276 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
blocked, the British fought with their backs to the wall in Imphal. The
Americans or ga nized a continuous airlift of supplies into Imphal
throughout the siege, which lasted three and half months. The Allies
had a ten- to- one advantage in terms of air power over the Japanese in
northeastern India and Burma. Badly overextended in the Pacific, the
Japanese found it impossible to provide air cover and to transport ad-
equate supplies to the INA troops as well as their own. Mutaguchi
would soon learn, to his dismay, that the large fish he thought he had
caught in his net was turning out to be a crocodile.^75
Mohammad Zaman Kiani, commander of the first division of the
INA, had established his base at Chamol, thirty- five miles east of Im-
phal, on April 17. In late April, M. Z. Kiani asked for the two battalions
of the Subhas Brigade deployed in the Chin Hills to rejoin his division,
to take part in the assault on Kohima and Imphal. This regiment had
seen action on the Haka- Falam front, and a young major, Mehboob
Ahmed, had brought credit to it. Its commander, Shah Nawaz Khan,
now shifted the main body of this brigade toward Ukhrul, en route to
Kharasom and Kohima. By mid- May, the Subhas Brigade had hoisted
the Indian flag on the mountaintops around Kohima, but the moment
when that town could have been seized had already passed. If the Japa-
nese had bypassed Kohima and taken the railhead at Dimapur, things
might have been different. An order to do so was ac tually issued on
one occasion by Mutaguchi, but was countermanded by his immedi-
ate superior, Kawabe. General William Slim, in his memoirs, thanked
the Japanese commander in the Kohima sector, General Kotoku Sato,
for not pursuing this option, which could have brought di sas ter to
the British forces in Imphal. The Nagas, the major tribal community
around Kohima, Shah Nawaz Khan reported, were helpful to the INA
troops. They did not want to be ruled by either the British or the Japa-
nese. “All that we would like to have,” they told Shah Nawaz, “is our
own Raja, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.” The Manipuris around Im-
phal also aided the INA, and some of them would return with the INA
to Burma.^76
The first division’s second regiment, the Gandhi Brigade led by In-
ayat Jan Kiani, took up its position on April 28 at the village of Khan-
jol. On May 2, a detachment of about three hundred soldiers from this