1,500 British Soldiers vs. 15,000 Japanese — The Siege That Broke Japan

[00:00:00]In March of 1944, the Japanese army launched the single most ambitious ground offensive of the entire Pacific War. They called it Operation U-Go. The plan was to cross the border from Burma into northeast India, capture the city of Imphal, and cut the Allied supply lines that kept China in the fight against [music] Japan. If it worked, it could shift the entire balance of power in Asia. But, the operation depended on one thing above [music] all else. A tiny hill town called Kohima, perched 5,000 ft up in the jungle mountains of what is now Nagaland, had to fall first. And when 15,000 battle-hardened Japanese soldiers arrived to take it, they found a garrison of barely 1,500 fighting men dug into a [music] narrow ridge waiting for them. What followed was one of the most savage sieges of the 20th century.

[00:00:53]The fighting got so close that at one point, [music] the only thing separating the two armies was a tennis court. To understand how the battle happened, you have to understand the man who set it in motion. Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi was the commander of the Japanese 15th Army.

[00:01:10]>> [music] >> And by early 1944, he was a man driven by a dangerous combination of ambition and desperation.

[00:01:17]Japan's war was going badly. The Americans were pushing across the Pacific island by island. China was still fighting, and Mutaguchi believed that a [music] bold strike into India could change everything. His plan was to send three divisions across the Burmese border, destroy the British and Indian forces gathered at Imphal, >> [music] >> and then push deeper into India. He genuinely believed that once Japanese troops crossed into India, the Indian population would rise up and overthrow their British colonial rulers. It was a fantasy. But, Mutaguchi had the authority [music] to act on it. The problem was logistics. The terrain between Burma and India was some of the most punishing on earth. Steep jungle mountains, valleys [music] choked with bamboo and monsoon mud. Narrow tracks that could barely support a man on foot, let alone [music] an army. British intelligence had looked at that terrain and concluded that no large force could move through it. They [music] were wrong. Mutaguchi sent two divisions toward Imphal from the south and east.

[00:02:18]His third division, the 31st, commanded [music] by Lieutenant General Kotoku Sato, got the mission that would decide everything. Sato was to march his 15,000 men through the Naga Hills, seize the little town of Kohima, and cut the only road connecting Imphal to its supply base at Dimapur. Without that road, the British forces at Imphal would be strangled. No food, no ammunition, no reinforcements. Kohima in 1944 was not a fortress. It was a quiet administrative center sitting on a narrow ridge surrounded by steep [music] hills covered in forest. The road from Dimapur to Imphal ran along the ridge, and whoever controlled [music] Kohima controlled that road. The town had a bakery, food depots, a general hospital with about a thousand [music] beds for soldiers recovering from malaria and tropical diseases, and a large Naga village on a neighboring hill. There was also the bungalow of Charles Pawsey, the British Deputy Commissioner for the area, a man who had spent [music] 20 years in those hills. Pawsey's home sat on terraced gardens at the top [music] of Garrison Hill, and behind bungalow was his personal tennis court. In a few weeks, that tennis court would become the most famous piece of ground in the entire Burma campaign. When reports reached British High Command that the Japanese were moving, the reaction was confusion. Nobody agreed on how many troops the Japanese could get through the jungle, or where the real threat was. Some officers thought the Japanese might send a regiment, maybe a brigade at most. The idea that an entire division of 15,000 men could march through those mountains seemed absurd.

[00:03:57]That miscalculation would nearly cost them everything. [music] Units were shuffled back and forth between Kohima and Dimapur in a mess [music] of contradictory orders that would have been comic if the stakes had not been so high. Colonel Hugh Richards, the British officer assigned to organize the defense of Kohima, never knew from one day to the next what forces he would actually have. Units arrived, [music] started digging in, and then got pulled away by different headquarters without [music] anyone telling Richards. He described the situation later as trying to fight a battle while his own side kept removing pieces from the board.

[00:04:35]Richards did what he could. He evacuated thousands of non-combatants from Kohima and organized anyone who could hold a rifle into some kind of defensive position along [music] the ridge.

[00:04:46]There was no barbed wire. The Naga Hills were not the Western [music] Front, and nobody had thought to stockpile that kind of material at a place [music] that was never meant to be defended. The positions were dug by hand into the hillside, and the men filling them [music] knew that when the Japanese arrived, there would be no falling back.

[00:05:04]Dimapur was the only direction left, and if [music] Kohima fell, Dimapur would be next. But one thing was clear. Whatever force ended up at Kohima, it was going to be small, [music] and once the Japanese offensive started, it was going to be surrounded. The unit that would bear the heaviest burden arrived on the 4th of April, cutting it as close as anyone could. The 4th Battalion of the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment, 18 officers and 446 men, marched into Kohima under the command of Colonel John Laverty. They were part of the 161st Indian Brigade, which had been sent to Kohima, pulled out, sent toward Dimapur, and then turned back again at the last possible moment. The rest of the brigade could not make it through before the Japanese closed the ring.

[00:05:54]So, the West Kents were on their own.

[00:05:57]Richards now had his garrison.

[00:05:59]It was not what anyone would have designed for a last stand. Along with the West [music] Kents, he had a company of the 7th Rajput Regiment, around 400 men of the Shah Regiment [music] from the Royal Nepalese Army, who had never seen combat, the remnants of Assam [music] Regiment and Assam Rifles units that had been trying to slow the Japanese advance, and roughly 500 convalescents and rear echelon troops from the hospital and supply depots.

[00:06:27][music] Maybe 2,500 people in total. About 1,500 of them could actually fight. Against an entire Japanese division of 15,000 men, there was one more person who mattered.

[00:06:41]Charles Pawsey had been asked to leave Kohima before the Japanese arrived. He was a civilian, not a soldier, and there [music] was no obligation for him to stay. He refused. Pawsey had spent two [music] decades living alongside the Naga people, and they trusted him. When the 161st Brigade had been pulled out days earlier, the Nagas took it as a sign that [music] the British were abandoning them. Pawsey's decision to stay changed their minds. The Nagas would go on to provide intelligence, [music] scout Japanese positions, carry wounded British soldiers to [music] safety through the jungle on their backs, and risk their own lives throughout the battle. General William Slim, the overall British commander, [music] later said their help was beyond value or praise. The first Japanese assault came at dusk on the 5th of April. The evening light was fading when artillery and mortar fire erupted from the jungle-covered hills around the ridge.

[00:07:39]Then, the infantry came. Soldiers of the 31st division charged out of the trees, screaming, firing, heading straight for the British positions. The defenders had been ordered to hold their fire until the Japanese were 30 m out. [music] When they opened up, Bren guns and Lee-Enfield rifles tore into the charging ranks, but the Japanese kept coming. They rushed into British trenches and the fighting turned into something out of a medieval nightmare.

[00:08:07]Fists, bayonets, [music] knives, shovels, entrenching tools, anything a man could grab became a weapon. Colonel Richards tried [music] to coordinate the defense from his command post, helped by a team of Sikh linesmen who spent most of the battle sprinting into artillery [music] fire to repair severed communication wires. Every time a shell cut the lines, [music] those men ran out into the barrage to splice the cables back together so Richards could talk to his company commanders. Without them, the defense would have splintered into isolated pockets fighting blind. But, the scale of what was happening was almost impossible to manage. The Japanese attacks came from multiple directions, probing for weak points along the tiny [music] perimeter, and they did not stop when darkness fell.

[00:08:54]Night after night, wave after wave, the Japanese threw themselves at the garrison. The defenders called the nightly barrage of fire the evening hate.

[00:09:04]Sleep became impossible. The Japanese would fire everything they had at dusk, mortars, [music] artillery, machine guns, and then the infantry would come screaming out of the dark. During the day, snipers kept the garrison pinned down. Any man who raised his head above the rim of a trench risked a bullet. Men fought, repaired positions, and waited for the next assault, running on [music] nothing but adrenaline and the knowledge that there was nowhere to retreat to.

[00:09:31]Some of the soldiers had stopped shaving. There was no time, no water to spare, and nobody cared what anyone [music] looked like.

[00:09:39]The only thing that mattered was holding the line until sunrise, and then holding it again until the next one. On the 8th of April, something happened that would become one of the most famous acts of individual courage in the entire war. A Japanese machine gun team had set up a position about 50 yd from the lines held by the Royal West Kents. The gun was chewing up the defenders, and nobody could get a clean angle on it. Lance Corporal John Harman, a 29-year-old from Kent, who was known as something of a maverick, decided to deal with it himself. He crawled forward alone, got close enough to throw a grenade into the position, and destroyed it. Then he walked back carrying the Japanese machine gun as a trophy. The next morning, [music] the 9th of April, Harman did it again. He spotted a group of Japanese soldiers [music] digging in ahead of his position. He ordered his Bren gun team to give him covering fire, fixed his bayonet, and charged [music] alone. He killed the Japanese soldiers in the position, but as he was walking back toward [music] his own lines, he was hit by a burst of fire. His company commander, Major Donald Easton, ran out under fire [music] to reach him. As Easton called for stretcher bearers, Harman looked up at him and said, "Don't bother, sir. I got the lot." He died shortly after. Harman was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, the first of two given during the battle. As the days wore on, the garrison's situation became desperate. The Japanese captured the areas known as GPT Ridge and Detail Hill, pushing the defenders into an ever-shrinking perimeter centered on Garrison Hill and Posy's [music] Bungalow. And with the loss of GPT Ridge came the loss of most of the garrison's water supply. Richards had to ration water to 1 pint per man per day. [music] In In heat, with men fighting and bleeding around the clock, one pint was almost nothing.

[00:11:35]Wounded soldiers lay in the open because there was no safe place to move them.

[00:11:40]Medical supplies were running out. The smell of the dead from both sides hung over the ridge in the tropical air. And then the fighting moved to the tennis court. The Japanese pushed through Pussy's gardens and occupied one end of the bungalow's tennis court. The British held the other end. The distance between them was roughly the length of the playing surface. Trenches were dug on both sides separated by that narrow strip of asphalt. Grenades [music] were lobbed across the court like tennis balls. Machine gun fire raked back and forth at point-blank range. The fighting was described in official reports as some of the hardest, closest, and grimmest of the entire Burma campaign.

[00:12:22]Men were killing each other from distances measured in feet, not yards.

[00:12:26]Despite all of this, the garrison held.

[00:12:29]Day after day, they held. The Japanese threw fresh troops at them every night and were beaten back every time. On some nights, the attacks came every half hour. The garrison's Rajput machine gunners fired so continuously in the 120° heat that their weapons literally melted down from overuse. British artillery positioned at Jotsoma, a ridge about 2 mi to the west, pounded Japanese positions around the [music] clock.

[00:12:58]Guided by spotters inside the shrinking perimeter, those guns were the garrison's lifeline. Without them, the sheer weight of Japanese numbers [music] would have overwhelmed the ridge days earlier. Airdrops brought some supplies, though in the chaos of the fighting, parachutes carrying food [music] and ammunition often drifted into Japanese lines instead. By the 16th of April, the garrison was running out of everything.

[00:13:22][music] The perimeter had been compressed to an area of roughly 350 square meters. Of the original 446 West [music] Kents, 150 were casualties. The remaining men were exhausted, dehydrated, [music] and many were wounded, but they had not broken.

[00:13:40]The relief finally came on the 18th of April. The British 2nd Division, under Major General John Grover, had been fighting [music] its way toward Kohima from Dimapur, smashing through a series of Japanese roadblocks along the road.

[00:13:54]On that morning, >> [music] >> the lead elements of the relief force, troops of the 1st Battalion, 1st Punjab Regiment, reached the garrison. The siege, 13 days of some of the most intense fighting the British Army had ever experienced, [music] was over. But the Battle for Kohima was not. The relief of the garrison was just the beginning of the second phase, and in many ways, it was even harder than the siege itself. The Japanese had not retreated. They had dug into the hills and ridgelines around Kohima with the same stubbornness they had shown in attacking it. And now the [music] British had to push them out, position by position, hill by hill, bunker by bunker. Fresh troops from the 2nd Division rotated in to replace the battered garrison, but the Japanese fought with a ferocity that stunned even hardened soldiers. Every hilltop had to be taken [music] individually. Bunkers had to be destroyed one at a time, often by men crawling [music] up within grenade range under direct fire. Tanks were brought up the narrow mountain [music] roads, but the terrain limited where they could go, and the Japanese had buried themselves [music] so deep into the hillside that direct hits sometimes failed to dislodge them. The battle for the tennis court alone lasted until the 13th of May, when the 2nd Battalion of the Dorsetshire [music] Regiment finally recaptured it after weeks of grinding, close-quarters fighting. Captain John Randall of the Royal [music] Norfolk Regiment, part of the relief force, was killed leading an assault on a Japanese [music] bunker position during this phase. He had told a fellow officer the night before that if he did not come [music] back to look after his wife and child. He was awarded the second posthumous Victoria Cross of the battle. The Naga people continued to play a role that history has often overlooked. Throughout the siege and the weeks of fighting that followed, Naga [music] villagers carried hundreds of wounded British and Indian soldiers out of the combat zone. They moved on narrow jungle tracks through driving rain >> [music] >> under occasional mortar fire fanning wounded men with branches when they had to stop for cover. A British officer from the 7th Worcestershire Regiment [music] described watching Naga stretcher bearers bring casualties in from the hills praising their calm and courage under fire. The doctors were [music] full of admiration. Without the Nagas, the casualty count would have been far worse. Meanwhile, behind the Japanese lines a different kind of crisis was unfolding. General Sato had marched his 31st division to Kohima with only three weeks of supplies. His superior, Mutaguchi, had promised [music] resupply that never came. By late April, Sato's men were starving.

[00:16:34]>> [music] >> Ammunition was running low. The monsoon rains were starting turning every trail into a river of mud [music] and the British were getting stronger every day pouring reinforcements and artillery into the fight while the Japanese got weaker with every passing hour. Sato began sending increasingly furious messages to Mutaguchi's headquarters demanding food and ammunition.

[00:16:58]Mutaguchi, sitting far behind the lines, could not accept that his grand offensive was collapsing >> [music] >> and refused to authorize a retreat. The exchange between the two generals became legendary. When Mutaguchi threatened to court-martial Sato for retreating, Sato radioed back with a response that would have been [music] unthinkable in the Japanese military culture of the time.

[00:17:20]He told Mutaguchi to do what [music] he pleased and that he would bring Mutaguchi down with him. On the 31st of May, Sato sent his final message. He called the [music] tactical ability of Mutaguchi's headquarters staff lower than that of cadets. Then he shut down his radio and pulled what was left of his division back toward the Chindwin [music] River leaving rear guards to slow the British pursuit. In the rigid hierarchy of the Japanese [music] military, what Sato did was practically unheard of. Officers were expected to fight to the death before disobeying an order. Sato chose to save his surviving men instead. The retreat became a death march. Thousands of Japanese soldiers, already weakened by starvation and disease, staggered through monsoon-drenched jungle. The monsoon had fully arrived by this point and the rain was relentless.

[00:18:11]Trails turned into rivers. Men collapsed in the mud and could not [music] get up.

[00:18:16]The trails became so littered with the dead and dying that retreating troops called them the roads of bones. Soldiers too weak to walk were left where they fell. Malaria, dysentery, and starvation [music] killed more men than British bullets ever had. Local Naga tribesmen who had suffered under the Japanese occupation [music] of their villages harassed the retreating columns. The Japanese had stolen livestock, destroyed homes, and used forced labor during [music] their advance. The Nagas had not forgotten. Of the 15,000 men Sato had marched to Kohima, only a fraction made it back across the Chindwin River into Burma alive. On the 22nd of June, British troops advancing south from Kohima met Indian troops [music] pushing north from Imphal at milestone 109 on the road between the two towns. The road was open. The siege of Imphal was broken.

[00:19:12]and the Japanese invasion of India was finished.

[00:19:16]In the broader scope of Operation U-Go, the losses were staggering. Of roughly 85,000 Japanese soldiers committed to the offensive, approximately 53,000 [music] became casualties. It was the single worst defeat the Japanese army had suffered on land up to that point in the war and they never recovered from it.

[00:19:36]The cost for the defenders was severe as well. Allied casualties [music] at Kohima and the surrounding fighting numbered over 4,000 killed, wounded, [music] or missing. The ridge itself was unrecognizable.

[00:19:49]The manicured gardens were craters, the bungalow was rubble.

[00:19:53]The tennis court was a scarred wasteland of broken earth and shattered [clears throat] concrete.

[00:19:58]The trees that had once shaded the hillside [music] were stripped to bare, splintered trunks. After the war, there was a reckoning for the Japanese commanders. Mutaguchi was relieved of his command and never held another operational posting. Sato was also removed, [music] though he was eventually treated more sympathetically by historians who recognized that his decision to retreat against orders [music] likely saved what was left of his division from total annihilation.

[00:20:26]The relationship between the two men became a case study in the catastrophic consequences of ego-driven planning and broken logistics. For decades, the Battle of Kohima was largely forgotten outside of military history circles. It happened in a remote corner of India in a theater of war that the British called the Forgotten War even while it was being fought. The troops in Burma [music] knew the nickname. They felt it. While the headlines focused on Europe [music] and the Pacific Islands, the soldiers fighting in the jungles and mountains of Southeast Asia [music] felt invisible.

[00:21:01]The men who survived Kohima came home to a country that barely knew their names [music] or what they had done. There were no parades, no newspaper spreads, no Hollywood films about what happened on that ridge. While Normandy, Stalingrad, and El Alamein filled the history books, Kohima slipped into obscurity. That changed in 2013 when the British National Army Museum conducted a public poll asking people to vote for Britain's greatest battle. The choice was wide open, spanning centuries of military history. And the result shocked [music] almost everyone. The battles of Kohima and Imphal, counted together, won the poll. A battle that most British people had never heard of was voted the greatest their country had ever fought.

[00:21:47]It was not a sentimental choice. The case was real. [music] Military historian Robert Lyman later said that the battle changed the course of the Second World War in Asia. [music] For the first time in the conflict, the Japanese army was decisively beaten on the [music] ground, and they never recovered from it. Authors and historians started calling it the Stalingrad of the [music] East. Field Marshal Slim, looking back on the siege years later, >> [music] >> wrote that sieges have been longer, but few have been more intense. And in none have the defenders [music] deserved greater honor than the garrison of Kohima. Today, the Kohima War [music] Cemetery sits on the slopes of Garrison Hill, maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

[00:22:28]>> [music] >> It holds 1,420 graves of Allied soldiers who fell during the battle. The cemetery is built on the terraces where the fighting was fiercest, and the outline of the old tennis [music] court is etched into the ground among the headstones. Visitors come from around the world and walk the same ground [music] where men fought hand-to-hand over a few hundred meters of ridge. At the base of the cemetery stands [music] a 15-ft monolith carved from local Naga stone, a memorial to the Second Division. Inscribed [music] on it is the Kohima Epitaph, words written by the poet John Maxwell Edmonds. They read, "When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your [music] tomorrow, we gave our today." Those 14 words have become one of the most recognized memorials of the Second World War. They are spoken at remembrance ceremonies. They are carved into monuments [music] and they carry a weight that only grows with time because they ask something of the living. They ask you to remember. The garrison at [music] Kohima was not supposed to hold.

[00:23:33]They were outnumbered 10 to 1. They were under supplied, thrown together from different units, and defending ground that had never been fortified. But, they held. 13 days against [music] an entire division, fighting in trenches so close they could hear the enemy breathing.

[00:23:49][music] The men of the Royal West Kents, the Rajputs, the Assam [music] Regiment, the Nepalese soldiers of the Sher Regiment, the convalescents who picked up rifles they [music] were never supposed to fire, and the Naga people who carried their wounded to safety through the jungle. [music] They all held and because they held, the Japanese invasion of India collapsed.

[00:24:11]The 31st division was destroyed.

[00:24:13]Operation U-Go became the worst defeat in Japanese [music] military history.

[00:24:18]The road to Imphal stayed open and the war in Asia turned. Sometimes a battle [music] comes down to a piece of ground so small you could walk across it in a few seconds. A tennis court, >> [music] >> a ridge, a line that a few hundred exhausted men refused to let the enemy cross. Kohima was that battle.

[00:24:38]And the men who fought it earned [music] every word of that epitaph.

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