The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [154]
Because of the mountainous Naga Hill region in the north, with jungle paths and narrow ridges 8,000 feet high, Slim assumed that Sato would have to try to capture Kohima with only a regiment; in fact on 5 April the entire 31st Division arrived there, after marching 160 miles in twenty days, bringing large numbers of animals both for food and for carrying arms and ammunition over passes and ravines and through jungles. Kohima was considered the key to Imphal 80 miles to the south, Imphal to Dimapur and Dimapur the key to British India itself, which is why it was soon to see, in the writer Compton Mackenzie’s view, ‘fighting as desperate as any in recorded history’.35
At 17.00 hours on 5 April, Colonel Hugh Richards of the 1st Assam Regiment, some of whose rear details were stationed at Kohima, was informed by a Naga tribesman that the Japanese were approaching along the road from Imphal, and there was no time to waste if he wanted to defend the town. Sure enough, Major-General Shigesaburo Miyazaki of the 58th Infantry Regiment was approaching, his pet monkey Chibi on his shoulder, having cut the Dimapur–Imphal road that morning (the Kohima–Imphal road was to be cut soon afterwards).36 Kohima, a village 5,000 feet above sea level surrounded by peaks 10,000 feet high to the west and 8,000 feet to the north and east, has been described as ‘an ocean of peaks and ridges crossed by bridle paths’.37 Richards had been trying to fortify the place for a month, stymied by a quartermaster in Dimapur who would not release barbed wire to him as there was an administrative regulation forbidding its use in the Naga Hills.
Defending the village perched on a ridge and soon completely surrounded by over 6,000 Japanese under Sato were 500 men of the 4th Battalion of the Royal West Kent Regiment under Lieutenant-Colonel John ‘Danny’ Laverty, some platoons of the Assam Rifles and Shere Regiment, a small detachment from the 1st Assam Regiment and some recruits from the Royal Nepalese Army, numbering around a thousand in total.38 The 1,500 non-combatant civilians proved a problem: although the tiny area the British Commonwealth forces were defending – effectively a triangle 700 by 900 by 1,100 yards – was well supplied with food and ammunition, the Japanese cut off its water supply early on in the siege, so that water had to be severely rationed. Despite his formidable advantage in numbers at Kohima, Sato had little faith in the success of U-Go in general. On the eve of his attack, he drank a glass of champagne with his divisional officers, telling them: ‘I’ll take this opportunity, gentlemen, of making something quite clear to you. Miracles apart, every one of you is likely to lose his life in this operation. It isn’t simply a question of the enemy’s bullets. You must be prepared for death by starvation in these mountain fastnesses.’39 The Japanese obviously did pep-talks differently.
What happened next rates with the great sieges of British history, such as that of Rorke’s Drift in the Zulu War. The Japanese, having taken positions above Kohima, bombarded the force inside the perimeter at dusk every day from 6 April onwards, before attempting to overrun it night after night. Vicious hand-to-hand fighting took place, with the Japanese capturing more and more of the village as the dreadful fortnight wore on. Every building in the village – the General Hospital, Garrison Hill, the Kuki Piquet, the Field Supply Depot (FSD) and its bakeries, the Kohima Club, the Detail Issue Store and the District Commissioner’s bungalow – became a scene of death and destruction, as some held out and others were captured by