How Kohima, as an Administrative Headquarters, Propelled the Nagas to Save Britain.
Ensconced in the bosom of Japfu Peak, the imposing second-highest peak in Nagaland, and over what was once a nondescript ridge-more significant as a symbolic seat of the British Empire, its political headquarters to check the incessant raids over the plains as it were-lies Kohima, at the cusp of an unlikely history which never seems to end. From being a forest belonging to an Angami village, which sometimes was left fallow and where jhum cultivation resumed after a cycle, Kohima was a picturesque sleepy slope on a hill. Neither the present-day Nagas nor the mighty colonial powers could have imagined that Kohima would become the site of the most ferocious battle in the annals of human history. It was here that the Allied forces stopped an invading army of the Japanese emperor Hirohito which saved a king faraway in England.
The Battle of Kohima during the Second World War has been written about with momentous vigour and skill by both American and British historians. These works largely attempt to glorify either General Stillwell or Field Marshal the Viscount Slim, or at times simply document the war which won the Allied forces a decisive victory over Japan's expansionist military plan. The victory restored some of what was lost after the humiliation of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 while effectively thwarting the Japanese attempt to expand into the Indian subcontinent. This was not the World War theatre of Europe or the Middle East, and little would the Allied forces know that they were about to shape world history at the hitherto unknown site called Kohima. History, therefore, was told by the victors about a place where mighty Britain retained control even as her significance was on the wane globally.
In a contest organized by the British National Army Museum, United Kingdom, the Battle of Kohima was picked over the more celebrated battles of D-Day and Waterloo, as Britain's greatest battle. The army of Lieutenant General William Slim, consisting of British, Indian, Gurkha and African troops is known to have won the war for the Allied cause in 1944 at Kohima. The combined forces effectively handed a historically significant defeat to the Japanese troops, thereby changing the course of the Second World War. The Battle is often referred to as the 'Stalingrad of the East' by Western scholars and writers. This is already well recorded and the same has been accepted across the world as the authentic narrative.
Historians even say that this was the last real battle of the British Empire and the first battle of the new India. But that is just the tale told till now by everyone except the Nagas. The real (hi) story left behind by the Japanese army led by Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi and Lt Gen. Sato and the Allied forces led by Slim still largely remains untold and therefore unknown.
Lieutenant General Sato is said to have commented that if it were not for the Nagas, the Allied forces would have been eventually defeated in Kohima, and the Japanese army could have easily secured the Dimapur Railway Station and triumphantly moved towards Bengal via Assam, thus reversing the course of world history. The little that is known about the role the Nagas played in this historic battle is recorded in some books.
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