TENNIS MATCH AT KOHIMA

 

I believe that all wars are evidence of failure; of diplomacy, of politics, of military strategy.  And another million minor inconsequential and unintended mistakes must cumulatively go wrong for a great battle to occur.  As an example,  I present for you, the great battle for Kohima.

Officials in Fukouka Prefecture kept a close watch on the young males growing up in the towns and fishing villages of Kyushu, the southern most island of Japan. Often they would drop in for an unannounced visits, to check on the boys health and status. Then, sometime during the young men’s 20th year, in the middle of the night, their conscription notices would arrive. It was claimed this delivery in darkness was done for security reasons, but it was usually followed by a very public send off to basic training. More likely the military merely wanted to drive home their ability to reach into each individual house in the nation at its most vulnerable members.

During the first year of war with America and the British Commonwealth (1942) the Imperial Japanese forces suffered 2,672 men killed each week (on average), while in 1943 that appalling number increased to 3,563 each week.  And the future promised only exponential growth in those tragedies.  On 26 October, 1943, the Japanese Emperor Hirohito' admitted that his nation’s situation was “truly grave”.  It was accepted that 1944 would be Japan’s last chance to stave off defeat in a war they had started.  In the Pacific the navy planned a counter stroke when the Americans struck the Mariana islands.  In China the Army launched “Operation One”, a three prong attack by half a million men.  And against British India, the Japanese Army decided on Operation “C”, a strike from out of Burma, which they had conquered two years earlier. 

After their basic training and before leaving Japan, each of the 15,000 Fukouka soldiers wrote out his will and ceremonially gave his life to the Emperor.  By now the nation could no longer wait until their twentieth year.  By late 1943 the Japanese were inducting boys of 17 and 18,  and men up to 44 years old.  But whatever their age, from day one the soldiers were treated brutally.  Officers and non-coms often slapped and beat their men for minor transgressions.  Personal violence was so common that Japanese soldiers often beat each other. 

This brutality was easily transferred to civilians and prisoners of war,  particularly but not exclusively outside of Japan.  The effect on unit moral was devastating, and by 1943 even the army high command wanted to correct it.  But by then the war had grown out of their control.

The men from Kyushu were formed into the 58th, 124th and 138th infantry regiments, and a Mountain Artillery, an Engineering and a Transportation regiment.. In late 1943 they were all assembled in Bangkok, Thailand and designated the 31st infantry division. 

Their irritable and dyspeptic commander was Lt. General Kotoku Sato.  He was of the opinion that his commanding officer was a blockhead, and openly told his staff that during Operation “C” he expected them all to starve to death.  Late in 1944 the division was moved by rail to the northwest corner of Burma, to the head of navigation on the Chindwin River. 

Each soldier was issued a 20 day supply of rice.  Their equipment and ammunition were carried on mules and elephants, but there would be no supply line back to the Chindwin. The plan was to move fast enough to capture British supply depots as they advanced, and use those to feed and arm their hungry soldiers.

On 15 March, 1944, the 31st division, operating on the extreme right wing of four other divisions, crossed the Chindwin River by boat and raft on a front 60 miles wide.  Moving quickly along winding jungle trails, their first objective was the tiny village of Kohima, 100 miles away and 4,000 feet up the 5,000 foot high Naga hills.  They planned to reach this objective by a forced march in three days and nights.  In fact it took them 15 days. 

The jungle was fetid, hot and sickening, filled with flies, ticks, mosquitoes and leeches big enough to crawl up your leg and suck your blood until they burst. The mosquito bites could cause septic sores. By the time the advanced elements of the 31st division reached the outskirts of Kohima the monsoon had begun, the trails were reduced to deep sucking mud, and the men of 31st division were strung out along the trials, exhausted and hungry.  Sickness and casualties had already reduced the Japanese force by 3,000 men.  

Still the remaining 12,000 Japanese soldiers had caught the British high command off guard, again.  The draftees from Fukouka Prefecture quickly surrounded the barely 2,500 Indian and British troops defending the Kohima Ridge. 

The ultimate goal for the 31st division was still 40 miles away; Dimapur, a British airfield, rail head and logistics base on the Brahmaputra River. From this depot a winding road climbed the Naga Hills, through a mountain pass along Kohima Ridge, and then ran southward to Impala. At Impala were three Indian divisions, commanded by British officers. The main Japanese thrust of four divisions was initially aimed at Impala. 

But if the 31st division could capture Kohima, those three Indian divisions would be cut off, and could be starved to death.  And if the 31st could capture Dimapur, the Japanese army would have enough food, ammunition and fuel to invade India itself.  Sato’s goal was to capture enough supplies at Kohima for the next forty mile march to Dimapur. 

In a first rush on the evening of 3 April , 1944, the men from Kyushu not only surrounded Kohima, they also captured British warehouses containing enough food to supply the 31st division for a year. But less than a month’s worth had been distributed when the Royal Air Force bombed the warehouses, and blew up the supplies.  When those initial captured supplies were used up each Japanese soldier received only one rice ball, some salt and a bottle of boiled water a day. 

Beginning on 6 April, under daily downpours and heavy mortar fire, the Japanese began a series of infantry attacks, squeezing the defenders back onto isolated hill tops along the ridge until the British  held only one, Garrison Hill.  

And atop that, at a 280 degree switchback in the Impala Road, was DC Hill, where in peaceful times the District Commissioner had built himself a summer bungalow, complete with a garden and a tennis court.  By 9 April, the the Japanese and British lines were separated only by the Tennis Court, and the entire battle for India and Burma had been reduced to a battlefield just 36 feet wide. 

Attacks and counter-attacks raged across the court (above, foreground), for day after day.  A British officer explained the battle this way. “We were attacked every single night... They came in waves…Most nights they overran part of the battalion position, so we had to mount counter-attacks...” Noted another source, “It was a very primitive battle. The Japanese had no air cover or air supply and attacked each night” 

Another British writer explained, “The defenders built barricades from the piled bodies of the attackers, the entire area eventually becoming a thick carpet of blackened and rotting corpses. When digging in, they found themselves often digging through the dead before hitting earth.” 

On the night of 13/14 April , the Japanese managed to manhandle a 75mm cannon onto a slight rise to fire point blank into the British trenches.  The survivors were forced to retreat. 

One of the Indian troopers, Wellington Massar, set up a machine gun on the billiard table in the remains of the club house, and cut down the Japanese attackers.  A Lt. King led a counterattack which retook the trench.  But the British position had been cut in half.  With daylight the Japanese launched what was supposed to be the final annihilating attack, but it was repulsed. 

A British Officer told his commander, “The men's spirits are all right, but there aren't many of us left,”  He said that if relief did not arrive within 48 hours, the position would fall.  Five days later, no one had been relieved, and the battle for the “shattered corpse-covered tennis court” was still raging.

On the morning of 18 April, British artillery began to fall on the tennis court.  It was the advance effect of the arrival of the British 2nd division, which had been flown into Dimapur the week before, and had now fought its way up the road.  

On the 19th the reliving column reached DC hill. What they found was “'filthy, bearded, bedraggled scarecrows” defending “shallow muddy trenches, dismembered limbs, empty cartridge cases, ammunition boxes and abandoned equipment, the debris of numerous assaults, and the stench of so many things rotting. The most lasting impression was caused by the litter of war- piles of biscuits, dead bodies black with flies and scattered silverware from the DC's bungalow.”

Still the men from Kyushu did not give up.  Now outnumbered and heavily outgunned, they contested every British advance, and were still holding an edge of the Tennis Court. 

As John Toland reported, in his book “The Rising Sun”, the 31st division was now eating “… grass, potatoes, snails, lizards, snakes – anything they could get their hands on, including monkeys”.  Harold Jones, one of the reliving solders, describe Kohima this way. “I was there about 10 days. It was a terrible place”

By 25 May most the Kohima ridge was back in British hands, and General Sato informed his despised commander that without food or ammunition his men could not survive past June First.  When his commander ordered the 31st division to “fight with their teeth” if they had no more bullets, Sato  instead ordered his men to withdraw.   It was the only time in the Second World War that a senior Japanese officer disobeyed a direct order while under attack, and ordered a retreat..

Toland tells what the Japanese retreat was like. “On the long trek back over the mountains in pounding rain, men fought one another for food.  Thousands of sick and wounded fell out of the march and killed themselves with grenades. The paths were seas of mud and when a man stumbled he became half buried in slime…Light machine guns, rifles, helmets, gas masks – anything useless – littered the trails.  Only the will to live propelled the survivors…and those who lasted out a day’s march huddled together for sleep that rarely came because of the constant downpour. Many drowned, too feeble to raise their heads above the rising water, and the Chindwin River itself, their goal, claimed the lives of hundreds more in its swollen waters….by the end of the year Japanese rule (of Burma) was on the point of collapse.” (pp 693) 

The 31st division had been destroyed. 67% of its precious 15,000 men were dead or wounded. The British counted 5,000 Japanese bodies on the Kohima battle field alone, and best estimates are that 7,000 of the men from Fukouka Prefecture were sacrificed in the attempt to take Kohima..  Fewer than 600 were taken prisoner.  

General Sato was relieved of his command, and sent sent home as unfit for duty because of wounds and physical wastage he suffered before Kohima.  The British poet JM Edmonds left the best epitaph on the battle, which appears on a monument at the British cemetery at Kohima, and which could apply to the sacrifice of both sides. “When you go home, Tell them of us and say, For their tomorrow, We gave our today.”

None of the Japanese counter strokes of 1944 worked. The Imperial Navy blundered into the “Great Marianas Turkey shoot”, which saw 3 Japanese air craft carriers sunk, and 633 air planes destroyed. The Japanese Navy never recovered. In China “Operation One” pushed the Chinese army back, and forced the American 20th Air Force to abandon their advanced bases, which prevented them from bombing Japan. But the Marinna's victory allowed the Americans to simply transfer the B-29 bombers to the Islands of Guam and Tainan, where they would prove even more effective at burning Japanese cities.

And Operation “C” had captured nothing and left 50,000 Japanese dead, and reduced the defense of Burma to an empty shell. And for all the treachery and villainy of the Japanese militarist in fermenting World War in the Pacific, their greatest victims were not citizens of the United States, nor the British nor even China. Their greatest victims were the people of Japan, like the young men of Kyushu, who gave their today for a lie.

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VIRGINS & Colonel Grant

I suggest, if you want a touch the reality of the American Civil War, you pick up a nine pound, 56 inch long, walnut stock .58 caliber model 1855 Springfield muzzle loading rifled musket, and think about what this weapon tells you about the world which built it. 

They made 47,000 such weapons in Massachusetts, and another 12,000 at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, before the war started.  Over the five years after Fort Sumter in 1861, they built about a million more in various versions. 

But to the volunteers who were handed one of those older, no longer state-of-the-art weapons (costing $20 each at the time, about $500 in today's money), they were revolutionary. This was likely the first mass produced piece of high tech these people came into intimate contact with. And once they did, they were no longer virgins.

Following the manual written by Brigadier General Silas Casey, (above) - West Point class of 1828), you began with your Springfield musket standing on its base. 

You removed a paper cartridge from the box on your hip. You bite or tear off the end of a paper cartridge (above), exposing 65 coarse grains of black powder, which you pour down the barrel. With your thumb you press the remains of the cartridge (with the bullet called a “minie ball” inside), into the top of the barrel. 

Using the rod stored beneath your musket's barrel, you ram the ball, cartridge and the powder down the barrel until it is firmly at the bottom. 

Replacing the ramrod, you lift the weapon to chest high. You half-cock the hammer, take a percussion cap from your cartridge box and place it atop the nipple covering the opening in the breach. Then you lift the weapon to your shoulder, pull the hammer back to full cock, aim toward the enemy and upon command, you pull the trigger, releasing the hammer.

The hammer falls, setting off the black powder in the percussion cap. The resulting explosion forces hot gases through the breach, which sets off the black powder in the barrel. This flash of heat causes the the soft lead on the bottom of the' minie' ball to expand, trapping the gases behind it. Those gases then drive the bullet out of the barrel at about a thousand feet per second. With luck you might hit a target 100 yards away. 

With training, a man could get off two, and maybe three, rounds every minute. But most of the soldiers, particularly in the early stage in the war, spent very little time learning to fire their weapons. Burning black powder produced enormous dense clouds of smoke, and after a few minutes you couldn't see what you are aiming at. Firing ranges were thus considered largely a waste of time for the average soldier. So the men spent most of their time learning to march.

Battlefield tactics were over half a century old by 1861, developed by Napoleon Bonaparte in the 1790's, when muskets were still smooth bore, and so inaccurate that to effectively injure an opponent they had to be used en mass, hundreds or thousands of muskets firing in the same direction at the same moment. 

Everything that occurred on the battlefield was done to create that moment, when the maximum number of men would discharge their weapons at the target, together.  The concept is still used today, and it is called "lead on target". 

General Silas Casey (above), in his 2 volumes of Infantry Tactics published in  1862,  listed 84 separate and distinct steps required to move a company of 84 men from a marching column four men wide, to their firing formation, in a rank thirty-two inches between each man, three ranks deep. And that was on the flat and open parade ground. 

The men and the officers had to to learn to do this, across unfamiliar and broken terrain, without thinking, while people were trying to kill them. The endless drilling required to achieve proficiency at this was boring, physically exhausting, and boring. And there was no way to prepare the men for the terror of replicating it while being shot at, under the noise and horrors of combat, because each human experiences combat differently and each combat is different than any other. 

What was it like? Well, in 1863, after two years of hard won experience with the demands, drudgery and the horrors of combat, the two sides met for three days at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. After that battle 35,000 abandoned but usable muskets were collected on the battlefield, of which 11,000 were unloaded and 24,000 were loaded, in one form or another. 

Of the loaded muskets, 6,000 had one charge, 12,000 had two charges, and the remaining 6,000 held anything from three to ten charges - One musket had twenty-two charges stuffed down its barrel;  powder, cartridge and bullet, one atop the other. 

The noise of all those muskets firing next to unprotected ears, producing all that smoke, meant that a soldier could no longer hear his own rifle going off. And if you missed the first loaded round not being fired, likely you never got a second chance. Firing a musket with anything more than one charge in the barrel often resulted in the weapon exploding. And that raises the question of how many battlefield casualties were unconsciously self inflicted.

Officers had a few things to learn too, even the 5'2” tall Ulysses Grant (above) who had graduated West Point in 1843. Although he had been forced to resign in 1854, his training made him a much sought after commodity, and during the opening months of the war, in June of 1861,  the governor of Illinois made him a colonel and he was given command of the 21^st Illinois volunteer regiment. 

These 1,000 men were described by their new commander as “men...who could be led astray.” And they had been. Grant said he “found it very hard work for a few days to bring all the men into anything like subordination; but the great majority favored discipline, and by the application of a little regular army punishment all were reduced to as good discipline as one could ask.”

On 3 July, 1861 the 21^st Illinois was ordered to Quincy, Illinois, but en route the destination was changed.

The 19^th Illinois regiment had been building a bridge over the Salt River west of Palmyra, Missouri - about 25 miles north west of Hannibal, on the Mississippi River. Troops of the Missouri State Guard, sympathetic to the south, had cut off the union troops. Grant was now ordered to rescue the fellow prairie state units.

However, by the time his men had reached the Mississippi river, the threatened unit had retreated back to Hannibal, with not a shot being fired by either force. Grant wrote later, “I am inclined to think both sides got frightened and ran away.” Still, Grant got his men across the big river, and marched to the scene. The 21^st Illinois spent two weeks finishing the bridge, and was then ordered to advance on a new Missouri State Guard regiment gathering to the south, at the forks of the Salt River.

The Missouri troops were commanded by a politician, Colonel (later Brigadier General) Thomas Alexander Hariss. His position was in a valley, and was overlooked by the small community of Florida, with about 100 residents. 

And as Grant approached the town he started to get nervous. “In the twenty-five miles we had to march we did not see a person, old or young, male or female, except two horsemen who were on a road that crossed ours. As soon as they saw us they decamped as fast as their horses could carry them.” Grant now had to assume the rebels were alerted of his approach, and would be waiting for his men. The young commander camped his men that night beside the road, so they would be fully rested for the battle he knew was coming in the morning.

In the morning, Grant lead his little force up the hill. “As we approached the brow of the hill...my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on. When we reached a point from which the valley below was in full view I halted. The place where Harris had been encamped a few days before was still there...but the troops were gone. My heart resumed its place.”

In fact, Harris and his still unprepared recruits had retreated on hearing that Grant was gathering horses and wagons just to prepare for his march south. With such a head start, his Missouri State Guards were now sixty miles away, heading to join larger rebel forces.  

Learning this, Grant noted it taught him something.  “It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event to the close of the war...I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his”. On the march back to the bridge at Palmyra, Grant noted, “The citizens living on the line of our march....were at their front doors ready to greet us now.”

And that taught him even something more useful, something still true today - winners are always popular. Grant was no longer a virgin.

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