Shamik Bag - The forgotten frontier
India’s contribution to the Allied war effort is nowhere more evident than in Britain’s greatest battle, fought in Imphal and Kohima
none of the Manipuri World War II veterans have reportedly received any pension or honorarium from the state government, though other states have done so, according to the secretary of the Sainik Board.
Sitting in a wooden chair on the verandah of his Manipur village home, 91-year-old Nehkhosong Singsit (Nehkhosong Kuki, according to army records) wasn’t expecting visitors when we walked in unannounced through the front gate, past a small lawn, and stood in front of his cheerful, sloping-roofed house. As his daughter helps her father into a shirt, Singsit’s son, Paogin, a retired bank employee, narrates the fascination his father had for the army uniform; as a 19-year-old, Singsit enrolled in the British-commanded Assam Regiment in 1943.
Other than the need to earn a living, the promise of owning an army uniform was the prime motivation when army recruiters came prospecting to their village at the height of World War II. “Back then, people of our Kuki tribe would wear scanty clothes and my father felt a natural attraction for the army uniform. It stood out for him,” says Paogin. Singsit would soon be called to action on the battle front when the British-led Allied forces faced a seemingly indomitable enemy in the Imperial Japanese army that was waiting to overrun Allied-held positions in Manipur and beyond.
As a sepoy, Singsit’s brief was to provide security to the British colonel who led the regiment of primarily Indian soldiers when the Japanese offensive began on 8 March 1944. The Japanese firing was relentless, and one of the bullets found its mark in his dear friend, sepoy Vaiphei. The Japanese began using his body as a shield, firing from behind him—a ploy that Singsit felt was both tactical as well as psychological. “I saw my friend’s dead body getting ravaged by bullets. The disrespect shown to the dead was shocking,” says Singsit, his voice firm, though his body is now bent over by age. “The other motive of the Japanese was to demoralize us by exhibiting the dead body of someone belonging to our own land.”
In later months, after the Allied forces scored a hard-fought, decisive victory, Singsit would be charmed by Japanese prisoners of war held at Meiktila in Burma (now Myanmar) doing pencil-sketch portraits of his colleagues and him for an extra roti or bidi. War, he found out, can also be about conflicting emotions. In the early 1940s in Manipur, a princely state yet to merge with an India then under British rule, the issue of land, and sense of belonging, was often defined ethnically by the locals. Following his honourable discharge from the army in 1949, Singsit preserved the uniform as a treasured memorabilia of the “fierce” three months between March and July 1944, when the Allied forces clashed with the Japanese.
But he had to burn the same uniform voluntarily a couple of decades later. A violent anti-India secessionist movement led by the Mizo National Front (MNF) was brewing in neighbouring Mizoram in the mid-1960s and Mizo underground military recruiters often visited Manipur villages dominated by Kukis, with whom they shared a close bond. “The Indian Army had a strong presence in our area. I was afraid that if they raided my home and found the uniform they might have misunderstood me for a Mizo militant. I felt extremely sad burning the uniform, but the Indian Army personnel didn’t know, nor would they have cared about my role as an Indian soldier in World War II,” says Singsit. Epic scale Forty kilometres from Imphal, Singsit’s rural home is a short drive off what some refer to as “The Road of Bones”.
Beyond the insistent beauty of the land of cloud-collected hills, meandering rivers and green fields, is the sobering backdrop of the dead. Around and away from the 138km stretch of road from Imphal in Manipur to Kohima in Nagaland is where around 70,000 soldiers and civilians committed their lives to the cause of world domination over those three tragic months. The battles fought in the tough terrain of Manipur and Nagaland and spread over a 600-mile (around 965km) area have since been recognized as among the biggest—and bloodiest—battles fought by Indian forces. Seventy years on, when diplomats and participants from Britain, Japan, the US, Australia and India gathered in Imphal on 28 June to commemorate the Battle of Imphal/Kohima—declared in 2013 as Britain’s greatest battle by the country’s National Army Museum, over other notable battles like Waterloo and D Day/Normandy—the memory of the dead, and a prayer for peace, hung like a veil over the proceedings.
Delegate followed delegate in remembering the thousands who lie interred at multiple cemeteries in the region, including those maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) in Imphal and Kohima. In just two cemeteries in the two cities, over 2,500 Indian soldiers are named; many more lie in cemeteries and memorials spread across the region. Y. Kawamura at the India Peace Memorial in Red Hill, Manipur While Scott Furssedonn Wood, the British deputy high commissioner in Kolkata, spoke about the “epic” scale of the battle where 200,000 soldiers and airmen from Japan, Britain, India, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Africa and Canada fought in harsh conditions, others, like Kolkata-based US consul-general Helen LaFave, brought up the issue of missing American soldiers and the continuing search for them. Y. K
awamura, charge de’affairs and minister and deputy chief of mission, embassy of Japan, spoke of eternal peace. At the extreme end of ferocity, Japanese and Allied troops engaged in almost hand-to-hand combat in the Battle of the Tennis Court, fought around the strategically positioned deputy commissioner’s bungalow in Kohima. The Battle of Kohima saw 4,064 British and Indian casualties, according to the CWGC. In Manipur, casualty-heavy battles were fought at Nungshigum, where three squadrons of the Royal Indian Air Force supported artillery operations to flush out the Japanese; at Kanglatongbi, where a vastly outnumbered Allied unit held out determinedly against the enemy’s design to capture a supply depot; and at Sangshak, where, from 21-26 March 1944, the first battle of World War II was fought on Indian soil.
The six-day battle saw the 2nd and 3rd Guerrilla Regiments of the Indian National Army (INA) fighting alongside the Japanese. The Japanese army was known for its ruthlessness and innovative ways of thwarting the enemy, like mimicking bird calls and creating tools that relentlessly sent out the rat-tat-tat sound of machine-gun fire. “Often (Japanese) soldiers stood out in the open with their guns with total disregard to their own safety,” writes Arambam Angamba Singh, co-convener of the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Imphal event, in the official souvenir.
While a Reuters report on the Battle of Imphal/Kohima topping 2013’s Britain’s Greatest Battles poll describes the country’s forces in the World War II campaign spread over North-East India and Burma as what many consider “The Forgotten Army”, similar opinions have been voiced in India on the collective amnesia regarding the Indian contribution to the Allied war effort... Read more