Flight by Elephant

by Andrew Martin

  He reached Miao at five o’clock on Saturday 3 October, and the headman, Mat Ley, told him that a group of Nagas settled nearby had found the cow elephant that Mackrell had lost en route to the Dapha on 9 June. It was perfectly safe and would be restored to him on payment of fifty silver rupees, which they hoped he would agree was a reasonable price. Mackrell ‘arranged for this’.

  He arrived at the Margherita golf club on Tuesday 6 October, where he was greeted by the Refugee Administrator for North Assam, Pearce, who congratulated him on disobeying the orders from Political Officer Walker and Mr Justice Braund, which he himself had endorsed. ‘I take my hat off to you,’ he said. On 7 October, Mackrell saw one of the rescued men at large on the fairways, not playing golf – that would be too much to expect – but ‘Whitehouse was walking with a stick!’ Mackrell then wired Sir John in Simla to say that all the rest of his people were out, and Sir John wrote to his wife that he was ‘thumping glad’ to hear it.

  On 10 October, Mackrell was driving towards the dusty, bustling town of Dibrugarh with Dr Burgess-Barnett in the passenger seat. They were going shopping, and Mackrell wanted to see ‘Routledge, Superintendent of Police about tyres’ (a recondite bit of business that need not detain us). They came to what passed for a traffic jam in that town at that time. They were stationary on a pot-holed road when a lorry came reversing towards them out of a side road. It was carrying long bamboos, sharpened at the projecting ends. These crashed through Mackrell’s windscreen, and he and the doctor were about to be impaled when ‘some Americans in a Jeep’ drove directly into the side of the lorry’s cab, so as to alert the driver.

  On Sunday the 11th the two motored to Shillong, where they both lived. Mackrell drove first to the doctor’s house, and waited outside in the car so that the reunion might be a private one. The noise from the doctor’s house, Mackrell wrote, ‘sounded like a football match’.

  He thought he might have to go in and ‘rescue him all over again’.

  Subsequently (Part One)

  On arrival in Calcutta, all evacuees were pressed to give their names to the women volunteers of the Evacuee Enquiry Bureau of 12, Wood Street, Calcutta. The women compiled two Registers of Evacuees from Burma, each disarmingly prefaced by ‘an apologia for the many errors it contains’. Volume 1 listed ‘European, Anglo-Burman, Anglo-Indian and other Non-Indian Evacuees’; Volume 2 listed Indian evacuees, or a small fraction thereof. Most of the evacuees mentioned in this narrative appeared in these volumes, including such Indian railwaymen as were named by Sir John in his diary: C. V. Venkatraman, R. V. Venkatachalam and S. T. Rajan all appear in Volume 2, giving date of arrival in Calcutta as 7 August.

  Absent from the register – even though we know he got out safely – is the name of Moses, that enigmatic Dutch wanderer, the International Boy Scout and supposed cheerleader for the Chaukan Pass. It would almost have been disappointing if his name had appeared.

  In both volumes, there is a category: ‘Casualties due to enemy action in Burma en route to India and deaths since arrival in India’, and there, in Volume 1, appears the name of C. L. Kendall, railway surveyor, whom we last saw being taken by ambulance from Margherita. He died at Panitalo Hospital on 8 July of cerebral malaria, leaving a young wife and a two-year-old son.

  For most of the returnees, there was a good deal of form filling, and a good deal of letter writing. Everyone wrote to everyone. (Almost everyone: as far as we know, Mackrell received no communication from Edward Wrixon Rossiter.)

  On 15 August, Eric Ivan Milne, the railwayman who’d come out with Sir John, wrote a letter to Mackrell, who did not read it until later, since he was at that point on his way back ‘into the blue’ for a second time. The letter touches all the bases we might expect:

  My dear Mackrell,

  I write and send you my warmest thanks for all you have done for us blokes through the Chaukan Pass from Burma. There is no doubt we should have been scuppered had it not been for you. We know you will get the rest of the party out.

  I flew to Delhi and got to my family at Bombay on 14th where I found everyone in great form. Unfortunately I had a bit of the reaction again and malaria and so I can do nothing much, not even buy clothes. The doctor (Col. Morrison of Rangoon) whom I know very well, said I was to have complete rest for 2 months! Well I doubt whether I’ll stick to that without a game of squash or something.

  My wife joins me in thanking you again for all the effort you made to get us out.

  Cheerio,

  Yours sincerely,

  E. Milne.

  Eric Ivan Milne quickly recovered and was soon, as his wife noted, ‘eating like six horses’. He and his family sailed for England in 1945; he died in 1978, aged seventy-nine, in Uckfield, East Sussex.

  After checking into the Grand Hotel, Calcutta, Sir John Rowland had a ‘real good go’ of tertian malaria, but on 30 August he was fit enough to leave Calcutta by train for Delhi; he had an entire carriage to himself, personally reserved for him by the General Manager of the East Indian Railway, the biggest and the grandest of the Calcutta-based networks. It was the least that one top railwayman could do for another. At Delhi, Sir John took the train to the verdant, and cool, hill town of Simla, where he checked into the best hotel, the Hotel Cecil.

  The government of Burma – or at least the British version of it – was being run from Simla. The Governor, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, was there, writing his Evacuation Report. On 3 September, Sir John had lunch with Dorman-Smith and recounted what probably became, over the years, the mother of all anecdotes. He wrote, ‘H.E. was most interested in the tale and said, ’altho’ I might not think so, he was most concerned over the fate of my party and myself and exceedingly worried.’

  From Simla, Sir John wrote a letter to his wife, recounting his own story, and the failure of the Black/Webster/Street expedition to rescue the remainder of ‘his people’: ‘It is most disappointing and if only I were ten years younger damn it all, I would go myself.’ But he mentioned that he had high hopes of ‘another rescue’ (Mackrell’s). He described in typically pugnacious style the work of the office that had been set up for him in Simla. It was largely concerned with settling claims for compensation from contractors with Burma Railways. A large number of these claims were, Sir John believed, ‘fictitious, in fact, preposterous’. But the decency behind Sir John’s bluster was also evident regarding dependants of dead railwaymen: ‘I am very pleased to say that Government has agreed to give wives and kin (if wholly dependent) pensions; that is, in the case of a widow unless she remarries. This is going to ease the lot of a number of women and children.’

  Sir John was still not quite over the jungle. He was still having to bandage his ‘wretched foot’ twice a day because of leech bites. And one of the last of the letters that we have from Sir John concludes: ‘I am penning this in my bedroom at the Cecil and a fairly large sized monkey is peeping in at the side window but he cannot get in as all the windows are covered with wire gauze. I have no doubt he is looking for food. The monkeys here never seem to stop eating.’

  On 12 October, Sir John Rowland wrote to Mackrell, expressing his thanks for rescuing ‘my party … Well, Mackrell I guess it’s just thank you very much over and over again.’ He wrote of his shock at the suicide of Street: ‘He was such a likeable lad, and full of the joie de vivre … still, it can be truly said he gave his life for others’, and he concluded ‘Au revoir … if it had not been for you, many of us would not be alive today.’

  Sir John never did return to work in Burma. He retired to South Africa, where he had a long imperial sunset. He was the only one of our evacuees eminent enough to appear in Who’s Who, but the entry was unvaryingly minimal, Sir John giving his address as c/o The Standard Bank of South Africa, Adderley Street, Cape Town. Career-wise there was no advance on ‘Chief Railway Commissioner, Burma 1937–41’. A marriage is mentioned, but no children … and no recreation, thereby frustrating the expectation that he might, in a spirit of irony, have written ‘w
alking’. Sir John fades from the book, and from life, in 1969, aged eighty-seven.

  On 18 October, Edward Lovell Manley, Sir John’s number two, who was in Mackrell’s last batch of rescuees, wrote a letter to Mackrell beginning as follows: ‘I am afraid I found it quite impossible, when we parted, to thank you for all you have done for us and even now it seems hopeless to find words adequately to express my gratitude.’

  He also wrote to the governor of Assam asking Mackrell to be excused for disobeying the order to withdraw, and to various officials expressing his gratefulness to Havildar Dharramsing, and the other men of the Second Battalion, Assam Rifles, and the political porters with whom they worked, including Taja Tami, who had mostly carried Whitehouse. After listing them by name, Manley wrote: ‘I understand that all these men who have helped us are being suitably rewarded by government and I sincerely trust they will receive the recognition they deserve.’

  The Havildar and the other Gurkhas of Mackrell’s Striking and Support parties were awarded the British Empire Medal.

  Edward Lovell Manley sailed for England in 1944, and died on the island of Jersey in 1960, aged seventy-six.

  Also in mid-October, Captain A. O. Whitehouse wrote to Mackrell from the United Service Club, Calcutta, thanking him, and saying he was ‘going into the Tropical School of Medicine this evening’, at which precipitous moment he is lost to history.

  Subsequently (Part Two)

  To summarize in one short paragraph those seismic events that have spawned thousands of books …

  After the longest campaign of the Second World War, Britain retook Burma in 1945, with the aid of the Americans and the Chinese. The Allies had learnt the dark art of jungle guerrilla warfare, as exemplified by the Chindit campaigns led by General Orde Wingate, an irregular man in more than just the military sense. Britain again ran the country until independence in 1948. India had gained its independence the year before, whereupon the British administrators left more or less immediately. Many commercial people ‘stayed on’ and the British tea planters of Assam continued to enjoy an expansive lifestyle until the 1960s, when they were driven out en masse by the heavy taxation inflicted on them by Mrs Gandhi.

  Between Britain and India, and amid all the turmoil of war and sudden independence, some threads of our story have become tangled or got lost. But leaving aside those mentioned in the previous chapter, and two of our principals (whom we will deal with separately), here is an attempt to account for the personnel we encountered roughly in the order in which they appeared.

  We start – as we began the book – with Millar and Leyden, who formed the first of what would turn out to be many advance parties making double marches. Guy Millar is still shown as being a manager of the Kacharigaon Tea Company in the 1951 edition of Thacker’s Indian Directory. He is gone from it by 1956, but the British Library’s intervening copies of the directory are missing. We do know that he seems to have gone to Japan on his way home, because he sailed from there to Britain in 1958. He died in Plymouth in 1970, aged sixty-seven. Regarding his servant … on 19 December 1942, the Defence Department of the Government of Burma decreed from Simla that ‘a double-barrelled breech-loading 12 bore shotgun should be presented, suitably inscribed, to Goal Miri’. So now Goal would be able to shoot sambhur with his own gun.

  Next, to John Lamb Leyden, Millar’s partner in that initial breakaway. He died ‘peacefully’ (i.e. not of tropical fever like his poetic eighteenth-century ancestor) in a nursing home in Rhuddlan, Clwyd, North Wales, in 1988, by which time he was John Leyden CBE. There was a Times obituary, and Leyden is also mentioned in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography in the entry for a man called David Rees-Williams, 1st Baron Ogmore. In 1948, in the last days of British rule in Burma, Rees-Williams – a lawyer and Labour MP – was involved in negotiating independence terms with the Burmese ethnic minorities, the peoples of the Frontier Areas. A committee was established under Rees-Williams, and he was provided with a secretary, a man called Ledwidge, who did not inspire much confidence in Rees-Williams, largely because he always wore ‘blue shirt, khaki shorts and pink ankle socks’. Williams refused to go into the restless Frontier Areas with a man thus attired, and so the Director of the Frontier Areas agreed to accompany him instead. This was John Lamb Leyden, ‘whose conduct during the war’ had, according to the entry, ‘been heroic’.

  After Burmese independence, Leyden turned his attention to Africa, and in 1948 he was in the Africa Department of the Colonial Office in London. In the 1950s, he was a director of the Uganda Development Corporation, a consultant to De Beers, and twice a UK Delegate to the United Nations.

  His spaniel, Misa, who had, it transpired, fallen into the gorge of the Noa Dehing river, was found, thin but alive and with three puppies, by a Gurkha soldier, one of those crossed over the Dapha by Mackrell. Nobody reading this will be surprised to hear that (a) we do not know the Gurkha’s name and (b) that he picked up Misa and the puppies, and, despite being on the edge of starvation himself, carried them all the way to the Margherita camp, where he handed them over to Tom-Tom Thomson, who arranged for them to be delivered to Leyden.

  George Rodger, the Life magazine correspondent who had observed the red-hot Buddhas in fallen Rangoon, became the first photographer into Belsen concentration camp in 1945. He later said that he felt ashamed of the way he’d tried to make good compositions out of the stacks of bodies, and he gave up war photography, but continued to travel, often in Africa, with camera in hand. He died in 1995 in Ashford, Kent.

  Dr Burgess-Barnett died on 9 April 1944 in Dooars, Bengal, aged fifty-six. It is not known of what cause, or whether his condition was a consequence of what he’d been through two years before.

  On Easter Sunday in 1958, the maverick botanist Frank Kingdon-Ward was for once at home in London. He was just back from Sweden, where he’d been lecturing on rhododendrons, and was planning a trip to Vietnam. Meanwhile, he was drinking in a pub in Kensington when he felt a tingling in his right foot. It was not the start of that condition of which we’ve heard so much, beriberi; it was the start of a fatal heart attack. He was buried in the county of his birth, Cambridgeshire, in the churchyard at Grantchester, the village immortalized in verse by the poet Rupert Brooke, who met the fate – death by insect bite – that Kingdon-Ward constantly flirted with. He was seventy-three.

  As for the Commandos …

  Of the Chaukan trek, Ritchie Gardiner, wielder of the silver propelling pencil, had written, ‘With some weapons training, especially in the use of Tommy guns and hand grenades, I believe I could hold my own with anyone in jungle fighting.’ Gardiner would fight in the jungle, but as it were vicariously. As Lieutenant Colonel Gardiner, he became the head of the Burmese section of Force 136, the Special Operations unit that succeeded the Oriental Mission. Force 136 was in the same line of business as Wingate’s Chindits, albeit a far smaller force and much less well known. Gardiner ran it from Calcutta, planning guerrilla raids on the Japanese from behind their lines, and relaying intelligence from his men on the ground to the RAF for bombing raids. The backbone of the force was men from the Karen peoples, who hated the Burmese.

  In 1985, Ritchie Gardiner wrote an article about his war work, which throws light on the fate of one of his fellow Commandos on the Chaukan trek, namely his colleague at MacGregor’s timber merchants, Eric McCrindle:

  After the 1942 retreat, most of the Karen operatives [British officers liaising with the Karens] had been overrun by the Japanese invaders, but they had been instructed to hide their weapons and await the eventual return of the British. One British officer, Major Hugh Seagrim, deliberately chose to remain behind, and was hidden from the enemy by the Karens. By then the Japs had occupied the country as far North as Myitkyina. During 1943 an attempt was made to contact Seagrim when two officers, Major Nimmo and Captain McCrindle, were dropped by parachute in the hills near Toungoo. It was one of the first operations by 136, and it was a disaster! The Japs soon got news of their arrival and surrounded thei
r camp, Seagrim managed to escape, but both Nimmo and McCrindle were killed, and the Japs started a wide-spread campaign of torture and murder in their efforts to force the loyal Karens to reveal Seagrim’s location.

  (Seagrim was later executed by the Japanese having given himself up in order to spare the Karens from further persecution.)

  In 1945, Gardiner directed Force 136 in skirmishing attacks that were crucial in the defeat of Japan, and he played a decisive political role, too. In early 1943, the Burmese nationalist leader, Aung San, whose Burma National Army had made common cause with the Japanese, decided that he had exchanged one form of imperialism for another, more sinister one. Aung San wanted to switch sides, but Dorman-Smith and the Burma government-in-exile wanted nothing to do with him. Ritchie Gardiner thought differently. He could see the usefulness of Aung San’s forces to the operations he was conducting; therefore, he and others ‘intervened at the highest political level’ to have Dorman-Smith overruled. So Force 136 now had two principal – and mutually antagonistic – allies, the Karens and the Nationalist Burmese.

  In early 1945, Aung San’s Burma National Army revolted against Japanese rule. Aung San then became the favoured British candidate for leader of independent Burma. Dorman-Smith still harboured grudges against him, but Aung San was the coming man and Dorman-Smith was yesterday’s man. Accordingly his return to the Governorship in 1946 was short-lived, and while on sick leave in Britain he was replaced by the British Army general Sir Hubert Rance, who was pro-Aung San. (Dorman-Smith would die in Britain in 1977, aged seventy-eight.)

  In July 1947, with Aung San poised to take over as the first leader of independent Burma, he was shot dead in Rangoon on the orders of a rival nationalist, U Saw, who regarded Aung San as a British stooge. Aung San’s vision of a united and democratic Burma would be bequeathed to his famous daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, and it is arguable that none of this would have happened without the intervention of Ritchie Gardiner, which in turn means that none of it would have happened without the earlier intervention – in saving Gardiner’s life – of Gyles Mackrell.