New Delhi: British royal Prince Andrew, the Duke of York will visit a World War II cemetery in north eastern Indian state of Nagaland, which is home to the graves of over a 1000 soldiers of both British and Indian, who halted the Japanese army's advance into India. The itinerary of the Prince, who is on a week-long visit to India to enhance trade and defense ties between the two countries, shows far-out Nagaland as the one exception, in a trip which otherwise has the usual four metropolitan cities of Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore and Kolkata, where Andrew will drop by for his business and social commitments. The Kohima war cemetery is a legacy of India's colonial military past, where Indian sepoys under command of their British officers, fought off the axis powers, not just in the dusty battlefields of India and Asia, but in Europe as well in the world wars. In April 1944, the sepoys halted the Japanese advance into India, in the grim battle of Kohima, now the capital of Nagaland. The bloody skirmish, known as the battle for Garrison Hill, stopped Japanese forces in their tracks as they tried to storm India, after a successful campaign in Burma. The bloody battle at Kohima spread over the local British resident deputy commissioner's bungalow, tennis court, where both forces were fighting for every inch, before finally the British reserves reached the Garrison hill and drove the Japs out, but not before over 1220 lives of the 2nd Battalion of the Dorsetshire Regiment, were lost. Andrew, will be the first member of the British Royal family to pay visit and pay tribute to these same slain patriots.
