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

  Again and again, he went out himself to escort uzis and elephants “safely through the lines after dark, with bells, if any, muffled.” Later, air travel helped him cover more ground. Aboard a two-seater observation plane, he penetrated enemy lines, swooping down low over villages to drop personal invitations.

  One day he and the pilot ventured eighty miles into Japaneseheld jungle. Williams first tossed out “a chit to announce myself” from the air. A few minutes later the pilot landed them safely in the middle of a paddy field. People came running out of huts, fields, and forests, shouting his name and expressing joy that he was still alive. “They informed me that there were Japs all around, that the Japs were very angry because I had been taking their elephants away, and that there was a price on my head.”

  He stayed only fifteen minutes. But a few days later, these very villagers had managed to smuggle forty more elephants to him. He was building his army.

  General Slim himself was amazed by the loyalty shown to Williams. After all, his men and their families were civilians and not subject to military law or discipline. They could do as they pleased. Slim said, “That they stayed, in spite of hardship, danger and separation from their homes—with at one time what seemed like small prospect of ever returning to them—was the measure of Elephant Bill’s leadership and of their trust in him.” Elephant Bill: Williams had earned a new nickname among the soldiers. No one was sure who started it, but it caught on fast. Word of his exploits was spreading quickly, too.

  Jim hoped Susan wouldn’t hear of them. In his letters to her, he played down the hazards, telling her instead about the antics of Browne and White, and the joy of reuniting with his elephants. Susan’s letters, in return, sustained him. The baby Lamorna was healthy, and Treve was growing in haste. The little boy was full of mischief—he had mastered the art of chewing betel nut, spitting the red juice as the Indians did. Susan was shocked to report, too, that she had caught the little girl next door showing her “fanny” to Treve.

  Jim’s unit had cobbled together harnesses and dragging equipment for two dozen elephants just as the first request for work came in. The commanding officer of the Royal Engineers of the forward division wondered if the animals might help haul some logs for a bridge. The sappers, or soldier engineers, were delayed, and he thought Elephant Company could prepare for their arrival. This was when Williams heard the true calling for his charges: not just as draft animals or as cargo bearers (which army brass always seemed to be pushing for) but as master bridge builders.

  He asked what sort of bridge was to be built. “Blue prints, pink prints, and even white prints were produced from a pig skin portfolio,” Williams wrote. Architecturally, it was grand. But to simply cross a shallow two-hundred-foot-wide waterway in the middle of the jungle? Williams realized he had to speak plainly: He thought of the structures he was taught to build so long ago and had been using and making ever since. “Picking up a pencil and paper, I drew an ‘Elephant Bridge’ with a rough calculation as to the number of logs it would require, number of elephants available, and said, ‘That will take 15 days to complete, and we want no sappers—it will carry anything on wheels or tracks.’ ” The heaviest load it would have to bear was ten tons, and Williams assured the officer that his homely little jungle span could withstand twenty. The chief engineer had wanted a wide bridge, configured for two-way traffic, but Williams told him two simple bridges, the kind the elephant men and elephants were accustomed to building, set side by side, would do the trick.

  The elephants could drag practically anything, including broken-down vehicles, but Williams knew their true calling in the war would be as master bridge builders.

  They shook hands, and the officer said he’d come back with word from the higher ups. Williams didn’t bother waiting. The harness equipment was sorted for twenty-five elephants, and the uzis were given their marching orders for the sizes of the logs required. A nod from a passing brigadier was all he needed. They started work on December 2, 1942, and were finished ahead of schedule, on the fifteenth, precisely when a whole brigade and their trucks passed over it.

  ON JANUARY 3, 1943, Elephant Bill was summoned to a meeting with the famed colonel Orde Wingate, who would be leading an elite guerilla unit called the “Chindits” (a derivative of the mythical Burmese lion called the “chinthe”) behind enemy lines in Burma the following month. Wingate, whom Life magazine called “a big-headed Scot who reads Plato for fun,” planned to operate deep in enemy territory in Burma using a radio to coordinate supply drops by plane. Wingate was known for his eccentric, imperious behavior, which won him few friends. He was so unorthodox—he might tie a raw onion around his neck as a snack or greet visitors naked—that his sanity was often questioned. Just the year before, while depressed, ill, and taking a powerful antimalarial drug, he had tried to commit suicide by stabbing himself in the neck. But Wingate was a brilliant and fearless tactician, and Williams recognized his remarkable intelligence as the colonel grilled him about the terrain on an illuminated map of Burma in the commander’s war room. Wingate hoped to blow up enemy-held bridges and railways.

  One of the many articles written about “Elephant Bill” during the war.

  Orders poured in for Elephant Company to build more bridges all around the Moreh-Tamu area, where the Twenty-Third Division was now headquartered. Williams was raring to go. But he always needed more elephants. And so did the Japanese. “This battle for elephants,” the Daily Mail of London said, “has constituted an important part of the general war out here.” On the ground, both sides maneuvered and fought to acquire them; from the air, elephants were legitimate targets. One foreign correspondent described what happened when American Volunteer Group air units spotted Japanese soldiers moving supplies on elephantback: They “machine-gunned the elephants, and when that failed to drop or even halt the beasts, the flyers dumped fire bombs, hoping to start stampedes.” Another report from the Daily Mail said that as the Japanese captured the elephants and used them to haul supplies, “We had no alternative but to attack the elephants wherever we could find them. More than 50 were killed by RAF bombers.”

  The fact that securing the elephants was a matter of dangerous warfare became apparent immediately. A group of uzis from the Karen minority got word to Williams that their group of forty-nine riders had twenty-nine elephants hidden in the jungles along the Chindwin. They wanted to join Williams, but the fifty miles that separated them was daunting. Here there were not only elephant camps that had gone to the Japanese, there were also plenty of enemy troops who were on the trail of Wingate’s Chindits.

  Knowing what they were up against, Williams requested the party of men and elephants be escorted by two platoons. But the guards never materialized. Instead Chindwin White and some Indian soldiers (so nervous, Williams said, they had “the jitterbugs”) tried to make do. By sticking to dense jungle, they safely marched forward, mile after mile. By the time they reached the Chindwin it was sunset—not the best hour for a crossing, but they would try. Unfortunately, the elephants weren’t game. As Williams well knew, the timing of river crossings was an elephant prerogative, involving that complicated psychological process of determining whom to follow. That night, no one stepped forward to swim in the darkness. The men knew better than to attempt any bullying. The crossing would have to wait till morning. The fettered elephants were left on the east bank, and the uzis were ferried over to the safer west bank for the night.

  Within hours, Japanese soldiers had quietly infiltrated the area. When they stumbled upon the elephants, they hid near them, waiting to ambush their returning riders.

  In the morning, oblivious to the presence of the enemy, White gathered eight boatloads of uzis and paddled back toward the elephants. As they neared the bank, a Japanese officer jumped out from behind a tree shouting “Banzai!”—a cry that often panicked Allied troops. The water around the boats exploded with gun and mortar fire. All the boats capsized, three Indian soldiers and one uzi were killed, two uzis were wo
unded, and the elephants were lost to the Japanese. The rest of the men swam back to the west bank. They would never know what became of the animals, but years later Williams heard that several had been shot out of a misguided belief that as the working animals of Karen rather than Burmese uzis they would be unmanageable.

  The work of recruiting more elephants went on. During the hot weather of 1943, seventeen new animals were drafted. It wasn’t enough. There were requests for bridge building throughout the slice of land that sat between the border of Manipur and the Chindwin River, but mainly they were working in the Kabaw Valley, a place that had earned the name “the Valley of Death” among military men during the exodus in May 1942 when refugees died in the hundreds of malaria, smallpox, dysentery, dehydration, and plain exhaustion. The Japanese were also becoming more aggressive just to the south, and there were constant clashes between the British on patrol and infiltrating Japanese soldiers in the area Elephant Company worked.

  It was only getting worse. In a position directly south of Williams’s, in the coastal area of Arakan, a large, months-long British offensive had gone badly. Everything from problematic command structure to equipment failure to weary soldiers was to blame. The toll of those killed and severely injured was three thousand—more than twice what the Japanese had sustained.

  It was time for regrouping, retraining, and reorganizing.

  IN MAY 1943, WILLIAMS was called back over the border to Jorhat HQ in Assam and asked hypothetically what would happen to Elephant Company if all of the British soldiers in the Kabaw Valley were ordered to retreat to India once more before the monsoon broke in June.

  As much as he missed Susan and the children, he didn’t like the idea at all. This was a pivotal moment in time. Despite the British losses, the average soldier believed that the tide was turning—or at least he could imagine the tide turning. That was because of Wingate and the behind-enemy-lines Chindits. They had done some damage to the Japanese, whom average soldiers had considered invincible. Even Slim had said with equal contempt and admiration that the Japanese soldier was “the most formidable fighting insect in history.” But the Chindits had traveled as lightly as possible, skirting the enemy and blowing up bridges and railways. There were finally some successes everyone could celebrate.

  British Army soldiers could conceive of beating the Japanese. The Chindits might have become a crack fighting force, but they hadn’t started that way. Many of them were just regular guys. “A regiment of the United Kingdom’s city-bred tinkers, tilers and bookkeepers matched their wits against the Japanese and the jungle and won—not decisively, but won,” the Associated Press reported. “They had proved Brigadier Wingate’s contention that quick training could make Allied troops equal to the jungle and the Japanese.”

  Wingate lost a third of his men in the effort. And hundreds who did return were so debilitated they could no longer serve. Slim would call the mission “an expensive failure.” Nonetheless, the whole endeavor made great propaganda: The courage and determination of his effort boosted British morale. Because of the Chindits, they began to feel that they were as fit for jungle fighting as the Japanese.

  So Williams was angry that just when it seemed possible that the British could retake Burma from the enemy, HQ was thinking of pulling back for a retreat during the monsoon. It would dismantle everything he had been working toward. And, worse than that, it would mean that once again his riders and all the local people who had provided help and support would see the British turn tail. He couldn’t bear it.

  There was nothing he could do but try to keep his elephants in Burma. And the only way to accomplish that was to stay put. He argued to be allowed sit out the monsoon in country with Browne. Army brass might have thought that was an impossible thing to do, but Williams had spent nearly twenty-five years in monsoon-lashed jungles. He got his way.

  He returned to Tamu, only to find that the local villagers had planned a pwai, or celebration, for the army. How ironic. Here the Burmese were planning to honor the very men who were abandoning them once again. Williams decided to keep the news of the retreat quiet.

  On June 12, 1943, Williams received a letter of gratitude from HQ. Lieutenant General Reginald Savory wrote:

  My dear Williams,

  I came round to see you yesterday to say goodbye but unfortunately you were out. This note is to bid you farewell and to thank you for the great assistance you have always given me. My job would have been very different and much more difficult had we not had your elephants to haul timber and make bridges, and it is a comfort to me now to know that your Elephant Camps are so situated that they can help in the maintenance of our forces in the Valley if necessary throughout the monsoon.

  I also have to thank you for the help you have given me in passing on information of the country based on your deep local knowledge.

  On the rainy evening of June 17, 1943, Williams watched in the fading light as the last army trucks rumbled over a low causeway the elephants had built. “What the riders thought I don’t know. All I could tell them was that Browne and I were remaining with them.”

  CHAPTER 24

  ELEPHANT COMPANY HITS ITS STRIDE

  WILLIAMS AND BROWNE, ALONG WITH COBBER, THE LABRADOR, hunkered down through the summer monsoon season. “Those really were, I think, the bloodiest rains that two Europeans ever weathered in Burma,” Williams wrote. It was a long slog, and, in addition to the discomforts of ceaseless rain, Williams began to feel a recurrent burning pain in his abdomen, which he decided to ignore. He was still able to get mail from Susan. Ringworm had plagued the community in Shillong, and Treve, though he never contracted it, was forced to wear a hat as part of a campaign to stop its spread. By now, Williams’s niece and nephew Diana and Michael were living with them again, too. And Susan’s letters were full of stories of high jinks—Michael sometimes picked chilies from a bush in the yard and bit them, even though the burn would send him scurrying up the driveway crying every time. Diana and Treve often climbed out their second-story windows onto the thatched roof and dove into each other’s rooms. Susan loved having them all together again—four little faces looking up and listening each evening as she read from a translation of scary German fairy tales.

  In the early stages of Williams’s monsoon stay, Gurkha soldiers—Nepalese recruits—universally respected and loved by the British, came to Moreh, many sick with fever. By this time the Japanese had cut off supplies of quinine from the Dutch East Indies, causing a shortage. Williams managed to acquire a ration of the drug, which he administered, but it was too late for some. “I had to make fourteen crosses by the end of those rains,” Williams wrote.

  Elephant camp soon became a hub of activity and information. The military men who were deciding where, when, and how the troops could return from their retreat were constantly dropping in. The strategy to recover Burma was under debate for months on end, and specialists of all stripes and branches landed at Moreh to study the situation. Elephant camp turned into a hostel. A visiting reporter counted a major general and four colonels among one day’s tally.

  Their journey was an easy commute from Imphal to the north since the two areas had been connected by what was a novelty throughout the region—an all-weather road. Imphal, despite its status as capital of Manipur, the eastern province of India, had been a provincial complex of villages inside a six-hundred-square-mile teardrop-shaped plain. But under Lieutenant General Geoffrey Scoones, Fourth Corps (part of Slim’s Fourteenth Army), it grew into a vital logistical base, complete with a communications center, an airfield, ordnance depots, cottage hospitals, and ample supply dumps.

  On Tuesday, November 23, 1943, four war correspondents made their way to Moreh to visit elephant camp and the increasingly fabled Elephant Bill. It was a matter of military security that they not reveal their location. So the dateline on Philip Wynter’s dispatch read SOMEWHERE IN BURMA. Here, the reporters found a small, comfortable compound of a few huts surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by Gurkha soldie
rs. By midnight, the group had settled in at Williams’s bamboo home and were knocking back Indian-made rum, smoking cigarettes, and trading stories. This even though the enemy was so close, one wrote, that lookouts could see “the smoke of Japanese cooking fires.” Nonetheless, it was a party.

  The newspapermen wanted to know everything about the elephants, and Williams was happy to oblige with story after story of his life with them. Despite their fun, the men were there to write the dangerous ever-shifting story of the war in Burma. “Our troops occupy Burmese villages one day, and the Japanese are there the next,” Wynter observed.

  A form of guerilla warfare is in progress on the central section of the Burma front. The front line is a pattern of outposts and patrols scattered along the mountains and jungles of the frontier.

  British troops, tough Indians, and Burmese guerillas are operating in and behind the Japanese front line. Their weapons range from tommy-guns to bows and arrows, and their transport from jeeps to elephants.

  He reported on how dirt tracks were being converted to real roads thanks to No. 1 Elephant Company. “They use elephants for laying teak logs in making bridges and culverts.”

  Williams was popular with the press not only because of his personality and the unique work he was doing; he also provided some relief to the unrelenting stories of the misery of the soldiers. Jungle life was killing them.