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 With strict provisos that he was to make a detailed examination of the supply situation, and to keep to the remit of a limited operation to establish a new defensive line, Mutaguchi was told to start planning his offensive.

      The bulk of his forces would be directed against Imphal, where the British 4 Corps was based and where there were several important airfields and vast supplies of fuel and ammunition. If Slim was to mount his offensive against Burma from Assam, Imphal would be the launching pad. The three divisions of 4 Corps were all separated from each other, with the majority of forces deployed close to the frontier. This made them vulnerable to being cut off and encircled. Once a siege was under way the defenders of Imphal would have to rely on the road to the base at Dimapur for food supplies. Cut this road, Mutaguchi believed, and Imphal could be starved into submission.

      In August 1943 Mutaguchi held a war game at his headquarters in Maymyo during which he revealed that he planned to send an entire division to block the road to Dimapur. They would do it by seizing the best defensive position along the route: the lightly defended hill town of Kohima. With Kohima under his control, Mutaguchi would be able to march on to Dimapur and capture the biggest supply base in the region. It would doom the defenders of Imphal and devastate Slim’s plans to invade northern Burma.

      In an official recording only to be released three decades after his death, Renya Mutaguchi described his projected invasion of northeastern India as the first step in turning the tide of war in Japan’s favour: ‘The motivation for starting this campaign is nothing but winning the Great Far Eastern War.’ The Imperial headquarters and the Southern Area Army under Count Terauchi hoped for a battle that would drive the British back from the Indian frontier. Japan would then consolidate a new defensive line and sit out the monsoon. Mutaguchi and his acolytes still hoped, with a chronic absence of appreciation of the global situation, for a favourable turn in the war in Europe that might, in conjunction with a Japanese victory in India, force the British into a separate peace and out of the war with Japan.

      Mutaguchi’s dream of victory was encouraged by the lobbying of Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the Indian National Army, who assured both Mutaguchi and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo that India would rise in rebellion once his men planted their flag on Indian soil. The ‘March on Delhi’ was bragged about on Tokyo radio and spread as a rumour by Japanese agents eager to foment instability in the Indian Army. In Defeat into Victory General Slim speculated that the defeat of British power in India was the ultimate aim of the invasion.

‘Here was the one place where they could stage an offensive that might give them all they hoped,’ he wrote. ‘If it succeeded the destruction of the British forces in Burma would be the least of its results. China completely isolated would be driven into a separate peace; India, ripe as they thought for revolt against the British, would fall, a glittering prize into their hands … it might indeed, as they proclaimed in exhortations to their troops, change the whole course of the world war.’ Certainly Mutaguchi indulged himself in ‘private speculations’ and, according to one author, even day dreamed about riding a white horse into Delhi. But a Japanese army with a line of communication extending across high mountains over a thousand miles to the docks at Rangoon, and with virtually no air and naval cover, could never have hoped to march deep into India, even with the supplies it captured from the British along the way.^* Neither Tojo, Count Terauchi or the Emperor entertained any thoughts of a ‘March on Delhi’ at this point in the war. By late 1943 defence was the paramount concern and Burma was the western anchor of Japan’s ‘Absolute Defence Sphere’. There would of course be spin-offs. Chiang Kai-shek would be isolated once more in China and the British would be humiliated in the eyes of their Indian subjects and American allies. If the resulting chaos kept the British tied down indefinitely in India so much the better.

      On 22 December 1944 Mutaguchi called a conference in Maymyo attended by Lieutenant General Kawabe, who commanded the Burma Area Army, and Major General Ayabe, deputy chief of staff to the commander of Southern Army, Count Terauchi, who controlled operations across South-East Asia. By now the doubters on Mutaguchi’s own staff had been silenced or banished. But he needed the final go-ahead from Tokyo. Fearful that the British would grasp the initiative and attack first, he pleaded his case with Ayabe. The deputy chief of staff agreed to make the argument for imminent action with Count Terauchi.

      A veteran of the great victory over Russia in 1905, the count was well respected in the imperial hierarchy and without his support Mutaguchi might have found himself delayed indefinitely. The Japanese war leadership, focused on the Pacific and the looming threat to the home islands, was, if not reluctant to commit to the Indian offensive, certainly too distracted to give it a high priority. Count Terauchi listened to his vice-chief’s account of the Maymyo war game and agreed to send him on to Tokyo to put Mutaguchi’s case directly to imperial headquarters.

      Ayabe was an experienced political operator. He had served in numerous senior staff positions and was posted abroad as military attaché to Poland in the early 1930s, and later as a liaison officer to the Axis powers in Berlin and Rome. Arriving in Tokyo, he found himself cast as persuader-in-chief for Mutaguchi’s adventure. For three days senior staff, including the chief of operations, questioned him closely about the risks of the offensive. Ayabe felt he had made the case well but knew a final decision could only come from Tojo. The deputy chief of staff was on his way back to the airport when he received news that a colonel had been despatched to see Tojo to seek final approval.

      The colonel in question was Susumu Nishiura, head of the Bureau of Military Affairs, who would later produce the first account of the war from inside the military hierarchy. His account, ‘Records of Showa War History’, laid bare the incompetence and decadence of the system.

      Arriving at Tojo’s home, he was told the prime minister was in his bath. Nishiura spoke to Tojo through a glass partition overlaid with steam. He recorded the following conversation:

      Tojo: What’s the matter?

      Nishiura: Sir, we urgently want a decision on the Imphal operation.

      Tojo: Imphal … yes … How about communications? Have they been properly thought out? Eh? Eh? It’s difficult country towards India you know.

      Nishiura: Yes, sir. The whole plan has been gone into in great detail. Tojo: What about Mutaguchi? Are his plans up to schedule? Eh? Has he got any problems?

      Nishiura: He is anxious to go ahead, sir.

      Tojo: What about air cover? We can’t help him much. Does he realise that?

      Nishiura: I take it he does, sir.

      Tojo: Now what about the result of pushing our defensive line towards India? What problems is that going to make for us? Eh? Are you sure it will make things better rather than worse? What will happen if the Allies land on the Arakan coast? Has anyone thought of that? Eh? Eh?’

      Tojo then climbed out of the bath and towelled himself before subjecting the colonel to a detailed interrogation on the strengths and weaknesses of the plan. Eventually Nishiura was told that the order would be signed. But Tojo warned that 15th Army was not to be ‘too ambitious’. When the order was finally issued a week later, Tojo stressed the defensive nature of the operation. ‘In order to defend Burma the Commander-in-Chief, Southern Army may occupy and secure the vital areas of north-east India in the vicinity of Imphal by defeating the enemy in that area at the opportune time.’ Count Terauchi was warned to keep a tight rein on Mutaguchi. As one Japanese officer put it to Mutaguchi when the latter told him he wanted to die on the Indian frontier, ‘It would no doubt satisfy you to go to Imphal and die there. But Japan might be overthrown in the process.’

      Tojo had delayed in approving the operation because he recognised that it was a significant gamble. Yet he reported optimistically to the Emperor СКАЧАТЬ