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

  In the village, Williams and White found chaos and fear. The outpost had only thirty armed soldiers, one Indian officer, and an inexperienced civil servant. And the movement of the enemy was unknown. The men were waiting for Thomas Arthur “Tim” Sharpe, a member of the Indian Civil Service who had not arrived when expected.

  Williams sent his message relaying his intended route, and he requested an airdrop of supplies for the men stranded in the area. He and White decamped as quickly as possible, unknowingly passing right under the noses of a “strong” Japanese patrol of fifty men. Williams and White made it back to the elephants, but just behind them, Sharpe, who had, apparently, been following in their tracks, was captured and, they heard, bayoneted repeatedly before being shot by the enemy.

  The group climbed higher and higher, starting every day at sunup and not stopping until just before sundown. Even then there was little comfort. Nights were lashed by chilling rains. Illnesses got worse, healthy travelers became sick, hungry, and sore; everyone was dropping weight. “The cold, at the altitude we now were, brought on attacks of malaria amongst the women, and we soon had a number of fever patients to look after,” Williams wrote. “There were cases of sore feet, dysentery, pneumonia and abscesses of the breast.”

  “Some of the elephants were in need of first aid as well,” he wrote. “But we could not let our invalids rest and recuperate; we had to push on. Every day we marched from dawn until after five o’clock in the afternoon, always in fear of a Japanese ambush.”

  Then it got worse. The game trails petered out and vanished completely in the thick vegetation. Every step the elephants would take had to be cleared by track-cutting and digging parties. The women who felt able-bodied insisted on lending a hand—using jungle knives to slash at undergrowth and bamboos. Williams noted that the more treacherous and hard-won the travel became, the more beautiful the scenery: lush greenery, stunning vistas, mist rising up from the valleys.

  They kept going. He figured they had now reached five thousand feet. “The great beasts were painfully slow in climbing,” Williams wrote, “and Browne had difficulty, owing to some of the older animals nearly collapsing.” Somehow, as always, Bandoola thrived. He was “the pride of the forest,” Williams wrote.

  The map continued to fool them. Villages marked on it had long evaporated. People shifted their home base often. But graves and other clues to recent habitation allowed Williams to roughly follow the indications sketched out.

  On the ninth day, Williams was scouting ahead when he came to an area “far, far off the beaten track,” where the map seemed to register an escarpment running north to south, parallel to a creek. Sure enough, he found the creek and good fodder for the elephants. The group could stop early and have a chance to rest up—something they had been campaigning for—in the comfortable, lush spot.

  Since everyone else was a long way behind him, Williams indulged his curiosity. He crossed the creek and continued toward a point in the ridge that from the looks of the map seemed the most manageable spot to scramble out of the next day. He thought he might as well check it out while he had the time.

  Plunging into the thick vegetation, he found it was slow going. The climb was quite steep and the bamboo dense. Unpleasant for him, it would be punishing for the elephants—but not impossible. For two miles of the reconnaissance run, he thought the route would be the way out, as onerous as it was.

  Suddenly, however, he came to a withering sight: an insurmountable wall, “a sheer rock face escarpment,” 270 feet high. Williams wrote, “My heart sank.” It was taller than some of the pyramids he had seen in Egypt. Just looking up at the summit was dizzying.

  The wall had to end somewhere. He turned to his left and painstakingly traced the base of the cliff heading south. After a mile there was no change, “not a single place,” he said, “where I could have possibly climbed it myself. There was no question of an elephant climbing a perpendicular cliff.”

  Experienced jungle salt that he was, Williams did detect an area where the thick vegetation had been slashed probably a year before. Near it was a scree—an area of tumbled rock, providing a few footholds. He surmised that this may have been a natural exit for some agile nomad in the area. Still, while an athletic forest dweller could maneuver his way up, it simply wasn’t a place most of his party, never mind an elephant, could climb. They would have to search for a way around the impenetrable wall of stone, no matter how arduous the going.

  Nonetheless, he marked the spot, slicing a large blaze on a tree with his knife, in the unlikely event they could find no better outlet. Exhausted now, he slashed his way back to the creek. Waiting for the elephants, Williams focused on their predicament—it would take at least two days to sort out their strategy, and this would be as good a place as any to rest the animals and allow them to feed and bathe.

  The elephant bells were still silenced since the threat of the enemy remained, so just a faint rustling announced the arrival of the large group. The elephants appeared in single file, each with a rider, some carrying children. Slowly, quietly, methodically, the grand procession of gray gathered by the water, and the air began to hum as the elephants grew excited in anticipation of being freed from their loads. Their foreheads plumped and vibrated as they rumbled, their faces pinching into what looked like tiny, sweet grins as they squeaked.

  Williams spoke to the men and the refugees, explaining the problem. His audience was initially somber, but when he announced that this would require a two-day standstill, the women cheered. Williams couldn’t help being amused by their delight, but he did explain, “that there was hard work and serious trouble ahead, not because there was no path, there had not been for days, but that it was impossible to get on until we had found an ascent and then dug a path up the escarpment.”

  While the riders unpacked the loads from the elephants’ backs and brought the animals to the creek for bathing, the women gathered their clothes, even stripping off most of what they had on, to do laundry.

  Before sunset, cook fires were burning, freshly scrubbed clothes were strung up, and little makeshift beds had been set out for the children. Williams, Browne, Hann, and White ate their meager rations and agreed that three parties would set off in the morning to survey the area. That night everyone slept well knowing they would stay put for a while.

  At dawn the next day, the British officers, each with a band of men, were off to the escarpment—Hann would travel its base north, White south, and Browne would assess the climbing at the landslip. Williams stayed in camp, tossing a grenade in the water, providing the grateful refugees a bonanza of fresh fish.

  Browne, the blue-eyed “gorilla”—so called because he was tall, strong, and athletic—slashed his way quickly to the tree Williams had marked the day before. He stood with his team at the bottom of the cliff and looked up, studying potential foot- and handholds. There wasn’t much, but he figured he’d give it a try. Scrabbling, sweating, and continually calculating his next move, he grabbed at any protruding rock and hefted himself upward. Skin scraped, knees banged, he managed to get himself to the very top of the ridge. Once up, he hiked out a way and discovered two things: a small trail that led south to the larger Silchar-Bishenpur Track and on into Assam; and a lively village of Chin people—a large ethnic minority with many different tribes and clans spread throughout the border area of India and Burma. They spoke a Tibeto-Burman language that Browne could not understand, but still, there was no better man from the elephant party to make contact with the locals. Williams always said that Browne was the Westerner beloved above all others by the people in that part of the world. He had a natural rapport. And so it was that he spoke with the villagers about the landscape and best way to travel. When it was time to find his way back down the escarpment, two men hefted their spears and volunteered to accompany him.

  Back at camp, the South African recounted to Williams what he had found: It was possible to reach the top, but just barely. He worried about Williams’s vertigo—he had a
horrible fear of flying in planes—and if it acted up, they’d have to blindfold him. His new friends told him that the route was, in fact, the most accessible portion of the whole escarpment. He mentioned that at the top of the ridge, they would be close enough to reach the Silchar-Bishenpur Track, the jagged but well-worn route through the mountains that connected the Imphal Plain to the town where they were headed. But both men agreed that would not be an option. In fact, “That was the one place we wished to avoid,” Williams said, “as until we had crossed over the track to the west, I could not feel that we were clear of a likely chance of meeting with a Jap patrol, and my orders were to avoid trouble, not look for it.”

  Ultimately, Browne’s judgment squared with Williams’s—if White and Hann returned empty-handed, they were out of luck. Most of the humans in their party could not make it up the escarpment, never mind the elephants.

  They had a long wait. The travel was such rough going, even without climbing any rock, that neither White nor Hann returned until dark. Hour after hour, mile after mile, they had spent the entire day looking for a way out. They never found one.

  Apparently, the escarpment spread limitlessly, north to south, with no letup, as though the earth simply vaulted dizzyingly to a new height right there. It was no surprise that the local men were right: The slight landslip that Browne had summited was the sole accessible point. The only alternative was to turn south or go back the way they came, and both would have meant marching directly toward enemy lines. Williams didn’t know how they would make their way around the obstacle, but he knew they couldn’t retreat.

  The thought of landing in the hands of the Japanese was horrifying to any soldier serving in Burma. Williams knew that even the women and children would not escape their cruelty. In Hong Kong and elsewhere, the Japanese had bound and bayoneted captured soldiers and nurses alike.

  As the war went on, troops witnessed evidence of sadistic treatment of other soldiers at the hands of the Japanese. One frontline fighter in Burma said, “It’s strange: after the initial few days I wasn’t worried about being killed, but I was really concerned about being wounded and captured because they had a habit of tying our wounded to a tree, leaving them overnight, and then using them for bayonet practice the next day. On another occasion a couple of our chaps had their private parts cut away when they were captured and I can only imagine the horrors and the pain that went with bleeding to death under those circumstances.”

  When they saw how “the Japs butchered all our wounded,” many soldiers would reciprocate in kind. “We were not merciful to them for the rest of the war. We didn’t take any prisoner,” one said. Another recalled finding a dozen captured Gurkha soldiers tied to trees. “They’d been slit right down the middle by the Japanese. They were cut in two and that really infuriated us. We thought, ‘Right, if we see a Jap again, there’s no mercy.’ ”

  Women, just like the men, were disemboweled, too, but often raped first.

  Being taken prisoner could be worse. The fate of POWs in Japanese hands was a ghastly one. In Burma, men were routinely starved, beaten, and worked to death in camps overrun with disease. By war’s end, the tallies showed that of the British soldiers captured by Germans, about 5 percent died. Of the Britons taken by the Japanese, the death toll was an astonishing 25 percent.

  Years later, historians would try to explain the complicated reasons for such behavior. In part, they would conclude, it was a cocktail of harsh discipline, national fervor, religion, childhood education, a cultural embrace of obedience over individuality, and a demand for utter allegiance and bravery that was enforced with physical punishment. But to an Allied soldier in the field, it didn’t matter why. They simply never wanted to find themselves at the mercy of the Japanese.

  That night, Williams could make only a couple of decisions with confidence—rations would be cut starting immediately. However they intended to get out of this mess, he knew it would add days to the anticipated travel time, and food would run out unless measures were taken preemptively. The near-starvation regimen was doing nothing for the mysterious and searing pain in his midsection that nearly doubled him over at times. But it had to be done.

  He also decided that ditching the elephants wasn’t an option. It was a consideration so unfathomable to him that he never even seriously considered it. He had seen elephants that had once been in enemy hands, and he was furious about their treatment: They had been kept in poor condition and even had their tusks sawn off, right to the sensitive root, for the ivory. “The way in which the Jap had elephants ‘tipped’ was criminal,” Williams said. It would not happen to Bandoola and the other creatures he had spent his life with.

  THE NEXT MORNING, THEY spread the red parachute out by the creek, as instructed by army superiors. Williams had no expectation that a passing Allied plane would spot them. Then he led the scouting party out—Hann, Browne, White, Po Toke, another senior elephant man, and the two guides from the Chin village. The group fought their way once again through the jungle to the landslip. At its base, everyone stood sweating in the heavy daytime heat, swatting bugs against their skin, and staring, heads tilted back, at the sheer rise. There was one very narrow ledge around the face of the cliff high up, and a few outcrops of rock just below it. Was it enough to do them any good?

  All of them had to test the wall that day—Williams included. “I was not blindfolded,” he wrote, “but I did many crawls on all fours!” Somehow, he made it all the way up and then managed the even scarier descent.

  Maybe it was desperation or an aftereffect of the adrenaline released during the climb. But back on solid ground, an idea began to surface—a preposterous solution that they didn’t even believe themselves: They would cut steps into the rock linking the natural ledges to create an elephant stairway. And they would complete it in two days’ time.

  No, it was impossible.

  Or was it? The cliff was composed of porous sandstone. Cutting into it was feasible.

  Existing ledges weren’t ample enough for the elephants’ footing. And, yet, there was a fix for that, too. The brush sprouting from the inner wall could be hacked away, gaining make-or-break inches of width for the stairway.

  An elephant stairway. In a kind of communal madness, as they talked, they began to persuade themselves it could work. They refined the plan, hashing out the details. Tentatively, they began to accept the idea, brainstorming over the calculations.

  Eventually, they had to grapple with the literal elephants in the room: What would the huge, ungainly animals do? Even with the maximum amount of engineering they could render to the escarpment, would it be enough to accommodate them?

  Williams had seen elephants do some amazing things, but nothing like this.

  CHAPTER 26

  THE ELEPHANT STAIRWAY

  WILLIAMS KNEW AT THE OUTSET THAT THERE WOULD BE SEVERAL places where the elephants would essentially have to stand on their hind legs to reach the next step, as if negotiating a ladder—and all the while, the animals would be able to see the astonishing drop to the jungle floor below. That’s if they could be persuaded to even initiate the ascent in the first place.

  What if the uzis got them started, and halfway up one of the elephants began to balk or even tried to turn around? It was too grisly to imagine. The falling animal would crush everyone and everything below. The frenzy would be contagious.

  But what about the corollary: If panic can spread across a group of elephants, how about confidence? This was the lesson Williams had gleaned from the river crossings, and it was the insight that the entire operation hinged on.

  So, could an elephant leader take this on? And who? They knew when presented with a wide waterway that they were expected to swim. But brought to a steep stone ladder, they might not know to climb. This time, the elephant riders would have to divine the answer—somehow absorb what the elephants knew. If Williams were to attempt it at all, he knew men would have to set the order of the lineup. Through the entire discussion, Po Toke had kept
silent. Po Toke’s opinion was important, but Williams knew he would speak only when he was ready.

  While the others began the long hike back to camp, White went up and over the escarpment with the two locals. They would check in at the village to hire as many men as possible for the work of clearing and cutting.

  Elephant Bill had a lot to think about. And the farther he got from the escarpment the more doubt entered his mind. No one had ever even heard of such a thing happening. Hannibal, crossing the Pyrenees and Alps with his war elephants, perhaps. But had they encountered a hazard like this? There had always been scholarly disagreement about Hannibal’s exact route. Williams knew this would be a totally novel task for his elephants, who had been living a strained life ever since the war started and whose condition had suffered on the current march.

  The whole way, Po Toke kept to himself. The old man wasn’t letting on. Finally, when they made camp, Po Toke, like a jungle oracle, spoke. “All will be well, Thakin,” he said, addressing Williams with the traditional address of “Master.” “Bandoola will lead.”

  He gave his benediction. Still, Williams wondered if Po Toke could really believe it himself. He so wanted it to be true that he dared not press him. In Williams’s quarter century in Burma, Bandoola had never disappointed. Now the knowing, agile, self-assured elephant might just pull off a miracle.

  The plan was on, and as often magically happens in thick forest, people materialized to help. White had gathered about twelve men with good jungle knives, and that very afternoon, instead of returning to camp, he brought the party to the landslip. They began their work from their vantage point above the cliff, working their way down.

  White joined the others in camp by evening, with everyone determined to get a good night’s sleep.

  Better fed and rested than they had been in days, “every fit man and woman in the camp was on that road next morning at dawn,” Williams wrote. They assigned four teams to different sections of the cliff face. All agreed that Williams should be nearest the base, he said, “in case I got giddy and fell over!”