Captain Robin Rowland was 22 when his regiment was deployed to the north-eastern Indian city of Kohima. It was May 1944, and a small group of British Indian soldiers were being assaulted by a whole division of Japanese forces.
Capt. Rowland, now 99, clearly remembers approaching the city, following a trail of devastation to the front line.
“We saw abandoned trenches and devastated villages, and as we moved forward, the smell of death was everywhere,” he said.
The young captain was a member of the Punjab regiment of the British Indian Army, on his way to help relieve 1500 of his fellow soldiers who had resisted their number in Japanese forces ten times.
Cut off by the Japanese, the allied forces depended only on supplies by air, and very few believed that they would be able to sustain the relentless onslaught. Japanese soldiers marched on Kohima through what was then Burma – their goal was to invade India.
The Japanese had already traversed the British in Burma, but no one expected them to successfully negotiate the mosquito-infested jungle hills and fast-flowing streams en route to Kohima, the capital of Nagaland, and Imphal, the capital of the state of Manipur in India. .
When they did so, the British Indian troops who had to defend the two villages were surrounded by more than 15,000 Japanese soldiers. They fought for weeks to prevent the Japanese from penetrating and conquering the strategic city of Dimapur, which could open the routes to the plains of Assam. Few believed that the defenders could gain the upper hand.
The Japanese soldiers came “wave after wave, night after night,” Capt. Rowland recalls.
The fighting was fierce and British Indian forces were confined to Garrison Hill, which overlooked Kohima. At one point, the fights descended into hand-to-hand fights, with only a tennis court between the two sides dug into the hill.
The besieged British Indian soldiers continued until the reinforcements arrived. After three months, by June 1944, with more than 7,000 casualties and almost no food supplies left, the Japanese division withdrew and returned to Burma, despite the order from above to continue fighting.
“It was a tremendous resistance by 1,500 British Indian troops,” said Capt. Rowland. “If the Japanese had taken Garrison Hill, they would have gone to Dimapur.”
The British Indian forces were ordered to pursue the retreating Japanese and Robin Rowland was among the pursuers. Some of the Japanese soldiers died of cholera, typhus and malaria, but the largest number perished due to famine when they ran out of supplies.
According to military historian Robert Lyman, the battle of Kohima and Imphal “changed the course of World War II in Asia”.
“For the first time, the Japanese were defeated in battle and they never recovered from it,” he told the BBC.
Although it was a turning point, the fighting in Northeast India never captured the imagination of the public as D-Day, Waterloo or other battles had in Europe and North Africa.
It is often described as ‘the forgotten war’.
According to Bob Cook, the head of the Kohima Museum in York City, people in Britain were simply too far away to register so much.
“The Germans were only 22 km from Britain,” he said. “The thing that affected the people in this country the most was the looming threat of the German invasion.”
But there have been attempts to teach people about the Battle of Kohima and Imphal. In 2013, it was voted Britain’s biggest fight after a debate at the Imperial War Museum in London, a surprise winner over D-Day and Waterloo.
Robert Lyman filed the case for Kohima. “Great things were at stake in a war with the toughest enemy any British army had to fight,” he said in his speech.
But there has been little attempt in the subcontinent to emphasize the importance of the battle, in which thousands of Commonwealth soldiers and Indians – including men from present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – lost their lives.
One of the reasons was the British division of India shortly afterwards, according to Charles Chasie, a historian in Kohima in Nagaland.
“One of the reasons I think was that India’s leaders were initially too busy dealing with the consequences of transition and division,” he said. “The British decided to leave in a hurry before things got too complicated on the subcontinent.”
The Battle of Kohima was seen more as a colonial war, while the post-war conversation focused more on the Indian independence struggle led by the Indian leader, Mahatma Gandhi.
In addition to the ordinary British Indian Army, thousands of people from the Naga ethnic community fought alongside the British and provided valuable intelligence in the conflict. Their in-depth knowledge of the mountainous area was of great help to the British.
Today, only a dozen Naga veterans of the Battle of Kohima live. Sosangtemba Ao (98) is one of them.
“The Japanese bombers flew every day and dropped explosives. The sound was deafening and there was smoke after each attack. It was disturbing,” he recalled. Ao.
He worked with the British for two months, paying one rupee a day. He still has a lot of admiration for the fighting ability of the Japanese soldiers, he said.
“The Japanese army was very motivated. Their soldiers were not afraid of death. For them, the battle for the emperor was divine. When asked to surrender, they would become suicide bombers.”
A documentary about the battle, Memories of a Forgotten War, was recently released online to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the Japanese surrender. A few years ago, producer Subimal Bhattacharjee and the crew traveled to Japan for a commemoration.
“When the Japanese and British veterans of Kohima met, they hugged each other and started crying,” he said. “It was the soldiers who shot at each other, but still they showed a special bond. It was spontaneous and we did not expect it. ‘
For the Japanese, it was a humiliating defeat, and Japanese veterans rarely talk about their experience in Kohima.
“None of the Japanese food was left,” said Wajima Koichiro, an interviewer for the documentary. “It was a losing game and then we withdrew.”
The ethnic Nagas, who helped the British and suffered great casualties, also continued to suffer. They hoped that the British would recognize them as a separate Naga nation during the handover of power, and not as part of India. But they were “severely disappointed”, said historian Charles Chasie, and many blamed them for the thousands of Nagas killed in the ensuing conflicts with the Indian government and army.
Over the years, the families of those killed at Kohima and Imphal, especially from Britain and Japan, traveled to the two war cemeteries there to honor their ancestors.
Capt. Rowland returned to Kohima with his son in 2002 at the invitation of the Indian Punjab Regiment. He stood in front of Garrison Hill, where he and his fellow soldiers had resisted the waves of Japanese fighters 58 years earlier.
“It brought back many memories,” said Captain Rowland, recalling how a group of 1,500 men stood against the force of the entire Japanese 31st Division. “It was a great military achievement.”
Before leaving Kohima, Capt. Rowland and his son stopped to lay a wreath at the foot of the war stone for rough stones on Garrison Hill. As he put the wreath in its place, he remembered eight fellow soldiers he knew and who had been lost.
He knew that the fight no longer had the imagination of the public like most famous fights, but those who were there would never forget it.
“It was a great tribute to the resilience of human nature,” he said.