Who won the Battle of Kohima?
British and Indian forces won the Battle of Kohima, fought from 4 April to 22 June 1944 in northeast India. A small garrison held Kohima ridge against the Japanese 31st Division for about two weeks until relieved, and the Allies then fought to clear the Japanese from the area. Together with Imphal, it destroyed Japan's offensive into India and turned the tide of the war in Burma.4
In the spring of 1944 Japan struck west from Burma toward India. At the hill station of Kohima, on the only road to the Allied base at Imphal, a small garrison of British and Indian troops found itself facing an entire Japanese division, in fighting so close that the two sides held opposite ends of a tennis court.5
Part of Battles of India · Before: Imphal, 1944 · Next: Longewala, 1971
Japan's march on India
In March 1944 the Japanese launched Operation U-Go, aiming to destroy the British and Indian forces at Imphal and strike into India. Their 31st Division, under Kotoku Sato, crossed the jungle hills to seize Kohima, cutting the road that supplied Imphal.6
The offensive was the plan of Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi, commander of the Japanese Fifteenth Army, who threw three divisions, the 15th, 31st and 33rd, together with a division of the Indian National Army, against the Allied bases in Assam. For eighteen months General William Slim's Fourteenth Army had been building up supply depots at Dimapur and Imphal for its own offensive into Burma. Mutaguchi meant to destroy them first. His relations with his divisional commanders were poor; Sato, according to the National Army Museum, thought him a "blockhead."7
Kohima mattered because of its road. The town stood about 5,000 feet up in the Naga Hills, some 40 miles from the great depot at Dimapur and 80 miles from Imphal, on the only road between them. British intelligence at first believed that no more than a few battalions could cross the mountains from the Chindwin. By late March it was clear that a whole division was coming, and on 29 March the Japanese cut the road between Kohima and Imphal.8
The defenders
Kohima was held by a scratch garrison of about 2,500 men under Colonel Hugh Richards, many of them noncombatants from the supply depots. Its fighting core was the 4th Battalion of the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment, flown in with the 161st Indian Brigade, and the 1st Assam Regiment, which had already fought a hard delaying action east of the town before being forced back. The ridge was so cramped that only one battalion could deploy on it; the rest of the brigade and its guns stood two miles to the west at Jotsoma.9
Against them came Sato's division, which the Ministry of Defence booklet puts at more than 12,000 men in the Kohima area and the National Army Museum at 15,000.10
The siege of Kohima ridge
From early April a garrison of about 1,500 fighting men, including the Assam Regiment and the Royal West Kent Regiment, held the ridge at Kohima against repeated Japanese assaults. Short of water and under constant fire, they were pushed back into a shrinking perimeter around Garrison Hill.11
The first major assault came on the night of 5 to 6 April, and the Royal West Kents fell back from the most exposed positions. Japanese attacks drove the defenders back, feature by feature: by 9 April the northeastern sector had been forced back to the tennis court, on 10 and 11 April the garrison lost ground on DIS and FSD hills, and the tracks to Jotsoma and the road to Dimapur were cut. What saved the garrison more than once was the accurate fire of the British guns at Jotsoma.12
Everything had to come by air. The first parachute drop, on 13 April, went to the wrong place and fell outside the perimeter, and through most of April each man had about a pint of water a day. Lance Corporal John Harman of the Royal West Kents, a sniper on DIS Hill, single-handedly destroyed a Japanese machine-gun post on 8 April and another trench the next day, 9 April, before he was killed; he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.13
The tennis court
The fiercest fighting raged around the Deputy Commissioner's bungalow, where the two sides faced each other across its tennis court, close enough to throw grenades. The tennis court became the symbol of the battle, and today it lies within the Kohima War Cemetery.14
Relief and counterattack
On 18 April the 161st Indian Brigade, supported by tanks and artillery, broke through to relieve the garrison, and the British 2nd Division then took over the fighting. Weeks of hard fighting followed to drive the Japanese from the ridges around Kohima in the monsoon rains. At the end of May Sato, his men starving, began to withdraw, and on 22 June the road to Imphal was reopened when British and Indian columns met at Milestone 109.15
The relief came just in time. On 14 April the 2nd Division and the 161st Brigade broke the Japanese roadblock at Zubza, and the news reached the garrison the next day. On the night of 16 to 17 April the Japanese threw in a last desperate attack and took FSD Hill, leaving the defenders hemmed in on three sides. On the morning of 18 April British guns opened up from the west, and troops of the 2nd Division and the 161st Brigade with tanks pushed in north-west of Garrison Hill. The siege, which had lasted thirteen days, was over.16
Clearing the ridges took far longer than holding them. Major General John Grover's 2nd Division tried to envelop the Japanese positions, sending brigades round toward GPT Ridge and Aradura in the south and the Naga Village in the north. The Japanese dug in deep and fought from bunkers that bombs, shells and flame-throwers could hardly shift. On GPT Ridge on 6 May Captain John Randle of the Royal Norfolks, already wounded, charged a machine-gun bunker alone and threw his body across its slit after silencing it, earning the second Victoria Cross of Kohima. The bungalow area held out until 13 May against the Dorsets and their tanks.17
By then Sato's men were starving. On 31 May he ordered the first units to withdraw, writing, in the words printed by the Ministry of Defence, that after two months of fighting "Shedding bitter tears I now leave Kohima." XXXIII Corps, led by the 2nd Division, pushed south down the road, and on 22 June it met the troops of IV Corps coming north from Imphal, ending the sieges of both. Accounts differ on the exact spot: most place the link-up at Milestone 109, while the Ministry of Defence booklet gives Milestone 110.18
The cost
The British and Indian forces lost about 4,000 men killed, wounded and missing at Kohima. The Japanese lost more than 7,000 men in the Kohima fighting alone, and many more to hunger and disease on the retreat. Across the whole offensive, the National Army Museum counts 53,000 dead and missing from Mutaguchi's Fifteenth Army of 85,000, against about 12,500 British casualties at Imphal.19
The battle was fought as much by aircraft as by infantry. By the end of the campaign, the Ministry of Defence booklet records, the RAF had flown in some 19,000 tons of supplies and 12,000 men and flown out 13,000 casualties and 43,000 noncombatants.20
Why Kohima mattered
The National Army Museum calls Imphal and Kohima together one of the biggest defeats the Japanese Army ever suffered. The offensive cost the Japanese tens of thousands of men, many to hunger and disease, and opened the way for William Slim's Fourteenth Army to reconquer Burma. In 2013 a poll by Britain's National Army Museum named Imphal and Kohima Britain's greatest battle, and the Kohima Epitaph, ending with the words "For your tomorrow, we gave our today," is still read at remembrance services.21
Lord Mountbatten called it "the British/Indian Thermopylae." Mutaguchi was relieved of his command and retired in December 1944, the month in which Slim and his corps commanders Scoones and Stopford were knighted by the viceroy at Imphal. Within a year the Fourteenth Army had crossed the Chindwin, taken Meiktila and Mandalay, and by early May 1945 Rangoon had fallen.22 › Battle of Imphal, 1944
Kohima today
Kohima is now the capital of the Indian state of Nagaland. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission's Kohima War Cemetery covers the slopes where the bungalow and its terraced garden once stood, between Garrison Hill and the northern end of the ridge. It holds 1,420 graves of World War II, and a Cremation Memorial at its top commemorates 917 Hindu and Sikh soldiers whose remains were cremated according to their faith. A Cross of Sacrifice stands on the terrace of the tennis court, which is marked out on the ground in remembrance.23
At the lower end of the cemetery stands the memorial of the British 2nd Division, a stone obelisk carrying the Kohima Epitaph. Its words are credited to the classicist John Maxwell Edmonds and modeled on the Greek epitaph by Simonides for the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae: "When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow, we gave our today."24 › The Battle of Thermopylae, 480 BC
