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

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СКАЧАТЬ describe the men of 4th battalion, a Territorial Army formation made up of men who had joined up before the war, and others who had been transferred from local militia after limited conscription was introduced in April 1939. The formation of which they were a part traced its roots to the eighteenth century, when it was raised as a regiment of foot during the Seven Years War. In time, and with the depredations of war, the battalion would absorb fresh drafts of men from all over Britain, but at the outset it was overwhelmingly Kentish in character, and most of its officers and men amateur soldiers.

      The coastline of their county, with its long sandy beaches, towering cliffs and sheltered coves, had witnessed the landing of the Roman conquerors and now beckoned to Hitler’s armies a few hours’ sail away in France. The officers and men of the 4th West Kents shared an attachment to this landscape, a county still dominated by green fields and hop farms with the conical towers of brewers’ oast houses. According to tradition, men from the west of the county were called Kentish Men, while those from the east were Men of Kent. The division between them followed the contours of the River Medway, which bisects the county on its way to the sea. As the county boundary blurred with that of Greater London, growing numbers of city dwellers gravitated towards the ranks of the Royal West Kents. The regimental history, written in the stolid prose of a different age, describes the qualities of the West Kent soldier: ‘The stubborn alertness of the Londoner is thus merged with the slower solidity of the worker in the Garden of England.’ In more prosaic terms, they might have been described as an intimidating concoction of hardy yokels and urban wide-boys.

      They formed their first bonds in the small drill halls of rural Kent. The shared sense of place provided essential glue in the 4th West Kents until the normal regimental allegiances could be forged through training and combat. As one recruit put it, ‘the Drill Hall proved to be a great social club for the young men of the town, and I remembered how good it felt to have left the Church Choir and Boy Scouts … to become one of the men!’

      Private Ivan Daunt, from Chatham, where the naval dockyards were accelerating production to meet the German threat, was one of the battalion’s notable characters. Conceived when his father was on leave from the First World War, he was one of nine children and was blessed from an early age with a gift for getting into trouble. Constantly playing truant, he eventually left school aged thirteen and became an apprentice carpenter. On the day his apprenticeship finished Daunt was called up. He resented the blow this represented to his earnings: ‘I was getting one shilling sixpence ha’penny an hour as a carpenter which was good money and I was doing quite well. And then I go into the army on one shilling and sixpence per day! And then they took sixpence of that for barrack damages.’ But Daunt surprised himself and took well to the army life, helped by the fact that most of his comrades were of the same age and from the same part of Kent. The private’s mood was further improved on discovering that his wages would go up to two shillings on the outbreak of war.

      The officers were the sons of lawyers, stockbrokers, wealthy farmers and teachers. The men of the ranks came from the same great pool that had filled the ranks of the British army for hundreds of years: factory workers, farm labourers, apprentice tradesmen, but also, now, the sons of an aspirant working class, boys who looked to white-collar jobs or even to go on to university.

      John Winstanley was beginning his studies as a trainee doctor at St Thomas’s Hospital in London when war broke out, ‘and I was happy because I thought I’d much rather be with my army chums than studying for medical school … and I had another two and half years before I could qualify’. He took well to military life. ‘I loved the Territorial Army, and the whole way of life; we were in the outdoors and I loved the marching and the comradeship.’ The First World War had been a brooding presence in the lives of many of the troops. In the town of Tonbridge an editorial in a school magazine in 1917 had included the following wry comment: ‘Lack of literacy may surely be pleaded by the editors this term – the literary half of them have suddenly been called up for military service!’ Fifty-three pupils and seven masters from Tonbridge School were to be killed in France.

      Private Peter Goodwin saw his father descend into the torment of severe shell shock. Goodwin was born in Tonbridge two years after the end of the war, one of three brothers in a working-class family. ‘There was a place outside Tonbridge … where there was a colony of shell shock victims. Once a weekend they would bring a party in to go to the cinema and they would walk … in all sorts of weather. It was terrible to see them, but to some extent it was also accepted as the normal order of things.’ His father ended his days in a psychiatric hospital. The generation of young men who joined 4th battalion at the outbreak of the Second World War did not set out with illusions of glory. This would be important in the trials to come.

      By the time the 4th West Kents made their stand at Kohima in April 1944 they were a battle-hardened outfit that had fought the Germans, Italians and Japanese, suffering exceptional losses. It was the fierce nature of what they had endured during the fall of France and later in North Africa that gave this battalion its formidable character, a self-belief that would carry them to war in Burma convinced that they could live up to their regimental motto of ‘Invicta’: the Unconquered.

      More than half of 4th battalion were either captured or killed during the last weeks of May 1940. In battle Ivan Daunt found a courage and resourcefulness that civilian life would never have demanded of him. Retreating to Dunkirk, he was trapped behind German lines. ‘Our whole bloody battalion had gone … not a word mate, not a word,’ he recalled. Daunt made a hazardous cross-country hike with a few other men to reach Dunkirk. The beaches were packed with waiting troops. Captain John Winstanley spent two to three days on the beach, with Stukas making regular bombing runs. Unless there was a direct hit on your position, he remembered, the sand tended to deflect the explosions upwards, a small mercy in the circumstances.

      The men marched in an orderly line along the beach until they were directed to a point where small boats would take them to a waiting ship. ‘We were like sheep … we had to stand there and hope for the best,’ recalled Ivan Daunt. On board, the decks were crowded with exhausted soldiers and their gear. Daunt eventually found a space where he, and the new silver cutlery service he had ‘liberated’ from an abandoned house, would be comfortable. Sadly for him, a sailor came and told the men to hand over any heavy material in their possession. Every last inch of space was needed and every ounce of excess weight had to go. His rifle and cutlery went over the side. The men on the decks could see the German aircraft screaming down to bomb the waiting ships. A hospital ship and a destroyer received direct hits while the 4th West Kents were waiting to sail.

      Their first taste of war had been of defeat and chaos. Half of their comrades lay dead, dying, or on their way to German prison camps. But the rescue at Dunkirk had salvaged some self-respect. More than 300,000 men had been evacuated and the 4th West Kents shared in the pride of that achievement. Private Wally Jenner knew he would live to fight another day. On a personal level, he was proud he had managed to hold on to his rifle. It made him feel, as he put it, ‘like a proper soldier’.

On 31 May 1942, the 4th West Kents, supplemented with a fresh draft of troops to replace the dead and missing, boarded a train for Liverpool where the SS Laconia was waiting to ship them to the desert battlefields of North Africa. The officers were wedged five and six to a cabin, and more than 3,000 men were crammed on to the lower decks. There was a blackout in force at night to ensure that no enemy aircraft or U-boats could spot the ship’s lights twinkling in the darkness. The floors and walkways were awash with vomit, the air filled with the smell of sick and sweat, and all of it accompanied by the constant thrum of the engines and the groans of sick men. There were submarine alarms that produced a ‘nerve-wracking uncertainty’.^* Because of U-boat activity in the Mediterranean, the Laconia was forced to take the long way round to Egypt, down the West African coast and up the other side. There was a stop at Freetown in Sierra Leone to take on supplies and from there the ship ploughed on to Cape Town, arriving on 1 July. Here there was a four-day stop for some shore leave, bars and girls for the men, lunches in the СКАЧАТЬ