Defeat Into Victory by Viscount Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim

Author:Viscount Field-Marshal Viscount William Slim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cooper Square Press
Published: 1956-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIV

HOW IT HAPPENED

THE story of the prolonged and hard-fought battle of Imphal–Kohima that developed from the plans of Japanese and British commanders is not easy to follow. It swayed back and forth through great stretches of wild country; one day its focal-point was a hill named on no map, the next a miserable, unpronounceable village a hundred miles away. Columns, brigades, divisions, marched and counter-marched, met in bloody clashes, and reeled apart, weaving a confused pattern hard to unravel. Yet the whole battle can be divided into four reasonably clear phases:

(i) Concentration—as each side strained every sinew to bring its forces into the fight.

(ii) Attrition—as week after week in man-to-man, hand-to-hand fighting, each strove to wear down the other’s strength and to break his will.

(iii) Counter-offensive—as gradually, but with increasing momentum, the British passed to the attack, and

(iv) Pursuit—when the Japanese broke and, snarling and snapping, were hunted from the field.

The opening moves in the Imphal–Kohima battle took place in the first days of March 1944. Then the 17th Division about Tiddim was at the top of its form. Cowan, who still commanded it, and his men, far from being depressed by the set-backs they had sustained, were thirsting for revenge. He had benefited from experience and was no longer trying to capture the Japanese positions by attacks along the knife-edge ridges of the Chin Hills. In the constant patrol fights, ambushes, and raids that his Gurkhas and the Japanese carried on against one another, the 17th Division was now having very much the better of the exchanges. Cowan was skilfully using the freedom of movement this gave him to begin the systematic isolation and piecemeal reduction of the enemy positions. He had already captured some of the most important of the lost ground, and the whole of it seemed relentlessly falling within his grasp, when the conditions of his local war changed suddenly and completely.

The Japanese offensive began on the 6th March 1944. On that day troops of 214 Regiment of the enemy 33rd Division began a series of attacks on our detachment covering the Manipur River bridge near Tonzang, twenty miles north of Tiddim. Cowan sent a battalion to reinforce our men. The assaults grew in strength, until it was evident the whole 214 Regiment, the equivalent of one of our brigades, was flinging itself against our Tonzang positions. Our defences held stoutly, but were in danger of being overwhelmed. Cowan, therefore, on the 13th, dispatched his 63 Brigade to make sure of this vital position in his rear.

Meanwhile, on the 8th March, another Japanese column, 215 Regiment, crossed the Manipur River from east to west, several miles south of our positions about Tiddim, and moved north by tracks through the hills. Its move was reported, but it was difficult to judge its strength, and neither patrol nor air reconnaissance could keep touch with it in the thick jungle. On the 13th came ominous news. The Engineer officer commanding at Milestone 109, nearly sixty miles north of Tiddim, reported that a Japanese force was in the hills a few miles to the west of his camp.

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