Captain Robin Rowland was 22 when his regiment was deployed in the city of Kohima, in northeastern India. It was May 1944 and a small group of British Indian soldiers was being attacked by an entire division of Japanese forces.
Captain Rowland, now 99, vividly remembers approaching the city, following a path of devastation to the front line.
“We saw abandoned trenches and destroyed villages, and as we went on, the smell of death was everywhere,” he said.
The young captain was a member of the British Indian Army’s Punjab regiment on his way to help rescue 1,500 of his fellow soldiers who spent weeks resisting 10 times more than their number in Japanese forces.
Isolated by the Japanese, the Allied forces depended exclusively on air supplies, and very few believed they could withstand the relentless attack. Japanese soldiers marched to Kohima through what was then Burma – their goal to invade India.
The Japanese had already defeated the British in Burma, but no one expected them to successfully negotiate the mosquito-infested jungle hills and fast-flowing streams en route to Kohima, the capital of Nagaland, and Imphal, the capital of the state of Manipur , in India .
When they did, the Anglo-Indian troops charged with defending the two cities were surrounded by more than 15,000 Japanese soldiers. They fought for weeks to prevent the Japanese from moving and capturing the strategic city of Dimapur, which could have opened up routes to the plains of Assam. Few believed that defenders could prevail.
Japanese soldiers came “wave after wave, night after night,” recalls Captain Rowland.
The fight was brutal and Indian and British forces were confined to Garrison Hill, which faced Kohima. At one point, the fight turned into hand-to-hand combat, with just a tennis court separating the two sides dug into the hill.
The besieged Anglo-Indian soldiers resisted until reinforcements arrived. After three months, in June 1944, with more than 7,000 casualties and almost no food supply, the Japanese division retreated and returned to Burma, despite top orders to stay and fight.
“It was a terrible resistance from 1,500 Indian-British soldiers,” said Captain Rowland. “If the Japanese had taken Garrison Hill, they would have gone to Dimapur.”
British-Indian forces were ordered to chase the Japanese in retreat and Robin Rowland was among the pursuers. Some of the Japanese soldiers died of cholera, typhoid and malaria, but by far the largest number died from starvation as their supplies ran out.
According to military historian Robert Lyman, the battle of Kohima and Imphal “changed the course of World War II in Asia”.
“For the first time, the Japanese were defeated in battle and never recovered,” he told the BBC.
But, although it was a turning point, the battle in northeastern India never captured the public’s imagination in the way that D-Day, Waterloo or other battles in Europe and North Africa did.
It has often been described as “the forgotten war”.
People in Britain were simply too far away to register so much, according to Bob Cook, the head of the Kohima Museum in York City.
“The Germans were only 35 kilometers of water from Britain,” he said. “What worried the people of this country most was the imminent threat of German invasion.”
But there have been some attempts to teach people about the Battle of Kohima and Imphal. In 2013, she was voted Britain’s biggest battle after a debate at the Imperial War Museum in London, a surprise winner over names like D-Day and Waterloo.
Robert Lyman defended Kohima. “Great things were at stake in a war with the most difficult enemy that any British army had to face,” he said in his speech.
But there was almost no attempt on the subcontinent to highlight the importance of the battle, in which thousands of soldiers from the Commonwealth and India – including men from modern day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – lost their lives.
One reason was the British partition of India soon after, according to Charles Chasie, a Kohima-based historian in Nagaland.
“One of the reasons I think is that India’s leaders were too busy dealing with the effects of transition and division initially,” he said. “The British decided to leave in a hurry, before things got too complicated and out of control on the subcontinent.”
The Kohima battle was seen more as a colonial war, while the postwar speech focused more on the struggle for Indian independence led by the Indian leader, Mahatma Gandhi.
In addition to the regular British-Indian army, thousands of people from the Naga ethnic community fought alongside the British and provided valuable information in the conflict. His deep knowledge of mountainous territory was of great help to the British.
Today, only a dozen or more Naga veterans from the battle of Kohima are still alive. Sosangtemba Ao, 98, is one of them.
“Japanese bombers flew every day, throwing explosives. The sound was deafening and there was smoke after each attack. It was distressing,” recalled Ao.
He worked alongside the British for two months, receiving one rupee a day. He still has a lot of admiration for the fighting ability of Japanese soldiers, he said.
“The Japanese army was highly motivated. Their soldiers were not afraid of death. For them, fighting for the emperor was divine. When asked to surrender, they would become suicide attackers.”
A documentary about the battle, Memories of a Forgotten War, was released online recently to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Japanese surrender. Several years ago, producer Subimal Bhattacharjee and his team traveled to Japan for a celebration.
“When the Japanese and British veterans of Kohima met, they hugged and started to cry,” he said. “These were the soldiers who shot each other, but they still showed a special bond. It was spontaneous and we didn’t expect it.”
For the Japanese, it was a humiliating defeat, and Japanese veterans rarely talk about their experience in Kohima.
“There is nothing left of Japanese food,” said one of them, Wajima Koichiro, who was interviewed for the documentary. “It was a losing game and then we gave up.”
The ethnic Nagas, who helped the British and suffered huge casualties, also continued to suffer. They expected the British to recognize them as a separate Naga nation during the transfer of power, and not as part of India. But they were “deeply disappointed,” said historian Charles Chasie, and many blamed them for the thousands of Nagas who were killed in subsequent conflicts with the Indian government and army.
Over the years, the families of those killed in Kohima and Imphal, especially from Britain and Japan, traveled to the two war cemeteries there to pay tribute to their ancestors.
Captain Rowland returned to Kohima with his son in 2002 at the invitation of the Indian Punjab regiment. He stood in front of Garrison Hill, where he and his fellow soldiers resisted waves of Japanese fighters 58 years earlier.
“It brought back a lot of memories,” said Captain Rowland, recalling how a group of 1,500 men fought against the power of the entire 31st Japanese division. “It was a great military achievement.”
Before leaving Kohima, Captain Rowland and his son stopped to deposit a wreath at the base of the rough stone war memorial on Garrison Hill. When he put the crown in place, he remembered eight soldiers he knew who had been lost.
He knew that the battle had not entered the public’s imagination like the most famous battles, but those who were there would never forget.
“It was a great tribute to the resilience of human nature,” he said.