SUNDAY last marked seven decades of the end of the Battle of Kohima and Imphal. A key phase of World War 2 in Southeast Asia, it pushed back the Japanese after they had overrun Singapore, Malaya and Burma, and poised to attack British India.
For having prevented a military debacle that would have finished the already declining British Raj, it beats Waterloo and D-Day in importance. The British consider it the worst war they fought in their global quest through centuries. Thus was it voted in a contest held by Britain’s National Army Museum last year.
The Japanese concede it was their worst defeat. It is so recorded by Robert Lyman, author of Japan’s Last Bid for Victory: The Invasion of India 1944. Neither have forgotten it.
A three-month commemoration ended on June 22 with a closing ceremony in Imphal, the capital of Manipur, India’s eastern-most state. Representatives from the United States, Australia, Japan and other nations attended.
India’s participation was minimal, confined to local officials and a retired general. The Indians have, by and large, forgotten it as a symbol of its colonial past. This is despite the fact that after both fighting and serving the British for nearly two centuries, this battle made Indian soldiers more confident of their own fighting abilities.
One can only speculate the reasons. Besides embracing the English language and retaining many of the British era military traditions, Indians have learnt to move on.
Despite the role Imperial Japan played and the heavy casualties — 4,064 Indian and British soldiers — Indians, unlike the Chinese or Koreans, have no real issues with the Japanese.
Japan is revered as the nation that hosted Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose during WW2. He formed the Indian National Army (INA) in then Malaya, Singapore and Burma, mainly of the prisoners of war taken by the Japanese. The INA fought alongside the Japanese in the same battle that is now being commemorated.
This is the twist of history. It must be recorded, however, that although Bose and INA are revered in India, the Indian Army did not accept any INA soldiers.
The third reason is that sufferings of the Nagas of Kohima and the Manipuris of Imphal and their sentiments have not mattered. Regrettably, they are located in India’s northeastern region, troubled by isolation and militancy and short on development.
The efforts, accelerated in the last two decades to make them worthy gateways to Asean, have been woefully inadequate.
But history is history and it is etched on the ground as much as in public memory and military records. Fought for over two years, the battle zeroed down for two bloody weeks to a few yards across an asphalt tennis court. Japanese troops would charge across the court’s white lines, only to be killed by almost continuous firing from British and Indian machine guns.
Some of the places that saw action are just a few kilometres from Myanmar’s border, or what was then Burma. They are well preserved, thanks to the region’s isolation. Trenches, bunkers and airfields remain as they were left 70 years ago, worn by time and monsoons but clearly visible in the jungle.
The British commanders did not believe that the Japanese could cross the nearly impenetrable jungles around Kohima in force. Surprised, the British Indian force of 1,500 was heavily outnumbered ten-fold and encircled by a full Japanese division of nearly 15,000.
The battle was fought in three stages from April 4 to June 22, 1944, around Kohima. It is often referred to as the “Stalingrad of the East”.
From April 3-16, the Japanese attempted to capture Kohima ridge, a feature which dominated the road by which the besieged British and Indian troops of IV Corps at Imphal were supplied. By mid-April, the small British force at Kohima was relieved.
From April 18 to May 13, British and Indian reinforcements counter-attacked to drive the Japanese from the positions they had captured. The Japanese abandoned the ridge at this point but continued to block the Kohima–Imphal road.
The Japanese, without air support or supplies, eventually became exhausted, and the Allied forces soon pushed them out of Kohima and the hills around Imphal. From May 16 to June 22, the British and Indian troops pursued the retreating Japanese and reopened the road. The battle ended when British and Indian troops from Kohima and Imphal met at Milestone 109, ending the siege of Imphal.
Lt Gen Renya Mutaguchi, who led the Japanese campaign, planned to push farther into India in hopes of destabilising the British Raj, which by then was already being convulsed by the Independence movement led by Mahatma Gandhi.
The British fought to defend their Raj. An unlikely heroine of their effort was Ursula Graham Bower, an English anthropologist who had lived and worked among the Naga headhunters.
She commanded an auxiliary force of 150 fiercely loyal Nagas that patrolled the dense jungle for two years, positioning itself between the two mighty armies.
Called the “Naga Queen”, she became the only woman guerilla commander in the history of the British Army.
Kohima has a large cemetery of 1,420 Allied war dead maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The cemetery lies on the slopes of Garrison Hill, in what was then a tennis court where the famed Battle of the Tennis Court was fought.
The epitaph carved on the memorial of the 2nd British Division in the cemetery has become world-famous as the Kohima Epitaph. It reads: “When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrow, we gave our today.”