ROAD OF BONES
THE SIEGE OF KOHIMA 1944
THE EPIC STORY OF THE LAST
GREAT STAND OF EMPIRE

FERGAL KEANE

COPYRIGHT

William Collins

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

First published in Great Britain by HarperPress 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

DEDICATION

In memory of John Shipster, soldier.

CONTENTS

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

LIST OF MAPS

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

EPIGRAPH

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

CORPORAL G. W. DRISCOLL, BURMA, 1944

PROLOGUE

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. Over two weeks of savage fighting they were held off by a British and Indian garrison which they outnumbered by ten to one.* The defenders were a mix of battle-hardened veterans and novices, thrown together in the last hours before the Japanese arrived. By the end, the defenders’ perimeter was down to a circumference of just three hundred yards, into which the Japanese fired shell after shell, blasting the wounded as they lay in open pits. In the trenches men fought with guns, knives, spades, anything they could lay their hands on. A British infantryman, Mark Lambert of 4th battalion, Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, recalled, ‘We were being shot at and shooting, we were kicking, using our rifles as hammers, using the butts of our rifles if they got close. From both sides we were animals.’ In one action a British subaltern sent his Indian troops to safety and faced the Japanese alone, a pile of grenades by his side and a gun in each hand. Another strangled a Japanese soldier, having woken next to him in a trench. Japanese officers charged with swords drawn into the teeth of British machine-gun fire.

Much of the fighting centred on a tennis court where men pitched grenades back and forth. Above all, the defenders were determined not to be taken alive by an enemy with a well-deserved reputation for cruelty. There were legion well-documented stories of prisoners being cruelly mutilated while still alive, or tied to trees for bayonet practice. ‘They had murdered people in the dressing stations and we just thought they were animals. We thought they had forfeited their right to be treated as humans because they didn’t behave like humans,’ recalled Major John Winstanley of 4th battalion, the Royal West Kents.

Both sides fought and died among the rotting corpses of their comrades. For Sepoy Mukom Khiamniungan of the Assam Regiment the battlefield remains a haunted place to this day. ‘I find Kohima appalling. By that I mean it’s a place where airplanes and bombs had mixed flesh and earth. That’s why I don’t like staying there. I don’t even have tea when I pass there.’

The defeat at Kohima precipitated the collapse of Japanese power in Burma and destroyed forever the Japanese soldier’s belief in his invincibility. A song written by a survivor from the Japanese 58th Regiment described how their positions were bombed by allied aircraft:

In the jungle, covered with green

Afternoon showers of bombing

Vegetation scattered, turning to empty field

Not a bird song to be heard.

To the Japanese the retreat was ‘the road of the bones’. Starving men begged their comrades to shoot them or blew themselves up with grenades. Lieutenant Yoshiteru Hirayama, a machine-gunner with 58th Regiment, saw dead soldiers lying along the river bank and others pleaded with him for scraps. ‘Most were too weak even to do that,’ he recalled, ‘I didn’t have food to give them.’

For the British it was a close affair. The defenders of Kohima and its smaller outposts bought vital time to bring in reinforcements. Even so it took another six weeks of bitter fighting for British and Indian troops to drive the Japanese from their well entrenched positions at Kohima. The story of the two week siege provides the core of this narrative not only because it describes an extraordinary struggle against great odds but because it offers a vivid portrait of a defining moment in the fortunes of two imperial powers. Both were in decline, and both desperately needed victory. It was the stand of the Kohima garrison which denied the Japanese a swift triumph and gave General William Slim’s 14th Army the platform on which to launch his campaign to rout a battle hardened enemy. Kohima is a story of empires colliding in a world where high imperialism was already an anachronism, and where defeat might have profoundly altered the story of the end of the British Raj. The India that the men of 14th Army fought to defend was struggling to free itself from British control. As the battle of Kohima was taking place the country’s main political leaders languished in colonial jails. Britain had brought India into the war without any reference to her people. The Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared the war a fight for freedom and democracy, prompting the Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru to ask, ‘Whose freedom?’ But Nehru also knew that the war represented the last stand of British rule in India, and that defeat by Japan could change the political dynamic in ways that neither he nor any other Indian leader could predict or be certain of controlling.

As for the Japanese, they had crossed into India proclaiming their desire to free the oppressed peoples of the Raj, yet they ruled over an empire brutalised by massacre and enslavement. They brought with them Indian rebels who, they hoped, would raise the population against the British, but were defeated by an army whose component parts reflected the greatest empire the world had ever seen. The battle was fought on the territory of a tribal people loyal to the Raj, but whose fate is one of the most haunting strands of this narrative.

There was a third power in this great struggle and its influence would be decisive. American aircraft would help ensure the survival and ultimate victory of the British and Indian forces, but beyond a shared desire to defeat Japan the war aims and strategies of the United States and Britain diverged sharply. President Roosevelt was determined that victory in the Far East would not lead to a reimposition of the colonial status quo. The influential American commentator Walter Lipmann wrote that ‘there is a strong feeling that Britain east of Suez is quite different from Britain at home, that the war in Europe is a war of liberation and the war in Asia is for the defence of archaic privilege … the Asiatic war has revived the profound anti-imperialism of the American tradition.’ The American view was reflected in prolonged arguments over war strategy: Roosevelt believed the Burma campaign should be fought to aid his Chinese allies in the north and not as a battle of territorial redemption for the empire. The divisions over strategy were not a purely Anglo-American affair. The conduct of the campaign also produced the greatest rupture in Churchill’s cabinet of the entire war, with the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), General Sir Alan Brooke, and his colleagues threatening mass resignation over the prime minister’s plans for ambitious, and logistically impossible, sea-borne operations. These high-level arguments form an insistent drum beat in the narrative of Kohima.

This book does not attempt to tell the story of every unit that fought at Kohima, nor does it describe in any detail the parallel battles fought ninety miles away at Imphal. The Imphal struggle, the adventures of Wingate’s Chindits and General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell’s Chinese divisions, and the interventions of Subhas Chandra Bose’s rebel Indian National Army are discussed only as they relate directly to events at Kohima. In telling the story of the British 2nd Division, which led the ousting of the Japanese from Kohima in the second phase of the battle, I have concentrated my particular attention on the remorseless politics of war. The division’s popular commander, Major General John Grover, was sacked from his job at the very moment of his triumph. A recommendation for a detailed account of the fighting exploits of the division is found at the end of chapter twenty-three.

In a story where epic courage and remorseless savagery are constant companions the narrative cannot avoid becoming, at least in part, a meditation on the nature of man. As a war correspondent of nearly thirty years’ experience, and an ardent reader of history, I came to the story of Kohima believing I knew the extremes of human behaviour in war. But, for me, Kohima belonged in new territory entirely. It was not just the exceptional nature of the hand-to-hand fighting, but the other story that emerged, the long human aftermath of Kohima, an unlikely narrative of reconciliation between old enemies, but also of bitter enmity between men who once fought side by side, a story that reached its extraordinary denouement, in one case, at the funeral of a Japanese general.

I came to Kohima entirely by accident. Several years ago a good friend telephoned and asked if I would interview his father for a private memoir. ‘We think he might open up more to somebody outside the family,’ he said. Over several weekends I interviewed Colonel John Shipster at his son Michael’s home in Hampshire. John had joined the Indian Army directly from public school at the age of eighteen and was commissioned into the Punjab Regiment. He arrived in Kohima after the siege but while the battle to retake the ridge from the Japanese was still at its height. At the outset I asked him what had been his proudest achievement of the war, a naive question in retrospect. ‘My proudest achievement of the war?’ he asked, a little bewildered. ‘The fact that I survived it!’ Only after he had detailed what had happened in the jungles and mountains could I say that I understood his answer. Towards the end of his life, memories of the war came back to haunt him, and he would frequently be woken by dreams of night fighting in the jungle.

This book is my account of the siege and relief of Kohima and is necessarily subject to one author’s idea of what was compelling and significant. There may be those who disagree with my emphasis on this or that event, or my judgements of different characters, but I hope they will recognise in this work a sense of awe at what men endured on that forgotten Asian battlefield.

* Sato’s estimated strength of around 15,000 men in 31st Division was set against a garrison force of around 2,500. But of this number only 1,500 were fighting troops. (Japanese Monograph 134, p. 164. US Army Dept. of History.)

ONE
An Empire at Bay

Stepping inside from the breathless slump of the afternoon, Captain Thomas Pardoe found the grand lobby of the Strand Hotel a sanctuary of unimagined proportions. Gone, suddenly, the noise of the Burmese street, the call of the shoeshine boys and the rickshaw wallahs, and the air heavy with the smell of damp and river water. Rangoon in those days was a city aspiring to stature, made prosperous as the port through which Burma’s vast rice crop was exported, but still only a minor eminence on the fringes of the eastern empire. Visitors from India found Rangoon lush with gardens that ‘bloomed with tropical profusion – bougainvillea, poinsettas, laburnum and tall delphiniums of piercing blue. The Golden Mohur trees flamed like candles against the green foliage …’ They might stop to admire the great pagodas of Sule and Shwedagon whose golden domes rose above the city, or enjoy a night at an English-language theatre and dinner at the Strand, before moving on to Singapore and Malaya or westward to India. With its high ceilings, roomy corridors and floors of teak, the Strand was built for an age before air conditioning. Its founders, the four Sarkies brothers, were Armenians who had emigrated to the Far East from Persia and established a chain of luxury hotels which included the Strand’s more famous relation, Raffles Hotel in Singapore. The white-jacketed porters at the Strand would have taken Captain Pardoe’s bags without fuss while he signed his name in the guests’ register, a book that had in times past recorded the signatures of Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling and the future king of England, Edward VIII, who had stopped there in 1922 while on a royal tour with his cousin, ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten. On that occasion a sumptuous barge, decorated with the Burmese symbol of royalty, four golden peacocks’ heads, and topped by three model pagodas, was provided for the prince. Oarsmen in long, flowing robes steered the royal barge while the future king relaxed in the pavilion, sheltered from prying eyes by shimmering white curtains which billowed gently as the boat moved across the royal lake near the centre of the city. Later on his journey the prince played polo at Mandalay, the former home of the Burmese kings, and ‘was entertained by dancing girls at a lavish reception’.

The city encountered by Captain Pardoe nearly twenty years later had grown outwards to accommodate the Indian migrant labourers working in the city’s docks and factories. Daily they unloaded tons of supplies destined for the Chinese Nationalist armies fighting the Japanese across the border far to the north. A correspondent for the Manchester Guardian reported on 2 February 1942 that 5,000 lorries carrying 30,000 tons were using the 712 mile route every day.* As Pardoe settled into his airy room at the Strand he must have relished the prospect of some time, no matter how brief, in Rangoon, an altogether different prospect from the central Chinese city of Chungking to which he was normally confined. That overcrowded, filthy city served as the temporary capital of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. As a liaison officer to the Chinese military headquarters, Pardoe was obliged to live there among hundreds of thousands of refugees, soldiers and a vast assortment of carpetbaggers and chancers. The American newspaper correspondent Theodore White described the streets as ‘full of squealing pigs, bawling babies, yelling men and the singsong chant of coolies carrying loads from up the river’. The generalissimo’s court was riven by relentless intrigue, spurred by the insatiable ambition of Chiang’s relatives to enrich themselves and by regional warlords who pleaded and menaced for favour.

Pardoe arrived in Rangoon on 8 February 1941, but was given just a day to refresh himself before embarking on a mission to tour the country’s borders with Thailand and China. It was to be a journey by road, rail, boat and air, to investigate the local defences and to coordinate possible future action with the Chinese. Pardoe met up with a Chinese military delegation a week into his tour at the town of Kyukok on the border of the Chinese province of Yunnan. With an air suggesting a weary familiarity with the ways of his allies, he noted that while the visit was ‘supposed to have been strictly confidential, I am told its formation and proposed tour had already been announced over the TOKYO wireless’. Chiang’s court was riddled with informers.

At this time, February 1941, the Japanese had not yet occupied Thailand, although there were numerous reports of fifth-column activities. Pardoe recorded the activities of suspected spies and Japanese attempts to subvert the local population in Burma.

At Lilem, on the border with Thailand, he reported a rumour that eight hundred Japanese wearing Thai uniforms had been spotted just across the frontier; while a postmaster at Tachilek, who was being paid ten rupees a month to spy for the British, gave news that as many as 5,000 Japanese had arrived in Bangkok. The information seems to have been exaggerated, possibly by a spy anxious to please his paymasters. Further north, Pardoe worried over the role of Italian priests in the Shan states bordering China, whose influence ‘over some of their Asiatic converts is so strong, fifth column activities would be a possibility’. At Maungmagan on the Tenasserim coast he heard suspicions about a Mrs Leal, the Austrian wife of an Irish tin-mine owner. ‘She also owns a mine in the Thai frontier area. She set off to visit this mine in early April, taking with her a portable wireless set. Up till the war she was admittedly strongly pro-Nazi. I saw a copy of her dossier … She is being watched. Mr Ruddy [Burma Auxiliary Force], who has known her a long time, considers she is either extremely clever or else entirely innocent.’ Some official reader of this document in Rangoon has scribbled the words ‘A remarkable statement!’ next to this assessment of the curious Mrs Leal.

Another foreigner to arouse suspicion was a Mr G. R. Powell of the Watchtower Society of Australia. This representative of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was placed under surveillance by the Burma police in a classic case of mistaken priorities. Mr Powell represented a religious faith that customarily excited the suspicion of colonial officials, yet the Jehovah’s Witnesses were among the groups enthusiastically persecuted by Hitler’s Reich and would have offered little threat to the security of Burma.*

The captain made detailed notes on roads and beaches that would make suitable invasion points. But for all the impressive detail on local military dispositions and possible enemy spies, Pardoe’s report did not contain a single line about possible evacuation routes for a retreating army or for tens of thousands of refugees. In those becalmed days before Japan entered the war, he could hardly have foreseen such a necessity. At the end of the report an unnamed intelligence officer wrote, ‘A very good report – may be very useful if fighting breaks out in Burma’. If – the conditional that masked a vast failure of intelligence, planning and, perhaps above all, imagination. The defence of Burma was left to a small garrison consisting of two British battalions and the eight battalions of local troops and military police that comprised the Burma Rifles and the Burma Frontier Force, as well as the part-timers of the Burma Auxiliary Force, all dispersed throughout the country’s three military regions – upper, middle and lower Burma. It was a force useful for colonial missions of chastisement but utterly unfit for defending a country larger than France against invasion by a modern army supported by armour and aircraft.

From Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff in London to the GOC Burma, Major General D. K. McLeod, and the Governor, Sir Reginald Dorman Smith, nobody had allocated the resources needed to defend Burma against an invasion from Thailand. They simply had not visualised Japan occupying Thailand and then sweeping Britain aside. Forget the evidence of Japan’s victory over the Russians four decades before, the abundant intelligence on Tokyo’s new ships, aircraft and artillery, or the defeats inflicted on the Chinese over the past decade. The Japanese were still little yellow men, myopic and bandy-legged, and could never pose a mortal threat to the greatest empire the world had ever seen. As Corporal Fred Millem of the Burma Auxiliary Force, the local equivalent of the Territorial Army, ruefully put it after the disaster: ‘China had exhausted Japan – she could not last more than three months. Japan’s air force was no good, her pilots all had bad eyesight and could not fly by night … Etc, etc, etc, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah!’ When war came, the Japanese 15th Army would deploy four divisions against one and a half divisions of British, Burmese and Indians.

The overall responsibility for the defence of Burma was given to the Commander-in-Chief Far East, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, who spent a year pleading in vain for more resources. Four days before Pearl Harbor, the prime minister described the threat of Japanese action as a ‘remote contingency’. Fighting alone in the years before America joined the war, he had understandably avoided confrontation with the Japanese. At one point the great enemy of appeasement was forced to kowtow in the face of Japanese insistence that he close the Burma Road, along which America shipped its war materiel north from Rangoon to the Chinese Nationalists. Shutting this lifeline would strangle the Chinese war effort and allow Japan to redeploy thousands of troops for use against America in the event of war. The closure of the road in July 1940 amounted, according to the old Burma hand George Orwell, to ‘a semi-surrender to Japan’. From July to October 1940 Churchill closed the road, until American pressure forced him to change his mind. However limited Churchill’s choices, the episode should have illustrated to the British just how much Burma mattered to the Japanese.

It is not known what ultimately happened to the report submitted by Captain Pardoe. It was certainly seen by the intelligence department in Rangoon, but whether it went higher than that we will never know. As for Pardoe, he would not survive the war. He was killed eight months later, fighting the Japanese in Hong Kong.

For Emile Charles Foucar, barrister-at-law, Saturday, 6 December 1941, was one of the most important days in the social calendar. He was not alone in waking with great excitement. That afternoon the finest ponies in Burma would race for the Governor’s Cup at the Rangoon Turf Club. It was an event that would draw virtually the entire European population and, as the only club that allowed non-white members, it would also attract Burmese and Indians of good social standing. Sadly for Foucar, he would be without his wife Mollie. She and the couple’s two children, a boy and a girl, had been shipped to England as a precautionary measure a few weeks before. Official Burma might play down the danger of invasion, but to Foucar the evacuation made good sense in view of the threatening noises coming from Japan. Emile Foucar was, above all, a man of common sense. He had been born in Burma, the son of a businessman who had come out from Britain in the late nineteenth century, a man swept eastward by the imperial dream at the very moment it was approaching its zenith. In the language of the colonial guide-books, the Burma he found was wreathed in the exotic: ‘Should Burma be visited after a tour in India, the traveller cannot fail to be struck with the great difference in the people and the scenery of the two countries. The merry, indolent, brightly-clothed Burmese have no counterpart in Hindustan, and the richness of the soil and exuberance of the vegetation will be at once remarked.’

Emile Foucar’s father and uncle began a timber business, exporting Burmese teak all over the world from their mills in the coastal city of Moulmein. Here Foucar senior did his patriotic duty by joining the Moulmein Volunteer Artillery. Like most of the white community, he sent his son Emile to England to be educated. There the young Foucar left school just in time to fight as an officer in Flanders. After the war he studied law in London but, finding the pickings slim, decided to return home and set up in practice in the country of his birth. Foucar gathered a substantial clientele from across the country’s racial mix. He could find himself representing a monk demanding the right to succeed to a monastery, investigating an insurance fraud by Chinese businessmen, or acting as counsel for a British plantation owner involved in a legal wrangle with the government.

When Emile Foucar arrived at the races on that humid December day he heard the band of 1st battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment (the 1st Glosters), playing and saw green lawns ‘ablaze with flowers and brilliant costumes’. The Governor, Sir Reginald Dorman Smith, made a grand entrance, driven down the course to the members’ enclosure, acknowledging the applause of the crowd with a gracious wave. It was, Foucar remembered, a golden afternoon.

He moved easily among the crowds, European and Asian, nodding to clients as he went. As an observer of his own society Foucar was sharp-witted and fair-minded, pushing at the limitations of his age and background. In a memoir published a decade after the war, he recalled how the Burmese were systematically excluded from British, and therefore influential, social circles, denied control over their country’s resources, and encouraged in subservience and servility. They were barred from European strongholds such as the Pegu Club and the Rangoon Gymkhana Club, where much of the real business of money and politics was conducted. On the trains European passengers like Foucar’s friend Bellows could make a scene if asked to share a carriage with a non-white. Bellows, who had been forty years in Burma, ‘insisted to the stationmaster that his fellow traveller be removed … so the merchant was put elsewhere’. Foucar also had an eye for the hypocrisies of late imperial life. It was well known, he wrote, that Bellows had a Burmese wife.

On the journey back east from England after the First World War, Foucar heard his travelling companions agree that the old days were gone. ‘Things aren’t what they were,’ an anonymous passenger told him. ‘The young Burman considers himself as good as his master.’ But this was still the colonial Burma of George Orwell’s Burmese Days, torpid, self-satisfied, a haven for mediocrities who would have struggled in a more dynamic or egalitarian setting. Although Burmese politicians sat in a legislative assembly and there was a Burmese prime minister, real power remained in the hands of the Governor, who controlled foreign affairs and security.

The C-in-C Far East, Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, offered an acerbic view of the colonial Englishman in Burma, all the more surprising because Brooke-Popham had been a stout defender of the rights of white settlers in Kenya when he was Governor there in the late 1930s. There was, he wrote, ‘a tendency among Englishmen to regard themselves as naturally superior in every way to any coloured race, without taking steps to ensure that this is always a fact … a failure to develop a sympathetic understanding with the Burmese … the majority of non-official Englishmen in Burma were more concerned making money and getting high dividends from their investments than of benefiting the native population.’

At the start of the 1930s an uprising led by the rustic monk and necromancer, Saya San, shook British rule. But it was the Indian minority rather than the British who suffered most. A colonial report noted that the Indians had ‘driven the more apathetic Burman out of the more profitable means of employment’. When violence erupted the Indians were the first to be attacked. A prominent nationalist leader denounced them as ‘birds of passage who have come to this land to exploit by fair means or foul in the fields of labour, industry or commerce’. Despite superior British firepower it took eighteen months to subdue a revolt that shook the British and inspired young nationalists to escalate their agitation against colonial rule. As Emile Foucar noted, ‘The indications were plain to those who would read them; yet when manifested amongst students and the educated classes they were brushed aside as the complaints of disappointed office-seekers envious of the white man. This attitude of self-complacency was comforting to those of us who saw a long continuance of British domination.’

At the same time, Burmese intellectuals were absorbing ideas and theories spreading from Britain. One Rangoon writer observed that ‘in the 1930s, so many of our students read the books which came out to us from Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club in London. The ideas of Marx reached Burma not from Russia but by way of England.’ The generation of urban Burmese that came of age in the 1930s was educated and politically aware, and some of its leading figures were already in contact with the intelligence officers of a new imperial force.

The Japanese dressed their intervention in the clothes of Asian brotherhood. By the late 1930s Japanese spies were busy recruiting agents and attempting to create a pro-Tokyo army which would act as a fifth column on the outbreak of war. Several of the nationalist leaders went to Japan for military training, among them Aung San, the father of future pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. This was the simmering Burma that lay beyond the European clubs and garden parties of Rangoon on the eve of war with Japan, and which thousands of British, Indian and Burmese troops would be asked to give their lives to defend.

The weekend of the Governor’s Cup race meeting in December 1941 was the last great gala of imperial Burma, although few, if any, of those who were there would have sensed the imminence of its demise. The dancers who packed into the ballroom of the Strand Hotel on race night were confident that Britannia still ruled the East and would continue to do so for a long time to come. For Emile Foucar the highlight of the evening was when a ‘stout lady, popular with local audiences … sang a comic song, concluding it by throwing up her skirt to show us the seat of her panties emblazoned with the Union Jack. How we cheered!’ The only irritant was the absence of fresh air, brought about by a practice blackout ordered by the military authorities. Not that most people in that cheery crowd believed a blackout was necessary. As the racegoers made their way home in the muggy early hours, the Japanese seemed a very long way away.

Twenty-four hours later, on 8 December 1941, Emile Foucar woke up to the news of the Japanese attack on the Americans at Pearl Harbor and the landings in Malaya, some five hundred kilometres from Burma. More worrying still, Japanese troops were also moving into Thailand. An agreement had been reached with the Thai government to allow Japanese forces free passage to the Burmese border. There was fierce fighting with some Thai troops, unaware of the agreement, who opposed the Japanese landings in the south. Yet Rangoon was quiet that morning. To Corporal Fred Millem the news came as a relief. Rumours of war had been incessant. ‘The suspense had been snapped and we knew where we stood. To me it was no surprise … when it came we were almost joyful, for it seemed certain suicide for Japan – her last desperate throw … Singapore, utterly and completely impregnable, still stood between the Japs and Burma.’

Emile Foucar immediately joined up to do his bit for the defence of the empire. As a former officer he was given the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel, working on intelligence and propaganda. On 10 December he went into the radio room at headquarters and found an operator anxiously trying to restore a connection. The man had heard something about the ships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, which had been dispatched east the previous autumn to deter the Japanese, but he could gather no details apart from the fact that the voice on the wireless was referring to them in the past tense. It was only the following day that Foucar learned that more than eight hundred men had been killed, and British naval power humbled, when Japanese bombers sank the ships off the coast of Malaya.

By the middle of December a Japanese force had crossed from Thailand and seized the strategically important Victoria Point airfield, vital to the RAF if it was to bring in reinforcements. Two days before Christmas 1941, with Hong Kong about to fall and Singapore threatened, Foucar was entering his office when somebody shouted out to look in the direction of Mingaladon airfield, to the north of the city. He saw bombers approaching, flying in a V-shaped formation – twenty-seven of them, pursued by a few British fighters.

The streets of Rangoon filled with crowds who cheered and clapped when they saw a bomber burst into flames and fall from the sky. But then the explosions began and thick smoke floated up from the centre of the city and the docks area. Shocked silence followed and then the sounds of terror, the screams of the dying and the noise of hundreds of feet stampeding along narrow streets. When the dead were counted there were more than 1,600 bodies, while many more were badly wounded.* The city began to empty.

Seventeen-year-old Donald Mellican was manning a Burma Auxiliary Force anti-aircraft position at Mingaladon airfield when it was attacked. Not a man among his crew knew the feeling of utter vulnerability that comes with being caught in the open by air attack, the sense of being like an insect racing for protection as giant boots come down to crush it, nor did they know the blinding panic of the sudden arrival of shells. A man under shellfire for the first time learns the ruthless capriciousness of shrapnel, how the tiniest sliver of scorching metal can bring death, and will come to dread the extravagant mutilations of flesh caused by close proximity to the shock waves of a blast. Mellican’s only experience of violence up until then had been the canings meted out at his school in Moulmein when boys were caught whistling at the girls playing hockey in the neighbouring academy. When the alarm was sounded at the airfield he assumed it was an exercise. Then, as the silver shapes in the sky came closer, he heard an officer shout to him to take cover. Bombs began to fall. After a few minutes of confusion Mellican climbed on to the anti-aircraft gun to shouts of ‘Traverse right’ and ‘Traverse left’, followed by ‘Fire!’. His fear left him as he blasted at the Japanese.

The drama lasted for an hour and when the Japanese had gone Mellican looked around at a scene of carnage. There were fires and delayed explosions. Wounded men were crying out for help. One Bofors gun had taken a direct hit. Mellican was called out later that night to help remove the dead. ‘The bodies were mangled, heads, limbs sprawled all over, and even the gun was splashed with flesh and brains sticking on metal.’ They were all boys Mellican had known. An officer ordered that nobody was to leave until the mess had been cleaned up.

‘We made makeshift stretchers from bits of wood, e.g. damaged furniture and doors. “Have you got an arm or a leg?” calls were made and eventually we had six figures ready. I recognised only two of them, “F. B.” and “J. K.”’ Both were boys Mellican had known from his schooldays. As he helped carry a stretcher away it became tangled in a hedge. When he looked back he saw that the intestines of the dead boy had caught in the hedge and unravelled. With his hands he freed the spilling guts and placed them gently back under the blanket. That night he slept in a bunkhouse that was quiet with the shock of war.

The crisis was compounded by problems of command at every level. Brooke-Popham, the C-in-C Far East, whose responsibilities included Malaya, Singapore and Burma, succumbed to the pressure of events and was replaced. In late December a new commander, General Sir Archibald Wavell, was sent to establish the short-lived ABDACOM,* a unified allied command based in Java, which was described by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), General Sir Alan Brooke, as a ‘wild and half-baked’ scheme. In the space of a few months, responsibility for operations in Burma shifted first to India, then to ABDACOM, and finally back to India. In Rangoon there was similar confusion. The GOC Burma, Lieutenant General D. K. McLeod, who had spent much of his life as a staff officer, was replaced on 27 December by Lieutenant General T. J. Hutton, who was himself sacked two months later. An Associated Press report from London had welcomed Hutton’s appointment and spoke of how ‘much has been done to strengthen the land forces which Lt. Gen. Hutton now takes over’. It was the propaganda of illusion, as the defenders would soon discover.

The Japanese launched their ground offensive from Thailand on 8 January. They sent two divisions against one and half British and Indian divisions.† But it was the quality of troops and command, not the numbers, that really mattered. When General Hutton failed to stem the advance he was replaced, on 5 March, by General Harold Alexander, a favourite of Churchill’s, who acknowledged that never had he ‘taken the responsibility of sending a general on a more forlorn hope’.

The official verdict on the failure to protect Burma would not emerge for another decade. But the conclusion was damning: ‘The effect that the loss of Rangoon would have on the British war effort was well known to the War Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff and to all commanders in the Far East … Yet, despite the breathing space of six weeks between the outbreak of war and the start of the Japanese drive into southern Burma, no adequate steps were taken to build up the forces required … Burma still remained practically defenceless.’

An Irish engineer, Professor W. H. Prendergast, working for the Indian Railways, was sent to Rangoon to see what help was needed by his counterparts on the Burma Railways, who were struggling to keep their locomotives running. ‘In the streets of this great thriving city nothing was to be seen but the scurrying jeeps, the criminals, the looters and the insane. No one was left except a small band of “Last Ditchers” and garrison troops who had volunteered to remain until the end.’ British troops and police shot looters. ‘Others, both soldiers and civilians, were punished by caning.’ The official history of the Indian Army described how ‘the deserted city and oil refineries and shattered storage tanks along the river presented an awe-inspiring spectacle as huge columns of flame leapt skyward beneath a vast canopy of smoke.’

Prendergast witnessed the last train departing Rangoon steaming slowly away and noted how ‘behind it pathetically followed, the spaniels, the Airedales, the terriers, all the big and little pets with their appealing eyes saying “Surely you cannot abandon US”.’ He travelled from one bombed station to another, helping with repair work. One morning he found the bodies of eighteen people who had died from cholera during the night. The American war correspondent Clare Boothe described the destruction by fire of part of the ancient royal capital of Mandalay in a dispatch for Life magazine. ‘It was to me a smell not unfamiliar. I remember, one hot summer, when I was a child, a dog died under our veranda porch … It was that smell. But a thousand times magnified until it seemed, as we whirled through the streets, all creation stank of rotting flesh … Here and there on the side of the streets lay a charred and blackened form swaddled in bloody rags, all its human lineaments grotesquely foreshortened by that terrible etcher – fire.’

Japanese air raids on the cities drove people into the countryside. Gripped by panic, the large Indian population of Burma, many of them labourers who worked in the mines or in the fields, headed towards the border with India. Some of the wealthier and more influential sought a passage by air or boat, but with limited space, and with priority given to whites, money was no guarantee of a seat. Nor was it always safe to attempt escape by air, as the Japanese enjoyed command of the skies. For the majority who set out on foot the journey meant navigating a mixture of terrain that exhausted even the strongest among them. The route north to safety lay over nine hundred miles of jungle, scrub, swamps and high mountain passes. It meant trying to ford raging rivers and struggling to gain a footing on liquid mud paths over mountains that rose to more than 8,000 feet.

The refugee columns were shadowed by flocks of vultures. The carrion-feeders settled in the trees over temporary camps or waited on the fringes of small groups whose members were too exhausted to move any further. It is the sound, rather than the sight, of vultures feasting that stays in the mind, an obscene cracking and tearing, which rose from countless roadside encampments on the retreat. There were anguished scenes as the elderly, so often the first to fall sick, urged younger family members to go on without them. A British eyewitness recalled seeing children with ‘distended bellies supported on sticks of legs, and all of them moved slowly, dragging along with expressionless faces, eyes on the ground and bodies wasted to the bone’. Of the more than half a million people who fled across the border to India over five months of the retreat, an estimated 80,000 died from a catalogue of diseases – cholera, dysentery, scrub typhus and malaria – and from the effects of malnutrition and exhaustion.* The dead lay all along the routes towards India. A British army officer carrying out a reconnaissance of the route north described a clearing where a band of refugees had expired: ‘I found the bodies of a mother and child locked in each other’s arms. In another hut were the remains of another mother who had died in childbirth, with the child only half born … A soldier had expired wearing his side cap, all his cotton clothing had rotted away, but the woollen cap sat smartly on the grinning skull. Already the ever destroying jungle had overgrown some of the older huts, covering up the skeletons and reducing them to dust or mould.’ The Scotsman, George Rodger, who would become a famous war cameraman, encountered a constant stream of fleeing people and was struck by ‘the incongruity of the items they had chosen to salvage from their homes … One man carried a cross-cut saw over his shoulder, another lugged along a large tom-tom, several had umbrellas, and one carried a bicycle with the back wheel missing …’

Most reports suggest the Japanese did not attack refugees. But they were preyed upon by Burmese dacoits and frequently attacked by villagers resentful of the Indian presence in Burma. As is so often the way when war causes a vacuum in authority, the meanest elements of society emerged to terrorise, pillage and resurrect old hatreds. The Burmans also attacked minorities like the Karen and the Chin, both of which had remained largely loyal to the British.

Troops frequently encountered the bodies of Indian families butchered by the Burmans. A British officer, Captain James Lunt, remembered seeing a beautiful Indian woman ‘striding along like a Rajput princess, her child clasped to her left hip … her pleated dark red skirt swinging like a kilt at every stride. Bangles at her wrists and ankles tinkled as she passed, her kohl-rimmed eyes meeting mine for a brief moment.’ He would see her again. One evening he was driving past a line of refugees and noticed corpses by the roadside. ‘A bright red skirt caught my eye and we stopped the jeep. She lay there, her long black hair streaming out into a pool of fast-congealing blood, her throat cut from ear to ear … the bright red skirt had been pulled up above her waist in a final obscene gesture. The child, a little way apart, lay with its brains spilling on to the tarmac.’

The teenager Donald Mellican, of the Burma Auxilliary Force, was manning a barricade outside Rangoon when he saw the Governor come past with his entourage en route to an airfield in the north of the country. The most senior British official in Burma urged the troops to fight on, but left too quickly to hear the men shout curses after him. Governor Dorman Smith had been given strict orders by Churchill to get out of Burma before he could be captured by the Japanese. Mellican trudged out of Burma in a long procession of soldiers and civilians, keeping despair at bay by reciting times tables and nursery rhymes. At one point he saw an Indian woman and two small children standing by a steep drop on a hairpin bend. ‘Before the next bend I turned to look back and only two children were to be seen.’

Mellican reached India after walking for three weeks. Only later would he find out that his mother and five siblings had died crossing the Hukwang Valley. One of them, Patrick, suffered an infected toe which quickly swarmed with maggots. They soon covered his entire body, ‘which made him go off his head before he died’. His father and his youngest brother, Reggie, struggled on until they met a Gurkha family. By this time the father was too weak to care for the child. Leaving him with the Gurkhas, he trudged on towards India, where he died soon after arriving.

An American missionary doctor retreating with refugees and Chinese troops recorded the primitive conditions in which he had to operate. ‘No sooner had we finished lunch than the Friends brought in another thirty-five patients,’ wrote Dr Gordon Seagrave. ‘One of them had his enlarged spleen shattered by a shell fragment. Insects were so numerous that they kept dropping into the wounds of the abdominal cases … We have been burning up the bloody remnants of clothes we have had to cut off our patients and cleaning up the grounds … My, what a stink!’

The locally recruited forces deserted the British in droves. According to one official estimate, by the end of the retreat only just over 6,000 remained out of a pre-war total of 20,000. Most were probably driven by the understandable desire to get back to their villages to protect their families, unwilling to risk a long exile in alien India or death for a cause they did not believe in. Some were also subject to political pressure from nationalists. Desertions among Indian troops in the Burmese army were prompted less by political considerations than by a desire to join their families who were fleeing the country.

The families of British officers in Burma joined the exodus. In most cases their men had already been called to duty. Mollie Birch set off with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter for India a few weeks after her husband was sent into action. She passed from train to refugee camp and then on again before arriving at the Chittagong Social Golf Club in Bengal on the evening of its annual dinner-dance. ‘They had heard evacuees were expected, had arranged for us to be taken to the club and to be given their dinner. As soon as we appeared the music stopped and everyone looked our way, we must have looked a very sorry sight, talk about chalk and cheese, here we were about thirty, dirty, smelly women and children – they were immaculate.’

Captain James Lunt, a Staff Officer with 2 Burma Brigade, was astonished by the behaviour of some of the British civilians he met along the route. ‘One man, a civilian whom I had known in happier times, sat down on my stretcher weeping copiously as he estimated his chances of obtaining some priority for the air trip to India. Another, a woman whom I had met in Mandalay, beseeched me to take her fur coat with me. She was wearing it at the time. Since I could barely stand, let alone walk, a fur coat was the last thing I wanted to be encumbered with.’

With the fall of Malaya and Singapore in the preceding months, the loss of Burma in May 1942 completed the trampling of imperial prestige. Emboldened by the Japanese successes Burmese nationalists lit large fires close to British positions to help guide Japanese bombers, while small groups of British troops had to be wary of attack from guerrillas. Across the newly taken Japanese possessions the first phase was underway in one of history’s epic movements: in Malaya and Burma, across French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, putative nation states, rival political groups, competing ideologies and numerous ethnic minorities, would emerge to stake their claims to power. Writing as the retreat north was gathering pace and a fortnight before he became deputy Prime Minister the Labour Party leader, Clement Attlee, put the matter succinctly. What was taking place was a continuation of European decline in Asia that had begun with the defeat of Russia by Japan in 1905. ‘The hitherto axiomatic acceptance of the innate superiority of the European over the Asiatic sustained a severe blow. The balance of prestige, always so important in the East, changed. The reverses which we and the Americans are sustaining from the Japanese at the present time will continue this process.’

Many were nervous of Japanese intentions. Sometimes they were the victims of savage Japanese repression. In Burma looters were shot on sight and their bodies publicly displayed as a warning. Drunks were tied up at traffic islands and made to stand for twenty-four hours without food or water. Ramesh S. Benegal, an Indian living in Rangoon, walked to Soortie Bara Bazaar, one of the city’s main shopping areas, and was confronted by a grotesque vision. At each of the four corners of the bazaar a severed head had been mounted on a pole. A note told passers-by that this fate awaited any who transgressed the law. But whether they were nationalists who welcomed the Japanese, or were simply cowed by the new occupiers, all were conscious that the age of the white master had gone.

Some officials certainly sensed the larger historical implications of the catastrophe. ‘We will never be able to hold up our heads again in Burma,’ said F. H. Yarnold, a deputy commissioner in the district of Mergui. For the fighting men retreating towards India there was little time to reflect on the great sweep of history. As the Japanese advanced from the east and south, the soldiers of the British, Indian and Burmese armies fought to escape a gigantic trap.

* Manchester Guardian, 2 February 1942. Up to quarter of a million Chinese worked to build the road between 1937 and 1938, an epic feat of engineering and labour.

* The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ opposition to conscription may have been a factor.

* The final death toll from the first day of Japanese bombing was more than 2,000.

* Wavell took over the American-British-Dutch-Australian Command (ABDACOM) on 30 December 1941. It was disbanded a week after the fall of Singapore.

† This would later increase to four divisions against two British and Indian divisions and eight, inferior, Chinese divisions based in the north.

* Estimates vary between 10,000 and 100,000. The figure of 80,000 is regarded as being the most accurate. See Christopher Bailey and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–45 (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2004), p. 167.

TWO
The Longest Road

They were walking through elephant grass near the Sittang river, some 66 miles from Rangoon and the last great natural barrier before the Burmese capital. Private Bill Norman of 2nd battalion, Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, heard planes approaching and thought it was Hurricanes or Tomahawks, until he heard the sergeant blow his whistle. After that, the air erupted with noise. Machine-gun bullets, the kind that could take a man’s arm off, smashed into the ground beside Private Norman. He ran into a rubber plantation and dived under some trees. Looking up, he saw an Indian soldier, with thin legs resembling ‘worn army leather bootlaces’, standing in the open and aiming his rifle at the Japanese planes. ‘I shouted at him in my very best barrack-room Hindustani to stop firing and take cover. With the greatest of smiles, with his beautiful white teeth, he held out his handspan and in the best of his barrack-room English said, “Twenty-one degrees, Sahib.” Telling him how well he was doing I let him get on with a fine bit of soldiering.’

The Japanese invasion had started three weeks before and, advancing from the east, had pushed the British and Indian forces back to the bridge over the Sittang. The heat, the lack of water, and the relentless movement took a heavy toll. Men began to fall out exhausted, unable to move another yard. Norman saw a sergeant go to one man and kick him as he lay on the ground. ‘Get on your feet and march or we will leave you to die,’ he said. The man did not get up, and was left to his fate. As the British retreated, the Japanese would emerge to attack from the surrounding jungle and then disappear.

In a few short days Private Norman became accustomed to the sight of dead bodies, many of them his comrades. By night the troops shivered in shirts that had been soaked by the day’s perspiration, hiding up in the jungle and hoping that the Japanese would not discover their position. Then, in the depths of the night, the calling would start, high-pitched Japanese voices that made Norman wish he could get even closer to the man beside him. Many soldiers found themselves torn between the fear of discovery by the probing Japanese and the urge to respond by firing off a few rounds. An official narrative of the battle described how the Japanese, ‘using coloured tracer ammunition, uttering war cries … succeeded in creating confusion in the darkness … [which] led to indiscriminate firing by certain units … the uncontrolled fire caused some casualties amongst our own troops’. Some of the troops retreating in the direction of the bridge were machine-gunned in error by the RAF. In the early hours of 23 February Private Norman heard a huge explosion in the distance. The bridge over the Sittang had been blown in order to stall the Japanese advance, but the result was that the bulk of a division, including Norman and his comrades, were trapped on the wrong side of the river. For years afterwards the timing of the demolition would be the source of bitter debate and recrimination. The troops left on the Japanese side, many of them Indian and Burmese, were both scared and furious, convinced their British commanders had abandoned them.

Silence descended over the area after the explosion, followed after a few minutes by the sound of the encircling Japanese chattering and screaming. Some of the stranded men worked frantically to make rafts from timber huts and bamboo, while hundreds threw away their guns, equipment and clothes, and plunged into the water. ‘As we crossed, the river was a mass of bobbing heads. We were attacked from the air, sniped at from the opposite bank.’ Many men drowned in the treacherous currents as they struggled to cross the mile-wide river. Lance Corporal Frost, 2nd battalion, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (2/KOYLI), hurled himself into the water even though he could not swim. It was a measure of the terror the Japanese inspired. Strong swimmers went to the aid of men in difficulty, some even making two or three trips to drag across the wounded. A major and two corporals went to the broken span of the bridge and looped ropes across to create a lifeline which enabled around four hundred troops, mostly Gurkhas, to reach safety.

The Japanese harried the retreating army. Private Yoshizo Abe, a sapper with 33rd Engineer Regiment, was advancing through a town near the river when British armoured vehicles came racing through. ‘The houses in the town were all burning and British armoured cars came bursting through the flames,’ he remembered. ‘We threw grenades and mines into the cars passing through the town. I did not take note of how long it lasted. I was euphoric and did not remember what I had done.’ Six or so British vehicles had stalled in the road, their occupants blown apart and burned as they tried to escape. Outside the town, Abe saw Indian soldiers advancing and firing from the waist. Each time the Japanese tried to advance they were beaten back by a hail of fire. Eventually Japanese firepower drove the Indians back. The Indians could only flee into the jungle and hope to avoid being caught.

Another Japanese private, Shiro Tokita, an infantryman with 33rd Division, remembered looking down on the Sittang bridge after it had been blown. ‘There were many fish floating in the water, killed by the explosion. On the river bank I saw a lot of shoes, and clothing scattered here and there.’ Tokita witnessed the surrender of a small British unit at a pagoda that was being used as a field hospital. The doctor of his battalion had the extraordinary experience of meeting a British doctor with whom he had studied in Germany. They tended the wounded together. At Shwedaung, later in the retreat, a Japanese officer, Major Misao Sato, encountered a dying British soldier lying under a tree. He was young, perhaps eighteen years old, and had been sniping at the Japanese from behind a bush. ‘I asked him in my broken English, “Where are your father and mother?” He said just a word, but clearly, “England”, and as I asked, “Painful?”, he again said a word, “No.” I knew that he must be suffering great pain.’ A stream of tears ran down the dying soldier’s face. Sato held his hand and found himself crying. The soldier died a few minutes later.

Such moments of chivalry were rare. In the 2/KOYLI missing personnel file there are many heart-rending accounts from soldiers who saw their comrades killed at Sittang. In the middle of one close-quarter fight, Lance Corporal W. Smith saw a wounded private pick up a Tommy gun and stand up, shouting at the Japanese to come out in the open and fight. He was shot in the head. Men struggled desperately to help one another under fire. Smith and a comrade tried to rescue a Lance Corporal McDonald who was wounded in the legs: ‘he told us to go and get out of it for he said there was no hope for him getting out of hear [sic] alive. And I told [him] that when we could get to the hospital we would send somebody for him, and then I felt somebody pull on my shirt and it was L/Cpl Rowley, and he said he was [dead], so with not having any spades with [us] we put him in a hole and covered him over with some wood.’

Corporal E. Rylah, despite being fully fit himself, volunteered to stay with a wounded comrade, although this meant trusting his fate to the Japanese. Private W. Hewitt was seen going in the opposite direction to his retreating company, because ‘the sound of the machine guns had temporarily unhinged his mind and he did not know where he was going’. One party of men ‘flatly refused to attempt the crossing and collected Tommy guns and disappeared in the direction of the Japanese lines’.

Private Bill Norman reached the river after the main crossing had taken place, finding only a handful of men still trying to get away. Like the others making the crossing, he abandoned his weapon. With a friend, he grabbed a thick bamboo pole for buoyancy, and the two of them set off across the river. With physical exhaustion setting in and the pole waterlogged, out of nowhere, it seemed, another figure joined the struggling pair, a big man and a strong swimmer who grabbed the pole and pulled them across.

The Cabinet papers for February 1942 described how ‘our troops have fought well and inflicted heavy casualties’, but acknowledged that the ‘Japanese attack has been remarkable for the excellence of its ground to air communications and for the coordination of air with land forces’. The RAF and pilots of the American Volunteer Group challenged the Japanese but were eventually overwhelmed by superior numbers.*

Rangoon was abandoned on 7 March 1942 and occupied by the Japanese the following day. The British managed to evacuate sufficient supplies of food and petrol to maintain their forces on the retreat, saving the army from starvation as it trudged towards India. Units fought through Japanese roadblocks, battered and demoralised by the enemy’s constant outflanking movements and encirclements; men with no aim but escape.

Almost a fortnight after the fall of Rangoon, General Alexander appointed a new commander to lead the forces in the field. Major General William Slim, a former officer of a Gurkha regiment, was serving in the Middle East when he was appointed to take command of the newly constituted Burma Corps on 19 March. He would become arguably the finest British general of the Second World War and a man loved by his multi-racial army. But with Rangoon gone and Japanese forces attempting the encirclement of the British and Indian forces retreating north, it was too late for Alexander or Slim to do much but try to save as many men as possible to fight another day from the two divisions and armoured brigade of Burma Corps.

Watching the rout of an army is always a salutary lesson, but Slim’s gift was to be able to watch and learn. He was a rare kind of soldier: quick-witted and daring; loved by his men because they knew he would not spend their lives cheaply; and possessed of a moral courage that allowed him to acknowledge his own errors. The lessons Slim learned in those terrible months from March to June 1942 would be embedded in his consciousness forever and would be used to weld troops from the British and Indian armies into one of the finest fighting units of the war, 14th Army.

Slim had grown up in a lower-middle-class family in Birmingham, the son of a failed small businessman and a devoutly Catholic mother, whose strong personality seems to have been inherited by her son. After leaving school he went to work as a teacher among some of the poorest and toughest boys in Birmingham, an experience that later gave him an invaluable insight into the minds of the men he would lead into battle. There were other jobs, including a periodic recourse to writing stories for magazines, but a childhood passion for military history found an outlet in the Officer Training Corps at his brother’s university. At the outbreak of the First World War, Slim was commissioned as a second lieutenant and was wounded at Gallipoli. During the early stages of the Second World War he was wounded again, while fighting the Italians in Eritrea. To his men he would always be ‘Uncle Bill’, a man of imposing physical build, with a protruding jaw that emphasised an air of resolution and command.

Slim conducted a skilful fighting retreat, buying time to allow the bulk of his army, and tens of thousands of their Chinese allies, to escape destruction or capture. When the monsoon broke in early May the principal routes of retreat became mires in which men slipped and fell as they trudged towards India. Slim watched troops shiver with fever as they lay on ‘the sodden ground under the dripping trees, without even a blanket to cover them’. In May, Lance Corporal W. Long of 2/KOYLI was retreating north from the town of Kalewa when his group was joined by a private suffering from cholera. The man had been in hospital but had decided to try to escape with his comrades rather than trust his life to the advancing Japanese. The seriously ill soldier lasted for eight miles of marching and then fell out. Lance Corporal Long reported, ‘We carried on marching. Two days later another party who set off marching after us caught us up and told us that they had passed Pte Powell lying dead on the side of the road.’

In one instance rough justice was meted out to a soldier accused of abandoning his post. Sergeant W. Butcher, 2/KOYLI, described how a private in his platoon deserted in the early hours. Private Ramsden was arrested three hours later and brought before the commanding officer, Major Mike Calvert. Calvert would go on to become the most successful of the Chindit commanders and one of the founders of the SAS. In the case of Private Ramsden he showed no mercy and ordered him to be shot.* Sergeant Butcher was given the job of carrying out the execution. ‘I tied him to a tree with his back to me. I placed a pistol between his shoulders and shot him at point-blank range. He was definitely dead before I left him.’ Private Ramsden had fallen in love with and married a Burmese woman.† The statement by his executioner refers to her as a suspected fifth columnist who was later arrested.

Burmese found aiding the Japanese could also be subjected to summary justice. Lieutenant Colonel C. E. K. Bagot of the 1st Glosters described an encounter on 3 May 1942: ‘At 1930 hrs signalling was observed on our right front and a patrol stalked 3 Burmans who were caught in the act. One man carried weapons and Japanese money. He was shot, the remainder were taken back 25 miles under escort of the Burma Frontier Force and dispersed, after they had been made to witness the execution.’

The final stage of the journey brought the troops through the Kabaw Valley. Captain Gerald Fitzpatrick and the survivors of 2/KOYLI encountered a scene of horror there that spurred them onwards. The rotting bodies of numerous refugees lay in the sun being devoured by vultures, while countless flies swarmed around the troops. ‘The impact of witnessing the vulturine disposal of the unfortunates, on our sick and wounded men, was quite miraculous. It was like a Lourdes cure; the pace quickened, backs straightened, men simply dare not fall back and die in this place.’ The jungle was endlessly strange. Ralph Tanner was ill with dysentery and had to briefly drop out of the column near the top of a hill. While he squatted, he saw ‘swallow tail butterflies drinking the salt on someone’s knees when there was a halt near the summit’. Volunteers from the Society of Friends (Quakers) were operating ambulances caring for wounded soldiers and civilians.* Doctor Handley Laycock was attached to the British forces and recalled a strange combination of cheerfulness and horror along the route to the border. ‘During these days we saw many scenes of intense horror. A man dying on this path usually remains until the rapid assaults of ants and other insects have reduced him to a skeleton. In the process he blocks the path and his presence there is exceedingly unpleasant. In some camps we found the dead and dying together, the latter too feeble to crawl away from the former. On the whole the morale of the men we met was high and they usually returned our greeting with a broad grin, and expressed embarrassingly profuse gratitude for anything that we could do to help them …’

As he tramped the last yards into India, Captain Fitzpatrick of 2/KOYLI looked up and saw two figures in uniform standing on a mound of earth just above him. One of them was General Sir Harold Alexander, GOC Burma, and the other was ‘a less flashy officer’, General William ‘Bill’ Slim.

Watching the retreating army, Slim felt a mixture of pride and anger. They looked like scarecrows dragging themselves across the border. But Slim noted that they still carried their weapons and looked like fighting units. ‘They might look like scarecrows but they looked like soldiers too.’ His anger arose from the reception accorded to his men by the military in India, where commanders and staff officers who had sat out the fighting in safety stood at the border hectoring the arriving troops. Sarcastic comments and parade-ground bellowing were directed at men who were on the verge of collapse. Ralph Tanner remembered being asked for his identity card by a corporal before finding his way to a train and eventually to hospital. On the way he used his penknife, sterilised with a match, to lance a wound on the arm of a soldier. ‘This let the pus out and the arm got better during the trip.’

In Slim’s view, his troops were received as if they were in disgrace. He acknowledged that to some extent they were paying the price for the ‘rabble’ of deserters, refugees and non-combatants that had crossed the border ahead of them over the previous weeks, but he could not excuse their treatment. According to official figures, 13,000 men were killed, wounded or missing on the retreat, not counting those who would die later from disease.

As the troops made their way into the main British base at Imphal, they were sent to camp on steep jungle hillsides, where there was no shelter apart from the trees and scant clothing, blankets, water or medicine. The psychological effect was devastating. Men lost the will to carry on. By Slim’s estimate, as many as 8 per cent of those he watched come out of Burma died from illness. Yet when he said goodbye to them he was cheered by the men, an experience he found ‘infinitely moving – and humbling’. Leaving Imphal he did not even have a jeep and it was left to his ‘faithful Cameronian bodyguard’ to coax back into life an abandoned refugee car that would carry them towards a small hill town called Kohima. Here the engine gave out. This town, with its small garrison of local troops and a military hospital and engineering works, was one of the furthest outposts of British power in India, an insignificant and sleepy place which had, in recent months, found itself directly in the path of a mass flow of refugees from Burma. Slim did not stay long. Together with his bodyguard he pushed the car out of Kohima until they reached a steep descent. From there they coasted downhill towards the railhead at Dimapur until a rise in the road stopped them. After that, they hitched a ride in a lorry and then found their way onto a crowded train. Slim would not see Kohima again for more than two years, but when he did it would be in vastly changed circumstances, and the little village he had passed through without fanfare would be associated forever with the fortunes of his army.

Many of the sick from Burma Corps were sent to hospitals in Ranchi in Bihar, where Slim went to visit them and argue for better conditions. He saw officers and men dying in squalor, the wounded lying on verandas and under trees waiting for admission, while overworked medical teams laboured relentlessly with the bare minimum of supplies.

But it was also at Ranchi that Slim began what was probably the most painstaking analysis of defeat undertaken by any British general of the war. In his account of the campaign Slim wrote of the despair that can descend on a defeated general. ‘In a dark hour he will turn in upon himself and question the very foundations of his leadership and his manhood. And then he must stop! For, if he is ever to command in battle again, he must shake off these regrets, and stamp on them, as they claw at his will and his self-confidence. He must beat off these attacks he delivers against himself, and cast out the doubts born of failure. Forget them, and remember only the lessons to be learnt from defeat – they are more than from victory.’ Although there were many more setbacks ahead, Slim was already preparing to take the war to the Japanese.

* The American Volunteer Group, or ‘Flying Tigers’, was a clandestine unit of American pilots operating in support of the Chinese Nationalists. Established in 1941, it became part of the United States Army Air Force in July 1942.

* Calvert wrote in his autobiography of being threatened with court martial because of allegations that he had shot deserters during the retreat. He vigorously denied the claims but asserted that Slim’s intervention had saved him from court martial. ‘I thought back to Wingate’s approval of Slim and silently added mine to it.’ Michael Calvert, Fighting Mad (Pen and Sword, 2004), p. 105. The account of Sergeant Butcher appears to contradict his denial.

† The Commonwealth War Graves Commission register of men killed in action during World War Two lists a Private Benjamin Ramsden, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, as having died on 26/04/1942. He is named on the Rangoon War Memorial alongside soldiers of 2/KOYLI who died in battle.

* The Friends Ambulance Unit on the China – Burma front was staffed by Quakers from America, Britain, New Zealand, Canada and China. The FAU was originally established during the Great War as a form of service for conscientious objectors. About 170 were active on the Burma front. (Source: Anthony Reynolds, ‘Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding.)

THREE
At the Edge of the Raj

In the hottest or wettest of weather the deputy commissioner wore a jacket and tie. Tall and with a face that invited confidence, he seemed like a Victorian housemaster remoulded as a servant of the Raj on its most remote frontier. But those who stayed longer than a few hours in his company found a man whose stiffness was in fact shyness, and when his reticence faded with acquaintance Charles Pawsey was a kind companion. Advice on the Naga Hills was freely offered, once he was sure the visitor would do nothing to disrupt the calm.

By early 1942 the peace of the hills had been disrupted. Charles Pawsey was standing on the Imphal road just outside Kohima when the first refugees from Burma came trudging in. The early arrivals seemed to be in good health and had some money. But in February Pawsey began to report the arrival of destitute groups of soldiers. A camp was established at the Middle School in Kohima to provide shelter. Soon the passage of exhausted, starving people had become ‘out of control’. An English volunteer who helped in the relief effort remembered these destitute thousands ‘hungry, thirsty, exhausted, numbed with shock … One’s taskmaster … is the crying need of hundreds of fellow beings displayed daily in all its nakedness.’ There were separate canteens for Europeans and Indians, with sandwiches for the former and rice for the latter.

The Daily Refugee Report from the Governor of Assam to the Viceroy of India for 14 May 1942 reported large parties of refugees trying to reach the railhead at Dimapur, about forty-six miles north-west of Kohima. They were being joined by Chinese troops fleeing the front. It was in this chaotic phase that the army staff formed their grim impression of the retreat. ‘Binns reports [the Chinese] Army [is] mere rabble who will reduce refugees behind them to pitiful condition … disarm and control Chinese if possible as otherwise will consume all food … including dumps and will become embroiled with hillmen whose loyalty will be seriously shaken if they are looted by our allies.’ Four days later, on 18 May, the Governor was reporting that approximately 3,000 refugees a day were on their way to Dimapur, and that the maharajah of neighbouring Manipur had abandoned his administration and vanished. In the middle of this Charles Pawsey was trying to provide assistance for the multitudes arriving in Kohima, and was becoming angry about the government’s failure to help him. Delhi had never planned for a retreat. Amid the stink of the refugee camps, Pawsey struggled to acquire adequate supplies of rice and to find labourers who could construct shelters or improve the tracks along which supplies would have to come. ‘There was no equipment of any kind,’ he wrote. ‘Supplies were a nightmare. So was lack of transport.’ With the help of civilian volunteers, many from tea-planting families, Pawsey was able to establish a system to feed and then transfer the refugees deeper into India.*

By July the flood of refugees had diminished to a trickle, and once the influx had come to an end Kohima and the Naga Hills settled into a nervous peace. The Japanese 15th Army was sitting on the other side of the Chindwin river, about seventy miles away at the nearest point. But they had halted for now. The Indian official history recorded that, by June 1942, ‘the onset of monsoon, long lines of communication in the rear, the need for reorganising forces for a major venture and opposition [in India] to any external aggression, prevented the Japanese from extending their conquests beyond Burma.’ The physical barriers to an attack were considerable. Between Kohima and the Japanese lay the Chindwin river and a mountain range, whose 8,000 foot peaks and steep jungled valleys were thought to be impassable by large military formations. If there was to be an invasion of India, the British believed it would come further south, via the Imphal plain or through the Burmese province of Arakan into Bengal. For now, Charles Pawsey could concentrate on re-establishing the normal routines of colonial administration.

By the time he became deputy commissioner at Kohima, Charles Pawsey was thirty-five years old and he had already exceeded his own life expectancy by many years. He was one of those rare creatures who had enlisted in 1914 as a teenage officer and survived to see the armistice in 1918. Educated at Berkhamsted, where he was briefly a contemporary of Graham Greene, Pawsey was an enthusiastic cadet and was praised in the school magazine for his ‘doggedness’ on the athletics track. He went on to study classics at Oxford, but when the First World War broke out Pawsey joined the Territorial Army and was commissioned in time to join the 1/8 Worcestershire Regiment in France in April 1915. More than two decades later, at Kohima, in the midst of another terrible battle, Pawsey would remember the experience of clearing the dead from the trenches at Serre on the Somme. The rotting corpses lay everywhere and ‘those trenches remained long in the memories of the officers and men, as their worst experience of the horrors of the field of a great battle’. Pawsey distinguished himself by going out repeatedly into no-man’s-land in daylight to rescue wounded men, until he was caught in a German gas attack and invalided away from the front. He was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery on the Somme, before being transferred to the Italian front in 1917. There he was captured during hand-to-hand fighting on the Asiago plateau, some 4,000 feet up in the mountains above Lake Garda. Captain Pawsey was a prisoner of the Austro-Hungarian empire until the armistice in November. Then he and a few other British prisoners commandeered a train with a wood-burning engine and rode south to freedom.

Discharged from the army in 1919, he might have chosen to return to Oxford to continue his studies. But Charles Pawsey decided instead to go to India, where he had family connections. His uncle Roger had served as a government collector in east Bengal. He successfully sat the exams for the Indian Civil Service and was assigned to work as an assistant commissioner in the province of Assam in the north-east. It was a job that would involve extensive travel in remote districts, with considerable risk from malaria and the potential for encounters with hostile tribes. Yet to a young man who had survived the horrors of the First World War the journey to Assam must have held fantastic promise. With its vast tea estates, trackless jungles and tribes of headhunters, it was unimaginably far from the desolation of post-war Europe.

Pawsey rose steadily through the ranks of the Indian Civil Service, spending much of his time engaged in resolving land disputes, and eventually reaching the rank of deputy commissioner of the Naga Hills, in which role he acted as de facto ruler of more than 40,000 tribespeople in an area that covered 6,400 square miles of some of the most remote territory on the planet. On clear nights Charles Pawsey would stand on his veranda and look out over the valley to see shoals of stars splashed across the Naga Hills. To the east this silvered horizon dropped behind the mountains into Burma, and westwards it stretched towards the plains of Assam and the distant India of cities and crowds. Situated at 4,137 feet, and with no swampland nearby, Kohima was regarded as the healthiest settlement in the area. The air was clear and mountain streams provided a continuous supply of fresh water flowing into a tank in Pawsey’s garden. Although temperatures could soar to 90° Fahrenheit in the middle of July, the weather was cool for most of the year. Like the rest of the region, Kohima was washed by the annual monsoon, when annual rainfall of as much as one hundred inches could bring movement along the local tracks to a halt.

The settlement was spread out along a ridge made up of a series of hills. Charles Pawsey and the local police commander had their bungalows on Summerhouse Hill at the northern end of the ridge. On the adjacent hills stretching southwards were the stores, workshops, clinics, barracks and jail of the colonial administration. Beyond these were the heights of Aradura Spur, which in turn led on to the dark and jungled form of Mount Pulebadze, towering over Kohima at 7,500 feet above sea level. On the other side of the valley, across the road linking Kohima with Dimapur to the north and Imphal to the south, lay the so-called Naga Village, where the huts of the tribespeople had gradually agglomerated to form a settlement of several hundred dwellings.

European visitors to Kohima first noticed the clear mountain air and the profusion of flowers. There was a famed local orchid called Vanda coerulea, its colour a striking blend of turquoise and maroon stippled with tiny squares, as well as rhododendron trees which could grow to over a hundred feet. The young English traveller Ursula Graham Bower first saw Kohima while on a visit to India in the winter of 1937. Entering Mr Pawsey’s domain she was first struck by the tidy appearance of the place, with its red-roofed bungalows and official buildings stretched across the mountain ridges; gazing further afield, she saw on each ridge a ‘shaggy village, its thatched roofs smoke-stained and weathered’. She was only twenty-three when she stood on the ridge and looked out over the valleys, but she felt irrevocably changed by that moment and in her writing we find a young woman faced with something that challenged her capacity for awe: ‘One behind the other the hills stretched away as far as the eye could see, in an ocean of peaks, a wilderness of steep fields and untouched forest, of clefts and gulfs and razorbacks which merged at last into a grey infinity. That landscape drew me as I had never known anything do before, with a power transcending the body, a force not of this world at all.’

Charles Pawsey’s bungalow stood above the road linking Kohima with Imphal. It was built of wood with a red tin roof and a spacious veranda; it was pretty and spacious, surrounded by pale pink cannas and scarlet rhododendrons, but not lavish. When a small road had to be cut to the bungalow, Pawsey, following the service rules, paid for it himself. Above the bungalow, reached via a terraced hill, was a tennis court upon which Pawsey’s occasional visitors could enjoy an hour or two of civilised sport. His life there was comfortable but not luxurious, for he was a man of ascetic temperament, driven by his work and a conviction that the welfare of the Naga people was his life’s mission. That he was a paternalist is beyond doubt – those who knew him remembered how he spoke of the Naga as ‘my children’. But that is not to cast him as a cartoon figure, the dutiful imperialist shepherding the childlike natives. He was driven by a sense of imperial duty but also by a deep, empathetic humanity, a quality that the horror of his experiences in the First World War had only served to deepen. Sachu Angami, a Naga born and brought up in Kohima, remembered seeing Pawsey walk around his bungalow garden every morning. ‘He was always calm and he would smile when he saw us children. But we were too scared to talk to this white man, of course. This was a man who, when he spoke, the words turned into orders that would be carried out.’

Pawsey rode out by mule on his visits to the villages, sometimes accompanied by an escort of police and stopping off for the night in government bungalows or huts, or at the homes of the handful of British residents. Pat Whyte was a young girl living at a coal-mining works in the hills and recalls Pawsey coming to stay with her family. She was about seven or eight years old when she walked in on him while he was reclining in the bath, causing the deputy commissioner considerable embarrassment. ‘I remember him calling to “get this child out of the bathroom”. He wasn’t very happy!’ Pawsey also acted as magistrate for the Naga Hills and would set up his court on the veranda of the Whytes’ bungalow where, surrounded by magnificently adorned warriors – Pat Whyte saw one man wear an entire bird as an earring – the deputy commissioner would consider the complaints of one clan against another. There were arguments over boundaries which could easily end in a blood feud if not handled with tact. Once, when Pawsey was hearing a case of murder after a headhunting expedition, a policeman emptied out an entire sack of heads in front of him as evidence. The deputy commissioner’s reaction is not recorded. It was also the magistrate’s duty – although this was usually carried out by Pat Whyte’s father – to disburse the opium ration to registered dealers. The supply, which smelt ‘sort of sickly sweet’, was meticulously weighed out before being hidden away again under lock and key.

Until the arrival of the railhead at Dimapur, about forty-six miles from Kohima, in the early 1930s, the European residents of the Naga Hills largely depended on the land to feed them. With water drawn from wells and springs, and using local labour, they grew vegetables, and what could not be grown they bought or bartered for: rice, goat meat and fruit. The cooking was European; only on Saturdays did they eat curry, and then it was a bland concoction.

The railway engineer W. H. Prendergast, who arrived in the area around the same time as Charles Pawsey, recalled nights in the government bungalows deep in the forest where a ‘fiendish shriek … made every nerve tingle, as some animal was chased to death’. Prendergast’s work on the railway line near Dimapur was hindered by the effects of earthquakes and by elephants which were in the habit of tearing up the wooden sleepers. For anybody travelling in the forests the tiger was the most dangerous enemy, stalking its prey through the thick foliage, a silent springing killer that could drag a man down from the back of an elephant. One man-eating tigress killed eleven people, including a soldier, before a Kuki tribesman, armed with an ancient muzzle-loading rifle, managed to kill her. By day the hills pulsated with the noise of wildlife. Gibbons and rhesus monkeys screeched in the canopy, while brilliantly coloured birds flashed through the trees – hornbills, the symbol of the Naga people, rare Burmese peafowl, and the bar-backed pheasant.

In the monsoon months Pawsey could find himself severely restricted. The rain swamped the jungle tracks and whole hillsides would come crashing down, a wall of rock and mud blocking the paths, forcing diversions through the jungle with its abundant leeches and the danger of malaria. Pawsey’s friend, the anthropologist Henry Balfour, curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, described a typical day travelling in the Naga Hills during the 1920s: ‘The going was appallingly slippery and it was not easy to keep the horses on their legs on the narrow ledge-like track … Most of the way it is rather “trick-riding” along a ledge track with a nearly sheer fall on one side.’ Conditions had changed little twenty years later when British and Japanese troops operating in the hills would see animals and men plunge to their deaths over these sheer drops.

When the Second World War broke out few in Delhi believed they would find Japanese armies sitting on the Burmese border. Once this situation presented itself, Charles Pawsey understood that it would fall to him to ensure that the Naga people and the other tribes of the Naga Hills did not go over to the Japanese. Given their history with the British they might have been tempted.

The story of rebellion in the Naga Hills is one of the least known of the colonial wars of conquest, but, once the extent of the bloodshed and the repression meted out to the tribespeople is understood, the magnitude of Pawsey’s task not only in maintaining peace but in recruiting the Naga into the formidable network of fighters, spies, scouts and porters who would help save the British at Kohima becomes all the more remarkable.

The British called them ‘barbarous tribes of independent savages’. Caught as they were between the advance of British imperialism and the equally ambitious kings of neighbouring Burma, the tribes of the Naga Hills could be forgiven for employing ‘savagery’ in defence of their independence. British interest in the Hills dated to the first Anglo-Burmese war of 1826 but the first military expedition was not launched until 1839 to punish villages that had raided into Assam. In the fighting that followed the invaders discovered that although ‘armed with only with spears, daos and a very few old muskets, [they] were a foe by no means to be despised’.

Closer in appearance to the people of Tibet and Nepal than to the Indian people of the plains, the Naga people are believed to be descended from tribes of hunter-gatherers who roamed out of the Pacific region and settled across the central Asian plateau. The Nagas encountered by early British explorers were tough warriors, divided into clans and sub-clans, which might share a village but have separate allegiances. They were led by elders who debated important issues around a ceremonial fire. The Naga martial culture, and that of other mountain tribes like the Kuki, centred around the taking of heads. A Naga male could not consider himself a true man until he had taken his first head, and the greater the number of heads taken in battle, the greater the prestige of the warrior. It was believed that in capturing the head a warrior seized the spirit and vitality of his enemy. The rotting heads would decorate the eaves of the Nagas’ bamboo and thatch homes, or would be hung from ceremonial poles in the villages. When it came to warfare, men, women and children were all considered fair game. A British military observer in 1879 cited one witness: ‘A party from one village attacked one of the clans of another large village in pursuance of a blood feud while the men were all away in the fields, and massacred the whole of the women and children … One of the onlookers told me … that he never saw such “fine sport: it was just like killing fowls”.’

Miekonu Angami grew up in the powerful village of Khonoma, which contained no fewer than three stone ‘khels’, or forts. As a child he saw the warriors returning home with the heads of their enemies. ‘They would cut close to the chin and catch the hair and carry the head that way … sometimes they brought the ears only. They put the heads and ears at the gate and everybody would come and touch the head and then could pass into the village. It was like saying a prayer. After that they would make a party and only the men could come to that.’ He could remember, too, a time between the wars when the British killed some warriors and dumped the bodies outside the village, laughing and shouting at the villagers. ‘Before, the British did not control us: there were brave men and great headhunters who were our leaders.’ Despite his feelings about the British, Miekonu would learn to prefer them to the Japanese.

The Nagas were gifted craftsmen and created a rich culture of visual art, exemplified in clothing, carving and body tattoos. A Naga warrior would cut his hair in a pudding-bowl shape and decorate it with the bright feathers of a forest bird and the tusks of a wild boar; he would garland his ears with shells and feathers or with the tresses of one of his victims; while around his neck he would string numerous strands of brightly coloured beads. The shawls they wore varied according to sex, age and marital status. For the warriors they could be red, or a mix of red and yellow stripes against a black background, often adorned with symbols denoting wealth and martial prowess. The warriors’ shields were frequently adorned with the hair of those they had slain in battle.

Until the First Anglo-Burmese war, the Naga Hills were nominally under the control of the Burmese kings of Ava. Under the Treaty of Yandaboo the lands were ceded to the British, who, like the previous rulers, exercised nominal control, certainly for the first fifty years of their administration.* The outsider presence was restricted to groups of missionaries, occasional explorers and anthropologists, and the more intrepid traders from the Assam plains.

By the 1870s, however, a combination of Naga raids into British-administered territory and the expansionist designs of the Raj towards neighbouring Burma made a more comprehensive imperial intervention inevitable. Another factor intervened, too: the discovery of wild tea growing in the jungles of Assam had led to a massive programme of plantation along the frontiers of the Naga territory and the importation of hundreds of thousands of indentured labourers. The presence of unruly tribes who could threaten the future of this lucrative enterprise was not to be tolerated. The Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, Sir Cecil Beadon, a man of notably dubious judgment, was concerned that, ‘exposed as Assam is on every side, if petty outrages are to be followed up by withdrawal of our frontier, we should very speedily find ourselves driven out of the province’.† Contemporary accounts of the fighting that followed are full of references to ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’. It is the language of a particular time, when the unassimilated native, whether on the North-West Frontier or in the jungles of the Naga Hills, was viewed by the imperial warrior with a mixture of fear, bemusement and condescension.

In November 1878 the Raj extended its administrative reach to what was then the native village of Kohima, at the centre of the most troublesome of the Naga districts and lying along a mountain track that led to the plains of Manipur, a princely state whose maharajah gave his allegiance to the British.* The British appointed a political officer, G. H. Damant, to Kohima in 1878, and when he set out for some mutinous Naga villages with only a small escort, the inevitable occurred. Despite being warned by friendly villagers not to continue on his way, Damant rode at the head of the column, straight into an ambush at Khonoma. Thirty-nine men were killed, including Damant, whose headless and handless corpse was found months later by a British patrol. The official inquiry noted, with characteristic understatement, that his preparations ‘had not in all respects been well judged’. A general rebellion followed the killing of Damant and the Naga advanced on the British fort at Kohima where 414 people, including women and children, had sought shelter. The first siege of Kohima began on 16 October 1879. There were just over 130 men under arms inside the stockade, but many of them were raw recruits, and the water situation was perilous. Attackers could easily cut off the spring that flowed into the fort.

Water rations were reduced to a quarter and food began to run low. A contemporary account described what a ‘pitiful sight it was to see the poor little creatures [children] crowding together, holding out their cups’. The siege was eventually lifted when a British officer leading Manipuri state troops rode through the mountains and scattered the Nagas. The retribution was savage. A punishment force of 1,300 troops, all of them Indians under British officers, along with mountain artillery and rocket units, was sent into the Naga territory in November 1879. As they advanced the British burned villages and destroyed the Nagas’ crops and livestock, rendering thousands of people destitute. The less militant villages were fined in rice and made to provide labour for the army. Villages that failed to supply the number of coolies demanded as forced labour were warned with the firing of shells and rockets around the settlement. ‘This had the desired effect and the coolies were speedily produced,’ the commanding officer reported.

In his telegram to the government of India at the end of the campaign the expedition commander, General Nation, was exultant, taking particular pride in the punishment meted out to the Khonoma Nagas, the most troublesome of the clans. ‘Their lands have all been confiscated and themselves broken up as a village community forever … The occupation of the country for so long by such a large body of troops has inflicted serious punishment, as we have drawn largely on their supplies of grain and labour … their fortified village [has been] levelled with the ground, and their magnificent stone-faced, terraced rice land, the work of generations, has been confiscated.’ In this manner was the Pax Britannica brought to the Naga Hills.

In Parliament the following year the Irish Home Rule MP, Frank Hugh O’Donnell, asked, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, whether ‘the Nagas have asked for annexation to the British Dominions’. The British then dispatched a deputy commissioner to Kohima, as well as political officers working under his direction. Together, they acted as a mix of spy, liaison officer, magistrate and mediator, and above all they provided an early warning system to ensure that Delhi was never again surprised by an uprising. Peace of a kind settled on the hills.

In 1918, when Charles Pawsey was fighting on the Italian front, the territory was again convulsed by violence. This time it was not the Nagas but a neighbouring tribe, the Kukis, who rebelled against the British, an uprising partly motivated by fear that men were about to be forcibly recruited to serve in the Labour Corps on the Western Front. The British achieved their declared aim of ‘break[ing] the Kuki spirit’ by blockading their fields. ‘For had they not surrendered … they would have been too late to prepare the ground for the next harvest, and would in consequence have been faced with famine.’ A total of 126 villages were burned. The official report noted that a policy of search and destroy ‘energetically carried out’ and ‘giving them no rest at all … has always subdued rebellious savages and semi-civilised races’.

The last uprising of any significance took place in 1931, before Charles Pawsey became deputy commissioner but at a time when he would have been working in the Naga Hills. A Naga religious visionary rose against the British and proclaimed a sixteen-year-old girl named Gaidiliu to be his priestess. She told her people to destroy their grain because the end of the British time was coming and they would inherit a new world. The priestess also promised the warriors that by sprinkling them with holy water she would protect them from the bullets of the enemy. When they charged a section of Gurkhas at Hangrum village eleven warriors were killed and many more wounded. Gaidiliu was eventually captured and imprisoned for fourteen years.*

Four years later, a statutory commission, which included Labour’s Clement Attlee and the Tory MP Stuart Cadogan, visited the Naga Hills to investigate the opinions of the local tribes. Cadogan referred to the Naga as ‘little headhunters’ who met the British for a palaver. ‘Presumably the District Commissioner had informed the tribal chieftain that my head was of no intrinsic value as he evinced no disposition to transfer it from my shoulders to his headhunter’s basket which was slung over his back and was, I think, the only garment he affected.’ Cadogan listened while the Nagas spoke of their fears about the future. Rumours about the protests led by Mr Gandhi and his Congress Party had reached the Naga Hills. The British politicians were told that the tribespeople feared the arrival of a ‘Black King’ who would replace the Raj. It is a measure of the isolation in which they had been kept that they told the delegation they preferred to have Queen Victoria as their ruler. Cadogan told the House of Commons: ‘they are an extremely moral people and live apparently decent lives, and … if we leave them alone, they will leave us alone.’ Clement Attlee, who as prime minister would eventually have to decide on the future of India and the Nagas, agreed with Cadogan: ‘There was overwhelming evidence that these people must be protected, and that they are far more liable to exploitation.’

Another British visitor was RAF Sergeant Fred Hill who spent a week living among the Naga as part of a survival course. Hill’s memories are not those of an anthropologist or a politician but of a working-class boy from Birmingham entranced by an alien world. From the Nagas he learned how water could be found in bamboo stalks and how to watch what the monkeys ate because ‘whatever they eat you can eat because if it kills the monkeys then it will kill you’. But he also recorded the deaths of Nagas from food poisoning as a result of eating rotting rations abandoned by the British. ‘Civilisation was no good to them, not our type of civilisation.’

Charles Pawsey saw his mission as one of protection. To achieve this he enforced the doctrine of Naga separateness laid down by the Raj. Visitors to the Naga Hills had to have a permit, and these were given out sparingly. Except in isolated cases, the planting of land for commercial purposes was forbidden. The same prohibition applied to private industry, with a handful of exceptions. Within the constraints of the imperial imagination this policy was benign and it ensured relative peace in the region, but its effect was to preserve Naga life in a political vacuum. As one Indian writer has put it, ‘Any observer of the North-East Indian situation may conclude that the tribal people there were purposely kept in isolation from the Indian nationhood.’ The logic of Naga separateness, codified under imperial rule, was to have devastating consequences when the Raj retreated.

Pawsey, like so many other servants of the Raj, could hardly have foreseen what war and the rising tide of nationalism would do to this world within a very short space of time. But the Japanese conquests in 1941–42 had an electrifying effect in India. By the summer of 1942 Gandhi and his supporters in the Congress Party had launched the Quit India campaign, demanding an immediate British withdrawal.* In the tea country of Assam next to the Naga Hills there were anti-British protests. In September 1942 thirteen people were shot dead in demonstrations at police stations. The following month Congress activists derailed a train carrying British troops into Assam, causing several deaths and widespread injuries. A militant was hanged and many others were sentenced to long prison terms. British troops arriving in India that year cound find themselves confronting angry crowds. Captain Gordon Graham of the Cameron Highlanders arrived with the British 2nd Division in June 1942 and recalled asking a Sikh man for directions to the police station: ‘My friend,’ the Sikh told him, ‘you will learn that the police in India are not here to help people. And neither are you.’

But among the Naga population, mistrustful of the Indians from the plains, there was negligible support for the Congress protests. If anything, Naga opinion had been radicalised in support of the British by the behaviour of some Indian troops retreating through the Naga Hills from Burma earlier in 1942. Rape and looting were reported from several areas as gangs of deserters moved towards Assam. To the Nagas, Charles Pawsey and his colonial administration seemed a far safer bet than the unknown quantity of an Indian liberation movement.

Still, the world of genteel drinks parties at Pawsey’s bungalow, of long treks into the interior by visiting anthropologists and botanists, of illiterate tribesmen living by the fiat of British officials, was slipping towards its twilight. Its last hurrah would be glorious and tragic, a drama of war that was both modern and inescapably Victorian, replete with outnumbered garrison, fanatical enemy, heroic last stands, and a cast of characters whose diversity and eccentricity belonged to the age of high empire.

* The Indian Tea Association (ITA) established a ‘Refugee Organisation’ to help deal with the influx of people into Assam. It was an early example of a civilian administered aid effort that would become so common in the later years of the 20th century.

* The Treaty of Yandaboo was signed in February 1826 and brought to an end the First Anglo-Burmese War. The treaty was a humiliation for the Burmese monarchy, which lost control over vast tracts of territory. Fifteen thousand British and Indian troops died in the war and many more on the Burmese side.

† Sir Cecil Beadon (1816–80) was criticised in an official report and in the House of Commons for his administrative failures during the Bengal famine of 1866–67 and ended his career in ignominy. He also told a House of Commons committee on the opium trade that the government was motivated solely by considerations of revenue, and that it would ‘probably not’ be moved by concerns about the ill effects of opium on those who bought it. Frederick Storrs Turner, British Opium Policy and its Results to India and China (Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1876), p. 256.

* This loyalty lasted only until 1891 when palace intrigues deposed the maharajah and installed a regent. On arriving to punish the usurper, the British were greeted by a band playing ‘God Save the Queen’. After a good dinner at the residency the British retired to bed, and were promptly attacked and their forces routed. NA, WO 32/8400, Proceedings of the Court of Inquiry assembled at Manipur on the 30th April 1891 and following days to investigate the circumstances connected with recent events in Manipur.

* Rani Gaidiliu survived the Second World War and was declared an honoured freedom fighter by the government of Jawaharlal Nehru. She went underground again in the 1960s when she led her followers against the dominant Naga political group in a brief civil war.

* The Quit India campaign was launched on 8 August 1942 after the failure of the mission by Sir Stafford Cripps to persuade Congress to support the war in return for a gradual devolution of power and the promise of dominion status. Gandhi called for immediate independence and was immediately arrested along with Nehru and the rest of the senior leadership of Congress, who would spend the next three years of the war in jail. There were an estimated 100,000 arrests and several hundred deaths in the rioting and crackdown that followed. By March 1943 the campaign had been suppressed, although the British had to devote fifty-seven battalions to maintaining internal security. The British official history of the war estimated that the training of a number of army formations and reinforcements was set back by up to two months and ‘there was a general loss of production in all factories turning out arms, clothing and equipment’. S. Woodburn Kirby, The War Against Japan, vol. 2: India’s Most Dangerous Hour (HMSO, 1958), p. 247.

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