Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 – The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire

Tokyo was snowbound on the night of 25 February 1936 as the death squads fanned out across the city. One of their targets was the Lord Privy Seal, the elderly Viscount Makoto Saito, who had spent the evening at a private showing of Naughty Marietta, featuring Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, in the home of the American ambassador. Within a few hours the old man was dead from an assassin’s bullet. The finance minister, Korekiyo Takahashi, who had resisted a huge rise in the military budget, was lying in his bed when the killers arrived. When an army captain told him he was to receive the Tenshu – the ‘punishment of heaven’ – he told him he was an idiot. Minister Takahashi was shot, then disembowelled and his arm hacked off.

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Although he is not mentioned in the contemporary accounts, Renya Mutaguchi came under suspicion as a member of the Imperial Way faction which launched the coup and he was sent away to China to command a regiment. There he made the fortuitous acquaintance of Major General Hideki Tojo, a coming force in the Japanese military, whose advocacy of expansion into China had helped set Japan on its collision course with the USA. The relationship would prove valuable in the years to come. By the time he reached his regiment in Peking, Mutaguchi had a finely developed sense of his destiny. On earth he contented himself with indulgence in women and alcohol – he was a prodigious drinker – and the admiration of sycophantic junior officers. But glory also existed for him as a posthumous ideal. He already inhabited his own glowing obituary.

Later, he would claim his place in history by asserting that he had precipitated the Sino-Japanese war of 1937 by ordering the firing of the first shots at the Chinese in the Marco Polo Bridge incident.

(#) Whatever the precise truth of Mutaguchi’s claim, he was certainly one of the central instigators of the pivotal act of Japanese aggression towards a gravely weakened Chinese state. Then came the war with the British and his triumph in Malaya. By the time he was appointed to command the 15th Army in March 1943, Renya Mutaguchi yearned for even greater glory and looked to the west, across the Burmese frontier into India, to realise his dream. He longed to exercise a ‘definitive influence’ on the outcome of a war that was daily slipping from Japan’s grasp.

Throughout 1943 there had been steady American gains in the Pacific. There had also been an ominous growth in submarine attacks on Japanese shipping, all of it prompting the emperor to announce in October that the country’s situation was ‘very grave’. Imports of bauxite, the aluminium ore that was vital for building aircraft, were among the worst affected. The shortage of oil, too, had consequences beyond the restrictions it placed on war industry, for it dramatically reduced the flying time available to train pilots. The young men being rushed through training to replace dead pilots were a poor match for their allied opponents.

Japan’s troops still defended stubbornly, fighting for every inch of ground, and her armies still controlled great swathes of China and the Pacific, as well as South-East Asia. But the problem for Tokyo was brutally simple: with American sea power in the ascendant, the island nation of Japan would soon be cut off from her empire, and the country lacked the industrial capacity to replace its supply aircraft and fighters as quickly as the Americans were shooting them down, or to replace the ships being lost daily to allied attacks.

The British build-up in the Arakan, and Slim’s wider preparations in India, had been observed. Japanese spies in India reported the arrival of thousands of new troops and the assembling of forces in the north-eastern border areas; they reported the increase in the number and quality of allied aircraft in the region, and the road-building programme near the frontier. Three Chinese divisions under the American General Joseph Stilwell were threatening the north of Burma.

If Burma were to be lost, followed by the collapse of Malaya and Singapore, the humiliation could fatally undermine the grip of the militarists on the direction of the war. It would also remove from Japanese control supplies of Burmese oil, rubber, timber and metals, and, if the British kept marching, it could ultimately threaten the vital oil reserves in the conquered Dutch East Indies. Defeat in Burma might also free hundreds of thousands of allied and Chinese troops for action elsewhere, including China, where the Americans wanted to advance to airbases closer to the Japanese mainland. If the war had been launched in the name of expanding Japanese power into Asia and securing essential resources, how could this reverse be explained to the people of Japan? Even to a man as dismissive of the public will as prime minister Hideki Tojo it would have been a tall order.

The idea of attacking the Indian frontier was not new. In fact, the British had been expecting such an assault since they were driven out of Burma in 1942. Then the Japanese had considered a plan to march into Assam and east Bengal, with the twin aims of defeating the British land forces and severing the air link that kept Chiang Kai-shek’s troops supplied in China. The so-called Plan 21 led to the issuing of an order ‘to attack and secure important strategic areas in north-east Assam state and the Chittagong area and to facilitate the air operation … to cut the air supply route to Chiang Kai-shek’.

Plan 21 was allowed to slip into abeyance, however, not least because Mutaguchi, among others, believed it was impossible to send anything larger than patrol-sized groups across the mountains into India. But in February 1943 imperial headquarters, fearful of a British offensive, came up with a new proposal. Using the careful phraseology ‘When the general situation permits’, the plan called for a thrust into east Bengal or Assam.

In the same month Brigadier Orde Wingate led a force of more than 3,000 men, seven columns divided into two groups, with mules to carry supplies, deep behind Japanese lines, where they remained until April, carrying out ambushes and attacks on rail lines.

(#) The Chindits, named after a lion-like creature of Burmese mythology, unsettled the imperial command, which believed that ‘these operations were … a reconnaissance in force prior to a large scale counter-offensive’.

But if imperial headquarters regarded the Chindit incursion with dismay, Mutaguchi saw it as a piece of vital intelligence. Wingate had proved that the impossible – in this case the crossing of the mountains between India and Burma – could be achieved. If Wingate could do it coming east, then what was to stop Mutaguchi going west? But the Chindits had survived for as long as they had because the allies were able to drop supplies at key points on their route, and they had done this with limited opposition from Japanese aircraft. In the jungle hills of the north-east the army that could be supplied was the army that would win. As he contemplated invasion, Mutaguchi relegated this vital element of his plans.

In early May 1943 fishermen along the banks of the Chindwin encountered a Japanese patrol mounted on elephants and led by a friendly and inquisitive officer. This Japanese had none of the arrogance that was typical of his rank. He spoke to the local Burmese in a respectful tone, asking them about the movement of British troops in the area. Lieutenant Colonel Iwaichi Fujiwara was a rising star who specialised in fomenting trouble for the British by recruiting nationalist groups. Mutaguchi had dispatched him along the Chindwin in the wake of the Chindit incursion with instructions to find out what the British were up to. Were they were merely conducting a reconnaissance, or were they the advance guard of a major offensive? Along the way Fujiwara claimed to have captured more than three hundred British prisoners, most of them men who were either lost or too sick to continue and had, according to the Chindit rule, been left behind. Many Japanese officers would have tortured and executed them. But Fujiwara needed intelligence and apparently the men were well treated. Certainly no war crimes charges were later laid against him.

From the prisoners Fujiwara learned of the existence of Orde Wingate and of his epic trek across mountains and rivers. A less gifted intelligence officer might have concluded that the ragged prisoners he had interrogated were symbols of another British failure. But on the long trek back to Maymyo by elephant, mule and foot, Fujiwara reached a different conclusion. When he went to see Mutaguchi at 15th Army headquarters he told his boss that he detected a new spirit in the British army – a reading that Mutaguchi, fatefully, chose to ignore.

The following month Fujiwara was back in the field, this time accompanied by fourteen spy-school graduates with whom he reconnoitred likely crossing points for a Japanese invasion of northeastern India. He came back with the news that a crossing was possible in the dry season and that enough food was available on the Japanese side of the Chindwin to sustain an invasion force. What he could not say was what conditions were like on the other side of the river. How much food was available? What was the attitude of the local tribes? Most crucially of all, he could not vouch for conditions in the mountains once the monsoon descended. Fujiwara nonetheless remained enthusiastic about a dry-season offensive. Even if he had entertained serious doubts he would have been given short shrift by Mutaguchi.

There was no room for troublemakers at Mutaguchi’s headquarters. When his chief of staff, Major General Obata, made clear his view that the invasion could not succeed because of problems of supply, disease and topography, he was sacked and replaced by the sycophantic Major General Kunomura, the man whose jealous rage over a geisha girl would lead him to assault a fellow officer. Mutaguchi surrounded himself with men whose agreement he could count on. With no dissenting voices left on his own staff, he turned his attention to bullying those further up the chain of command into agreement.

In late June 1943 Mutaguchi addressed a conference of senior officers in Rangoon. But instead of allowing the debate on an offensive to take its course, he tried to bounce those present into swift agreement by presenting his own ready-made plan for the invasion of north-east India. It included, most controversially, proposals to move beyond establishing a new defensive line and to break through into the plains of Assam. The ever-obliging Kunomura was given the job of presenting the plan, but was quickly savaged and put in his place by a furious officer who accused him of trying to pre-empt the conference.

Mutaguchi also ran into opposition from sceptical senior officers, including a brother of the emperor, Prince Takeda, who did not believe the 15th Army could be supplied in India and reported this view to imperial headquarters when he returned to Tokyo. Mutaguchi planned for his men to survive by capturing British supplies, an idea described by another officer as trying to ‘skin the racoon before you caught him’. However, Mutaguchi had the benefit of influential supporters and propitious circumstances. A nation facing defeat always runs the risk of becoming captive to desperate adventures. Japan needed a victory and Mutaguchi’s strike against British India offered the best hope. His superior, Lieutenant General Mazakazu Kawabe, was an old colleague from China days and ensured that his subordinate’s plans for India were not swept aside. The sceptics were told to have faith. Kawabe would keep an eye on Mutaguchi and any final decision would be his.

Kawabe is a man one might have expected to exercise restraint. He was in many respects the antithesis of his junior: cautious and famously abstemious, he was a moral puritan where Mutaguchi was a glutton. In appearance Kawabe was bespectacled, short and thin, with a twirling moustache. Perhaps he saw in Mutaguchi a virility and hunger for success that he knew to be conspicuously lacking in himself, confiding to his diary at the end of June 1943: ‘I love that man’s enthusiasm. You can’t help admiring his almost religious fervour.’ In the end, the imperative of success carried the day for Mutaguchi. With strict provisos that he was to make a detailed examination of the supply situation, and to keep to the remit of a limited operation to establish a new defensive line, Mutaguchi was told to start planning his offensive.

The bulk of his forces would be directed against Imphal, where the British 4 Corps was based and where there were several important airfields and vast supplies of fuel and ammunition. If Slim was to mount his offensive against Burma from Assam, Imphal would be the launching pad. The three divisions of 4 Corps were all separated from each other, with the majority of forces deployed close to the frontier. This made them vulnerable to being cut off and encircled. Once a siege was under way the defenders of Imphal would have to rely on the road to the base at Dimapur for food supplies. Cut this road, Mutaguchi believed, and Imphal could be starved into submission.

In August 1943 Mutaguchi held a war game at his headquarters in Maymyo during which he revealed that he planned to send an entire division to block the road to Dimapur. They would do it by seizing the best defensive position along the route: the lightly defended hill town of Kohima. With Kohima under his control, Mutaguchi would be able to march on to Dimapur and capture the biggest supply base in the region. It would doom the defenders of Imphal and devastate Slim’s plans to invade northern Burma.

In an official recording only to be released three decades after his death, Renya Mutaguchi described his projected invasion of northeastern India as the first step in turning the tide of war in Japan’s favour: ‘The motivation for starting this campaign is nothing but winning the Great Far Eastern War.’ The Imperial headquarters and the Southern Area Army under Count Terauchi hoped for a battle that would drive the British back from the Indian frontier. Japan would then consolidate a new defensive line and sit out the monsoon. Mutaguchi and his acolytes still hoped, with a chronic absence of appreciation of the global situation, for a favourable turn in the war in Europe that might, in conjunction with a Japanese victory in India, force the British into a separate peace and out of the war with Japan.

Mutaguchi’s dream of victory was encouraged by the lobbying of Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the Indian National Army, who assured both Mutaguchi and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo that India would rise in rebellion once his men planted their flag on Indian soil. The ‘March on Delhi’ was bragged about on Tokyo radio and spread as a rumour by Japanese agents eager to foment instability in the Indian Army. In Defeat into Victory General Slim speculated that the defeat of British power in India was the ultimate aim of the invasion.

‘Here was the one place where they could stage an offensive that might give them all they hoped,’ he wrote. ‘If it succeeded the destruction of the British forces in Burma would be the least of its results. China completely isolated would be driven into a separate peace; India, ripe as they thought for revolt against the British, would fall, a glittering prize into their hands … it might indeed, as they proclaimed in exhortations to their troops, change the whole course of the world war.’ Certainly Mutaguchi indulged himself in ‘private speculations’ and, according to one author, even day dreamed about riding a white horse into Delhi. But a Japanese army with a line of communication extending across high mountains over a thousand miles to the docks at Rangoon, and with virtually no air and naval cover, could never have hoped to march deep into India, even with the supplies it captured from the British along the way.

(#) Neither Tojo, Count Terauchi or the Emperor entertained any thoughts of a ‘March on Delhi’ at this point in the war. By late 1943 defence was the paramount concern and Burma was the western anchor of Japan’s ‘Absolute Defence Sphere’. There would of course be spin-offs. Chiang Kai-shek would be isolated once more in China and the British would be humiliated in the eyes of their Indian subjects and American allies. If the resulting chaos kept the British tied down indefinitely in India so much the better.

On 22 December 1944 Mutaguchi called a conference in Maymyo attended by Lieutenant General Kawabe, who commanded the Burma Area Army, and Major General Ayabe, deputy chief of staff to the commander of Southern Army, Count Terauchi, who controlled operations across South-East Asia. By now the doubters on Mutaguchi’s own staff had been silenced or banished. But he needed the final go-ahead from Tokyo. Fearful that the British would grasp the initiative and attack first, he pleaded his case with Ayabe. The deputy chief of staff agreed to make the argument for imminent action with Count Terauchi.

A veteran of the great victory over Russia in 1905, the count was well respected in the imperial hierarchy and without his support Mutaguchi might have found himself delayed indefinitely. The Japanese war leadership, focused on the Pacific and the looming threat to the home islands, was, if not reluctant to commit to the Indian offensive, certainly too distracted to give it a high priority. Count Terauchi listened to his vice-chief’s account of the Maymyo war game and agreed to send him on to Tokyo to put Mutaguchi’s case directly to imperial headquarters.

Ayabe was an experienced political operator. He had served in numerous senior staff positions and was posted abroad as military attaché to Poland in the early 1930s, and later as a liaison officer to the Axis powers in Berlin and Rome. Arriving in Tokyo, he found himself cast as persuader-in-chief for Mutaguchi’s adventure. For three days senior staff, including the chief of operations, questioned him closely about the risks of the offensive. Ayabe felt he had made the case well but knew a final decision could only come from Tojo. The deputy chief of staff was on his way back to the airport when he received news that a colonel had been despatched to see Tojo to seek final approval.

The colonel in question was Susumu Nishiura, head of the Bureau of Military Affairs, who would later produce the first account of the war from inside the military hierarchy. His account, ‘Records of Showa War History’, laid bare the incompetence and decadence of the system.

Arriving at Tojo’s home, he was told the prime minister was in his bath. Nishiura spoke to Tojo through a glass partition overlaid with steam. He recorded the following conversation:

Tojo: What’s the matter?

Nishiura: Sir, we urgently want a decision on the Imphal operation.

Tojo: Imphal … yes … How about communications? Have they been properly thought out? Eh? Eh? It’s difficult country towards India you know.

Nishiura: Yes, sir. The whole plan has been gone into in great detail. Tojo: What about Mutaguchi? Are his plans up to schedule? Eh? Has he got any problems?

Nishiura: He is anxious to go ahead, sir.

Tojo: What about air cover? We can’t help him much. Does he realise that?

Nishiura: I take it he does, sir.

Tojo: Now what about the result of pushing our defensive line towards India? What problems is that going to make for us? Eh? Are you sure it will make things better rather than worse? What will happen if the Allies land on the Arakan coast? Has anyone thought of that? Eh? Eh?’

Tojo then climbed out of the bath and towelled himself before subjecting the colonel to a detailed interrogation on the strengths and weaknesses of the plan. Eventually Nishiura was told that the order would be signed. But Tojo warned that 15th Army was not to be ‘too ambitious’. When the order was finally issued a week later, Tojo stressed the defensive nature of the operation. ‘In order to defend Burma the Commander-in-Chief, Southern Army may occupy and secure the vital areas of north-east India in the vicinity of Imphal by defeating the enemy in that area at the opportune time.’ Count Terauchi was warned to keep a tight rein on Mutaguchi. As one Japanese officer put it to Mutaguchi when the latter told him he wanted to die on the Indian frontier, ‘It would no doubt satisfy you to go to Imphal and die there. But Japan might be overthrown in the process.’

Tojo had delayed in approving the operation because he recognised that it was a significant gamble. Yet he reported optimistically to the Emperor that ‘we will achieve the objective before the rainy season which begins in mid-May, defeat the enemy in northern Burma and thoroughly cut the route from India to China’.

As 1943 came to an end two complementary Japanese offensives were being planned. Before Mutaguchi would launch across the Chindwin there would be the diversionary strike in the Arakan. The 55th Division would attack General Christison’s 15 Corps, and would be supported by loud propaganda that they intended to march on Calcutta. While this was underway Mutaguchi’s 15th Army would ready itself to cross the Chindwin and catch Slim unawares, striking the decisive blows at Imphal and Kohima. The British and Indians would be swiftly overwhelmed. On this assumption was disaster built.

* (#) Bushido, The Way of the Warrior, was a code originating in the Samurai era which emphasised the virtues of discipline, sacrifice and courage. Every Japanese officer was enjoined to embrace bushido as his guiding principle.

* (#) It should be pointed out that the rescript also emphasised that ‘superiors should never treat their inferiors with contempt or arrogance … making kindness their chief aim’.

* (#) The first election with adult male suffrage in Japan did not take place until 1928. Two years later a right-winger shot the prime minister, and two years after that young naval officers killed his successor. The slide into military rule and international isolation quickened. In 1931 the army, ignoring the Cabinet, staged an incident in Manchuria that led ultimately to Japan’s departure from the League of Nations.

* (#) The coup might have succeeded if Emperor Hirohito, in whose name the rebels claimed to act, had chosen to support the Imperial Way. But he was appalled by the attacks on his most senior advisers and condemned the plotters; martial law was declared and the mutinous officers either committed suicide or were captured and executed. But the 26 February incident boosted the military, which used the instability that followed as an excuse to increase their grip on the levers of power. It was the critical moment after which the march to war in Asia became inevitable. John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936–1945 (Pen and Sword, 2005), p. 17.

* (#) Japanese forces stationed in China under an international agreement provoked a confrontation by staging night manoeuvres on 7 July 1937. After a dispute with the Chinese over the alleged kidnapping of a Japanese soldier during the operation the Japanese opened fire on Chinese positions. The soldier was later found unharmed.

* (#) Major General Charles Orde Wingate (1903–1944) has remained as divisive a figure after his death as he was in his lifetime. His ideas for long-range penetration operations behind enemy lines, and the use of air power to deploy and supply these troops, foreshadowed the special operations forces of today. Perhaps his most important achievement was in boosting public and troop morale with his first Chindit expedition in 1943. Coming after the humiliation of the retreat from Burma and the failed first Arakan offensive, the image of the British forces surprising the Japanese behind their own lines was a morale and propaganda coup. It also inadvertently hastened the Japanese to disaster by convincing them that they could send large forces of men across the mountains into India. They did not appreciate the appalling human cost of Wingate’s operations or the extent to which he increasingly depended on the diversion of huge air resources to deploy and supply his troops. Of the 3,000 Chindits who entered Burma on the first expedition, one thousand never returned and a further six hundred were too ravaged by illness to ever fight again. On the second Chindit expedition – ‘Operation Thursday’ – a force of some 12,000 men sustained 944 dead, 2,434 wounded and 452 missing. Wingate was killed on 24 March,1944 when his plane crashed near Imphal.

* (#) The Japanese plan for a ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ approved by the Cabinet in 1940 made no mention of India, nor did the Japanese officials who outlined the Empire’s territorial ambitions in their discussions with Germany ever suggest such a conquest. When the British conducted an inquiry in 1948 and interviewed fourteen top ranking Japanese officers, it concluded that ‘a search of all the available records failed to reveal any documents which would provide a conclusive answer to the question of whether or not the Japanese government entertained concrete plans for the invasion of India by the Japanese Army.’ (Cited p. 142, The Imperial War Museum Book of the War in Burma