Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [53]
To the fury of the Japanese general, on 19 June, after eighty-five days, Kotuku Sato, his subordinate divisional commander at Kohima, abandoned the assault and began to fall back. The monsoon, which struck with exceptional force, reduced the tracks behind the Japanese front to mud-baths. “Despair became rife118,” said Iwaichi Fujiwara, a staff intelligence colonel. “The food situation was desperate. Officers and men had almost exhausted their strength after continuous and heavy fighting for weeks in the rain, poorly fed…The road dissolved into mud, the rivers flooded, and it was hard to move on foot, never mind in a vehicle…Almost every officer and man was suffering from malaria, while amoebic dysentery and beriberi were commonplace.”
Still the Japanese army commander would not abandon Imphal. When Sato, back from Kohima, reported to Mutaguchi’s headquarters on 12 July, a senior staff officer coldly offered him a short sword covered with a white cloth. Sato, however, felt more disposed to kill his superior than himself. He declared contemptuously: “15th Army’s staff possess less tactical understanding than cadets.” He recognised, as Mutaguchi would not, that the Japanese forces should have acknowledged failure and fallen back before the monsoon broke. Japanese often spoke scornfully of the long and cumbersome British logistic “tail.” Now they discovered the cost of themselves having no “tail” at all.
Mutaguchi’s hapless soldiers fought on at Imphal, being driven back yard by yard with crippling losses. Their commander’s behaviour became increasingly eccentric. Having ordered a clearing made beside his headquarters in the jungle, he implanted decorated bamboos at the four points of the compass, and each morning approached these, calling on the eight hundred myriad gods of Japan for aid. His supplications were in vain. On 18 July the general bowed to the inevitable, and ordered a retreat. His ruined army began to fall back towards the Chindwin River, into Burma, Slim’s vanguards pressing on their rear. “One battle is much like another to those who fight them,” observed Captain Raymond Cooper of the Border Regiment, who was wounded at Imphal. This is indeed true. But the consequences of Imphal and Kohima far transcended any British achievement in the Far East since December 1941.
The campaign was a catastrophe for the Japanese. Of 85,000 fighting soldiers committed, 53,000 became casualties, five divisions were destroyed, two more badly mauled. At least 30,000 men died, along with 17,000 mules, bullocks and pack ponies, both sides’ indispensable beasts of burden. The Indian National Army, in British eyes traitors, collapsed when exposed to action, and surrendered wherever Slim’s soldiers would indulge them. Fourteenth Army suffered 17,000 casualties, but its spirits soared. “We knew we had won a great victory,” said Derek Horsford, commanding a Gurkha battalion at the age of twenty-seven. “We were chasing Japanese up and down thousand-foot hills, finding everywhere their dead and abandoned weapons and equipment.” An eyewitness with Fourteenth Army, advancing in the enemy’s wake, wrote:
The air was thick119 with the smell of their dead. The sick and wounded were left behind in hundreds…We saw dead Japs all along the road, some in their stockinged feet, and where the hills were highest and most exhausting, they lay huddled in groups. They carried only a mess-tin, steel helmet and rifle. Some lay as though asleep,