| The Kohima 2nd
Division Memorial is maintained by the Commonwealth
War Graves Commission on behalf of the 2nd Infantry Division. The memorial
remembers the Allied dead who repulsed the Japanese 15th Army, a force
of 100,000 men, who had invaded India in March 1944 in Operation U-Go.
Kohima, the capital of Nagaland was vital to control the area and in fierce
fighting the Japanese finally withdrew from the area in June of that year.
The Memorial
itself consists of a large monolith of Naga stone such as is used to mark
the graves of dead Nagas. The stone is set upright on a dressed stone pedestal,
the overall height being 15 feet. A small cross is carved at the top of
the monolith and below this a bronze panel is inset.
The panel bears
the inscription:
When You Go
Home,
Tell Them Of
Us And Say,
For Their Tomorrow,
We Gave Our
Today.
The words are attributed
to John Maxwell Edmonds (1875 -1958), an English Classicist, who had put
them together among a collection of 12 epitaphs for World War One, in 1916.
According to
the Burma Star Association the
words were used for the Kohima Memorial as a suggestion by Major John Etty-Leal,
the GSO II of the 2nd Division, another classical scholar. The verse is
thought to have been inspired by the Greek lyric poet Simonides of Ceos
(556-468 BC) who wrote after the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC,
Go tell the
Spartans, thou that passest by,
That faithful
to their precepts, here we lie.
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