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When you go home Tell them of us and say: For your tomorrow, We gave our today.
The Kohima Memorial, in the hills high above the India–Burma border, bears one of the most moving epitaphs (above) ever inscribed for fighting men. It recalls the linked battles of Imphal and Kohima where, between March and July 1944, British and Commonwealth troops inflicted a decisive defeat on Japanese forces. General Bill Slim, the subject of the first part of our special, was the architect of this hard-fought victory, which marked a critical turning point in the punishing Burma campaign. But what was it like to take part in this epic clash, and what determined the outcome?
The arena of battle
There were good reasons why Imphal and Kohima became the main focus of the struggle between British and Commonwealth forces and imperial Japan in the spring of 1944. The Imphal plain, at the centre of India’s Manipur region, lay some 70 miles to the west of the border with Burma. Here the British had established a major forward base. An area of level ground, 30 miles long and 20 miles wide, surrounded by hills, it was a potential launch pad for an Allied reconquest of Burma.
Imphal has been described as the hub of a wheel from which a number of spokes radiated. The best road, capable of carrying armour and heavy equipment, ran northwards for some 130 miles to the key supply base at Dimapur. Another road, running 164 miles south-west, connected Imphal to the town of Tiddim. Other routes, of poorer quality, stretched out to the north-east, south-west, and south-east. In early 1944, the British were completing the construction of six airstrips at Imphal. The appearance of supply dumps, hospitals, workshops, and other buildings underlined the importance that they attached to the site.
To capture Imphal was the objective of Operation U-Go, the brainchild of Japanese Fifteenth Army commander General Renya Mutaguchi. He had conceived an ambitious plan with several purposes. The seizure of Imphal would forestall an invasion of Burma by British and Commonwealth forces. It would also interrupt the flow of supplies by air over the Himalayas – known to Allied air-force personnel as the ‘Hump’ – from India to anti-Japanese forces fighting in China. More ambitiously, Mutaguchi hoped to open the way to an invasion of India. He hoped that such a decisive demonstration of British powerlessness would spark a rebellion, leading to the collapse of colonial rule in the subcontinent.
Slim became aware of an intended Japanese assault, thanks to intelligence reports indicating a build-up of troops close to the Chindwin River. Against conventional expectations, he decided that he could exploit the threatened incursion to his advantage. He proposed to allow the Fifteenth Army to advance into the heart of Manipur. He would turn Imphal into an impregnable defensive position, against which the Japanese forces would shatter themselves. This entailed withdrawing 4th Corps, which had been tasked with patrolling to the south, to strengthen the defence of the plain. Although the two sides were roughly equal in terms of infantry, the Allies enjoyed an advantage in tanks, artillery, and aircraft.
Slim was convinced that the Japanese would continue to put their faith in relentless frontal assaults from which they would find it almost impossible to withdraw. They had a track record of prioritising the offensive with little regard for logistical considerations. Slim expected that Mutaguchi would exhaust his forces in trying to take Imphal, over-extending his lines of communication and opening himself up to devastating counter-attacks, in which superior Allied hardware would prove decisive.
Slim’s insight into the enemy’s offensive mentality was sound, but he and the commander of 4th Corps, Lieutenant-General Geoffrey Scoones, underestimated the guile of the Japanese leadership. Mutaguchi split his forces, allowing the Allies to think that the main thrust was to come from the south. In fact, the greater part of the Japanese army would approach from the east and north of Imphal.
The jaws of defeat
As a result of this misreading of the enemy’s intentions, the Allies came close to disaster in the opening stages of the battle. Scoones failed to recognise that the Japanese attack had begun on 7 March, a week before the anticipated start of hostilities, with a strike by 33rd Division from the south. A report of some 2,000 Japanese troops crossing the Manipur River with mules and light artillery was not taken seriously. Scoones delayed ordering the withdrawal of 17th Indian Division, based at Tiddim. It was thanks to the initiative of the latter’s commander, Major-General David ‘Punch’ Cowan, that the evacuation began just in time to avoid the division being cut off.
Cowan managed a successful fighting retreat, helped by the dispatch of two of Scoones’ three brigades from Imphal. By 4 April, 17th Indian Division reached Imphal, where it would make an important contribution to its defence. Slim later acknowledged that he had been unwise to delegate such an important decision to a subordinate, who did not possess all the necessary knowledge of the wider situation.
The net began to close on Imphal as, a week later, the Japanese 33rd Division’s infantry moved up the Kabaw Valley and clashed with the 20th Indian Division. Meanwhile, 15th Division cut the main road to the north. The main Japanese force, the 31st Division under Lieutenant-General Sato, targeted the hilltop settlement of Kohima, 80 miles north of Imphal. Its strategic significance came from its location at the summit of a pass that offered the best link between northern India and Burma. Standing 5,000 feet above sea level, and overshadowed by mountains twice that height, its distinguishing feature was a north–south ridge, steep and thickly wooded. If the Japanese could take Kohima, they could cut Imphal off from Dimapur.
The initial Allied reaction to this onslaught was faltering. Isolated at Imphal, Scoones received a mass of conflicting intelligence about Japanese movements which it was difficult to analyse. The 4th Corps commander was arguably by temperament too slow and methodical to respond quickly to unexpected developments. It was clear to Slim that 4th Corps was in urgent need of reinforcements. The only way that this could be done in time was by airlifting 5th Indian Division from Arakan, on the Bay of Bengal, where it had helped to defeat a subsidiary Japanese attack in the Battle of the Admin Box. Following an appeal by Slim, Supreme Allied Commander Lord Mountbatten diverted 25 transport aircraft from flying supplies to China over the ‘Hump’. He had no authority to transfer the planes from American command, but his political overlords approved the decision in hindsight, accepting that it was unavoidable in the circumstances.
Still more remarkably, Mountbatten secured the means of keeping the Imphal garrison supplied. Air support was indispensable in sustaining the beleaguered troops. Curtiss C-46 Commandos and Douglas C-47 Skytrains delivered a total of 12,500 reinforcements and almost 19,000 tons of supplies between mid-April and the end of June; 13,000 sick and wounded soldiers were airlifted to safety.
On the ground, the fighting had a gruesome quality, reminiscent of Stalingrad or the Somme in the First World War. Soldiers faced each other from positions just yards apart. Both sides used mortars to fire high-explosive, smoke, and flare projectiles. The bipod-mounted Bren gun and its Japanese equivalent, the Type 99 light machine-gun, were indispensable in this environment. At even closer quarters, Japanese bayonets were matched by Gurkha kukris. The slopes of Imphal were devastated by shell-fire, with shattered tree stumps and the putrefying bodies of the dead lying unburied under a scorching sun. When the monsoon broke, conditions became even worse, as trenches collapsed under the continuous rain and troops floundered in ankle-deep mud.
Battle for the ridge
Simultaneously, Kohima came under attack. For six days in late March, the 50th Indian Parachute Brigade held out against superior numbers at Sangshak, to the south-east. At a cost of heavy casualties, they delayed the Japanese arrival at Kohima, buying valuable time. Nevertheless, the Allied position was still extremely precarious. Until a relatively late stage, Slim had assumed that Dimapur, rather than Kohima, would be the primary target for the enemy. He even endorsed an order given by General Montagu Stopford to send 161st Indian Brigade to Dimapur.
As a result, the Kohima ridge was more thinly defended than it might have been when the Japanese assault began on 4 April. A garrison of just 2,500 men – 1,000 of whom were non-combatants – faced a 6,000-strong enemy force from behind improvised defences. Under the weight of repeated Japanese assaults, the perimeter shrank to a triangular area, 700 yards by 900 yards by 1,100 yards. Shortage of water was a perpetual problem. Some relief was provided when the defenders discovered a spring- fed pipe, but its exposure to enemy fire meant that water could only be drawn under cover of darkness.
The antagonist: Renya Mutaguchi
Lieutenant-General Renya Mutaguchi (1888-1966) took part in the invasion of China and Malaya before being appointed to lead Japan’s Fifteenth Army in March 1943. The invasion of north-east India that led to the Battle of Imphal was his project. He possessed Slim’s willingness to take risks, but without his opponent’s scrupulous attention to logistics, and was uninter-ested in the welfare of his troops. Over-confident and obsessed with his quest for personal glory, Mutaguchi was intensely disliked by his subordinates. He was relieved of his command in August 1944 after leading his army into its most comprehensive defeat. At the end of the war, Mutaguchi was imprisoned for war crimes until March 1948, spending the rest of his life after his release in obscurity.
Garrison Hill, where the most intense fighting took place, was a scene of horror, with men on the verge of exhaustion engaging each other in close-quarters combat. At one point, the two sides were dug in on opposite sides of a tennis court, close to the British deputy commissioner’s bungalow, lobbing grenades at each other. By 20 April, 161st Brigade had fought its way back to relieve the beleaguered garrison. One of its officers, Brigadier David Wilson, reported that the area was ‘indescribable for its filth and horror and smell’, with wrecked buildings and decaying corpses strewn everywhere. The surviving soldiers, he recalled, ‘looked like aged, blood-stained scarecrows, dropping with fatigue’.
In spite of the early mistakes made, Slim’s overall strategy was starting to bring results. 4th Corps had survived, inflicting losses on the enemy that they could not hope to replace. Allied morale held firm, buoyed by visits from Fourteenth Army’s inspirational commander. Slim’s refusal to be daunted by the force of the Japanese onslaught inspired confidence among the hard-pressed troops. Even when events were running in favour of the enemy, he managed to mask his own inner tension.
Even so, the battle was far from over. The Japanese still blocked the road between Kohima and Imphal. They had honeycombed the surrounding area with dugouts and tunnels, which were virtually impossible to clear. Hurricane fighter-bombers and US-built Vultee Vengeance fighters strafed the Japanese positions, while on the ground the British brought up numbers of 25-pounder field guns and 3.7-inch mountain howitzers.
The turning point came when British engineers bulldozed a track up the steep terraces. To the amazement of the Japanese, they winched an M3 Lee tank up, which crashed down on the enemy positions on the tennis court. This ageing vehicle, considered virtually obsolete by this stage in the war, did immense damage with its hull-mounted 75mm gun, 37mm turret armament, and pair of 7.62mm machine-guns. In its wake came troops who finally took possession of the ridge. By then, the tennis court and the deputy commissioner’s bungalow had been totally obliterated.
Supply was the key factor in the final defeat of the Japanese forces. At the start of the campaign, an excessively optimistic Mutaguchi had ordered his troops to carry rations for just 20 days. He had expected that they would be able to replenish their stocks from captured Allied provisions. An attempt to drive herds of cattle to provide meat – the so-called ‘Genghis Khan’ method of supplying an army – failed, as most of the animals died in transit. Foraging for food in nearby villages proved no substitute for a functioning supply chain.
Meanwhile, aerial resupply sustained the Kohima garrison. It was a challenging business for the Allied pilots. It was hard to drop supplies accurately to a force that had been pressed into such a narrow area of ground. Unavoidably, some air-dropped food and equipment fell into enemy hands – though not enough to affect the final outcome.
Slim vindicated
Slim’s concentration on bleeding the exhausted Japanese Fifteenth Army to death was vindicated by the course of events. By the beginning of June, there was an open split in the Japanese command, as Lieutenant-General Sato defied Mutaguchi by ordering the withdrawal of 31st Division from Kohima. In fury, the Japanese commander sacked Sato and other subordinates whom he accused of defeatism. The decisive point came on 22 June, when the British 2nd Division, moving south, linked up with the 5th Indian Infantry Division as it advanced northwards. The road between Imphal and Kohima was now reopened.
Mutaguchi finally bowed to the inevitable on 8 July, ordering a retreat across the Chindwin. Even then, he issued one final, absurdly unrealistic command to his broken troops: ‘if your hands are broken, fight with your feet… if there is no breath in your body, fight with your ghost.’ The starving Japanese were pursued relentlessly by Allied forces, who came upon innumerable rotting corpses and abandoned weapons and equipment along the jungle tracks. Eye-witnesses recalled enemy soldiers, ravaged by hunger and disease, who had thrown away everything except canes to help them stagger along. The onset of the monsoon added to the misery.
It was a monumental disaster for the once invincible invaders. Fifteenth Army had taken 53,000 casualties since March, compared with 16,000 on the Allied side. The Japanese had lost practically all their heavy equipment, too. Their senior command was left deeply divided. They were in a much weaker position to resist Slim when he embarked on his ultimate objective later that year: the invasion of Burma.
Imphal and Kohima had been a uniquely gruelling ordeal. More demanding than a single set-piece battle, this had been a series of confused, savage encounters, fought in the grimmest of conditions. Together they tested the endurance of soldiers on both sides to the limit. The Japanese infantry possessed inferior equipment and suffered under poor leadership. Yet they fought with self-sacrificing determination. Their British and Commonwealth counterparts enjoyed much better logistical support. Their experience of battle was, however, among the worst that any soldiers of the entire war had to face. If they were not labouring through dense jungle, they were under siege in squalid, water-filled foxholes, contending with disease and resisting remorseless attacks by a fanatical enemy. They earned in full measure the tribute etched on the Kohima memorial.
Find Out More: Good overviews include Louis Allen, Burma: the longest war 1941-45 (Phoenix Press, 2000) and Jon Latimer, Burma: the forgotten war (John Murray, 2004). The Kohima Educational Trust film Imphal and Kohima: Britain’s greatest battle, a documentary hosted by James Holland and Robert Lyman, is available on YouTube. See also: https://kohimaeducationaltrust.org.
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