Still, the world of genteel drinks parties at Pawsey’s bungalow, of long treks into the interior by visiting anthropologists and botanists, of illiterate tribesmen living by the fiat of British officials, was slipping towards its twilight. Its last hurrah would be glorious and tragic, a drama of war that was both modern and inescapably Victorian, replete with outnumbered garrison, fanatical enemy, heroic last stands, and a cast of characters whose diversity and eccentricity belonged to the age of high empire.
* The Indian Tea Association (ITA) established a ‘Refugee Organisation’ to help deal with the influx of people into Assam. It was an early example of a civilian administered aid effort that would become so common in the later years of the 20th century.
* The Treaty of Yandaboo was signed in February 1826 and brought to an end the First Anglo-Burmese War. The treaty was a humiliation for the Burmese monarchy, which lost control over vast tracts of territory. Fifteen thousand British and Indian troops died in the war and many more on the Burmese side.
† Sir Cecil Beadon (1816–80) was criticised in an official report and in the House of Commons for his administrative failures during the Bengal famine of 1866–67 and ended his career in ignominy. He also told a House of Commons committee on the opium trade that the government was motivated solely by considerations of revenue, and that it would ‘probably not’ be moved by concerns about the ill effects of opium on those who bought it. Frederick Storrs Turner, British Opium Policy and its Results to India and China (Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1876), p. 256.
* This loyalty lasted only until 1891 when palace intrigues deposed the maharajah and installed a regent. On arriving to punish the usurper, the British were greeted by a band playing ‘God Save the Queen’. After a good dinner at the residency the British retired to bed, and were promptly attacked and their forces routed. NA, WO 32/8400, Proceedings of the Court of Inquiry assembled at Manipur on the 30th April 1891 and following days to investigate the circumstances connected with recent events in Manipur.
* Rani Gaidiliu survived the Second World War and was declared an honoured freedom fighter by the government of Jawaharlal Nehru. She went underground again in the 1960s when she led her followers against the dominant Naga political group in a brief civil war.
* The Quit India campaign was launched on 8 August 1942 after the failure of the mission by Sir Stafford Cripps to persuade Congress to support the war in return for a gradual devolution of power and the promise of dominion status. Gandhi called for immediate independence and was immediately arrested along with Nehru and the rest of the senior leadership of Congress, who would spend the next three years of the war in jail. There were an estimated 100,000 arrests and several hundred deaths in the rioting and crackdown that followed. By March 1943 the campaign had been suppressed, although the British had to devote fifty-seven battalions to maintaining internal security. The British official history of the war estimated that the training of a number of army formations and reinforcements was set back by up to two months and ‘there was a general loss of production in all factories turning out arms, clothing and equipment’. S. Woodburn Kirby, The War Against Japan, vol. 2: India’s Most Dangerous Hour (HMSO, 1958), p. 247.
On their way to Kohima from Burma, refugees would occasionally encounter Japanese units. They were not prevented from leaving Burma by the patrols and were usually able to carry the news of their encounters to Pawsey and the tea-planters who were organizing the relief effort. ‘Some of them gave us the grim information,’ wrote a planter, ‘that the Japs did not intend to bomb the road too badly as they looked forward to making full use of it themselves.’ The British and Indian forces were in no state to face a serious Japanese offensive. The 1st Glosters were stationed in Kohima as part of 17th Indian Division from August 1942 but were still suffering the effects of the retreat. As well as sick and wounded, a high proportion of troops were on leave. The battalion had left most of its equipment behind in Burma and supplies of food were short because of transport problems. As Captain H. L. T. Radice recalled, the road was constantly disintegrating because of heavy rain. ‘As a result, the battalion was on half rations.’ A Japanese reconnaissance plane came over frequently, but to the intense relief of the Kohima garrison it was never followed up by an air raid. As the refugees left, the village returned to its usual function as supply depot, a convalescent centre for sick and wounded troops, and the administrative headquarters of the Raj in the Naga Hills. Soon the officers were enjoying a social life once more. Lieutenant Dennis Dawson of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps described a bucolic existence: ‘It [was] a lovely place, a sleepy place. We had parties. There were three hospitals. Plenty of nurses and we thought “well this is a lovely life up here”.’
The autumn of 1942 was taken up with training exercises. The most excitement was a series of mock attacks on each other’s camps. Patrols were sent out to gain knowledge of the country and its people. ‘Everywhere these patrols went,’ said Captain Radice of the 1st Glosters, ‘the local Naga tribesmen showed themselves to be friendly and hospitable.’ From his experience of the terrain, Charles Pawsey understood that the first line of defence against any potential Japanese incursion into the area, large or small, should be an ‘invisible’ intelligence screen. Regular formations marching in long columns could not provide this. Only the Nagas could pass through the jungle as ghosts, moving between India and Burma to spy on Japanese troop concentrations, ingratiating themselves with Japanese officers by pretending to support the overthrow of the British and hanging around Japanese camps to pick up intelligence while playing the role of simple-minded rustics. One of the more exotic snippets that later reached army intelligence came from a Naga who reported the presence of a Japanese commander ‘living with two wives and a maid and … having two monkeys with him trained to hurl grenades’. The unnamed officer who wrote down this story added a coda that speaks loudly of contemporary attitudes: the information had come, he wrote, ‘from a Naga who may not have known the difference between a Jap and a monkey’.
The dilemma for the planners in military intelligence was how to use the Nagas and other tribal groups in a way that imposed some kind of order on operations but allowed them the freedom to range behind enemy lines. By the standards of contemporary military thinking the answer was unusually flexible. Lieutenant Barry Bowman, commander of a Chindit reconnaissance platoon later in the war, was standing in a jungle clearing one day when he heard a clanking noise coming down the track. The platoon took cover and waited to open fire, convinced it was a Japanese unit. ‘To our great relief and surprise an elephant hove into view. On its back was a crude bamboo howdah and perched half-in and half-out of it was an eccentrically clad British officer who waved to us cheerily … A quick cup of tea and he was on his way … he was a tall, biblically bearded fellow in flowing white robes, striding along at a great pace holding up a large black umbrella against the sun … His personal servant close behind him carrying a 12 bore shotgun.’ Bowman had met an officer of V Force, one of the more esoteric units of the entire war, a combination of tea-planters, adventurers, regular officers, old soldiers, former headhunters and Indian troops. In the Naga Hills the local tribes would act as guides, spies and soldiers in the ranks of V Force.*
The founder of V Force was Brigadier A. Felix Williams who, at forty-seven, had already spent fifteen years learning the art of guerrilla warfare on the North-West Frontier. As commander of the Tochi Scouts,†