Kohima, WWII’s Overlooked Turning Point

The year 1944 marked a pivotal chapter in the Second World War. June 6 saw the Normandy landings, the audacious Allied invasion of mainland Europe. A day earlier, Rome had fallen to the Allies, becoming the first European capital to be liberated. By September, the Allies launched ‘Operation Market Garden’ - an ambitious and risky attempt to outflank German defenses by seizing key bridges in the Netherlands which ultimately became a heroic failure.

Today, as these events are commemorated on their 80th anniversaries, another titanic clash of the war, largely forgotten by history, took place in a remote corner of colonial India. The Battle of Kohima, fought between March and July 1944 between British Commonwealth forces and the Imperial Japanese Army, was just as brutal and consequential, yet it remains overshadowed by the European theatre.

Stalingrad may capture the popular imagination, but Kohima, fought on the Indo-Burma border, was no less significant. By halting the Japanese advance, it changed the trajectory of the war in Southeast Asia and set the stage for the British and Commonwealth forces to retake Burma. The Japanese dream of an imperial empire collapsed along the ‘Road of Bones.’ Until recently, the Battle of Kohima remained on the fringes of history, mostly preserved in the memoirs of servicemen like Arthur Swinson's ‘Kohima’ and John Henslow's ‘A Sapper in the Forgotten Army’. However, Field Marshal William Slim's ‘Defeat into Victory’ emerged as the definitive account. Recent works, notably Fergal Keane's ‘Road of Bones’, have helped bring this overlooked theatre into the spotlight.

But why does Kohima matter? In early 1944, Japan was on the back foot. In the Pacific, the Americans’ island-hopping campaign was drawing ever closer to Japan’s home islands, threatening strategic bombing raids on its cities. The Japanese high command, desperate to relieve this pressure, gambled on an offensive into India. A successful push into the Assam plains, they believed, might trigger the collapse of British colonial rule and open the door to a negotiated settlement with the Allies. Thus, the Japanese launched Operation U-Go, aiming to seize Imphal, Kohima, and Dimapur, critical logistical hubs on the route to Assam and Bengal.

Facing them was Slim, commander of the British 14th Army, who had been quietly rebuilding a demoralised force battered by defeat in Malaya and the humiliating fall of Singapore in 1942. The British and Indian armies had endured the longest retreat in Commonwealth history, following the Japanese invasion of Burma.

Kohima came under siege on April 4, 1944. For over two weeks, 15,000 crack Japanese troops surrounded the garrison, which was outnumbered and short on supplies. But Slim’s men, bolstered by one battalion of the 161 Indian Brigade and the 1st Assam Regiment, held firm. Vital supplies were airdropped, and the garrison endured, testing and proving the theory that troops could stand and fight while being resupplied from the air.

The battle’s significance cannot be overstated. The Japanese offensive was decisively crushed, securing Imphal, safeguarding Dimapur, and delivering a fatal blow to Japan’s war effort in Southeast Asia. For the Indian Army, Kohima was transformative. The battles at Kohima and Imphal helped forge a modern, mechanised force capable of waging an all-arms war. Many of the formations that fought there would later serve in post-independence India, notably the 161 Indian Brigade, which was rushed to defend Srinagar during the 1947-48 Kashmir conflict. Kohima deserves far greater recognition.

(The writer is a advocate at the Punjab and Haryana HC and a military history enthusiast)