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

On 24 July 1942, nearly two months after they had set out from England, the 4th West Kents arrived in the Gulf of Suez and disembarked at Port Tewfik, where they prepared to join the allied counter-offensive against Rommel. The German general’s aim was to break through the allied defensive line stretching from El Alamein into the desert and open the way for an assault on Cairo, the last step needed to drive the allies out of North Africa. If he moved quickly enough, and if his enemy stumbled, there was a chance the Desert Fox could steal victory before the continuing build-up of British men and armour would make his task impossible.

The 4th West Kents spent a fortnight doing ‘toughening up marches’, without water, conducting mock attacks and practising night manoeuvres in the desert. The war diary for this period describes a battalion rapidly preparing itself for action, but the only incident of note was the death of a soldier who was accidentally shot.

One night Private Ivan Daunt was sitting with a few friends when he heard his name called out. An officer came over carrying a telegram from home. ‘I got down, put a sheet over my head and lit a match and it says: “A son is born.” I wouldn’t see him for another three years.’ In the desert night he felt a combination of joy and unspeakable sadness.

On 20 August a distinguished visitor arrived at 8th Army headquarters. The prime minister was on his way back from Moscow where he and President Roosevelt had met with Stalin, ‘the old Bear’, as Churchill described him to the welcoming party of officers. Now promoted to captain, Donald Easten was serving as a liaison officer between 132 Brigade, of which the 4th West Kents were part, and 8th Army headquarters. He suddenly found himself called upon to act as scout for the prime minister’s visit to front-line positions, a journey that would involve traversing a minefield. He practised the route several times in advance. ‘I was thinking I was going to meet the General and Churchill and two or three other people in vehicles. I found that I was leading something that looked like an armoured division! There were so many newspaper people, reporters and armoured cars and heaven knows what else.’ Easten led the convoy through the desert, found the gap, and made his way through to the other side. There he handed over to another officer and Churchill waved him goodbye with a shout of thanks. When he got back to the division headquarters he was immediately summoned and given ‘the most tremendous rocket’. He had apparently taken a fifty-yard detour off the safe route without knowing it. ‘However I didn’t blow the old man up,’ he recalled, still with an expression of considerable relief more than fifty years later.

Orders came down for the 4th West Kents to prepare to move off and mount an operation to interdict Rommel’s supply lines in the area of Alam Halfa. The troops moved out into the darkness at 2300 hours on 3 September, but German planes had spotted them forming up in the early evening and the sound of their vehicles was already attracting enemy mortar fire. Captain John Winstanley moved forward with B company on a ‘wonderful moonlight night’, but from the outset things went wrong. As the New Zealand official history describes it, the 4th West Kents ‘became considerably disorganised, with trucks on the wrong routes and often, in losing the way, becoming stuck in the soft sand or in the minefields … there was a confused mass of men and trucks’. Unbeknown to the battalion one of the few truly effective elements in the Italian army was waiting for them, holding fire in trenches that lay right across the line of advance.

The Folgore Division was an elite formation of paratroopers who could be depended on to stand and fight. As the advance eventually got under way, Winstanley heard the sound of men moving along on either side of him in silence. And then fury was unleashed. ‘The silence was shattered by a roar of automatic fire, and showers of Italian grenades burst among the forward companies. Many of the men were hit but the leading platoons charged the enemy positions.’ Enemy mortars crashed into the battalion’s vehicles and fires lit the sky, silhouetting the advancing men and making them an easier target for the machine-gunners. John Winstanley was firing his rifle lying flat on the ground when a bullet pierced his arm. He screamed in pain but maintained his position, urging his men to fight while trying to return fire himself.

Enemy aircraft now appeared and dropped parachute flares to illuminate their targets. Caught in the open desert, the majority of the 4th West Kents could only lie flat on their faces and pray. Most of their entrenching tools were in the burning vehicles and in any case it would have taken hours to dig proper foxholes in the flint-hard ground. The strafing and bombing by Stukas and the mortar and machine-gun fire from the Italians pulverised the battalion. Some men did make it into the Italian trenches and fought hand to hand with the defenders; they even managed to take some prisoners. But the battle was going badly and by 3 a.m. the order was given to withdraw. Carrying the severely wounded with them, the 4th West Kents, including an exhausted John Winstanley, eventually found some cover at a ridge several thousand yards back from the scene of the battle. Winstanley was evacuated to a military hospital, where he spent several weeks recovering from his wound. Private Ivan Daunt reflected bitterly on the experience of Alam Halfa: ‘The intelligence wasn’t thorough … we weren’t there long enough to know.’ The battalion lost 250 men killed, wounded or missing, more than half its strength. It was an agonising reminder of the catastrophe of France in 1940.

The regimental history recorded that the 4th West Kents were ‘thrown away in a suicidal attempt to cut off the retreat of the enemy’. It was, as twenty-two-year-old Peter Goodwin put it, ‘a complete cock-up. That was when morale reached its lowest point in the war. Everyone knew that it was a wasted effort and we lost a lot of people.’ Ivan Daunt felt changed by the desert, older and wiser, and determined that the war was something he would survive and see through to the end. Twice he had been caught up in disaster. He swore it would not happen again.

As had happened after France, new men and officers arrived to make up for the losses suffered at Alam Halfa. Among them was Lieutenant Tom Hogg, a transport officer who had grown up on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales. He had already survived death once by the time he joined the army: a motorcyclist had knocked him down when he was ten and left him with a fractured skull and broken leg. In those days the cost of the operations he needed ran to the price of ‘ten good milk cows by my father’s reckoning, and therefore a considerable loss to him’. At Giggleswick village school he was written off as a plodder and ‘suffered terribly from the impatience of teachers who clearly thought me too dim to be worthy of their time’. On leaving school in 1939 he joined the Territorial Army in Yorkshire, becoming, according to the Daily Mirror, the youngest sergeant in the British army at the outbreak of war. He found his way to the 4th West Kents after escaping from German captivity near Tobruk. To Ivan Daunt, the new members of the battalion like Tom Hogg were a source of strength: ‘A lot of them had been in other battles. They had been elsewhere. They weren’t rookies … And the NCOs … we got hardened ones coming in. And that made a lot of difference. Especially at Kohima.’

Hogg remembered some of his early experiences with particular distaste. On several occasions the 4th West Kents would see a group of Italians waiting to surrender and approach them. All of a sudden there would be a shout in German and the would-be prisoners would throw themselves down, revealing a German machine-gun crew who would open up on the British. The idea was to capture the transport. ‘This particular trick caused “bad blood” among our men, and I recall seeing one of our Red Caps … roll a live grenade into a trench full of prisoners who had already surrendered. I wondered how he would have felt if the roles had been reversed.’

A new commanding officer arrived at the battalion that autumn. Lieutenant Colonel H. W. Lambert was a pious man with a fascination for the holy places of the Middle East. He was liked by the men. Lambert began his command with inspections ‘in detail’ of all the battalion companies; drill routines, bathing procedures, battle training and leave procedures were all examined rigorously. Company commanders referred men they did not regard as physically or mentally fit to the medical officers for regrading. Lambert was restoring morale in the most sensible way possible, by ensuring that normal battalion life was resumed.

In December 1942 the 4th West Kents became part of 161 Brigade, 5th Indian Division, with which they would serve until the end of the war. As part of 161 Indian Brigade they would fight alongside two Indian battalions, the 1/1 Punjab and 4/7 Rajput. The practice of brigading two Indian battalions with one British battalion dated back to the fear-filled aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

The West Kents were to be sent to Iraq to counter the possibility of a German thrust from the Caucasus against the Iraqi oilfields. Lieutenant Hogg found himself leading the column and navigating by the sun. ‘I was supplied with a jeep with a sun-compass on the bonnet and by keeping a careful watch on the sun’s relative movement we were able to arrive within sight of the bridge superstructure at Fallujah, after 700 miles of desert-driving, which was not bad!’ The journey was punctuated by numerous stops ordered by the devout Colonel Lambert. Captain Donald Easten remembered, ‘We had to stop and get the soldiers out of their vehicles to listen to the CO talk about the holy places. I remember hearing the sergeant major telling the lads to get out of the trucks: “Out ye get lads, more Jesus stuff.”’ Ivan Daunt and his comrades would mutter and dutifully dismount for another wholesome lecture.

Wintering in Baghdad, Captain Harry Smith remembered the sullenness of the locals, the dust storms that whipped grit into the most well-covered orifices, and the endless waiting for a German thrust which every man of them sensed would never come. Smith was a schoolmaster and had married on the eve of the war. The school magazine printed the usual congratulations, but with a poignant coda: ‘Congratulations to Mr. H. Crispin Smith on his marriage on 13th November to Miss Iris Reaves … Though we miss him greatly, we know he is giving another kind of service, and we hope that later, in a war-free world, he will resume his normal work with us.’ He had been wounded at the battle of El Alamein and spent most nights in Baghdad in a state of semi-wakefulness. Shortly after arriving he awoke to find a pack of wild dogs, the snarling and mange-ridden brutes that haunted Baghdad’s alleys, rooting through his belongings. He froze and feigned sleep until the pack moved on. Not only were there dogs and jackals for the men to fear at night, but also the rifle snatchers, some of the best and most ruthless thieves in all of Iraq, ‘who wouldn’t think twice about using a knife if they were cornered’.

The battalion made route marches of more than twenty miles and conducted repeated mock attacks. But any danger of a German attack from the Caucasus vanished with the defeat of von Paulus’s German 6th Army at Stalingrad in early February 1943. Soon afterwards a new commanding officer arrived to replace Lieutenant Colonel Lambert. The devout and steady leader was replaced by Lieutenant Colonel F. S. Saville, a man of genial nature but with no experience of battle. At the end of May the 4th West Kents were given fresh orders. They were to sail for India where a new army was being readied for war with the Japanese. For Captain John Winstanley it was exciting news, for he had strong family connections with the East. His parents had lived in the Burmese jungle, where his father had worked as an officer for the Burma Forest Service. When his mother became pregnant with John it was decided that she should return to England for the birth. Her husband stayed behind to join the Burma Sappers and Miners, and was eventually posted to the North-West Frontier. He died there of typhoid in 1919. The telegram announcing his death reached Winstanley’s mother just as she prepared to rejoin her husband. She would never see India or Burma again.

The new CO, Lieutenant Colonel Saville, regaled his officers with the joys awaiting them in India. Donald Easten recalled, ‘When he heard we were going to India he said, “You will all have three or four servants and you will have to play polo. The problem for some of you will be that you will only be able to afford one pony, but the rest of you should be able to afford two or three.” We were all saying to one another, “Perhaps we ought to tell him we’re at war!”’ Before long his enthusiastic word pictures of life on the subcontinent earned the unfortunate lieutenant colonel the nickname ‘Playboy of India’. Saville had not been with the battalion in the crucible of the Western Desert and it would have taken a personality of considerable force to impress the battle-hardened troops. Lieutenant Colonel Saville was not that man.

Camp was struck swiftly in Baghdad and the men boarded trucks for the start of their journey south to the port of Basra, passing on the way the walls of Kut al Amara, where thousands of British and Indian troops, among them men of the Royal West Kents, had been killed or else died in Turkish captivity in April 1916. From Basra they steamed slowly down the palm-lined fringes of the Shatt al-Arab, passing the dhows of fishermen and little inlets where women washed clothes and children swam and splashed in the muddy water. The landscape beyond the waterway was an immense plateau of reeds, braided through with little canals along which the fishermen constructed their huts of dried reeds. The children waved to the men on deck as the ship glided down towards the open sea.

Approaching Bombay on the morning of 20 June 1943, the battalion heard the sound of a brass band as they came into the harbour. The triumphal reception was being granted because of their part in the victory at El Alamein. It was, no doubt, also intended as a reminder to the more mutinous subjects of the Raj that British fortunes were improving. One officer recorded that ‘there was a faint hint of comic opera about our arrival. Bombay greeted us with a brass band and grave warnings to the effect that irresponsible talk about Japanese fighting ability was liable to have a bad effect on the morale of British troops.’ He also noted, almost as an afterthought, that Burma was to be their destination.

Bombay occupied a special place in the history of the Indian national liberation movement, for it was there that the Congress Party had been founded nearly sixty years before, and there that Mohandas K. Gandhi had launched the Quit India movement. By the time the 4th West Kents arrived, Gandhi, Nehru and the other main leaders of the Congress were in prison. The troops knew little of this state of affairs. What information they had came from a handful of old soldiers who had served in Bombay before the war, when the Raj had guaranteed that the humblest of white men could feel themselves among the earth’s chosen. The old soldiers painted a glorious picture of life in the army camp for Private Ivan Daunt and his comrades as they crowded on the gangways to disembark. There were servants to take care of every need. Best of all, Daunt was told, were the punkah-wallahs, who fanned the soldiers while they took their nap during the hot afternoons, operating the overhead fans with their toes until they too, invariably, nodded off. Daunt was advised to keep a boot ready to throw at any punkah-wallah sleeping on duty.

Of all the cities of the eastern empire, Bombay was the most self-consciously striking in the first impressions it gave: a jumble of architectural styles which could have appeared as a grandiloquent folly but invariably inspired the admiration of visitors arriving by sea. Its buildings were not only a fusion of the impulses that drove the dream of empire but a tribute to the enduring power of its institutions, from the government secretariat to the law courts to the university, all facing towards the great bay on the Arabian Sea. Waiting at the docks to greet the West Kents, dressed in distinctive red dhotis, was an army of coolies, the carriers and bearers of the Raj, kept in order by supervisors swirling their long lathis.

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Wartime disembarkation in Bombay could be a lengthy and frustrating process. Men, weapons, vehicles and supplies had to be unloaded on to the quayside. Robert Kay, a gunner with the Royal Artillery, remembered being woken at 4.30 in the morning to start the process: ‘The whole operation took place in the cramped spaces of a troopship, with on-board temperatures exceeding 95 degrees Fahrenheit, with men all dressed in battle equipment, sweating and swearing and carrying kit bags and everything else they owned.’ Others would curse the bureaucracy of the Colonel Blimps who charged a West Kents officer two shillings customs duty on his double-barrelled shotgun. Irritation and impatience were mixed with awe. An officer remembered the shock of the exotic when he looked out over the side of the ship to see a giant sea snake, twelve feet long and highly venomous.

In the streets that day the West Kents saw snake charmers and acrobats, and a man who could put a meat hook through his nose and pull it out through his mouth. They were assailed by the pungency of the great port city, the smell of spices piled high in the small shops and curried food being cooked on the footpaths, the reek of open drains and piled garbage and the constant raucous hymn of supplication: ‘Baksheesh, baksheesh.’ Ivan Daunt remembered that the beggars called him ‘Rajah’ and that he saw two men carrying a pole on which was hung a beggar-man, ‘all mangled and his legs, arms all bent’.

The rise in nationalist sentiment had not inhibited the famed entrepreneurial spirit of Bombay. Taxis ferrying officers to the Taj Hotel, right next to the Gateway of India, bore the Union flag on their radiators and the drivers made the appropriate patriotic noises. The hotel had been converted into an officers’ club where five- or six-course meals, followed by cabaret and dancing, could be enjoyed. Walking outside at dusk, one group of newly arrived officers saw a profusion of street sleepers. They were ‘staggered to see Indian bodies lying there on the pavement, pedestrian islands and almost anywhere; they all looked quite dead, and the more so as their faces were covered with a shroud’.

The 4th West Kents marched to the railway station and set off on a 1,000 mile train journey across India to the training base at Ranchi, where General Slim’s 14th Army was being readied for war. The men were loaded into third-class carriages with hard wooden seats and the officers dispatched to overcrowded sleeper compartments. Diaries of those wartime journeys recall heat, dust, discomfort, and the excitement of traversing the subcontinent. Captain Arthur Swinson, a staff captain with the British 2nd Division, who would later encounter the West Kents at Kohima, was a budding writer who kept a careful account of the sights of India. ‘Every station brought its new quota of ragged half-starved children demanding “bukshees”, some on their own and some egged on by their equally ragged parents. I hardened my heart against them but “Boggie” (who is to take holy orders after the war) feels he must go about doing good and so gives them annas.

(#) This causes their wails to increase tenfold. The persistence of the Indian beggar is equalled only by his ingratitude.’

But for all his irritation with the beggars, Swinson was not immune to the magic of India, the immensity of the visions it offered, temporal and divine, or the ingenuity of its cultures. When the train stopped on the banks of the Ganges he noticed groups of Indians bathing themselves and their water buffalo. A woman among the crowd changed her dirty sari for a clean one, ‘without exposing one square inch of flesh that she shouldn’t’. The troops on board cheered her when she had finished, but ‘she was a lady … and made pretend she didn’t hear a thing’. A friend of Swinson’s, Captain Keith Halnan, recalled that when they stopped for lunch, ‘there would be tables laid out on the platform for the sahibs and we would sit and have lunch and the train waited until we were finished. What a life!’

For the other ranks experiencing India for the first time, the journey was a blend of chronic physical discomfort, appalling tedium and moments of wonder. Ray Street, who would become a battlefield runner for the 4th West Kents, believed he was witnessing scenes from a Bible story when he paused at some of the bigger stations and huge crowds ‘swept towards the train, dressed in their white flowing garments’. A platform guard gave the signal for departure by striking a length of old railway track with a piece of wood and this precipitated a final rush of hopeful travellers, clinging to doors and windows and the roof. Wary of the onrush, the troops stored their rifles under the wooden seats, having been warned that they would fetch a price of £100 on the North-West Frontier. Street remembered seeing a band of dacoits chained together and led along the platform by a policeman at one of the stations.

(#) They were, he reckoned, the roughest-looking bunch of individuals he had ever seen. His friend, Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes, felt unnerved passing a building where vultures feasted on human corpses. The building had no windows, doors or roof. The bodies were laid out on metal bars and when the bones had been picked bare they would fall through the bars to the ground. ‘It was so strange to me, coming from England like,’ he remembered. What Wykes saw was a Zoroastrian ‘Tower of Silence’, where the body is left to be eaten by vultures so that it does not pollute the earth.

Later on he would become, if not exactly blasé about seeing corpses, then certainly less inclined to worry about them. The train crossed central India on its journey towards Ranchi, through dry scrub and forest, across great rivers and mountains, a five-day journey moving steadily eastwards towards western Bengal, where the high summer temperatures were rendered more tolerable than in the furnace of the plains by the monsoon rains. The schoolmaster Captain Harry Smith was transfixed by the world unfolding outside his carriage. He would remember the light fading to deep blue on the plains as evening came on, the sound of langur monkeys squabbling in the forest by the track, and the fires of wood and animal dung which produced a sweet acrid smell – ‘for me always the smell of India’ – when the train passed near villages.

In the cool of dusk the train would stop and cooks would alight to prepare the evening meal, invariably a concoction that involved bully beef or soya-link sausages and whatever else they had been able to scavenge. Tinned food was favoured, not for its flavour but because it reduced the chance of stomach upsets. Dinner was eaten on the ground in the shade of the carriages and washed down with tea made from water drawn from the engine’s boiler. As Harry Smith recalled, ‘it was tea made with lashings of sugar, condensed milk and water that tasted of engine oil. Delicious!’

Many who took the troop train to Ranchi that June would not come back; others would return without limbs, or brutally disfigured in other ways; some would be wounded in the spirit by the loss of friends or the memories of what they had endured and seen. As the West Kents rattled slowly across India, the generals, British and Japanese, were laying plans to change the face of the Asian war.

* (#) There was a tragic postscript. On the return journey, loaded with over 3,000 people, among them many Italian prisoners of war, the Laconia was torpedoed off the West African coast. Over two thirds of those on board lost their lives.

* (#) A long bamboo rod still used by police to keep public order in India.

* (#) A unit of currency in British-ruled India, roughly equivalent to one sixteenth of a rupee.

* (#) Dacoits are bandits or outlaws frequently operating in large groups.

SIX (#)

Fighting Back (#)

By the middle of 1943 General Slim knew his enemy well and was certain that the fight to retake Burma would be hard and bloody. Of the Japanese soldier he wrote: ‘He fought and marched till he died. If five hundred Japanese were ordered to hold a position we had to kill four hundred and ninety-five before it was ours – and then the last five killed themselves. It was this combination of obedience and ferocity that made that Japanese Army, whatever its condition, so formidable, and which would make any army formidable.’ The previous November, British and Indian forces had stumbled to disaster in the Burmese province of Arakan in a vain attempt to drive the Japanese back and begin the recapture of Burma. After an initial advance, the Japanese had driven the British and Indian forces back. No ground had been gained despite a casualty toll of 5,057 killed, wounded or missing.

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The Japanese used the tactics of outflanking and encirclement that had caused Slim’s troops such anguish on the retreat from Burma. The terrain on which they fought was ribboned by rivers and streams, harboured numerous swamps, and was bordered to the west by the sea and to the east by the Mayu range of hills. These rose to 2,000 feet at their highest and were covered in dense forest. It was, recalled one British officer, ‘the sort of jungle country in which there could be no front line’, covered in thick primary forest, full of exotic plants and animals, and providing awe-inspiring views, and one of the very last places on earth you would choose to fight a war. When the south-west monsoon arrived, rainfall could reach as much as two hundred inches. The tracks became impassable and the waterways were the only practical means of movement. Even these, swollen with new rain, became, in the words of a senior British commander, ‘very formidable obstacles, all of which have to be bridged to allow passage of troops and transport … Indeed campaigning in the monsoon in Burma may be said to be one of the most arduous operations anywhere in the world today.’ A staff officer sent to investigate wrote: ‘our troops were either exhausted, browned off or both, and both Indian and British troops did not have their hearts in the campaign. The former were obviously scared of the Jap and demoralised by the nature of the campaign i.e. the thick jungle and the subsequent blindness of movement, the multiple noises of the jungle at night, the terror stories of Jap brutality … the undermining influence of fever, and the mounting list of failures.’ Just as had happened on the retreat the previous year, Slim found himself dispatched to lead the ground operations when it was already too late to effect change. Yet it was here in the Arakan that Slim was now planning his first offensive against the Japanese.

The failure of the first Arakan campaign was rooted in practical and political problems. The battle readiness of the troops was paramount. Over the previous eighteen months the Indian Army had recruited massively. At one point recruits were being dispatched to training centres at a rate of 50,000 per month. There had been too little time to turn these raw recruits into soldiers ready for the challenge of the Arakan, or to prepare the British troops fighting alongside them for jungle warfare. The cream of the Indian Army was fighting overseas, where resources were being devoted overwhelmingly towards the fighting in North Africa.

Looming over it all were the politics of the Grand Alliance. Since the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the loss of the Philippines the following April, American ships and planes had routed Japan’s carrier fleet at the Battle of Midway on 4 and 5 June 1942. Four carriers, several battleships, around 275 planes, and nearly 5,000 men were lost. Yet the British were still sitting in the positions to which they had retreated after the fall of Burma. There were many in Washington only too keen to accuse London of lassitude. A song doing the rounds of senior American military figures after the fall of Malaya and Singapore that gave an indication of American attitudes to the officer class of the British empire:

To lunch they go at half past one –

Blast me, old chap, the day’s half done.

They lunch and talk and fight Jap,

And now it’s time to take a nap.

The British in Asia were widely caricatured as blimps and buffoons, selfish and self-satisfied, borne aloft on the suffering of millions of brown and yellow subjects. Roosevelt himself was determined that victory in the Far East would not lead to a reimposition of the colonial status quo. The Atlantic Charter, which was signed at the Arcadia conference held by Churchill and Roosevelt in December 1941–January 1942, committed the allies to ensuring ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’. The Americans believed this included India and the rest of the British empire, as well as the French and Dutch colonial possessions occupied by the Japanese. Churchill emphatically did not.

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An aggravated Churchill wired his deputy, Clement Attlee, in London about ‘the danger of raising the constitutional issue in India at a moment when the enemy is on the frontier’. But he was a shrewd enough politician to realise that preserving the Raj in the face of American opposition demanded a serious military effort in South-East Asia. Limited resources would always make Europe the priority and would ensure that Britain was the junior partner in the Far East. But if the British possessions in South-East Asia were still in enemy hands by the time the Americans defeated Japan, as they surely would be, how could Churchill make any claims for the recovery of territory in the post-war negotiations?