Fighting Through to Kohima : a Memoir of War in India and Burma

261 Pages·2009·1.55 MB·English

by  Lowry

First published in Great Britain in 2003 by
Leo Cooper
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street, Barnsley, S Yorkshire
S70 2AS

Copyright © 2003 by Michael Lowry
9781783460137

A catalogue record for this book is available from
The British Library
Typeset in Sabon by
Phoenix Typesetting, Burley-in-Wharfedale, West Yorkshire
Printed in Britain by
CPI UK
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
FOREWORD
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1 - Training for War
Chapter 2 - Convoy
Chapter 3 - India and The North West Frontier Province
Chapter 4 - The Arakan
Chapter 5 - Bayonet, Sword and Grenade
Chapter 6 - Surrounded
Chapter 7 - The Maungdaw-Buthidaung Road
Chapter 8 - The Massif
Chapter 9 - Behind Us Again
Chapter 10 - The North East Frontier, Assam
Chapter 11 - Kohima
Chapter 12 - Reflections
References
Bibliography
Index
FOREWORD
by
RICHARD HOLMES

Mike Lowry belongs to a special generation. His father joined the army in the
summer of 1914, won a well-deserved Military Cross for gallantry on the
Somme two years later and was invalided out in 1919, shortly after the author of
this book was born. He grew up in the knowledge that many of his
contemporaries had lost their fathers in the war, and Remembrance Sunday
retains a particular significance for him. Lowry entered the Royal Military
College at Sandhurst in January 1938, was commissioned into the Queen’s
Royal Regiment in June 1939, was aboard a troopship when war broke out, and
soon found himself with his regiment’s 1st Battalion in Allahabad, at the
junction of the Rivers Jumna and Ganges. His baptism of fire came on the
North-West Frontier, where he was wounded by a rifle bullet and soon found
himself commanding a company.
Frontier warfare came to an end for Mike Lowry and his battalion in
December 1942 when 7th Indian Division was formed for the fighting in Burma.
There was some useful training in central India before the division deployed to
the Arakan under the inimitable Major General Frank Messervy. Once there,
men learnt lessons in the school of hard knocks. Hungry leeches had to be
removed from particularly sensitive areas by touching them with salt or, more
riskily, a burning cigarette. Lowry lost his first soldier, drowned while crossing a
river, and wrote to the man’s parents ‘with heavy heart and nagging conscience’.
And then his company was involved in sharp fighting with the Japanese; it is a
reflection of the harsh character of the infantry battle in Burma that it lost men to
sword and bayonet in its first action.
Mike Lowry’s battalion was heavily engaged in what has gone down in
history as ‘the Battle of the Admin Box’, where the division, surrounded by the
history as ‘the Battle of the Admin Box’, where the division, surrounded by the
Japanese, stood fast and was supplied by air. As was so often the case in Burma,
the climate, disease and parasites imposed their own strains; men were ‘eaten
alive with bugs, hoppers and the usual dug-out crawlers’. Ticks became so
deeply embedded that they had to be prised out with a pen-knife. After the fierce
fighting for the Admin Box, the battlion was flown up to Assam, where it was
engaged in very bitter fighting at Kohima, losing many of its fine officers and
NCOs in the process; Lowry’s company was at one point reduced to two officers
and 28 men. After the battle he was evacuated with malaria, bidding farewell to
his company with evident emotion.
One of the reasons why I so admire this book is because of the tribute it pays
to the junior leaders who helped make 1st Queens the fine battalion it was.
Lowry writes with real feeling of ‘these stalwart soldiers, the corporals, the lance
corporals and so very often the private soldiers, who have to take on a great
burden of responsibility and must make these split second judgements when
operating invariably under tense conditions.’ And he celebrates the fact that ‘The
unwavering acceptance of their dangerous reponsibilities was carried out without
hesitation and with great courage’.
In an era when we have grown accustomed to sustaining heavy casualties it is
worth remembering just what serious fighting against a determined adversary
means. ‘I buried Private West and Corporal Taylor in the area of 12 Platoon’s
position at 12.50 pm,’ writes Lowry. And when a trusted and experienced officer
was killed at Kohima, there was the shock of close-quarter death: ‘I saw the
contents of that clever head spread out on the ground; no grey and white matter
could have been portrayed with such awful clarity.’ And yet he is able to take a
wider view, giving credit where it is due outside his battalion. The Admin Box
could not have been held without ‘a tremendous combined effort that involved
pilots and crews from Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, India, New
Zealand and South Africa’. There were lighter moments, one of them coming
when the commanding officer, coming under fire during a visit to forward
troops, inadvertently took cover in an old latrine. And there were moment when
the fighting itself had its own attractions: Lowry honestly admits that shooting
the Japanese as they fell back was ‘tremendous fun’ and he was ‘getting a kick
out of this’.
This is a moving account of the part played by an excellent battalion in some
of the roughest fighting in a very hard war. It is entirely characteristic of its
author’s generation that he modestly makes no mention of his own decorations,
but the reader can see just what an inspiration he was to his company, doing its
but the reader can see just what an inspiration he was to his company, doing its
brave bit at war’s sharpest end. It is an achievement well worth remembering.

Richard Holmes
Acknowledgments
I am fortunate that I have not had to rely on my memory too much when writing
this book. It has been a habit of mine to make a note of events that I thought
were noteworthy.
The factual elements have for the most part been taken from diaries I kept on
the North West Frontier of India and in the war against the Japanese in Arakan
and through to Kohima in 1943 and 1944. The latter diary was published as a
book in 1950 with the blessing and a Foreword by the Colonel of The Queen’s
Royal Regiment, General Sir George Giffard GCB DSO; but that book has been
out of print for about thirty years.
However, I have to say that the diary I kept in some detail whilst in Arakan
and Kohima, was not my initiative: I shrank from keeping one as I thought I was
too busy! But it was the second-in-command of my B Company, Captain Tiny
Taylor (no one knew his first name, he was of course a tall man) who prevailed
on me and said I really ought to keep a record of the interesting events that were
happening even before we met the Japanese. To influence his request, Taylor
presented me with an A4 size exercise book; and my soldier-servant (batman),
Private Kingshott, then bound it in khaki cloth so efficiently that it weathered a
monsoon and kept me busy in dull moments. And now today, sixty years older,
the Diary which now deserves a capital ‘D’, sits in my desk and looks as young
as many old people feel but can’t gallop about.
Fortunately I discovered that my mother could never throw any papers away.
Among them were my father’s letters to her, his fiancée, from England and
France during the First World War. Before my parents died in the late 1970s,
they handed back to me all the letters that I had written to them during the
Second World War.
My parents could never have met but for that First World War, and so I have
begun my story with Sarajevo 1914, five years before I was born. Twenty years
later my generation became involved in the Second World War.
This story covers some operations on the North West Frontier of India.
Undoubtedly those hard, fit-making, disciplined months in very cold and very