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

  He secured long-term accommodations for what was left of No. 1 Elephant Company. The elephants, he said, needed a long rest after what they had been through. So they would stay for about four months in one of the greenest, ripest, most beautiful corners of the world, only a quick two-mile hike down the road from the bungalow where he was staying.

  Williams battled the administration, which attempted to transfer the animals to Delhi as part of the Indian Army, and he withstood the wrath of the tea planters who didn’t want to lose their crops to the hungry herd. He secured months of peace in the green Eden of Assam for the elephants. It meant rest and plentiful food for Po Toke and the other elephant men he had worked with so long. Eventually, their bridge-building services would beckon once again, and Williams would move his group back to Burma, where their work would change the course of history. In part due to the 270 bridges they built from local materials, lightweight prefabricated sections were available to construct the largest known Bailey bridge, which was built across the Chindwin at Kalewa in December 1944. It was a decisive logistical coup. Without that bridge ensuring the flow of men and supplies, the winter campaign might have ended in nothing more than a standoff instead of a victory.

  Williams sketched this Bailey bridge, which was built across the Chindwin at Kalewa in December of 1944. Historians say the elephants made this logistical coup possible.

  But that would come later. At the moment, the animals needed relief, as their lives depended on it. And by the summer of 1944, the Japanese were on the run. For now, Bandoola and the other fifty-two elephants would be “in safety from the horrors of war.”

  Williams visited the tusker in his green refuge and, as usual, brought him sweet tamarind balls. In the shade of some trees, he had Bandoola lower himself to the ground. He stood close to the elephant and fed him, watching the animal’s eyes halfway close in satisfaction as he noisily ate each treat.

  For the elephant wallah, who had always experienced melancholy during great transitions, this was an especially tough one. His life with elephants was coming to an end. He couldn’t see all the details of what was ahead, but of this he was certain: He would return to Burma, the Allied forces would continue their victory there, and when the fighting was over, he would leave. The world he loved was not just disappearing; it was already gone. The British Empire would shrink away from its borders. Williams had lost the Burmese members of his family, and the elephants were next. The effect of the separation would be momentous. The bond he had forged with the animals was something so large and deep he could frame it only in spiritual terms, saying they were his “religion.”

  Toward the end of the war, Williams grew nostalgic for the peaceful days with his elephants. This is one of his watercolors from that time.

  Seeing this prospect, he began to stoke what would become a favorite fantasy: that many surviving war elephants would become free, wild elephants. He even enumerated to himself, like a catechism, all the reasons the scenario was plausible: He knew hundreds of elephants had vanished in Burma during the fighting. Yes, he conceded, many must have died. But a good portion of them had to have simply run off, and another set must have been injured. Of those injured, many would have been able to heal themselves with elephant remedies, such as sealing wounds with mud. In fact, he was sure the escaped elephants must have “greatly outnumbered those that lost their lives.”

  In small but meaningful scenes throughout the remotest parts of the jungle, one by one, he imagined these hero elephants meeting up with their wild cousins, just as they had night after night in their logging days. But this time there were no teak bells around their necks, no uzis calling them in the morning darkness. “Herds of wild elephants show no resentment when domesticated animals join them,” Williams wrote. “This tolerance is just one of the things about elephants which makes one realise they are big in more ways than one.” Though he had always thought logging elephants had a good life, he found himself now pining for them to have something better. The war sometimes made men harder and softer at the same time.

  Even with this reassuring vision of the future, he stood next to Bandoola and cherished every second of the present. Here, in this oasis of tea, as he passed his hands over the barrel of the tusker’s body, he had the chance to hold on to something fleeting, and let time stand still for just a moment. “Htah!” he called to Bandoola. And the great tusker rose up.

  EPILOGUE

  JAMES HOWARD WILLIAMS WAS MENTIONED IN DISPATCHES TWICE for gallantry in facing the enemy, and awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1945. The Japanese had been defeated, and though Bombine struggled to continue operations, remote pockets of Burma were not welcoming places for the families of forest men.

  On a wintry day in February 1946, Jim Williams and his family returned home to England. They settled in Jim’s birthplace in Cornwall, though his mother and father were long dead. Like many who had spent their entire adult lives in the far-flung corners of the empire, they found the homecoming unsettling. Initially, Treve absolutely hated England, which was not his home, and he would always remember the unhappiness of “the cold and chilblains and food coupons.” He missed his beloved nanny Naw Lah terribly. For Jim it was an unbearable uprooting. Characteristically, he did not speak of his distress. To a certain extent, he had already experienced this same inner conflict during his extended leaves. “However much I swore that I wanted to be home, when I was home I found myself yearning to get back to the everyday difference of the jungle,” he wrote. Now, as fond as he was of his boyhood world, a sense of exile again crept in. Many men who had spent their working lives in the East were terrified of going home to England and living on a pension. Gone were the spacious home, the servants, the ponies, the cars, and the memberships in every club. But for Williams it went much deeper than that. He had found the best of himself in Burma. Back in England, the man who was so exquisitely tuned in to elephants and so adept at jungle survival could only search for a new purpose. He had always joked that his life with elephants provided him with the skills to do only one thing in retirement: “to follow performing elephants in the sawdust ring, dressed as a clown, carrying a bucket and spade.” He purchased meadowland and a nearby water mill to grow daffodils for the London market, and for a time was an executive for a pesticide company. Nothing seemed quite right—nothing except the rugged beauty of Cornwall and his beloved family.

  Treve was more than a bit like him—smart, full of energy, and fascinated by animals. Lamorna was bighearted and curious about the natural world. In school she struggled in part with what would now likely be diagnosed as dyslexia, and she had difficulty being accepted by the other children. Jim and Susan took her out of school and allowed her to learn in her own way. She would never fit into a “normal” role in society, but she was loved. Always fond of misfits, Jim treated her with a rare understanding and acceptance.

  In Cornwall, Jim reveled in some of his old pastimes, once again roaming the moors and indulging in his favorite childhood treats, including kidney pie and Cornish pasties. In no time, he began to lose his lean jungle frame.

  In November 1948, after Williams made a trip to America, The New Yorker published a long profile of him by E. J. Kahn, Jr. The subsequent attention led to a contract for Williams’s memoir, originally titled “Elephants in Peace and War,” which he had started writing during his hospital stay in wartime. Published as Elephant Bill in 1950, it was a bestseller, opening a new world to Williams in which he could travel widely and lecture on the creatures he missed so much.

  But he still longed to be with them in the flesh. In the early fall of 1951 an invitation came. Dick Chipperfield of the famous Chipperfield’s Circus phoned to ask “Elephant Bill” to visit his twenty-seven female Asian elephants while they were performing in Exeter, 120 miles away. It stirred something long suppressed. “Having said good-bye to my elephants, I felt they could never again occur in my life,” Williams had written. But here the animals were, once more coming to his rescue. “I acc
epted with alacrity,” he wrote.

  Williams sketched out two different covers for his memoir.

  En route his mind was full of the majestic jungle elephants he had known: Bandoola, Ma Shwe, Mahoo Nee, little Guide Man, even crazy Taw Sin Ma. Every one had been so important to him that before he left Burma he had gone on an arduous pilgrimage, visiting the 417 elephants he could reach, just to say good-bye.

  Unfortunately, by then, he had already seen the last of his beloved elephant Bandoola. The great tusker had been killed before war’s end, in circumstances that would haunt Williams for the rest of his life. It was, he would always maintain, nothing short of murder. After the long vacation at the tea estate, Bandoola and the rest of Elephant Company had returned to Burma. As the Japanese were driven out of the country, more and more animals joined the Allied elephants’ ranks. In the unfolding victory their services were in even higher demand for bridge construction, hauling teak to sawmills for boat-building, and ferrying supplies. The elephants had never been pushed harder. “Bandoola carried the brunt of the heavy work,” Williams wrote. “He even worked by moonlight.” But Williams checked in constantly and found the tusker in robust condition.

  Then on one of Williams’s visits to Po Toke’s work camp, Bandoola was absent from the inspection line. When Williams inquired, Po Toke said that Bandoola had been missing a couple of days. In fact, the tusker had not been seen for several. Despite the war effort’s urgent need for timber, Williams bucked orders and shut down the camp’s operation, sending every man available out to scour the forest for Bandoola. There was no sign of him. Williams sensed something was wrong, but just then, he was called away by his superiors. Five days later, he rushed back to Po Toke’s camp and learned that Bandoola had still not returned. When Williams unleashed his fury on Po Toke, the old mahout, sobbing, admitted that Bandoola was dead. He claimed he did not know what had happened.

  Two riders led Williams to the body. “There lay Bandoola,” Williams would write. He stared in disbelief at the rotting corpse, not quite ready to comprehend that his hero was gone. Bandoola’s right tusk had been hacked off, and the left remained plowed into the earth where his head had fallen. A single bullet fired directly into his skull had killed him. Williams shook with grief and anger. Storming back to camp, he assigned sentries armed with Sten guns to guard the body round the clock. If the executioners returned to fetch the remaining tusk he knew his Karen soldiers would shoot to kill. He wanted revenge.

  Williams began a scorching investigation, interrogating soldiers and searching the huts of a local Chin village. The bullet that killed Bandoola was a .303, a standard military cartridge. Its identification did nothing to narrow down a likely culprit. He fired Po Toke, who had lied to him for more than a week, and confiscated all local weapons, but his inquiry produced no leads.

  Heartsick, he had Bandoola’s left tusk removed. It was a talisman he kept with him for the rest of his life, one that was meant to remind him of the life of Bandoola, but instead always filled him with sorrow for the tusker’s senseless death. He came to believe with increasing certainty that Po Toke had killed him out of a deranged attachment to the great animal. Po Toke, Williams was convinced, was unwilling for anyone else to take over the tusker’s care. As Po Toke faced the end of his own working days, the fear of a new handler for Bandoola had become “a haunting worry.” Releasing him to the wild in this area must not have seemed feasible to Po Toke, but if it had, Williams wrote, he would have happily been an accomplice, helping to give the tusker his freedom. Such was the complicated and often paradoxical relationship between the two men that in the agonizing days after the discovery, Williams was filled with a bitter kind of love for Po Toke. Here was the man who had taught him everything and shared with him this astonishing creature. Without Po Toke there would have been no Bandoola. But he had also destroyed that elephant in the glory of his prime. Williams was filled with fury against Po Toke the murderer. Yet, while Williams saved Bandoola’s left tusk, he prayed it was Po Toke who possessed the right. After all, these tusks were sacred to only two people in the world. And Bandoola was their bond.

  Williams grieved Bandoola as he would a brother, and he buried him as a war hero. Somewhere on the border of Burma and India is a monument. Carved on a giant teak tree, “preserved for humanity,” are the words BANDOOLA BORN 1897, KILLED IN ACTION 1944. Williams never saw Po Toke again. Harold Browne later heard Po Toke had become leader of a gang of dacoits, and in 1954, an American working out of the embassy in Rangoon sent word to Williams that Po Toke was alive and making his home in a village just a few miles outside of Witok, near Moreh.

  Back in England, the circus elephants gave Williams a chance to reconnect with his old life. He was led to them as they stood “munching meadow hay.” The great swaying, chirping, ear-flapping beasts were eager to know him. They met his eyes, and their dancing trunks stretched to close the gap between him and them. He walked forward and his hands instinctively reached for them. He read them by touch, the way he used to in his old life. He clasped their trunks, and passed his knowing palms along the barrel of their bodies. They made him laugh and maybe even cry: The look and feel of them. The sounds they made. The clean way they smelled. It felt like a homecoming.

  He was shown a young calf with a small, infected hole in her ear that wouldn’t heal. Chipperfield assumed it was a bullet hole from her capture in the wild. Williams examined the sore, explaining it was a piercing that a string would have been tied to during her training. The old elephant wallah cleaned the area and lanced the small boil, briefing the circus men about how to care for it in the coming days. He was Elephant Bill again, if only for a few moments.

  When it was time to go, he surprised even himself. He started to walk away, but wheeled back around, suddenly casting off his overcoat to rub its lining against the hides of the elephants, “determined,” he said, “to take the scent of them home with me.”

  Williams would go on to write several other memoirs: Bandoola (1953); The Spotted Deer (1957), published in the United States as The Scent of Fear; and Big Charlie (1959) and In Quest of a Mermaid (1960), both published posthumously.

  J. H. Williams found a new career writing about his elephants, though he resisted the celebrity status that came along with it.

  His books provided much-needed income and much-resisted celebrity. There were movie options over the years involving Gary Cooper, Ernest Borgnine, and even Sophia Loren, though no films were ever made. Williams tried his hand at screenwriting and got as close to Burma as Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Siam (Thailand) in the process. He was flown east to scout out film locations and, best of all, to conduct elephant casting calls. Back home, he was involved in purchasing five elephants to ship to Borneo to become teak haulers, and he had another adventure, transporting a huge circus elephant cross-country.

  In the spring of 1957, Treve left for Australia where he would go to veterinary school, fulfilling a shared dream for both father and son. As he stood waving to Treve at the docks of Southampton, Jim’s eyes filled with tears, and he whispered to Susan that he would not live to see the boy again.

  He was right. On July 30, 1958, at the age of sixty, James Howard Williams died during an emergency appendectomy. So accustomed to the burning ache of his ulcer, he mistook the new, sharper agony as more of the same. The man who never spoke of his woes stoically bore the pain of a burst appendix until it was too late.

  For Christen Goguen

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MY FIRST COMPANION IN PURSUIT OF THE J. H. WILLIAMS STORY was Robin Perkins Ugurlu, who came with me to Tasmania in the spring of 2010. Robin had provided me with a remarkable cache of letters from her family archive for my book The Lady and the Panda, and in the decade since, she had become a close friend and international travel partner. She’s such a charmer that wherever we go, doors and hearts open to us. As we set out to meet Williams’s son Treve, I thought that talent might prove useful.

  I already had the six memoirs (
one written by Williams’s wife, Susan) that make up the substantial published record of the life of Elephant Bill. What I needed were the traces that were unpublished, unknown, private. I had been in touch with Treve, a well-known racehorse veterinarian, for several months, yet I still did not have a clear impression of how much archival matter he possessed. As is often the case with research, I just had to go and find out.

  The moment of truth came at Treve’s lovely house in a picturesque town in northern Tasmania, where he had set out, on the polished table in his dining room, a small overnight suitcase of letters and clippings—a little anticlimactic, but I was grateful to examine whatever material existed. Robin and I began to sift through the yellowed papers while Treve worked upstairs in his study examining X-rays of a Thoroughbred’s legs. The three of us broke for lunch that day in the village pub, and later, after more reading, there was supper, Scotch, and conspiratorial laughter. Before bedtime, we were a tight-knit trio.

  The next morning Robin and I again arrived at Treve’s to discover that he had lugged down a massive chest filled with archival treasures: unpublished manuscripts, autobiographical screenplays and movie treatments, typed speeches, diary fragments, handwritten notes and essays—it was the El Dorado of Elephant Bill files. Apparently, though we hadn’t even known we were on probation, Robin and I had passed muster. I was ecstatic. It was clear that from this immense cache would emerge the heart of this book: the truer, funnier, earthier, and more emotional James Howard Williams.