Road of Bones (24 page)

The men of Sato’s 31st Division who prepared to advance across the Chindwin were fiercely loyal to their emperor and their unit but they grumbled to each other as much as any soldier anywhere. A barrack-room ballad found on the body of a dead Japanese at Kohima in June 1944 was written in the universal voice of the soldier.

Any man who joins the bloody army of his own free will is an
Absolute fool, but it’s all in the sacred name of patriotism.
You’ve to forsake your parents, dedicate your body to the state.
Then do your damndest for your country.

The author was writing about army life before the battle. He listed his complaints in detail. There was the endless guard duty, midnight raids on barracks to check for absentees which dragged everybody out of bed, the NCOs and officers who were ‘a swell-headed lot’ and scroungers, the close arrest if you got back five minutes late on a leave pass.

The system is so well organised that you do every blessed thing
To the bugle – get up, go to bed, attend sick parade and ‘orders’ –
You even eat at its bidding.
There’s pay parade every ten days, but you get so little that
You can’t even buy yourself fags.

Had the ballad been discovered, the man would certainly have faced pain at the hands of the
Kempeitai.
Yet the tone of disillusionment does not mean he would refuse his duty. It simply shows after seven years of war, with victory no closer, he had few illusions left.

Yoshiteru Hirayama was a new lieutenant with the 58th Regiment and was given command of a machine-gun company which had seen combat in China. The men were clearly wary of their new officer and tested his reactions with numerous stories of how difficult their experience had been in China. ‘All the stories had been about how hard it had been … they didn’t indicate how I should behave in combat or what I should do. They just said how tough it was.’

Chuzaburo Tomaru, the son of a banker from Nagoya, was a supply officer with the 138th Regiment and could trace his doubts back to the moment he was crossing a river near Changsha in China. ‘I just heard that the war against USA started. I thought Japan was in big trouble. We were already fighting with China and then a big country like USA became our enemy. It was massive.’ Tomaru had
already gained plenty experience of ‘living off the land’. It meant stealing from Chinese peasants. ‘There was no food coming from behind so we went into Chinese houses. It was usually a family without men. I saw women trembling on the bed. We took their food.’ His enduring memory of China was the day they brought in a suspected spy. In practice this could mean anybody arrested on the whim of a Japanese soldier. The man was terrified. One of Tomaru’s comrades dug a hole and forced the suspected spy to sit in it. Then the company commander came to Tomaru and asked him if he wanted to behead the man. ‘I said I did not want to. I had never done it before. So another soldier cut his head off and the man rolled over in the hole and they covered him with sand.’ Such scenes were repeated with nauseating frequency in Japanese-held areas of China. After his service at Changsha, Tomaru was sent to Shanghai, where he set sail for Singapore and ended up marching five hundred miles into Thailand. On the way he met British prisoners of war constructing a bridge on the Kwai river. The men were ‘miserable’-looking but he remembered how one had said to him that British forces would one day cross this bridge to defeat the Japanese. ‘I thought “what are these guys saying?” They will have no chance.’ But as he marched away, the image of the emaciated men haunted him. It looked to him like a possible vision of his own future.

Senior Private Manabu Wada, of the 138th Regiment, had a similar encounter. ‘A British soldier came up to me and said, “Japanese master, please give me a cigarette.” He was a very tall man. Owing to the hard daily work he was skinny but well shaped … I gave him a few cigarettes from my chest pocket, and we each lit one and smoked together. He smoked with great enjoyment and blew out great puffs of smoke. Although we could not understand one another clearly we managed a dialogue with gestures.’ The POW told him Japan would be defeated because it had to depend on human labour rather than machinery to build the railway. Without fail the British would win, he said. ‘I was displeased with his words because he was actually smoking my cigarettes … “Japan will win definitely,” I said.’

Dr Takahide Kuwaki, an army doctor from Tokyo serving with 124th Regiment, was an ideologue, deeply influenced by the ultranationalist circles in which he had moved while at university. There was also a wilful streak in his nature. Against the tradition of the times, he defied his parents and married for love, with a girl he had met at university. By the time of his departure for the war, Takahide was the father of a baby boy. ‘It was an extraordinary thing to do in that period when arranged marriages were the thing to do. I had a very strict upbringing and my father was really mad.’ The family would acknowledge neither wife nor child. When the time came for him to leave, Takahide’s wife was forbidden from accompanying him to the station. That would have involved her meeting his parents. Travelling to the forward positions of 31st Division, he was enraptured by the landscape of ‘high mountains, big rivers and wild fields’, and convinced by the propaganda about Asian unity. The 124th Regiment had lost nearly a third of its strength at Guadalcanal and Takahide had every expectation that they would be in the forefront of Sato’s advance into India. ‘I had a firm resolve to die. I believed human beings had to do something good and correct. When I was young I learned about people who gave their lives for something good and that was something I believed in. I thought the percentage chance of my surviving would be low. Even in a situation where 90 per cent of people are dying I didn’t want to survive in that circumstance. To escape was a nonsensical idea.’

Sato spent the last weeks before the attack camped within easy march of the Chindwin. His infantry were based at three points along the approach to the river, waiting for the order to advance. One day Sato and his staff officers sat discussing the routes each regiment would take after crossing into India. They were debating how long it would take them to march from the Chindwin through the hills to Kohima. A soldier who was present recalled what happened. He refers to Sato throughout by the old samurai honorific, ‘My Lord’. ‘Most of the men, especially the young ones like us measured a map by ruler and answered the distance. My Lord got angry and said: “You cannot instruct the campaign that way. In a battle in mountainous area, the
vertical level of mountains affects marching schedule. You have to think about the distance, considering this level.” Just like My Lord said, I wrote the vertical level of mountains on the graph … It means that if there is 100 km, then you actually have to march 200 km. My Lord instructed to consider the gap between regular paths and rocky paths; whether there are bridges on mountain stream or not and so on.’ With his experience of battle, and his foreboding about the operation, Sato knew such details could mean the difference between life and death.

On 12 February 1944 Sato received a visit from an old friend, Lieutenant General Naka, chief of staff of the Burma Area Army. They had both attended the Sendai Military Academy and Sato felt able to press him on the question of supplies. The whole business needed to be re-examined, he said. As a parting gift Sato gave his friend a pair of peacocks and an elephant’s tooth. After the meeting he reached a decision in his own mind that, if supplies were not forthcoming, the 31st Division would leave the battle. Not long afterwards, he received a second and more unwelcome visitor. Mutaguchi had sent his sycophant, the geisha-loving Major General Kunomura, with new orders. ‘I have a special request to pass on from the Army Commander,’ said Kunomura. ‘If 31 Division sees the opportunity, he wants you to advance to Dimapur. It is his most earnest wish.’

There followed a blazing row. Sato rounded on Kunomura, saying he could not accept that he was being asked to turn a plan to consolidate the defence of Burma into an offensive on the main British supply base in north-east India. ‘My orders from the 15 Army itself are to occupy Kohima. I will do my utmost to achieve that. But how can I move on to Dimapur at a moment’s notice? What is the enemy strength there? What supplies will I have? Just saying “Go to Dimapur” without examining any of these factors is foolish.’ In an attempt to placate Sato, Major General Kunomura committed 15th Army to delivering ten tons of supplies per day once Sato had set off. The promise would lead to bitter recrimination later on.

By 24 February, more than a fortnight before the 31st Division crossed the Chindwin, the war correspondent of the Domei News
Service, Yukihiko Imai, travelling with the 58th Regiment, noted that the men were already eating pineapple roots and wild grasses to preserve their food stocks. ‘They were suffering diarrhoea, gastric ulcers and beri beri.’ He also recorded that allied aircraft could be heard constantly flying above the canopy. Many of the 31st Division veterans recalled their anxiety at seeing British and American fighters overhead and an almost complete absence of Japanese planes. The Commander of 15th Army was not deterred. A visitor to his headquarters in Maymyo met him in the blooming garden where Mutaguchi told him: ‘My officers do everything, I just tend my roses.’

It was a job that demanded patience, stealth and strong nerves. The Chindit officer, F. H. A. Lowe, gave a vivid account of jungle patrolling. ‘Visibility is practically nil – a man could creep to within five yards of a sentry without being seen – the jungle is full of small sounds – the creaking of trees, the rustling of bushes and undergrowth, the snapping of twigs and branches, the whisper of grass disturbed by a snake or small animal – or was it a man’s stealthy footfall? The call of a night bird – or was it a signal to a lurking enemy? The jungle closes in on the motionless sentry, every flickering shadow seems to be a man. Let any man who has never known fear stand in such circumstances, and, if he has any imagination at all, his hair will begin to prick the back of his neck, his spine will chill, and, if he is honest, he will say “I am afraid.”’ The secret war was escalating. All through December reports were coming from the villages of probes by the Japanese and their INA allies. By day and night V Force was tracking the infiltrators. On occasions the war of track and skirmish developed into full-scale battles. There was hand to hand fighting between the Assam Rifles troops of V Force and the Japanese on 23 December with the attackers ‘being cut up by our kukris’. As the year came to an end such encounters became numerous.

The intelligence told Slim to expect an offensive by the 15th Army in mid-March. Imphal would be the target but a smaller force, probably no larger than a regiment, would be sent to cut the road at Kohima. The conventional military response would be to strike first
and gain the initiative.
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In the background, but always an insistent presence, the Americans were pressing for offensive action to forestall Mutaguchi. On 23 February, 1944, Roosevelt wrote to Churchill: ‘The continued build-up of Japanese strength in Burma requires us to undertake the most aggressive action within our power to retain the initiative and prevent them from launching an offensive that may carry them over the borders into India … I most urgently hope therefore that you back to the maximum a vigorous and immediate campaign in Upper Burma.’

But Slim planned to do precisely the opposite. He would wait for Mutaguchi to come to him. In fact he would do something even riskier. Once the enemy offensive had begun, the divisions facing them on the Chindwin would be ordered to withdraw, conforming to the stereotype of previous British retreats. The Japanese would follow, their line of communication getting steadily longer and more exposed, until Slim stood and faced them on the Imphal Plain. There he had ample supplies of food, an advantage in armour and artillery and, most important of all, two all-weather airfields. Slim knew there were generals in Delhi who were petrified at the risk he was taking. Suppose the Japanese advanced too quickly and outflanked the retreating divisions? The staged retreat might easily become a chaotic rout? Timing, Slim agreed, was everything. Fatefully, he left the decision on that with his Corps Commander, Liutenant General Geoffrey Scoones.

In Kohima they had been getting reports about increased Japanese activity in the Naga Hills since the beginning of the year. Infiltrators had attempted to recruit villagers as spies. Charles Pawsey’s deputy, P. F. Adams, wrote on 17 January that he had entered a village that he suspected was going over to the enemy and recommended it ‘should be strongly dealt with’. Another village was also suspected of entertaining the Japanese. ‘I then decided to punish Sahpao by destroying one half to two thirds of their rice houses, this would also prevent the Japs buying supplies of rice. This was done and we then withdrew.’ Nowhere in Adams’s account is there any indication of concern about the consequences of such destruction for a people caught in the middle of a war.