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By Root 1402 0

of the battalion position, so we had to mount counterattacks.’ His company lost half of its 120 men at Kohima, and other units suffered in like proportion. Sgt. Ben McCrae wrote: ‘Your nerves got to you. You could have sat down and cried your eyes out. Which a lot of blokes did – they got so low-spirited with it all. You were hungry, cold and wet, you thought, “When am I going to get out of here?” You didn’t, you couldn’t.’ Sgt. Bert Fitt took out three bunkers with grenades, then found his Bren gun empty when he met a Japanese. ‘When you get to hand-to-hand fighting like that, you realise that you or he’s going to get killed … You close in and hope for the best … I crashed the light machine-gun into his face … Before he hit the ground I had my hand on his windpipe … I managed to get his bayonet from his rifle and I finished him with that.’

In action, there was a fine line between courage which heartened others and bluster which incurred their contempt. 1st Norfolks were uncertain on which side to place their bombastic colonel, Robert Scott. Amid the carnage, Scott said ebulliently to his riflemen, ‘Come on you chaps, there’s no need to be afraid, you are better than those little yellow bastards.’ When struck on the scalp by a glancing shrapnel splinter, he shook his fist at the Japanese lines and said, ‘The biggest bloke on the damn position and you couldn’t get him! If you were in my bloody battalion I’d take your proficiency pay away!’ Captain Michael Fulton said to a fellow officer, ‘Well, Sam, I’d better get off and earn my MC.’ Fulton ran forward, and within seconds was shot through the head. At Kohima, 1st Norfolks lost eleven officers and seventy-nine other ranks killed, thirteen officers and 150 other ranks wounded.

‘Almost to a man the Japs had died without trying to escape,’ wrote a British company commander of the Border Regiment after a night clash further south, on the Imphal plain. ‘But one was burning in the open, and his yellow limbs were black and shining like those of some fantastic Negro; another who had come out to fight was dead and sprawling, a bayonet like an outsize arrow still sticking in his chest; three more, already wounded, were running for the cover of a tall bamboo clump some thirty yards wide.’ Some men found the struggle too much for them: ‘For the first time, that day, I saw two men crack,’ wrote the same officer after another savage encounter at Imphal. ‘One, a six-foot corporal, who spent the afternoon cowering in a ditch, the other, a reinforcement who when nothing was happening in the middle of the night suddenly broke and ran – until somebody stopped him with a bayonet.’

Devastating artillery, armoured and air power gradually reduced the attackers. A Lee-Grant tank lurched down steep terraces blackened by days of bombardment to retake the tennis court at Kohima, firing at point-blank range into Japanese foxholes. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi, the Japanese commander, had launched his offensive with little logistic support, and the RAF daily battered his lines of communication. Soon the besiegers began to starve. On 31 May, without authorisation the local Japanese commander at Kohima ordered a withdrawal which collapsed into rout. On 18 July, Mutaguchi likewise bowed to the inevitable: the remnants of the Japanese forces around Imphal embarked upon a ragged, stumbling march towards the Chindwin river, racked by hunger, tormented at every twist of the mountain trails by Allied aircraft and pursuing troops.

A despairing Japanese soldier wrote: ‘In the rain, with no place to sit, we took short spells of sleep standing on our feet. The bodies of our comrades who had struggled along the track before us lay all around, rain-sodden and giving off a stench of decomposition. Even with the support of our sticks we fell among the corpses again and again as we stumbled on rocks and tree roots laid bare by the rain and attempted one more step, then one more step, in our exhaustion.’ The outcome of the twin battles of Imphal and Kohima was the heaviest defeat ever suffered by a Japanese army: out of 85,000