Battle of Kohima

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Kohima came down, at one point, to a tennis court. In April 1944, British and Japanese soldiers occupied trenches on opposite sides of a small rectangle of flat ground beside a colonial administrator's bungalow in the Naga Hills of Northeast India, close enough to lob grenades at each other across a strip of open ground that measured no more than the length of a tennis court. What had begun as a Japanese plan to knock out a British base became something far larger: a fight that American historians Alan Millet and Williamson Murray would later describe as the most savage close-quarters combat in the entire Second World War. The questions the Battle of Kohima raises are not just military ones. How did a small garrison of fewer than two thousand fighting troops hold a ridge against a full Japanese division? Why did the Japanese commander eventually retreat without orders, an act essentially unheard of in his army? And why, in 2013, did a poll by the British National Army Museum name the Battles of Kohima and Imphal "Britain's Greatest Battle"? The answers lie in the terrain, the supply lines, the personalities of two deeply hostile Japanese generals, and the ferocity with which both sides fought over a patch of jungle-covered ridge in one of the most remote corners of the war.

• 2. The Japanese Plan

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  Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi commanded the Japanese Fifteenth Army and, by early 1944, had transformed what was meant to be a modest spoiling attack into an attempt to invade India itself. The original plan, codenamed U-Go, was approved by Imperial General Headquarters on the 7th of January 1944. Its scope was limited: disrupt British IV Corps at Imphal in Manipur and prevent an Allied offensive that year. Mutaguchi pushed well beyond that brief. He envisioned Japan demonstrating the fragility of the British Empire to Indian nationalists and cutting off the American supply route to Chiang Kai-shek's army in China. To reach Imphal and then push further, his forces first had to take Kohima, the town that sat astride the only good road between the Brahmaputra River valley and the front. That task fell to the Japanese 31st Division, made up of the 58th, 124th and 138th Infantry Regiments and the 31st Mountain Artillery Regiment. Mutaguchi also wanted the 31st Division to push on from Kohima to Dimapur, 30 miles further north, where the Allies kept a supply dump 11 miles long and 1 mile wide. The division's commander, Lieutenant General Kotoku Sato, had never been consulted during the planning and told his own staff before they set out that they might all starve to death. Sato and Mutaguchi had stood on opposing sides of a factional split within the Japanese Army during the early 1930s, and Sato regarded his superior as a blockhead. That personal hostility would prove decisive weeks later, when Sato faced a choice between obeying orders and keeping his men alive.

• 3. March Through the Jungle

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  On the 15th of March 1944, the Japanese 31st Division crossed the Chindwin River near Homalin and began moving north-west through jungle trails across a front almost 60 miles wide. Carrying only three weeks of food and forced to leave behind half its artillery because of transport shortages, the division was committed from the start to a race against starvation. The left wing, commanded by Major General Shigesaburo Miyazaki, moved fastest. On the 20th of March, Miyazaki's force ran into the 50th Indian Parachute Brigade under Brigadier Maxwell Hope-Thomson near Sangshak. The Battle of Sangshak lasted six days. The Indian paratroopers ran critically short of drinking water, while Miyazaki fought most of the battle without his artillery. When the battle ended, the parachute brigade had lost 600 men and the Japanese more than 400. Miyazaki also captured food and munitions that the Royal Air Force had dropped to the defenders, but the delay cost his troops a week. Meanwhile, Lieutenant General William Slim, commanding the British Fourteenth Army, was reassessing his assumptions. Japanese documents captured at Sangshak revealed that a full division, not just a regiment, was heading for Kohima. Slim knew the town was almost undefended, and that Dimapur further north held the logistical heart of the entire front. He asked his superior, General George Giffard commanding Eleventh Army Group, for reinforcements. The 161st Indian Infantry Brigade under Brigadier Dermot Warren was flown to Dimapur, along with the 24th Mountain Artillery Regiment. The 23rd Long Range Penetration Brigade was dispatched by rail to Jorhat, 50 miles north of Dimapur, to threaten the flank of any Japanese push on the base.

• 4. The Siege of Kohima Ridge

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  When the siege began on the 6th of April, the garrison at Kohima numbered around 2,500 people, of whom roughly 1,000 were non-combatants. The fighting troops included one battalion of the 4th Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel John Laverty, a company of the 4th Battalion 7th Rajput Regiment, soldiers from the Assam Regiment, men from the Burma Regiment and the Shere Regiment of the Royal Nepalese Army, and various convalescents. Colonel Hugh Richards, a former Chindit, commanded the garrison. The ridge itself determined the shape of the fighting. It ran roughly north to south, with the Deputy Commissioner's compound and tennis court near a bend in the road, and Garrison Hill overlooking everything. The water supply point sat on GPT Ridge and fell to the Japanese on the first day of the siege, leaving the garrison to find water from a small spring on the north side of Garrison Hill that could be reached only after dark. Medical dressing stations were exposed to direct fire, and the wounded were often hit a second time as they waited for treatment. Japanese troops had captured a large rice warehouse in Naga Village shortly before the siege began, enough by some accounts to feed the division for three years; Allied aircraft bombed the warehouse and destroyed the supply almost immediately. The garrison was also shelled with weapons the Japanese had captured at Sangshak. By the night of the 17th-the 18th of April, the Japanese overran the Deputy Commissioner's bungalow. They also captured Kuki Picquet, physically severing the garrison in two. Lance Corporal John Pennington Harman of the 4th Royal West Kent Regiment distinguished himself in the fighting around Detail Hill during those early days, single-handedly destroying two Japanese machine gun posts on the nights of the 7th-8th and 8th-the 9th of April before being killed while withdrawing from the second attack. He was later awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

• 5. Relief and Counter-Attack

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  The British 2nd Division under Major General John Grover had begun arriving at Dimapur in early April. By the 11th of April, the Fourteenth Army had roughly matched Japanese troop numbers in the area. The 5th Brigade of the 2nd Division broke through Japanese roadblocks to reach the 161st Brigade at Jotsoma on the 15th of April. On the 18th of April, the 161st Brigade attacked toward Kohima with tanks of the 149 Regiment Royal Armoured Corps and the 1st Battalion 1st Punjab Regiment in the lead. After a day of heavy fighting they broke through. An officer from the relieving 6th Brigade described the garrison as looking like "aged, bloodstained scarecrows, dropping with fatigue," noting that the only clean things about them were their weapons. The counter-attack that followed lasted until mid-May. The British assembled a formidable artillery concentration: thirty-eight 3.7 inch Mountain Howitzers, forty-eight 25-pounder field guns and two 5.5-inch medium guns, supported by Hurricane fighter-bombers of 34 Squadron and Vultee Vengeance dive-bombers of 84 Squadron. Against this, the Japanese could field only seventeen light mountain guns with very little ammunition. The terrain, however, negated much of this advantage. The monsoon had broken, and troops attacking the steep slopes of Kohima Ridge moved through deep mud. In places the 4th Brigade cut steps up hillsides and built handrails to make progress. Two successive commanders of the 4th Brigade were killed in close-range fighting on GPT Ridge. Jail Hill, Kuki Picquet, FSD, and DIS fell to the British on the 11th of May after smoke shells blinded the Japanese machine-gunners. The final obstacle was the tennis court and the gardens above the Deputy Commissioner's bungalow. On the 13th of May, after multiple failed assaults, the British dragged a Lee tank up a newly bulldozed track, crashed it down onto the tennis court, and destroyed the Japanese trenches. The 2nd Battalion the Dorsetshire Regiment then cleared the hillside where the bungalow had stood.

• 6. Starvation and Retreat

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  By the middle of May, Sato's troops were starving. The 31st Division had entered the campaign with three weeks of rations, and those were long exhausted. Japanese resupply efforts had sent two missions using captured jeeps to haul goods forward from the Chindwin, but both deliveries carried mainly artillery and anti-tank ammunition rather than food. The British 23rd Long Range Penetration Brigade, operating behind the division, had cut Japanese supply lines and blocked foraging in the Naga Hills east of Kohima. Mutaguchi, whose main assault on Imphal had stalled around the middle of April, was simultaneously demanding that Sato detach forces from the Kohima fighting to strike Imphal from the north, without providing any means of supplying them. On the 25th of May, Sato notified Fifteenth Army HQ that he would withdraw on the 1st of June unless his division received supplies. When no relief came, he abandoned Naga Village and other positions north of the road on the 31st of May, acting without orders from his superior. A divisional commander retreating unilaterally was effectively without precedent in the Japanese Army. Miyazaki's rearguard fought on, demolishing bridges and blocking the road south toward Imphal, but was eventually forced off the road and into retreat eastward. The remnants of the 31st Division moved painfully south, only to find that other Japanese units, equally hungry, had already consumed whatever supplies had been stockpiled near Ukhrul and Humine. Many men were too weak to travel further than those improvised hospitals, which had no medicines, no medical staff, and no food. By the time British and Indian forces from Kohima met the 5th Indian Infantry Division advancing north from Imphal at Milestone 109 on the 22nd of June, the 31st Division had suffered at least 5,764 battle casualties in the Kohima area alone. British and Indian losses stood at 4,064 dead, missing and wounded. Many more Japanese subsequently died of disease, starvation, or took their own lives.

• 7. Commanders and Consequences

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  Sato was removed from command of the 31st Division in early July, replaced by Lieutenant General Tsuchitaro Kawada. He refused an invitation to commit seppuku and demanded a court martial to force his complaints about Fifteenth Army headquarters into the open. At the prompting of Lieutenant General Masakazu Kawabe, the army declared Sato mentally unfit to stand trial, a verdict that prevented any public airing of the planning failures Sato believed had doomed his division. Miyazaki, who had fought through the entire campaign, was promoted and given command of the Japanese 54th Division in Arakan. On the Allied side, Major General Grover was dismissed from command of the 2nd Division on the 5th of July for perceived slowness in the offensive and for difficulties with the Indian formations under his command. He accepted the dismissal without complaint and was appointed Director of Army Welfare Services at the War Office. A memorial to him was unveiled at Jotsoma, the site of his 2nd Division headquarters, seventy years after the battle. Brigadier Dermot Warren, who had commanded the 161st Brigade during the siege, was promoted to lead the 5th Indian Division but was killed in an air crash the following year. Slim, reviewing the Japanese commanders, derided Sato as the most unenterprising of his opponents and actively discouraged the RAF from bombing Sato's headquarters, calculating that keeping the general alive and in command served Allied interests. Japanese accounts reach a different conclusion, placing responsibility on Mutaguchi for a plan that was underpowered from the start, and for the personal antagonism that left the 31st Division without adequate supply or support at the moment it mattered most.

• 8. Memory and Meaning

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  The War Cemetery on the slopes of Garrison Hill holds 1,420 Allied war dead and is maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It sits on what was once the Deputy Commissioner's tennis court, the same ground where soldiers threw grenades at each other across a no man's land measured in yards. The memorial of the 2nd British Division in the cemetery carries an inscription that has become known as the Kohima Epitaph: "When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrow, we gave our today." The verse is attributed to John Maxwell Edmonds, who lived from 1875 to 1958, and is thought to have drawn on the epitaph Simonides wrote for the Spartans who died at Thermopylae in 480 BC. The comparison between Kohima and Stalingrad, drawn by writers including Martin Dougherty, Frank McLynn, and Jonathan Ritter, reflects the scale of what was decided there: the failure of the U-Go offensive effectively ended Japan's capacity to defend Burma from Allied counter-attacks over the following year. In 2024, the Nagaland Government unveiled the Kohima Peace Memorial together with Hiroshi Suzuki, the Japanese Ambassador to India. The project was funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency through its Official Development Assistance programme and implemented by the Nagaland Forest Management Project. The memorial complex includes a museum with personal diary entries written by both Japanese and British soldiers who fought in the Naga Hills, voices from both sides of the same battle preserved in the same building, in the same town where the battle once determined the course of a war.