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

  On the morning of March 16, 1944, as the Japanese were hitting Tamu hard, everything seemed set for the elephant evacuation, and at noon, the camp phone rang. The voice on the other end uttered the secret code to withdraw. Word also came that the Japanese had crossed the Chindwin just to the north and were gaining ground quickly. The enemy would play into Allied hands, but not on the Allied timetable. Slim had anticipated their movement, though the Japanese were risking everything, coming earlier than expected and in greater strength.

  The first phase was going to be rough. The enemy, with their own strategy for victory in Imphal, plotted a three-pronged advance—from the south, east, and north. Williams could not know any of that, but he sensed from the increase in battle noise that enemy troops were marching his way. He jumped into his Jeep and raced up to Kanchaung to tell Hann and Browne they must start at dawn the next day. Williams unfolded a map and drew out the route for Hann to follow to Imphal. Hann seemed stunned by the enormity of what was being asked of him and the very real risk of being discovered by a Japanese patrol. If you can’t do it, Williams said, the only alternative is to shoot the elephants here and now. That appeared to stiffen Hann’s resolve. When Williams left, he told Hann: “Au revoir, and the best of luck. You can make it. You must. Don’t worry if you lose any animals en route, but push on with your main body.”

  From Hann’s camp, Browne went on to Mintha to tell the men what the plan was. He then traveled back to elephant camp to help Williams close it down, figuring he would run up to Mintha again at dawn. He went to bed while Williams kept working. They could hear the sound of traffic as the army moved men and equipment all night. At midnight on March 17, 1944, the field phone rang: The Japanese had crossed the Chindwin to the north in strength. They were invading via two main roadways. The good news was that British soldiers were headed north beyond Mintha, where Browne needed to go.

  Hann departed nearby Kanchaung on schedule, headed for Imphal. Browne left elephant camp at first light to meet up with the second group of elephants. When he reached Mintha, he would send word back. Williams had a bad feeling about the Mintha group, though he didn’t know why. In camp, he waited. It was nerve-racking. Hour after hour dragged on. He called HQ, reporting that the Kanchaung elephants were on their way, but the movement of the Mintha team remained a mystery. He was ordered to abandon elephant camp immediately and head for Imphal to prepare for the arriving elephants.

  Before Williams could begin burning sensitive maps and materials, Browne returned “all bandages and lots of blood.” His truck had been cruising along at 40 mph when it “took a tree square in the nose, and a hell of a mess was the result.” The truck was totaled. He had never made it to Mintha. A passing medic had fixed him up on the spot, and warned him that no traffic would be allowed through now as “scrapping” with the enemy was expected within two hours. He had rushed back to elephant camp hoping to catch Williams. The two men called on higher-ups to allow them to drive to the waiting elephants at Mintha. Their request was repeatedly denied. The Japanese offensive made travel on that route impossible. They could not reach the elephants. Though the chance of it was remote, they hoped to connect with the group in the hills as they headed to Imphal.

  Hours later, with the sounds of war raging all around them, they drove out, worried about the elephants and what the evacuation as a whole meant. “The Japs were back,” Williams wrote. “I was again on the run, and had lost touch with thirty-three elephants.” After spending the night at the midway point of Palel, they reached Imphal on March 18, 1944. The good news was the continued Allied air superiority: “Make no mistake, we control the skies in Burma,” crowed the Daily Express. But for Williams, there was only chaos and concern. He learned that the Mintha elephants had never even started their march, but had been dispersed into the jungle where they at least stood a better chance of evading the enemy.

  There was no word at all from Hann and Bandoola’s party. It was beginning to look as though Elephant Company was finished, lost in the very hills the Japanese were infiltrating.

  Defying orders, Williams and Browne refused to just sit and wait at Imphal. In the chaos, no one would know where they were, so they put miles on the Jeep, covering every road not yet in Japanese hands. Each time they bumped into British troops headed north, Williams would ask, “Have you seen any elephants?” As anxious as they were, this always struck the fighting men as comical.

  Williams checked in at brigade headquarters and learned how close the Japanese were. On March 20, 1944, there was a titanic clash between Allied and enemy tank divisions near Tamu in which all the lighter Japanese tanks were destroyed. It was an auspicious bulletin, but not the information Williams was looking for. A brigade major manning the field phone finally hung up and turned to Williams: “Sorry, Sabu. Your elephants were mistaken for Jap elephant transport in the high bamboo, and were shot up coming down the slope from Sibong.” Williams felt sick, but it soon became clear that this was a small group of unknown elephants, and not Hann’s band. Still, time was running out. Senior officers began to think all was lost and that Williams and Browne should just evacuate. So the two men again dodged their superiors and continued their search, heading back into unsecured zones in their Jeep.

  Finally, with no time to spare, Williams located Hann. He was within two days’ march of the Imphal Plain. He had been through hell, getting so close to the enemy that he had had to travel at night to evade them. But he made it, losing only one animal. Bandoola and the others were safe. Williams made sure they were on track and then drove back to Browne with the good news. At HQ, he received orders to head north and west of the Imphal Plain with the remaining forty-five elephants once they arrived.

  By now Williams understood his evacuation was temporary. His elephants were prized animals. In fact, army officials estimated the value of this group in what today would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. High command wanted them far from the raging fighting. There would be no bridge building in this heated battle, but the hope was that afterward there would be much work for the elephants once again.

  Getting out of the Burma-India borderland would not be easy. Between Imphal and the safety of British-held Assam were a series of five mountain ranges, five to six thousand feet high. It was wild country, rugged, dangerous, and not mapped in any detail. It was terrain Williams was unfamiliar with, and the elephants weren’t equipped for. Furthermore, there were no highways, and the few existing tracks were likely held by the enemy.

  Even under ideal conditions the journey would have been nearly impossible. Williams had to plot their escape route and order supplies. Physically, he was not well. A tooth had begun to throb, and the pain in his gut that he had told no one about persisted. He needed to find transportation for the uzis’ families who could not possibly join them on this trek.

  He contacted a friend doing refugee work in the area and booked safe passage for the women and children of the riders, and then advanced Browne and Hann on a five-day northwest course to get them to the outer edge of the Imphal Plain. He would meet them for the start of the real trek. In the meantime, he and Chindwin White, who had now returned to the fold, set off in the Jeep to scout out the best exit point. Williams suspected that following the Barak River from where it began as just streams in Manipur would make sense. It drained into the Surma Valley in Assam, providing water and good greens for the elephants the whole way.

  At three in the afternoon, Williams and White arrived at the bridge that crossed the Barak on the Imphal–Dimapur Road. They stopped at milepost 102 and were pleased with what they found. Even if it meant dealing with waterfalls and gorges, the Barak had a lot to offer, especially since the most logical route—the Silchar-Bishenpur Track—was now unsafe for travel.

  By the time they got back to camp, however, news had come in that the Japanese had just swarmed the Imphal–Dimapur Road exactly at milepost 102, where Williams had stood less than three hours before. Their planned route was now off-limits. What they had
available to them was merely a foot track.

  Williams then went to the corps commander. Blueprinting the escape route was a waste of time. It was best, Williams argued, if they simply packed up and left. Instead of filing his flight plan, he wanted to be free of red tape so he could head out, improvising as necessary. Permission was granted, providing that at the very least, Williams would stop in the village of Tamenglong to signal he had made it that far.

  For Williams, it looked like he finally had everything necessary for a departure. But, again, the picture shifted. The Seventeenth Division, an exemplary force with Gurkha battalions, had returned to headquarters through the enemy line, bringing with them sixty-nine women and children—mainly families of Gurkha soldiers who had been in Japanese hands in the Chin Hills. These refugees also needed to get to Assam. With hot spots igniting all around, no one in the military had time to deal with them, and so they were left in the middle of a war zone. They would either have to hunker down somehow, or make their own way out, perhaps with the aid of an inexperienced soldier. The odds were against them either way.

  Williams volunteered to take them, knowing full well that the addition of the fragile refugees would hamstring his effort. It was going to be difficult enough to thread a group of jungle-hardened riders, soldiers, and elephants through the unmapped, hostile, and mountainous terrain. The sick women and children would slow them down, making them more vulnerable to the swift-moving Japanese soldiers. The chances were great that they would stumble into a swarm of enemy soldiers who were notorious for their barbaric methods of killing captives. The 1942 exodus was fresh in Williams’s mind. The families had barely escaped that time; now the conditions were exponentially worse. There were fewer supplies to last them on a longer, more arduous, and unknown route. It was all too likely that in these higher elevation mountains the elephants would lose their footing, panic, and be pitched down the side of a cliff. And the half-starved human travelers would be susceptible to any jungle ailment.

  Still, Williams said if five members of the group—the pregnant women and elderly, were evacuated by plane, he would escort the rest. His offer was happily accepted, and the development recast a dangerous quest into one now deemed suicidal.

  The pessimism of all those around Elephant Company was summed up by the chief field doctor. He said that despite the brutal fighting breaking out all around them, if he were given the chance to leave the war zone with Williams, he’d refuse. “I’d rather stay here and starve, Bill,” he said. Even Slim wondered how Elephant Bill might avoid capture in his “trek across pathless mountains” as “the Japanese made their great bid for victory.”

  Williams had faith, though, and it wasn’t centered on other people. “The more I saw of men … the better I liked my elephants,” he wrote.

  He soldiered on. The elephants—including Bandoola—the sixty-four refugees, and the uzis were moved to a starting site at the farthest northwest corner of the Imphal Plain, called “one of the most forsaken spots in the world.” The whole plateau was locked away from the rest of the world by dense, jungle-covered mountain ranges.

  Williams slipped back to Imphal proper in order to have his bothersome tooth extracted. He would take no chances, having suffered terribly from the bacterial infection known as trench mouth in World War I. From his commanders, he received a red parachute which he was told to spread on the ground every day so their journey could be followed by air—“someone else’s idea!” he said with well-placed skepticism. He had a massive undertaking ahead of him. But he possessed the finest elephants in the world, the most loyal riders, fifteen days’ rations, and a case of rum from an old friend, Steve Sutherland, who had told him, “Say nothing, Bill, but if there is nothing else you will need on this Hannibal trek, I am sure you will need that.” He also had twenty-five years of experience surviving the surprises of the jungle.

  He was grateful that Susan was safe in India with the children. He dashed off a quick note to her, which stood a good chance of being delivered. He told her he “was commencing a trek” and said that she “should not expect to hear” from him for some time. Everything he could do to prepare was done. He left Imphal to join what was left of Elephant Company at the base of the mountains at the edge of the plain.

  “I was alone again, for a short run in my Jeep to camp with my old Labrador dog Cobber,” Williams wrote. “He seemed to realise the whole situation and leaning over gave me one slobbering lick, and a cheering tail wag; he was looking ahead through the wind-screen, tongue hanging out with a broad grin, as if to say ‘Next stop, Surma Valley.’ ”

  Williams, Browne, White, and Hann huddled to talk through their plans. It was agreed. At dawn the next day, April 5, 1944, they would begin their journey through the mountainous, mysterious, and inhospitable borderland.

  The elephants would be loaded up with the rations, the few essentials they would need to cook and sleep, and the frailest of the refugees who could not walk. The Karen camp workers were outfitted with Stens—British submachine guns—and rifles. And the officers were given their instructions.

  Po Toke approached Williams with bad news about Bandoola. He was on musth, chained some distance from the rest. From the temples of the tusker’s great head came a small trickle of liquid, which was just forming dark streaks running down toward his mouth. Po Toke and his rider would stand guard holding a spear. It was a horrible stroke of luck. “Tell him he can stay there and starve unless he wants to behave himself,” Williams said. Bandoola had an edge to him but was not acting out. When Po Toke looked at his boss, Williams said, smiling, “I’ll risk him on musth.” He pointed to the range of blue mountains to the west, and said the climb “will soon knock the musth out of him.” Williams knew the hard travel would extinguish the tusker’s raging hormones; he just hoped that in the meantime, Bandoola wouldn’t “upset the biggest apple cart I have ever had to push.”

  Williams woke the next morning to familiar sounds. All around him in the predawn cool of subtropical India came the hushed stirring of people and animals. Workers were striking tents, stoking breakfast fires, and softly clanking buckets as the animals were watered and fed. Despite the foreboding of the morning, Williams was, as always, charmed by the muted poetry of an elephant camp coming to life, the way that in the morning mist, still under the dark sky, the animals loomed huge and ethereal. Just like the little elephant boy in one of Kipling’s stories, he could look up at one of his tuskers “and watch the curve of his big back against half the stars in heaven.” Permeating everything was the scent he loved: the earthy, oaty essence of the elephants.

  The animals were now illuminated in the amber light of the rising sun—forty-five full-grown adults; eight babies. They were all lined up together except, of course, for Bandoola. Williams walked over to his friend and saw that “his musth glands were discharging freely down his cheek but I ignored them, for this was no time for meeting troubles half way.”

  At the treeless foothills west of Imphal, with the two main roads out having been blocked by the enemy, the peculiar group began their ascent over the only passage left them—a graded mule track. Williams drew a straight line west on his map from Imphal over the uncharted range of mountains to the safety of the Balladhun tea plantation in Silchar: 120 miles, and he knew every one of them would be hell.

  The unit was large in every way possible: fifty-three elephants, forty armed ethnic Karen soldiers, ninety uzis and elephant attendants, sixty-four refugee women and children, and four officers: “an extraordinary collection,” Williams noted. “What was ahead no one knew, nor did anyone discuss it.”

  Williams might have been disheartened except that he was amazed by “the cheerfulness of the Burmans” and the strength of the spirited refugees. Many, if not most, were unfit for a long march, but because the elephants were loaded with supplies, only the sickest could ride. “Pity,” Williams wrote, “was a luxury we could ill afford.”

  They walked all day, the last of the stragglers catching up to the
main group at dusk. Williams chose a campsite by a clean, rushing river to spend the night. There was water and plentiful forage for the elephants. The animals were unloaded and walked to the river’s edge. It was easy to spot Bandoola and to see that he was placid again. “As I had hopefully predicted,” Williams wrote, “that first day’s march knocked all the thoughts of springtime or whatever musth might be described out of even Bandoola’s head and brawn.”

  The next morning, they were up and out early once again, as they would be day after day. It was torture for the refugees who had begun the expedition in poor physical condition, yet they never complained. Williams was touched by their stoicism. Each morning even the lame would insist on walking. Only about seven of the sickest would mount elephants from the start. As each mile passed, the number of those riding elephants would increase so that by the end of the day, about a dozen refugees would ride into camp. But again the next morning, tired and sick women and children would gamely walk for as long as they could. For their part, the riders were so attentive to the children that they were given extra cigarette rations in compensation.

  After a couple of days, Williams and White split off. Fulfilling the one promise to HQ, the men were diverting to Tamenglong to send off a signal. The two would then rejoin the main group, which was heading due west to an area Williams had identified as Haochin.