Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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However, though the British faced Japanese troops on every side, the besiegers were in far more precarious condition than the besieged. Through the months of desperate fighting which followed, Slim’s men held almost all the cards. Their numbers were much superior—albeit not locally at Kohima—and supported by tanks and artillery such as the Japanese were unable to deploy. They possessed command of the skies, and sufficient transport planes to achieve a feat unthinkable earlier in the campaign—the air supply of Imphal and Kohima. British and Indian troops were notably better trained and equipped for jungle warfare than in the past. They defeated the Japanese Arakan thrust so quickly that Slim, with the help of American aircraft secured by Mountbatten’s intercession, was able to shift two divisions from that front to reinforce Imphal and Kohima.
Finally, the British were led by their ablest field commander of the war. Bill Slim—no one called him William—was born in Bristol in 1888, younger son of a hardware wholesaler whose business failed. The boy grew up in difficult circumstances. He always wanted to be a soldier, but spent the years before the First World War first as a pupil teacher, then as a clerk in a steel business. He wangled his way into Birmingham University Officers’ Training Corps, and thence to a commission in 1914. He survived the bloodbath of Gallipoli, which killed or wounded more than half his battalion. Slim transferred to the Gurkhas and was serving with them when hit in the lung. In Mesopotamia he was wounded again by shrapnel and won a Military Cross. He finished the war as an Indian Army major.
Broad and burly, with a heavy jaw and much solid common sense, between the wars he advanced steadily in rank, assuaging financial embarrassment by the somewhat unexpected means of writing magazine stories under the pseudonym of Anthony Mills. It was Slim’s misfortune to command Burcorps, the British force in Burma, during the disastrous retreat of 1942. It was generally acknowledged that he bore no personal responsibility for that defeat, but he himself liked to tell a story of his later return to Burma. One night he slipped unnoticed into Fourteenth Army’s operations room, to perceive two staff officers standing before the map, one pointing confidently and proclaiming: ‘Uncle Bill will fight a battle there.’ The other figure demanded why. ‘Because he always fights a battle going in where he took a licking coming out!’
In contrast to almost every other outstanding commander of the war, Slim was a disarmingly normal human being, possessed of notable self-knowledge. He was without pretension, devoted to his wife Aileen, their family and the Indian Army. His calm, robust style of leadership and concern for the interests of his men won the admiration of all who served under him. ‘Slim is a grand man to work for—he has the makings of a really great commander,’ enthused his chief of staff, Brig. John Lethbridge, in a 1944 letter to his wife. A soldier wrote of Slim: ‘His appearance was plain enough: large, heavily built, grim-faced with that hard mouth and bulldog chin; the rakish Gurkha hat was at odds with the slung carbine and untidy trouser bottoms; he might have been a yard foreman who had become managing director, or a prosperous farmer who’d boxed in his youth.’
An Indian artillery officer told a typical ‘Uncle Bill’ story. Suddenly summoned to order a full regimental shoot, the gunner dashed into his command post, knocking aside a big stranger who impeded his passage. Emerging shortly afterwards, he recognised his army commander, and began to stammer an apology for treating him so brusquely. ‘Don’t bother about that, my boy!’ said Slim cheerfully. ‘If everybody worked like you, we’d get to Rangoon a lot sooner!’ The only people who seemed doubtful of Slim’s merits were his superiors. Churchill never warmed to this bluff, understated officer, fighting a campaign with which the prime minister had no sympathy. Throughout Slim’s career as commander of Fourteenth Army there were attempts to ‘unstick’ him, even in his final glory days. His blunt honesty, lack of bombast and unwillingness to play courtier did him few favours in the corridors of power. Only his soldiers never wavered in their devotion.
In a lecture to the officers of 10th Indian Division, which he led earlier in the war, Slim voiced some of his thoughts about command: ‘We make the best plans we can, gentlemen, and train our wills to hold steadfastly to them in the face of adversity, and yet to be flexible enough to change them when events show them to be unsound, or to take advantage of an opportunity that unfolds during the battle itself. But in the end every important battle develops to a point where there is no real control by senior commanders. Each soldier feels himself to be alone…The dominant feeling of the battlefield is loneliness, gentlemen.’
So it was through the bloody spring and early summer of 1944. On the plain at Imphal, and in the soaring Naga Hills where Kohima stood, British, Indian and Japanese troops struggled for mastery. ‘The scenery was superb,’ wrote one of the defenders, ‘the Highlands without heather, the Yorkshire fells without their stone villages, all on a colossal scale which made our trucks look very puny…On such an immense landscape, it felt like defending the Alps with a platoon.’ Ammunition consumption was prodigious. One battalion, 3/10th Gurkhas, expended 3,700 grenades in a single day’s clashes. The Japanese, short of artillery support, likewise used showers of grenades to cover their attacks. Three British brigadiers died at Kohima. The tennis court of the former district officer’s bungalow became the scene of some of the most brutal fighting of the war. Slowly, steadily, superior firepower told. Allied aircraft pounded the overstretched Japanese supply line. As well as losing ground, Mutaguchi’s soldiers began to starve.
To the fury of the Japanese general, on 19 June, after eighty-five days, Kotuku Sato, his subordinate divisional commander at Kohima, abandoned the assault and began to fall back. The monsoon, which struck with exceptional force, reduced the tracks behind the Japanese front to mudbaths. ‘Despair became rife,’ said Iwaichi Fujiwara, a staff intelligence colonel. ‘The food situation was desperate. Officers and men had almost exhausted their strength after continuous and heavy fighting for weeks in the rain, poorly fed…The road dissolved into mud, the rivers flooded, and it was hard to move on foot, never mind in a vehicle…Almost every officer and man was suffering from malaria, while amoebic dysentery and beriberi were commonplace.’
Still the Japanese army commander would not abandon Imphal. When Sato, back from Kohima, reported to Mutaguchi’s headquarters on 12 July, a senior staff officer coldly offered him a short sword covered with a white cloth. Sato, however, felt more disposed to kill his superior than himself. He declared contemptuously: ‘15th Army’s staff possess less tactical understanding than cadets.’ He recognised, as Mutaguchi would not, that the Japanese forces should have acknowledged failure and fallen back before the monsoon broke. Japanese often spoke scornfully of the long and cumbersome British logistic ‘tail’. Now they discovered the cost of themselves having no ‘tail’ at all.
Mutaguchi’s hapless soldiers fought on at Imphal, being driven back yard by yard with crippling losses. Their commander’s behaviour became increasingly eccentric. Having ordered a clearing made beside his headquarters in the jungle, he implanted decorated bamboos at the four points of the compass, and each morning approached these, calling on the eight hundred myriad gods of Japan for aid. His supplications were in vain. On 18 July the general bowed to the inevitable, and ordered a retreat. His ruined army began to fall back towards the Chindwin river, into Burma, Slim’s vanguards pressing on their rear. ‘One battle is much like another to those who fight them,’ observed Captain Raymond Cooper of the Border Regiment, who was wounded at Imphal. This is indeed true. But the consequences of Imphal and Kohima far transcended any British achievement in the Far East since December 1941.
The campaign was a catastrophe for the Japanese. Of 85,000 fighting soldiers committed, 53,000 became casualties, five divisions were destroyed, two more badly mauled. At least 30,000 men died, along with 17,000 mules, bullocks and pack ponies, both sides’ indispensable beasts of burden. The Indian National Army, in British eyes traitors, collapsed when exposed to action, and surrendered wherever Slim’s soldiers would indulge them. Fourteenth Army suffered 17,000 casualties, but its spirits soared. ‘We knew we had won a great victory,’ said Derek Horsford, commanding a Gurkha battalion at the age of twenty-seven. ‘We were chasing Japanese up and down thousand-foot hills, finding everywhere their dead and abandoned weapons and equipment.’ An eyewitness with Fourteenth Army, advancing in the enemy’s wake, wrote:
The air was thick with the