Road of Bones (48 page)

The Dakotas from Troop Carrier Command were now making daily supply and ammunition runs to the beleaguered garrison. Their pilots included many who had spent their pre-war lives shuttling around Asia and Africa in the service of colonial airlines, or
working for oil and mining companies. In the case of Squadron Leader Alec ‘Fatty’ Pearson of 194 Squadron, his RAF service followed a period flying in Kenya, where he had been the pilot on Ernest Hemingway’s trip to Kilimanjaro in 1937. Hemingway subsequently used Pearson as the pilot character in his short story ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’. Joining the RAF did not cramp Alec ‘Fatty’ Pearson’s love of the wild colonial lifestyle. Pilot Derek Thirlwell remembered Pearson pushing the plane up to above 10,000 feet to avoid turbulence, a technique perfected in the rainy seasons of East Africa. ‘We carried packed lunches but first Fatty produced a bottle of sherry!! … and to my surprise it uncorked like a bottle of champagne.’ On another occasion Thirlwell was sitting beside a pilot who produced a pipe and started filling it with tobacco. He then lit it and opened the pilot’s window until the slipstream had the pipe glowing brightly.

‘Fatty’s’ parties after supply drops were legendary among the aircrew. On one especially cold night he challenged each member of the returning aircrew to down three araks each, one after the other. The spirit had the taste and effect of paint-stripper. One pilot waited until ‘Fatty’ was looking the other way and emptied his arak into the fire. There was an explosion and coals were blown out on to the carpet. ‘Fatty’s’ response was: ‘That was bloody silly Robbie, such a waste!’ He then handed him another arak and drawled, ‘would somebody please put the carpet out before the mess burns down’.

The refuge sought in alcohol was understandable. The Americans reported cases of men breaking under the strain, or calming their nerves by resorting to opium, freely available at the Chinese end of the route. In a few instances, the authorities shut down officers’ clubs because pilots were too hungover to report for early starts. They flew in conditions that tested nerves and skill to the utmost. Monsoon cloud formations that concealed terrifying pockets of turbulence, high winds and rain generated by powerful storms, thick mist that obscured drop zones and airfields, could all bring disaster.

One pilot with 194 Squadron recalled how he was leaving Burmese territory on a night with low visibility when he suddenly lost control of his aircraft. He found himself in a spiral dive, his
stomach pushed back against his spine, the unseen earth rushing towards him. Fighting with the throttles he levelled the plane off and pushed forward into full climbing power, only just clearing the mountains. Eric Forsdyke, who flew with 117 Squadron RAF, recalled how the monsoon thunder clouds could rise up to nearly 60,000 feet from the mountain tops. If the pilots could not find a way through the cumulo-nimbus clouds they would reduce speed and put on sunglasses to protect their eyes from the flashes of lightning. Anybody who has travelled through severe turbulence in the comfort of a pressurised modern aircraft must struggle to comprehend the nightmare of battering through the monsoon in the shell of a Dakota. The squadron lost 20 men in the skies over Burma. Among them was Sergeant Forsdyke’s good friend from Yorkshire, Freddie Crowther, whose aircraft was downed by turbulence. ‘Almost every night in the mess he played his favourite record on the old wind-up gramophone … That night after he and his crew failed to return we played his record in memory of him.’

The Americans who had been pulled by Mountbatten from the ‘Hump’ route across the Himalayas in order to help the defenders of Kohima and Imphal had flown in conditions that no peacetime pilot would have thought of attempting. A poem by an American flight lieutenant captured the daunting nature of the work:

In the best of weather the hazards

’Twould take a year to tell,

But on instruments up in the ‘Soup’ and ice

The going is really hell!

Rocky and evil and awful,

So you’re scared if you have to jump:

Crossing the ocean is easy

Alongside of flying the ‘Hump’!

Thunderstorms could stretch for hundreds of miles. One pilot recalled: ‘Knowing that the leading edge of a storm will drive you down, it is necessary to go in as high as possible to prevent being
smashed into the top of a hill. However, holding absolutely to a set compass heading, this downward force suddenly ends and is replaced by such a strong upward flow that with the plane pointed down and with the engines pulling full power, we gained as much as five thousand feet in a few minutes. It took both of us using all our strength to work the controls to keep the plane from rolling over. One of the other crews did just that, plus had all their front glass broken by large hail stones, but they survived.’

As the monsoon approached there were growing risks. Flying through cloud, rain and lightning, the pilots clung to map references, scanning gaps between clouds for any sign of smoke in the shape of a letter ‘L’, the agreed signal for the drop zone. On one trip north of Kohima, Deryck Groocock was looking for a gap in the clouds at 8,500 feet. He was just 1,500 feet above the mountains. Groocock told his crew to prepare to drop the supplies, when he suddenly noticed the air speed dropping off. He was unable to hold the plane’s nose down. It reared up and the aircraft flipped into a right-hand spin. They were suddenly plummeting at a rate of 2,000 feet per minute. Groocock’s swift arithmetic told him he had forty-five seconds before the plane hit the invisible mountains. ‘I took the normal spin recovery action – full opposite rudder, stick forward and thought, “This is the end.” I saw the altimeter go down to 6,000 ft., 5,500 ft., and 5,000 ft. and still we had not hit. The next second we came out below the cloud at 4,500 ft. under control and in a valley with great peaks vanishing into clouds on either side of us. Trembling like a leaf, I flew down the valley.’ Groocock discovered that moving the rice towards the door for dropping had pushed the centre of gravity beyond safe limits.

The pilots had rescued Slim in the first instance by flying in troops to defend Kohima and Imphal, now they were dropping supplies to keep that army fed and armed. Between January and April 1944, Troop Carrier Command delivered more than 69,000 tons of supplies, while General Sato at Kohima waited forlornly for mule trains of food and ammunition. This was the strategic advantage central to Slim’s plan for victory.

Pilots engaged in bombing attacks against the Japanese were largely safe from enemy planes. The RAF enjoyed air superiority by this stage of the war. The greatest fear was what would happen if mechanical failure or bad weather forced them to bail out or ditch in the jungle. The pilots returned after each run to airstrips that were, by comparison with the conditions for the infantry, models of comfort. None had experience of living rough in the forest. The jungle below was distant and alien, a world seen through the prism of a Perspex shield.

As the fight for Kohima escalated, Ken Moses, a crewman with ‘Fatty’ Pearson’s 194 Squadron, saw the landscape alter. The thick vegetation on Garrison Hill was gone; on the stumps of trees hung silk and jute parachutes, trenches were braided across the hills. A season of withering had swept the hills. ‘I remember looking down on the devastation at Kohima while on one of these drops – it reminded me of the WWI scenes of Belgium.’ A flight sergeant on another plane remembered flying in low: ‘often we would end up about 250 feet over the hills, with the Japs shooting at us. All I could see was a mass of faces looking up at us. I could not see the type of weapons, only the flame from the guns.’

Across the Imphal and Kohima front, fighters and fighter-bombers from the USAAF and RAF were completing the destruction of the Japanese air force. The fledgling Indian Air Force also brought a squadron to the battle.
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One squadron of American P-38s (the same type of aircraft that had killed Admiral Yamamoto of Pearl Harbor fame in 1943) claimed to have destroyed ninety-six Japanese aircraft in its first six weeks of operations. Japanese airstrips in northern Burma were now within easy striking range of the fighter-bombers. The commander of Third Tactical Air Force, Air Marshal Sir John Baldwin, wrote of how ‘the Japanese Air Command had been forced into the humiliating position of laying on from Air Units based on comparatively secure RANGOON strips, such ineffective and fleeting support as their army – 600 miles away in the Northern
mountains – received’. The intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel Iwaichi Fujiwara thought that air superiority ‘gave the enemy an overwhelming advantage … [and] had an important psychological effect on the troops’. The almost complete absence of Japanese aircraft above the Naga Hills compounded the men’s growing sense of being alone in a hostile wilderness.

The Japanese still believed the ridge could be taken and that supplies could be seized from the Kohima stores. Men were also being told by their NCOs that 15th Army would make good on its promise to send fresh food and stocks of shells for the mountain artillery and mortars. Even if the men had been tempted to desert, there was nowhere they could have fled. They were told the Nagas were head-hunters and even cannibals. If they did manage by some extraordinary good fortune to make it back to the Chindwin, there was the prospect of the
Kempeitai
removing their heads. Lieutenant Chuzaburo Tomaru, a man who loathed being at war, was ‘fighting on because were told to. If you tried to leave you would have been heavily punished at the time. There was no such thought among us.’ Machine-gun company commander Captain Keizo Moto was one of the men trying to storm the tennis court. ‘How could we escape from that hole? They say the operation was so bloody and brave. But for me, I’m not brave, I was only ordered to be there.’ There were plenty of others, perhaps a majority, like the military doctor Takahide Kuwaki, who still believed that laying down one’s life for the emperor was the greatest possible honour. For Lieutenant Hiroshi Yamagami, who had the honour of carrying 58th Regiment’s flag, it was as simple as proving he was worthy of being called a warrior. ‘When I first entered the army school I thought I was fighting for my country and my family. But at Kohima it wasn’t like that. I just wanted to win. Don’t take it wrong, I wasn’t looking for glory. I followed orders. I never thought about surviving. That was not my purpose.’

The Japanese ranks contained men of differing views and widely disparate abilities. What held them together at Kohima was a formidable mix of ruthless discipline, loyalty to their regiments, love of the
emperor, and a belief that fate would somehow deliver victory. As the old Japanese proverb has it,
Un wa yusha wo tasuku
– ‘Fate assists the courageous’. For General Sato, always the realist, the accumulating evidence of British strength pointed to only one conclusion: Kohima Ridge would have to be taken very quickly if defeat was to be avoided. He issued a stern warning: any man who lost or failed to maintain his rifle would be shot.

They were red-eyed and bearded and they smelled of sweat, excrement and death. Men would light ‘Victory V’ cigarettes just to smell something that didn’t reek of all the bad possibilities Kohima offered. ‘They smelled like camel shit and tasted that way too,’ one soldier said. There was barely enough water now for a mug of tea a day. Men spent most of the time parched, with their tongues swollen in their mouths and their throats raw from grit. They scratched the lice that insinuated themselves into every crevice and fold of the body; many suffered the torment of dhobi itch, angry red fungal eruptions which spread across the crotch and buttocks. Their hands and faces were black with the grime of the battlefield. For the medical orderlies the lack of personal water for washing was especially trying. Frank ‘Doc’ Infanti, Royal West Kents, had just finished the perilous job of treating a wounded man at the tennis court when he wandered into the HQ area. The company clerk saw him and shook his head. It was then that Infanti noticed that his hands were covered in the dried blood of the wounded man. Nobody could wash at Kohima. Those were the orders from Laverty and Richards. ‘The company clerk [said], “Cor, your hands are in a bit of a state … and he gave me a little bit of water to wash my hands.”’ This small act of kindness would be a cherished memory of Infanti’s for the rest of his life.

In contrast to the poor relations between Laverty and the garrison staff, the West Kents got on well with the soldiers of the Assam Regiment and the other front-line troops. Lieutenant Pieter Steyn,
1st Assam, had some sympathy for Laverty’s predicament. ‘Laverty’s relationship with Hugh Richards … was not cordial, but it must be remembered that the RWKs were the only complete unit at Kohima amidst all the confusion of order and counter order. Laverty could be excused for trying to protect his battalion in the circumstances.’ But officers and men struggled to help each other. Major Franklin of the West Kents continued to keep the garrison water-carrying system running, and Captain Harry Smith was a regular visitor in Richards’s bunker. A garrison officer, Captain W. P. G. MacLachlan, remembered the soothing effect of the peacetime schoolmaster’s voice. ‘[He] regarded the Jap with the contempt of an ex member of the 8th army mingled with the didactic attitude of a house-master to an unruly fourth former. During a heavy mortar attack he could be heard muttering: “A lot of humguffery going on tonight.” The word “humguffery” caught on, and his contempt of the Jap was infectious, and did much to quieten the nerves of our heterogeneous collection of soldiery, many of whom had not previously been in action.’

Captain Donald Elwell of the Assam Regiment was racing to escape Japanese mortar and sniper fire when he almost rolled in the doorway of a West Kent dugout. ‘Why don’t you come in, instead of cluttering up the doorway?’ a voice asked. With the mortars dropping close by, Elwell crawled in and was offered a cup of tea. ‘Sorry the missus isn’t in, Sir,’ his host declared. ‘Meanwhile, here we are and here we stay. That’s it, sir, isn’t it?’ Elwell could only nod in agreement.