Maj. Gen. Raj Mehta (retd)

Question Col Madhukar Bhat, the current commanding officer of 4 Maratha Li {Fighting Fourth}, about the Imphal-Kohima Battle and the hand-selected 65^th CO of his Unit’s 222 years old command lineage, a paltan famous for matchless battle performance, breaks into droll Ganpat (Maratha) smile. “No way sir! For us, it’s our most significant Battle Honour and India’s pride,” says the officer known for his savoir faire.

“Forgotten for decades for complex, saddening reasons, its extraordinary contribution to warfighting on the Indo-Burmese Front was recognised through a poll organised by Britain’s National Army Museum,” he continues. “Asked to select Britain’s best ever battle, voters including top military professionals selected the climacteric Imphal-Kohima Battle over the Battle of Waterloo, Allied D-day Normandy Landings and Rorke’s Drift”.

Madhukar adds, “Very experienced in the battle area, 4^th during the battle was the bedrock of the newly raised 50 Indian Parachute (Para) Brigade deployed at Sangshak with its troops still streaming in when 4^th was placed under its command. The fierce, non-stop combat that followed for a week with elite take-no-prisoners Japanese 15 and 31 Divisions made their contacted troops almost hors d’ combat even as we too suffered severe losses.”

Sangshak was the starting conflict of the extended Battle of Imphal-Kohima of March 1944 fought in India’s remote north-eastern corner against the Japanese; a battle they totally lost. The irony, as Gardiner Harris writing in the New York Times points out in a June 2021 article on the Sangshak battle, is that ‘It was a largely Indian victory, almost forgotten in India’.

The CO muses: “Even though our Sangshak withdrawal was touted by Japanese radio propaganda as ‘A crushing Japanese victory over the elite 23 Infantry Division’ (50 Para Brigade being under its command)’; it was a hollow victory because the battle exhausted the formations whose primary task was to capture Imphal-Kohima: not just to deny it as an operational base for Allied Forces to recapture Burma (Myanmar) but also to provide a base for the Japanese 15th Army to ‘March to Delhi’ with the Indian National Army (INA) leading. As things turned out, the week-long delay caused at Sangshak allowed our Allied hierarchy enough time to reinforce Imphal and Kohima and take on the Sangshak-exhausted/depleted Japanese troops. This led to their worst, most humiliating Japanese defeat ever. Sangshak was thus a tipping point and 4th the only participating unit to be awarded a Battle Honour for it”.

The focus here is primarily on bringing out the strategic value above the tactical conduct of the Sangshak Battle which has been well established by the Colonel of the Maratha LI, Maj. Gen. Eustace D’Souza PVSM. He wrote its war history in 1995-2000 for its 200^th anniversary titled: Valour to the Fore. He includes in it a brief yet comprehensive overview of Sangshak by CO 4/5 Maratha LI (as 4^th was then known), Lt Col Jackie Trim, OBE, written for the Unit’s War Diary followed by his then Adjutant Maj WD McConnel’s crisp description about how the unit withdrew from the battered Sangshak Defensive Box overflowing with the overpowering stench of hundreds of rotting Indian and Japanese soldiers’ bodies and carcases of army mules after withdrawal orders were executed on night 26/27 March 1944. The 4^th also has a blow-by-blow account of their Sangshak odyssey by just deceased Lt Col P.V. Ramnathkar, a dedicated Regimental officer and later Centre Museum Curator.

This article encapsulates the circumstances under which Sangshak fortuitously became a critical knife-edge start to a campaign which could have gone either way and how errors in conduct on both sides--inadvertent, reckless, even malicious, forced the bruising battle on a plateau overlooking Tangkhul Naga Sangshak village to lie incognito until it’s true contribution and value were realised 70 years later.

Topography and Climate

The Imphal-Kohima battle-space is what Gen. (later Field Marshal) WJ ‘Bill’ Slim, who converted ‘Defeat into Victory’ in Sangshak and who was voted in the same UK survey as ‘the best General UK ever had’ overshadowing Gen. Wellington of Assaye/ Waterloo fame called as ‘those hellish jungle mountains’. Strategic planners in London during World War II simply couldn’t comprehend how vital battles had to be fought on th