had already made raids across the river to push back the Chinese further into Yunnan, but increased Nationalist strength supported by a part of
Chennault’s
Fourteenth Air Force indicated the preparation of a major offensive. This was confirmed by signals intercepts. The Japanese, having captured a Chinese codebook, were able to decipher all the radio traffic from K’un-ming and Chungking. Although the Japanese achieved a certain success in counter-attacks against troops crossing the river, Chinese forces were too strong.

On 17 May, Stilwell launched a glider assault with part of Galahad Force on Myitkyina airfield and seized it. ‘
This will burn the Limeys
,’ Stilwell gloated in his diary. But the Japanese rapidly reinforced the 300-strong garrison in the town and soon the Americans were besieged. The Japanese had stockpiled large supplies of ammunition there. Exhausted and sick,
with jungle skin sores, Merrill’s men began to collapse. Some suffered so badly from dysentery that they simply cut a flap in the seat of their pants to save time.

Stilwell showed little sympathy, either to his own men or to the Chin-dits. But with his reinforced Chinese divisions now surrounding the town, the Japanese became the besieged. And on 24 June a simultaneous attack by Chinese troops and the Chindits of Brigadier Michael Calvert’s severely weakened 77th Brigade seized the key town of Mogaung to the west. Yet it would take until the beginning of August before the Japanese commander in Myitkyina committed
seppuku
, and his surviving troops slipped away into the jungle across the Irrawaddy. At last work on the Ledo Road to China could be started, and US transport aircraft were able to fly a much shorter and less dangerous route, almost doubling the tonnage of supplies delivered to China.

As the great battle round Imphal continued against Mutagachi’s 15th Army, Allied regiments counter-attacked. But they, like the Americans, were astonished and appalled by the Japanese talent for excavation into hills to make bunkers. A newly arrived subaltern joining the 2nd Border Regiment was told by his platoon sergeant: ‘
By Christ, them little bastards
can dig. They’re undergound before our blokes have stopped spitting on their bloody hands.’

General Slim’s prediction that the monsoon would harm the Japanese supply routes far more than his own proved true. His Fourteenth Army could rely on air drops, while Mutagachi’s men were starving. Lieutenant General Tanaka Noburo, who had arrived on 23 May to take over command of the 33rd Division in the south, wrote in his diary: ‘
Both officers and men look
dreadful. They’ve let their hair and beards grow until they look exactly like wild men of the mountains… They have had almost nothing to eat–they’re undernourished and pale.’ By June his division had lost 70 per cent of its strength. Some of his men went for days on end with nothing to eat but wild grass and lizards. Their officers had secured what few supplies there were for themselves. In many cases, they attacked in the vain hope of finding tins of bully beef in Allied trenches.

Japanese soldiers were by no means immune from
combat fatigue
and psychosis, but only a small number were evacuated. Sufferers unable to take the strain any more committed suicide. Japanese soldiers had various names for paralysing fear, such as ‘losing your legs’ or ‘samurai shakes’ for uncontrolled trembling. They tended to cope with fear by adopting one of two extremes: either profound fatalism, with the acceptance that they were bound to die, or else denial, convincing themselves that they were invulnerable. On their departure for the army, most had been
presented with a ‘thousand-stitch’ scarf by their mothers which was supposed to ward off bullets. But as Japan’s defeat became more evident, fatalism became almost obligatory since field service regulations forbade any soldier to allow himself to be taken prisoner, even if badly wounded.

General Mutagachi was becoming deranged. He called for attack after attack, but his divisional commanders ignored his orders. On 3 July, the Imphal Offensive was finally called off. The Japanese retreat across the Chindwin left a trail of horror. Allied troops on their advance passed abandoned Japanese wounded, infested with maggots. In most cases they simply put them out of their misery. Mutagachi’s 15th Army had lost 55,000 men. Around half of their casualties were due to starvation or disease. Both General Kawabe Masakusu, the commander-in-chief of the Burma Area Army, and Mutagachi were relieved of their commands. Allied casualties during the battles for Imphal and Kohima amounted to 17,587 killed and wounded.

In China, the Ichig
Offensive had begun in April. It was the largest operation that the Imperial Japanese Army had ever undertaken, with 510,000 men out of the total of 620,000 men in the China Expeditionary Army. But for once the Japanese did not have air superiority. In fact by the beginning of 1944 relative strengths had been reversed. The Nationalists had 170 aircraft and the US Fourteenth Air Force 230, while the Imperial Japanese Navy had only a hundred, the rest having been withdrawn to make up for the disastrous losses in the Pacific. Chennault believed that he had enough aircraft to defend his bases, but Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo authorized the doubling of air strength for the forthcoming operations.

The main objective of the
Ichig
Offensive
was, as Chiang had also warned, to eliminate the airfields of the Fourteenth Air Force. The first phase, the Kog
Offensive, came from the Japanese 1st Army in the northeast, heavily reinforced from the Kwantung Army in Manchukuo. The Japanese did not attack Mao Tse-tung’s Communist forces based on Yenan to the west, which had done little for some time except kill collaborators. The Japanese were interested only in crushing the Nationalists.

In April, the 1st Army attacked south across the Yellow River to meet up with part of the 11th Army advancing north from round Wuchang– Hankow. This cleared the Peking–Hankow railway, establishing the first part of the corridor. The Nationalist troops in Honan province recoiled in disorder. Officers fled, commandeering military trucks, carts and oxen to evacuate their families and all the booty they had looted from towns and in the countryside. Outraged peasants who had been robbed of their food and pathetic belongings disarmed officers and soldiers. They killed many, even burying some alive.

Their hatred for the local authorities and the army was more than understandable. A severe drought in 1942, made worse by the Nationalist food taxes in kind, and exacerbated by the cynical exploitation of local officials and landowners, had led to a terrible famine that winter and into the spring of 1943. Three million out of thirty million people in the province are thought to have died.

Chiang Kai-shek’s worst fears had come to pass, and his best-equipped divisions were tied down at American insistence in the Burma–Yunnan campaign. After Chennault had taken the lion’s share of the supplies, and Stilwell had allocated the rest to X-Force and Y-Force, little had been left to re-equip other Nationalist armies. Those in central and southern China lacked weapons and ammunition, and in many cases had not been paid. When Chiang had asked Roosevelt for a billion-dollar loan to keep his forces going, Washington instantly saw it as a form of blackmail to obtain money for himself, as the price of keeping Nationalist China in the war.

In January, Chiang’s reluctance to commit Y-Force on the Salween front for fear of a Japanese offensive had prompted Roosevelt to threaten to cut off Lend–Lease completely. And once the Ichig
Offensive began, Roosevelt did not want Chennault’s Fourteenth Air Force or the recently arrived 20th Bomber Command’s B-29s to be used in support of Nationalist troops, even though Chennault’s attacks had been a major factor in provoking the Japanese onslaught. Roosevelt, despite all his championship of the Nationalist Chinese, was cynical and dismissive of anything which did not speed the triumph of American arms in the short term. Convinced that the United Nations led by America and the Soviet Union would be able to solve everything afterwards, he had a dangerous disregard for post-war consequences.