Retracing the Forgotten Army

Visiting Assam and Nagaland

Looking east from the Kohima-Mao road. It was over these hills that 20,000 Japanese troops of Lt Gen Sato’s 31st Division marched in March 1944, intent of capturing Kohima. They failed. Need they have focused only on Kohima? Perhaps not!

I’m currently in Myanmar, having another look at the battlefields of 1945. Every time I visit these battlefields, new ideas and perspectives emerge and I never fail to learn something new. History isn’t something you learn once, perhaps as when you ‘learn’ a subject at school. It is, rather, an an evolving appreciation of the past that changes, develops and matures as one considers events repeatedly over time, or through a new or different lens. I’ve now got to the point where I am convinced I need to write a new - big - book, on the subject of Kohima. Although I’ve studied the battle for many years, I haven’t yet had the opportunity to tell its full orbed story in a single volume, so look out for this in the next few years. It’ll need to wait until a couple of fascinating projects on the go at the moment reach their own finale; of which, more anon.

Photos taken at Jessami

These two weeks in what was Burma have followed on from a fascinating two week-long trip back to the hills of Assam and Nagaland. I travelled with a group to Kohima, Jessami and Kharasom, before heading to the far north of the Brahmaputra Valley to look at Dibrugarh, Digboi and Ledo, the centre not only of oil production and extensive tea plantations in Assam, but also of the remarkable Hump Airlift. For about 900 days between late 1942 and 1945 a fleet of 600 US aircraft flew daily missions 7-8 hours to Chungking and back in what the aircrew dubbed the Aluminium Trail. I cover this story in part in my book Among the Headhunters. It was an extraordinary logistical effort, and the basis, as my friend Giles Milton explains, of the Berlin Airlift a few years later. As the carrying capacity of a C47 - the workhorse of the Hump fleet - is about 2.5 tons, and 650,000 tons were transported to China over this time, it meant that on average about 280 aircraft were in the air every single day of this vast operation. Extraordinary. About 480 aircraft were lost, the majority to engine failure, icing and accident, as well as to Japanese fighters flying out of Myitkyina.

Standing on Ledo airfield

The good news is that I take travellers whenever I visit this part of India, with the support of Sampan Travel, and I’d be delighted if you wanted to join me. I’m coming again in April and November this year, both visits for two weeks. Each trip is slightly different. For the trip in November we will be visiting - in addition to Kohima - the beautiful village of Jessami, where Lt Col ‘Bruno’ Brown did such damage to Lt Gen Sato’s hopes of any easy victory at Kohima; Shillong in the Khasi Hills (and home of the Assam Regiment), as well as spending time in Calcutta at the Glenburn Penthouse overlooking the Victoria Memorial considering Kolkata’s history and its role in sustaining the remarkable Indian war effort from 1943 onwards.

At Jessami we are hosted, accommodated, fed and watered - by the Village Council

Let Bertie Lawson at Sampan know if you are interested, as spaces are always limited, and the early bird always catches the worm!

At Zubza, the 2nd Division Admin Area and site of the gun lines, looking 10-miles (and 2,000 feet higher) east towards Kohima. It was here that Lt Gen Montagu Stopford first saw Kohima and described the ridge, most appositely, as ‘the stop in the bottle’.