Inferno - Max Hastings [356]
Devastating artillery, armour and air power gradually reduced the attackers. A British 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 men committed, 53,000 became casualties. Among their 30,000 dead, as many perished from disease and malnutrition as from Allied action. Mutaguchi’s forces lost all their tanks, guns and animal transport, which were irreplaceable. On no single battlefield of the Pacific campaign did Hirohito’s forces suffer as severely.
After almost three years of defeat in the east, the victors’ morale soared. Although a difficult campaign lay ahead in 1945, to reoccupy Burma at the end of a long, long supply line, Slim knew he had cracked the spine of the Japanese army in Southeast Asia, staking his claim to be recognised as the ablest, as well as best-loved, British field commander of the war. As for the Japanese, Mutaguchi had never anticipated that he could conquer India, but cherished hopes that the spectacle of the “Indian National Army” attacking the British might stimulate a general revolt against the Raj. Instead, the INA’s performance discredited it as a fighting force. Victory in Assam and Slim’s subsequent advance into Burma temporarily reasserted British authority in India. While Indian popular enthusiasm for independence remained undiminished, strikes and street violence receded.
THE CRITICAL BATTLES of 1944 took place much farther east, however. That summer, a huge accession of resources to the Pacific theatre, notably warships and planes, enabled the United States to close the ring on Japan. While men continued to die and ships to sink, the U.S. Navy’s dominance changed the character of the struggle. Petty Officer Roger Bond of the carrier Saratoga said, “If you went out to the Pacific after … January of 1944, you had a completely different experience and viewpoint than those before … I wasn’t part of the one where we truly were losing, getting chased out of the place.” The Japanese were still fighting hard, but everywhere they were being forced back.
On Bougainville as on many other islands, Hirohito’s soldiers paid the price for staging foolish, futile infantry attacks against well-armed defenders. An American wrote in March 1944: “Enemy dead were strewn in piles of mutilated bodies, so badly dismembered in most cases that a physical count was impossible. Here and there was a leg or an arm