For sheer dogged endurance, no battle honour of the British Army quite compares with Imphal and Kohima. For four and a half months in 1944 these two “towns” on the Indian-Burmese border were subjected to continual and increasingly desperate attacks as the Japanese tried to break into India, the seat of Britain’s strength in the Far East. Robin Rowland, a 22-year-old lieutenant in the Punjab Regiment, and one of the last British survivors of the twin battles, described it as “the nearest I’ve come to hell”.
After the fall of Malaya and Singapore in early 1942, the Japanese quickly overran Burma. In September General Sir Archibald Wavell, commander-in-chief India, ordered a force from his Eastern Command to mount an attack on the coastal Arakan region. After some initial success, the Japanese counterattacked, and in March 1943 the force was withdrawn. Lieutenant General William (Bill) Slim was appointed to command of a newly reorganised army (the Fourteenth), and in October Winston Churchill transferred operational control to the newly formed South East Asia Command, sending Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten to be supreme allied commander.
Rowland, who had joined the 7th Battalion, 2nd Punjab Regiment (7/2 Punjab), also newly raised, earlier in the year, had moved with his regiment from the depot at Meerut, northeast of Delhi, to Madras (now Chennai) after the fall of Singapore, when Japanese landings suddenly looked possible. Although they had done no jungle training, in September 1943 they were ordered to Arakan to join the Fourteenth Army.
In the introduction to Mist on the Rice-fields (a quote from Kipling), an account of the fighting by his company commander, John Shipster, Rowland wrote: “In Arakan, as later at Kohima and Manipur State, it was war against nature: torrential rain, mist, bitterly cold early mornings, mud and blazing sun. It was also war against an implacable and ferocious enemy . . . In times of peace the Arakan had its own strange beauty. In war it was evil: a place of treachery and terror. If men were brave in action, few witnessed it; if they had quit it would often have been unobserved . . . all depended on the soldier and how he bore himself, and each fighter had to conquer his own heart.”
Slim spent months rebuilding morale after the earlier reverses (he called his memoir Defeat into Victory), wanting first to convince his British and Indian soldiers that the Japanese were not innately superior jungle fighters. Initially, therefore, he concentrated force against small targets — battalions to attack Japanese platoons, and brigades with tanks, supported by aircraft, to attack companies. Critics said it was “using a steam hammer to crack a walnut”, but Slim countered by saying: “If you happen to have a steam hammer handy and you don’t mind if there’s nothing left of the walnut, it’s not a bad way to crack it.”
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Battalions of the Indian army were organised similarly to British battalions, but their command structure was different. There were fewer King’s commissioned officers — sometimes just three or four per company, perhaps just two of them British — but there was an intermediate layer, the viceroy-commissioned officer, subedars and jemadars, who had risen from the ranks and who helped to execute the “sahib’s” orders. Rowland had nevertheless been able to apply himself seriously to language training in his 18 months since arriving in India (and indeed he still spoke Urdu well in his later years).
The 7th/2nd embarked for Chittagong in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) in September, a five-day voyage in a rusty bucket of a steamer. On disembarking they marched up-country to Ranchi for jungle training, before a final march to the Arakan front of 100 miles, which took another five days.
“During the day the sun blazed down, interrupted by intermittent heavy showers. During the night it rained steadily. The surface of the road was of soft, wet, sticky clay, badly broken up by military vehicles. Our boots and legs were soon caked knee-high with mud . . . [until] in late September [we] took up defensive positions in the foothills of the Mayu range.” The battalion, wrote Shipster, “entered the Arakan feeling fit and ready to face whatever lay head. Morale was good, but there were no officers with any operational experience and we knew very little about our potential enemy.”
Their baptism of fire was indeed swift and brutal, and after a month and more of skirmishing, in February the Japanese mounted a counteroffensive, “Ha-Go” (“Operation Z”), in preparation for what was to be the main offensive, “U-Go” (“Operation C”) on Kohima and Imphal. On March 10, Rowland’s commanding officer was killed while personally leading a counterattack. When 7/2 Punjab were pulled out, of the 14 British officers who had entered the Arakan only four remained, and of the Indian other ranks 300 had been killed or wounded. Rowland was by now in temporary command of his company.
Fortunately, in early May, the battalion having been withdrawn to Dimapur in Nagaland, on the border with Assam, Shipster, who had recovered from his wounds, returned to command of the company, and with an immediate DSO from the Arakan battles. Rowland, now a captain, reverted to second-in-command and took charge of the company’s “echelon”, its administrative tail, for the move up to reinforce the Kohima front. During the move, at the head of a column of 100 or so mules, Rowland encountered Vera Lynn. “I could hardly believe it . . . the nation’s sweetheart, singing the likes of We’ll Meet Again and The White Cliffs of Dover at the top of her voice just 200-300 yards from me and my mules. She had all of these battle-hardened soldiers eating out of her hand in the middle of nowhere. It was just such an amazing moment, so utterly surreal. I watched Vera and listened to her for about 15 minutes before I had to push off and get back on with the war.”
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On the final approach to Kohima, the 7/2 Punjab’s new commanding officer told Shipster that although the battalion was supposed to act as brigade reserve, he had been ordered to send a company to reinforce the 4th/15th Punjab, and that he wanted the 22-year-old Shipster, as the most experienced company commander, to take his company of Sikhs.
Three weeks’ intense combat followed, some of it literally hand to hand, and frequently at night. “Conditions were appalling, washing was impossible, and hot food could only be distributed at night,” Shipster wrote. “To add to our difficulties there was the continual rain, which filled the bottom of our trenches.” General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the imperial general staff, confided to his diary that he saw “disaster staring us in the face” in Assam.
Slim’s “Forgotten Army”, as they called themselves with customary ironic pride, held their ground, however, and the Japanese began withdrawing in early June. They had suffered their first defeat in southeast Asia, losing some 55,000 killed, wounded or missing. It was the turning point of the war in the region, but it came at a cost to the Fourteenth Army, who lost nearly 17,000 in the jungled hills of Nagaland and Manipur. The memorial at Kohima carries the famous “Kohima Epitaph”, inspired by an epigram to the fallen at Thermopylae: “When You Go Home, Tell Them of Us and Say, For Your Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today.”
Robert (Robin) Todd Rowland was born in Co Antrim, Northern Ireland, in 1922, the younger son of a regular officer in the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. He was educated at Crossley and Porter School, Halifax, the depot town of the “Dukes”, and then Ballyclare High School. At 18 he entered Queen’s University, Belfast, to study law, and joined the officer training corps. There was no conscription in Northern Ireland, but he volunteered as soon as he was eligible and, as the Indian army was being rapidly expanded, was offered a commission after training initially at the Guards Depot, Caterham, and then at Mhow in central India. He was commissioned in July 1942 and posted first to the Royal Deccan Horse, joining the Punjabis the following year.
After Kohima, he took permanent command of the company, in the rank of acting major, and led it during the long counteroffensive to clear Burma. Then after the dropping of the atomic bombs and the Japanese surrender, his battalion took part in the disarming of the Imperial Japanese Army in Thailand and Malaya. He did not get back to Britain until September 1946, but in the Malay capital, Kuala Lumpur, he met Kathleen (Kay) Busby, an army nurse, as his mother, Jean, had been. They were married in London in 1952. Kay died in 1991. Their sons survive him: Peter, a managing director in Adelaide; and Andrew, a chartered surveyor.
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On discharge from the army he returned to his law studies and was called to the Northern Ireland Bar in 1949, becoming a QC in 1969, a county court judge in 1974 and president of the Lands Tribunal from 1983. In addition he was a member of the War Pensions Tribunal for ten years, a member of the legal advisory committee of the general synod of the Church of Ireland, and chancellor of the dioceses of Armagh, and Down and Dromore. His reputation for impartiality and independence, and the fact that he was not a member of the Orange Order, perhaps made him less of a target for republicans and he always maintained minimum security, even flouting that to go fishing with his sons in the hills above Belfast.
For all his faith and humanity, however, Rowland always said he could never forgive the Japanese: “They were a terribly cruel enemy.”
His Honour Judge Robin Rowland, Kohima veteran, was born on January 12, 1922. He died on November 9, 2022, aged 100