TIME PIECE

I am assured by fundamentalist Christians that six thousand years ago God created the world in six days. Of course, six thousand years ago a day was about the shortest period of time humans could measure accurately. And the mystical number six is also the number of sides to the electromagnetic spaces that give cell phones their name. Within each 10 square mile cell surrounding every tower, 832 separate frequencies are used, two frequencies for every individual phone conversation. For the last half century the preferred method for defining these frequencies, the time between each electromagnetic wave crest, has been to hit a ball of 10 million pure cesium atoms with a microwave beam. The cesium then produces one energy wave crest 9 billion, 192 million, 631 thousand 770 times every second and will maintain that exact frequency - and your cell phone conversations or web connection -  it is estimated, for about 20 million years. And 20 million beats 6 thousand any day of the week.

The only problem is that pure cesium is rare. The metal is so it eager to combine with oxygen that on contact it instantly steals water's two oxygen atoms, thereby generating enough heat to visibly explode the now free hydrogen atom like a mini-Hindenburg. Given a little time cesium will even dissolve glass to steal its oxygen. Cesium is only stable in nature in a rare rock called Pegmatite (above), and 82 % of all the cesium rich Pegmatite known to exist on earth has been found in one place, beneath a single narrow lake along the Bird River in Manitoba, Canada, a land unknown in 1656, to the Archbishop of Ireland.

In retrospect the Irish primate James Ussher (above) seems an unlikely source for 300 years of dogmatic intellectual stagnation. In life he was a purveyor of political compromises. Ussher's “Annales veteris testamenti” (Annals of the Old Testament), published in 1650, displayed his love of dusty manuscripts, esoteric minutiae and ancient languages. As an academic it was his judgment the world began after sunset on Sunday 23 October, 4004 B.C. He was using the best evidence available at the time, and disagreed about the date for creation with the Oxford mathematician Sir Isaac Newton by just four years.

Bernic Lake is about 60 miles northeast of Winnipeg, just beyond the western edge of the Canadian Shield. But on this spot two and a half billion years ago, Precambrian rains fell upon sterile volcanic basalt of the shield, chemically altering and eroding the rock into the world wide ocean, laying down oxygen poor sediments called Greenstone belts. These belts were buried and heated, compressed and folded at least three times, beginning two billion years ago with the advent of plate tectonics, until eventually batholiths of a new rock, granite, rose and (above) intruded the Greenstrones at depth. And at one batholith, about 15 miles due west of today's small community of Lac du Bonnet, Manitoba, cracks in the Greenstone were injected with chemically rich waters from the granite, concentrating a potpourri of rare earth metals, lithium, beryllium, tantalum and cesium.

Sir Isaac Newton's modern fame is as the discoverer of gravity, the inventor of calculus and optics and his three Laws of Motion. When praised by his contemporaries Newton explained he stood on the shoulders of geniuses. But the great economist John Maynard Keynes also called him “the last of the magicians.” Newton devoted most of his time and effort to alchemy, and his search for the Philosopher's Stone, which would magically turn lead into gold. Newton was no more a fool, than Bishop Ussher. But both of men were of their age, and they lacked the technology to more precisely measure the world they lived in. But they both wanted to do better.  Neither of them thought human knowledge should stop where it was.

The Bird River flows through the largest remaining, seemingly eternal, boreal forest on earth. It is an awe inspiring terrain, but capable of supporting only two humans per square mile. Since 1929 some 60 families in Lac du Bonnet have depended upon the Cabot Corporation's Tanco mine (above) to earn a living.  Since the middle of the 1990's, each year's 30,000 kilograms of cesium extracted from the great rock rooms beneath Bernic Lake, have been destined to lubricate and cool oil drilling equipment world wide, in the form of caesium formate. The tiny fraction used in atomic clocks would never economically justify keeping the mine open. But there is enough profitable cesium under Bernic Lake to last another ten years. If the mine does not swallow the lake first.

At room temperature a single atom of cesium has 55 electrons in six orbits around its nucleus - two in the first level, eight in the second, eighteen in both the third and fourth, eight in the fifth and a lone single electron on the outside or valance level. It is the valance electron that emits energy at a specific frequency when excited by microwaves, as was first predicted in 1945 by Professor Isidor Rabi from Columbia University. With all due respect to Professor Rabi, he was not smarter than Newton, but as Newton put it, Rabbi was standing on Newton's shoulders. Seven years later the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) built the first cesium atomic clock. They kept perfecting and miniaturizing the design until about 1968, when they established the highest standard of measurement - until recently

Until 1989 cesium sold for less than $5 a gram (above). Then came the invention of cesium formate, a slurry that was liquid enough to lubricate drilling bits, and heavy enough improve drill efficiency and to carry rock back up the bore hole, while enduring the temperatures and pressures found thousands of feet underground at the point of a drill bit.  By 1998 the price of 99% pure cesium was over $60 a gram. It was then that Cabot decided to maximize profits by extracting even the ore holding the up the roof of their mine. They shaved away the pillars supporting the ceiling, from 50 feet in diameter to just 25. In 2012 the price of cesium was $70.60 a gram. Then, in 2013, Cabot admitted that over the past three years at least a ton of rock had fallen into their mine because “The crown pillar...is unstable and requires immediate action”.  Corporate greed was destroying the goose that laid the golden egg.

The accuracy of cesium clocks is now the limiting factor in available cell phone channels, the accuracy of Global Positioning systems, higher precision and versatility in the electrical grid and better science in every field. So in the new generation of clocks, the NIST-F2, introduced on 3 April 2014, the chamber containing the cesium ball is chilled to minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit (-193 ºC). This does not change the frequency of the cesium, but it eliminates much of the “noise” of all the other atoms in the chamber, so the faint electromagnetic vibrations produced by that single valance election can be more clearly heard and more closely defined. Instead of losing a second every 20 million years, the NIST-F2 loses a second every 300 million years. With this the internet will get faster, cell phones will get more versatile and dependable and there will be more profit and better lives for every living human on earth.  Until the cesium runs out.

Bernic Lake (above) will drown Cabot's golden goose and the world's primary source of cesium within three years,  unless something is done. Cabot's solution is to bulldoze a new road through the virgin forest, build dikes across the lake, and “de-water” the now isolated section over their mine. In Cabot's opinion, this provides “an optimal solution, in that it eliminates the immediate risk of flooding, minimizes the long-term footprint of the project, and upholds Cabot’s corporate commitment to being responsive, responsible and respected citizens...”. It will also keep oil pouring into pipelines around the world, and profits pouring into the pockets of Cabot directors and majority stockholders. It will continue to pour $28 million a year into the Lac du Bonnet economy, and save 150 jobs in Manitoba. It will also provide cesium for new NIST-F2 clocks world wide. And it may kill the three mile long Bernic Lake, and poison the Bird River, the Winnipeg River and Lake Winnipeg which all those sources pour into.

About six thousand years ago a Sumerian Michelangelo crafted an 8 foot long, 3 foot wide copper tribute to his God, the powerful lion headed eagle Imdugud (above). Copper was a new medium six thousand years ago. The metal has two electrons in its first orbit, eight in the second, eighteen in the third, and like cesium, a single electron in the valance level. But unlike cesium, when exposed to oxygen and moisture, copper only slowly forms a layer of green verdigris, or copper carbonate, which then shields the underlying metal from further corrosion. 

The Imdugud frieze, found in the ancient city of al' Urbaid, has been dated using carbon 14 techniques, which uses the science developed by Newton and extended by Professor Isidor Rab. The science of chemistry and metallurgy tells us the ore for the frieze came from mines in present day Iran, mines whose tailings and waste rocks were scavenged by a third and fourth generation of miners for copper not long after Bishop Ussher's birth date for the universe. Perhaps the ore was carried to Ubaid in a ship powered by a sail, an invention which also made its first appearance about 6,000 years ago, as dated from the images painted on pottery, an unbroken line of which can be followed style change by style change, over the last eight thousand years - 2,000 years older than Bishop Usher ever imagined.

In the past Christianity has denied that atoms decayed, that sunlight could be split into a spectrum, that the sun was at the center of the solar system, that anything existed before sunset Sunday, 23 October, 4004 B.C. None of those contentions proved or disproved the existence of God. And eventually each, and a thousand others, were discarded, without destroying the faith of the faithful. Only insisting that ignorance is truth, that hypocrisy is devotion, only by taking his name in vain and by mistaking your will for God's will, only that threatens faith..  And your ability to receive a cell phone call from your kids telling you they have been hurt at school.

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MONEY AND PATROTISM

I understand why Republicans have such a naive faith in capitalists. Certainly, the businessmen or women who risk their own futures on the vagaries of markets and customers deserve respect. But the farther you get from the pain of your own mistakes the less you are a capitalist, and the more an elitist. As proof,  I present to you a German flute maker who made his fortune in England, and then doubled it by investing in the American fur trade; John Jacob Astor (above). He made in his life time the modern equivalent of $110 billion - so much money that his fortune survived two hundred years. It survived the great depression, four generations of 20th century “death taxes” and two world wars, and the great recession of 2007, so that his distant heirs are still enjoying its benefits. Astor’s “genius” was that he saw the American fur trade was not about fur, it was about dope.

See, post-revolutionary war American did not have enough customers to support a native industry. America had to be an exporter.  Her nearest customers were in Europe.  But by 1810, hunters had so decimated eastern populations of beaver, otter, squirrel and fox, that trappers were shipping furs fifteen hundred miles just to reach an Atlantic port.  Overland transportation costs now made American fur a luxury item in Europe.   But, and this was Astor’s genius, the west coast of North America was still filled with fur, swimming and walking around.  And just across the Pacific were millions of Chinese opium addicts.  And Astor saw the connection between those two.

Plugged into the global English banking system, Astor realized he could buy furs in the Pacific Northwest from native Americans for the price of some fish hooks and axes, sell them in China and Japan for working capital, with which he could buy Afghanistan opium, which could be sold in China at an enormous profit. All he had to do was buy enough British politicians to send the Royal Navy to force the Chinese to leave his opium fleets alone. That was what the British meant by Freedom of the Seas.  And the real magic was that Astor never had to go to any of those places himself and look dead otters or dead addicts in the face.  He hired others to do that. Of course, it turns out, working at a distance has its own price.

To put his plan in motion Astor hired two men. First he dispatched Wilson Hunt, who was a New Jersey businessman (and a junior partner), at the head of 64 French Canadian trappers, to head overland for the Columbia River.  And then he convinced the U.S. Navy to loan him Lieutenant Jonathan Thorn, hero of the battle of Tripoli.  And it turns out Astor was a really bad judge of character. Neither of these guys had any business running anything.

Thorn left first, on 8 September, 1810 in command of the 290 ton, 10 gun ship, the Tonquin. She carried 34 seamen, French Canadian trappers and clerks, and everything needed to set up Astor’s fur collecting station at the mouth of the Columbia River.   But barely had they passed out onto the Atlantic when Captain Thorn turned into Captain Bligh.  He cursed the crew for singing a sea ditty. And when Alexander McKay, another junior partner in the venture, commented on the lousy food, Thorn called him “the most worthless human who ever broke a sea biscuit.”  That night McKay wrote in his notebook “I fear we are in the hands of a maniac” McKay had no idea. 

Wilson Hunt and his party left St. Louis on 21 October, 1810, but traveled only 450 miles up the Missouri River before winter forced him to camp just south of present day St. Joseph, Missouri. They were in birch bark canoes and the plan was to follow the Lewis and Clark trail over the Rocky Mountains. But over the long dark winter months Hunt started to think for himself, a mistake which was to prove disastrous.

By early December, when the Tonquin stopped for fresh water in the Falkland Islands, the passengers had begun speaking only French in the presence of the by now hated Captain Thorn, because they knew he did not speak French and it drove him crazy.  He paid them back by acting the even more petty tyrant. When five of his passengers went sightseeing and missed his deadline to return, Thorn weighed anchor and set sail, leaving them desperately rowing for three hours to catch up.  He would have abandoned them to their fate, had not the wind fortuitously shifted and allowed the exhausted Canadians to collapse, vomiting, back on board.  Everybody now had a thorn in their side; Captain Thorn

On Christmas day this unhappy ship rounded Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America. And on the 12th of February 1811, after sailing across the Pacific Ocean, with stops in India and China to confirm business arrangements, the Tonquin anchored off Hawaii, for pork and water and to pick up a few additional workers. Thorn had by now convinced himself there was going to be an armed rebellion against him at any moment.  His opportunity for dealing with this perceived threat arrived on 22 March 1811, when the Tonquin stood off the mouth of the Columbia River, at a cape with attractive title of Desperation Bay.

Captain Torn ordered his first mate, Ebenezer Fox, to take four of the Canadians and find a route over the treacherous sand bar at the river’s mouth. (Even today, the U.S. Coast Guard station at Desperation Bay responds to 400 calls for help every year.) Fox begged to be allowed to replace the Frenchmen. “I am to be sent off, without seamen, in boisterous weather, and on the most perilous of missions.” Captain Thorn bellowed, “Mr. Fox, if you are afraid of water, you should have remained at Boston. I command here! Mr. Fox, do not be a coward. Put off!” At about 1:00 p.m. Mr. Fox and the Canadians did just that, and were never seen again.

The next day Captain Thorn dispatched another seaman and three unhappy Hawaiians to find a passage. They also disappeared into the surf.  Only now,  with the ranks of his opponents thinned, did the captain dispatch able seamen. With difficulty they found an opening in the bar, and led the ship to the safety of the bay.  The survivors were overjoyed to be on dry land and away from the insane Jonathan Thorn.  Wrote one of the party, “The loss of eight of us within two days was deeply felt.” They immediately began building a fort, which they christened with the name of the man who signed their pay checks (and who had hired Captain Thorn!); Fort Astor. 

Captain Thorn did not wait for the construction to be completed. Now that he had put the worst of the troublemakers ashore, and before the supplies had been completely unloaded, he sailed north, intending on returning in few weeks. Mr. McKay, ordered to accompany the madman north, handed over his journals and bade his friends goodbye.  “If you ever see us again it will be a miracle”. 

There was no miracle. Off Vancouver Island Captain Thorn applied his powers of diplomacy to a local tribe, who in response butchered the entire crew (including Thorn, thank God).  Somehow fire reached the ship’s magazine, and the resultant explosion killed most of the avenging natives as well. Thus ended the naval and diplomatic career of Lt. Jonathan Thorn, dispensing death to everything and everyone he touched.  He also left 16 survivors back at Fort Astor, stranded on the lonely west coast of North America, with barley half the  supplies they needed and with no way of communicating their plight to anyone who cared to listen.

Meanwhile, as you may remember, Wilson Hunt was still leading a party of 65 French Canadian trappers out of Missouri.  And after thinking the thing over carefully, Mr. Hunt decided not to follow the trail blazed by Lewis and Clark.  With the arrival of spring, in April 1811,  he bought horses from the local Indians and mounted up his French Canadian trappers, each of whom had been hired because of their skills in handling a canoe. 

By September of 1811, these miserable dudes had got as far as the North Fork of the Snake River (also called Henry’s Fork), in present day Idaho. Here Mr. Hunt faced an open rebellion from his French Canadians, who found their thighs badly chaffing. So they gave their horses as gifts to the local Indians, and the trappers set about constructing birch bark canoes. This proved to be a bad idea, as just two days after launching their tiny armada, two men drowned and two canoes were overturned (dumping all their food and supplies) as the river alternated between cascades, rapids and rock strewn shallows.  Progress was so slow the party cleaned out every edible creature within reach of the river. In desperation, the starving Canadians split up into four groups. One turned back for civilisation, stumbling upon the broad South Pass through the Rockies along the way, while the other three groups headed further down “The accursed mad river.”

As they descended the Snake River they entered a narrow canyon. Quickly they were trapped in a quarter mile wide abyss, between 700 foot high walls of solid basalt.  There was nothing to eat here beyond the fish in the river. As Richard Neuberger would write, “It was a winter of famine, and they boiled their buckskin foot gear and drank the fetid broth. Two more voyageurs were swallowed up by rapids and another went mad.”

The survivors finally exited this purgatory by climbing out of the canyon. Again under Mr. Hunt’s command, they scattered in search of food.  Luckily they were stumbled upon by compassionate Indians, who fed and clothed the men before passing them on, tribe after tribe, until they were welcomed, each sad ragged party after the other, by the survivors of Astor’s ocean going disaster. Of the 64 who had set out from St. Louis in the fall of 1810, barely 45 staggered into Fort Astor, the last arriving in February of 1812…just in time for the war of 1812,  between the United States and Great Britain.

Captain William Black, of HMS Raccoon, was startled at what he saw. “Is this the great Fort Astoria I have heard so much of around the world? Good God, I could batter it down with a four-pounder in two hours!” But he did not have to. The Astorians, as they referred to themselves, surrendered to reality, secure in the knowledge that whatever nation’s flag was flying over the fort it remained the private property of an English citizen who had hired mostly French Canadians to do his dirty work. The war was, at worst, an inconvenience.

When the Treaty of Ghent was signed in December of 1814, a special clause was written, which specifically transferred the captured Fort Astoria from Britain back to the United States, where Mr. Astor had now taken up residence. Average men might occasionally die for a flag, but for rich elitists, money always trumps patriotism. 

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TENNIS MATCH

I believe that all battles are evidence of failure; of diplomacy, of politics, of military strategy.  A million minor inconsequential things must go wrong for there to first be a war and then a battle, and another million unintended mistakes must cumulatively be made for a great battle to occur. Even the language we use to describe these disasters is mistaken. In battle, nothing is “great” except the courage of the men caught up in it.

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 before. 

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, 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 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 by 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.  From this point forward each Japanese soldier received 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 still held only one, Garrison Hill.  And atop that, at a 280 degree bend in the switchback Impala Road, was DC Hill, where in peaceful times the District Commissioner had built himself a summer bungalow, complete with garden and 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, 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 forward 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 following 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, 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 silver 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 and 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 Marshal 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 defence 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 todays for a lie.

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