Someone named Michael Knight wants you to know that, while this development gives him big sads because it's so utterly shocking, shocking given the degree to which the U.S. "...laid the foundations for (post-Saddam Iraq's) democratic traditions..., "Iraq is unraveling".
Excuse me while I take a moment to shove my arm in my mouth to keep from becoming hysteric.
You mean that by invading a precariously cobbled post-Ottoman multiethnic kleptocratic peri-state (rich with a tradition of dictatorial strongmen and winner-take-all politics), proceeding to devastate the physical and economic landscape while enabling the Shiite and Kurdish elements that were the last men standing after we defenestrated the Tikriti mafia, we then left behind a perilously unstable entity that is now in the process of deconstructing into a Maliki dictatorship amid the political, social and economic wreckage that "shock and awe" and a horrendously mismanaged occupation produced?
Really? Really?
No shit, Sherlock.
But the best part of the Foreign Policy article is here: "The United States laid the foundations for these democratic traditions, and can still be a powerful voice in getting Iraq back on track."
What Iraqi with a functioning brain cell would want the United States anywhere within the maximum effective range of anything to do with the governance of Iraq? Is this Knight guy completely whack? Does he think that in a mere decade the Iraqis have forgotten Viceroy Bremer and his shambolic Coalition Provisional Authority? Forgotten checkpoint shootings, arbitrary detentions, Blackwater goons shooting up random streets, bags of unmarked cash filling unnammed pockets? Forgotten the massive corruption, colossal ignorance, and hubris we showed turning up with a 30 round magazine and a copy of Atlas Shrugged, ready to hustle the East?
Every so often I am reminded that "we" as in We the People (and particularly We the People in our representatives in the U.S. government) really haven't the slightest clue what we look like from the outside. People like this Knight, who seems to have actually been there and done that, and yet still seem to think that we have anything to say to Iraq and the Iraqis other than "Oops, my bad."
I'll be the first to say that I hope that the U.S. government and its foreign policy agencies have some sort of idea how to help this place that we knocked down because of some lying grifters' lies and then turned upside-down and shook until its face turned red.
But I'll also be the first to admit that we didn't have a goddamn idea when we had thousands of armed soldiers there on how to actually do that. And that for someone, anyone, to try and pretend - and con the U.S. public into believing - that we now have anything more than a whisper of a hope in hell?
In a just world that person would be kicked in the ass so hard that he would be unable to sit down for a week.
But it is symptomatic of the world we have created that the ass of Mr. Knight and those like him in our government and our punditry will remain as soft and pillowy as a fluffy white cloud.
While the asses of those people who paid the bitter price for the lies and the illusions of Mr. Knight and his ilk will be sore as boils assuming that those poor bastards are still alive to feel the pain.
And there is just no damn justice in that at all.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
From the archives: Bud and Annette, in her Yellow Coat
She found the postcard in the bottom of the box; it was near the bottom, last but one of the pottage of paper inside. Pastel colors on one side, the other scrawled with his familiar backtilted handwriting, the slashing slant of “l” and “h” as familiar to her as the color of the walls around her. She could almost see his hand moving across the cardboard. Strong, blunt fingers, big knuckles. Even after he’d retired, long after he’d moved up from the shop floor, he had a mechanic’s hands.
She moved slightly, seeing not the empty room and the mess of papers spread out but the hard white light of a desert afternoon outside the dim hotel room. The bulk of him against the white doorway writing to his sister in the gloom; her yellow coat folded neatly over the plain wooden chair, spectator pumps primly together on the floor beside him at the table. Just another late afternoon on the road with him, the motels and meals in diners and reading in back seat in the shade of a cottonwood grove outside the plants while he was inside selling hose clamps and thermostats and voltage regulators.
For a moment her body didn’t feel the aches and indignities of eighty years. For a moment her legs remembered the good long muscular stretch after that hard day’s ride, her scalp the feeling of sun-hot silk over clean hair, the rough caress of the back of his hand across her neck that could still then – ten years after that first USO dance – make her belly tighten and her shoulders loosen. Just for a moment, sitting dry-eyed in silence, in her sensible grandma dress, she could feel the way he made her feel when he looked at her slantendicular with those hard mechanic’s hands on the steering wheel in the hot, bright afternoon.
And in that moment she missed him so hard that it crushed her chest, binding on her heart like a hose clamp binding a cracked radiator hose.
“Mom?” came Jeanelle’s voice from the front of the house. “We can’t wait any longer if we don’t want to be late for the service!”
Fifty years since they had last surprised each other, for good or ill. Fifty years leaving in the morning with a hard kiss and a cheerful admonition not to run off with the mailman. Only the last surprise of waking without him beside her, of the empty spaces around her, of the hard, hot pain within her.
“Coming…” she answered. She stood up and placed the paper back in the shoebox carefully.
“Goodbye, Bud” she said, and turned out the light.
She moved slightly, seeing not the empty room and the mess of papers spread out but the hard white light of a desert afternoon outside the dim hotel room. The bulk of him against the white doorway writing to his sister in the gloom; her yellow coat folded neatly over the plain wooden chair, spectator pumps primly together on the floor beside him at the table. Just another late afternoon on the road with him, the motels and meals in diners and reading in back seat in the shade of a cottonwood grove outside the plants while he was inside selling hose clamps and thermostats and voltage regulators.
For a moment her body didn’t feel the aches and indignities of eighty years. For a moment her legs remembered the good long muscular stretch after that hard day’s ride, her scalp the feeling of sun-hot silk over clean hair, the rough caress of the back of his hand across her neck that could still then – ten years after that first USO dance – make her belly tighten and her shoulders loosen. Just for a moment, sitting dry-eyed in silence, in her sensible grandma dress, she could feel the way he made her feel when he looked at her slantendicular with those hard mechanic’s hands on the steering wheel in the hot, bright afternoon.
And in that moment she missed him so hard that it crushed her chest, binding on her heart like a hose clamp binding a cracked radiator hose.
“Mom?” came Jeanelle’s voice from the front of the house. “We can’t wait any longer if we don’t want to be late for the service!”
Fifty years since they had last surprised each other, for good or ill. Fifty years leaving in the morning with a hard kiss and a cheerful admonition not to run off with the mailman. Only the last surprise of waking without him beside her, of the empty spaces around her, of the hard, hot pain within her.
“Coming…” she answered. She stood up and placed the paper back in the shoebox carefully.
“Goodbye, Bud” she said, and turned out the light.
(I wrote this six years ago in response to a friend's creation of a piece of art she called a "story box". Here's how I introduced it then: "This little story box is handcrafted by a gal in Texas who's got a whole pantsload of creativity. She calls this one "Bud and Annette, in her yellow coat". The other day she posted this picture on her blog and asked for submissions for a "back story" for the story box."
I liked what I wrote back then, I still like it, and I didn't want it to disappear in the netherlands of Blogger. So, for what it's worth, I'm reposting it. Enjoy. Or not; at the risk of seeming churlish, it's my blog and I'll write if I want to)
If you enjoyed the story you might enjoy the inspiration, as well. Here's the original "story box":
Deus vult
I have gotten to a point where it is almost impossible to number the things about the United States (and much of the larger sphere of humanity, circa 2013) that drive me fucking crazy.
It seems incomprehensible to me that, given the options we have, that we seem bound and determined to drive this goddamn bus back into political and economic oligarchy, social inequity, and intellectual credulity and irrationality. But that seems to be the case in a fairly broad swath of the American and global publics.
Idiocies, ranging from tantrums of anti-science to an apparent longing for Dickensian unregulated capitalism, abound. People whose world-views range from simplistic to outright delusional find it childishly easy to convince the public to elect them to high office. Even our political "scandals" seem more boneheaded and ginned-up than the scandals of just a couple of decades ago...perhaps because we chose to deliberately obscure and forget those earlier scandals rather than look on them with critical eyes.
Obviously a hell of a lot of this that's happening in the U.S. has to do with the congealing of what's called "movement conservatism" in this country.
The U.S. GOP as currently constituted is less a political party as it is a cult. The GOP of my young adulthood believed in things like free markets, low taxes, strong armies, and "personal responsibility" as social goals and legislative objectives.
The current GOP believes in them as dogmas, the difference being that if you have a political position you can reasonably modify it or negotiate over it with people who don't agree with it to find as much of a compromise as you can but if you have an article of faith then it is either that or damnation. You would rather be dead, and your opponent be dead, and everything around you flaming wreckage than accept anything less than everything you demand.
But I think that this is just a symptom of a larger disease; the resurgence of fundamentalism.
The GOP is just one of the organizations that has been taken over by - or has deliberately absorbed within itself - people whose outlook is irrational based on belief rather than reason and conviction rather than questioning.
Human life has always been hard. Human problems have always been difficult; usually complex, often prone to messy, unsatisfactory, unpleasant outcomes. Humans have always been contrary, irritating, perverse, unruly creatures who tend to defy commonsense and logic in pursuit of unreachable and unreasonable desires.
And reasoning or questioning your way through this mess is damn deadly difficult.
It's difficult to acquire bits of evidence, it's difficult to sift through evidence to discern fact from perifact and outright fiction. It's difficult to assess our own best interests to apply this evidence to our potential courses of action to decide on the one or ones that will produce the best outcomes for us. And even more difficult is then trying to apply this to our group; our family, our village or town, our region, our nation, our world. Instead of answers you get more questions. Instead of comfort you find more trouble. You end up feeling small, and alone, and helpless, especially if you're a person who is troubled by things you don't understand or don't like going on around you. You WANT to feel strong and untroubled. You WANT answers, not more questions.
That's where "fundamentalism" helps.
Having a simplistic creed makes those decisions a hell of a lot easier. You don't have to worry about the moral or spiritual or economic or political complexities of your actions; God (or Marx, or the free market, or Allah...) says it, you believe it, that settles it.
There's only one teensy-weensy problem with that; it makes you functionally insane.
If you choose not to apply human reason to human problems, if you choose to instead effectively print yourself a set of punch cards with a small range of standard answers to the Big Questions on them, then you have made yourself into a sort of meat computer and if your inputs are wrong then your outputs will be wrong.
David Atkins does a good job of summing up the immense problems with this approach to human life and human issues:
The problem I have with that is that "faith", by its very nature, is personal. I believe some things because I am who I am and I have seen and done and learned what I have; I cannot transfer that to you anymore than I can slide the scar on right hand I earned by shoving it through a plate glass window when I was eight off my hand and onto yours.
I can tell you about that scar. I can try and convince you that the scar is a good scar, and one that should shape the way you live your life.
But the moment I try and force you to bear that scar - whether by law or might or social pressure - I put myself in a dangerous place.
And more and more I see people who want to force others to bear their scars, for no better reason than that they believe in their scars strongly enough to want to force those others to bear them, too.
That drives me fucking crazy.
What's worse, I cannot see a way around it.
We know more now, and more of us know more, about ourselves, about our world, about the natural processes, about politics and economics and societies of every stripe.
And yet we, many of us, seem to insist not on using that knowledge but deliberately ignoring it; making others' and our own lives more difficult, meaner, crueler, less tolerant, more violent and random and loveless rather than kinder and more rational.
And I have absolutely no idea how - if all that information and knowledge and communications cannot - you change that.
It seems incomprehensible to me that, given the options we have, that we seem bound and determined to drive this goddamn bus back into political and economic oligarchy, social inequity, and intellectual credulity and irrationality. But that seems to be the case in a fairly broad swath of the American and global publics.
Idiocies, ranging from tantrums of anti-science to an apparent longing for Dickensian unregulated capitalism, abound. People whose world-views range from simplistic to outright delusional find it childishly easy to convince the public to elect them to high office. Even our political "scandals" seem more boneheaded and ginned-up than the scandals of just a couple of decades ago...perhaps because we chose to deliberately obscure and forget those earlier scandals rather than look on them with critical eyes.
Obviously a hell of a lot of this that's happening in the U.S. has to do with the congealing of what's called "movement conservatism" in this country.
The U.S. GOP as currently constituted is less a political party as it is a cult. The GOP of my young adulthood believed in things like free markets, low taxes, strong armies, and "personal responsibility" as social goals and legislative objectives.
The current GOP believes in them as dogmas, the difference being that if you have a political position you can reasonably modify it or negotiate over it with people who don't agree with it to find as much of a compromise as you can but if you have an article of faith then it is either that or damnation. You would rather be dead, and your opponent be dead, and everything around you flaming wreckage than accept anything less than everything you demand.
But I think that this is just a symptom of a larger disease; the resurgence of fundamentalism.
The GOP is just one of the organizations that has been taken over by - or has deliberately absorbed within itself - people whose outlook is irrational based on belief rather than reason and conviction rather than questioning.
Human life has always been hard. Human problems have always been difficult; usually complex, often prone to messy, unsatisfactory, unpleasant outcomes. Humans have always been contrary, irritating, perverse, unruly creatures who tend to defy commonsense and logic in pursuit of unreachable and unreasonable desires.
And reasoning or questioning your way through this mess is damn deadly difficult.
It's difficult to acquire bits of evidence, it's difficult to sift through evidence to discern fact from perifact and outright fiction. It's difficult to assess our own best interests to apply this evidence to our potential courses of action to decide on the one or ones that will produce the best outcomes for us. And even more difficult is then trying to apply this to our group; our family, our village or town, our region, our nation, our world. Instead of answers you get more questions. Instead of comfort you find more trouble. You end up feeling small, and alone, and helpless, especially if you're a person who is troubled by things you don't understand or don't like going on around you. You WANT to feel strong and untroubled. You WANT answers, not more questions.
That's where "fundamentalism" helps.
Having a simplistic creed makes those decisions a hell of a lot easier. You don't have to worry about the moral or spiritual or economic or political complexities of your actions; God (or Marx, or the free market, or Allah...) says it, you believe it, that settles it.
There's only one teensy-weensy problem with that; it makes you functionally insane.
If you choose not to apply human reason to human problems, if you choose to instead effectively print yourself a set of punch cards with a small range of standard answers to the Big Questions on them, then you have made yourself into a sort of meat computer and if your inputs are wrong then your outputs will be wrong.
David Atkins does a good job of summing up the immense problems with this approach to human life and human issues:
"Fundamentalism of any nature causes extraordinary harm. Fundamentalists believe that the ends justify the means, and that their ideology cannot fail--only people can fail their ideology. Christian and Islamist fundamentalists alike attribute any ills befalling the world as a sign of inadequate obeisance to their God, and do whatever it takes to remake the world more in keeping with their scriptural dogma. Market fundamentalists elevate the "free market" as a divinely infallible authority, attributing even the most obvious market and corporate failures to intrusions of "big government", and offer up only more deregulation, tax cuts and the occasional military coup as a solution. Even Marxist fundamentalists exist, looking at the failures of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot not as refutations of their dogma, but as inadequate implementations of their ideology. The end result of all of these fundamentalist beliefs is mindless tragedy, violence and death."When I look around what I see as the basis of a hell of a lot of this Vortex of Fucking Crazy is more than a willingness; an intense desire, almost a need to retreat from cautious ratiocination into simplistic answers driven by "faith".
The problem I have with that is that "faith", by its very nature, is personal. I believe some things because I am who I am and I have seen and done and learned what I have; I cannot transfer that to you anymore than I can slide the scar on right hand I earned by shoving it through a plate glass window when I was eight off my hand and onto yours.
I can tell you about that scar. I can try and convince you that the scar is a good scar, and one that should shape the way you live your life.
But the moment I try and force you to bear that scar - whether by law or might or social pressure - I put myself in a dangerous place.
And more and more I see people who want to force others to bear their scars, for no better reason than that they believe in their scars strongly enough to want to force those others to bear them, too.
That drives me fucking crazy.
What's worse, I cannot see a way around it.
We know more now, and more of us know more, about ourselves, about our world, about the natural processes, about politics and economics and societies of every stripe.
And yet we, many of us, seem to insist not on using that knowledge but deliberately ignoring it; making others' and our own lives more difficult, meaner, crueler, less tolerant, more violent and random and loveless rather than kinder and more rational.
And I have absolutely no idea how - if all that information and knowledge and communications cannot - you change that.
Monday, May 13, 2013
Navel Proceedings
Watched the Disney John Carter again with the Boy last night.
My online pal and commenter mike luuuurves this film, and I have to admit that mostly because of that I really wanted to love it, too. Instead I liked it well enough but not with the same fervor.
I found a lot of the same problems that many of the reviewers had; a fair amount of draggy exposition mixed in with the slam-bang action sequences, and an overall sameness to the general feel of it. Lots of it is fun, there's some gorgeous spectacle, but it's hard to avoid the feeling that you've seen it done elsewhere before.
As this Globe and Mail review pointed out, that isn't really a John Carter problem, it's a Burroughs problem. The stuff that seemed so awesome in 1917; flying machines, ray guns, dying empires on lost planets...by 2013 they've been done to death. We've been there and done that so often that the liveliness just kind of leaches out.
It's not a bad film, though, not at all. It's a good popcorn actioner and both the Boy and I enjoyed it.
The Boy liked the fighting, we both love the Tharks, but I think one of the reasons I enjoy it is Lynn Collins' Dejah Thoris.
And let's face it, why not? Dejah is a fanboy's wet dream. A nubile and gorgeous alien babe dressed in a couple of bits of jewelry and...well, a couple of bits of jewelry
I'm shocked, shocked.
Getting away from Dejah for a moment her creator ERB was kind of a piece of work, a 20th Century writer with deep roots in the 19th Century, a wanna-be soldier and a vicarious adventurer. After I watched John Carter the first time through I went out and picked up Princess of Mars from our fine Multnomah County Library and tried to read the original story.
I gave up about halfway through.
A big part of the reason is ERB's prose style. It's hopelessly 19th Century, full of the sorts of romantic and heroic conventions that 20th Century wars knocked the stuffing out of. At the time it was written the notion of the hero wearing a "fighting smile" while dueling furiously probably seemed rakish and admirable; with a better understanding of how frightening and stressful fighting for your life really is it seems ludicrous, almost parodic. All the description is florid to a Baroque degree and the way the people interact just seems ridiculous; you can't imagine people, any people, even imaginary people in an invented world, acting like that.
The other is that ERB's values were straight out of his times, and those times are so gone that they might as well be the Paleolithic. His good men are all parfit gentile knights and his good women all chaste and gentile ladies - who are kidnapped again and again and threatened again and again with rape - including our gal Dejah. Not that anybody actually gets raped; it's all good fun and our hero always wins. So the whole notion of making the rape of your heroine a plot device kind of slides by, and that kind of squicks me out; I got the feeling that ERB kinda liked the idea of rape.
He also has a rock-solid certainty that Race is Destiny, and there's no confusing who the White Men are. Even the backstory of the protagonist as a Confederate veteran of the Lost Cause seems kind of skeevy in retrospect; ERB obviously intended it to help establish John Carter as a cavalier, a kind of American aristocrat but the effect is, instead, to loop back to the nasty racism that saturated his timeperiod. You can almost hear the happy darkies crooning spirituals down in the slave shacks in the background.
Gah.
So the original book is kind of a wash.
But Collin's movie Dejah isn't; she's fiery and smart and tough. And funny. And, of course, a total babe; this isn't real life, fergawrshsakes.
Her costume, while more voluminous than a Burroughs original, is skimpy enough that a genuine fighting princess of Helium would have spent most of her time worrying that one of her opponents was liable to snip off a dangly bit or two.
But, here's the thing I kept thinking about watching the film again.
The film stays fairly close to the ERB canon, from the radium pistols to the Thark jezails to the nefarious Therns and so on and so on. So the assumption is that the other aspects of the original story are in there. We see the Thark egg-incubator in the opening Barsoom sequence; the Tharks hatch from eggs, K? That's important.
Because on Burrough's Mars everyone and everything hatches from eggs.
Martian women, regardless of species, are oviparous.
So why the hell does Dejah have one of these;
Nothing that hatches from eggs has a navel.
But, damn, Disney...how hard would it have been - how tiny an amount would it have cost amid the ginormous CGI budget - to spackle over Lynn's bellybutton? Nobody but us fanboys would have even noticed it but we'd have nodded knowingly and appreciated the gesture.
Silly? Sure, but then so's making a multimillion dollar picture of a sort of ragtime-era sci-fi version of the Prisoner of Zenda.
Call me nitpicky. But there you go; I can't be other than I am. I'm the sort of person who looks at a gorgeous woman playing an alien princess in a sci-fi action movie and notices Dejah Thoris' navel
My online pal and commenter mike luuuurves this film, and I have to admit that mostly because of that I really wanted to love it, too. Instead I liked it well enough but not with the same fervor.
I found a lot of the same problems that many of the reviewers had; a fair amount of draggy exposition mixed in with the slam-bang action sequences, and an overall sameness to the general feel of it. Lots of it is fun, there's some gorgeous spectacle, but it's hard to avoid the feeling that you've seen it done elsewhere before.
As this Globe and Mail review pointed out, that isn't really a John Carter problem, it's a Burroughs problem. The stuff that seemed so awesome in 1917; flying machines, ray guns, dying empires on lost planets...by 2013 they've been done to death. We've been there and done that so often that the liveliness just kind of leaches out.
It's not a bad film, though, not at all. It's a good popcorn actioner and both the Boy and I enjoyed it.
The Boy liked the fighting, we both love the Tharks, but I think one of the reasons I enjoy it is Lynn Collins' Dejah Thoris.
And let's face it, why not? Dejah is a fanboy's wet dream. A nubile and gorgeous alien babe dressed in a couple of bits of jewelry and...well, a couple of bits of jewelry
(Here's how ERB describes her costume: "She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure."
Here's cartoonist Frank Cho's version per the ERB description:
Good luck with your PG rating with THAT one, Disney. Sheesh.)This is pure Slave-Leia-dom; the slavering fanboy inventing his perfect naked dreamgirl.
I'm shocked, shocked.
Getting away from Dejah for a moment her creator ERB was kind of a piece of work, a 20th Century writer with deep roots in the 19th Century, a wanna-be soldier and a vicarious adventurer. After I watched John Carter the first time through I went out and picked up Princess of Mars from our fine Multnomah County Library and tried to read the original story.
I gave up about halfway through.
A big part of the reason is ERB's prose style. It's hopelessly 19th Century, full of the sorts of romantic and heroic conventions that 20th Century wars knocked the stuffing out of. At the time it was written the notion of the hero wearing a "fighting smile" while dueling furiously probably seemed rakish and admirable; with a better understanding of how frightening and stressful fighting for your life really is it seems ludicrous, almost parodic. All the description is florid to a Baroque degree and the way the people interact just seems ridiculous; you can't imagine people, any people, even imaginary people in an invented world, acting like that.
The other is that ERB's values were straight out of his times, and those times are so gone that they might as well be the Paleolithic. His good men are all parfit gentile knights and his good women all chaste and gentile ladies - who are kidnapped again and again and threatened again and again with rape - including our gal Dejah. Not that anybody actually gets raped; it's all good fun and our hero always wins. So the whole notion of making the rape of your heroine a plot device kind of slides by, and that kind of squicks me out; I got the feeling that ERB kinda liked the idea of rape.
He also has a rock-solid certainty that Race is Destiny, and there's no confusing who the White Men are. Even the backstory of the protagonist as a Confederate veteran of the Lost Cause seems kind of skeevy in retrospect; ERB obviously intended it to help establish John Carter as a cavalier, a kind of American aristocrat but the effect is, instead, to loop back to the nasty racism that saturated his timeperiod. You can almost hear the happy darkies crooning spirituals down in the slave shacks in the background.
Gah.
So the original book is kind of a wash.
But Collin's movie Dejah isn't; she's fiery and smart and tough. And funny. And, of course, a total babe; this isn't real life, fergawrshsakes.
Her costume, while more voluminous than a Burroughs original, is skimpy enough that a genuine fighting princess of Helium would have spent most of her time worrying that one of her opponents was liable to snip off a dangly bit or two.
But, here's the thing I kept thinking about watching the film again.
The film stays fairly close to the ERB canon, from the radium pistols to the Thark jezails to the nefarious Therns and so on and so on. So the assumption is that the other aspects of the original story are in there. We see the Thark egg-incubator in the opening Barsoom sequence; the Tharks hatch from eggs, K? That's important.
Because on Burrough's Mars everyone and everything hatches from eggs.
Martian women, regardless of species, are oviparous.
So why the hell does Dejah have one of these;
Nothing that hatches from eggs has a navel.
(Update 5/15: In the comments section Jack Saint raises a good point; some of the non-mammals of Jasoom DO have navels, specifically, some birds have a sort of small scar from the chorio allantoic duct that connects the yolk sac to the embryo. This at least gives our gal Dejah a shot at having a navel, though (as I discuss in the comments as well) the chance of her sporting anything like Lynn Collins' cute little innie is fairly low. Still - at least the possibility's there. Proof, if we needed it, of the awesomesauce of Nature in all Its Works...)But regardless of the biology of navels, there you have it; the fanboy in me comes out not drooling over naked space babes but niggling over ridiculous petty plot details like who has or hasn't got a bellybutton.
But, damn, Disney...how hard would it have been - how tiny an amount would it have cost amid the ginormous CGI budget - to spackle over Lynn's bellybutton? Nobody but us fanboys would have even noticed it but we'd have nodded knowingly and appreciated the gesture.
Silly? Sure, but then so's making a multimillion dollar picture of a sort of ragtime-era sci-fi version of the Prisoner of Zenda.
Call me nitpicky. But there you go; I can't be other than I am. I'm the sort of person who looks at a gorgeous woman playing an alien princess in a sci-fi action movie and notices Dejah Thoris' navel
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Half a Word
I should note that this is the first time in years that Mojo has gone and left me with the kiddos for any period of time.
It gives me a tremendous awe (and a sort of horror) at the idea of doing this for weeks, months, years.
It's not the work; kidcare isn't really work. It's the inconvenience and the boredom of it. My kids are great kids. But they're KIDS. Meaning that they like kids things and want to DO kid things. I got over that about forty years ago. And without another adult around this place the vortex of kid-energy is hard to escape from; it's all-kid all the time. And unless you're a certain type of fifty-five year old playing with LEGOs, watching Madagascar, and reading Scylla the Seal Fairy gets real old real fast.
At least the Boy enjoys playing basketball and soccer; but then you have the issue of how-long-will-his-little-sister-be-content-making-daisy-chains?
So single parents? My hat is off to you.
And my love? I hope you're having a wonderful time. And I don't begrudge you a moment.
But I'm gonna be glad as hell to see you, and not just for the wild marital-reunion makeup monkey sex.
Sheesh.
It gives me a tremendous awe (and a sort of horror) at the idea of doing this for weeks, months, years.
It's not the work; kidcare isn't really work. It's the inconvenience and the boredom of it. My kids are great kids. But they're KIDS. Meaning that they like kids things and want to DO kid things. I got over that about forty years ago. And without another adult around this place the vortex of kid-energy is hard to escape from; it's all-kid all the time. And unless you're a certain type of fifty-five year old playing with LEGOs, watching Madagascar, and reading Scylla the Seal Fairy gets real old real fast.
At least the Boy enjoys playing basketball and soccer; but then you have the issue of how-long-will-his-little-sister-be-content-making-daisy-chains?
So single parents? My hat is off to you.
And my love? I hope you're having a wonderful time. And I don't begrudge you a moment.
But I'm gonna be glad as hell to see you, and not just for the wild marital-reunion makeup monkey sex.
Sheesh.
Friday, May 10, 2013
MILF Gone Wi...on vacation
Sorry the posting has been so light; the thing is, I'm single parenting for the long weekend and the preceding week was taken up with getting ready for that. Mojolicious is off to St. Augustine with three of her old college chums (now there's a thought...does anyone this side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge call their friends "chums" anymore? They did at one time, anyway, if the pop novels of the Thirties and Forties are any indication. Hmmm.) for a long weekend of fun and sun.
The funny thing is that three of the four are now nice conventional mommies who leave a total of three husbands and six kiddos between them back home. The comic viewpoint nearly images itself:
Which reminds me of a story.
When The Boy was small - about three years old or so - Mojo enjoyed a similar weekend with one of the friends she's vacationing with this time (let's call her GeoChick, since she, too, is in the earth sciences). Now I like GeoChick; she's a rambunctious, earthy gal and visually is most delightfully curvaceous. Since at that time Mojo was also quite buxom it was hard to...ummm...let's say not "talk to their racks" as us doggish guys tend to if not careful with our gazes.
Anyway, little Peep missed his mommy then as he does now, and about 0.4 nanoseconds after the door closed behind her he asked me "Where's Mommy?"
"Mommy is in Seattle with Auntie GeoChick." I replied. "She'll be home in three days." There was about half a second of silence as he digested this. Then:
"Where's Mommy?"
This went on about for about ten minutes on the hour, every hour, for the next two days. Every time I gave him the same answers; Mommy's in Seattle with Auntie GeoChick. She'll be home in three (two, one and one half...) days.
On Saturday we'd gone to theanimal prison zoo and had a relatively-where's-mommy-free afternoon. But on the ride home with nothing else to distract him (and wretched traffic, so lots to distract me...) Peep pipes up noisily from his carseat "Where's Mommy?!?" and I snapped.
"Mommy's with Auntie Chris jumping up and down on a hotel bed naked rubbing their boobies together like in one of those Girls Gone Wild videos! Okay? Stop asking where the hell Mommy is! She'll be home tomorrow!"
Peep cries, I growl, by the time we get home he's asleep (the Carseat Magic, yes!) and we go back to "Where's Mommy/In Seattle with Auntie Chris" for the remaining weekend. Mommy walks through the door Sunday evening and thrills the Peep, who fawns and drools all over her in approved toddler fashion, climbs into her lap, snuggles down, sighs, looks up and asks;
"Why did you an' Auntie Chris jump an' rub your boobies together?"
I won't describe the look I got other than if it were knives I'd have looked like the house special at Yoshi's Sashimi Palace in a heartbeat.
"What?! He asked me a zillion times and every OTHER time I just told him you two were in Seattle and you'd be home tonight! How the hell could I know that he would remember the one time I snapped?"
The funny thing is that I think my wife understands guys and our Girls Gone Wild issues. She was madder than hell, though, that I taught him the word "boobies".
Now the kids are older we've actually joked with Mojo about Mommies Gone Wild and she joked back, but with a glance at me that said plainer than words "Yeah, you horndog, you WOULD like me to make one of those videos with my friends, wouldn't you..?"
Sigh.
Busted.
So to speak.
But, as my wise bride also says, the thing about marital desire is that you can work up an appetite anywhere so long as you come home to eat; die Gedanken sind frei - you can think what you want about who you want in the privacy of your own head, provided you both understand that those are just sparks, and the fire you're tending is in the two of you's eyes and hearts. I'm married, not blind; I still appreciate the beauty of a beautiful woman. But the woman I desire is...right now, she's somewhere south of the Georgia state line.
Dammit.
Now I'm missing the hell out of my bride and she's only been gone for a day.
Gotta run. It's Treat Day and my daughter is responsible for her class Oreos.
The funny thing is that three of the four are now nice conventional mommies who leave a total of three husbands and six kiddos between them back home. The comic viewpoint nearly images itself:
Which reminds me of a story.
When The Boy was small - about three years old or so - Mojo enjoyed a similar weekend with one of the friends she's vacationing with this time (let's call her GeoChick, since she, too, is in the earth sciences). Now I like GeoChick; she's a rambunctious, earthy gal and visually is most delightfully curvaceous. Since at that time Mojo was also quite buxom it was hard to...ummm...let's say not "talk to their racks" as us doggish guys tend to if not careful with our gazes.
Anyway, little Peep missed his mommy then as he does now, and about 0.4 nanoseconds after the door closed behind her he asked me "Where's Mommy?"
"Mommy is in Seattle with Auntie GeoChick." I replied. "She'll be home in three days." There was about half a second of silence as he digested this. Then:
"Where's Mommy?"
This went on about for about ten minutes on the hour, every hour, for the next two days. Every time I gave him the same answers; Mommy's in Seattle with Auntie GeoChick. She'll be home in three (two, one and one half...) days.
On Saturday we'd gone to the
"Mommy's with Auntie Chris jumping up and down on a hotel bed naked rubbing their boobies together like in one of those Girls Gone Wild videos! Okay? Stop asking where the hell Mommy is! She'll be home tomorrow!"
Peep cries, I growl, by the time we get home he's asleep (the Carseat Magic, yes!) and we go back to "Where's Mommy/In Seattle with Auntie Chris" for the remaining weekend. Mommy walks through the door Sunday evening and thrills the Peep, who fawns and drools all over her in approved toddler fashion, climbs into her lap, snuggles down, sighs, looks up and asks;
"Why did you an' Auntie Chris jump an' rub your boobies together?"
I won't describe the look I got other than if it were knives I'd have looked like the house special at Yoshi's Sashimi Palace in a heartbeat.
"What?! He asked me a zillion times and every OTHER time I just told him you two were in Seattle and you'd be home tonight! How the hell could I know that he would remember the one time I snapped?"
The funny thing is that I think my wife understands guys and our Girls Gone Wild issues. She was madder than hell, though, that I taught him the word "boobies".
Now the kids are older we've actually joked with Mojo about Mommies Gone Wild and she joked back, but with a glance at me that said plainer than words "Yeah, you horndog, you WOULD like me to make one of those videos with my friends, wouldn't you..?"
Sigh.
Busted.
So to speak.
But, as my wise bride also says, the thing about marital desire is that you can work up an appetite anywhere so long as you come home to eat; die Gedanken sind frei - you can think what you want about who you want in the privacy of your own head, provided you both understand that those are just sparks, and the fire you're tending is in the two of you's eyes and hearts. I'm married, not blind; I still appreciate the beauty of a beautiful woman. But the woman I desire is...right now, she's somewhere south of the Georgia state line.
Dammit.
Now I'm missing the hell out of my bride and she's only been gone for a day.
Gotta run. It's Treat Day and my daughter is responsible for her class Oreos.
Monday, May 06, 2013
Astoria, City of Landslides
The coastal city of Astoria should really replace these big wooden signs you pass on the way into town. I don't know what they call themselves now; "Astoria, City by the Sea"? "Astoria, City of Trees, Cheese, and Ocean Breeze"? (That one is really, no shit, the motto of Tillamook County just in case you thought I was really reaching.
Anyway, they should just admit it and call themselves "Astoria, City of Landslides".
This is one, away up in the hills southeast of town. That mossy green tree-trunk-looking thing in the middle? That's the old Navy Heights pipeline that used to be under four feet of soil cover. Oops.
But no matter - there's tons of these things all through the city and roundabouts. The one right behind the Pig n' Pancake has crept so far downhill that it's halfway across Bond Street. Rather than mitigate the thing the City has just closed the westbound side and made it a one-way street. Fah.
Anyway, I didn't really write this to complain about the damn landslides. They put food on my table, so I don't say bad things about them. What I wanted to show you was this lovely Victorian anachronism:
This is the old "Astoria City Water Works" of 1895. The water was piped down from the eastern hills through this pipe, made from wooden staves wrapped with wire and then coated with tar.
Some of these wooden pipes are still in service, by the way, in the older Oregon cities like Astoria and Portland. They are, as you might imagine, a horrible maintenance headache. The old Astoria main has been replaced by steel, however. The old headworks, though, have not, and are still working along mroe than a century old, hidden down in the dell behind the bizarre column that "celebrates" the fur traders, merchants, layabouts, grifters, oddbodies, and assorted refugees, outcasts, and wildmen who turned up at the far edge of North America to see if there was anything to the notion that there was something for nothing.
No moral there, I suppose, other than that it takes all sorts to build something that lasts a hundred years or more.
Anyway, they should just admit it and call themselves "Astoria, City of Landslides".
This is one, away up in the hills southeast of town. That mossy green tree-trunk-looking thing in the middle? That's the old Navy Heights pipeline that used to be under four feet of soil cover. Oops.
But no matter - there's tons of these things all through the city and roundabouts. The one right behind the Pig n' Pancake has crept so far downhill that it's halfway across Bond Street. Rather than mitigate the thing the City has just closed the westbound side and made it a one-way street. Fah.
Anyway, I didn't really write this to complain about the damn landslides. They put food on my table, so I don't say bad things about them. What I wanted to show you was this lovely Victorian anachronism:
This is the old "Astoria City Water Works" of 1895. The water was piped down from the eastern hills through this pipe, made from wooden staves wrapped with wire and then coated with tar.
Some of these wooden pipes are still in service, by the way, in the older Oregon cities like Astoria and Portland. They are, as you might imagine, a horrible maintenance headache. The old Astoria main has been replaced by steel, however. The old headworks, though, have not, and are still working along mroe than a century old, hidden down in the dell behind the bizarre column that "celebrates" the fur traders, merchants, layabouts, grifters, oddbodies, and assorted refugees, outcasts, and wildmen who turned up at the far edge of North America to see if there was anything to the notion that there was something for nothing.
No moral there, I suppose, other than that it takes all sorts to build something that lasts a hundred years or more.
Si vielleuse pouvait...
On Sunday afternoon I took a couple of sunny hours and did this:
My just-turned seven-year-old daughter did this:
That, by the way, is perhaps the single most critical difference between seven and fifty-seven. It's neither size nor strength; it's raw energy. The little turbines just spin away like a hydroelectric plant during flood season.
My just-turned seven-year-old daughter did this:
That, by the way, is perhaps the single most critical difference between seven and fifty-seven. It's neither size nor strength; it's raw energy. The little turbines just spin away like a hydroelectric plant during flood season.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Decisive Battles: Kohima 1944
Battle of Kohima Dates: 6 APR - 31 MAY 1944
Forces Engaged: Great Britain -
4th Bn, Royal West Kent Regiment (Queen's Own) - about 450 infantrymen
A total of about four companies of infantry; one each from the 3rd Bn, 2nd Punjab Regiment, 1st (Garrison) Bn, Burma Regiment, 5th Burma Regiment, and 27 BN, 5th Mahratta Light Infantry - about 200-300 infantrymen
3rd Assam Rifles (-) (The Assam Rifles were not truly infantry but a native constabulary employed in Nagaland, but by 1944 could act fairly effectively as light infantry given logistical and fire support)
The Shere Regiment (-) (a recently recruited outfit from the Kingdom of Nepal, less detachments)
Artillery: 1x25lb cannon and crew
Armor: None
Combat Support.Combat Service Support: Various small units and detachments including engineer, signals, medical, transportation, field kitchen and bakery, pioneer, and administration elements.
Approximately 2,500 all arms under COL Hugh Richards
Note: On 6 APR supporting elements of 161 Brigade, 5th Indian Division were several miles west of the main "boxes" at Kohima, including divisional artillery and two infantry battalions. In addition, aviation assets of 221 Group RAF flying out of Imphal provided close-air and logistical support for the garrison. By mid May the British forces had grown to two divisions including several armored units and a massive aerial umbrella...
Imperial Japanese Army (大日本帝國陸軍, Dai-Nippon Teikoku Rikugun) - 31st Division (第31師団 Dai-sanju-ichi Shidan) consisting of:
Infantry: 58th Infantry Regiment (COL Takada), 124th Infantry Regiment (COL Fukuoka), 138th Infantry Regiment (COL Nara) Each Imperial infantry regiment was notionally composed of three roughly 1,000-man battalions plus regimental troops for about 3,800 infantrymen per regiment.
Artillery: 31st Mountain Artillery Regiment (About 900 artillerymen in three battalions with 12x75mm mountain howitzers per battalion for a total of 36 cannon.
In addition, Japanese infantry units carried on the now-obsolete tradition of "battalion guns"; light artillery directly attached to infantry units. Each battalion had 2x70mm Type 92 cannon (really almost more of a heavy mortar; a very short range, high-angle weapon)
for a total of 18 of these things. And the regiments appear to have had a regimental gun battery of 4x75mm field guns for a total of 12x 75mm cannon. The total number of field artillery cannon assigned to 31st Division was supposed to have been 48x75mm howitzers and 18x70mm howitzers; it is difficult to tell how many of these weapons made it through the Naga Hills to Kohima, but some did, as the battle reports will show.
Armor: IJA infantry divisions were assigned an "tankette company", largely kitted out with Type 94 九四式軽装甲車 , Kyūyon-shiki keisōkōsha "94 type light armored car" or TK tankette (TK is the abbreviation of Tokushu Keninsha, "special tractor") There is no evidence to suspect that the 31st Division managed to get their tankettes anywhere near Kohima or ever intended to take them there.
The division also had engineer and transportation regiments, each about 800-900 troopers each.
Our best guess is that the division was down to about 70% strength by the time it arrived at Kohima, so from the original 20,000 all arms probably 14,000 all arms under LTG Satō Kōtoku (佐藤 幸徳)
Although 15th Army and the overall IJA higher (Burma Area Army) should have had air support I can find little or no evidence that it was used effectively or at all in the Kohima-Imphal Campaign. I can find little or no information about the Army Air forces supposed to have been supporting the U-Go offensive except notes that the RAF had effectively gained control of the air by early 1944. So for all practical purposes the IJA at Kohima had no aviation assets whatsoever. Whatever the Furious Division (烈兵団 Retsu Heidan) gained at Kohima would be through its own efforts.
Note: Again, this is not a typical "Decisive Battles" post. For one thing, the battle of Kohima (and the related battle of Imphal) as well as the overall 1944 Burma Campaign have been extensively covered elsewhere, as I will discuss in the Sources section below. This is the second in the series of "The Imperial Japanese Army of WW2 - What Went Wrong" posts (the first was Bataan this past January, the third, on Kalkhan-Gol, follows in May...). I don't want to talk so much about the events of the battle itself as what it exposed about the IJA and why I consider it far and away the least effective and least modern of the major combatant armies in WW2 perhaps outside of Italy's. So while I do want to cover the basic events of the battle the bulk of the post will discuss what Kohima tells us about the IJA, its strengths and weaknesses.
Sources: Again, since this is a blog we'll concentrate on the online references for this engagement.
The Wiki entry is surprisingly good, and is a worthwhile starting point for any websearch on Kohima. Another worthwhile source if the History Learning Site's entry for the battle. The British 2nd Division Association has a web page that discusses the engagement, although largely repeating the information available on the other two sites.
Several of the British units that fought at and near Kohima have websites discussing the units' role in these engagments. The Queen's Regiment is one, and here's a fascinating one from the 7th Bn, The Worcestershire Regiment, that features extracts from the war diary of one CPT H. Swinson, who continues the great British tradition of military raconteurs.
We'll hear more from him later.
Perhaps most appropriate for us living today is the Commonwealth War Graves site Forever India that talks about the engagements and the monuments raised afterwards to the men who never left Imphal and Kohima.
Worthwhile written works include:
Perhaps the single most worthwhile source is Field Marshal Slim's own 1956 account Defeat into Victory. Hard to get any more authoritative than the man who directed the British side of the battle.
Leslie Edward's 2009 Kohima: The Furthest Battle: The Story of the Japanese Invasion of India in 1944 and the ‘British-Indian Thermopylae’ is given universally good review at Amazon. I did not get a copy but it sounds like a must-read for the serous student of this engagement.
Fergal Keane's 2001 Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944 won the British Army "Book of the Year" award; I have no idea what the value of that is but suggests a worthwhile read.
And Robert Lyman has produced two works about the battle and campaign: Japan’s Last Bid for Victory: The Invasion of India, 1944 in 2011, which is said to be a very excellent work, and an earlier work with Peter Dennis for Osprey, Kohima 1944 which is the usual mix of decent text, maps, and photos/pictures that characterizes this series.
The Campaign: To understand the battle of Kohima and the whole Burma campaign you have to go back in history, to the Japanese war aims and to the British history of colonization in India.
Imperial Japan's motivation for starting the "Great Pacific War" was pretty simple; it needed petroleum for its armed forces in China and the oilfields were held by the Dutch in the Indonesian archipelago. Everything else - the attacks on the U.S. in the Philippines, the French in Indochina, and the British in Singapore and Malaya - was simply to secure the lines between the petroleum in the Dutch East Indies and the Home Islands.
But once the IJA had seized the British territories along the South China seacoast it was confronted with a dilemma; those territories were no more defensible against a British counterattack than that had been against a Japanese attack. The vast British reservoir of men and material to the west in India would be a constant threat. The Japanese gains needed strategic depth, and that meant that the British forces in Burma needed to go.
Add to that the nuisance of the Burma Road. Taking a chunk out of that supply route would help strangle their old enemy the Nationalist forces in China. Together these objectives pulled the IJA 15th Army into Burma in early January 1942.
The initial conquest of Burma was quick, aided by a number of the usual early-war Allied clusterfucks; the British Burma Army was an undertrained and undersupplied trainwreck, the Nationalist "forces" were their usual shambolic selves, the Burmese climate and terrain were horrific. And Burma exposed what was becoming increasingly obvious elsewhere; that the British Empire was founded on economic sand. Britain flat-out couldn't afford to fight more than two modern campaigns, and between the Middle East and the defense of Britain itself there was little or nothing to spare for Burma.
Wartime stress was also widening cracks in the supposed "jewel in the imperial crown", India. Indian independence activities - the "Quit India" movement - was tearing up the eastern areas of Bengal and Bihar through which troops and supplies had to move as well as sucking up "reliable" British and Imperial units. And famine - which was a consistent feature of colonial India - was hammering Bengal, which also sucked up resources and hindered war production and preparation.
So by May, 1942, the British Far East forces were pinned back to the eastern borderlands of India, sick, battered, and hung down.
This part of British India was called Assam in the Forties. It was then pretty much what it is now; a lightly-peopled frontier that was very little changed from preindustrial times, dominated by steep, thickly jungled hills and the numerous threads of the Brahmaputra river system. It was probably a welcoming place for the tribes that had lived there for centuries but for troops fighting mechanized warfare it was a bloody nightmare.
Here's what the diarist from the 7th Worcestershires has to say about the Assamese hill country:
This gave the Japanese infantry a reputation as "masters of the jungle"; the Allied troops in Burma developed bugout fever, and as soon as Japanese forces turned up behind them tended to bolt for safety, abandoning supplies that the Japanese with the threadbare logistical organization used to continue their advance.
1943 brought something of a stalemate to Burma. The British forces were still suffering from logistical and tactical problems and the so-called Arakan Campaign was a bloody mess. The attempt to regain some Burmese ground fell apart on the usual issues - British and Indian units were still fairly useless in the jungle, command and control was still iffy, and supply was hampered by the terrain and weather.
It was also at Arakan that the Allies first encountered the IJA gift for bunker-building; the damn things were built like fortresses, incredibly well concealed, and provided murderous interlocking fields of fire for the defenders.
Japanese artillery, while never numerous and relatively immobile and thus fairly useless in attack, proved vicious in defense. Bunkers and defensive lines could be pre-registered and preplotted fires called in on the Allied attackers; Japanese defenders had no fear calling in fires on their own positions and that was ruinous for the exposed Allies trying to force the positions.
So the British forces in eastern India - now organized as 14th Army - backed off and regrouped. Its new commander, LTG Slim, had different ideas about how to fight the Japanese in the jungly hills of Assam:
This engagement was something of a rat-scramble. The British tried another attack into Arakan, the Japanese responded as they had in 1943, with a counter-attack the succeeded in surrounding a portion of the attackers; the so-called "Admin Box".
Using Slim's tactics the Admin Box held. The Japanese were unable to secure their "Churchill rations" and had not anticipated either the 360-degree defense or the effectiveness of the Allied aerial resupply and interdiction. Thousands of Japanese soldiers died of starvation and disease. The British then eventually evacuated the Arakan area because it was just a nasty malarial swamp; the Japanese regained it and held on until the collapse in 1945.
So at the beginning of the 1944 campaigning season - the summer monsoons made any sort of major military activity impractical - everyone was back to where they had been in late spring 1942; the British clinging to the far western edge of Burma and Assam in India, the Japanese still trying to close off the Burma Road and hang on to what they had gained in Burma as things got ugly for them back in the South Pacific.
At this point the sparkplug for the fight at Kohima starts sparking; 牟田口 廉也, LTG Mutaguchi Renya, commander of the IJA 15th Army since March 1943.
Mutaguchi was an interesting guy, and not in a particularly good way. He was one of these guys who see every problem as a nail and themselves as the Big Hammer. He had been a player in the 皇道派 (Kōdōha) ultranationalist faction in the Army during the Twenties and Thirties, and was thoroughly saturated with the belief that the mystical Japanesy-ness of bushido and the old-school traditional pre-Western ways was capable of defeating the effete Europeans and their industrial warfare.
He was also apparently kind of an asshole personally. Almost all of his division commanders either outright hated him or were deeply suspicious of his glory-hunting and willingness to see everyone else die for his country so long as he got the credit for the win.
Mutaguchi had been beating the drum for attacking the British in Assam for a year. The Wiki entry for Imphal summarizes some of what was in his head:
Mutaguchi's plan was in the mold of the IJA grand tactics of the Forties. A two-division assault on British defenses centered on the Assamese town of Imphal would draw the Allied attention there and immobilize the British reserves. While all eyes were on Imphal the third 15th Army infantry division, Sato's 31st, would swing around to the north and overrun Kohima (cutting the land route to Imphal) and seize the large supply depots around Dimapur. This would both resupply the 15th Army and starve out the Imphal garrison.
Mutaguchi's plans were also based on a number of assumptions, almost all of them incorrect.
- He assumed that the British and Indian troops were still the same mooks the IJA had whipped in Burma in 1942-43, with the same tactical and logistical weaknesses. The lessons of the Admin Box had not been absorbed.
- He also assumed that the attackers would solve their logistical problems by a combination of capture and bizarre innovation. For example, he proposed to herd cattle and buffalo along the jungle tracks to act as self-propelled rations. This worked about as well as you'd expect to if you herded a bunch of cows along vertiginous jungle tracks; most of the future beef tonkatsu fell into ravines or died of malnutrition or disease.
- He also assumed that the Allies would suffer from the same engineering and pioneering shortcomings his own troops did and would be without armored and artillery support; he left his tanks and most of his cannon back at the staging areas.
Perhaps the single worst miscalculation the 15th Army commander made was the choice of unit to make the Kohima attacks. Sato, 31st Division's commander, was convinced from the get-go that Mutaguchi was all eaten up with victory disease and was grossly underestimating the logistical problems the 31st would face. He was on record with his division staff that they might all starve to death.
And there were personal issues, too; Sato thought Mutaguchi was an idiot who thought with his sword arm - he called him a "blockhead". Sato has also bee on the other side of the IJA factional fight (the Toseiha side) and considered Mutaguchi's notions of mystic Japanese bad-assery dangerous hoo-ha that would get him and his boys of the Furious Division killed.
Still, IJA discipline was still intact in late winter 1944, and so in mid-March Sato's troops moved off down the thready jungle tracks towards their objectives. Operation U-Go was on.
The Engagement: 31st Division crossed their line of departure on 15 MAR 1944, moving northwest in a broad front but slipping along the narrow trails that wound through the Assamese hills. First contact was made by the 58th Infantry north of Imphal on 20 MAR; the Allied unit, 50th Indian Parachute Brigade were driven back after the six-day Battle of Sangshak and lost 600 guys. But they knocked down 400 troopers from the 58th and delayed that unit - which had the most direct march to Kohima - for a week.
The other piece of good luck that came out of Sangshak was capture of some 31st Division documents that blew the gaff; LTG Slim now knew that the division's objectives were Kohima and Dimapur. This was crucial; 14th Army had disregarded the Kohima sector as impassable and had posted a minimal covering force in Kohima and had nothing other than support units at Dimapur. Slim sent a rocket to his superior asking XI Army Group for a release of additional reserves to strengthen the Kohima area.
These reserves turned out to be 161st Indian Infantry Brigade and 24th Mountain Artillery Regiment Indian Artillery which were flown into Dimapur. And the British 2nd Division was alerted to move from its depots in south and central India to the Assam front.
Kohima itself is dominated by a north-south ridge studded with hilltops.
The only road from Dimapur to Imphal runs along the east side of the ridge. At the time of the engagement the ridge was what the British would have called a "hill-station", the administrative and residential complex for the colonial administration of the Nagaland District. The house of the administrator was located along the road, complete with true colonial accessories such as formal gardens and a tennis court. The local gentlemen's clubhouse stood on a terrace overlooking this little pied a terre, all set amid the dense forests of the Assamese hills.
A local town, Naga Village spread over the so-called Treasury Hill and Church Knoll to the north. Other eminences, such as "GPT Ridge" Aradura Spur, rose to the south and west.
British and Indian combat support and service support troops were camped along the ridge, giving names to various features such as "Field Supply Depot or FSD Hill".
LTG Slim had the same grand tactical vision as his opposite number Mutaguchi; he saw Kohima as no more than a roadblock or a delaying position. The real objective were the supply depots around Dimapur, and therefore 161 Brigade was held in position west of Kohima to cover the more critical position. Only a portion of the brigade - a company of the Rajputs and 4th Bn, Royal West Kent Regiment - managed to reinforce Kohima before 31st Division arrived and cut the road from Dimapur. The Kohima garrison was surrounded and the battle of Kohima had properly begun.
The details of the fighting are well described elsewhere; for about eleven days the defenders withstood a nightmarish succession of infantry attacks and shelling. The only drinking water point, on GPT Hill, was overrun on 6 APR as the British and Indian defenders were driven in to a relatively small perimetr on Garrison Hill. Before thirst could force their surrender a small spring was uncovered on the north side of the hill.
The north end of the ridge, around and within the regional Deputy Commissioner's bungalow, was a ridiculously vicious miniature death-struggle of the sort that seems to develop in protracted engagements.
The so-called "Battle of the Tennis Court" locked the West Kents and Assamese (from both the Assam Rifles and the Assam Regiment) with units of the IJA 58th Regiment in a regular WW1-style trench battle, with no man's land as the net and the two sides dug in within a short grenade-toss of each other along the sidelines.
Aerial resupply and artillery support from 161 Brigade helped hold the Kohima positions, and this dogfight went on from about 8 APR to 18 APR; the worst night coming on 17/18 APR when 31st Division troopers overran the DC's bungalow and Kuki Picquet and cut right through the defensive box. But the Japanese troops were whipped, couldn't managed to push on over the top of Garrison Hill, and by the morning of 18 APR elements of the British 2nd Division, 161st Indian Brigade and Lee-Grant tanks from XXXIII Corps cleared the north-west of Garrison Hill and opened the road from Dimapur.
But the Furious Division wasn't beaten yet. The now-pointless fight continued another month. The Japanese positions on the tennis court were cleared 12 MAY by an infantry-tank assault led by U.S.-made Lee (M3) tanks of 150 Regiment Royal Armoured Corps. The next day Japanese troops were spotted abandoning their positions not under pressure.
Sato's men were largely undone by British tactical stubbornness, aerial superiority, and logistical disaster, with the supply problems perhaps the most critical. Almost no materials reached 31st Division after 6 APR.
The Naga hills themselves provided little provender and were dangerous to forage; the Naga hillpeople were not pleased to see these strange Asian invaders and enjoyed the opportunity to indulge in the headhunting forbidden by the British authorities. Japanese foraging parties tended to simply disappear into the jungle...
LTG Sato informed his Army commander of his supply issues on 13 MAY: “Because of the rain and starvation there is no time. Decided this division, accompanying the sick and wounded, should move to a point where it can receive supplies.”
Mutaguchi's reply was characteristic of the man: “It is very difficult to understand why your division should evacuate under the pretext of supply difficulties, forgetting its brilliant services. Maintain the present position for ten days. A resolute will makes the Gods give way.”
But a resolute will cannot fill an empty belly or reload an empty rifle.
By mid-May the Allied forces, now over two-division strength, were driving in the Japanese positions north and south of Kohima Ridge. LTG Sato informed his superior that if he was not resupplied by 1 JUN he would have to withdraw. In the first week of June what was left of 31st Division began to filter southeast, and then east.
The retreat was horrific. Whatever supplies and food had been pushed up from 15th Army rear had been used up or eaten by the line-of-support troops who were as starved as the grunts. Japanese troopers literally dropped dead along the jungle trails, drowned in creeks, and were abandoned under trees. Their pursuers from XXXIII Corps, 2nd British and 7th Indian Divisions, had little to do other than walk carefully behind this deathmarch and police up the equipment from the bodies.
On 22 JUN the lead XXXIII Corps elements met 5th Indian Division advancing north out of Imphal.
The Outcome: British grand tactical victory with strategic consequences.
The Impact: Kohima-Imphal effectively broke the IJA 15th Army; the losses in men and material couldn't be and were never recovered. When 14th Army advanced into Burma the following year it was practically a walkover. The failure of the U-Go Offensive has been compared to Stalingrad, a disaster from which the IJA in Southeast Asia never recovered.
But why did this attack fail so disastrously? What had happened that had so changed the two armed forces engaged so as to reverse the British disasters of Malaya into the British walkover in Burma in three years?
Well, here's what I think:
1. The IJA suffered from a great excess of "warriorness" There's a sort of a saying about how amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk about logistics; like all sayings its as much false as true. But in general good fighters were promoted in the IJA; good logisticians - or good strategists, or good innovators - were not. In my opinion the IJA produced a fairly good bunch of company commanders. Even their best commanders had fairly serious issues with logistics; Yamashita in Malaya, Homma in the Philippines. And for all that tactical maneuver was expected grand tactical or strategic maneuver was considered effete Western caprioling; Homma was effectively relieved for not being brutal enough at Bataan.
2. And even tactically, the IJA was crude even by the standards of 1941 and never improved. As we'll see in May, the IJA never really bothered learning the lessons of armored warfare, and against a mobile opponent was brutally mishandled, first at Khalkhin-Gol in 1939 and again against the Soviets in 1945. And, to an extent, that's understandable; the IJA was designed to fight against the Chinese, who were pathetic, and in the islands of the South Pacific where armor was not a critical skill.
But even the slower, simpler skills of infantry combined-arms were largely beyond the IJA. The Japanese Army in WW2 never developed an effective infantry-tank team. Japanese artillery was effective enough in defense but slow in attack and typically undersupplied at all times (another facet of the IJA's logistical shortcomings). Despite having respectable individual aircraft in 1941 the IJAAF never developed an effective close-support or aerial resupply system.
In fact, the single biggest element I see in the IJA's tactical bag of tricks was stagnation. The IJA never developed anything they didn't have in 1941; new tactics, new techniques, new equipment. They were great at static defense. They had some early successes maneuvering against enemies who were less competent tactically than they were; the British and the Americans in 1941, the Chinese pretty much anytime. But the Allies grew steadily better at warfighting, at doing everything from shooting, moving, and communicating to supplying themselves with new and better weapons. The Japanese never did.
3. The IJA had real command problems that it never solved, although this might have been more of a "Japanese" problem than an Army problem. Kohima is a classic illustration of everything wrong with IJA generalship. Almost everyone involved thought LTG Mutaguchi was an idiot whose plan was smoke and mirrors; nobody was willing to put the blocks to him. Meanwhile, LTG Sato's most dangerous course of action would have been to mask Kohima while driving on Dimapur - Slim worried that he would do just that. Instead, the 31st Division just threw itself at the defensive boxes on Kohima Ridge again and again; Mutaguchi doesn't seem to have tried to find out what Sato was doing or control him, and Sato doesn't seem to have bothered to find out what his commander's intent was. The entire C3I system in 15th Army and 31st Division was completely adrift, and nobody did anything until too late and the troops were dying of starvation in the jungle.
I understand that a big part of Japanese masculinity (at least in the Forties and among the sorts of guys who became Army generals, if not today) was that you didn't argue and bicker with one another. Everyone was supposed to have this amazing group-mind sort of thing that came from being all Japanese-y and culturally homogeneous. You could "disagree" but through a complex system of indirect signals and non-words that the recipient was supposed to just "get".
Well, it didn't work in this case and seems to have done fairly badly elsewhere. I'm not sure what that all ties up with, but it sure killed a lot of poor bastards in the Assamese hills for no damn good at all.
Regardless of the whys, the whats and wheres of Kohima are damning to the IJA. Before Kohima things were not going well for the Japanese war effort in Southeast Asia; after Kohima, and Imphal, things went from bad to worse. The war was lost.
All that was left was the killing. The monument at Kohima to the dead of the British 2nd Division sums it up bitterly but well:
"A few days after the road was open, orders came through that the Brigade would move down into Imphal for a rest. The Brigadier proposed riding down for a recce. with his gun-man. The road winds down out of the mountains and on to the grassy plain. What a relief to find a piece of flat ground again and a straight road instead of the eternal hair-pin bends every hundred yards or so!
We had a look at the Rest Camp allotted to us, then went along to 4 Corps H.Q. to see the B.G.S. As it was about one-thirty, he wasn't in his office, so we went along to "A" Mess to find him. I might mention that the H.Q. consists of well-built bashas on the side of a woody hill, and to get at it you have to cross the air-strip and then filter through whole covies of C.M.P.'s. In "A" Mess we found more brass hats than I've ever seen in one room together. Two Corps Commanders were there, their B.G.S.'s, not to mention B.G.A.'s, C.R.A.'s, and full Colonels. Lunch was finished and the mass of red was having coffee in the ante-room. The Brigader pushed his way in and I followed. In a corner I found a solitary subaltern: I didn't know him, but I fell on his neck like a long-lost brother. He was the only officer within three ranks of me. We introduced ourselves.
"Good morning," he said, "will you have a beer?"
"A beer?" I echoed. "I thought you were besieged and we were relieving you."
"Besieged?" he asked in a pained voice. "Whatever made you think that? We've been all right. Do have a beer. There's plenty in the Mess."
I accepted with alacrity. It was good stuff when it arrived, and I said "Cheerio" and swigged it down. Then unaccountably (to the subaltern) burst out laughing. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Anything wrong?"
I thought of the weary, beerless months we'd spent trying to relieve these people. "No, nothing wrong," I said, "but it's a bloody funny war, isn't it?"
Forces Engaged: Great Britain -
for the purposes of this discussion we're going to limit the scope to the actions and forces that met near the little town of Kohima in the Assam Hills in April, 1944. For the British 14th Army, the garrison at Kohima in 4 APR 1944 consisted of an assortment of odds and sods, including:Infantry:1st Assam Regiment (which had been conducting a fighting withdrawal since 1 APR and was probably down to no more than 400-500 infantrymen)
4th Bn, Royal West Kent Regiment (Queen's Own) - about 450 infantrymen
A total of about four companies of infantry; one each from the 3rd Bn, 2nd Punjab Regiment, 1st (Garrison) Bn, Burma Regiment, 5th Burma Regiment, and 27 BN, 5th Mahratta Light Infantry - about 200-300 infantrymen
3rd Assam Rifles (-) (The Assam Rifles were not truly infantry but a native constabulary employed in Nagaland, but by 1944 could act fairly effectively as light infantry given logistical and fire support)
The Shere Regiment (-) (a recently recruited outfit from the Kingdom of Nepal, less detachments)
Artillery: 1x25lb cannon and crew
Armor: None
Combat Support.Combat Service Support: Various small units and detachments including engineer, signals, medical, transportation, field kitchen and bakery, pioneer, and administration elements.
Approximately 2,500 all arms under COL Hugh Richards
Note: On 6 APR supporting elements of 161 Brigade, 5th Indian Division were several miles west of the main "boxes" at Kohima, including divisional artillery and two infantry battalions. In addition, aviation assets of 221 Group RAF flying out of Imphal provided close-air and logistical support for the garrison. By mid May the British forces had grown to two divisions including several armored units and a massive aerial umbrella...
Imperial Japanese Army (大日本帝國陸軍, Dai-Nippon Teikoku Rikugun) - 31st Division (第31師団 Dai-sanju-ichi Shidan) consisting of:
Infantry: 58th Infantry Regiment (COL Takada), 124th Infantry Regiment (COL Fukuoka), 138th Infantry Regiment (COL Nara) Each Imperial infantry regiment was notionally composed of three roughly 1,000-man battalions plus regimental troops for about 3,800 infantrymen per regiment.
Artillery: 31st Mountain Artillery Regiment (About 900 artillerymen in three battalions with 12x75mm mountain howitzers per battalion for a total of 36 cannon.
In addition, Japanese infantry units carried on the now-obsolete tradition of "battalion guns"; light artillery directly attached to infantry units. Each battalion had 2x70mm Type 92 cannon (really almost more of a heavy mortar; a very short range, high-angle weapon)
for a total of 18 of these things. And the regiments appear to have had a regimental gun battery of 4x75mm field guns for a total of 12x 75mm cannon. The total number of field artillery cannon assigned to 31st Division was supposed to have been 48x75mm howitzers and 18x70mm howitzers; it is difficult to tell how many of these weapons made it through the Naga Hills to Kohima, but some did, as the battle reports will show.
Armor: IJA infantry divisions were assigned an "tankette company", largely kitted out with Type 94 九四式軽装甲車 , Kyūyon-shiki keisōkōsha "94 type light armored car" or TK tankette (TK is the abbreviation of Tokushu Keninsha, "special tractor") There is no evidence to suspect that the 31st Division managed to get their tankettes anywhere near Kohima or ever intended to take them there.
The division also had engineer and transportation regiments, each about 800-900 troopers each.
Our best guess is that the division was down to about 70% strength by the time it arrived at Kohima, so from the original 20,000 all arms probably 14,000 all arms under LTG Satō Kōtoku (佐藤 幸徳)
Although 15th Army and the overall IJA higher (Burma Area Army) should have had air support I can find little or no evidence that it was used effectively or at all in the Kohima-Imphal Campaign. I can find little or no information about the Army Air forces supposed to have been supporting the U-Go offensive except notes that the RAF had effectively gained control of the air by early 1944. So for all practical purposes the IJA at Kohima had no aviation assets whatsoever. Whatever the Furious Division (烈兵団 Retsu Heidan) gained at Kohima would be through its own efforts.
Note: Again, this is not a typical "Decisive Battles" post. For one thing, the battle of Kohima (and the related battle of Imphal) as well as the overall 1944 Burma Campaign have been extensively covered elsewhere, as I will discuss in the Sources section below. This is the second in the series of "The Imperial Japanese Army of WW2 - What Went Wrong" posts (the first was Bataan this past January, the third, on Kalkhan-Gol, follows in May...). I don't want to talk so much about the events of the battle itself as what it exposed about the IJA and why I consider it far and away the least effective and least modern of the major combatant armies in WW2 perhaps outside of Italy's. So while I do want to cover the basic events of the battle the bulk of the post will discuss what Kohima tells us about the IJA, its strengths and weaknesses.
Sources: Again, since this is a blog we'll concentrate on the online references for this engagement.
The Wiki entry is surprisingly good, and is a worthwhile starting point for any websearch on Kohima. Another worthwhile source if the History Learning Site's entry for the battle. The British 2nd Division Association has a web page that discusses the engagement, although largely repeating the information available on the other two sites.
Several of the British units that fought at and near Kohima have websites discussing the units' role in these engagments. The Queen's Regiment is one, and here's a fascinating one from the 7th Bn, The Worcestershire Regiment, that features extracts from the war diary of one CPT H. Swinson, who continues the great British tradition of military raconteurs.
We'll hear more from him later.
Perhaps most appropriate for us living today is the Commonwealth War Graves site Forever India that talks about the engagements and the monuments raised afterwards to the men who never left Imphal and Kohima.
Worthwhile written works include:
Perhaps the single most worthwhile source is Field Marshal Slim's own 1956 account Defeat into Victory. Hard to get any more authoritative than the man who directed the British side of the battle.
Leslie Edward's 2009 Kohima: The Furthest Battle: The Story of the Japanese Invasion of India in 1944 and the ‘British-Indian Thermopylae’ is given universally good review at Amazon. I did not get a copy but it sounds like a must-read for the serous student of this engagement.
Fergal Keane's 2001 Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944 won the British Army "Book of the Year" award; I have no idea what the value of that is but suggests a worthwhile read.
And Robert Lyman has produced two works about the battle and campaign: Japan’s Last Bid for Victory: The Invasion of India, 1944 in 2011, which is said to be a very excellent work, and an earlier work with Peter Dennis for Osprey, Kohima 1944 which is the usual mix of decent text, maps, and photos/pictures that characterizes this series.
The Campaign: To understand the battle of Kohima and the whole Burma campaign you have to go back in history, to the Japanese war aims and to the British history of colonization in India.
Imperial Japan's motivation for starting the "Great Pacific War" was pretty simple; it needed petroleum for its armed forces in China and the oilfields were held by the Dutch in the Indonesian archipelago. Everything else - the attacks on the U.S. in the Philippines, the French in Indochina, and the British in Singapore and Malaya - was simply to secure the lines between the petroleum in the Dutch East Indies and the Home Islands.
But once the IJA had seized the British territories along the South China seacoast it was confronted with a dilemma; those territories were no more defensible against a British counterattack than that had been against a Japanese attack. The vast British reservoir of men and material to the west in India would be a constant threat. The Japanese gains needed strategic depth, and that meant that the British forces in Burma needed to go.
Add to that the nuisance of the Burma Road. Taking a chunk out of that supply route would help strangle their old enemy the Nationalist forces in China. Together these objectives pulled the IJA 15th Army into Burma in early January 1942.
The initial conquest of Burma was quick, aided by a number of the usual early-war Allied clusterfucks; the British Burma Army was an undertrained and undersupplied trainwreck, the Nationalist "forces" were their usual shambolic selves, the Burmese climate and terrain were horrific. And Burma exposed what was becoming increasingly obvious elsewhere; that the British Empire was founded on economic sand. Britain flat-out couldn't afford to fight more than two modern campaigns, and between the Middle East and the defense of Britain itself there was little or nothing to spare for Burma.
Wartime stress was also widening cracks in the supposed "jewel in the imperial crown", India. Indian independence activities - the "Quit India" movement - was tearing up the eastern areas of Bengal and Bihar through which troops and supplies had to move as well as sucking up "reliable" British and Imperial units. And famine - which was a consistent feature of colonial India - was hammering Bengal, which also sucked up resources and hindered war production and preparation.
So by May, 1942, the British Far East forces were pinned back to the eastern borderlands of India, sick, battered, and hung down.
This part of British India was called Assam in the Forties. It was then pretty much what it is now; a lightly-peopled frontier that was very little changed from preindustrial times, dominated by steep, thickly jungled hills and the numerous threads of the Brahmaputra river system. It was probably a welcoming place for the tribes that had lived there for centuries but for troops fighting mechanized warfare it was a bloody nightmare.
Here's what the diarist from the 7th Worcestershires has to say about the Assamese hill country:
"It was silent in the jungle . . . .The IJA had learned to use the thick vegetation of Southeast Asia to offset their technical shortcomings. Not overburdened with artillery and armor and traveling largely on foot the Japanese infantry had adapted the German infiltration tactics of 1918 to their plans; they would probe until they found gaps in the Allied "lines" (nearly unavoidable in the dense foliage and rough terrain), slip through and reassemble across the Allied supply and communications routes.
Sometimes in the evening the wind would creak through the bamboo trees, waving their tall green branches against the sky; or sometimes the leaves would rise from the ground and dance onward a few steps before falling to sleep again; or the monkeys way up on their jungle roof would quarrel and screech and squeal in excitement, then swiftly swing into the leafy distance; but these temporary sounds could not break the eternal silence any more than a pebble churn the surface of a pool. Nor could the cooks rattling their dixies, nor the troops patrolling along the paths, nor any of the sounds of an army in training.
The silence of the jungle is not the silence of the town, nor the open fields, nor the downs, nor the plains, nor the high mountains; it is the stifled silence of one who waits seeing his enemy bare before him. The troops knew and feared this jungle silence; they spoke in hushed voices or walked glancing about them. At night, though they slept side by side, the sentries would hear them crying out, the nameless fear having entered their dreams, look round them, then lie back to sleep again. Some became sick and others sullen, but all felt the dull stifling of the heart.
It was cold in the jungle. The men dug themselves down into the earth, slashed bamboos and unrolled them to make their beds, wove branches for a mattress, and huddled together in their blankets for warmth. But at night the dew dripped down from the tree-tops and the air would turn to a frozen breath. At Reveille there were few men who would strip to waist, for the cold stream water burned on the flesh. The morning sun would not penetrate the jungle; sometimes a thin beam would creep down the paths and paint the bamboos at a bend with gold, or sometimes skim along the roof ; but no warmth would reach the men on the ground till breakfast was eaten and work begun."
This gave the Japanese infantry a reputation as "masters of the jungle"; the Allied troops in Burma developed bugout fever, and as soon as Japanese forces turned up behind them tended to bolt for safety, abandoning supplies that the Japanese with the threadbare logistical organization used to continue their advance.
1943 brought something of a stalemate to Burma. The British forces were still suffering from logistical and tactical problems and the so-called Arakan Campaign was a bloody mess. The attempt to regain some Burmese ground fell apart on the usual issues - British and Indian units were still fairly useless in the jungle, command and control was still iffy, and supply was hampered by the terrain and weather.
It was also at Arakan that the Allies first encountered the IJA gift for bunker-building; the damn things were built like fortresses, incredibly well concealed, and provided murderous interlocking fields of fire for the defenders.
Japanese artillery, while never numerous and relatively immobile and thus fairly useless in attack, proved vicious in defense. Bunkers and defensive lines could be pre-registered and preplotted fires called in on the Allied attackers; Japanese defenders had no fear calling in fires on their own positions and that was ruinous for the exposed Allies trying to force the positions.
So the British forces in eastern India - now organized as 14th Army - backed off and regrouped. Its new commander, LTG Slim, had different ideas about how to fight the Japanese in the jungly hills of Assam:
"The basic premise was that off-road mobility was paramount: much heavy equipment was exchanged for mule- or air-transported equipment and motor transport was kept to a minimum and restricted to those vehicles that could cope with some of the worst combat terrain on Earth. The new doctrine dictated that if the Japanese had cut the lines of communication, then they too were surrounded. All units were to form defensive 'boxes', to be resupplied by air and assisted by integrated close air support and armour. The boxes were designed as an effective response to the tactics of infiltration practised by the Japanese in the war. Slim also supported increased offensive patrolling and night training, to encourage his soldiers to lose both their fear of the jungle and their belief that Japanese soldiers were better jungle fighters."Using these tactics and techniques the British had some success in Burma in early 1944.
This engagement was something of a rat-scramble. The British tried another attack into Arakan, the Japanese responded as they had in 1943, with a counter-attack the succeeded in surrounding a portion of the attackers; the so-called "Admin Box".
Using Slim's tactics the Admin Box held. The Japanese were unable to secure their "Churchill rations" and had not anticipated either the 360-degree defense or the effectiveness of the Allied aerial resupply and interdiction. Thousands of Japanese soldiers died of starvation and disease. The British then eventually evacuated the Arakan area because it was just a nasty malarial swamp; the Japanese regained it and held on until the collapse in 1945.
So at the beginning of the 1944 campaigning season - the summer monsoons made any sort of major military activity impractical - everyone was back to where they had been in late spring 1942; the British clinging to the far western edge of Burma and Assam in India, the Japanese still trying to close off the Burma Road and hang on to what they had gained in Burma as things got ugly for them back in the South Pacific.
At this point the sparkplug for the fight at Kohima starts sparking; 牟田口 廉也, LTG Mutaguchi Renya, commander of the IJA 15th Army since March 1943.
Mutaguchi was an interesting guy, and not in a particularly good way. He was one of these guys who see every problem as a nail and themselves as the Big Hammer. He had been a player in the 皇道派 (Kōdōha) ultranationalist faction in the Army during the Twenties and Thirties, and was thoroughly saturated with the belief that the mystical Japanesy-ness of bushido and the old-school traditional pre-Western ways was capable of defeating the effete Europeans and their industrial warfare.
He was also apparently kind of an asshole personally. Almost all of his division commanders either outright hated him or were deeply suspicious of his glory-hunting and willingness to see everyone else die for his country so long as he got the credit for the win.
Mutaguchi had been beating the drum for attacking the British in Assam for a year. The Wiki entry for Imphal summarizes some of what was in his head:
"His motives for doing so appear to be complex. He had played a major part in several Japanese victories, ever since the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937, and believed it was his destiny to win the decisive battle of the war for Japan. He may also have been goaded by the first Chindit expedition, a raid behind Japanese lines launched by the British under Orde Wingate early in 1943."Another factor may have been the insistence of the Indian National Army leaders that defeating the British in Assam would inspire a nationalist uprising in India. Certainly part of the motivation was political; the leader of the "Free India" movement, S.C. Bose, was tight with the commander of the Burma Area Army.
Mutaguchi's plan was in the mold of the IJA grand tactics of the Forties. A two-division assault on British defenses centered on the Assamese town of Imphal would draw the Allied attention there and immobilize the British reserves. While all eyes were on Imphal the third 15th Army infantry division, Sato's 31st, would swing around to the north and overrun Kohima (cutting the land route to Imphal) and seize the large supply depots around Dimapur. This would both resupply the 15th Army and starve out the Imphal garrison.
Mutaguchi's plans were also based on a number of assumptions, almost all of them incorrect.
- He assumed that the British and Indian troops were still the same mooks the IJA had whipped in Burma in 1942-43, with the same tactical and logistical weaknesses. The lessons of the Admin Box had not been absorbed.
- He also assumed that the attackers would solve their logistical problems by a combination of capture and bizarre innovation. For example, he proposed to herd cattle and buffalo along the jungle tracks to act as self-propelled rations. This worked about as well as you'd expect to if you herded a bunch of cows along vertiginous jungle tracks; most of the future beef tonkatsu fell into ravines or died of malnutrition or disease.
- He also assumed that the Allies would suffer from the same engineering and pioneering shortcomings his own troops did and would be without armored and artillery support; he left his tanks and most of his cannon back at the staging areas.
Perhaps the single worst miscalculation the 15th Army commander made was the choice of unit to make the Kohima attacks. Sato, 31st Division's commander, was convinced from the get-go that Mutaguchi was all eaten up with victory disease and was grossly underestimating the logistical problems the 31st would face. He was on record with his division staff that they might all starve to death.
And there were personal issues, too; Sato thought Mutaguchi was an idiot who thought with his sword arm - he called him a "blockhead". Sato has also bee on the other side of the IJA factional fight (the Toseiha side) and considered Mutaguchi's notions of mystic Japanese bad-assery dangerous hoo-ha that would get him and his boys of the Furious Division killed.
Still, IJA discipline was still intact in late winter 1944, and so in mid-March Sato's troops moved off down the thready jungle tracks towards their objectives. Operation U-Go was on.
The Engagement: 31st Division crossed their line of departure on 15 MAR 1944, moving northwest in a broad front but slipping along the narrow trails that wound through the Assamese hills. First contact was made by the 58th Infantry north of Imphal on 20 MAR; the Allied unit, 50th Indian Parachute Brigade were driven back after the six-day Battle of Sangshak and lost 600 guys. But they knocked down 400 troopers from the 58th and delayed that unit - which had the most direct march to Kohima - for a week.
The other piece of good luck that came out of Sangshak was capture of some 31st Division documents that blew the gaff; LTG Slim now knew that the division's objectives were Kohima and Dimapur. This was crucial; 14th Army had disregarded the Kohima sector as impassable and had posted a minimal covering force in Kohima and had nothing other than support units at Dimapur. Slim sent a rocket to his superior asking XI Army Group for a release of additional reserves to strengthen the Kohima area.
These reserves turned out to be 161st Indian Infantry Brigade and 24th Mountain Artillery Regiment Indian Artillery which were flown into Dimapur. And the British 2nd Division was alerted to move from its depots in south and central India to the Assam front.
Kohima itself is dominated by a north-south ridge studded with hilltops.
The only road from Dimapur to Imphal runs along the east side of the ridge. At the time of the engagement the ridge was what the British would have called a "hill-station", the administrative and residential complex for the colonial administration of the Nagaland District. The house of the administrator was located along the road, complete with true colonial accessories such as formal gardens and a tennis court. The local gentlemen's clubhouse stood on a terrace overlooking this little pied a terre, all set amid the dense forests of the Assamese hills.
A local town, Naga Village spread over the so-called Treasury Hill and Church Knoll to the north. Other eminences, such as "GPT Ridge" Aradura Spur, rose to the south and west.
British and Indian combat support and service support troops were camped along the ridge, giving names to various features such as "Field Supply Depot or FSD Hill".
LTG Slim had the same grand tactical vision as his opposite number Mutaguchi; he saw Kohima as no more than a roadblock or a delaying position. The real objective were the supply depots around Dimapur, and therefore 161 Brigade was held in position west of Kohima to cover the more critical position. Only a portion of the brigade - a company of the Rajputs and 4th Bn, Royal West Kent Regiment - managed to reinforce Kohima before 31st Division arrived and cut the road from Dimapur. The Kohima garrison was surrounded and the battle of Kohima had properly begun.
The details of the fighting are well described elsewhere; for about eleven days the defenders withstood a nightmarish succession of infantry attacks and shelling. The only drinking water point, on GPT Hill, was overrun on 6 APR as the British and Indian defenders were driven in to a relatively small perimetr on Garrison Hill. Before thirst could force their surrender a small spring was uncovered on the north side of the hill.
The north end of the ridge, around and within the regional Deputy Commissioner's bungalow, was a ridiculously vicious miniature death-struggle of the sort that seems to develop in protracted engagements.
The so-called "Battle of the Tennis Court" locked the West Kents and Assamese (from both the Assam Rifles and the Assam Regiment) with units of the IJA 58th Regiment in a regular WW1-style trench battle, with no man's land as the net and the two sides dug in within a short grenade-toss of each other along the sidelines.
Aerial resupply and artillery support from 161 Brigade helped hold the Kohima positions, and this dogfight went on from about 8 APR to 18 APR; the worst night coming on 17/18 APR when 31st Division troopers overran the DC's bungalow and Kuki Picquet and cut right through the defensive box. But the Japanese troops were whipped, couldn't managed to push on over the top of Garrison Hill, and by the morning of 18 APR elements of the British 2nd Division, 161st Indian Brigade and Lee-Grant tanks from XXXIII Corps cleared the north-west of Garrison Hill and opened the road from Dimapur.
But the Furious Division wasn't beaten yet. The now-pointless fight continued another month. The Japanese positions on the tennis court were cleared 12 MAY by an infantry-tank assault led by U.S.-made Lee (M3) tanks of 150 Regiment Royal Armoured Corps. The next day Japanese troops were spotted abandoning their positions not under pressure.
Sato's men were largely undone by British tactical stubbornness, aerial superiority, and logistical disaster, with the supply problems perhaps the most critical. Almost no materials reached 31st Division after 6 APR.
The Naga hills themselves provided little provender and were dangerous to forage; the Naga hillpeople were not pleased to see these strange Asian invaders and enjoyed the opportunity to indulge in the headhunting forbidden by the British authorities. Japanese foraging parties tended to simply disappear into the jungle...
LTG Sato informed his Army commander of his supply issues on 13 MAY: “Because of the rain and starvation there is no time. Decided this division, accompanying the sick and wounded, should move to a point where it can receive supplies.”
Mutaguchi's reply was characteristic of the man: “It is very difficult to understand why your division should evacuate under the pretext of supply difficulties, forgetting its brilliant services. Maintain the present position for ten days. A resolute will makes the Gods give way.”
But a resolute will cannot fill an empty belly or reload an empty rifle.
By mid-May the Allied forces, now over two-division strength, were driving in the Japanese positions north and south of Kohima Ridge. LTG Sato informed his superior that if he was not resupplied by 1 JUN he would have to withdraw. In the first week of June what was left of 31st Division began to filter southeast, and then east.
The retreat was horrific. Whatever supplies and food had been pushed up from 15th Army rear had been used up or eaten by the line-of-support troops who were as starved as the grunts. Japanese troopers literally dropped dead along the jungle trails, drowned in creeks, and were abandoned under trees. Their pursuers from XXXIII Corps, 2nd British and 7th Indian Divisions, had little to do other than walk carefully behind this deathmarch and police up the equipment from the bodies.
On 22 JUN the lead XXXIII Corps elements met 5th Indian Division advancing north out of Imphal.
The Outcome: British grand tactical victory with strategic consequences.
The Impact: Kohima-Imphal effectively broke the IJA 15th Army; the losses in men and material couldn't be and were never recovered. When 14th Army advanced into Burma the following year it was practically a walkover. The failure of the U-Go Offensive has been compared to Stalingrad, a disaster from which the IJA in Southeast Asia never recovered.
But why did this attack fail so disastrously? What had happened that had so changed the two armed forces engaged so as to reverse the British disasters of Malaya into the British walkover in Burma in three years?
Well, here's what I think:
1. The IJA suffered from a great excess of "warriorness" There's a sort of a saying about how amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk about logistics; like all sayings its as much false as true. But in general good fighters were promoted in the IJA; good logisticians - or good strategists, or good innovators - were not. In my opinion the IJA produced a fairly good bunch of company commanders. Even their best commanders had fairly serious issues with logistics; Yamashita in Malaya, Homma in the Philippines. And for all that tactical maneuver was expected grand tactical or strategic maneuver was considered effete Western caprioling; Homma was effectively relieved for not being brutal enough at Bataan.
2. And even tactically, the IJA was crude even by the standards of 1941 and never improved. As we'll see in May, the IJA never really bothered learning the lessons of armored warfare, and against a mobile opponent was brutally mishandled, first at Khalkhin-Gol in 1939 and again against the Soviets in 1945. And, to an extent, that's understandable; the IJA was designed to fight against the Chinese, who were pathetic, and in the islands of the South Pacific where armor was not a critical skill.
But even the slower, simpler skills of infantry combined-arms were largely beyond the IJA. The Japanese Army in WW2 never developed an effective infantry-tank team. Japanese artillery was effective enough in defense but slow in attack and typically undersupplied at all times (another facet of the IJA's logistical shortcomings). Despite having respectable individual aircraft in 1941 the IJAAF never developed an effective close-support or aerial resupply system.
In fact, the single biggest element I see in the IJA's tactical bag of tricks was stagnation. The IJA never developed anything they didn't have in 1941; new tactics, new techniques, new equipment. They were great at static defense. They had some early successes maneuvering against enemies who were less competent tactically than they were; the British and the Americans in 1941, the Chinese pretty much anytime. But the Allies grew steadily better at warfighting, at doing everything from shooting, moving, and communicating to supplying themselves with new and better weapons. The Japanese never did.
3. The IJA had real command problems that it never solved, although this might have been more of a "Japanese" problem than an Army problem. Kohima is a classic illustration of everything wrong with IJA generalship. Almost everyone involved thought LTG Mutaguchi was an idiot whose plan was smoke and mirrors; nobody was willing to put the blocks to him. Meanwhile, LTG Sato's most dangerous course of action would have been to mask Kohima while driving on Dimapur - Slim worried that he would do just that. Instead, the 31st Division just threw itself at the defensive boxes on Kohima Ridge again and again; Mutaguchi doesn't seem to have tried to find out what Sato was doing or control him, and Sato doesn't seem to have bothered to find out what his commander's intent was. The entire C3I system in 15th Army and 31st Division was completely adrift, and nobody did anything until too late and the troops were dying of starvation in the jungle.
I understand that a big part of Japanese masculinity (at least in the Forties and among the sorts of guys who became Army generals, if not today) was that you didn't argue and bicker with one another. Everyone was supposed to have this amazing group-mind sort of thing that came from being all Japanese-y and culturally homogeneous. You could "disagree" but through a complex system of indirect signals and non-words that the recipient was supposed to just "get".
Well, it didn't work in this case and seems to have done fairly badly elsewhere. I'm not sure what that all ties up with, but it sure killed a lot of poor bastards in the Assamese hills for no damn good at all.
Regardless of the whys, the whats and wheres of Kohima are damning to the IJA. Before Kohima things were not going well for the Japanese war effort in Southeast Asia; after Kohima, and Imphal, things went from bad to worse. The war was lost.
All that was left was the killing. The monument at Kohima to the dead of the British 2nd Division sums it up bitterly but well:
When you go homeTouchline Tattles: I'm afraid I really can't do better than our Captain Swinson. So here's his tale of the End of the Battle of Kohima:
Tell them of us and say,
For your tomorrow,
We gave our today.
"A few days after the road was open, orders came through that the Brigade would move down into Imphal for a rest. The Brigadier proposed riding down for a recce. with his gun-man. The road winds down out of the mountains and on to the grassy plain. What a relief to find a piece of flat ground again and a straight road instead of the eternal hair-pin bends every hundred yards or so!
We had a look at the Rest Camp allotted to us, then went along to 4 Corps H.Q. to see the B.G.S. As it was about one-thirty, he wasn't in his office, so we went along to "A" Mess to find him. I might mention that the H.Q. consists of well-built bashas on the side of a woody hill, and to get at it you have to cross the air-strip and then filter through whole covies of C.M.P.'s. In "A" Mess we found more brass hats than I've ever seen in one room together. Two Corps Commanders were there, their B.G.S.'s, not to mention B.G.A.'s, C.R.A.'s, and full Colonels. Lunch was finished and the mass of red was having coffee in the ante-room. The Brigader pushed his way in and I followed. In a corner I found a solitary subaltern: I didn't know him, but I fell on his neck like a long-lost brother. He was the only officer within three ranks of me. We introduced ourselves.
"Good morning," he said, "will you have a beer?"
"A beer?" I echoed. "I thought you were besieged and we were relieving you."
"Besieged?" he asked in a pained voice. "Whatever made you think that? We've been all right. Do have a beer. There's plenty in the Mess."
I accepted with alacrity. It was good stuff when it arrived, and I said "Cheerio" and swigged it down. Then unaccountably (to the subaltern) burst out laughing. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Anything wrong?"
I thought of the weary, beerless months we'd spent trying to relieve these people. "No, nothing wrong," I said, "but it's a bloody funny war, isn't it?"
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