The siege of Kohima

On 6 April 1944 the siege of Kohima began. Kohima was a small administrative settlement in the Naga Hills, in the British province of Assam. The Japanese 31st Division under Lieutenant General Kōtoku Satō, which had been marching through the mountains from the Chindwin since mid-March, had closed the road west of the town the day before and cut off its garrison. At the same time Imphal, the capital of Manipur and the main base of the British IV Corps, had been cut off by land for several days. Both battles were part of Operation U-Go, launched on 7 March by Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi’s Fifteenth Army.

War chronologies describe the day in these words: “the Japanese drive on the Imphal plain, supposedly halted, proves strong enough to encircle British forces at Imphal and Kohima”. The general sense is right, but nobody had halted the offensive beforehand. Reports at the end of March of a “Japanese retreat” referred to other sectors of the Burma front, not to the Japanese offensive against India. At Imphal the Japanese attacked without pause, and the encirclement did not happen in a single day: they cut the Imphal–Dimapur road on 28–29 March and surrounded Kohima on 5–6 April.

The road through the Naga Hills

Kohima lay on a ridge at an altitude of about 1,500 metres, halfway between Dimapur and Imphal. Dimapur was a railway station and a large supply base on the edge of the Brahmaputra valley; Imphal was the base and airfields of Lieutenant General Geoffry Scoones’s IV Corps. Between them ran a single winding mountain road, some 210 kilometres long. Whoever held Kohima controlled that road: he could cut Imphal off by land or, pushing on, threaten Dimapur, the Assam railway and the airfields from which aircraft flew over the Himalayas to China.

Mutaguchi’s plan was for the 31st Division to take Kohima and block the road while the 15th and 33rd Divisions captured Imphal. Satō had three infantry regiments – the 58th, 124th and 138th – and, according to Japanese figures, some 15,000–20,000 men. They advanced in three columns across the mountains, along paths hitherto used only by caravans. Mules, horses, oxen and porters carried the artillery and supplies. The division took food for about three weeks: Mutaguchi counted on capturing the rest from British depots.

The left column – the main body of the 58th Regiment under Major General Shigesaburō Miyazaki – lost about a week fighting an Indian parachute brigade at Sangshak. From 1 April the centre and right columns ran into the forward posts of the newly raised 1st Battalion of the Assam Regiment at Jessami and Kharasom, a few dozen kilometres east of Kohima. The posts held out for several days and were then overrun or fought their way back in small groups. On the evening of 3 April Miyazaki’s troops reached the Naga village on the northern edge of Kohima.

A garrison on the ridge

For a long time the British refused to believe that a whole division could cross the Naga Hills. By the end of March, when documents captured at Sangshak showed that the entire 31st Division was heading for Kohima, the Indian 161st Brigade of Brigadier Dennis Warren, part of the 5th Division, had already been brought from the Arakan to Kohima. But the area commander, Major General Ranking, pulled it back to Dimapur, which was considered more important. Lieutenant General William Slim, commander of the Fourteenth Army, later wrote that Dimapur was his greatest worry: its fall would have cut off not only Imphal but also General Joseph Stilwell’s forces in northern Burma and the airfields of the airlift to China.

On 3 April command of the sector passed to the headquarters of Lieutenant General Montagu Stopford’s XXXIII Corps, which had arrived by rail from the interior of India. The next day Stopford sent the 161st Brigade back to Kohima. Before the Japanese cut the road, only Lieutenant Colonel John Laverty’s 4th Battalion, Royal West Kent Regiment, and a company of the 4th/7th Rajputs managed to get into the town. The brigade’s other two battalions and its artillery dug in a few kilometres to the west, near the village of Jotsoma, in the so-called Jotsoma box, and supported the defenders with their fire from there.

The garrison was commanded by Colonel Hugh Richards, formerly an officer with the Chindits, whose founder, Major General Orde Wingate, had been killed in an air crash on 24 March. Besides the Royal West Kents he had men of the Assam Regiment who had withdrawn from Jessami, platoons of the paramilitary Assam Rifles, the Shere Battalion of the Royal Nepalese Army, companies of the Burma Regiment, and convalescents, drivers, storemen and other service troops. According to British studies the garrison numbered about 2,500 men, of whom roughly a thousand were unfit for combat – leaving some 1,500 able to fight. Facing them came first the battalions of the 58th Regiment, followed by further units of the 31st Division.

The defenders’ position was a chain of hills along the road which took their English names from the camps on them: Garrison Hill, Kuki Picquet, FSD (from the Field Supply Depot), DIS (from the Detail Issue Store), Jail Hill (from the prison) and, to the south, GPT Ridge. On the slope of Garrison Hill stood the bungalow of the Deputy Commissioner of the district, Charles Pawsey, with its garden and tennis court. Pawsey, who had administered the Naga Hills for years, stayed in Kohima throughout the siege. The Nagas for the most part remained loyal to the British: they served as scouts and porters, and often refused food to the Japanese columns.

The first days of the siege

The Japanese began probing the defences from the south on the night of 4–5 April. The next day their troops reached the road west of the ridge, between Kohima and Jotsoma, and closed the ring around the defenders. From 6 April, taken as the start of the siege proper, the garrison was under constant fire from mortars and mountain guns – some of them captured at Sangshak and in abandoned British depots. The Japanese infantry attacked mainly at night, pushing the defenders off one hill after another.

On the very first day the Japanese took GPT Ridge, where the main water point was. Some of its defenders could not break through to the rest of the garrison and withdrew towards Dimapur. The canvas water tanks on FSD Hill and by the hospital had not been filled or dug in beforehand. A small spring was found on the northern slope of Garrison Hill, but it could be reached only at night, and water was strictly rationed. Over the following days the Japanese took Jail Hill and then DIS and FSD. The defence shrank around Garrison Hill and the bungalow.

On 8 April Mutaguchi ordered Satō to send a detachment towards Dimapur. Satō reluctantly detached a battalion of the 138th Regiment, but a few hours later Mutaguchi’s superior, the commander of the Burma Area Army, Lieutenant General Masakazu Kawabe, cancelled the move: Dimapur was not an objective of the operation approved by Tokyo. Many historians regard that day as one of the greatest missed opportunities of the whole battle for the Japanese. Dimapur was still weakly defended at the time, and the British 2nd Division was only just detraining.

The tennis court

The heaviest fighting raged around the Deputy Commissioner’s bungalow. The Japanese took it bit by bit, and the tennis court on the terrace above became no man’s land. The two sides’ trenches were a dozen or so metres apart, and for many nights the soldiers hurled grenades at each other across the tennis net. That image – a battle on the tennis court in a colonial official’s garden – later became the symbol of the whole battle.

On the nights of 7–8 and 8–9 April Lance Corporal John Harman of the Royal West Kents single-handedly destroyed two Japanese machine-gun posts near DIS Hill. Returning from the second attack, he was mortally wounded. He was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross – the first of two won in the fighting at Kohima.

Conditions inside the ring were appalling. The dressing stations lay within reach of Japanese fire, and wounded men waiting for treatment were often hit again. There was nowhere to bury the dead. Supplies – ammunition, water, medicines – were dropped by transport aircraft, but the defended area was so small that some of the drops fell on Japanese positions. The 161st Brigade’s battalions at Jotsoma were themselves cut off from Dimapur, but their guns could fire on the slopes around Garrison Hill, often only a few dozen metres in front of the defenders’ lines. According to many accounts it was this fire that repeatedly stopped the Japanese attacks.

Imphal surrounded

At the same time as Kohima, the Japanese were closing the ring around Imphal. At the end of March the 60th Regiment of Lieutenant General Masafumi Yamauchi’s Japanese 15th Division cut the Kohima road a dozen or so kilometres north of the town, while the 51st Regiment descended onto the plain from the north-east. In the south, Lieutenant General Genzō Yanagida’s 33rd Division, which had failed to destroy the Indian 17th Division at Tiddim, followed it towards Bishenpur. In the east, a detachment under Major General Tsunoru Yamamoto with tanks and heavy artillery was attacking along the road from Tamu towards the Shenam Pass, beyond which lay the airfield at Palel. On 4 April his drive along the road collapsed under the fire of British anti-tank guns; from 8 April heavy fighting raged there for the peaks above the pass.

On that same 4 April the 17th and 23rd Indian Divisions, supplied by air drops, reached the Imphal plain from the south. Scoones thus had four divisions inside the ring – the 5th, 17th, 20th and 23rd – and an armoured brigade, by various estimates more than 100,000 men in all, including service troops. That was precisely what Slim wanted: from the outset he had intended to give battle on the plain, where he could use tanks, artillery and air power, while the Japanese had to fight at the end of mountain supply routes several hundred kilometres long. The condition, however, was that Imphal could be held from the air.

Surrounded Imphal was no defenceless fortress. It had two all-weather airfields and several airstrips, and Admiral Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander of South East Asia Command, had already in March taken transport aircraft from the airlift to China on his own responsibility. Douglas C-47s and Curtiss C-46s flew in food, ammunition, fuel and reinforcements, and flew out the wounded and tens of thousands of service troops who, under siege, would only have been extra mouths to feed. British and American aircraft ruled the skies; the Japanese army air force, bled white earlier over the Arakan, carried out only a handful of larger raids during the whole battle.

Mutaguchi had reckoned that Imphal would fall within three weeks and that his men would live on captured stocks. The first weeks of April showed that this calculation did not add up. The depots the Japanese did capture – such as the one at Kanglatongbi on the Kohima road – had been emptied beforehand. Their own supply columns barely made it across the mountains, and the monsoon was approaching.

Place in the war

The siege of Kohima lasted two weeks. On the night of 17–18 April the Japanese took the bungalow and Kuki Picquet, splitting the defence in two; the defenders now held only part of Garrison Hill. On the morning of 18 April the leading units of the 161st Brigade broke through to the garrison, supported by the British 2nd Division, which had fought its way from Dimapur through the Japanese roadblocks. The fighting for the Kohima ridge, however, went on until mid-May, and the road to Imphal was not reopened until 22 June. Throughout that time Imphal was supplied by air – from 18 April under Operation Stamina, in which, according to the British official history, well over ten thousand tons of supplies and about 12,000 men were flown in by July, and tens of thousands of wounded and men not needed for the defence were flown out.

For the Japanese, the entry into Kohima was the high point of Operation U-Go. They got no further: the 31st Division, starving and bled white, was stuck on the ridge, and at Imphal no attack broke through IV Corps’ defences. At the turn of May and June Satō, against Mutaguchi’s orders, began to withdraw his division from Kohima, and in July the whole Fifteenth Army retreated across the mountains in the monsoon. By various estimates the Japanese lost between 50,000 and more than 60,000 men killed, dead of starvation and disease, and wounded in the operation – the greatest defeat the Japanese army had suffered on land up to that time.

For Slim’s Fourteenth Army and for the Indian Army, Kohima and Imphal became what El Alamein had been for the British in Africa: a turning point after which the initiative in the war for Burma passed to the Allies. For the first time British and Indian troops did not fall back before a Japanese offensive but withstood encirclement and destroyed the attacking divisions. At the end of 1944 the Fourteenth Army crossed the Chindwin, and in May 1945 the Allies retook Rangoon.

On the Kohima ridge, on the former tennis court and the slopes of Garrison Hill, there is today a war cemetery with the graves of more than 1,400 Allied soldiers. The memorial to the British 2nd Division bears the inscription known as the Kohima Epitaph: “When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow, we gave our today.”