The Battle of Kohima: The Brutal World War II Turning Point on the Road to Burma

In The Battle of Kohima: The Brutal World War II Turning Point on the Road to Burma, Jack Whitaker tells the gripping true story of the siege that halted Japan’s advance into India and changed the course of the war in Asia. In the spring of 1944, high in the hills of northeastern India, Japanese troops surrounded a small British and Indian garrison at Kohima, a remote ridge that commanded the only road linking India to Burma. For weeks, outnumbered defenders held out under relentless attack, fighting at such close quarters that the lines of battle ran across a tennis court.

Drawing on war diaries, eyewitness accounts, and military reports, Whitaker reconstructs the desperate struggle for Kohima, the hunger, exhaustion, and courage that defined one of the most intense battles of the Second World War. From the Japanese gamble to invade India to the final Allied counterattack that broke the siege, he brings to life the men who fought and died in the jungles and ridges of Nagaland.

More than a story of strategy and survival, this book reveals how Kohima became the pivot of the entire Burma campaign, a victory of endurance that turned retreat into advance and marked the moment when the tide of war in the East began to flow the other way.