Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II

by Croke, Vicki Constantine

  As Williams followed the path on the ascent to the Manipur hills, he found two sobbing Indian children. The brother and sister were tiny and wretched. Their mother, not much more than a teenager, had collapsed against an embankment in the scorching sun. She was crumpled in the dust of the road, sick, starving, and dehydrated, as thousands trudged by her. Williams knelt by her side, cradling her. Despite the danger of communicable disease, he brought his canteen to her lips and she drank. She could not speak, but the man who had spent a lifetime with animals almost understood her better without words.

  “In her eyes,” he wrote, he saw gratitude, a “blessing.” But also terror for her children. He felt she was wordlessly asking him: What will become of them? They looked at each other and then silently she died in his arms. “The change came suddenly, and a moment later I realised that I was left alone with the responsibility of these two children.” He could not carry them for the long trek ahead. He stood frozen, gathering his senses, and then for no reason he could even articulate, he turned back with them for a short distance. A Jeep, something very rare on that road, jounced toward him, and behind the wheel was a staff captain he recognized from Tamu. Williams stepped in his path to block him. The captain immediately waved him off. “Can’t be done, old chap,” he was saying. Williams asked that the children be hidden under a tarp in the back, and then he threatened to throw the captain and his jaunty vehicle “down the khudside” (mountainside), if he refused. The captain agreed to take them to a camp in Imphal. “Great was the lump in my throat,” Williams wrote, when the two were loaded safely into the Jeep. Later, when Williams had made it to Imphal himself, he checked in and found the siblings alive, in good health, and being tended to in the orphan section.

  The monsoon season arrived in May. The deluge was as relentless as the Japanese: thunderstorms, drenching rain, and torrents running down hillsides “baring the ribs of the earth,” as one American correspondent described it.

  Mandalay fell to enemy forces, which continued to drive up from the southern part of the country and spread out to the rest.

  On May 5, 1942, American general Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, who had arrived in Burma just as it was collapsing, sized up the Japanese threat. He headed to India, on foot, like the other refugees, leading his staff to safety. Retreating British forces, exhausted and ragged, headed that way, too. British casualties and losses were high, and the Japanese, with their superior numbers, air support, and training, sustained few. The outcome was demoralizing. At the end of his trek, Stilwell said, “We got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it’s humiliating as hell.” It wasn’t much solace, but at least there was news that the Japanese were experiencing a few defeats in the Pacific and on land in New Guinea.

  On the home front, in Shillong, Susan gave birth in safety to their daughter, Lamorna, on September 10, 1942. Jim was with her, as he had been ordered to stay put for several months to help with timber surveys. Seeing that his family was comfortable, well fed, and safe, he carried a “gnawing ache to get back to those left behind” in Burma. Knowing that his elephants could be of real use to the war effort, he spoiled to see how many he could round up. Finally, in October 1942, as the Fourteenth Division slowly made a return from India into the border area of Burma in the south, Williams was summoned by Noel Mackintosh Stuart Irwin, general officer commanding the Eastern Army. The high-ranking general had a newly minted commission to offer him: that of elephant adviser. It was an odd position since there were no elephants to advise. At least not yet.

  By the beginning of November, Williams was posted as a lieutenant colonel to the Fourth Corps Headquarters in Jorhat, Assam, which was a straight shot 273 miles north of Tamu. Eventually he would be part of the famous Fourteenth Army, which by 1944 would be a million men strong, the largest Commonwealth army in the war, whose field of operation was about one hundred thousand square miles. It was for the most part an Indian army; but with an international cast of fellow soldiers including Englishmen, New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, East Africans, and Chinese; and from Burma, Burmans, Kachins, and Karens, among many others. Fighting with them would be the Americans of Merrill’s Marauders, as well as the pilots of the Flying Tigers.

  Williams’s post would come under the jurisdiction of two of the most famous officers of the war: Slim, and Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the supreme Allied commander of South East Asia Command, or SEAC. (Americans, not surprisingly, weren’t gung-ho about fighting to help regain British colonial territories. One joke had it that the acronym SEAC stood for “Save England’s Asian Colonies.”) Of the two leaders, Williams’s philosophy was best matched to that of Slim. Slim had verbalized it to some of the officers under him: “I tell you, therefore, as officers, that you will neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor smoke, nor even sit down until you have personally seen that your men have done those things. If you will do this for them, they will follow you to the end of the world. And, if you do not, I will break you.”

  The intelligence service soon realized what a resource Williams was. He spoke Burmese and retained a mental map of every road, creek, railway track, and hidden jungle path in north-central Burma. They couldn’t get enough of him. Officers peppered him with constant questions. Still, because he felt he could be doing even more for the cause if he were in Burma with his elephants, he went straight to the top. One day, during a work break, he defied protocol by walking over to Irwin’s office and poking his head in to ask for a word. Speaking directly with the GOC could be dicey, especially given Irwin’s reputation as a rude, even belligerent, commander with a superior sense of his own abilities.

  Waved in, he got right to the point: He wanted a Jeep and his freedom. The Japanese had not penetrated as far as Tamu, and Williams wanted to get back there “to find out if there are any elephants not yet in the hands of the Japs.” He had no idea how many of his old teams were still free, nor did he know how those who had been conscripted by the Japanese were being employed. His hunch was that plenty of the resourceful riders had kept their animals hidden, and that even those who had been captured were being used solely for transport—a waste of elephant talent. Only a teak man understood the scope of their ability. Building anything could be a snap since they could act as cranes where no crane could be transported, deftly lifting logs into place at a height of nine or ten feet. They could tow vehicles bogged down in mud, or haul timber for boat construction at the major rivers. Most of all, the elephants could move the army farther and faster across undeveloped terrain by building bridges and enlarging tracks. Tanks and Jeeps wouldn’t be thwarted by wide rivers and deep jungle. Additionally, “elephant bridges” could be constructed with materials at hand, saving the precious modular, lightweight components of a new kind of bridge called a “Bailey bridge” for crucial hot spots. In short, elephants could help win the war.

  Williams knew Burma so well that he could sketch scenes of villages from memory. Note the insignia of the 14th Army at the top.

  The commander agreed.

  In order to operate where he wanted, however, Williams was assigned to the Special Operations Executive, the British dirty tricks department, a much different branch than the more straitlaced Secret Intelligence Service. From that point on, he was part of the elite Force 136: soldiers who functioned behind enemy lines in Burma, didn’t play by the rules, sabotaged the Japanese at every chance, and lived by their wits.

  Assigned to the elite Force 136, Williams intended to go behind enemy lines in order to reclaim his elephants.

  Jim, who had been writing to Susan daily, dashed off a note telling her that he was not sure how frequently she would hear from him. He would keep writing, but mail service, even by military courier, would not be reliable.

  Driving his own Jeep, with Cobber the black Lab riding shotgun, and speeding south toward Burma during the most beautiful time of year, Jim Williams was himself again. Out from under army red tape and given the license to rejoin his elephants, he felt that
he could finally do some good. But the wave of euphoria was short-lived.

  Near the familiar village of Tamu, a potent and stomach-churning stench overtook him, enveloping his open-air Jeep. The scent was not new to him, but the magnitude was of another order. Swinging the Jeep toward it, covering his mouth and nose, he drove onto what looked like the set of a horror movie, a place one visiting journalist would dub “the city of the dead.”

  Here, as Williams remembered from his own departure, were hundreds of cars and trucks piled up and abandoned. When Williams last saw them six months before they were empty. Now, they were full.

  He looked at the occupants, and from every vehicle they stared back at him with empty eye sockets. They smiled in horror, each mouth a toothy grinning rictus. There were skeletons sitting upright at the steering wheels, and rotting corpses leaning against passenger side windows. Every windshield framed a macabre portrait of the damned.

  What had occurred was obvious to him. These were the people who had arrived too late, when the rains had started. Desperate, starving refugees had made it this far, but could go no farther as the wall of water and deep mud trapped them. Before them, the mountains were impassible, behind them, the Japanese firmly held the rest of the country. Having no other shelter, they ducked out of the pounding rain into cars, buses, and even ambulances. Without food, they slowly died there.

  Williams zigzagged the Jeep around the still traffic and geared down to a stop, the vehicle shuddering as it was turned off. He stepped out. He might have wanted to run from the putrid smell, but he felt drawn in. As he walked through the silent town, he found dead bodies everywhere, all fixed in place performing the most mundane tasks—sitting upright, hunched over moldy tables, holding a telephone receiver in the telegraph office, or reclining on beds that then collapsed beneath the weight of their rotting bodies. There was nothing he could do for any of them now. He got back in the Jeep and drove away. The scene, he wrote later, told him “a gruesome story.”

  Setting up camp in the nearby village of Moreh, Williams quickly formed the idea to create his own irregular army. A very small one. It would be made up of a few others like him who had spent their lives in Burma: men who had been tested by years in the forest, who lived through loneliness and illness, who spoke Burmese, and understood that uzis were human beings who deserved respect. With them, he suspected he could penetrate enemy lines and sneak elephants right out from under the noses of the Japanese.

  Loyal, capable, and irreverent, Harold Langford Browne would be the first recruit in Williams’s irregular jungle force.

  The first “hire” was Harold Langford Browne, his old buddy now with the Indian Twenty-Third Infantry Division of the British Indian Army. Browne was irregular, all right. “South African by birth and a man of magnificent physique,” Williams said, “with broad shoulders and narrow hips, Scandinavian blue eyes, and hairy all over, like a gorilla.” Most important were his loyalty as a friend and his affection for the uzis. He would not tolerate any colonial posturing toward them. “Harold was more loved by the Burmans than anyone I ever knew,” Williams noted. “And he knew plenty about elephants.”

  Browne’s decency and decisiveness came through in one of his first tasks—torching the city of the dead. He took the quick ride up to Tamu, poured gasoline over all the cars and corpses, and struck a match. It was a funeral pyre that was respectful of the dead, but also provided a hygienic scorching vital to the health of those who would now be working in the town.

  Williams and Browne, were next joined by Stanley “Chindwin” White. The short, burly, energetic man had an essential quality that was compulsory when joining Williams’s team: “Of all the round pegs in Army square holes—he was one,” Williams wrote. An oddball. White, as his nickname implied, was acquainted with every inch of the Chindwin as a river captain. Conversant in Burmese and Hindustani, he was a crack shot, a comedian, and a bit of a jungle polymath.

  “Harold Browne and Chindwin White made a grand team,” Williams wrote. “Their intimate knowledge of all Burmans was extraordinarily useful.” Their first objective would be to regain their elephants. Not an easy task: The Japanese, who now occupied the whole of Burma, had issued a directive ordering all uzis to report for the war effort. Noncompliance was punishable by death. And while it was true that Tamu, which was experiencing an unusual break in the monsoons, seemed to be an island for the British, enemy patrols could nevertheless be near.

  Williams felt certain there were men still loyal to him who would take a risk to come back. The best strategy would be simply to put the word out that he was looking for riders and elephants. Of course, the elephant Williams most wanted to draft was Bandoola. Browne, who had spent the last several months playing cat and mouse with the enemy in the nearby forests, left Tamu for Po Toke’s village of Witok on a mission to find the tusker. He had no idea what he would discover.

  At the start of the occupation, Po Toke had tethered Bandoola in a remote area and spent months moving him around to avoid detection. Because Bandoola couldn’t forage, Po Toke had had to hand-feed him. The elephant master had stretched the allowance Williams had given him for six months. And he had exhausted himself gathering the hundreds of pounds of food Bandoola required.

  Broke and despairing, he still couldn’t capitulate. He would never comply with the Japanese call for elephants. He had decided it was better to lose his beloved elephant to the forest than to the Japanese. So in an exquisite bit of bad timing, just days before Browne’s arrival, Po Toke had followed his secret path deep in the jungle to Bandoola. Removing the tusker’s leg chains, he told him, “Keep clear of wild tuskers and don’t fight.” Then he set Bandoola free.

  When Browne appeared, everyone in Witok, especially Po Toke, was touched that he had risked his life to reach them. He wasted no time in outlining for Po Toke what he and Williams wanted to do. The haggard elephant man was game. He just needed to find Bandoola.

  Browne also conscripted another old colleague, an “Anglo-Burman” named MacVittie, and the three men hiked back to Tamu. Williams was shocked by Po Toke’s haggard appearance, but the old elephant man wanted only to strategize about finding Bandoola and safely marching him to Tamu. As eager as Williams was to secure the tusker, he insisted on fattening Po Toke up with combat rations before allowing him to go on the mission. Po Toke agreed to spend two days eating and resting. Then he and MacVittie, just the two of them in order to avoid attention, set off.

  Three days later, Williams, in his hut, heard a commotion outside.

  It was, as he had hoped, Bandoola. The tusker was huge and healthy, and he walked forward with Po Toke and MacVittie sitting on his neck. It was an arresting sight. “I have never seen even a wild elephant in such magnificent condition,” Williams wrote. Here was his friend of twenty-two years. Courage and strength in the flesh. His gray bulk firm and sure, his step silent. There was the familiar scraping sound of skin as the elephant flapped his freckled ears to cool himself. How confident, even cocky, Bandoola looked with his jaunty curved tusks.

  Williams walked forward to greet them, addressing the elephant in Burmese and reaching out to pat him. Bandoola’s presence offered instant serenity. First, there was always the current of energy that seemed to pass from his skin into Williams’s palm. Then the rumbled greeting that was more felt than heard. There was something more, too: Just having Bandoola on their side seemed to portend victory.

  There couldn’t be a more auspicious start for Williams’s new work. Like the great tusker of Kipling’s “Toomai of the Elephants,” Bandoola would become “the best-loved and the best-looked-after elephant in the service of the Government.”

  Williams framed it as a historic moment. “Bandoola was presented to me to be enrolled as No. 1 War Elephant,” he wrote, “the first of the elephants to fight for the freedom of Burma from the Japanese, and worthy of his glorious name.”

  CHAPTER 23

  THE MAKING OF ELEPHANT BILL

  ELEPHANT COMPANY CONSISTE
D OF EXACTLY ONE ELEPHANT. THAT had to change. Fortunately, Williams and Browne heard that a group of uzis and their more than three dozen elephants, drafted by the Japanese, were gathering about forty miles to the east. They were poised to depart south for Mawlaik, Williams’s old headquarters, now held by the enemy.

  There was no time to lose in intercepting them. Williams sent runners with word that he was in Tamu waiting for them if they could make it. It was a dangerous request, but as Williams always said, it was easier to skulk by the Japanese with elephants than with Jeeps. The elephants, with their bells silenced, as they would be throughout the war, could be moved undetected at night with no headlights to give them away.

  The uzis got the message and immediately headed out after dark to join Williams, entering a forested area where Japanese patrols were frequent. There were more elephants than riders, but the uzis’ wives, who were accustomed to traveling with them, pitched in as substitutes.

  The next day, Williams excitedly watched forty elephants stroll into camp: twenty-five good, mature working elephants, plus fifteen extras—young (under twenty), pregnant, with calves, or thin and out of condition. He walked out to greet them, patting trunks, slapping flanks, and speaking to them in Burmese. They formed the nucleus of No. 1 Elephant Company, Royal Indian Engineers. Bandoola’s comrades-in-arms. From that moment on, Williams knew for sure that his uzis, wherever they were, would risk their lives to rejoin him.

  He and Browne pitched camp on the northern outskirts of Tamu, in the village of Moreh, to establish their elephant camp headquarters. It was the start of a campaign to attract greater numbers of uzis and elephants to their side. Gathering them was perilous work, but that was expected of anyone in Force 136, those authorized to penetrate enemy lines. Williams made his way through danger zones with the help of his network of informants—the villagers who were the eyes and ears of the forest. He received astonishingly accurate and swift intelligence on the movement of the enemy.