Bones of the Fathers – The Battle of Kohima Remembered
By Michael Shipster 2010

Fergal Keane launched his new book Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 on Wednesday 28th May 2010 at the Royal Commonwealth Club, London, in the presence of many veterans. A very moving event.

Private Tom Cattle (2nd Dorsets) with author Fergal Keane

I must have sung the National Anthem – what? hundreds of times in my nearly sixty years, but when the young Shinto priest and his party of Japanese invited us to follow their rendering of the Imperial Japanese Anthem with ‘God Save the Queen’, my immediate worry was I might not remember the words.  My two companions were also troubled: Toby Sinclair, a photographer and friend of 25 years, leaned over and quietly confessed he could not sing in tune; and Fergal Keane, the BBC correspondent, as an Irishman, was visibly struggling with quite a different dilemma. But this was no place for faint hearts. We nodded to one another and gave voice.  

Sixty-six years ago there was only one national anthem sung where we were standing: on the tennis court at Kohima, in Nagaland, on India’s border with Burma.  In April 1944 this little hill station was the last line of defence that stood between the seemingly invincible Japanese army and the plains of India to the west.  Here a small garrison of Indian and British infantry fought an entire Japanese Division to a standstill on a patch of land hardly bigger than a football field, around the Deputy Commissioner’s Bungalow.  Afterwards Earl Mountbatten described it as ‘one of the greatest battles of history…in effect the Battle of Burma, naked unparalleled heroism, the British-Indian Thermopylae’.  Today, the battle is little known, or remembered.

Before the war Kohima had been an idyllic colonial backwater.  With their unerring instinct for location, the British administration had placed the DC’s residence on a spur, with spectacular views over the Naga Hills, surrounded by lawns and flowers - and a tennis court for recreation. As word of the Japanese advance reached the garrison, the defenders, caught by surprise, tore up the gardens and dug themselves in to await the Japanese onslaught.  

For thirteen days and nights they held out, beating off wave after wave of attack, under constant artillery and mortar bombardment and sniper fire from the surrounding hills.  Often just yards apart, Japanese, Indian and British soldiers engaged in savage hand-to-hand fighting with whatever weapons were to hand, even trenching tools.  One account has it that sometimes the air was so thick with grenades it was like some lethal snowball fight.  Falling back as each successive line of defence fell, the British and Indian forces made their final stand around the tennis court and the now ruined DC’s Bungalow.

My father, Major John Shipster, reached Kohima as part of the relieving force in May 1944.  Just turned 22, he was commanding an infantry company in the Punjab Regiment, part of Slim’s 14th Army.  Four years before, after the war broke out, he had enlisted straight from school and shipped out to India.  By the time he reached Kohima he had already seen heavy fighting in the Arakan campaign in Burma, in which he had been severely wounded and where he had been awarded an immediate DSO.  

The scene that greeted him as he arrived in Kohima was one of utter devastation.  The trees were gaunt skeletons, the ground torn up by shellfire and littered with unburied dead bodies.  The stench was appalling.  The once-pristine grounds of the DC’s residence now resembled an apocalyptic scene from the Somme.  Though the garrison was relieved, the Japanese were far from beaten and it took a further two months of bloody fighting to drive them out of Nagaland and into Burma.

After the war, the battlefield was given to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.  The lawns, flowers and shrubs returned, and the lines of the tennis court were again marked out, this time in stone.  Around the Cross of Remembrance 1470 soldiers - Christians, Muslims and Jews – were laid to rest in neat rows overlooking the town, and a memorial erected to the 917 fallen Hindu and Sikh soldiers who were cremated, after their faith.  At the lowest point, near what is now a bustling traffic circle, a massive slab of stone was dragged into place by Naga tribesmen, bearing the famous Second Division inscription: ‘When you go home/Tell them of us and say/For your tomorrow/We gave our today’.

Though my father seldom spoke of his experiences in the war, Kohima is a name I have grown up with, synonymous with glory, sacrifice and slaughter.  In 1988, when I was posted as a diplomat to the British High Commission in Delhi, I arranged permits for my father and me to visit the battlefield, his first visit in over forty years.  We travelled together by train across the Indian plains he had known as a young soldier, first to the Punjab Regimental Depot at Ramgarh, where he received an emotional welcome, then on to Ranchi, where his regiment had completed jungle training in 1943.  But when the time came to proceed to Kohima, he decided he could not after all face it.  My father lived to a good age, but during his last years his sleep was disturbed by nightmares, which he could never quite recall on waking.

I finally made it to Kohima a few weeks ago, travelling with Fergal, who was researching his book on the battle, and Toby, as photographer.  Over several days we walked up and down the steep ridge, matching the features of the now sprawling town to old photographs and maps of the battle from my father’s album, and so came to understand better what the defenders had endured.  But from Fergal I learned something else: the terrible resonance of the name Kohima for the Japanese survivors and the families of those who never returned home.  Of the 15,000 troops of the Japanese 31st Division that launched the assault on Kohima, fewer than 5,000 survived.

The image of the Japanese in the Second World War that I’ve carried with me from childhood is one of almost inhuman discipline and capacity for sacrifice, able to march and fight on a bowl of rice a day; but also a brutal people, who routinely mutilated prisoners and slaughtered enemy wounded.  My father learned to respect them as soldiers, but he knew he could expect no mercy if he fell into their hands.  They in turn would rather commit suicide than allow themselves to be taken prisoner.  

In later life, my father decided to visit Japan to seek out Japanese soldiers who had fought at Kohima. He and those in his group were aware that this was seen almost as an act of betrayal by other British veterans, especially ex-POWs, who could ‘neither forgive nor forget’.  He understood their bitterness, but felt it was the right thing to do.  In the hot springs of Hakone with his elderly Japanese hosts he found a shared understanding of what they had all been through, and reconciliation. At the end of his visit he presented his personal notebook and map of Kohima to a former Japanese company commander who had fought there.

Towards the end of our stay in Kohima, a group of Japanese tourists arrived at our hotel: sons and daughters of soldiers who had fallen in the Burma campaign.  For most this was their first visit, though one had come 30 years before, to look for his father’s bones for reburial in Japan. After dinner I approached them. Only one spoke any English, a young Shinto priest, whose grandfather, a major in the Imperial Japanese Army, had been killed near Kohima.  His bones had never been found.

I showed him a picture of my father from that time, and he in turn pulled out of his pocket a sepia photo of a similarly young man in an oversized uniform, staring seriously into the camera, flanked by his parents.  He said he would be performing a ceremony for the families at the cemetery the next day – there is no memorial to the Japanese at Kohima - and invited us to join them.

The following morning we looked on as they gathered in silence on the tennis court.  Dressed in dark suits and gym-shoes, with ceremonial scarves round their necks, they unrolled their banners and flags and tied them to the base of the Cross of Remembrance.  They set up a makeshift altar on which they placed photos of their fathers, flowers, burning incense, wooden boards with greetings, and gifts for the afterlife: bananas, crackers, fruit juice, cigarettes.

After the singing of the national anthems and opening prayers, the priest invited the group to approach the altar. One by one, they bowed, knelt and put a pinch of incense on the flame.  An elderly woman, carrying photos of her uncle and father, whom she had never known, read a message to them, her voice shaking with emotion.  The priest nodded to me to come forward and I did so, copying what I had seen the others do.  

The priest sang some concluding prayers, and then turned to the three of us and thanked us for being there.  Our presence, he said, had helped them find comfort and peace.  In reply I explained why I had come and how profoundly Kohima had affected my father.  Also how, when British veterans like him had travelled to Japan to meet their former enemy, they had met with anger and incomprehension from some British veterans, who had suffered terribly at the hands of the Japanese.  But that visiting Japan had helped him, too, find peace.  I thanked them for including us, and said I thought my father would have approved.

Next morning, in the dining room waiting for breakfast, I found myself alone except for a young British woman at an adjacent table.  I asked what had brought her to Kohima.  She said she was part of an aid project, and this was her third visit.  She in turn asked me why I was visiting, and I replied: “My father fought here”.  She said she’d heard of the battle, but had not visited the cemetery.  “Who was fighting?” she asked.  “Was it in the Second World War?”  I replied it was, and that many Indian, British and Japanese soldiers had been killed.  “What was the result?” she asked.  “I mean, who won?”

Winchester, February 2010


Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944
Fergal Keane
Harper Collins April 2010