LETTERS MemorialTune for Lt JohnYoung Sir, Your decision to launch a
competition for the composition of a tune to commemorate the death in action of Captain JohnYoung (right) on March 30th 1944 at Kharasom in the Naga Hills of Assam is one that will gladden the hearts of the few surviving veterans of the Battle of Kohima, that ‘great, bitter battle’ as the Japanese called it. As a Company Commander he would have been promoted Captain, as the contem- porary accounts of the battle all refer to him as Captain. A Glasgow man, educated at Hillhead High School, he would have inevitably been known to his Sassenach comrades as ‘Jock’. (We all were.) Commissioned into the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, he had volunteered for the Indian Army and had been posted to the 1st Battalion the Assam Regiment. This was a wartime regiment raised in June 1941 from the Naga,Kuki, and Lushai tribesmen of the Naga Hills. The Indian officers, who in the India Army commanded the platoons, and the senior NCOs were former Gurkha ‘line boys’ from the Assam Rifles, the paramilitary police force in Nagaland. Only boys from the moun- tains of Nepal were accepted into the regular Gurkha Rifle regiments.‘Line boys’were the sons of Gurkha soldiers who had settled in India. General Orde Wingate’s first
expedition against the Japanese in Burma in 1943 had shown that it was possible for small columns reliant on radio communications and air supply to penetrate and operate deep into
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enemy territory. The Japanese thought that if we could do it them, they could do it to us, only better. In March 1944, they sent three entire divisions, some 40,000 soldiers, to attack the British and Indian positions on the other side of the Chindwin River between India and Burma.Two divisions were directed South, on to Imphal, the principal British base; the third was directed North, on to Kohima, its mission to capture Kohima and hold it to prevent any reinforcement reaching Imphal from the North. Their total lack of air supply daunted them not in the least. They would capture all they needed from the British. Kharasom is a Naga village on the
Jessami track leading from the Chindwin to Kohima. ‘A’ Company of 1 Assam Regiment under Jock Young was told to occupy and fortify Kharasom. It was to be held ‘to the