I believe that all wars are evidence of failure; of diplomacy, of politics, of military strategy. And another million minor inconsequential and unintended mistakes must cumulatively go wrong for a great battle to occur. As an example, I present for you, the great battle for Kohima.
Still the remaining 12,000 Japanese soldiers had caught the British high command off guard, again. The draftees from Fukouka Prefecture quickly surrounded the barely 2,500 Indian and British troops defending the Kohima Ridge.
The ultimate goal for the 31st division was still 40 miles away; Dimapur, a British airfield, rail head and logistics base on the Brahmaputra River. From this depot a winding road climbed the Naga Hills, through a mountain pass along Kohima Ridge, and then ran southward to Impala. At Impala were three Indian divisions, commanded by British officers. The main Japanese thrust of four divisions was initially aimed at Impala.
But if the 31st division could capture Kohima, those three Indian divisions would be cut off, and could be starved to death. And if the 31st could capture Dimapur, the Japanese army would have enough food, ammunition and fuel to invade India itself. Sato’s goal was to capture enough supplies at Kohima for the next forty mile march to Dimapur.
In a first rush on the evening of 3 April , 1944, the men from Kyushu not only surrounded Kohima, they also captured British warehouses containing enough food to supply the 31st division for a year. But less than a month’s worth had been distributed when the Royal Air Force bombed the warehouses, and blew up the supplies. When those initial captured supplies were used up each Japanese soldier received only one rice ball, some salt and a bottle of boiled water a day.
Beginning on 6 April, under daily downpours and heavy mortar fire, the Japanese began a series of infantry attacks, squeezing the defenders back onto isolated hill tops along the ridge until the British held only one, Garrison Hill.
And atop that, at a 280 degree switchback in the Impala Road, was DC Hill, where in peaceful times the District Commissioner had built himself a summer bungalow, complete with a garden and a tennis court. By 9 April, the the Japanese and British lines were separated only by the Tennis Court, and the entire battle for India and Burma had been reduced to a battlefield just 36 feet wide.
Attacks and counter-attacks raged across the court (above, foreground), for day after day. A British officer explained the battle this way. “We were attacked every single night... They came in waves…Most nights they overran part of the battalion position, so we had to mount counter-attacks...” Noted another source, “It was a very primitive battle. The Japanese had no air cover or air supply and attacked each night”
Another British writer explained, “The defenders built barricades from the piled bodies of the attackers, the entire area eventually becoming a thick carpet of blackened and rotting corpses. When digging in, they found themselves often digging through the dead before hitting earth.”
One of the Indian troopers, Wellington Massar, set up a machine gun on the billiard table in the remains of the club house, and cut down the Japanese attackers. A Lt. King led a counterattack which retook the trench. But the British position had been cut in half. With daylight the Japanese launched what was supposed to be the final annihilating attack, but it was repulsed.
A British Officer told his commander, “The men's spirits are all right, but there aren't many of us left,” He said that if relief did not arrive within 48 hours, the position would fall. Five days later, no one had been relieved, and the battle for the “shattered corpse-covered tennis court” was still raging.
On the morning of 18 April, British artillery began to fall on the tennis court. It was the advance effect of the arrival of the British 2nd division, which had been flown into Dimapur the week before, and had now fought its way up the road.
On the 19th the reliving column reached DC hill. What they found was “'filthy, bearded, bedraggled scarecrows” defending “shallow muddy trenches, dismembered limbs, empty cartridge cases, ammunition boxes and abandoned equipment, the debris of numerous assaults, and the stench of so many things rotting. The most lasting impression was caused by the litter of war- piles of biscuits, dead bodies black with flies and scattered silverware from the DC's bungalow.”
Still the men from Kyushu did not give up. Now outnumbered and heavily outgunned, they contested every British advance, and were still holding an edge of the Tennis Court.
As John Toland reported, in his book “The Rising Sun”, the 31st division was now eating “… grass, potatoes, snails, lizards, snakes – anything they could get their hands on, including monkeys”. Harold Jones, one of the reliving solders, describe Kohima this way. “I was there about 10 days. It was a terrible place”
Toland tells what the Japanese retreat was like. “On the long trek back over the mountains in pounding rain, men fought one another for food. Thousands of sick and wounded fell out of the march and killed themselves with grenades. The paths were seas of mud and when a man stumbled he became half buried in slime…Light machine guns, rifles, helmets, gas masks – anything useless – littered the trails. Only the will to live propelled the survivors…and those who lasted out a day’s march huddled together for sleep that rarely came because of the constant downpour. Many drowned, too feeble to raise their heads above the rising water, and the Chindwin River itself, their goal, claimed the lives of hundreds more in its swollen waters….by the end of the year Japanese rule (of Burma) was on the point of collapse.” (pp 693)
The 31st division had been destroyed. 67% of its precious 15,000 men were dead or wounded. The British counted 5,000 Japanese bodies on the Kohima battle field alone, and best estimates are that 7,000 of the men from Fukouka Prefecture were sacrificed in the attempt to take Kohima.. Fewer than 600 were taken prisoner.
By 25 May most the Kohima ridge was back in British hands, and General Sato informed his despised commander that without food or ammunition his men could not survive past June First. When his commander ordered the 31st division to “fight with their teeth” if they had no more bullets, Sato instead ordered his men to withdraw. It was the only time in the Second World War that a senior Japanese officer disobeyed a direct order while under attack, and ordered a retreat..
General Sato was relieved of his command, and sent sent home as unfit for duty because of wounds and physical wastage he suffered before Kohima. The British poet JM Edmonds left the best epitaph on the battle, which appears on a monument at the British cemetery at Kohima, and which could apply to the sacrifice of both sides. “When you go home, Tell them of us and say, For their tomorrow, We gave our today.”
None of the Japanese counter strokes of 1944 worked. The Imperial Navy blundered into the “Great Marianas Turkey shoot”, which saw 3 Japanese air craft carriers sunk, and 633 air planes destroyed. The Japanese Navy never recovered. In China “Operation One” pushed the Chinese army back, and forced the American 20th Air Force to abandon their advanced bases, which prevented them from bombing Japan. But the Marinna's victory allowed the Americans to simply transfer the B-29 bombers to the Islands of Guam and Tainan, where they would prove even more effective at burning Japanese cities.
And Operation “C” had captured nothing and left 50,000 Japanese dead, and reduced the defense of Burma to an empty shell. And for all the treachery and villainy of the Japanese militarist in fermenting World War in the Pacific, their greatest victims were not citizens of the United States, nor the British nor even China. Their greatest victims were the people of Japan, like the young men of Kyushu, who gave their today for a lie.
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