Road of Bones (51 page)

The following morning A company was pulled out of the line and sent to rest, if that were possible, near the Indian hospital at the summit of Garrison Hill. The 4th battalion had by now suffered two hundred casualties, approaching half the number that had entered Kohima; many of those with less serious wounds went back into the trenches to fight. At some point before C company was also replaced on 17 April, Private Ray Street recalled, a bottle of rum was passed round. ‘I began to feel really merry and started singing aloud, “Onward Christian Soldiers”. Soon the others joined in and it seemed the whole hill was singing … I don’t know what the Japs made of it but we gave little thought to that. Mind you the next barrage seemed heavier.’ The Assam Regiment and Assam Rifles who came in to take over the positions had earned the respect of the Royal West Kents, no mean feat given the latter’s ingrained sense of superiority to any other fighting formation. The 4th battalion history recorded that both Assam units ‘had proved their fighting qualities and could be relied on to hold any position given to them’.

Loyalty to comrades, as well as the terrible situation at the ADS, was decisive in the decision of wounded men refusing to leave the line. Private Norman passed through the ADS on his way from Detail Hill to get water. ‘It was a most terrifying and heartbreaking experience. We kept falling over dead bodies which were black and decaying … as we passed through the hospital the smell was overpowering.’ He also recorded that because of the high number of casualties C company had ceased to exist and was now part of A company. Major Donald Easten was a witness to the scene at the ADS
while he was having his wounded arm dressed. ‘Many of the wounded I feel sure died in the last few days because they had given up hope. Yet they were incredibly cheerful, outwardly, up to the end.’

Throughout 17 April the Japanese mounted attacks. Trenches were lost and retaken, but the positions on Supply Hill were becoming untenable. Japanese shelling, machine guns and snipers were killing and maiming the Indian troops and wearing down the reserves of faith. A young Indian officer, Major Naveen Rawlley, commanded the composite troops on the hill and led three counterattacks under withering fire. He was an officer who found his mettle under the pressure of enemy attack; at the start of the siege he had presented himself to Richards and offered to do any job that was required. ‘Are you infantry?’ Richards had asked. Rawlley replied in the affirmative. ‘9/12th Frontier Force Regiment, Sir.’ In the days that followed he welded a frequently unwilling assortment of men into a fighting unit and held on to Supply Hill, fighting alongside the West Kents and then the Assam troops, until resistance was impossible. On the night of 17 April a heavy Japanese barrage set buildings alight across Supply Hill. The defenders fled, leaving behind Rawlley, who stayed hunkered down throughout the bombardment.
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He managed to escape an advancing wave of Japanese and reach the next line of defence at Kuki Piquet. This small hill was the last before Garrison Hill with its headquarters bunkers and the ADS. If the Japanese took Kuki Piquet, the garrison was as good as lost. Every remaining man, around 2,500, including all the wounded and non-combatants, would be crammed into a space barely three hundred yards in diameter. Once the Japanese were in among the defenders on Garrison Hill, the advantage of artillery support would be lost. No observer would risk bringing down fire in such a confined space.

Even the bravest man his limits, a place where courage is rendered useless by the demands of the body. After thirteen days with little or no sleep, the ever-present smell of death, the sight and sound of men dying, a chronic shortage of water, and the air filled with flying
metal, the nervous system was beginning to win its struggle with the conscious mind. By the reckoning of one Assam Regiment officer, there were about forty-five battle-ready men on Kuki Piquet. They included what was left of Donald Easten’s D company, the Assam troops who had survived the battle of Supply Hill, a handful of 4/7 Rajput, and the remains of Naveen Rawlley’s composite force. All were physically and mentally exhausted after the flight from Supply Hill, ‘infected by this panic’, according to the West Kents’ war diary. Preparing to attack them were at least two Japanese companies, around 360 men, with more in reserve.

Up at the Advanced Dressing Station during the day of 17 April, Lieutenant Colonel Young was making plans for evacuation. As soon as there was a breakthrough, he wanted his men ready to move. On the radio from Jotsoma, Warren told Laverty to expect a company of 1/1 Punjab, supported by tanks, which would begin the relief under cover of a massive barrage. Once the Punjab troops had deployed to cover the evacuation, the walking wounded would move off in groups of twenty; they would be followed by the stretcher cases in batches of six, at ten-minute intervals. The route would take them down to the road, past the Indian hospital, and in full view of the Japanese positions opposite. The stretcher cases would be picked up by ambulance, while the walking wounded would make their way to trucks. The tanks and artillery would keep the Japanese heads down while the evacuation took place.

Faith was slipping away from many of the wounded in spite of Padre Randolph’s best efforts. He talked to men constantly and helped the orderlies clear the mess whenever a shell landed in a trench. The devout Christian Lieutenant Bruce Hayllar, shot in the opening hours of the siege, was rewounded by a shell fragment as he lay in his open trench. ‘Each time they fired some of our friends were killed. It was terribly frightening. But there is always somebody worse off than yourself and you all know you are in it together. In my case I used to pray like mad. I used to say to my friends: ask for God’s help. Just pray. It doesn’t matter which god you pray to. You think to yourself, “If we
are meant to get out, we will get out, if not it’s just bad luck.”’ By the night of 17 April Hayllar no longer believed he would get out. ‘We kept hearing we would be relieved, and it didn’t happen.’ Sensing that the end was near, he asked for his pistol. Other officers were doing the same. People were crying beside him, others screamed from the pain of their wounds, and he resolved to blow his own brains out rather than fall into Japanese hands. Did the idea of suicide bother his Christian conscience? ‘No. In a way I think it’s all right. If heaven is just around the corner and you die to get there … We were afraid of being captured by them and being killed in a gruesome way.’

The shelling of Garrison Hill intensified and Hugh Richards believed it was the worst since the siege began. ‘How my own H.Q. and R.W.K. H.Q. escaped direct hits I don’t know, but they did.’ Lance Corporal Dennis Wykes was nearby with some remnants of A company. Like everybody else, he heard the firing coming from Supply Hill and felt the barrage shake Garrison Hill. He began to think he might not survive. ‘The officers just came round and said, “We’ll fight to the last round, the last bullet and we’ll stick until that happens.” Our forces were so decimated one of the young lads said, “Can I put a pip on my shoulder, I’m still alive.” And it was a bit of a joke, he wanted to be an officer!’

On the tennis court the Assam were still holding their own. But Calistan’s troops were also being overtaken by fatigue and, for some, a conviction that they would not survive. Lieutenant Pieter Steyn wrote of how ‘many were the anxious questions being asked. “Sahib, how long do you think we can hold out?” asked one man on DC Bungalow. But how could they be answered – anyhow with what certainty? Officers and men who asked such questions could only trust blindly that they were not destined to be annihilated. Many felt they were in the presence of something too big to grasp.’

On Kuki Piquet the defenders looked down the slope into the darkness and waited for the charge. Donald Easten tried to rally his men of D company. ‘I was wounded but not so bad I couldn’t do something. I tried to rally people. I hope to a certain extent I was able to steady things. I think I said, “Come on, chaps, it’s not as bad as all
that”, and then I gave instructions about where they should position themselves.’ Private Tom Jackson was Easten’s company clerk, ‘which meant general dogsbody’, and was regarded by his boss as ‘a wonderful fellow, a cockney and a man I became very fond of’. Jackson had delivered a signal to another trench when the Japanese opened up. ‘All hell let loose: shells, rifle fire, shouting Japanese.’ Company Sergeant Major Bill Haines, blind and still leaning on the arm of a helper, shouted at Jackson to withdraw to a trench further back. Jackson took off and jumped into a hole, where he met an Indian officer and the sapper Lieutenant John Wright, the man who had blasted the Japanese out of the bashas on Detail Hill an eternity ago. ‘I jumped in,’ Jackson recalled, ‘and the lieutenant asked me what was happening. I said that if the Japanese came up the hill “we’d had our chips”. He said, “Right, we’ll use bayonets.”’

At half past two in the morning the defenders heard screams on the slope below and the sound of men clambering towards them. This time the wave stuttered before the Bren and rifle fire but then swept onwards until the Japanese were in among the defenders. Artillery support broke up the Japanese reinforcements at the bottom of the hill for a short while, but the enemy revived and came again. CSM Haines found Jackson and told him to retreat up the hill. ‘We were clearly getting a hammering and couldn’t hold the position. Off we went, one of the signallers getting wounded in the leg as he jumped into a hole.’ At thirty, Haines was one of the battalion’s old soldiers, a veteran of France, where he had been awarded a Military Medal and, according to Easten, ‘one of those chaps who never pushed himself forward but you knew if you said, “what do you think we ought to do about this?” he would come up with the right answer’.

How much could he see of what was happening around him? With his eyes badly damaged from the mortar blast, it may have been only the flaring light from the fires or shadows darting around him. But Haines would have certainly heard the noise, the screams of British and Japanese, the explosions and shooting, and his own hoarse voice urging the defenders to hold on. A few minutes after jumping into his new trench Tommy Jackson heard that Haines was dead. The men
nearby quickly recovered Haines’s badge, revolver and compass, and gave them to Jackson. Donald Easten had come forward to direct a Bren-gun crew when he heard the news. ‘A company sergeant major in battle is your right-hand man. He was about thirty yards from me at the time. I went down to talk to some chaps about getting a Bren gun in a certain position and there was his body. It was dreadful.’

The Japanese scattered the remaining defenders before them. The men of D company, the Assam formations, the 4/7 Rajput and Rawlley’s composite Indians fled from Kuki Piquet and on to Garrison Hill. This brought the Japanese to within one hundred yards of the command bunkers. In what can only have been an act of desperation, Laverty ordered Tom Hogg of B company to gather up his three survivors from 10 platoon and ‘enough stray men’ to retake a position captured by the Japanese. Hogg was horrified. Fortunately the conversation took place over the field telephone. ‘There was no mention of any kind of support. I realised it could be only a vain suicide mission and I hesitated before replying, long enough fortunately for a shell to burst sufficiently close by to stop the conversation and I heard no more of that proposition.’ John Laverty had run out of options. He did not have the numbers to make a counterattack. The hill was crowded with fighting troops; the number of wounded had now swollen to around six hundred and added to those were the increasingly panicked non-combatants. If the Japanese were to come in strength now, he felt sure Garrison Hill would fall. Where in God’s name was the relief? His mortar platoon commander, Sergeant King, struggled into the command bunker. King and his mortar team had worked relentlessly, bringing fire down on any concentration of Japanese that could be seen. He wanted permission to move his mortars so that he could fire on Kuki Piquet before the Japanese had time to form up. In an account given later, King was described as having ‘half his jaw … hanging away so that he could talk, only half intelligibly, out of the side of his mouth. His right shoulder was hunched forward with the shot-away portion of the jaw resting on it. While he spoke he kept spitting out gouts of blood on to the floor of the dugout.’ Laverty told King to get himself
treated at the ADS. The wounded man would go only after he had first been given an order to bring his mortars into action. They were soon falling on the Japanese occupiers of Kuki Piquet.

With the entire garrison in peril, 2nd Division artillery renewed its bombardment, not only on the Japanese infantry positions but on Sato’s artillery as well; the British 25 pounder guns were directed by the observers inside the garrison and forward observers creeping close to Japanese positions. Captain Arthur Swinson witnessed the bombardment from the road outside Kohima. ‘Stood and watched the flashes spurt and die as they fired, lighting up the camp one second to plunge it into darkness the next. What with these lighting effects and the demoniacal roar of sound, the whole scene was pitched into the over-real vividness of a nightmare.’