Bisa Laknung grew up after the war, with many elephants—Rungdot among them. He remembered playing with Rungdot when he was a boy and going on rides with him in the forest. The elephant was especially quick in retrieving items dropped on the forest floor or in the middle of a river.
“He was a really very huge tusker,” Bisa Laknung recalled. We were sitting in small plastic chairs outside his house, a sprawling hybrid of modern concrete and traditional Kachin bamboo architecture. Both the concrete and the bamboo wings of the house had steep-pitched rooflines, characteristic of Kachin huts in the hills. “He was nine and a half feet at the shoulder. Like many of the best elephants, he was actually born with us, not in the wild. I grew up with stories about his father, Klangdot, who must have been born in the nineteenth century sometime.”
I asked about Rungdot’s mahout during the war.
“Rungdot had many mahouts over the years. I don’t know which one it was during the war. The elephant rider I remember best from my childhood was named Siong Gam. But he wasn’t Rungdot’s mahout—he was a fandi, an elephant catcher. His khoonkie was named Grammon.” The conversation’s turn from mahouts and fording elephants to fandis and khoonkies didn’t surprise me. In the Trans-Patkai area, fandis are generally perceived as more prestigious, and therefore more memorable, than mahouts. Nonetheless, I pressed for more information about Rungdot.
Bisa Laknung acquiesced. “He died at around the age of seventy. It was 1972, 1973 maybe. We’d been letting him roam in the forests near Digboi. Sometimes we’d have him do some logging work, or we’d need him for transportation. Even after the war, you really needed elephants for transportation here. Not so much like now. Maybe Rungdot made elephant babies in the Digboi forest, but we’d have no way of knowing that.”
Bisa Laknung’s son and two grandsons were with us. The family was clearly very proud of its connection to this chapter of the war. They’d lent out elephants not only for the Chaukan Pass rescue but also for rescues at the Pangsau Pass. Later in the war, their elephant teams assisted in the early stages of building the Ledo Road, which starts not far from the Bisas’ house and then winds upward through the hills toward the Pangsau Pass. From there, the road crosses the Hukawng Valley and loops through Myitkyina, turning south to finally meet the original Burma Road, which goes into China. With the completion of the Ledo Road in 1945, the British in India were finally able to supply the Chinese resistance by way of an all-land route. By this time the war’s tide had already turned. In the 1990s, the Bisas hosted a reunion of American veterans who’d been stationed along the road. The family showed me a home video they’d made: families had come from Texas, Arkansas, and Michigan to the tea gardens of Ledo.46
The fading of the mahouts from memory—whether oral or archival—is disappointing. They were, after all, the humans most responsible for the rescues. In the case of Maggie’s unnamed Burmese mahout, one wonders whether, for one reason or another, Russell wanted to protect his identity. In the case of the Chaukan episode, author Andrew Martin proposes that a kind of class divide separated the mahouts from everybody else involved in the operation. The mahouts “combined the independence of all taxi drivers with the unionized bolshiness of some train drivers,” Martin opines.47 This coheres with the recollections of James Howard Williams, the official in charge of elephant logistics around the Shenam Pass. In his memoirs, Williams remembered having to deal with strikes and labor agitation among the mahouts of the Burmese teak forests during the 1920s.48 Martin cites a similar type of incident during the Chaukan rescue, in which Mackrell placed one of the mahouts, Ragoo, under arrest. Ragoo had been organizing his fellow mahouts to demand better pay for their involvement in the rescue. The other mahouts agreed to continue working at existing wages, but only if Ragoo was set free.49
Of course, elephants in these situations had their own way of going “on strike.” They could refuse to do the tasks before them. They could steal off into the forest at night. But the officials always seemed more eager to remember the names of the elephants than of the mahouts who knew the elephants best, and who represented half of the relationship that made these daring operations possible.
BANDOOLA, MAGGIE, RUNGDOT: these were just a few of the elephants who assisted in the human exodus across the Patkais. They were the ones who happened to cross paths with Westerners, who—armed with cameras or possessed of a desire to pen memoirs—told the evacuation elephants’ story after the war. Many other elephants, numbering in the hundreds, were also involved in these operations. Some of them appear in other accounts, though we rarely find such detailed narratives. A British captain, R. H. Gribble, recalled chatting with his Kachin mahout as they approached the Pangsau Pass in 1942. The mahout turned to him and said, “Do you know that elephants used to be men—that is why they have so much intelligence?”
The Kachin looked so serious when he said it that Captain Gribble almost believed him. “Thank god they now have four powerful legs,” he replied. “Otherwise our chances of getting out of this jungle would be remote.” The two men laughed.50
By 1943, the main movement through the Pangsau Pass was by British and American troops coming in the other direction, from India into Burma. The Allied armies were gradually chipping away at the Japanese occupation, and the elephants were still essential. One major recalled that “Shan and Kachin mahouts jabbered at ex-clerks from the North of England on how to handle the mortar-carrying elephants.”51
Another soldier, Ian Fellowes-Gordon, remembered being assisted by a Hkamti elephant named Ma Gam, during a mission to take supplies from the Putao Plain through the Kachin jungle to the Burma Road. At the southern edge of the Putao Plain, the platoon reached a village where they’d hoped to eat and rest for the night, only to find it abandoned due to the war. One house remained standing, but its roof had collapsed in the storms. The platoon slept there anyway, exposed to the pouring nighttime rain. “Only Ma Gam was happy,” recalled Fellowes-Gordon, “thundering about his jungle in search of leaves while the humans soaked slowly indoors.”52
In 1943 and 1944, as the British moved back into the Chindwin Valley, they repurposed many of the work elephants as “sappers”: bridge construction labor. The elephants proved uniquely useful at hauling teak logs from nearby forests to the bridge construction sites and at hoisting the timber upward onto pylons.53 The ingenious “safety lock” elephant we met in Chapter 2 devised his technique at such a work site.
Throughout their occupation of Burma, the Japanese also employed hundreds of elephants and mahouts, mostly for timber and infrastructure-building projects. While the British had their Bombay-Burma Timber Corporation, the Japanese had their Nippon-Burma Timber Union: both were elephant logging corporations.54 While the British used elephants to help build teak bridges along the Chindwin Valley and along the northern Ledo Road, the Japanese employed some four hundred elephants in the construction of the Burma-Siam Railway. This Japanese project was designed to link Bangkok to the Burmese seaport and rail terminus at Moulmein, thus hastening the flow of supplies to Japanese-occupied Burma. The Japanese high command hoped this would undercut the Allies’ Ledo and Burma road projects in the north. Along the Burma-Siam Railway, elephants crashed paths through the thick jungles of the Karen Hills. They also carried barrels of water, which construction workers needed continuously, not only for themselves but also to wash their boring drills when they clogged with mud.55 The Japanese also took 350 logistics elephants with them during their foray into Manipur, India, in 1944.56
The Japanese were cruel to their elephants, according to Williams, refusing to let them roam in the forest at night, for fear that the mahouts would use the morning fetch as an opportunity to desert.57 It’s hard to know how much credence to give Williams here, in this characterization of the other side. A Burmese teak and elephant official, U Toke Gale, writing after Burmese independence, agreed that the Japanese commanders tended to mistreat and overwork the elephants. But Gale seems to have been close with the British teak w
allahs earlier in his life, during the colonial period (Gale makes this clear enough in his book), so his memories of the war might have been colored by those previous friendships.58
The later recollections of some Japanese soldiers deployed along the Burma-Siam Railway suggest that in tending to the elephants, the Japanese followed the usual local methods: a nightly roaming period followed by the morning fetch. “Everyone took good care of the elephants,” former soldier Abe Hiroshi told an interviewer in the early 1990s. “Even Japanese soldiers who beat up Burmese never took it out on the elephants.” Hiroshi described how the Japanese overseers would let the elephants loose in the mountains in the evening:
They’d search for wild bananas and bamboo overnight and cover themselves with dirt to keep from being eaten up by insects. In the morning the Burmese mahouts would track them down from their footprints. They’d usually be no more than one or two kilometers away. Then they’d get a morning bath in the river. Each mahout would scrub his own elephant with a brush. The elephants looked so comfortable, rolling over and over in the river. It took about thirty minutes. Then they had full stomachs and were clean and in a good mood. Now you could put a saddle mount or pulling chains on them and they’d listen to commands and do a good day’s work.59
Ian Denys Peek, a British POW who was made to work along the Burma-Siam Railway, would later write that for his Japanese work-masters, a POW was in effect “one fourteenth of an elephant.” His account too seems to contradict Williams’s impression of how the Japanese treated their elephants.60
What’s most striking when considering in tandem the British and Japanese experiences working with elephants during the war is the degree to which the elephants became objects of intense struggle—not as symbolic “booty” but as a resource of enormous strategic importance. Simply put, elephants were the key to controlling the rain-soaked Burmese uplands between India and China. The 1942 evacuation from Burma into India, the 1944 Japanese invasion of the British Indian province of Manipur, and the eventual Allied reinvasion of Upper Burma—all these operations made extensive use of trained elephants.
Thus, individual elephants might work for different sides over the course of the war. The most famous example is Lin Wang, a Burmese logging elephant seized by a Japanese platoon during the occupation. Chinese Nationalist soldiers captured Lin Wang from the Japanese in 1943 near the Shweli River on the Shan-Yunnan border, along with several other Japanese elephants. The elephants helped the Chinese soldiers cross rivers and hoist large crates onto trucks. When the war ended, the soldiers wanted to march the elephants triumphantly to the Chinese coast, but the route, going through mostly agricultural territory, didn’t have any forestland in which the elephants could feed at night. The elephants rode most of the way in trucks and drew visitors in Guangzhou. When the Nationalists withdrew to Taiwan, Lin Wang went with them. He died at the Taipei Zoo in 2003, at the incredible age of eighty-six.61
AND WHAT BECAME of Bandoola and Maggie, the principal elephants of Williams’s and Russell’s memoirs respectively?
Bandoola’s fate was an unhappy one. After the evacuation operation at the Shenam Pass and the eventual Allied reinvasion of Burma, Williams had Bandoola and many other elephants sent to the Chindwin Valley to drag timber and do sapper work such as bridge or boat building. One morning in 1945, Williams found Bandoola in the forest—dead. He’d been shot. One tusk was sawed off, the other intact. Enraged, Williams questioned the whole work camp for information and discovered that the elephant had been dead for several days, and that most of the mahouts in the camp knew about it but didn’t inform Williams for fear of upsetting him.
At first, Williams assumed that a tribal Chin hunter must have come down from the hills and murdered Bandoola for the ivory. He took several soldiers to the nearest Chin village and placed many people there under arrest, making angry threats about what would happen unless a villager came forward and produced the stolen tusk. But, calming down, Williams reconsidered how strangely his own mahouts back at the camp had acted—especially Po Toke, who had been Bandoola’s mahout at the ascent up the elephant stairway at the Shenam Pass and who was now the manager of the sapper camp. Williams later wrote: “I have often wondered whether old Po Toke had become so war-weary as to become slightly deranged in his intellect and whether he had shot Bandoola, rather than leave him to a successor.” Williams further wondered whether perhaps the one missing tusk hadn’t become a sentimental keepsake for Po Toke—and whether the other one hadn’t been left there for Williams. Reflecting on how much the mahouts had already suffered and sacrificed through the war, he decided not to investigate Po Toke and sadly let the matter drop.62 A biographer of Williams adds:
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.63
As for Maggie, the elephant who’d ferried so many human beings across the Namyung River by Pangsau Pass: she went with Russell and the others into India as far as a village called Nampong. This was close to the British railhead at Ledo, and the road had become better. The elephants were no longer needed in the journey. There were still many refugees back at Pangsau Pass, and also at Chaukan. The officials at Nampong asked that the refugees leave their elephants behind so the animals could be sent back into the hills to continue the evacuation work. Russell agreed to give Maggie up.
But the next morning, when the Burmese mahout went out to look for Maggie, he found only the remains of a broken chain. Though he trailed her footprints up a hill into the forest, he did not succeed in catching her again. She was gone. “Maggie had faithfully brought us this far,” Russell wrote. At the Namyung River, “God provided her to meet our need: at Nampong, her work was finished, and He took her away.”64
The local elephant fandis in the hills around Nampong might put it a different way: a spirit-mahout had fetched her instead.
THE FATE OF MAGGIE, and its contrast with those of Rungdot and Bandoola, is instructive for thinking about survival among Asian elephants more generally. On the whole, World War II appears to have been disastrous for the work elephants of Burma. On the eve of the Japanese invasion, the colonial Burmese logging industry calculated a population of roughly ten thousand domestic elephants. More work elephants likely lived in the tribal uplands, untallied by the forestry department. At the war’s end, though, the number had collapsed to fewer than four thousand.65 Over the next half-century, the number gradually grew again, as elephant lumbering operations became centralized in the post-independence government, under an entity called the Myanmar Timber Enterprise. The forestry department kept careful annual records of the number of elephants belonging to government timber camps or to licensed ethnic minority owners. The department recorded just over six thousand elephants in the 1970s. Since then, the number has slowly shrunk again, to closer to five thousand.66
The war’s impact on wild elephants, though, is much less clear. It’s possible that the violence of the war significantly reduced the wild herds. But a number of details from the narratives given above, and others like them, indicate that something else may have been occurring. Williams, Russell, and Fellowes-Gordon all describe passing through abandoned villages. Areas that during peaceful times had many hunters’ and swiddeners’ camps became more wilderness-like during wartime. The records from the Chaukan rescue convey a similar landscape: the railway party had hoped to find Lisu villages in the area around the Chaukan Pass but found none. Thus at least in some areas, the war may very well have had the effect of expanding the wild elephants’ range into zones normally occupied by humans.
Consider too the scenes of work elephants’ crossing paths with wild herds and sometimes absconding with them; or of whole groups of timber elephants’ disappearing into the forest; or of Maggie’s own disappearance into the jungle beyond Nampong. It’s plausible that in t
he chaos of the war, a great many domesticated elephants went over into the wild, and that some of the herds they joined then migrated into areas beyond the war’s reach. Such escapes into the wild might even account for a significant part of the decline in officially tallied work elephant numbers.
This isn’t to say that the war was “good” for the elephants overall. Many wild elephants did not escape the violence. Williams recalls that for a period of the war, the fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force were under orders to open fire on any elephants seen in Japanese territory, since they could potentially be work elephants for the enemy. Some pilots, appalled by the order, asked that it be cancelled, but the requests went unheeded.67 A similar phenomenon would come up decades later during the Vietnam War, when American pilots were similarly ordered to open fire on elephants, seen by the U.S. command as potential transport vehicles for the Vietcong.68
Many other elephants wound up like Bandoola: killed while on the job. The Hkamtis of the Lohit Valley remember two unhappy incidents where Allied troops fired on Hkamti elephant convoys bringing them supplies. Dozens of elephants and men died, and the surviving elephants are remembered for carrying their fallen mahouts through the forest back to their home villages, dozens of miles away.69 Other elephants wound up like Lin Wang, mobilized away from the Burmese forests to become “compound” elephants in zoos or in tourist camps—with good food, perhaps, but few opportunities to mate. Many wound up more like Rungdot: they went back to the logging and transport work they had done before the war, and for the remainder of their days they had the freedom to forage in the forest at night and to mate—perhaps with wild elephants like Maggie.
What we might consider, from these fragmentary insights into the elephants’ collective wartime experience, is that just as Asian elephants have developed a set of everyday work skills that keep them adjacent to the monsoon forest—skills in handling timber and performing transport across muddy forest terrain—they also seem to have skills that are especially useful for certain kinds of human emergency situations. Such skills, if understood and appreciated by the elephants’ human handlers, can increase the odds of work elephants’ being moved into settings where they can commingle with wild herds they would not ordinarily encounter. The emergency mobilization of elephants—into forested areas, anyway—can open up new opportunities for species reproduction.
Giants of the Monsoon Forest Page 9