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

* (#) Even before war broke out there had been problems. As early as August 1939 a Sikh platoon in the Punjab Regiment deserted after a religious leader ‘so lowered their spirit that they deserted rather than face the dangers of war’. Later that year a group of Sikhs in Egypt rebelled when asked to load lorries, believing such coolie work was beneath them. A year after the first outbreak in the Punjab a squadron of the Central India Horse refused to board ship in Bombay. A mutiny and hunger strike among Sikhs of the Hong Kong and Singapore Royal Artillery in 1940 was provoked by orders that the men should wear solar topis. The investigators sent from India blamed the ‘faulty administration’ and told the regiment to back down on the helmet order. The troubles prompted one far-seeing intelligence officer, Colonel Wren, to write in 1940: ‘We have by our policies towards India, bred a new class of [Indian] officer who may be loyal to India and perhaps to Congress but is not necessarily loyal to us … The army would be helped by a more positive policy on the part of His Majesty’s Government … which will transform our promises of independence for India into reality in the minds of the politically minded younger generations.’

* (#) The desire to escape the hellish conditions of Japanese prisoner of war camps was a decisive factor for many. Among the officers there were undoubtedly substantial numbers who had been alienated by the racist treatment they received at the hands of colonial officials in pre-war Malaya. This could range from being forced to sit in separate compartments from Europeans on trains and excluded from clubs where a colour bar operated. The INA also drew thousands of recruits from Indian communities in South-East Asia, many of them from the rubber plantations of Malaya and drawn by Bose’s promise of a new India in which the restrictions of caste would be overturned.

* (#) The famine was caused by a complex interplay of factors: a cyclone that devastated huge areas of rice cultivation; the loss of Burmese rice imports after the Japanese occupation; rumours about shortages and subsequent hoarding of food; incompetence and corruption in the regional government; and the failure of the British and Indian governments to act speedily. Food was being shipped out of Bengal to support the war effort while the population starved. As the historian of the famine, Richard Stevenson, writes: ‘The famine in Bengal was caused by a lack of money, not by a lack of food. A hyperinflation was created in Bengal in 1942 as a result of the war and as a result of government policies. A part of the population, British and Indians connected with the war industries, was protected … the other part, the cultivators and the fishermen, was not protected … The economy of rural Bengal was too simple and impoverished to withstand the profound and prolonged disruptions applied to it by the government, a British government, in pursuit of its war goals.’ Richard Stevenson, Bengal Tiger and British Lion (iUniverse, 2005), p. viii.

† (#) Twenty out of twenty-four INA soldiers trained in espionage and parachuted behind allied lines were captured; two raiding parties landed by submarine were also arrested.

* (#) The transformation was directed by General Sir Claude Auchinleck who replaced Wavell as C-in-C India in 1943. Auchinleck began his career in the Punjab Regiment before rising to become one of the most senior British generals. He was immensely popular with the Indian troops.

SEVEN (#)

Jungle Wallahs (#)

By the time they reached the training camp at Ranchi, the officers and men of the 4th West Kents were an exhausted mass. Stiff and sore, they climbed on to waiting trucks which took them to the base where Colonel Saville had imagined his subalterns playing polo and the old soldiers in the ranks had spoken of armies of punkah-wallahs cooling their afternoon naps. The shock of the Ranchi base was profound. It was desolate and dusty and they would live in tents; the place was generously populated with snakes and scorpions, one of the latter giving a painful sting to Ivan Daunt as he worked on repairing a storage building. Daunt recovered after a few days but found little of the Ranchi experience to his taste, although with considerable sangfroid he went on to help his company win the weekly snake-finding contest, organised to entertain the men and keep the serpent population at bay.

One of the first challenges for the West Kents was to get used to living and working with the great and unsung hero of the Burma campaign – the mule. During the misery of the retreat from Burma in 1942, General Slim had realised the imperative of creating armies that could move swiftly, unencumbered by dependence on ‘the tincan of mechanical transport tied to our tail’. The immediate answer to this problem was the mule, a crossbreed of horse and donkey with greater intelligence and endurance than either. Without these beasts the armies would never have been able to fight in the trackless expanses of the jungle, where trees barred the way to jeeps and the ground became a sucking swamp in the monsoon. As John Winstanley recalled, ‘The mules, of course, were with us all the time. They were our lifeline. We were now an animal borne infantry battalion.’ The search for sufficient mules for Slim’s army ranged far and wide. In one instance 650 mules were transported from Bolivia by an Anglo-Argentine cattle-rancher, Robin Begg, who brought a team of Argentine gauchos with him on the ship to India. The animals were so well cared for that all but three survived the rigorous journey.

Lieutenant Tom Hogg was allocated five chargers and sixty-five mules. As the son of a farmer, he was judged the right man for converting the 4th West Kents to animal transport. There were several London bus and taxi drivers among his men and he wondered how they would make the transition. There was no need to worry. ‘Many became so attached to their particular mule that they would not allow anyone else to touch them, and later on, grieved terribly when some of the animals unavoidably got wounded or killed in the fighting.’ But Ivan Daunt remembered how the mules learned to regard the approach of a soldier with foreboding. ‘Oh dear, oh dear … as soon as the mule sees you coming towards him … Cor blimey, poor buggers, I felt sorry for ’em. Some of the climbin’ they had to do.’ A mule could take loads of up to 80 pounds on each of its flanks, and in the case of mountain artillery mules more than twice that amount. The mules had one major disadvantage, though. In the still of the jungle, their braying carried long distances and alerted the enemy. The 14th Army solution was to cut out the vocal chords of the unfortunate beasts. A Chindit remembered one mass de-braying: ‘Round came the doctor with a chloroform rag, put over the mule’s mouth or it may have been an injection, I don’t remember. However, one soldier had to sit on the mule’s head with a thing like a dunce’s hat as soon as the doctor cut into the mule’s sound box! The chloroform and blood was so unbearable that the bloke on its head could only stop for a few minutes as it nearly put the soldier to sleep; so all had to take turns. It was horrible – I took my turn!! … When the operation was completed [we were] told to undo our ropes and await the water-man … After one or two splashes the poor animal looked up, all glass eyed, struggled to its feet and tried to use its voice … with no sound coming out!’

The men learned to move silently through the jungle, and learned how to react if they made a noise or heard a noise. As one British officer remembered, ‘the answer to noise was silence; this was particularly important at night – to freeze for as long as it takes and let the enemy make the mistake and make a noise – although it could have been a monkey following us through the trees.’ The troops were taught how to prepare panji pits as booby traps for the Japanese: these were staves of sharpened bamboo placed in and around concealed pits. They could be smeared with dirt or excrement to ensure the wound inflicted would become poisonous. They learned, too, how to remove leeches by burning them with a cigarette: simply pulling them out with your fingers left the head embedded in the skin and caused blood poisoning. To their disgust, the leeches proved adept at finding their way into the most intimate corners of the anatomy. In return for gifts of cigarettes and salt Indian labourers showed them how to make shelters and beds from bamboo, and which plants were edible and which to avoid. Men from the pioneers, like Ivan Daunt, learned to construct bridges for fording jungle streams and small rivers. Daunt also recalled that they were introduced to American K rations, which included such treats as chopped ham and eggs, veal loaf, instant coffee, cigarettes and chewing gum. All the 4th battalion men regarded them as infinitely superior to the British diet.

Troops heading into the jungle for the first time learned how easy it was to become lost and to miss a target by a wide distance. An officer later recalled, ‘It was often proved that some soldiers would nearly always move to the right around an obstacle in their path, others would always go round to the left of it. If one continued moving this way for, say, 1,000 yards the objective could be missed by a large margin. The soldier had to bear this in mind and make corresponding corrections as he moved.’ Above all, no one wanted to find himself alone in hostile jungle.

They carried out mock attacks. Ivan Daunt was lying in a ditch when a senior officer appeared and said, ‘bang bang bang … I am a machine-gunner.’ The men in the ditch were supposed to consider themselves dead. But one of the 4th battalion wags replied, ‘Yes, sir, and I’m an anti-tank gun.’ As Private Daunt recalled, ‘It cracked us up.’ On another occasion, during a night exercise, a patrol surrounded a group of officers sitting in the dark and talking, a habit that might cost their lives fighting the Japanese. The men captured them with a shout of ‘Gotcha!’

There was a growing feeling among company commanders like John Winstanley and Donald Easten that the exercises were exposing the inadequacy of their commanding officer. After talking it over, the younger officers went in a delegation to see Lieutenant Colonel Saville. Donald Easten described what happened next. ‘We went to see him and each of us told him in turn that we had no absolutely no confidence in him. So he turned to us and said: “Do you realise this is mutiny?” And we said: “It might be, we don’t know. But we have no confidence in you, in putting the lives of our men in your hands in action in Burma.”’ The 4th West Kents were by now part of 161 Brigade, whose commander was the avuncular, if occasionally fiery, Brigadier Frederick ‘Daddy’ Warren. As the senior officer among the group John Winstanley was nominated to take the matter to Warren. ‘He gave me absolute stick … for this mutiny really … to go and say that you are not going to go and work under this man! … and I was sent packing, and the man was removed because as the brigadier said, “Well, you’ve made it impossible for him to command anyhow.”’ Lieutenant Colonel Saville was sent to a staff appointment in Delhi. The man who replaced him would make a profound mark on the 4th West Kents and the whole story of Kohima: he could inspire devotion among his men and the contempt of those he crossed, and he would carry the 4th West Kents through their darkest days.

He did not at first sight cut an intimidating figure. The new CO was about five foot nine and not heavily built. But Lieutenant Colonel John Laverty had a presence that could cow the toughest of the battalion’s hard men. He was forty-four when he came to lead 4th battalion, still a comparatively young man but nearly two decades older than most of those under his command. Laverty was variously known as ‘Texas Dan’, because of the cowboy-style military hat he wore, or ‘Colonel Lavatory’, the latter nickname apparently derived from a rugby song the precise lyrics of which have been lost to history. Neither men nor officers ever dared to use the nicknames to his face. Laverty carried a long bamboo rod to use as a climbing stick; it could also give him the appearance of a prophet descending from the heavens with the judgement of God.

John Laverty did not tolerate muttering from his officers. When Lieutenant Tom Hogg went to him to complain about problems created by a soldier in his platoon, Laverty immediately asked him which rifle company he wanted to join. ‘By those who understood the situation this amounted to a “slap across the face” for me,’ recalled Hogg. ‘In fact, that aspect of it went completely over my head at the time, and I enjoyed the prospect of doing some real fighting.’

One of the battalion medical orderlies, Lance Corporal Frank Infanti, gave a different picture of Laverty. Infanti had a troubled history with the battalion. Both his parents were Italian and this had led to his brother being interned in the opening months of the war, ironically while Frank himself was being evacuated with the West Kents from Dunkirk. When he was refused permission to visit his brother in the internment camp Infanti said he would no longer carry a rifle. In a moment of compassion the then CO decided against disciplinary action and made Infanti a medical orderly. ‘I got on extremely well with Laverty because I’m a little fella. I would never have got in the army normally because I’m too short. And he sort of respected me because I kept up with everybody! On the marches and all that. He was an unusual bloke, Laverty. He used to call me “Doc” Infanti which was a great compliment to an orderly … he spoke in a very cultivated voice … almost as if he had had elocution lessons.’

John Laverty was born Henry Jarvis Laverty in Londonderry on 8 October 1900 to a prominent family in the building trade. His father Henry built the Protestant cathedral of St Anne’s in Belfast and had a large brickyard in Carrickfergus, which one employee reckoned had ‘made the mortar for half the houses in Carrick in those days’. He went to school at Foyle College, which numbered a Lord Chancellor of Ireland, numerous rugby internationals and a Viceroy of India among its alumni. A month before the end of the First World War, John Laverty applied to Sandhurst, from where he was commissioned into the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in 1921. These were bad years in his home country. Ireland was convulsed by war between the IRA and the forces of the crown. As a member of a prominent Protestant family who had decided to join the British army, it is safe to surmise that John Laverty would have had little sympathy with Irish rebels.

What Laverty retained of that Ulster Protestant upbringing was the flinty outward manner of a man raised among righteous but unyielding citizens. His son Patrick, who saw his father only once during the war, thought him a soldier to the core. ‘Pure and simple he was a warrior. That is what he was good at … He was pretty tough. They called him bloody-minded and I think he probably was. You didn’t get anywhere. I mean once he made up his mind he couldn’t be varied at all. He was absolutely pig-headed in that regard.’

After three years in the Inniskilling Fusiliers, Laverty joined the Essex Regiment, where his index card referred to him as ‘Mad Jack’, possibly a reflection of the bloody-minded personality described by his son and some of his junior officers. His war-fighting experience was gained in the small colonial police actions of the inter-war period, firstly in Kurdistan and later in Sudan. He was awarded a Military Cross during the suppression of the Kurds in 1932 and was later promoted to be Inspector of Signals for the British-controlled Iraqi army. By the time the Second World War broke out John Laverty was back with the Essex Regiment, with the rank of major, and had married Renee Stagg, a doctor’s daughter from Southend, whom he had met while playing golf. Within a few months of their wedding she was pregnant with the first of three children. On the outbreak of war Laverty was posted to the East End of London on ‘anti-panic’ duty, while Renee and her baby were sent to Shropshire to escape the Blitz. ‘There was a big parting of the ways. Everybody was going through those kind of separations,’ Renee recalled. John Laverty was eventually posted to serve with the Essex Regiment in India in 1942. By the following year he had been promoted from major to the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel and sent to lead 4th battalion, Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, into battle.

Captain Donald Easten remembered his arrival. ‘I thought to myself, “Thank God, at last we have someone who knows what he is talking about.” He was not the kind of person you would say, “I would do anything for this chap,” but at least he was competent. You knew his decisions would be properly thought out. I didn’t love him. I don’t think any of us did. We respected him.’ Respect would have been enough for John Laverty.

The men were coming to the end of their training period and could properly call themselves ‘jungle wallahs’. Ray Street was one of the smaller men in the battalion and weighed only eight and a half stone, but he was quick on his feet and brave, ideal material for a battlefield messenger who would have to run quickly between positions under fire. He had started the war as a soldier in the Worcester Regiment but after undergoing his jungle training in India was sent off to 4th battalion to help bring them up to full strength for the fighting ahead. Street had not seen combat yet, but had heard his father’s stories of the fighting at Gallipoli and the throat wound that had nearly ended his life. His experience of war on the home front had been eventful. Having enlisted first into the Home Guard, Street was allocated to Birmingham city centre and found himself there during a German bombing raid. A stick of bombs hit the street next to where he was standing. Running to the scene he saw that a cinema had been hit and the street was full of screaming, wounded people. He rushed inside to help evacuate the survivors. A woman sat with her arms folded serenely in the seat where she had been watching the film. But her head had been sliced cleanly off by a piece of flying metal.

By now the old Kentish character of 4th battalion had changed. There was still a core of men like John Winstanley, Ivan Daunt and Donald Easten who had been through France and North Africa together, and who came from within a few miles of each other at home in England. But Ray Street was a Brummie and his mate Dennis Wykes came from Coventry; the new CO was an Irishman; and there were Welsh and Scottish voices to be heard too. The Kentish component had gradually come to accept Dennis Wykes and the other replacements, although he was still some way from being able to call any of them his friends. ‘They looked at us warily as if to say “you haven’t seen any action and we wonder what you’re going to be like.”’

The oddest of the newcomers to join them in India was the posh boy. Of all the men in the ranks of 4th battalion, John Harman was the most enigmatic, not only because of the extraordinary nature of what he would do, but also because his background was so different and his personality so resistant to easy definition. He must have been one of the most unlikely candidates to win the Victoria Cross of the whole war. John Pennington Harman, known to his friends as plain ‘Jack’, was the eldest son of a millionaire. His sister Diana, one of three siblings, said, ‘Although he seemed to disregard society right through his life he wasn’t at all insensitive. It’s just that he didn’t play by the same rules. He found that they led you up blank ways. He didn’t find that he was pursuing the things he was interested in if he conformed.’ At prep school in Bristol he was unhappy; it was not just the normal pain of a child removed to a boarding school at seven years of age, but also the sense of being forced into a straitjacket of discipline and expectation for which he had no sympathy. There was an added complication. John’s dormitory was close to the Bristol Zoo in Clifton and at nights he was distressed by the sounds of animals. They represented, according to his sister, ‘unwelcome captivity and restraint’. He ran away from school twice before his parents brought him home.

He was then sent to the famous Bedales School in rural Hampshire. Founded by J. H. Badley in 1893, Bedales was a revolutionary establishment by the standards of its day. Stressing that each child needed to be treated as an individual human being, Badley saw the era after the First World War as ‘a great opportunity, one of the greatest in our history, if only it can be realised and utilised to the full’. The school was a haven for nonconformists and while John never focused on his academic work, lacking ‘concentration in things which did not interest him’, he was allowed to indulge his love of nature in the school’s ample grounds. As his sister Diana saw it, ‘he seldom wanted to finish something he had embarked upon – it didn’t seem quite important enough to engage him’.

John’s father, Martin Coles Harman, owned Lundy Island, a craggy and beautiful piece of land off the Devon coast. Harman senior was prone to eccentricity. He liked to consider Lundy his private fiefdom, even going so far as to mint his own coins, a presumption of sovereignty that saw him prosecuted and fined. Lundy became for his son the one place where he could live according to his own designs. The cliffs and coves, the old granite quarry, were places where dreams could be fashioned without disturbance from the mundane demands of everyday life. John dreamt of finding precious metals on Lundy and engaged in a prolonged correspondence with a Spanish mineral ‘diviner’ who claimed extraordinary powers of underground perception. Boreholes were drilled but nothing was found. The family’s retainer on Lundy, Felix Gade, wrote that John ‘seemed to feel that it only needed a stroke of genius for him to be provided with a fortune, without grinding work!’ The two shared an interest in the island’s bees and worked together on the hives, with occasional advice from John’s father. John’s friends from Bedales would visit Lundy in the summer holidays and were, according to his sister, ‘all oddities, people like himself, who didn’t quite conform’. There was a chaste romance with a girl called Denny, one of six children who formed a large gang with the Harmans. They swam, fished and chased all over the island, and in the evenings read Dickens by lamplight. His sister remembered John’s body shaking with laughter.

His diaries of life on Lundy reveal a boy who was a careful observer of weather, wildlife and landscapes, but not remotely sentimental about the harsher aspects of the natural world. Entries for February 1932 describe shooting a cock sparrow with his catapult at twenty yards and witnessing a staged fight between a ferret and a rat. ‘The ferret killed the rat in about 30 seconds.’ Yet a week later he was describing how he heard a thrush and a lark singing in the morning and was nursing a chaffinch with a broken leg given to him by Felix Gade. ‘Thurs. 31st … Heard Chaffinch singing in Millcombe. My chaffinch is still all right and ought to be singing soon.’

But to understand John Harman and the exceptional figure he later became at Kohima, it is necessary to examine what happened to his world at the beginning of the 1930s. His mother, Amy Ruth Harman, was a beautiful and vivacious woman who enjoyed the social whirl of London far more than the countryside but who, by the close of the 1920s, had become seriously ill with kidney failure. She was given morphine to ease the excruciating pain but died in 1931 at the age of forty-seven. John Harman was deeply distressed by the early death of his mother, in the same year that he was due to leave school. And the family’s troubles were set to deepen.

Martin Coles Harman had made his fortune in corporate finance, quitting school at sixteen to join Lazard’s as a clerk on £48 per year and eventually accumulating a portfolio of companies worth an estimated £12 million – a vast sum in the 1930s. The Daily Sketch described him as the ‘pre-war City’s wonder man’. ‘Bushy-browed Martin Harman always did things the big way … Veteran financiers clucked their tongues as Harman zoomed from a bank clerk’s high chair to the chairman’s swivel chair in a dozen different board rooms – all this between 1923 and 1933.’ Yet a year after the death of his wife he was declared bankrupt, with liabilities of £550,000 and assets of just £10,000. The precise source of Harman’s financial catastrophe is hard to ascertain; family members suggest he got into difficulty during the Great Depression. Worse was to follow. In 1933 Harman senior was convicted of embezzlement and sent to Wormwood Scrubs prison for eighteen months. According to Diana Keast, her brother was devastated. ‘He so looked up to his father. They really were very close. I know that it hurt him a great deal to see that happen to his father. Of course he never doubted his father, never.’ Throughout this grim period Lundy Island remained the beacon of stability. Martin Coles Harman had placed the island in trust so that it could not be seized by his creditors.

It was at this time, when he would have been about eighteen years of age, that John set off on his travels. His journey would take him the best part of four years, from Spain to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. He worked on sheep farms, cut timber in forests and tried his hand at gold prospecting, always eventually moving on. The only note of any romantic involvement was with a woman in New Zealand who shared with him an interest in the paranormal. Throughout his life John Harman would seek out clairvoyants and soothsayers. After returning from his travels he went to Lundy and worked again with Felix Gade and the bees. But in November 1941, with the tide of war still running against Britain, John decided to enlist in the Household Cavalry, believing he would be working with animals. Almost immediately, and predictably, he found that military life was not to his taste. Writing to his father – now free from jail and discharged from bankruptcy – he cursed the life of the barracks. ‘Life is just bloody hell, dirty, noisy, crude and inefficient. I heartily wish I had never joined up. There is no time to do anything after the set tasks are done … how I would like to be stalking deer in NZ a free man … I learn almost nothing each day.’ In April 1942 he was thinking of running away ‘to a life of solitude … I can hardly constrain a desire to desert and damn the consequences.’

One can imagine how strange this well-spoken son of a millionaire must have appeared to his fellow soldiers, a great many of them tough working-class lads from the inner cities. There are several references in John Harman’s letters to the ‘crudeness’ of barracks life, the boredom of being a soldier and the pain caused to his feet by marching. What is perplexing is Harman’s refusal to take the commission that would have offered him a more comfortable existence. With his education and background, even allowing for the disgrace of his father’s imprisonment, Jack Harman would have been a likely candidate for officer training. In a letter to his father he explained his reluctance, in spite of the fact that he considered himself to be a ‘gentleman’. Self-doubt was at the root of his decision: ‘I have given the matter of taking a commission a lot of thought and there is no doubt that if I was an officer I would be able to resume the life I was used to, to some extent. On the other hand I am constitutionally so unsoldierly that I am filled with doubts about the whole thing … Does the status of Gentleman entitle a man to be an officer with the King’s Commission though he is not the soldier-type? I think not … well!’

By September, John was with the Worcester Regiment and having second thoughts about his status in the ranks, writing to his father that he was going to apply for a commission as soon as he could. He never did. ‘I am still a private soldier after a year in the army,’ he wrote to a friend. He was still interested in divining and considered putting up a proposal to the War Office to use his ‘special knowledge’ to help detect submarines. Nothing seems to have come of that. By the end of January 1943 he had changed regiments once more and was soldiering with 20th battalion, The Royal Fusiliers, and on his way to India. A friend, Wally Evans, who was with him on the troopship to the East saw Jack frequently gathering up ‘empty beer bottles that were laying around the ship in order to recover the deposits paid on them’. He would use the money to buy equipment that was lighter and less bulky than his own. When a call went out for volunteers to join depleted regiments, John Harman and several others put their hands up to join a draft going to 4th battalion, Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment. ‘The biggest blunder of our lives,’ remembered Evans, ‘for what we had to go through in Burma.’ But Harman was looking forward to the possibility of fighting in Burma, or at least getting himself to the jungles of South-East Asia. In August 1943, just over a month before the 4th battalion shipped out to the front line, he wrote to his father with a romanticised view of jungle warfare: ‘Four years in NZ stand me in good stead and if we ever have to fight in the Burmese Jungles it will be right down my street. Frankly, I would rather hear the noises of the jungle than the ceaseless clattering and yapping of the barrack rooms; and eating food almost entirely out of tins gets me down. In the jungle a man may “spit” a snake over a fire and eat it all himself and make a decent cup of tea.’

Harman was sent to D company, under the command of Captain Donald Easten, an assignment that was providential: he was placed under the authority of a man who wore his rank lightly but with great effect. Easten had the wisdom to look the other way at the minor indiscretions of his men, and he had the gift of showing them that he cared for their welfare. He was swift to sense the potential in John Harman. ‘He was a great countryman who found his way everywhere day or night, he understood ground as well as obviously being a very solid citizen who wasn’t going to bolt if something nasty happened. He was brave and of course in the end it was proved.’

In early October 1943 John Laverty was given orders to move out for Burma. The 4th battalion was to be shipped across the Bay of Bengal for General William Slim’s coming offensive. What Slim did not appreciate was that the Japanese were also planning an attack in the Arakan. The operation, code-named Ha-Go (literally Operation Z), was designed to draw away British resources and attention from the frontier with India, where the commander of the Japanese 15th Army was planning an audacious surprise. Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi sweeps through the story of the Burma war like a force of nature, and in late 1943 he was offering his superiors a tantalising vision of victory.

EIGHT (#)

The Master of the Mountains (#)

Even in the middle of war the town preserved an atmosphere of grace. Forty miles east of Mandalay in central Burma, Maymyo had been the summer capital of the British administration where civil servants and soldiers escaped the enervating humidity of Rangoon among broad avenues of towering eucalyptus and pine. They enjoyed the cool air of a hill town and the fresh victuals of its abundant gardens, where around ‘the spacious houses of red brick the cannas flaunted gay flags of pink and orange; trailing masses of crimson bougainvillea topped the bamboo hedges’. For a period in early 1942 it was the headquarters of the retreating Burma Corps, until the Japanese signalled their advance by bombing the poorer district, forcing its inhabitants to flee in panic towards Mandalay. Colonel Emile Foucar passed lines of retreating Chinese troops and ‘several yellow-robed corpses, Buddhist monks shot by the Chinese’.

Now, where British civil servants had played polo and sipped gin in the twilight, there were new masters. Where the British other ranks might have slipped out at night to the seamier fringes of town while their officers drank in the mess, these latest occupiers brought with them their own entertainment. The geisha house of the 15th Army command was called ‘The Inn of Brightness’ and it was run by established brothel-keepers from Osaka. It served pure sake and tuna sushi imported from Japan, and the girls played music, recited poetry and had sex with the officers of the Imperial Army – all part of that curious blend of the aesthetic and the priapic which prevailed among the army’s officer corps. These were men who could weep at the elegance of a haiku, or sit down to practise exquisite calligraphy, on the same day that they presided over the beheading of prisoners. Arguments over girls could result in unpleasant scenes. The British intelligence officer Louis Allen, who interviewed many Japanese prisoners, described how a major general had found a colonel making a pass at ‘his’ girl. The colonel was dragged outside and, in front of the sentry, slapped across the face for his temerity.

In this particular instance, the senior officer would have felt more than the usual degree of impunity. After all, Major General Todai Kunomura was chief of staff to the most powerful Japanese officer in northern Burma, a man with the best of political connections, a track record of success, and upon whom the destiny of the entire imperial project in Burma now rested. Kunomura was the most devoted of servants – a lickspittle if you believed his enemies – to Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi, commander of the Japanese 15th Army. Mutaguchi, aged fifty-five, was at the height of his powers when he set up his headquarters at Maymyo. During the invasion of Malaya in 1942 he led the 18th Division with panache and had been wounded in the shoulder by an enemy grenade at Johore on the approach to Singapore, his leadership earning him a congratulatory letter and bottle of wine from General Yamashita, the so-called ‘Tiger of Malaya’. Tall and powerfully built, Renya Mutaguchi was physically brave and, like most Japanese officers of his time, a disciple of the warrior code of bushido,

(#) though what this actually meant in practice could vary significantly between individuals.

In Renya Mutaguchi’s case it meant being an exemplar of the bushido ethic of physical courage, but he was also a man whose bombast and egotism were at variance with the principles of humility and caution that informed the true spirit of bushido. That said, those virtues were hardly valued in the Japanese military hierarchy of the 1930s, and Mutaguchi was a true creature of that rash decade. Born in Saga prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu, he was the son of the once prominent Fukuchi family, which had fallen on hard times. His father had died when Renya was young, leaving the boy and his brother to be brought up ‘almost like orphans’. He was eventually adopted by the Mutaguchi family and made their heir; this was a common practice, dating from the Samurai era, when families who did not have a male heir could adopt in order to preserve the family line and name. A few years after Mutaguchi’s death in the 1960s, his son Morikuni told a biographer that his father had gained his driving energy to succeed from the difficulties of his childhood. ‘Where his father had drifted, he was determined to forge ahead resolutely. Where his father had faltered before opposition, he would blast it aside.’ In later life Mutaguchi never spoke willingly of his father. It was as if he felt shame or anger towards him, or perhaps a mixture of both. More than anything, it seems, he was determined not to be weak. The military offered the strength and resoluteness that he craved.

The Japan in which Mutaguchi grew up regarded the military as a higher caste, in whose ranks lay the great hope of national unity. Wars had been fought and won against the Chinese and Koreans, but also against Tsarist Russia, the first European power to be defeated by Asians in the modern age. The distinguished historian of Japan, John Dower, quotes a song from the 1880s that presages the intentions of this new power:

There is a law of the nations it is true

but when the moment comes remember the strong eat up the weak.

The lives of young Japanese males were circumscribed by two core imperial rescripts. The first was a code of ethics for all the military, which was the most important document in preparing for a militarised society. ‘Loyalty [is] their essential duty,’ it declared, ‘death is lighter than a feather.’ Soldiers were told that orders should always be regarded as coming from the emperor himself.

(#) Military training was brutal and designed to instil an attitude of mercilessness towards their opponents.

Takahide Kuwaki was born in 1918, the son of a lieutenant general who had fought in China and served as a military attaché in Turkey and France. Kuwaki graduated as a doctor before being sent for military training where, to his shock, social class and educational qualifications made no difference to the way he was treated. ‘I was surprised by that! They slapped me if I said something wrong.’ Hiroshi Yamagami left home for an army college at the age of fourteen. At school he remembered feeling sorry for people who were not Japanese. The Chinese were referred to with contempt. ‘We called them “Chankoro”, which means Chinks,’ he said. His parents rowed incessantly and the military life offered him an escape. There was fun sometimes but what he remembers most is a great deal of suffering. The day began with a three- or four-hour run to build up physical stamina. The slightest infraction was severely punished. ‘The teacher beat you with his fist and the reason for the punishment would be something like not saluting properly, or if you were not standing properly to attention. Sometimes the whole group would be slapped because of what an individual had done. The punishment to the soldiers would be worse; we would instruct the NCOs to hit our soldiers. They would slap harder and more often. They would stick their stick into them or beat them with them. Or they would keep the man standing in the same posture for an hour. The Japanese army trained soldiers very strictly in order to make a strong army.’ Violence was a matter of policy, not occasional excess.

Renya Mutaguchi emerged into manhood in a society where parliamentary democracy was still relatively new, and constantly threatened.

(#) The Japanese military was captive to expansionist ideas, not simply as an expression of historical destiny but as an answer to the more pragmatic issue of limited national resources. Japan imported more than 80 per cent of its oil from the USA, a humiliating and strategically crippling dependency. If Japan were to meet its destiny as a great world power, an empire in more than name, it would have to expand beyond the portions of China and Korea that it controlled and into the resource-rich nations of South-East Asia. The Japanese military constructed the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ as a cover for their new imperialist expansionism. It was a charter to loot the resources of these territories, with even more rapacity and brutality than the incumbent powers.

Renya Mutaguchi joined the army as a teenage cadet in 1908. As a young officer he served with the international expeditionary force dispatched to Russia in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, as military attaché in France, and on active command in China. It was a heady time for young officers like Mutaguchi, as military influence in Japanese society was growing rapidly. Cliques within the military formed secret societies, all pledging devotion to the emperor, all propagating expansionism, but divided, often murderously so, over the exact nature of the state they wished to create.