All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [352]
The Arakan thrust was smashed so swiftly and comprehensively that Slim was able to airlift some of his units north-eastwards to strengthen the defence of Imphal and Kohima, key road junctions separated by a hundred miles. The battles there in the spring of 1944 produced the heaviest fighting of the war on Britain’s eastern front. Climatic conditions in Assam and Burma were as wretched as those of the Pacific, with the added hazard of mountain terrain; even before men began to fight, mere movement on precipitous hill faces strained their powers to the limit. ‘The physical hammering one takes is difficult to understand,’ said Lt. Sam Hornor, Signals Officer of 1st Norfolks.
The heat, the humidity, the altitude and the slope of almost every foot of ground, combine to knock hell out of the stoutest constitution. You gasp for air which doesn’t seem to come, you drag your legs upwards till they seem reduced to the strength of matchsticks, you wipe the salt sweat out of your eyes. Then you feel your heart pounding so violently that you think it must burst its cage … Eventually, long after everything tells you you should have died of heart failure, you reach what you imagine is the top of the hill only to find it is a false crest … You forget the Japs, you forget time, you forget hunger and thirst. All you can think of is the next halt.
Bugler Bert May said of Kohima: ‘It was a stinking hell of a hole. All the vegetation on the ground was dead … Leeches, they used to get through on to any part of your body that was open. You used to get a lighted cigarette, stick it on his tail and “bonk”, he’d pop off.’ For weeks after the Japanese attack began on 7 March, the issue seemed to hang in the balance. The Japanese encircled Slim’s positions. There was panic at Dimapur, the big supply dump beyond Kohima. Lt. Trevor Highett of the Dorsets said later, ‘There are few things more unpleasant than a base in a flap. It was full of people who never expected to fight, and who couldn’t wait to get out. “Take what you like,” they said. “Just give us a signature if you’ve got time.”’ Then the infantrymen trudged forward to join the battle. Each day witnessed fierce small-arms and grenade battles at close quarters, as the Japanese charged again and again.
The former district commissioner’s tennis court became the focus of the struggle for Kohima, with only a few yards separating the Royal West Kents’ positions from those of their foes. ‘We shot them on the tennis court, we grenaded them on the tennis court,’ said company commander John Winstanley. ‘We held because I had constant contact by radio with the guns and the Japs never seemed to learn how to surprise us. They used to shout in English as they formed up, “Give up” … One could judge just the right moment to call down gun and mortar fire … They were not acting intelligently and did the same old stupid thing again and again. We had experienced fighting the Japs in the Arakan, [with them] bayoneting the wounded and prisoners … They had renounced any right to be regarded as human, and we thought of them as vermin to be exterminated. That was important – we are pacific in our nature, but when aroused we fight quite well.’
The battlefield was soon reduced to a barren, blackened wilderness, stripped of vegetation by blast, pockmarked with craters and foxholes, festooned with the coloured parachutes on which supplies were dropped to the garrison. The stench of death and putrid flesh hung over everything. ‘We were attacked every single night,’ said Major Frankie Boshell, a company commander in the Berkshires, who relieved the West Kents. ‘On the second night they started at 1900 and the last attack came at 0400 next morning. They came in waves, like a pigeon shoot. Most nights they overran part