Fergal Keane - Road of Bones - The Siege of Kohima 1944 – The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire

FERGAL KEANE

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Harper Press in 2010

Copyright © Fergal Keane 2010

Fergal Keane asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

Maps by Hugh Bicheno

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Source ISBN 9780007132409

Ebook Edition © JULY 2013 ISBN 9780007439867

Version 2018-12-05

In memory of John Shipster, soldier.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

List of Maps

Epigraph

Prologue

1 An Empire at Bay

2 The Longest Road

3 At the Edge of the Raj

4 The King Emperor’s Spear

5 Kentish Men

6 Fighting Back

7 Jungle Wallahs

8 The Master of the Mountains

9 The Hour of the Warrior

10 Sato San

11 Into the Mountains

12 Flap

13 Onslaught

14 To the Last Man

15 Siege

16 ‘Hey! Johnny, Let Me Through’

17 Over the Mountain

18 Dreams Dying

19 The Black Thirteenth

20 A Question of Time

21 The Last Hill

22 Attrition

23 The Trials of Victory, and Defeat

24 The Road of Bones

25 When the War Is Over

26 The Quiet Fathers

Epilogue: After Hatred

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Notes and Sources

Chronology

Dramatis Personae

About the Publisher

India 1942–1945

Burma Theatre 1943

Kohima District

Arakan Battles 1944

U-Go Offensive, March – April 1944

Kohima, 5 April 1944, Kohima Defence and Japanese Attacks

Kohima Ridge

Final Stand and Grover’s Advance on Kohima

The Road of Bones, June – December 1944

Final Offensive 1945

‘The dreams of empire lure the hearts of kings – and so men die’

CORPORAL G. W. DRISCOLL, BURMA, 1944

In the morning the general left his house after breakfast and walked into the country. He did this for two years. In the heat of summer the old soldier found the going harder. He sweated heavily and his bones hurt in the evenings. When the winter came he wore an old army greatcoat and walked along the ridges of the frozen rice paddies. He did not stop when the snows came and might amuse himself by trying to count the white geese in the fields. It was hard to tell where the snow ended and the birds began. The general was born here in Yamagata, among fishermen and farmers on the north-east coast of Japan. Here, in the town that lay between the mountains and the sea, he would atone for the great disaster. Every time a soldier’s bones came home from the front he would set out on his travels. ‘I will finish this before I die,’ he told his son.

Kohima. It lived with him every day of his life. All of the men who had followed him lying in unmarked graves, lost along the mountain tracks, or drowned in the Chindwin river. At every house he bowed and introduced himself and having been invited in he would remove his shoes and sit with the family. Sometimes it would be a woman with young children, at other times a widow alone, or elderly parents. But all of them were linked to the general by the most immutable of bonds. He had taken their sons, husbands, fathers, over the mountains to India and they had not come back. At times they showed him photographs and letters. Many expressed surprise at his visit. The generals of the Imperial Japanese Army were not usually to be found calling on the homes of ordinary soldiers. The general carried a candle in his pocket and he would light this and read a poem for the dead. Its exact words have been lost with time, but he spoke of the soldiers’ courage and how sorry he felt that they had lost their lives. His son, Goro, believed Lieutenant General Kotuku Sato wished he had died with them. ‘I had the impression that he had very strong feelings of loss over what happened to his men on the battlefield,’ he said. The general knew there were many officers who believed he should have killed himself. How could he live with the shame of such a defeat?

I listen to the story in Goro Sato’s home in Ibaraki. He produces photo albums, a whole bundle of them, devoted to his father’s memory. There are pictures of Kotuku Sato in cadet’s uniform which date from the beginning of his career in the early 1920s. Later, in the 1930s, he is photographed standing next to Emperor Hirohito at a military exercise. There are images of the rising young officer dressed in furs and heavy boots on the Chinese border, and one of him relaxing in a kimono with a glass of sake and a broad smile on his face. There is one intriguing image. The general is dressed in a white linen suit, standing next to an American-made car. The photograph was taken outside a pagoda somewhere in South-East Asia. The general looks much older. There is a wariness in his expression that was not present in the earlier images.

‘Where is that?’ I ask.

‘That is in Java, after he was relieved of his command,’ Goro responds. He then tells me that a more senior general tried to have his father declared insane. He sent a medical team to Java to examine him. ‘The rumour was that he was crazy. How else could they explain what he had done?’ he says. But the doctors found that Sato was entirely sane. It is easy to see how his superiors might have thought him mad. A Japanese commander did not disobey orders to stand firm, he fought to the death. ‘You must never forget that the men who survived loved him,’ said Goro. ‘They were only alive because of him.’

By the Japanese account nearly half of the 84,000 men of the 15th Army who marched into India were killed or died of starvation and disease. It was a disaster without parallel in the history of the Imperial Army. General Sato’s 31st was one of three divisions of the 15th Army which crossed the Chindwin river in March 1944. Of his 15,000 strong force, almost half would never return, and those who did were emaciated fever-ridden ghosts. Yet Sato’s march into India had started with victory. The 31st Division had annihilated every outpost in their way until they came to the small town of Kohima in the Naga Hills.