Flight by Elephant

by Andrew Martin

  Others again carried more whimsical items: a tom-tom drum, a bicycle with the back wheel missing, a cross-cut saw. In the Chaukan Pass, Millar, as we have seen, did not have the strength to carry his favourite revolver. How much sooner would people abandon their harmoniums, oil paintings, photographic albums?

  Prome was now a giant refugee camp infested with cholera and typhoid, where thousands of Indians waited for Irrawaddy steamers to carry them north – boats that never appeared. One option from here was to break out of Burma halfway up its western coast. This was a matter of crossing the Irrawaddy which lies immediately west of Prome – in Burma, there is always a river in the way and this was a wide one – then traversing the jungles of the Arakan Mountains by means of the Taungup Pass, aiming all the while for the small port of Akyab in the Bay of Bengal, from where it might be possible to take a boat for Chittagong, India. This was the first of two or three routes to be known, more or less officially, as ‘Valleys of Death’, and refugees were on it even as it was being surveyed – and found to be a hopeless prospect – by British officials. Among the difficulties likely to be encountered were Burmese dacoits, Japanese bombers, lack of food and water, cholera, typhoid and malaria. But it is estimated that between a hundred and two hundred thousand Indians escaped via the Taungup Pass.

  On 9 March, meanwhile, Japanese forces had entered Rangoon, which had been set ablaze and partly demolished by a team of British officials and soldiers called ‘the last ditchers’. Oddly, some of them were accountants. When they’d finished their work, the cranes in the docks stood at crazy angles; the Irrawaddy river paddle steamers had been scuttled, a thousand trucks burnt out … and so the great theme of the flight from Burma – the theme of pedestrianism – was underlined. Two thousand Burmese criminals and lunatics roamed the streets. The doors of the prison, the lunatic asylum and the leper hospital had been thrown open. There seemed no alternative, the staff having all departed, but the official responsible, Judicial Secretary Mr Fielding Hall, was so disturbed by the action he had performed that he took his own life.

  This was just the kind of setting that George Rodger liked, and he went on a sight-seeing tour, revolver in hand. He observed twenty brass Buddhas glowing red hot above a temple wall. They were thrown into relief by the black cloud that hung over Rangoon, caused by the burning of the 150 million gallons of oil in the tank farm of the Burmah Oil Company’s refinery just outside the city. This had been blown by 700 charges of gelignite laid by a captain of the Royal Engineers called Walter Scott. He was only twenty-three, but already a demolition veteran, having blown up much of the infrastructure of northern France prior to the evacuation of Dunkirk. The refinery would burn for six weeks.

  In the second city, Mandalay, things were going the same way, except that here it was hotter (120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade), Mandalay being in the burning desert plain of central Burma. Many of the refugees had arrived here by train, only to step directly into another giant refugee camp in which cholera had broken out. In Mandalay, as in Rangoon, the prisoners had been let out of the jail. Here, too, Dorman-Smith said the city would be held, and people ought to stay put, at least until suitable evacuation routes had been prepared. Here, too, the Burmese rioted against the Indians (resulting in 600 dead), and here also a single Japanese bombing raid – on the night of 3 April – killed 2000 civilians.

  Mandalay had never been as beautiful as its name: Kipling romanticized it in his poem ‘The Road to Mandalay’, but he’d never been there. It was a shanty-town of wooden houses; a Wild West-looking place. The tallest structures on the dusty streets were the telegraph poles. Most of these were skewed after the bombing, and it is said the vultures of Mandalay had become so fat on the corpses in the streets that when they perched on the wires, the poles would collapse entirely. It was only a small comeuppance for the vultures, and in any case the telegraph station was out of action.

  The predominant drift from Mandalay – for both refugees and the Burma Army – was to the north-west, over the Irrawaddy river by boat or by the Ava Bridge. The latter was supposedly closed to refugees, but there were reports of British soldiers charging them to cross, and pocketing the proceeds. The Japanese, approaching up the Irrawaddy, were kept back from the bridge retreat by 48th Gurkha Brigade. One thousand seven hundred Gurkhas faced 4000 Japanese and killed 500 of them. The bridge – a graceful iron pontoon (there being so many rivers, the British in Burma had become great bridge builders) – was blown up by the British on 30 April. To Field Marshal Sir William ‘Bill’ Slim, commander of the Allied forces in Burma, the collapse of the bridge symbolized the collapse of British power in Burma, and the military now joined the civilians in the evacuation to India.

  The north-westerly drift led towards the border town of Tamu, which became the start of the main evacuation route from northern Burma. The first leg of the route ran from Tamu to Imphal, capital – and only town – of the nominally independent Indian state of Manipur. From Imphal, the route led to Dimapur in Assam, a pretty Victorian town with a railway station and pine trees, but it was very malarial and the spring rains of 1942 had brought out the notorious Dimapur mosquito. About 200,000 would go this way, contending with – besides the mosquitoes, cholera and malnutrition – dust and burning scrub giving way to mud and monsoon.

  Other evacuees, including the Governor, Dorman-Smith, headed 200 miles north of Mandalay, going along the railway to Myitkyina, and into a cul-de-sac.

  The Man in the River

  Millar and Leyden had retreated behind a boulder, so as to be screened from the horrible sight, if not the sound, of the Dapha river. One of the Kachin porters volunteered to go a little further north along the Dapha to see whether he could find a crossable point. The quicker he came back, the better the news was likely to be. Millar and Leyden waited, and Millar smoked. When half an hour had passed, they knew it was unlikely to be good news. It was now raining again. More than an hour had passed by the time the Kachin re-emerged from the jungle. My life depends on this man’s answer, thought Millar, and he, Leyden and Goal Miri stepped out from behind the rock to greet the man, who indicated that they should walk through the trees with him, a little way towards the red-earth bank of the Dapha.

  The river fumed below them, and the Kachin pointed to where it disappeared into violet-coloured hills intersecting neatly, as in a children’s story. The Kachin believed that if they walked five or six miles along the riverbank in that direction, they might come to a crossable point. But Millar knew that, in their present condition, it would take two and a half days to cover that much dense jungle and then, the river having been crossed, they would have to spend the same time heading back south along the other side in order to be on track for civilization. It was no go; they could not afford another five days without food.

  Millar looked at Leyden; Goal Miri was looking at the waters of the Dapha. Suddenly, he shouted, ‘Look, a man is being washed down the river!’ One of the Kachins was in the middle of the Dapha. Just his head and shoulders were showing, and he was going down stream at what Millar called ‘an unpleasant pace’.

  But the man was not being washed down the river. He was crossing the river, in that his feet were – albeit intermittently – on the bottom: he was moving at a rapid diagonal. For every step he took towards the opposite bank, he seemed to be swept two paces downstream, towards fast rapids. If he hit those he’d be straight into the confluence whirlpool, from which he would eventually shoot out, and be borne along the Noa Dehing to its intersection with the mighty Brahmaputra, that creator of the Assam plain, and there he would arrive at civilization, most likely as a drowned corpse.

  But the Kachin reached the opposite bank. He staggered out, turned, then waded in again, and came directly back. He had proved it could be done. ‘That man will live in my memory forever,’ wrote Millar. Unfortunately, he will not live in the memory of history forever because we do not know his name. Why had he risked his life in that way? It is not enough to say he was being well
paid. The Kachins had been retained by Millar and Leyden in return for silver rupees (paper money was too flimsy for jungle dwellers; it tended to rot, get burnt, or be turned to pulp by the rains, or eaten by termites), and far more of them than they could earn from selling the superfluous produce of their agriculture. But the Kachins were not being paid enough to justify risking their lives, and they all knew they were doing precisely that. Millar and Leyden had told them the food was going to run out; they had been offered the chance to turn back on more than one occasion and the offer had been rejected. It was a matter of honour. Some of the porters told Millar and Leyden that their brothers served in the Burma Rifles, so they were loyal to the British (in the shape of Millar and Leyden) because their brothers were loyal to the British.

  A conference was held on the original bank. The Kachins tied the party’s diminished packs onto the tops of their heads. On the rocky river beach the party formed a human chain, each man holding the other’s wrists, and the chain walked slowly into the water. Every man was thus anchored by all the other men; on the other hand, if one man was swept into the rapids, they all would be. They would move a little way, then brace, then move again, Millar – who was at the front, holding his rifle above his head – shouting ‘Go!’ every time.

  They reached the opposite bank, and climbed out exhausted. There was no possibility of any further walking that day. They moved into the trees, so as to escape the worst of the rain, and the Kachins set down the loads. Every man looked at every other man, and every man grinned. Millar was thinking of the enigmatic Errol Gray, of Woodthorpe and MacGregor and their collapsible boat, of swaggering Henri of Orleans. He had, in a sense, beaten all of them. He wrote, ‘We felt extraordinary mental elation – at least I did – at having crossed this river after heavy rain three months later than the last date it was thought to be fordable.’

  They made a rough canopy of bamboos, lit their fire and continued to gaze at each other, too tired to speak, let alone move on. And then a new thought came to Millar. Would anybody ever know they’d crossed the Dapha?

  What use was mental elation without food? Also, Leyden was now running a fever. What this amounted to we don’t know. Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta is full of young British men and women who died of unspecified ‘fever’. In Leyden’s case, the possibilities were all too numerous. The most obvious is malaria. It’s true that mosquitoes thin out above 2000 feet, so there had not been too many of them in the Chaukan Pass itself, but now Leyden was lower down. In any case sandflies, which the British in Burma called polaungs, increase above 2000 feet, and these transmit leishmanaisis, with its own accompanying fever. Or their bites can turn septic, as can leech bites, or any other cut, and monsoon rain turns the skin wrinkly – as when one has spent too long in the bath – and liable to splitting. Or the fever might have been dysentery, typhoid or cholera – the embarrassing symptoms of these perhaps being thought unmentionable by Millar.

  All these possibilities would have been encouraged by exhaustion and malnutrition.

  Going back to the sambhur in that jungle clearing … why didn’t Millar and Leyden shoot more than one? The true jungle wallah might also demand to know why they didn’t preserve the hacked meat by wrapping it in a wide leaf – a bamboo leaf would have done perfectly well – and smoking it in the embers of a fire so that it would last for many days. And then again, surely there are edible plants in the jungle?

  There are, but even Captain Tainsh couldn’t list many in the Bengal Club of Calcutta, and he was a man obsessed with emergency nutrition, to the point where his autobiography is entitled Fungi in Peace and War, 1917–47.

  The fact is that Millar and Leyden did not have time to be smoking meat or nibbling plants to see whether they were poisonous. Instead they were in a great hurry, because they formed an advance guard, a breakaway from a party of British and Indian evacuees whose ability to proceed through the mountainous jungles of the Chaukan Pass and beyond was considered less than that of Millar and Leyden. In short, if Millar and Leyden did not get through, many people behind them would die.

  Beyond Mandalay

  In coming to Myitkyina, the British had reached the end of the line – literally, in that it was the last stop on the sparse Burmese railway network. It was also a dead end. Mountainous jungle lay to the north and west, occupied China to the east, Japanese soldiers to the south. The only way out short of entering those jungles was by air, and there was an airfield outside the town. It was just a clearing in the trees with a bamboo hut, like a cricket pavilion. Evacuation flights – to Dinjan, Assam – had been shifted there as airfields to the south were successively abandoned to the Japanese.

  Life correspondent George Rodger had stopped off at Myitkyina airfield before he himself walked out of Burma. He took a photograph and sent it to The Times where, to the annoyance of the British government, it was published on 15 April 1942. The caption ran: ‘Ready for Evacuation – The RAF has evacuated hundreds of women and children from the fighting areas in Burma. Some are seen sheltering from the sun under the wing of an aeroplane before leaving.’ Sunglasses, smiles and sola topees are the order of the day, and the subjects look very unharassed, like tourists rather than refugees. The half-dozen women, five children and one man look to be British or Anglo-Indian at the darkest. There are no Indians among their number, even though Indians constituted the great majority of the refugees.

  In The Story of Burma, F. Tennyson Jesse attempts a corrective:

  The following figures may be of interest to those who accuse us of furthering the interests of the whites, for they show what the RAF, the US Air Corps, and the Chinese National Airways Co did to evacuate people from Myitkyina to India in May 1942: 8616 persons were evacuated, of whom about 6000 were civilians and 2000 were army casualties. Of the 6000 civilians, 3500 were Eurasians and Burmese, 2200 were Indian, and 300 were English.

  By ‘May’ she means ‘early May’ because the flights would not continue throughout that month.

  Every morning, would-be passengers trekked through jungle scrub from the nearby refugee camp, suitcases in hand, to wait for the two Douglas Transports – lumbering mules of planes that landed each day from Assam. With each successive day, they appeared later and later out of the thick white cloud in which the monsoon was brewing. From mid-April, these clouds had been threatening to halt the flights altogether; by 6 May they had blotted out the mountains to the north-west over which the refugees hoped to be carried. The cloud also made each day more suffocating, yet the women and children – they mainly were women and children – who waited for the planes seemed to have been at the dressing-up basket: the women might be wearing two hats, or two dresses, or they might be wearing coats in 110 degrees Fahrenheit. These were the clothes they could not fit into their suitcases.

  On 6 May the first Transport landed, and those with passes for it boarded by means of the usual regulated scramble. When the doors of the aircraft were closed, a small girl stood screaming repeatedly beside it. Her mother was on the plane and she was not. This minor tragedy (nothing much by the standards of the evacuation) was about to be overtaken by a bigger one. As the Douglas Transport prepared to take off, the sound of another plane was heard coming from within the cloud. It was not the second Douglas Transport; that was not due, and this unseen aircraft had a thinner engine note. A Japanese fighter – one of those nihilistically called a Zero – came out of the clouds and the refugees who’d been unlucky a minute ago, being unable to board the plane, were lucky now, because they could race into the jungle. As they ran, the first Zero circulated the airfield three times with a red flag sticking from the cockpit window. It was later surmised that this had been a warning pass, and the door of the plane on the ground did open, and three or four people did jump out; but, by then, another three Zeros had come out of the cloud, and they machine-gunned the Douglas Transport. They circled away, came back, machine-gunned it again. At least thirty-five people were killed, and many more injured.

  Just
as Rangoon and Mandalay had been abandoned after a Japanese air raid, so now was Myitkyina airfield, and two days later, the Japanese took the town. It is estimated that 40,000 refugees were scattered into the surrounding countryside by the fall of Myitkyina, and they were the ones who’d been banking on the airlift, and who were all geared up for it, with their cotton frocks, high-heeled shoes and children in tow. They were not dressed for long-distance walking.

  The Governor, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, had himself boarded one of the last flights. He would establish a Burma government-in-exile from the hill station of Simla, India, where he would write an elegant, rueful report on the evacuation, characterizing the main theme as sauve qui peut, possibly because it sounds better than ‘every man for himself’. The military word was ‘fluid’. The situation had become fluid. This was especially the mindset post-Myitkyina. Army officers (always British) lost their men (usually Indian), and vice versa. Senior British police officers found that all their Burmese and Indian policemen had melted away. Telegraphic and telephonic communication did not exist. There was a shortage of wireless sets, which in any case didn’t work well in the mountainous terrain towards which everybody was heading. All civil and military authority collapsed.

  Given that survival now depended on a person’s ability to walk into India, some maps would have been useful. But one of the sub-divisional officers in Myitkyina had rounded up a cache of maps and burnt them, to keep them from the Japanese. Some decided to stay in the villages to the north. But most refugees felt it better to try a ‘Valley of Death’ than wait in Myitkyina, so a route to Assam began to be talked of. It had been ‘opened’ since March; it lay through the Paktoi Hills, and ran along something called the Hukawng Valley.