Road of Bones (38 page)

Laverty was trying to identify gaps in the core defences around Garrison Hill and Pawsey’s bungalow. On his last visit to Kohima he had been quartered at the Treasury, which now lay outside the northern perimeter and was within easy sniping and mortar range of Pawsey’s bungalow; it was important but had been abandoned by Richards before the siege because he lacked the troops to defend it. Laverty now saw it as a serious threat to the garrison and went to Richards’s headquarters to press for a company to be sent. Richards was away visiting other positions and his second-in-command refused Laverty’s request. The West Kents’ CO did not let the issue drop. He eventually got Richards to send a company of the Shere Regiment out to the Treasury. By now Richards was well aware of the quality of the Shere Regiment and its capacity for bolting, but he had no other troops to turn to. The force of Laverty’s personality may have decided the matter.

The company of the Shere Regiment was duly sent; rifle fire was heard coming from the Treasury, and the company ran back. They left an officer and several men behind, claiming the Treasury was held by the Japanese and their attack was a failure. But at dawn Richards had a message from the missing officer saying that he held the Treasury and needed the rest of the company. The familiar fiasco followed. ‘I sent the company out again. No further communication was received from the Treasury, nor was the company seen again.’ The British officer sent to command the Shere troops, Captain Jimmy Patrick, 7 Gurkha Rifles, wrote his own account of what happened. ‘The troops refused to pass the field of fire of a sniper. Had to double across first before others would follow. All then crossed
safely. Crossed main road in the glare of burning transport and advanced along south side of spur towards Treasury Knoll. Used shadows cast by clouds crossing moon to cross road between us and pine-clad slopes leading up to Treasury lawn … solitary Jap threw firecracker. Discovered whole company had fled hurriedly, leaving me alone on lawn. Went down to foot of slope, and managed to reform two platoons to try again. No firecracker this time but same chicken-heartedness. All ran away. After much effort, gathered together two platoons out of three who started out, and withdrew to Kohima. Reported failure.’

There was one shred of good news. A company of the 4/7 Rajput, who had fought alongside the West Kents in the Arakan, made it through the Japanese lines to reinforce the garrison. They would be the last British and Indian troops to do so for a fortnight. Richards called a conference at his headquarters. Word was sent to ‘Bruno’ Brown of the Assam Regiment, Major Keene of the Assam Rifles, and John Laverty. Laverty did not appear. ‘At the time I thought nothing of it,’ Richards said, ‘there were plenty of reasons why he could have been elsewhere.’ But Richards’s attempt at establishing his leadership was being ignored. When he went to see Laverty at the West Kents’ headquarters, immediately above his own position, Richards found that he seemed to resent his presence. ‘I tried my best to get close to him but he remained aloof and his attitude to officers of the Garrison was quite unjustified. It should have been possible to work closely together and the fact that it was not was no fault of mine. Instead of help I got no cooperation.’ When Richards sought to borrow a charger for the garrison wireless set – his own had broken down – Laverty refused him. It may well have been because Laverty wanted to protect his own communications, but it meant that all radio traffic to the outside had to pass through him. Laverty’s direct line to Warren at 161 Brigade headquarters shut out Richards.

At ten o’clock that night, Laverty called Warren and gave his report. ‘All quiet except for occasional shelling. Main threat from south, but skin not yet punctured. Body threatened by pin-pricks on all sides except right shoulder. Am trying to evacuate wounded and
non-combatants tomorrow. That’s all – off.’ Shells smashed into Detail Hill as night fell. The defenders, battle-tested warriors and terrified amateurs alike, pressed themselves deep into their dugouts. Outside, the Japanese were digging, crawling into position, forming themselves into attacking formations. From now on, there would be no rest, only days and nights of screaming and death.

John Faulkner felt the round snap by him. The sniper had a good line on his position. Rounds had been flying since daylight. Sitting in his trench and hoping the war would pass him by was not an option. He was a novice and the veterans of A company watched his reactions continuously. They had not been touched by the panic of the deserters from some of the garrison units, but all it took was one scared officer and things might be very different. Faulkner went first to the cookhouse and ate breakfast and then headed for the road to try and recover some of the kit, including bedrolls, left during the shelling of the previous day. Many of the West Kents had spent the cold, damp night huddled up in trenches without bedding. As he moved down the hill, Faulkner met Lance Corporal John Harman. Faulkner would have found Harman a difficult person to understand – not that it was personal, it was just that he disliked people who didn’t attempt to fit in. ‘He was typical of his generation,’ his daughter Margery recalled, ‘he was a conformist, very aware of status.’ When they met, Harman was scanning a track which ran along GPT Ridge. ‘Snipers on that track,’ he warned Faulkner. As they spoke, an Indian soldier darted along the track. A shot rang out and dust exploded at the soldier’s heels. He kept running and reached the cover of a wall, where he turned to shout in joy. Survival at Kohima was based on the most slender margins.

Faulkner ran out himself. ‘I heard the “thump” of a bullet as it passed over the track behind me.’ Looking back, he saw Harman ‘strolling unconcernedly down with one hand in his pocket’. Once
more fate had smiled kindly on the soldier from Lundy Island. Faulkner himself endured a terrifying scuttle around the litter of abandoned and burned-out vehicles. The moment he stuck his head out from behind a vehicle a round cracked past. He dodged from truck to jeep to truck, but only found a few 3 inch mortar rounds. ‘Every little helped,’ he said. What stuck in his mind was the strange good luck of Lance Corporal Harman. Faulkner was probably too new in the battalion to have heard the stories about Harman from the Arakan; his daredevil sniping from paddy fields, how he shot a cow to get meat for his men, and the assurance he gave to Donald Easten that he would live to a ripe old age. Harman was living up to an image of himself that he had nurtured, as the immortal outsider who disdained the path of privilege. His fellow soldiers had long ago lost the habit of sneering at his posh accent and manifest eccentricity. Easten regarded him as the best infantryman in D company but was troubled by his strangeness. To stay alive in war a man must respect the instinct for self-preservation. He can never do it entirely of, course; battle is about facing the risk of death or maiming. But every soldier will recognise the sane margins of behaviour; a man with such contempt for snipers has either crossed the line from bravery to recklessness or is seeking a glory in death that has been impossible for him to find in life. Harman was ready for glory.

By the afternoon of 6 April, the road to Dimapur was finally closed to all traffic. Hopes of moving casualties out by that route vanished. Medical arrangements within the perimeter were seriously inadequate. The hospital was under fire from mortars and machine guns; there were several small regimental aid posts but no advanced dressing station for treating serious cases, and no central point where casualties could be brought and assessed – the crucial task of triage, in which men are separated into the doomed and the saveable. Nor was there a senior medical officer present who could direct operations. This left Richards and Laverty to manage large numbers of wounded men in a heavily shelled area at the same time as fighting a battle for the garrison’s survival. They needed a well-protected dressing station with deep interconnected and ventilated bunkers where
surgeons could work in safety and relative cleanliness. That was clearly impossible now. What they got instead was one of the most remarkable men in the history of war medicine.

On the afternoon of 6 April, an officer, ‘slight and wiry of figure’, arrived in Kohima, escorted by a handful of Indian soldiers. Lieutenant Colonel John Young, commanding officer of 75th Indian Field Ambulance, was by this stage an old friend of the West Kents. His surgeons and orderlies had treated the wounded and dying in the Arakan; Young himself had been present at the tunnels when the West Kents were mauled by their own artillery. He was a cosmopolitan figure, a good polo-player who had once studied art in Vienna, and a keen student of military tactics; he spoke fluent Urdu and, most importantly, his presence in a field hospital calmed men. Young had the gift of appearing unafraid, which is not to say that he felt no fear but that he had learned to master it. To a grievously wounded man, listening to shells landing close by, the face of the calm doctor was a last link with hope.

Back in the Arakan his men forded waist-high paddy fields under sniper fire to reach casualties. On the first day of Operation Jericho the previous December, they had dealt with eighty-three casualties in the first ninety minutes of combat. By the end of January, Young’s men had evacuated 258 battle casualties and 299 sick, as well as carrying out a mass inoculation of 12,000 civilians against cholera. More prosaically, several gunners of the 24th Mountain Regiment were treated after consuming mushrooms that had produced unexpected effects. ‘Typical symptoms not unlike those of acute alcoholic intoxication were noted. Complete inability to orientation was general. The mushrooms had been eaten fried for breakfast,’ the war diary recorded. By the time the 75th Indian Field Ambulance reached Kohima there was little in the way of sickness or wounds they had not confronted.

Young’s medical orderlies had been in action at Kohima from the moment the 4th West Kents arrived. When the shelling started, they jumped out of their trucks and began to tend to the wounded. Moments later one of their vehicles took a direct hit. Lieutenant Colonel Young was still at 161 Brigade headquarters when this news
arrived. He felt his place was with his men at Kohima. At 0630 hours on 6 April Young was told by Warren that garrison morale was low and the situation in Kohima ‘extremely serious’. Half an hour later the message was reinforced when shells began to land in Warren’s own camp at Milestone 42, outside Kohima.
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By 0900 hours Young was meeting Warren once more. Laverty’s second-in-command, Major Peter Franklin, made the perilous journey out of Kohima to report that the medical situation was critical. It was enough for Young who set out on foot with his escort, passing through territory crawling with Japanese patrols to reach Kohima at 1430 hours.

Young arrived in Kohima with a vigour that must have impressed Hugh Richards. From the outset he treated Richards with the respect due to a garrison commander. He set to work straight away, inspecting the existing facilities, quickly formulating a plan, which Richards accepted. By 1800 hours the majority of the different aid posts were consolidated into an advanced dressing station (ADS) near Laverty’s and Richards’s bunkers; the medical stores were also brought together in the same area. A handful of posts remained with different companies to offer immediate treatment to smaller wounds or to comfort dying men.

When he arrived, Young found that medical personnel had been pulled away to act as infantry. They were swiftly brought back and given work treating the wounded. In three and a half hours seventy-nine casualties were brought in, given immediate treatment, and had their names recorded. This last was more than an administrative procedure. Recording a man’s name reassures him that he is not going to be forgotten. Lieutenant Bruce Hayllar, wounded in the chaos of Jail Hill, was an early beneficiary of Young’s actions. ‘Young was a very good chap. There was this tiny little trench where we were treated and he was so good there, working non-stop to keep people alive. Also you felt relieved to be lying among men who had also been through it; you didn’t feel so alone.’

Young asked Laverty for a platoon of pioneers to build a dugout that would shelter up to a hundred casualties; he commandeered a hundred non-combatants to build trenches where more casualties could be accommodated. A team of stretcher-bearers was dispatched to bring in rations and ‘medical comforts’, a probable reference to whisky and rum liberated from the abandoned stores under cover of darkness. By the end of the day, Young could confidently declare to Warren over the West Kents’ radio that the ‘medical situation [was] … fairly satisfactory’. It would not remain that way for long.

Major Nagaya’s company was in mourning. Nagaya, who had wept for his dead soldiers and for the shame of not recovering their bodies at Sangshak, was gone. The colour-bearer of the 3rd battalion, Lieutenant Hiroshi Yamagami, was in his trench when the news came through. ‘I was told that he went to observe the fighting and he ran into the British and was killed. He fought them with his sword. I felt so very sad about that.’ Nagaya was struck on the head by fragments from a grenade thrown by hidden defenders. Yamagami heard that it had happened when Nagaya stumbled on a British pillbox near Detail Hill. Lieutenant Shosaku Kameyama was nearby and came running to his stricken leader. ‘When I ran to him, he was dead, lying on a makeshift stretcher, a tent sheet tied between two poles.’ A bundle of white wild chamomile had been laid near the major’s nose as a death offering. Captain Kameyama gave orders to cut off a finger from the corpse, cremate it, and send the ashes to the dead man’s family in Japan. Kameyama was heart-sore. ‘Such a genuine man! I had felt that I could go with this man without a hesitation.’