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Journalism of Courage
While speaking in Manipur, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday (September 13) said that “Netaji Subhas (Chandra Bose) had called Manipur the door to India’s freedom”. What was he talking about? Here’s a brief history.
Although the Indian contribution was pivotal in the Allied war effort, there were only two places in which World War II directly came to India. One was in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which Japan annexed without any resistance from the British in 1942 and occupied till 1945.
The other was in the North East, which, according to many war historians, saw some of the most bitter fighting of the war.
Japan took Singapore in February 1942, and by May, they had occupied much of Burma. This put the might of the Japanese forces at the doorstep of India, the most important British colony in context of the war effort.
Not only was India a giant logistics base for the Allies, the colony contributed crucial manpower, resources, and financial assistance to the war effort. Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, the former Commander-in-Chief of India, had famously said that Britain “couldn’t have come through both wars [World Wars I and II] if they hadn’t had the Indian Army”.
Viscount William ‘Bill’ Slim, then a Lt General, was the commander of the British 14th Army tasked with the defence of the Northeast and an eventual recapture of Burma. Very early, he identified Imphal to be particularly crucial to his objectives.
“The Imphal plain, some forty by twenty miles in extent, is the only considerable oasis of flat ground in the great sweep of mountains between India and Burma. It lies roughly equidistant from the Brahmaputra Valley and the plains of Central Burma, a natural halfway house and staging place for any great military movement in either direction between India and Burma,” Slim wrote in his famous memoir Defeat into Victory (1956).
Between 1942 and 1944, Imphal became one of the most important forward bases for the Allies, one that was used to supply Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese resistance troops who were fighting the Japanese in their own country. The British also launched a number of limited offensives into the Arakan valley from Imphal.
Come 1944, a full-scale offensive into Burma was planned. Pre-empting this, after two years of relative passivity, the Japanese 15th Army in March 1944 began its invasion of the Northeast. The offensive was two pronged with Imphal being the ultimate objective.
The thrust of one attack was Kohima, not particularly important in and of itself, but a town which lay on the crucial Dimapur-Imphal road. Cutting this road off would make it much harder to send supplies to Imphal. The thrust of the second attack was Imphal itself, taking which would allow Japan to interrupt air supplies to China and provide them a foothold to conduct air attacks on the rest of India.
Apart from the British 14th Army and the Japanese 15th Army, there was yet another actor in the battles of Imphal and Kohima: the Indian National Army (INA) under Subhas Chandra Bose.
While the INA’s presence, compared to Japanese troops, was negligible, Bose was keen on his army’s 6,000-odd troops being “at the vanguard of the Japanese advance into India”. “…This was…the moment the INA had long been waiting for,” wrote historian Hemant Singh Katoch in his book India’s Historic Battles: Imphal-Kohima,1944 (2024).
Bose, in his speech while taking over the INA on July 9, 1943 had said: “When the British government is thus attacked from both sides — from inside India and from outside — it will collapse, and the Indian people will then regain their liberty”.
As things would turn out, the INA and the Japanese would face a catastrophic defeat which would turn the tide of the war in Asia for good.
The two battles
The Battle of Kohima lasted from early April to early June 1944, and unfolded in two phases: the first, in which only 1,500 British Indian troops defended positions on the Kohima Ridge against a Japanese force of 15,000 men, and the second, in which Allied troops slowly evicted the Japanese from the hills surrounding Kohima.
The fighting was intense, and at one sector, only the width of the town’s tennis court separated the two sides. “Attack after attack had been launched (by the Japanese) across this very tennis court during the battle,” Katoch wrote. The British finally managed to bring in tanks to obliterate Japanese infantry at point blank range.
To the south, the Japanese had effectively surrounded the Imphal valley by April. Till the end of June, they relentlessly tried to break through Slim’s defences from multiple directions, but were unsuccessful.
Slim wrote: “The fighting all around its circumference was continuous, fierce, and often confused as each side manoeuvred to outwit and kill. There was always a Japanese thrust somewhere that had to be met and destroyed. Yet, the fighting did follow a pattern. The main encounters were on the spokes of the wheel, because it was only along these that guns, tanks, and vehicles could move.”
Footnote in history
In the end, Slim’s defensive tactics and Allied superiority in logistics prevailed. After failing to break through in Imphal and Kohima, Japan’s 15th Army and the INA were forced to retreat to Burma, all while suffering heavy losses due to the enemy’s air superiority and gunpower, as well as starvation and disease. The 85,000-strong Japanese 15th Army eventually suffered 53,000 casualties while the British sustained 12,500 casualties at Imphal and another 4,000 casualties in Kohima.
By 1945, the British had launched their campaign to retake Burma, and Japanese troops and the INA once again were in retreat. Many perished, others surrendered. By August, Bose, the INA, and the Japanese were back in Singapore. After the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered on August 15. Bose died in a plane crash three days later.
The battles of Imphal and Kohima, although pivotal to the Allied war effort, became a footnote in history. In the Western imagination, they are not nearly as remembered as the campaigns in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific. And in India, these battles are hard to situate in nationalist historiography which valourises the INA, even though a lot more Indians fought — and died — on the other side. This included locals: Nagas, Meiteis, and Kukis.
But as the late Meghnad Desai wrote for The Indian Express in 2019, “…Kohima ensured Allied victory. There is no harm in India celebrating the battle… to remember the brave people who fought for the cause they believed in.”
