Copyright © 2014 by Vicki Constantine Croke
Map copyright © 2014 by Simon M. Sullivan
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
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Images on this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page and this page courtesy of Di Clarke. All others courtesy of Treve Williams.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Croke, Vicki.
Elephant Company: the inspiring story of an unlikely hero and the animals who helped him save lives in World War II / Vicki Croke.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4000-6933-0
eBook ISBN 978-0-679-60399-3
1. Williams, J. H. (James Howard) 2. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Burma. 3. Elephant Company (Great Britain) 4. Bandoola (Elephant) 5. Animals in logging—Burma—History—20th century. 6. Asiatic elephant—Burma—History—20th century. 7. Working elephants—Burma—History—20th century. 8. Animals—War use—History—20th century. 9. Burma—History—Japanese occupation, 1942–1945. I. Title. II. Title: Inspiring story of an unlikely hero and the animals who helped him save lives in World War II.
D767.6.C76 2014 940.54′259591092—dc23 2013032280
www.atrandom.com
Jacket design: Victoria Allen
Jacket photographs: courtesy of Treve Williams
v3.1
[Fluffer Nutter]
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
MAP
PART ONE
THE MAKING OF AN ELEPHANT WALLAH
CHAPTER 1: THE SHOULDERS OF A GIANT
CHAPTER 2: INTO THE JUNGLE
CHAPTER 3: MEETING THE BOSS—AND THE ELEPHANTS
CHAPTER 4: INITIATION RITES
CHAPTER 5: HOW TO READ AN ELEPHANT
CHAPTER 6: THE FAIREST TUSKER OF THEM ALL
CHAPTER 7: THE BURNING BOSS
CHAPTER 8: SEX, CRICKET, AND BLUE CHEESE
CHAPTER 9: SCHOOL FOR MEN AND ELEPHANTS
CHAPTER 10: DRUNK ON TESTOSTERONE
CHAPTER 11: MASTER CLASS IN TRUST AND COURAGE
CHAPTER 12: THE JUNGLE FAMILY HAS NO WIFE
CHAPTER 13: “THE MURDER OF ME”
CHAPTER 14: BANDOOLA: HERO OR ROGUE?
CHAPTER 15: A MURDER INVESTIGATION
CHAPTER 16: REBELS AND REUNIONS
PART TWO
LOVE AND ELEPHANTS
CHAPTER 17: TIGER HOUR
CHAPTER 18: THE CANNIBAL ISLANDS
CHAPTER 19: SUNLIGHT AND SHADOW
CHAPTER 20: INTO THE CAULDRON
PART THREE
WAR ELEPHANTS
CHAPTER 21: FLEEING BURMA
CHAPTER 22: NO. 1 WAR ELEPHANT
CHAPTER 23: THE MAKING OF ELEPHANT BILL
CHAPTER 24: ELEPHANT COMPANY HITS ITS STRIDE
CHAPTER 25: A CRAZY IDEA
CHAPTER 26: THE ELEPHANT STAIRWAY
EPILOGUE
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
JAMES HOWARD WILLIAMS WAS A WORLD WAR II LEGEND. NEWSPAPERS and magazines around the world, including The Times of London, the Melbourne Herald, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Life magazine, loved telling the story of the quietly charismatic war hero with a dash of mysticism, who could talk to elephants. He had gone to work in the teak industry in Burma in 1920, and over the years displayed a remarkable gift for understanding the hearts and minds of the great beasts who pushed, pulled, and dragged the logs to the riverways. Without any veterinary training, Williams had evolved into a skilled and intuitive animal doctor. He knew more about elephants, one paper said, “than any other white man.”
When World War II broke out, Williams formed a unique and indispensible unit for the Allies. His Elephant Company not only helped defeat the Japanese in Burma, it also saved the lives of countless refugees. For much of the war, he operated far out in front of the Allied forces, facing the enemy in wild mountainous terrain.
The work of elephants, it turned out, was vital to troop movement. They made bridge building possible, and they hauled supplies to units bogged down in places even mules couldn’t negotiate. Their services were so crucial that they were coveted by both the Allied forces and the Japanese.
Williams’s fearless snatching of elephants from Japanese hands made headlines and earned him a popular nickname, Elephant Bill. As part of the elite Force 136, fighting behind enemy lines, he waged what the Daily Mirror called “a holy war against the Japanese.” His extraordinary exploits became nearly mythic when he saved a group of evacuees, and like the famous military hero from 218 B.C., conducted his own “Hannibal trek,” crossing not the Alps, but several mountain ranges between Burma and India with his train of elephants.
The Daily Mail’s headline “Elephant Bill Won His War: Beat Burma Japs” might have been reductive, but Williams was awarded the Order of the British Empire and mentioned in dispatches twice for gallantry in facing the enemy. His efforts led famed field marshal Sir William Slim to write movingly about how much he owed Williams and the elephants.
All the correspondents of the time touted what Williams did to help elephants. But Williams thought they’d gotten it backward. It was the elephants who had helped him. Not only did they give him joy and a reason to live in the lonely jungles, but they became his teachers. “Look,” he told one reporter, “I’ve learned more about life from elephants than I ever did from human beings.” And there, hidden in the inverse of all those newspaper articles, was the even more astonishing, if overlooked, story: how the elephants had transformed a carefree young man into a war hero.
Living day by day with elephants, he had absorbed their deeper, more philosophical cues. In fact, he discovered in them the virtues he would work to develop in himself: courage, loyalty, the ability to trust (and the good sense to know when to be distrustful), fairness, patience, diligence, kindness, and humor. “Not a bad way to learn,” he said, because “the elephant takes a more kindly view of life than we do.”
Some of the most pivotal moments of Williams’s life were guided by the elephants’ creed. He won the faith of a monstrous boss by refusing to back down, just as he had seen serious bull elephants do when tested by bigger, older ones. Two elephants who scrapped one day, he learned, would forage together the next, because they had won each other’s respect. Williams would also forgive an employee who tried to kill him when he realized that the attack never would have happened if he had treated the man with the dignity he accorded his elephants. He would not make that mistake again. Even his courtship of Susan, the woman who would become his wife, mimicked the graceful tuskers who gently followed a female, reading her mood and approaching when invited. Finally, when Williams came to command men in war, he fully understood the difference between a leader and a bully. The elephants had taught him this distinction, too, when they organized themselves at treacherous river crossings. Time and again, he found that the universal truths he had observed in the jungle applied not just to elephants but to people, too.
Williams had witnessed a l
ife among the elephants that would be hard for those outside to fathom—in fact, he reported behaviors that many would not believe until they were validated decades later by biologists in the field. He had seen these creatures thoughtfully solve problems, use tools, protect one another, express joy and humor, stand up for something more important than their own safety, and even, perhaps, comprehend the concept of death. There was a largeness to them that was about more than their physical size, a quality triggered especially when their sense of decency or outrage was provoked.
Could one really call it decency? Williams thought so. Courage defined them. He had witnessed their bravery—mothers defending babies, tuskers squaring off against each other, closely bonded females running toward danger, not away, to protect one another.
There were simple lessons from the animals, like how to be content with what he had. And there were more complex ones, too: the realization, for instance, that trust requires much more than affection; it depends on mutual confidence—strength, not niceness. Or that sometimes it’s not necessary to know what elephants or people are thinking, as long as one honors what they are feeling.
He called his elephants “the most lovable and sagacious of all beasts,” “the most magnificent of animals,” and “God’s own.” His time in the logging camps of Burma was spent studying them, healing them, learning from them, and, he was never ashamed to admit, loving them. “The relationship between man and elephant,” he would say later, “is nine-tenths love.” Several elephants would be like family to him, and one in particular, a noble tusker named Bandoola, would be his kindred spirit. Through accidents, illness, and the loneliness of the forest, elephants not only made his plight bearable; they helped give it meaning. He told intimates, “I am convinced that life in such conditions would be impossible if it were not for the elephants.”
Later in life, Williams would have an epiphany. What the elephants meant to him had gone beyond notions of friendship or even family. The great animals, he decided, had become his religion. Through them he had been saved, reborn, and even christened—renamed as Elephant Bill. With them, he had gained a world of wisdom and compassion. In a way, he proudly told one writer, he had even become one.
CHAPTER 1
THE SHOULDERS OF A GIANT
DEEP IN THE JUNGLE-CLAD HILLS OF NORTHWEST BURMA, CLOSE to the border of the Indian state of Manipur, Billy Williams, delirious with fever, began to regain consciousness. Half dreaming, he scrambled to piece together what was happening. His lanky body felt cockeyed and unresponsive. Even opening his eyes seemed impossible. As hallucination gave way to reality, he remembered his predicament: He was stranded in an inaccessible forest, on the wrong side of the raging Yu River, during the dangerous, unrelenting monsoon rains of 1927, and he had never been sicker.
His spiking fever was accompanied by chills. The lymph nodes at his groin were swollen to the size of fists, and some of the small pustules lining his feet and legs had broken open. For days he had been unable to eat and could barely drink. That morning he could not even stand.
As the lashing rains tore at his clothes, he suddenly felt something that he couldn’t make sense of: His cot was lurching, as if it was trying to buck him off. Forcing his eyes open, Williams realized he was not on the wrong side of the river, but smack in the middle of it, riding an elephant through the churning avalanche of water. Around him, deadly two-ton tree trunks shot down the rapids like missiles, crashing into one another with a sound like thunder.
Blinking against the pouring rain, he seized the rail of the large bamboo cargo basket, or “kah,” he lay in as it rocked him back and forth, perilously close to the frothing current. The elephant was pitched at a steep angle, leaning his flank into the wall of water, shouldering all his weight against the chocolate-colored torrent in an effort to keep his footing. Yet Williams felt oddly lucky. That was because of the elephant he rode. There was no way Williams could mistake the animal’s identity—even in his feverish state, slumped high up in a basket. The broad expanse of the gray back, the delicate pink freckling bordering the ears, and the rakish slant of the gleaming white tusks, their tips just visible from this viewpoint—this was the only elephant who could brave the crossing: the strongest and most stouthearted creature in the forest, the best friend Williams ever had. Bandoola.
Williams, who managed several teak logging camps, would eventually know a thousand elephants by name during his years with the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation. Of all of them, Bandoola was dearest to him, owing to his intelligence, virtue, and strength. Williams had confidence that even without a rider’s guidance, “the great elephant knew what he was doing,” using his own instincts and judgment for this passage.
Not that a human voice could be heard over the pounding water, but Williams probably mustered the breath to at least whisper encouragement. He had made a habit of speaking to the working elephants in the language they were trained in—Burmese. More than any other animal, he believed, they craved conversation. Their vocabularies, the number of words they understood, were astonishing, but to Williams, impressive as that was, there was something that counted more. These creatures could read underlying emotion, understand intent, perceive what was really being expressed. Now, verbalized or not, Williams would make plain to Bandoola that he was grateful and believed in him.
The bull already knew how ill Williams was. Earlier that day, the mahouts, or “uzis” as they were called here, who worked for Williams had cinched a cargo basket to Bandoola’s back. It was an unusual event for the tusker, who was a logging elephant, not one of the small pack elephants called “travelers.” Nonetheless, he had stood patiently, head held high, ears flat against his neck, as the rain pelted his back and ran off his wrinkled hide in runnels. Soaking wet, his skin had inked into a deep purple. Elephants in Burma knew how to cope with monsoon. If he tilted his head forward, his large, bony brow ridge would shield his eyes from rain, and he could keep water from spilling into his nostrils by hanging his trunk down straight, curling it under at the very end. When a limp Williams was carried out of his tent, Bandoola’s dark eyes, beneath their heavy, wrinkled lids and long lashes, tracked the movement, lending him the meditative look particular to elephants. Bandoola not only recognized Williams, he knew something was wrong. This person was different from the energetic, confident man who when visiting camp invariably produced a sugary tamarind ball treat for Bandoola, spoke to him, scrubbed his sandpaper skin exactly where it needed scratching, ran his hands along his hide, swabbed ointment on abrasions, and then slapped his flank good-bye. He had nursed Bandoola back to health for a whole year after a fight with another tusker, spending every day cleaning the wounds and applying antiseptic and fly repellent. Now Williams, the elephant saw, was as broken as Bandoola had been then.
The order “Hmit!” was given, and Bandoola sank down, back legs buckling first into the sludge, then the front. Several Burmese men, their colorful sarong-like longyis sodden with rain, struggled with slipping hands and feet to hoist the senseless Williams up to the basket atop Bandoola’s shoulders. Two of them, Williams’s closest servant, Aung Net, and another camp worker, would ride with him.
As the body was passed upward, Bandoola swiveled his trunk, pressing his nostrils to Williams, and breathing in deeply. Even through Williams’s clothing Bandoola was picking up organic clues, especially from the armpits and between the legs. Like all elephants, he was a master chemist, analyzing much of the world through his sensitive nose. Bandoola could ascertain innumerable facts about any animal: last meal eaten, fitness, anxiety level, or hormonal state. Elephants read one another—and people—this way. Bandoola’s prodigious brain, highly evolved to negotiate a complex social world, kept a dossier of the men around him, especially Williams, whom he had known for seven years. Scent was a critical part of that inventory. Williams’s transformation into a seasoned forest man was telegraphed to Bandoola in large part by his body odor. Billy Williams smelled different as a veteran than he had as a recruit.
Over time, his diet and smoking habits changed, the ratio of fat to muscle shifted, and his confidence around elephants grew, meaning certain hormones that often signaled fear were reduced. The city washed out of the man, and the jungle seeped in. When Williams had an opportunity for sex, Bandoola could smell that, too.
Williams did not possess a single photograph of Bandoola, but commissioned this rendering of the great tusker.
What Bandoola inhaled this day was misery. With just a few whiffs of Williams’s body, the tusker processed the rank breath, the change in hygiene, and the yeasty scent of an infection. Elephants routinely help other ailing elephants, lifting them when they cannot stand, feeding them when they are unable to forage. Are they capable of doing the same for people? Williams couldn’t prove Bandoola was aware of his dire condition, but it damn sure felt that way to him during his flashes of consciousness.
Like all the European teak men, Williams was a nomad of the forest. He knew illness and accident went with the job, that bouts of malaria were as frequent as colds were back home. Hundreds of miles—roadless, muddy, rain-drenched, wooded, and mountainous—from any medical help, he and his colleagues toughed out such episodes. Even the most robust among them could wither and die within days of something seemingly innocuous: a headache, a cut, a chill. “No one who works in the jungle,” Williams once wrote, “calculates on a ripe old age as a near-certainty.” The tropical forest was capricious in its blessings and curses. Indigenous people made sense of it with a pantheon of jungle sprites that they called “nats”: some cruel, sneaky, and slick, others kind and generous. The nats personified the soul of the forest.
Staying alive—especially for outsiders like Williams—took every trick a man could muster. The company’s numbers told the story: Williams had been one of forty-one young recruits hired for the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation in 1920. Now, seven years later, only sixteen of them were still on the job. The others were either dead, dismissed, or disillusioned. Though he knew the attrition would continue, he hoped he wouldn’t be the next to go. With Bandoola, at least he had a chance.
Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II Page 1