Inferno - Max Hastings [355]
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 with which supplies were dropped to the garrison. The stench of death and putrid flesh hung over everything. “We were attacked every single night,” said Maj. 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 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. The 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!” Capt. 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, the 1st Norfolks lost 11 officers and 79 other ranks killed, 13 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 farther 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