Why Japan’s Invasion Of India Broke On 1,500 British And Indian Troops

0530 hours, April 5, 1944. 200 miles east of the Indian Rail at Dimmapur on a mountain saddle in the Naga Hills, 9 miles from the place where India ends and Burma begins. A man stands at the window of a bungalow. His name is Charles Py. He is 50 years old, deputy commissioner of the Naga Hills since 1937, decorated for valor with the military cross in the first world war.

 A career officer of the Indian Civil Service, 20 years in these hills, fluent in tribal customs on firstname terms with men who carried spears. He has been told to leave. He has refused. He looks out at the garden he laid out himself. The tennis court he built for his guests, the road that runs past his fence, the hill behind his house, the one the army has decided to call Garrison Hill.

 And in the halflight, he sees what the army has been telling him is coming for 10 days now. A Japanese division, roughly 15,000 men, disciplined, veteran, confident, the same army that swept through Burma in 1942, the same officer corps that took Singapore. He counts the defenders, there are about 1,500 fighting men on Garrison Hill.

Behind them, in the hospital and the supply huts, perhaps a thousand more, cooks, clerks, walking wounded, men who handle telephones and rations and mules. Together, roughly 2500 souls, 10 to one against. Charles Porsey is not a soldier of the line, but he has spent 2 years studying military situation maps and reading dispatches, and he knows the ratio that wins a siege. It is not 10:1.

It is not 5:1. The defender’s edge runs out somewhere around 3:1 against, sometimes earlier, depending on the terrain. By the standard arithmetic of war, Kohima is going to fall. He cannot see how it does not. He spends the morning trying to write a dispatch that explains in measured language what is about to happen. He cannot finish it.

The words run out and the firing starts before he closes the page. Pause on that sentence because here is what almost nobody at his bungalow window understood that morning, including Py, including Colonel Hugh Richards, who commanded the garrison, including the men of the fourth battalion Royal West Kent Regiment, who had marched into Kohima the day before.

 This is not a story about a garrison’s last stand. This is not a story about a hill held against the odds. This is a story about an army that came 200 m into India carrying only what it could eat in 3 weeks and an enemy that had quietly learned how to be fed from the sky. The Japanese came expecting to capture British rations.

They came expecting to find supply depots and grain stores. They came expecting that the British defense would do what every British defense in Burma had done before, which was to break and to leave its stores behind. They came carrying enough food for 20 days. They were on day 14. By the time the sun was up over Garrison Hill on the morning of April 5, the clock on the Japanese invasion of India had already started counting down. None of them knew it yet.

Most of them would never know it. But the men crouched in their trenches on Kohima Ridge were not the thing that broke Operation Yugo. The thing that broke Operation Yugo was the timetable. Part one. To understand what brought 15,000 Japanese soldiers to a mountain saddle in the Naga Hills, you do not need to go back to the start of the Pacific War.

 You need to go back to a different war entirely. The war between Russia and Japan in 1904 and 1905. Because Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi, who commanded the Japanese 15th Army in the spring of 1944, was a soldier of a particular school. He had grown up inside an army that had taught itself across 40 years that aggressive movement defeats firepower, that the offensive solves problems the defensive cannot, that a Japanese soldier on the march, lightly fed, lightly equipped, was worth several of any enemy he was likely to meet. This was not a fantasy.

It was a doctrine that had worked. In 1905, the Japanese had broken Russian armies in Manuria. In 1937, they had broken Chinese armies on the planes and in the cities of central China. In 1941 and 1942, they had broken the British in Malaya in 70 days. They had broken the British again in Burma in 3 months.

 They had taken Singapore, then a fortress with an army smaller than the one that surrendered to them. By every metric the Japanese officer corps cared about, the offensive was the answer. And in early 1944, Mutaguchi looked at a map of the Indo Burmese border and saw a chance to apply the doctrine one more time.

 He proposed an offensive that he called Operation Yugo. It was not in his original conception an invasion. It was a spoiling attack. The British were obviously preparing to push back into Burma. Mutaguchi would strike first, push them off balance, capture the road junction at perhaps reach the rail head at Dimapur and break up the British buildup before it began.

 That was the plan on paper. What it became in Mutaguchi’s mind across the winter of 1943 to 1944 was something larger. He began to speak of crossing the Brahmautra, of reaching the Bengal plane, of triggering an uprising of the Indian population against the Raj. He spoke of riding a white horse through the streets of Delhi.

 He found in the exiled Indian nationalist Subas Chandra Bos a partner who shared the vision. Boosez had raised an army from captured Indian soldiers in Singapore. He called it the Indian National Army. He marched it under a banner that read Delhi Charalo to Delhi. The Imperial General headquarters in Tokyo was skeptical.

 The terrain between Burma and India was the worst in Asia. Mountains, jungle, malaria. There was no road on the Burmese side that could carry an army. There was barely a road on the Indian side. Supply in any conventional sense was impossible. Mutaguchi had an answer for this. He had three. First, the offensive would move fast.

 Three divisions across the Chinduin River. Three roads through the mountains. Three independent thrusts hitting the British before they could concentrate. Speed was the multiplier. A Japanese division moving light could march in two weeks what a British column needed 2 months for.

 Second, the offensive would carry cattle. Tens of thousands of beef cattle requisition from Burmese villages would walk with the divisions. The cattle would carry packs on their backs. When the rations ran out, the cattle would be eaten. The Imperial Japanese Army had used this method in China. It had worked.

 Third, and most importantly, the offensive would be fed by the British. This was not wishful thinking. This was a documented pattern. Every time the British had been defeated in Burma, they had left supplies behind. Whole depots, whole warehouses. The Japanese army that took Rangon had moved on captured British petrol and captured British rations for months.

 The men marching on Kahima were not carrying the food they would need to win. They were carrying the food they would need to reach the food. Mutaguchi gave Lieutenant General Koto 3 weeks of rations. Then they would be in Kohima. Then they would be eating what the British had brought. Pause on this. Because the plan was not absurd.

The Japanese officers reading the orders did not laugh. They had eaten British rations for 2 years. They had requisitioned British petrol, fired British rifles, slept in British camps. The lessons of 1942 were clear. The British would fall back and the British would leave their stores behind and the Japanese would walk on what the British had left. Sarto studied the orders.

 He was a different kind of officer from Mutaguchi. Cautious, methodical. He distrusted operational poetry. He believed Mutaguchi was a self-promoter, and he said so privately to his staff. He called Mutaguchi a blockhead, but the doctrine was sound even if the man was not. Sarto accepted his objective. On March 15th, 1944, the Japanese 15th Army crossed the Chinduin River.

 85,000 men in three divisions with their cattle and their pack mules and their three weeks of rations on their backs. The march was extraordinary. The 31st division covered in some places more than 15 mi a day in mountain country. They moved at night through trees so thick that pilots looking for them saw nothing.

 They were on schedule. They were ahead of schedule. By the end of March, the lead elements were past the Naga ridge line. By April 4, they were closing on Kahima. The doctrine had brought them this far. The doctrine had brought them within sight of India. What Mutaguchi had not factored in, and what Sarto had not yet seen was that something on the British side had changed. Part two.

 Here is what had changed. In the autumn of 1942, after the British had been driven out of Burma in 3 months, a quiet revolution had begun inside the British Indian command. It did not happen in any one place. It did not have a single architect. But its center of gravity was a man whose name almost nobody outside the army knew at the time.

 Latutenant General William Slim, commander of what would become the 14th Army. Slim looked at the problem of fighting in Burma and saw two things that the Japanese had not. The first was that the men who had defeated the British in 1942 had not really been Japanese. They had been British logistics.

 The British had been forced to retreat in part because the British supply system could not cope with the terrain. The Japanese had won by being lighter. So if Slim could solve the British logistics problem, the Japanese advantage went away. The second was that the only way to solve the British logistics problem in country where there were no roads and no railways and no rivers that ran the right direction was the air.

 It is hard to overstate how new this idea was. Across the whole of the Second World War, no army on any front had ever supplied a major sustained operation entirely by air. The Germans had tried in 1943 to supply their encircled army at Stalingrad by air. They had failed. The army had starved. The lesson was clear. Aircraft could not feed an army.

Slim disagreed. In 1943, Major General Ord Windgate’s first Chindit expedition into Burma had been supplied by air from start to finish. It had been small. It had been costly. But it had proved that the thing could be done. By the spring of 1944, Slim had built around that proof of doctrine and organization and a fleet.

 The aircraft was the Douglas C47 Dakota. Twin engine, Americanbuilt, range a,000 m, cargo capacity about 4 tons, slow, unarmed in its original form. The most important supply aircraft of the war. Slim had under his command by April 1944 several squadrons of them. RAF-31 squadron which the men called the friendly firm and which had been flying transports in India since 1929.

 RAF 194 squadron sister squadron to 31 62 and 117 squadrons. American troop carrier squadrons. And when the Japanese offensive began and Slim went to Lord Lewis Mountbatton and asked for more, 20 extra commando transports diverted off the hump route into China. Mountbatton authorized the diversion on his own initiative.

 He did not have the authority to do it. He did it anyway. President Roosevelt was reportedly displeased. Prime Minister Churchill backed Mountbatton. The aircraft came. Pause on this. The C-47 Dakota at Kahima did not drop supplies from a safe altitude. It dropped them from between 200 and 300 ft. That is the height of a tall office block.

 It dropped them onto a perimeter that at its worst was less than 500 yd across. It dropped them through small arms fire and machine gun fire and shell fire from every Japanese position on the ridge. The pilots flew the same routes in daylight twice a day, sometimes three times. The air crew could see from the cockpit the men they were dropping to.

 They could see the men firing at them. The official Royal Air Force narrative of the war written after the fighting gave a single sentence to summarize what happened over Kohima. Three aircraft were lost on supply duties during the entire 80 days of the siege of Kohima. Two Dotas and one Wellington. Over Kohima itself, the official narrative wrote and read this line carefully.

 The aircraft were hit and hit again but not one was lost. Three in 80 days. That is the money number of this story. Not the number of men on the hill. Not the number of Japanese in the valley. Three aircraft. We will come back to that number. Pause on it. While the aircraft were flying, the men on the ridge held. The fighting on Kohima Ridge in the second and third weeks of April 1944 was by the testimony of every officer who saw it and every veteran who survived it.

 The worst of the Burma campaign. The trenches were 40 yards apart in places. The ground was earth churned to mud by mortar fire. The water ration was at one point less than half a pint per man per day. There was no question of evacuation. There was no question of retreat. There was until the road opened nowhere to go.

 And in the middle of it, a lance corporal of the Royal West Kent Regiment did something that nobody around him quite believed. His name was John Pennington Harmon. He was 29 years old. He was the son of a millionaire who owned a private island off the Devon coast. He had been to Switzerland to study under the followers of a mystic who had told him that he would live a long life.

 He was, by every account, casual about danger, polite, distracted, intermittently brilliant. He had failed officer training. He had ended up a lance corporal. He had told his friends on the boat to India that nothing would happen to him in the war. On the morning of April 8, on a feature called Detail Hill, a Japanese machine gun position had dug in about 50 yards from his company.

 Harmon walked towards it. He carried a single grenade. He pulled the pin. He held the grenade in his hand for two seconds before he threw it, which meant it would detonate on landing rather than after a delay. He destroyed the post. He walked back across the open ground carrying the Japanese machine gun he had taken. The next morning, he did it again, another position.

 Five Japanese soldiers, four of them with a machine gun, one of them with a rifle. Harmon went forward alone. He shot four of them. He bayonetted one. He turned to come back. He was hit by machine gun fire from a flank. He was carried into the trench by his company commander, Major Donald. His last words to Easton with ease. Don’t bother, sir.

I got the lot. It was worth it. He was awarded the Victoria Cross. He is buried on the hill he died defending. I want to ask you something now because the next section is going to take us into the deeper structure of why Kohima held. Before we go there, men like John Pennington Harmon and the West Kents around him and the Assam regiment and the Nagara Scouts who carried the wounded out under fire deserve to be remembered.

 Every like on this video keeps the story of that hill visible for a few more people. It does not cost anything. It matters more than it should. The aircraft kept coming. Part three. Zoom out from the trenches on Kohima Ridge. Zoom out from the Dakotas overhead. Zoom out from Mutaguchi at his headquarters and Sarto at his command post in the hills.

 Zoom out in fact from the whole battlefield and look at what made the air supply at Kohima possible. Because what we are about to describe is not the courage of one pilot or the discipline of one squadron or even the cleverness of one commander. It is the deepest system the British Empire had ever built. Begin in Bengal.

 By April 1944, the port of Kolkata was unloading more tonnage per month than it had at any point in its history. 200,000 tons of military stores a month, sometimes more. The Indian railway system, which Slim called the longest and worst supply line of any army in any theater of the war, ran from the docks at Kolkata to the rail heads at Dimmapur and Leo.

1,400 m of single track and broad gauge and meter gauge and reloads in between. The Bengal and Assam railway by 1944 was operating at three times its pre-war capacity. It was being run in part by American railway battalions on loan to the British and by Indian railway men who had been working the line for 40 years.

 From the rail heads, the stores moved onto roads. The roads were not good. The Dimmapur to Infal road, the only paved road into the Infal plane, was a single carriageway cut into the side of a mountain 200 m long with grades steep enough to break gearboxes. In good weather, it carried 1500 tons a day. In monsoon, it carried almost nothing. and from the road.

 When the road was cut, the stores moved into the air. The air bases, Camila, Agatala, Imfalme, Tulihal, Dimapur. By April 1944, Slim’s command was operating from more than 30 airfields across northeastern India, most of them built in the previous 18 months by Indian labor and American engineers. The Royal Indian Army Service Corps ran the supply packing depots.

 The Royal Air Force Regiment guarded the airfields. The RAF maintenance units kept the aircraft serviceable in heat and damp and dust. The Indian Meteorological Department fed weather forecasts into operations rooms every 6 hours. Behind all of it, the Indian Army. By 1944, the Indian Army was the largest allv volunteer army in human history.

 2 and a half million men recruited from every province, every religion, every linguistic community. officered by a mixed core of British, AngloIndian, and increasingly Indian commissioned officers funded by the Indian taxpayer through the Indian government’s contribution to the war effort. The men who held Cohima were not, in the simplest sense, British.

 The Assam regiment was Indian. The Assam rifles were Indian. The Royal Nepalese Share Regiment, the battalion that arrived at Kohima just before the siege closed was Nepoese. Half the riflemen of the 14th Army were Indian or Girka. The cooks were Indian. The mule drivers were Indian. The clarks were Indian.

 This is why when Lord Mountbatton described what happened at Kohima after the war, he did not call it the British thermopoly. He called it the British Indian thermopoly. This was the system the Dakotas at Kohima were drawing on. Every parachute had been packed in a depot near Kolkata. Every box of compo rations had been loaded by Indian labor at a railhead.

Every gallon of aviation petrol had been refined at a Bardon in Persia and shipped by tanker across the Indian Ocean. The aircraft that dropped supplies onto Garrison Hill on the morning of April 19, 1944 had taken off from an airfield built by Indian labor on land surveyed by Indian engineers, fueled by petrol pumped through Indian-built pipelines, loaded with rations packed by Indian hands.

 And the Japanese structurally could not match any of it. The Japanese army that crossed the Chinduin in March 1944 had no air supply doctrine. The Imperial Japanese Air Force had been bled white over the Solomons and the Philippines. The Japanese transport aircraft fleet was small to begin with and most of it was committed to the Pacific.

 The Japanese supply system in Burma ran on trucks and porters with cattle for the final stretch and that was it. There was no equivalent of the Dakotas. There was no equivalent of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps. There was no equivalent anywhere in the Japanese military structure of the apparatus that fed the men on Kohima Ridge.

 This is why the three aircraft figure matters. Three aircraft lost on supply duties across the whole siege of Infal and Kohima. Two Dotas and one Wellington. The Japanese could not have replaced one of them. The British could replace 10 in a week. It is the difference between an army that believed in offensive momentum and an army that had quietly across two years rebuilt itself around the most boring military virtue in existence, logistics.

The men who flew the supply runs over Kohima were doing something nobody in the world had done before. They were not heroes in their own minds. They were transport pilots. They were logistics. They were, in the words of one of them, the lorry drivers of the sky. But the cumulative effect of what they did over 80 days of continuous operations was to turn a doctrine that the Japanese army had relied on for 40 years into a paper plan on a dead general’s desk.

 The doctrine was that an army moves faster than a defense can react. The British answer was that the defense does not have to react if it can be fed where it stands. Pause on that line. The defense does not have to react if it can be fed where it stands. That is the lesson of Kohima. That is the lesson of Infal.

That is the lesson of the whole 14th Army campaign. You do not have to maneuver if you do not have to retreat. And you do not have to retreat if you do not have to eat. I want to ask something else of you now. If your father, your grandfather, or your great uncle served in the 14th Army, or in any of the British Indian formations in Burma, in any of the supply units that kept Kohima alive in RAF-31 Squadron or 194 Squadron or any of the transport squadrons, in the Assam Regiment or the Assam Rifles or the Royal West Kents, I would be

grateful if you would put their name and unit in the comments. This is one of the most underwritten campaigns of the war. The men who served in it called themselves the Forgotten Army because they returned home in 1945 to a Britain that had moved on to the European victory parades and nobody remembered Infal. Nobody remembered Kohima.

 The comments are how the names come back. Back to the hill part four. While the aircraft kept coming on the other side of the ridge, the Japanese were learning what they had not believed when they crossed the Chinduin. The captured British supplies were not there. The British had not run. The British had not abandoned their depots.

 The British had, in fact, removed every scrap of ration, every drum of petrol. Every box of ammunition from the forward positions before the siege closed. What the Japanese had assumed would be sitting in the storehouses at Kohima and Infal was on aircraft in the air, being dropped to the men they were trying to overrun. Sarto understood this earlier than Mutaguchi did.

 By the end of April, his patrols were sending back reports that the British were not breaking. The trenches on Garrison Hill were holding. The wounded were being flown out. The dead were being buried where they fell. There was no looting. There was no panic. There was no flight to the rear. The British defense was, in Sarto’s word, immovable.

 Sarto sent signals to Mutaguchi requesting resupply. The signals were not answered, or they were answered with exhortations to attack harder. Mutaguchi was by this point in his command post several hundred miles away. Drinking heavily and writing operational poetry. He believed the offensive needed only one more push. He believed Sarto lacked nerve.

 He believed Sarto was failing him. Sarto believed Mutaguchi was a blockhead. He had always believed it. He now had evidence. By the second week of May, Sarto’s division had been in the field for 8 weeks. They had crossed the Chinduin with 3 weeks of rations. They had crossed the ridge lines into India with the assumption that the British rice and the British rum and the British petrol would be waiting.

 They had received in 8 weeks almost no resupply. The cattle that had walked with them from Burma had been eaten in the first month. The grain villages they had hoped to forage from were either empty or hostile. The Nagas had carried their crops away into the hills before the Japanese arrived on the instructions of Charles Py and his district officers, who had spent 15 years cultivating the relationships that now mattered.

 The 31st Japanese division in the second week of May 1944 was eating what it could find. Grass, bamboo shoots, the bark off trees. There was no medical evacuation. There was no replacement of equipment. There were, by some Japanese accounts, men so weak they could not lift their rifles. And while the Japanese starved, the British counterattack arrived.

 Major General John Grover, commanding the second division, had marched his men up the Dimapur road through April. By the end of the month, his lead brigades were in contact with the Japanese on the ridge. By the first week of May, they were fighting their way position by position across features the men would name for the rest of their lives.

 Kukie Pay, FSD Ridge, Jail Hill, GPT Ridge. And on GPT Ridge on the 4th of May, a young captain of the second battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment did the thing that decorated men do. His name was John Neil Randall. He was 26 years old. Born in Bernares in India where his father had served, educated at the Dragon School in Oxford, then at Malbor, then at Mertton College, Oxford, where he read law.

 His closest friend at Oxford had been Leonard Chesher, the bomber pilot who would later win the Victoria Cross over Germany. Randall had a young wife, Mavis, whose own brother had won a Victoria Cross as a bomber pilot the year before. Randall was, in the language of his unit’s officer reports, an officer of striking promise.

 On May 4, his company commander was wounded in the assault on GPT Ridge. Randall took over the company. He led it forward against a system of bunkers that dominated the position. He was hit in the knee. He continued to lead the attack. By the end of the day, his company had taken the ridge except for one bunker, the strongest, which had cost the assault every officer it had thrown at it.

 At dawn on May 6, Randall attacked that bunker alone. Rifle, bayonet, a single grenade. He was hit by machine gun fire from inside the bunker. As he reached it, he pulled the pin of the grenade. He threw it into the firing slit. He threw his own body against the slit so that even if the grenade did not silence the gun, his body would.

 He died there against the bunker in the morning of May 6. He was awarded the Victoria Crossostuous. His Victoria Cross sits today in the Imperial War Museum in London on loan from his family displayed beside the Victoria Cross of his Oxford friend Leonard Chesher. Pause on that sentence. Read it again.

 The Victoria Cross of John Randall killed at Kahima sits on display next to the Victoria Cross of Leonard Chesher who survived the war. Two friends from the same Oxford College. Two medals from the same war. One man went home. One man did not. This was the kind of fight the British had brought to Garrison Hill.

 By May 13, the tennis court in front of Charles Porsey’s bungalow where the Japanese had dug in opposite the Royal West Kents was taken. A track had been bulldozed up the back of the hill. A Lee Grant tank, the largest tank the British had on the ridge, had been hauled to the summit by a sergeant named Waterhouse of the 149th Royal Armored Corps.

 The tank rolled onto the tennis court. It fired its 75 mm gun into the Japanese bunkers at a range of 20 yards. The bunkers came apart. The Royal West Kents and the Dorsuche Regiment went in behind the tank. The tennis court was British again. It was the first sign had that the position was lost. Mutaguchi did not yet know.

 Mutaguchi was still issuing orders for the offensive to continue. Sarto received the orders. Sarto read them. Sarto did the thing that no Japanese divisional commander had done in the war until that moment, he ignored them. Part five. On May 25, 1944, Sarto signaled his army headquarters that unless his division was resupplied within a week, he would withdraw on June 1st.

 The signal was not granted a satisfactory reply. On May 31, Sarto did the thing he had warned he would do. He pulled the 31st division off the ridge and ordered it back into the hills in defiance of standing orders. Mutaguchi reportedly signaled, “Retreat and I will court marshall you.” Sarto reportedly signaled back, “Do what you please.

” It was the first divisional level retreat against orders in the history of the modern Japanese army. The men of the 31st division marched back the way they had come in the monsoon, sick and starving, abandoning equipment and abandoning the wounded, fighting rear guard actions against Naga ambushes and British pursuit columns.

 By the time they reached the Chinduin 8 weeks later, more than 2/3 of the men who had crossed it in March were not with them. Most had not been lost in combat. They had been lost to starvation, to exhaustion, to disease, to the road back. ST was removed from command on July 7, 1944. He demanded a court marshal.

 He wanted to expose Mutaguchi’s plan as the failure it was. The Imperial Japanese Army denied him a trial by declaring him mentally unfit. His farewell to his division recorded by Japanese sources contained the line, “Our swords are broken and our arrows spent.” He died in 1959. In his bed, Mutaguchi survived the war.

 He was relieved of command in December 1944. He spent the rest of his life arguing that his plan would have worked if Sarto had pushed harder. Almost nobody in the postwar Japanese army agreed with him. On June 22nd, 1944, the men of the second division moving south from Kohima met the men of the fifth Indian division moving north from Imal.

 At a point on the road called Milestone 109, the road was open. The siege was over. The invasion of India was finished. Now go back to the question we started with. Charles pausy at the window of his bungalow at dawn on April 5 with 1500 fighting men against 15,000 Japanese watching the start of a siege he could not see a way out of.

 How did Kohima hold? The Japanese had numbers. The British had aircraft. The Japanese had momentum. The British had time. The Japanese had a doctrine 40 years old. The British had a system 18 months old. The Japanese had three weeks of rations. The British had a railway from Kolkata and a road from Dimmapur and an airfield at Camila and 30 squadrons in the sky.

 The Japanese came expecting to find supplies. The British had moved them into the air. This is the part of the story I want to be honest about. Kahima was not a perfect British victory. The cost was high on both sides. The handling of the Japanese retreat was in places without mercy. The Naga villages that had carried the wounded out under fire received less after the war than they were promised.

The men of the 14th Army came home in 1945 to a Britain that had already moved on to the European victory and had largely forgotten that there had been a war in Asia at all. They called themselves the forgotten army for a reason. But the men on Garrison Hill held Lance Corporal John Pennington Harmon of the Royal West Kents who walked alone at a Japanese machine gun and brought back the gun lies in the Kohima War Cemetery.

 His Victoria Cross is held by his regimental museum in Maidston. Captain John Neil Randall of the Royal Norfolks, who threw his body against the bunker on GPT Ridge, lies a few yards from him. His Victoria Cross is held by the Imperial War Museum on display beside the Victoria Cross of Leonard Chesher. His friend Charles Py who refused to leave Coima returned to his bungalow after the siege and rebuilt the tennis court.

 He retired to Suffukk in 1947. He did not write a memoir. He died in 1972. Sto is remembered today by a small memorial in the war cemetery on Garrison Hill, maintained by Japanese veterans who have come back year after year to leave flowers. In 2013, the National Army Museum in London held a public vote to determine what the British public considered the greatest battle in British military history.

 The candidates included D-Day, Waterloo, Ajin Court, the Battle of Britain. The vote was not close. Kohima and Impal together, one with more than half of all votes cast on the second division memorial at Kohima carved into a slab of nagger stone are two lines of English verse that were not originally written about Kohima.

 They were composed by a Cambridge classicist named John Maxwell Edmunds in 1919 in memory of the Spartans who had died at the pass of Themopoly 2,400 years before. They were moved to Kohima after the battle on the suggestion of a staff officer of the second division called Major John Etial. They read as follows.

When you go home, tell them of us and say, “For your tomorrow, we gave our today.” Subscribe if you want the next chapter because there are more of these. More doctrines, more generals, more forgotten ridges and forgotten men and forgotten units of the British Indian Army that in the spring of 1944 stopped the largest land offensive the Japanese Empire ever launched and turned it round inside 90 days.

 Their name should not be allowed to disappear.