Читать книгу Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 – The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire - Fergal Keane - Страница 12

On their way to Kohima from Burma, refugees would occasionally encounter Japanese units. They were not prevented from leaving Burma by the patrols and were usually able to carry the news of their encounters to Pawsey and the tea-planters who were organizing the relief effort. ‘Some of them gave us the grim information,’ wrote a planter, ‘that the Japs did not intend to bomb the road too badly as they looked forward to making full use of it themselves.’ The British and Indian forces were in no state to face a serious Japanese offensive. The 1st Glosters were stationed in Kohima as part of 17th Indian Division from August 1942 but were still suffering the effects of the retreat. As well as sick and wounded, a high proportion of troops were on leave. The battalion had left most of its equipment behind in Burma and supplies of food were short because of transport problems. As Captain H. L. T. Radice recalled, the road was constantly disintegrating because of heavy rain. ‘As a result, the battalion was on half rations.’ A Japanese reconnaissance plane came over frequently, but to the intense relief of the Kohima garrison it was never followed up by an air raid. As the refugees left, the village returned to its usual function as supply depot, a convalescent centre for sick and wounded troops, and the administrative headquarters of the Raj in the Naga Hills. Soon the officers were enjoying a social life once more. Lieutenant Dennis Dawson of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps described a bucolic existence: ‘It [was] a lovely place, a sleepy place. We had parties. There were three hospitals. Plenty of nurses and we thought “well this is a lovely life up here”.’

The autumn of 1942 was taken up with training exercises. The most excitement was a series of mock attacks on each other’s camps. Patrols were sent out to gain knowledge of the country and its people. ‘Everywhere these patrols went,’ said Captain Radice of the 1st Glosters, ‘the local Naga tribesmen showed themselves to be friendly and hospitable.’ From his experience of the terrain, Charles Pawsey understood that the first line of defence against any potential Japanese incursion into the area, large or small, should be an ‘invisible’ intelligence screen. Regular formations marching in long columns could not provide this. Only the Nagas could pass through the jungle as ghosts, moving between India and Burma to spy on Japanese troop concentrations, ingratiating themselves with Japanese officers by pretending to support the overthrow of the British and hanging around Japanese camps to pick up intelligence while playing the role of simple-minded rustics. One of the more exotic snippets that later reached army intelligence came from a Naga who reported the presence of a Japanese commander ‘living with two wives and a maid and … having two monkeys with him trained to hurl grenades’. The unnamed officer who wrote down this story added a coda that speaks loudly of contemporary attitudes: the information had come, he wrote, ‘from a Naga who may not have known the difference between a Jap and a monkey’.

The dilemma for the planners in military intelligence was how to use the Nagas and other tribal groups in a way that imposed some kind of order on operations but allowed them the freedom to range behind enemy lines. By the standards of contemporary military thinking the answer was unusually flexible. Lieutenant Barry Bowman, commander of a Chindit reconnaissance platoon later in the war, was standing in a jungle clearing one day when he heard a clanking noise coming down the track. The platoon took cover and waited to open fire, convinced it was a Japanese unit. ‘To our great relief and surprise an elephant hove into view. On its back was a crude bamboo howdah and perched half-in and half-out of it was an eccentrically clad British officer who waved to us cheerily … A quick cup of tea and he was on his way … he was a tall, biblically bearded fellow in flowing white robes, striding along at a great pace holding up a large black umbrella against the sun … His personal servant close behind him carrying a 12 bore shotgun.’ Bowman had met an officer of V Force, one of the more esoteric units of the entire war, a combination of tea-planters, adventurers, regular officers, old soldiers, former headhunters and Indian troops. In the Naga Hills the local tribes would act as guides, spies and soldiers in the ranks of V Force.^*

The founder of V Force was Brigadier A. Felix Williams who, at forty-seven, had already spent fifteen years learning the art of guerrilla warfare on the North-West Frontier. As commander of the Tochi Scouts,^† he had pursued the Fakir of Ipi up and down the mountains and gullies of Waziristan. To establish V Force, Williams was given £100,000 and a headquarters staff, and promised a delivery of 6,000 rifles. The guns never turned up, so the brigadier embarked on an extraordinary gun-running operation. He sent his men into the bazaars of India’s great cities to buy up what weapons they could. Then he turned to the most reliable suppliers in the entire subcontinent, the arms dealers of the North-West Frontier. Under the direction of local police, the gunsmiths of Peshawar turned out thousands of rifles which were shipped to Assam in a first-class carriage. Some of the money given to Williams was spent on enticements for the Naga Hill tribes: red blankets, beads, osprey feathers, opium and elephant tusks were among the cargo carried into the villages where men would be recruited into V Force. Many of the V Force officers were planters or policemen, whose local knowledge and years of experience with the hill tribes were thought to make them better suited to clandestine operations than regular soldiers. The truth was that it depended almost entirely on the individual: some V Force officers took to the life with gusto while others became sick and dispirited, discovering that weeks of trekking in thick jungle were a different prospect altogether from walking the hills of a tea plantation.

In its early days V Force enjoyed considerable freedom. It was supplied by the army but operated according to the instincts of its officers, many of them characters who would never have fitted into normal military routines. Operating in the Naga Hills later in the war, Lieutenant Bowman discovered that patrolling in the tribal areas could be a source of both trial and astonishment. Like almost every other officer engaged in special operations, he was impressed by the Nagas’ loyalty to the British. This was the outer limit of empire and yet echoes of home could be found in the most unlikely places. Entering a village one evening, Bowman’s patrol was greeted heartily by the headman. ‘The Pahok headman was extremely pro-British and insisted on us having dinner in his big long hut. It was all very claustrophobic, full of smoke and very dark with just one or two primitive oil lamps. However, the chicken and rice and rice beer were extremely welcome. The headman rounded off the evening by producing a battered old HMV gramophone on which he played his only record – it was Harry Lauder singing his old music hall song “Keep right on to the end of the road”. Highly appropriate.’ In another village the headman saved the lives of Bowman and his colleagues by alerting them to the presence of Japanese in a nearby hut. Having sprinted into the jungle, Bowman then regrouped with his unit and worked back to cover near the hut. ‘I decided not to hang around any longer and we opened fire. The Japs leapt and fell back under the hut and we raked the hut for a few rounds more and then hightailed back up the hill.’

Each of the six V Force areas was covered by at least two cells operating independently of each other, so that information could be cross-checked in case the Japanese tried to spread false intelligence. But the idea of using the V Force units as proper guerrillas gradually faded away because they could never muster enough firepower or trained men to challenge the Japanese in battle. The jungle also took a heavy toll. As one V Force commander, Colonel R. A. W. Binny, wrote, ‘Experienced officers were wounded, went sick or were relieved and their places filled by young officers from units in India. Though keen enough they could not quite keep up the patrolling standards or endure the same hardships as the earlier ones.’ The hardships were considerable, particularly for young men fresh from barracks in India. Lieutenant Colonel Ord, who commanded 5 V Ops Area, wrote that all the men under his command had to be able to march an average of thirty miles a day across the hills, unencumbered by heavy baggage. ‘A heavily loaded man is not a guerrilla.’

There were other, more esoteric elements to their jungle education. Edward Lewis was a V Force officer operating inside Burma, where local Chin tribesmen instructed him in the traditional means of body disposal. ‘When somebody died they put the body into a tree and let the ants eat the flesh. They would then go and collect the bones and put them in a hole.’ An official document noted that the Chins operating with V Force were ‘very fond of biting each other which is considered more satisfying than a mere brawl with knives’.

The V Force experiment was far from perfect: sectarian feuding among local tribes in the Arakan compromised its operations; and the lack of experienced officers inevitably reduced efficiency. An attempt to introduce fiercely warlike Afridi tribesmen from the arid North-West Frontier into the jungles under V Force command ended in mutiny and the disbandment of the Afridi Legion. A few senior generals viewed V Force, and all similar secret organisations, with disdain, believing they absorbed considerable resources for minimal gain. Some of this was undoubtedly based on genuine concerns, but there was also a strong element of prejudice. General Slim was more generous. ‘Later, along the whole front,’ he wrote, ‘V Force became an important and very valuable part of the whole intelligence framework.’ The Commander-in-Chief India, Sir Archibald Wavell, visited V Force headquarters at Imphal, nearly ninety miles from Kohima, where, having listened to an officer outline plans, he gave his blessing in a few brief sentences: ‘Good. Remember I back you. Make and commission your own officers. If you want help let me know. Good night.’

At the age of twenty-four she had made her first solo journey into the jungle. ‘There was a great deal of tut-tutting and a firm belief that at the end of three days I would be borne home in a fainting fit.’ Instead, Ursula Graham Bower stayed out for several weeks and came back ‘happy as a sandboy’, clutching specimens of Naga art. Her second trip took her to the Ukhrul district, on the border with Manipur, an area where the Nagas still practised headhunting and where three unfortunate Manipuri traders had been decapitated a short time previously. Ursula Graham Bower rationalised the practice: ‘If you come home with the head then you know that the rest of the gentleman is not looking for you.’

Within three years of that first jungle excursion, Ursula Graham Bower was commanding her own unit of V Force in the Naga Hills. The story of her conversion from Roedean debutante to commander of a tribal force is one of the most extraordinary of the war. The creation of V Force had led to a demand for officers who had lived among and were trusted by the Nagas. In the febrile atmosphere of 1942 this meant sweeping away the normal conventions of recruitment and opening the way for mavericks like Graham Bower.

She first visited the Naga Hills in 1937 when her ambition to study archaeology at Oxford was thwarted by a slump in the family fortunes. That summer a schoolfriend, Alexa McDonald, invited Ursula to accompany her to India, to visit her brother who was a civil servant in Manipur. The two women went by ship, train, river steamer, train again, car, foot and bamboo river raft. Travelling by raft, they knitted to while away the hours drifting down long rivers. Stopping to explore a small island, they had to run for their lives after a guide spotted tiger prints in the mud. After her adventure Ursula would never feel at ease in London again. Back home she began to cultivate senior fellows of the Royal Geographical Society, impressing them with her knowledge of Naga life and her enthusiasm for research. She made a second visit to Naga country before returning home in April 1939 to join the London Ambulance Service as war approached. The boredom of the phoney war, ‘knitting interminable jumpers and waiting for a siren that never came’, and her longing for the Naga Hills got the better of her and she announced to her family that she was going back to India. They responded with shock, suspecting that she had ‘gone completely off her rocker’, but hoping that she might meet a nice young officer in India – somebody who might prove more capable than they had been of taming her adventurous spirit.

She reached Kohima in November 1939, only to be told that a permit to travel out into the hills could not be granted yet. For reasons that were probably to do with the outbreak of war, the Naga Hills were strictly off-limits on the orders of the political agent. Frustrated in her ambition, Ursula Graham Bower suffered a nervous breakdown. ‘I hadn’t realised that a shock of this sort could stun one physically,’ she wrote. ‘I remember almost nothing of the next twenty-four hours.’ She went to see the political agent in person at Manipur, but he would not change his decision. Afterwards Ursula wandered alone in the dusk for hours. Her nervous collapse lasted a fortnight, during which time she put away or locked up anything that might be used as a suicide weapon. ‘It was a giddy path. The holds were so small; one clung hand by hand, a finger.’

Eventually permission was granted and she set off for the Cachar Hills, some eighty miles, as the crow flies, from Kohima. This was a district adjoining the Naga Hills, where the sixteen-year-old priestess-cum-rebel Gaidiliu had been active against the British. Gaidiliu had told her followers that even in prison the British could not kill her spirit, and that she would return in a form that her enemies would be unable to recognise.

When Ursula Graham Bower arrived she was surrounded by adoring locals who clearly believed she was the vanished priestess. The impression was reinforced by her physical appearance: the Englishwoman was tall and statuesque. ‘She [Gaidiliu] was tall and rather strongly built and one of her more lunatic followers decided I was the reincarnation … half the population appeared to go stark staring mad … they were rushing at me clawing at me and calling me Goddess.’ Warriors who had fought under Gaidiliu came in from their villages to see the reincarnation. Privacy became impossible. At one point she was having a bath when an elderly man carrying a gift of a chicken walked into her hut. She had no towel and only a bar of soap with which to cover herself. She screamed and a bodyguard rushed in to hustle the old man out. When she reported back to the government an official told her, with the ingrained cynicism of his species, that ‘if they must have a goddess they might as well have a government one’.

Ursula’s parents had nurtured visions of her attending glittering balls in Delhi or taking afternoon tea in Simla, but by the middle of 1942 their debutante daughter was about to become the first female guerrilla commander in the history of British arms. Although her only experience of war thus far had been taking care of refugees and wounded soldiers coming out of Burma, the fact that she lived in the hills and was respected by the local Nagas made Ursula Graham Bower a logical choice for command.

After consulting with Charles Pawsey and other officials, the head of V Force dispatched an elderly officer to bring her the news of her appointment. The man he sent, Colonel Douglas Rawdon Wright, was an old India hand who had ridden with the Deccan Horse on the Somme in one of the last great cavalry charges of British arms. He had also spent several years as an officer with the Assam Rifles. Although badly wounded in the leg on the Western Front and forced to retire to England, he yearned to return to the India where he had soldiered as a young man. Colonel Rawdon Wright badgered the military authorities for a job. Eventually they sent him out to Assam to a desk job with V Force. Rawdon Wright soon tired of the inertia of headquarters and the nagging sense that younger men were laughing at the desk-bound old warrior with the pronounced limp. When asked to go into the Cachar Hills and give Ursula Graham Bower news of her command he seized the opportunity with enthusiasm.

Looking out of her bungalow one August lunchtime, Graham Bower saw an elderly white man limping down the narrow path to the village. She immediately sent a man with a note to invite the visitor to lunch. A reply came a few minutes later: ‘So sorry but I’ve got a gammy leg. I’d better go straight on down to the rest-house.’ Later in the afternoon she made her way down to meet the colonel and saw that he was unable to bend his leg. But when they set out to explore the district he refused all offers of help from the Nagas: he would not be carried about ‘like a woman’ or some effete civil servant from Delhi. And so the group traversed steep inclines over several miles while Rawdon Wright struggled along, sometimes going down on all fours to force his way upwards, and all the time chatting with Graham Bower about the quality of the fishing in the hills or about people they knew in common in Kohima and Imphal. ‘He was superb,’ she wrote later. ‘We might have been sitting in a club veranda.’ On his way back down from the hills the Naga offered to provide a litter on which he could be comfortably carried. Again he refused. Graham Bower’s account of his departure can be read as an elegy not only for an old soldier, but for an ideal of imperial duty that was entering its twilight. She stood with the village headman and watched the colonel climb over the rocks and over the slippery ground, leaning on the shoulder of his guide until he reached the turn of the road that would take him out of view. He stopped and turned back to wave. ‘We waved back. Then the white shirt was gone. Nobody said anything, because there was too much to say.’ On his way down to the plains he fell over three times. The journey ruined his health and he was dead before the end of the year.

Ursula Graham Bower lived in the Cachar Hills among terraced rice paddies whose surfaces glistened like signalling mirrors whenever the sun broke through the monsoon clouds. The area had recently experienced severe hunger, the consequence of decades of competition over land, and the destruction of the rice crop by grasshoppers. Graham Bower believed the area, which lay outside Charles Pawsey’s bailiwick, had been neglected and mismanaged by officials ‘not always of the best type’, men who regarded Cachar as merely a way station on the road to a better job. The government was not loved here; there was an awareness of neglect, and lingering bitterness over the suppression of the Gaidiliu rebellion, which would test Graham Bower’s political skills to the utmost. Colonel Rawdon Wright had told her to recruit from all the villages of the area. Recruit first, he said, and the guns and ammunition would follow. But then what? By now the stories of what the Japanese did to anybody they captured were well known. Death from a bullet would be a highly desirable outcome for a young woman caught with a weapon in the Naga Hills. A V Force patrol that had infiltrated back into Burma at the end of the previous May had been captured by the Japanese near the Chindwin river. An Indian officer had had his eyes gouged out before being killed, while two tribal scouts had been tied to a tree and executed.

Ursula Graham Bower would never have recruited her little army, or found the confidence to lead operations, without the help of Namkiabuing, a warrior of the Zemi Naga group, who became her bodyguard and assistant. She wrote of him in terms that rose above the contemporary European discourse of the ‘good native’. ‘He had an intense, a vivid sense of right and wrong. They were to him a personal responsibility. He could no more compromise with wrong than he could stop breathing.’ From the start Namkia made it clear that he was no pliant instrument of European rule. The two argued regularly and he submitted frequent resignations before returning to work. His granddaughter, Azwala, thought Namkia regarded Ursula more as a younger sister than as his employer: ‘He was very protective to her … because … they do not have a sister. So Ursula Graham Bower was a very beloved sister of the family.’

It was in the villages that Namkia proved his gift for debate. There were many in the area with bad memories of recruitment during the First World War, when labour battalions were raised for the Western Front. The men who returned brought back tales of horror. Graham Bower recorded a typical argument during one of her recruitment drives:

A Hangrum man [stood] up: ‘You’ll take us away! It’s a trap!’

Namkia [stood] up in an answer: ‘No! It’s an honest offer!’

‘Why should we fight for the Sahibs? We didn’t fight for the Kacharis, we didn’t fight for the Manipuris – why should we fight for the British?’

Namkia again: ‘Why shouldn’t we? Did the Kacharis or the Manipuris stop the Angamis raiding? Haven’t the Sahibs done that? Haven’t they given us roads and salt markets? Haven’t they given us protection and peace? Don’t we owe them something for that?’

And so it went on. Recruits were eventually offered but they were not warriors. Graham Bower noted that the village had offered up ‘the lame, the halt and blind’. Eventually, after she had sworn an oath that the men would not be taken away from the hills, the village relented and offered fitter specimens.

Next, the problem was to arm the recruits from the different villages. It was government policy to keep arms out of the hands of the Nagas and other tribes in order to stop them raiding each other or turning the weapons on the British. The arrival of the Japanese on the border removed this restraint. Graham Bower’s men were issued with guns, ninety ancient muzzle-loaders, which were probably as much a danger to themselves as to the Japanese. Still, they boosted the recruits’ self-esteem and their confidence in Graham Bower. They patrolled the hills with knowledge of the terrain and of concealment that no European could have matched. V Force headquarters gave orders that they were to avoid engagement with the enemy. Intelligence gathering was the priority.

A British soldier sent to learn jungle warfare skills with Graham Bower remembered her effect on both the Nagas and his British comrades. ‘When she spoke she had the most beautifully cultured voice and when she spoke we were captivated. Everyone of us said later that if she said “I want you to hang yourself by the neck from the nearest tree,” I am sure we would have done it. And these Nagas worshipped her.’

Closer to Kohima, Charles Pawsey had his own Naga intelligence network constantly bringing updates from the border area. In early September 1943 he received a message from a village reporting a suspicious-looking man claiming to be local but believed to be Japanese or Chinese. A fortnight later Pawsey was reporting to his deputy that ‘Japanese in great numbers had entered the hills … three villages have been bombed and burned for disobeying their orders and five people killed’. There were worrying reports, too, about some village chiefs offering their services as guides to the Japanese in return for gifts of salt. The Naga Hills were tense and expectant.

Perhaps because of wartime tension, the sense of the prevailing order being threatened, the hills experienced a brief revival of headhunting in late 1943. The Governor’s Fortnightly Report for the first half of December recorded that two villages had joined with a Burmese village in a major raid across the border. A second report to the Governor evoked the tense nature of affairs: ‘In the Naga Hills Tribal Area the powerful Konyak village of Sangnyu is reported to be threatening to interfere with the carriage of supplies for us by Zangkam who are their hereditary enemies.’

There were less threatening annoyances. Ursula Graham Bower was disturbed one morning by the arrival of an officer with a large retinue of porters. He had made his way to her post by claiming that he was a V Force officer. The lieutenant was in fact attached to an engineering unit and had been sent to look at the wreckage of a crashed American aircraft. Graham Bower was suspicious of the empty litter being carried by his men. When questioned, he told her it was for a sick subordinate. But the Nagas discovered that it had been used to carry the lieutenant through the hills, ‘making him the laughing stock of several villages in the process’. He told the Naga headman that because he was over forty he could not walk the difficult terrain. The headman was himself over sixty. It was an image of simpering weakness that could undermine the image of V Force among the local tribes. Remembering poor old Rawdon Wright and his brave progress across the hills, Graham Bower was furious and decided to teach the newcomer a lesson. ‘We had not been so bitter or angry for years,’ she wrote. Having learned that the lieutenant was also terrified of the ghosts that were reputed to stalk the hills, she arranged for two Nagas to terrorise him with fearful noises throughout the night. He left the following morning, whey-faced with exhaustion and fear.

Both Ursula Graham Bower and Charles Pawsey decided to stay on the wild frontier and take whatever the war might bring. Although as different in personality as it was possible to be – she the feisty extrovert, he the eternal reticent – they were driven by something more than duty to the empire. One could describe what they came to feel for the Nagas as loyalty, except that it was more intimate than that. By different paths they had come to love the Naga people and would stand or fall with them when the hurricane struck. It was a love that would be reciprocated at Kohima in courage and blood.

* Set up in 1942, the plan was for V Force to operate in six areas along the 800 mile frontier between India and Burma, with headquarters at Cinnamara in Assam. Its existence was predicated on the assumption that the Japanese would eventually attack. In the event, V Force was to remain behind and carry out hit-and-run operations. Several other clandestine groups, including Z Force and Force 136, as well as the Special Operations Executive, also operated in the frontier area.

† The Tochi Scouts were made up of around twenty white officers and 2,000 native troops. The Canadian correspondent Gordon Sinclair wrote in his book Khyber Caravan (reissued by Long Riders’ Guild Press, 2001) that they were ‘the only branch of the service who did, and do, wheel into action on their own responsibility without the okay of politicians’.