Battle of Kohima
The Battle of Kohima was the turning point of the Japanese U-Go offensive into British India in 1944 during the Second World War. It took place in three stages from 4 April to 22 June 1944 around the town of Kohima, now the capital city of the state of Nagaland in Northeast India. From 3 to 16 April, 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 and British Indian force at Kohima was relieved.
From 18 April to 13 May British and British 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. From 16 May to 22 June the British and British Indian troops pursued the retreating Japanese and reopened the road. The battle ended on 22 June when British and British Indian troops from Kohima and Imphal met at Milestone 109, ending the Siege of Imphal.
In 2013, a poll conducted by the British National Army Museum voted the Battles of Kohima and Imphal as "Britain's Greatest Battle". The Battles of Kohima and Imphal have been referred to by authors such as Martin Dougherty and Jonathan Ritter as the "Stalingrad of the East".
Background
The Japanese plan to invade India, codenamed U-Go, was originally intended as a spoiling attack against the British IV Corps at Imphal in Manipur, to disrupt the Allied offensive plans for that year. The commander of the Japanese Fifteenth Army, Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi, enlarged the plan to invade India itself and perhaps even overthrow the British Raj.If the Japanese were able to gain a strong foothold in India they would demonstrate the weakness of the British Empire and provide encouragement to Indian nationalists in their decolonization efforts. Moreover, occupation of the area around Imphal would severely impact American efforts to supply Chiang Kai-shek's army in China. The objections of the staffs of various headquarters were eventually overcome, and the offensive was approved by Imperial General Headquarters on 7 January 1944.
Part of the plan involved sending the Japanese 31st Division to capture Kohima and thus cut off Imphal. Mutaguchi wished to exploit the capture of Kohima by pushing the 31st Division on to Dimapur, the vital railhead and logistic base in the Brahmaputra River valley.
The 31st Division's commander, Lieutenant General Kōtoku Satō, was unhappy with his role. He had not been involved in the planning of the offensive, and had grave misgivings about its chances. He had already told his staff that they might all starve to death. In common with many senior Japanese officers, Sato considered Mutaguchi a "blockhead". He and Mutaguchi had also been on opposite sides during the split between the Toseiha and Kodoha factions within the Japanese Army during the early 1930s, and Sato believed he had reason to distrust Mutaguchi's motives.
Prelude
Starting on 15 March 1944, the Japanese 31st Division crossed the Chindwin River near Homalin and moved north-west along jungle trails on a front almost wide. Because of a shortage of transport, half the artillery regiment's mountain guns and the infantry regiments' heavy weapons were left behind. Only three week's supply of food and ammunition was carried.Although the march was arduous, good progress was made. The left wing of the division, consisting of the bulk of the 58th Regiment and commanded by the division's Infantry Group commander, Major General Shigesaburō Miyazaki, was ahead of the neighbouring formation when they clashed with Indian troops covering the northern approaches to Imphal on 20 March.
The Indian troops were the 50th Indian Parachute Brigade under Brigadier Maxwell Hope-Thomson, at Sangshak. Although they were not Miyazaki's objective, he decided to clear them from his line of advance. The Battle of Sangshak continued for six days. The parachute brigade's troops were desperately short of drinking water, but Miyazaki was handicapped by lack of artillery until near the end of the battle. Eventually, as some of the Japanese 15th Division's troops joined the battle, Hope-Thomson withdrew. The 50th Parachute Brigade lost 600 men, while the Japanese had suffered over 400 casualties. Miyazaki had also captured some of the food and munitions that had been dropped by the Royal Air Force to the defenders of Sangshak. However, his troops, who had the shortest and easiest route to Kohima, were delayed by a week.
Meanwhile, the commander of the British Fourteenth Army, Lieutenant General William Slim, belatedly realised that a whole Japanese division was moving towards Kohima. He and his staff had originally believed that, because of the forbidding terrain in the area, the Japanese would only be able to send a regiment to take Kohima.
Slim knew that there were few fighting troops, as opposed to soldiers in line-of-communication units and supporting services, in Kohima and none at all at the vital base of Dimapur to the north. Dimapur contained an area of supply dumps long and wide. As the fall of Dimapur would have been disastrous for the Allies, Slim asked his superior, General George Giffard, for more troops to protect Dimapur and to prepare to relieve Imphal.
The Allies were already hastily reinforcing the Imphal Front. As part of this move, the infantry and artillery of the 5th Indian Infantry Division were flown from the Arakan, where they had just participated in the defeat of a subsidiary Japanese offensive at the Battle of the Admin Box. While the main body of the division went to Imphal, the 161st Indian Infantry Brigade, commanded by Brigadier Dermot Warren and with 24th Mountain Artillery Regiment, Indian Artillery attached, were flown to Dimapur.
Early in March, the 23rd Long Range Penetration Brigade was removed from Major General Orde Wingate's Chindit force, and was dispatched by rail from around Lalaghat to Jorhat, north of Dimapur, where they could threaten the flank of any Japanese attack on the base. Giffard and General Claude Auchinleck, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Indian Army, also prepared to send the British 2nd Division and Indian XXXIII Corps HQ under Lieutenant General Montagu Stopford from reserve in southern and central India to Dimapur, by road and rail.
Until XXXIII Corps headquarters could arrive at Dimapur, the HQ of 202 Line of Communication Area under Major General Robert Philip Lancaster-Ranking took command of the area.
Battle
Geography
Kohima's strategic importance in the wider 1944 Japanese Chindwin offensive lay in that it was the summit of a pass that offered the Japanese the best route from Burma into India. Through it ran the road which was the main supply route between the base at Dimapur in the Brahmaputra River valley and Imphal, where the British and Indian troops of IV Corps faced the main Japanese offensive.Kohima Ridge itself runs roughly north and south. The road from Dimapur to Imphal climbs to its northern end and runs along its eastern face. In 1944, Kohima was the administrative centre of Nagaland. The Deputy Commissioner was Charles Pawsey. His bungalow stood on the hillside at a bend in the road, with its gardens and tennis court, and a clubhouse, on terraces above. Although some terraces around the village were cleared for cultivation, the steep slopes of the ridge were densely forested.
North of the ridge lay the densely inhabited area of Naga Village, crowned by Treasury Hill, and Church Knoll. South and west of Kohima Ridge were GPT Ridge and the jungle-covered Aradura Spur. The various British and Indian service troop encampments in the area gave their names to the features which were to be important in the battle e.g. "Field Supply Depot" became FSD Hill or merely FSD. The Japanese later assigned their own code-names to the features; for example, Garrison Hill, which overlooked Kohima, was known as Inu and Kuki Piquet as Saru.
Siege
Before the 161st Indian Brigade arrived, the only fighting troops in the Kohima area were the newly raised 1st Battalion, the Assam Regiment and a few platoons from the 3rd Battalion of the paramilitary Assam Rifles. Late in March 161st Brigade deployed in Kohima, but Major-General Ranking ordered them back to Dimapur, as it was felt initially that Dimapur had more strategic importance. Kohima was regarded as a roadblock, while Dimapur was the railhead where the majority of Allied supplies were stored. Slim also feared that the Japanese might leave only a detachment to contain the garrison of Kohima while the main body of the 31st Division moved by tracks to the east to attack Dimapur.To Slim's relief, Satō concentrated on capturing Kohima.
As the right wing and centre of the Japanese 31st Division approached Jessami, over by road to the east of Kohima, elements of the Assam Regiment fought delaying actions against them commencing on 1 April. Nevertheless, the men in the forward positions were soon overrun and the Assam regiment was ordered to withdraw. By the night of 3 April, Miyazaki's troops reached the outskirts of the Naga village and began probing Kohima from the south.
Stopford's Corps HQ took over responsibility for the front from Ranking on 3 April. The next day, he ordered the 161st Indian Brigade to move forward to Kohima again, but only one battalion, 4th Battalion Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment commanded by Lieutenant Colonel John Laverty, and a company of the 4th Battalion, 7th Rajput Regiment arrived in Kohima before the Japanese cut the road west of the ridge. Besides these troops from 161st Brigade, the garrison consisted of a raw battalion from the Royal Nepalese Army, some companies from the Burma Regiment, some of the Assam Regiment which had retired to Kohima and various detachments of convalescents and line-of-communication troops. The garrison numbered about 2,500, of which about 1,000 were non-combatants and was commanded by Colonel Hugh Richards, who had served formerly with the Chindits.The siege began on 6 April. The garrison was continually shelled and mortared, in many instances by Japanese using weapons and ammunition captured at Sangshak and from other depots, and was slowly driven into a small perimeter on Garrison Hill. They had artillery support from the main body of 161st Brigade, who were themselves cut off away at Jotsoma, but, as at Sangshak, they were very short of drinking water. The water supply point was on GPT Ridge, which was captured by the Japanese on the first day of the siege. Some of its defenders were unable to retreat to other positions on the ridge and instead withdrew towards Dimapur. Canvas water tanks on FSD and at the Indian General Hospital had neither been filled nor dug in to protect them from fire. While a small spring was discovered on the north side of Garrison Hill, it could be reached only at night. The medical dressing stations were exposed to Japanese fire, and wounded men were often hit again as they waited for treatment.
Some of the heaviest fighting took place at the north end of Kohima Ridge, around the Deputy Commissioner's bungalow and tennis court, in what became known as the Battle of the Tennis Court. The tennis court became a no man's land, with the Japanese and the defenders of Kohima dug in on opposite sides, so close to each other that grenades were thrown between the trenches. The American historians Alan Millet and Williamson Murray wrote about the fighting at Kohima between the Japanese vs. the Anglo-Indian troops: "Nowhere in World War II – even on the Eastern Front – did the combatants fight with more mindless savagery".
On the night of 17/18 April, the Japanese finally captured the DC's bungalow area. Other Japanese captured Kuki Picquet, cutting the garrison in two. The defenders' situation was desperate, but the Japanese did not follow up by attacking Garrison Hill as by now they were exhausted by hunger and by the fighting, and when daylight broke, troops of 161st Indian Brigade arrived to relieve the garrison.