Place · battlefield & war cemetery · India
Kohima
The Naga hill town where in April and May 1944 the Japanese Fifteenth Army and the INA were held, at one point with the two sides fighting across the deputy commissioner's tennis court. The cemetery on the ridge holds 1,420 Commonwealth graves.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.670, 94.110
Worth knowing
The epitaph on the memorial — when you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow we gave our today — was written by John Maxwell Edmonds in 1916 and is not about Kohima at all. Kohima and Imphal together were voted Britain's greatest battle in a 2013 National Army Museum poll.
Connections (2)
- Companion in the same setKangla Fort, Imphal
Imphal and Kohima were one battle fought in two places about a hundred kilometres apart, from March to July 1944. Kohima sat on the road that supplied Imphal, and holding it — at one point with the two sides throwing grenades across a tennis court — starved the Japanese offensive out. The retreat through the monsoon killed more of the attacking force than the fighting had, and the two actions together were voted Britain's greatest battle in a 2013 poll.
- Site adjacencyKisama Heritage Village
The battle of Kohima was fought over a Naga hill town whose people were not consulted about any of it and who then carried the wounded, guided columns and buried the dead for both sides. The Naga account of 1944 is largely oral and is not the one in the regimental histories. Kisama, a few kilometres away, is where the Hornbill Festival now assembles the Naga tribes annually — the same population, presenting itself on its own terms.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kohima War Cemetery”. Robert Lyman, Japan’s Last Bid for Victory: The Invasion of India 1944; Commonwealth War Graves Commission records.
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