e2history

Fearing attack from both Chinese and Indian forces, the Japanese Fifteenth Army launched an attack on British forces collectin in India during the spring of 1944. The attack, mounted from Burma, was intended as a preemptive strike to knock out British forces led by General William Slim before they gathered enough strength to over-run Japan's weak and isolated troops stationed in Burma. Their plan was to take the communication stations of Kohima and Imphal, held by British and Indian forces, before advancing on Bengal. Slim planned to launch his attack from the plain of Imphal, a large area of open ground, the only terrain in the area suitable for airfields. Slims communication line ran from his base north for two hundred and ten kilometers through the pass at Kohima to the start of the Assam railway system in Dimapur. Despite the fact that the communication line ran parallel with the front line for just under one hundred and thirty kilometers, Slim was not daunted, as it was thought to be impossible that any Japanese force bigger than a battalion would be able to penetrate the sixty five kilometer stretch of jungle growing between the Japanese based on the Chindwin river and the road. Consequently, it was considered unnecessary to have a force any bigger than a battalion to control the eastern approach to Kohima.

Simultaneous with outbreaks of fighting around Imphal, Japanese troops began to push through dense jungle toward Kohima. Fearing attacks on their communication lines, the British sent Colonel Hugh Richards to Kohima to oversee the defenses. A veteran of the First World War, Richards had led the 3rd West African Brigade as part of the Chindit special forces, before being relieved of his command after the revelation that, at fifty years of age, he was ten years to old to serve with his unit. Arriving March 23rd, Richards learned that under his command would be the Assam Regiment Battalion, a Native State battalion and a number of poorly trained soldiers, some of whom had had no actual training in the handling of weapons. Staking out his defensive position at Kohima Ridge, Richards learned on the twenty-seventh of March that the entire Japanese 31st Division was advancing upon him, led by Lieutenant-General Sato. On April 5th, reinforcements arrived to support Richards, the majority of the Native State battalion having fled. Richards now had under his command members of the 4th Battalion Royal West Kent Regiment, part of the 161st Brigade, along with the 20th Mountain Battery and the Indian Artillery, totaling in 1,500 combat-capable men. However, Sato had by now moved more than 15,000 men through the treacherous Assam terrain, but also brought in 75 mm guns, deployed to pound the ridge. Daily, new troops were being drafted in to join the onslaught, and slowly Richards' perimeter began to shrink. At one section of the ridge, the two opposing forces were separated from each other only by the width of a tenniscourt which lay behind the commissioners bungalow, occupied by the Japanese. In order to retake it, the British drove a tank up to the front door and discharged a number of shells inside.

One of the many outstanding feats of Kohima was the remarkable accuracy with which the remaining guns of 161st Brigade were fired. Officers from the 20th Mountain Battery ordered the guns to be fired at a hill 2.3 km from Kohima, where the brigade had been brought to a halt by the Japanese whilst en route to assist Richards. It was said that the guns were fired so accurately that at one point a curtain of defensive fire was laid only 13.5 m away from the garrisons forward positions.

One of the key weapons used in the defense of Kohima was the Bren light machine-gun, a British .303 version of a Czechoslovakian weapon, featuring a curved 28 round magazine. Brought into service in 1938, every section of a platoon in a rifle company was equipped with a two-man Bren group, comprising of one man to operate the gun, and another to reload it and change the barrel before it overheated. Each gun was supplied with two air-cooled barrels and 25 magazines. The gun could fire accurately up to 1,829 meters and could fire at a rate of 500 rounds per minute.

On April 13th, nicknamed "The Black 13th", a supply parachute drop failed when most of the mortar ammunition and the much needed drinking water fell behind Japanese lines. The enemy guns then opened up on the hospital trenches, packed with the wounded, as Sato's infantry attack continued. Knowing they only had to resist for four more days, Richards' men fought on vigorously, until April 18th, when forces arrived to relieve Richards and his men, who were by now clustered into a box measures no more than 320 m square, after suffering in total more than 600 casualties.

The Battle of Kohima raged on after Richards' men had been relieved. Sato ordered a number of his men to construct a fortified line in the pass, which they defended ferociously. Slim placed enormous pressure on Sato in order to re-open the pass, which continued even after the breaking of the monsoon at the end of May. Slowly the Japanese gave ground, until on the 22nd of June the Japanese fortified line broke, and the pass was once again re-opened, forcing the Fifteenth Army into retreat.

After the battle, Lieutenant-General Kotoku Sato became unnerved and disobeyed a direct order to join his men up with other Japanese forces for a last-ditch attempt to defeat the British further south, and was consequently dismissed. On the battlefield, the tree's once thick with foliage lay bare, and the buildings had for the most part been reduced to ruble.

Subsequent to the advance of the Japanese army, Britain was able to re-take Burma, after the Japanese army became severely weakened with casualties (65,000 dead), starvation and a lack of ammunition, though continued to fight, despite coming under attack from both land and air. It was the Battle of Kohima, the battle of which the Burma campaign centered around, which eventually turned the tide in favour of the British in the struggle for Southeast Asia.

Born James Warren Jones in 1931 in Crete, Indiana, Jones was raised largely by his mother who taught him to distrust organised religion and also by a family friend who was a member of the Christian Pentecostal movement. From an early age, Jones held strong spiritual beliefs and exhibited a fascination in the end of the world as described in the bible. In 1955 Jones formed a breakaway sect known as Wings of Deliverance comprising of members of the Assemblies of God Pentecostal Church, insisting that the churches board should contain an balanced number of black and white members. Consequently he renamed his sect The Peoples Temple, reflecting the ethnic diversity that was the group's aim. In 1960, Jones became a minister of the Disciples of Christ denomination, though his title remained independent from that organisation. In 1965, increasing racial tensions caused Jones to move his sect from Indiana to Ukiah, California. Jones's main reason for choosing this location was that it was a nuclear safe-zone, meaning that in the event of nuclear war it would most likely remain untouched. Here, Jones enlarged his church by recruiting from the better-off members of society, and until the mid-1970s, the People's Temple continued to grow at a steady pace. By 1972 the sect had established a second centre in San Francisco.

In 1974 Jones gained permission from the Guyanan government to establish a colony in a remote strip in the interior. Initially called The People's Agricultural Mission, the colony grew slowly at first, with only 50 members by the beginning of 1977, however after the launch of an investigation into tax evasion on account of The People's Temple led by the US government, Jones encouraged members of the sect to relocate to Guyana, he himself moving to live there full-time. The following year, the colony was renamed Jonestown in honor of its leader, and was inhabited by the vast majority of the Peoples Temple's members, who were in excess of 900 members. Many followers who arrived were shocked by what they found on arrival but were unable to leave. The colonists were made to work eleven hours per day six days a week, and on Sundays were made to work for eight hours. The majority of the labour was carried out in the fields where food was grown to sustain the colony, however there was also deforestation and construction to be carried out. Jonestown was later described by a survivor as having more in common with a concentration camp than a religious community.

Everything in Jonestown was carried out communally; in dormitories, husbands and wives slept in separate beds, at meal-times everyone was fed at the same time, everyone attended meetings together, and were forced to listen to the voice of their leader broadcast over a PA system.

After his arrival at the colony, Jones began to abuse drugs on a massive scale. Members of the sect would often be kept awake at night as a result of his playing loud music over the loud-speakers, or preaching endlessly into the night. Living separately from his followers in a house along with his numerous lovers, he had access to food, alcohol and drugs, whereas the main body of the sect survived on rice and beans.

Jones regularly held "White Nights", training sessions where the community was expected to prepare for an attack on the colony by unknown soldiers. During one such drill, Jones ordered his people to commit suicide, and, following his instructions, they all drank from a vat of what emerged to be harmless liquid. Jones now knew that his people were prepared to die for him.

Jones insisted on all members of his sect severing all links to the outside world, giving over all their wealth and assets over to him for what he called 'redistribution'. People who had escaped the colony formed an opposing group, which succeeded in persuading Congress to deal with the matter in hand. Congressman Leo Ryan was sent to Guyana to investigate these alleged infringements of human rights, arriving on November 17, 1978. People living in the colony had been warned by Jones to look happy and unified, but by the end of day one a group of sixteen had come forward and told Ryan that they wished to leave the colony, much to the anger of Jones. That night, a member of the sect attempted to cut Ryan's throat, but was prevented from doing so by members of Ryan's entourage, which included journalists from television and newspapers. The next day, Ryan decided to cut his visit short and return to the US. Boarding two planes which had been chartered to take them back to the United States, Ryan's party was ambushed by a group of Temple guards traveling in a cart towed behind a tractor. Ryan and several others were killed instantly by gunfire, and many others were seriously wounded. Back at the colony, Jones addressed his followers who were amassed in a building about the visit of the congressman. Jones's words were not congratulatory, but instead of disappointment. He told his followers that the only path left open to them was a "revolutionary suicide".

The members of the People's Temple were given a lethal dose of potassium cyanide, valium and chloral hydrate. The people formed lines and filed past the vat to be administered the poison, mixed into grape juice. Mothers brought their children forward to receive their dose first, before consuming the poison themselves. The poison acted quickly, and by the end of the day a total of 914 people lay dead, 276 of them children. Jones died of a gunshot wound to the head—possibly self-inflicted—but nobody witnessed the event and survived.

It was widely believed at the time that Jones had some kind of mental control over his followers. This is doubtful, as in a society such as that which existed in Jonestown, it is unlikely that something such as hypnotic control would have been completely effective.

The most likely theory is that Jones created a feeling of isolation in his colony which was so great that it caused members of his sect to become paranoid and believe that people were out to destroy their group (which in a sense they were) and therefore enter into a state of siege mentality. The idea that the sect was in constant danger of elimination by its enemies also allowed Jones to justify his armed guards, who were in reality there to stop people from leaving the colony. For several years Jones had told of an imminent global war, and his followers, who were living in isolated conditions in the middle of a jungle, had no means of knowing otherwise.

There were rumours after the incident of the involvement of the CIA, and it was speculated that Jonestown was in reality a US government-run experiment into the powers of hypnotism. There is evidence to suggest that Jones himself was in fact a CIA operative. Jones told members of his sect that his years in Brazil in the 1960s were spent helping orphans, whereas his neighbors remember him leading a life of luxury and boasting that he was in the pay of the US government. In Guyana, Jones met regularly with representatives of the Russian embassy. Guyana was a socialist country at this time, however Jones often preached extreme communism to his followers. Could he have been a double agent, posing as a dissatisfied American citizen and passing on false information to the Soviet government? It has been suggested that Ryan discovered what was going on and attempted to return to Washington to expose the experiment, and the CIA had no choice but to kill him in order to maintain utter secrecy regarding their experiments. Initial reports suggest only 500 died of poisoning, but later journalists supplied with information from the CIA reported the death toll to be nearer to 900. The possibility exists that the other 400 survived the suicide and were hunted down and massacred in the jungle in the following days. A report by a Guyanan coroner stated that up to 700 of the bodies showed signs of having been forcibly killed. One of the most prominent arguments supporting the theory that the CIA were responsible is this: why would Jones shoot himself as opposed to taking the poison like everyone else, and if he was murdered, by whom? Some suggest that the CIA had an operative amongst Ryan's party who, after the massacre at Port Kaituma, returned to the colony and ordered Jones to initiate the mass-suicide before killing him.

One of the few who survived the ordeal was a man named Larry Layton. Expressing a desire to leave with the others in Ryan's party, he boarded one of their planes. Despite the other defectors' suspicion of his intentions, Ryan allowed him to come along. Once on board the six-seat Cessna, he produced a gun from underneath his poncho and opened fire, killing two, before being disarmed and restrained. At his trial, he was unable to speak and was compared by his own father to being "like a robot". His father worked as a biochemist at the US Army's Dugway test-site in Utah. Layton's brother worked as a mercenary working for CIA-backed rebels in Angola. Psychotropic drugs were found scattered throughout Jonestown. This evidence supports the theory that Jones somehow "reprogrammed" members of his cult. Could Layton's inability to speak be put down to the use of these psychotropic drugs? If Jonestown was a CIA experiment into mind-control, it would have been difficult to orchestrate. How would it work? Certainly, the religious background to the sect would have aided greatly, as well as the isolation and physical strain the people of the Peoples Temple were put through in day-to-day life in the colony. Rumours exist of electromagnetic devices which could be used to the same effect as psychotropic drugs. Some claim there even to have been experiments into direct thought control techniques involving telepathy.

Whether it was a massacre or a suicide is still the subject of much debate, but nearly everyone who remembers the incident will agree that it was one of modern religious history's darkest moments, and one which will not soon be forgotten. James Warren Jones has earned his place alongside others such as Charles Manson as one of America's icons of evil.

Sources:
Dreams and Magic, by James Stokes
http://www.conspire.com/jones.html
Now also appears on my website, Pimpin' Villains.

Or at least, they are worth a lot less than you might imagine. The story of how the diamond came to be viewed as the rarest and most coveted of gemstones, found on the fingers of married women worldwide, is a story of insatiable greed, ruthless strong-arming, and most of all, brilliant marketing.

Today when a woman gets engaged in most of the developed nations of the world, she expects a diamond engagement ring and most likely will also have some sort of diamond setting on her wedding ring as well. After all, the diamond is the rarest of gems, and what better way to show a women exactly how much you love her than with the gift of a diamond. Right?

But this was not always the case. In fact, as recently as 100 years ago a woman whose husband-to-be could afford one was at least as likely to wear a ruby, sapphire, or emerald on her wedding ring as a diamond. Indeed, in countries as far apart as India and England, it was the ruby, not the diamond, that was exalted as the most beautiful and rarest of gemstones, and thus it is not surprising that in India, the word "lal" means "red," "ruby," and "beloved" as well. Indeed, statistically speaking, the ruby is the rarest of the major gemstones, followed by the emerald.

The Rise of De Beers

Enter a family of South African of Afrikaner heritage who in the early 1900s owned a small but productive diamond mine - The De Beers. Through a combination of business acumen, worker exploitation, and large quantities of luck, the De Beers corporation had become one of the world's biggest producers of diamonds by the 1930s. At first openly in the 1930s and then secretly during World War II, De Beers gained a leg up on the competition by selling industrial diamonds to a desperate Adolph Hitler, with whom other more principled diamond producers refused to deal.

By the 1950s De Beers controlled a majority of the Earth's diamond supply. Over the next three decades, the company went on a massive buying spree, acquiring mines in South America, the United States, India, and the rest of Africa, asserting one of the world's largest and most successful monopolies over one of its most coveted items.

With its monopoly power, De Beers has been able to control diamond prices worldwide by dumping or withholding diamonds in its private stockpile. As a privately owned company not traded on any stock market, De Beers is not required to divulge its assets, profits, or the size of its diamond hoard, although it has been estimated that even if all diamond production were ceased tomorrow, De Beers has enough diamonds secreted away to maintain current rates of diamond consumption for 15-20 years.

This stockpile has been the key to maintaining the De Beers monopoly. Whenever a new mine was discovered or a competitor attempted to undersell De Beers' inflated prices, the company would simply flood the market with diamonds, driving prices so low that its rivals would be brought to their knees, either forced to sell out to De Beers or to sign agreements agreeing to follow De Beers' orders on pricing.

Protecting the Prize

The simple fact is that diamonds are simply not as rare as De Beers would have you believe. Oh sure, at one time diamonds were fairly rare, but over the course of the 20th century thousands of new diamond lodes have been discovered and hundreds of new mines have been opened. Annual diamond production in 1988 was approximately 100 times what it was in 1900. In the 1980s, De Beers had to contend with huge new diamond finds in Australia and Russia, which it did by buying out the Australian mines (and promptly shutting them down) and signing an agreement with the Soviets that there would be no further exploitation of the largest diamond fields known to man - the Siberian Diamond Fields. It is estimated that a diamond that sells today for $100 would actually be worth about $2 in a reasonably competitive open market.

Moreover, in the late 1960s scientists had discovered a way to synthetically produce industrial grade diamonds. At first these artificial diamonds were no threat to De Beers because the company had largely abandoned the industrial sector to focus on the gemstone market, and because the first artificial diamonds could easily be detected with simple tests that exposed their inferior chemical structure. But when a team of General Electric scientists began perfecting a way to artificially synthesize flawless gem-quality diamonds indistinguishable from their natural counterparts, De Beers bought off the company executives and the project was abruptly terminated.

But even after eliminating alternative sources of diamond production, the company faced another, more fundamental problem. De Beers is in the business of selling diamonds. But while diamonds don't truly last forever, they do last an awfully long time. In selling a product that couldn't be burned, melted, crushed, or corroded away, De Beers had to find a way to prevent people from reselling their diamonds and thus undercutting the company's ability to set artificially high prices.

The De Beers' solution was to establish an ingenious distribution system whereby authorized De Beers dealers commission and actually own almost all the jewelry that people buy, and not the actual jewelry stores themselves. The stores showcase all but the least expensive items on loan from the authorized intermediary dealers, and only have to pay the dealers for the pieces they actually sell. The stores agree to the system because it minimizes they risk they have to assume, while the dealers agree not to sell directly to customers (and thus wrecking the system) because if they do, De Beers will cut off their supply of diamonds completely.

The end result is that it is virtually impossible to resell diamonds for anything close to their original purchase price. It does not make sense for stores to repurchase diamond pieces at full price when they can display as much as they want for free, and the dealers are forbidden to buy diamonds from anyone except De Beers. Customers are encouraged to think of diamonds as an investment, but in many cases they would be better off putting their money under the mattress. In the rare cases when people trying to resell diamond jewelry actually find an independent dealer willing to buy back their piece and are not offered "store credit," they can get only a tiny fraction of the price they paid. Smart thieves don't steal diamonds unless they can steal a massive hoard all at once, and they never, ever steal diamond jewelry - only unset diamonds, preferably uncut as well.

Winning Her Heart

But ruthless business practices account for only half of De Beers' astonishing success story. The other half is in the marketing. As mentioned, a century ago most women did not receive a diamond engagement ring from their husbands to be. In fact, most women did not receive an engagement ring at all - the wedding band itself was considered sufficient to appease the womanly craving for self adornment.

But beginning in the 1930s, De Beers and other diamond producers (who still existed, back then) began heavily pushing the diamond engagement ring as a required final step in the proper middle-class courtship. But advertisements might not have been enough, so De Beers reached the customer's psyche via one of their weakest spots - movies. De Beers began loaning expensive diamond jewelry to movie studios in the 30s (and continues to do so today), with the stipulation that the pieces be worn only by the biggest stars. If the jewelry was not worn enough or by the right people, De Beers would stop loaning the pieces (or even start loaning them to the studio's rival). This practice continues today and is especially noticeable at the Oscars, watched my millions worldwide, wherein most of the women in attendance are wearing borrowed diamond jewelry owned and loaned by authorized De Beers dealers.

In Britain, consumption of diamond jewelry, especially engagement rings, increased dramatically in the 1950s and 60s at the same time De Beers began loaning extravagant diamond jewelry to a young Queen Elizabeth. In the 60s and 70s De Beers introduced the ubiquitous A Diamond is Forever ad campaign, which for decades now has blatantly equated a man's love for his wife with whether he buys her a diamond or not. The campaign has to be considered one of the most successful in advertising history, considering that 90 percent of American women and 89 percent of British women receive diamond engagement rings up from about 55 percent in the 1950s. Even in a place like Japan, where traditionally there were no rings of any kind - wedding, engagement, or otherwise - a 1999 survey revealed that an astonishing 80 percent of Japanese women who marry receive a diamond engagement ring, whereas less than 5 percent received one as recently as 1967. And when the success of the engagement ring proved not enough to satisfy De Beers, they began introducing new concepts like the eternity ring and the 25th anniversary diamond.

Not Forever?

Today De Beers controls about 70 percent of the world's supply of diamonds, still enough to control prices, but down from its 1980s heyday of 85 percent. And the sun may be beginning to set on the De Beers diamond empire. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the agreement not to exploit the Siberian fields was rendered moot, and indeed newly opened mines in Russia have accounted for the lion's share of the the decline in De Beer's marketshare. Moreover, small-scale diamond-mining operations in India and Southeast Asia have become more efficient and collectively competitive, while remaining too numerous and undocumented for De Beers to easily buy out, and new diamond fields continue to be discovered in Australia, Canada, and elsewhere. Already DeBeers has been forced to modify some of the most abusive of its trading practices. The final blow may come in the form of increasing efforts in recent years to create synthetic gem-quality diamonds, which De Beers is already trying to combat with various schemes such as "watermarking" its "true" diamonds.

Nevertheless it would be foolish to underestimate a company which has weathered so many storms with such ruthlessness and ingenuity. De Beers still remains a vastly wealthy and powerful company with a stockpile of diamonds that would still be worth millions even if diamonds were to become significantly devalued in the future. Suffice to say that even with its marketshare reduced to "only" 70 percent, the De Beers corporation is not going anywhere in the near future, nor will you or I be buying $2 diamond rings any time soon.

Not that any of this matters. The fact remains that when I get married, my wife is going to want a diamond engagement ring, and there is precious little I can do to change her mind. I know this. Maybe I am bitter?

Sources

PBS, BBC, and Australian Broadcasting. "The Diamond Empire." (90 min. television show)

Salon.com. "Not Forever." http://archive.salon.com/business/feature/2000/09/27/diamonds/index.html

The Atlantic Monthly. "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/82feb/8202diamond1.htm

Wired Magazine. "The New Diamond Age". September 2003.