Flight By Elephant: The Untold Story of World War II’s Most Daring Jungle Rescue. Andrew Martin

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СКАЧАТЬ The caption ran: ‘Ready for Evacuation – The RAF has evacuated hundreds of women and children from the fighting areas in Burma. Some are seen sheltering from the sun under the wing of an aeroplane before leaving.’ Sunglasses, smiles and sola topees are the order of the day, and the subjects look very unharassed, like tourists rather than refugees. The half-dozen women, five children and one man look to be British or Anglo-Indian at the darkest. There are no Indians among their number, even though Indians constituted the great majority of the refugees.

      In The Story of Burma, F. Tennyson Jesse attempts a corrective:

      The following figures may be of interest to those who accuse us of furthering the interests of the whites, for they show what the RAF, the US Air Corps, and the Chinese National Airways Co did to evacuate people from Myitkyina to India in May 1942: 8616 persons were evacuated, of whom about 6000 were civilians and 2000 were army casualties. Of the 6000 civilians, 3500 were Eurasians and Burmese, 2200 were Indian, and 300 were English.

      By ‘May’ she means ‘early May’ because the flights would not continue throughout that month.

      Every morning, would-be passengers trekked through jungle scrub from the nearby refugee camp, suitcases in hand, to wait for the two Douglas Transports – lumbering mules of planes that landed each day from Assam. With each successive day, they appeared later and later out of the thick white cloud in which the monsoon was brewing. From mid-April, these clouds had been threatening to halt the flights altogether; by 6 May they had blotted out the mountains to the north-west over which the refugees hoped to be carried. The cloud also made each day more suffocating, yet the women and children – they mainly were women and children – who waited for the planes seemed to have been at the dressing-up basket: the women might be wearing two hats, or two dresses, or they might be wearing coats in 110 degrees Fahrenheit. These were the clothes they could not fit into their suitcases.

      On 6 May the first Transport landed, and those with passes for it boarded by means of the usual regulated scramble. When the doors of the aircraft were closed, a small girl stood screaming repeatedly beside it. Her mother was on the plane and she was not. This minor tragedy (nothing much by the standards of the evacuation) was about to be overtaken by a bigger one. As the Douglas Transport prepared to take off, the sound of another plane was heard coming from within the cloud. It was not the second Douglas Transport; that was not due, and this unseen aircraft had a thinner engine note. A Japanese fighter – one of those nihilistically called a Zero – came out of the clouds and the refugees who’d been unlucky a minute ago, being unable to board the plane, were lucky now, because they could race into the jungle. As they ran, the first Zero circulated the airfield three times with a red flag sticking from the cockpit window. It was later surmised that this had been a warning pass, and the door of the plane on the ground did open, and three or four people did jump out; but, by then, another three Zeros had come out of the cloud, and they machine-gunned the Douglas Transport. They circled away, came back, machine-gunned it again. At least thirty-five people were killed, and many more injured.

      Just as Rangoon and Mandalay had been abandoned after a Japanese air raid, so now was Myitkyina airfield, and two days later, the Japanese took the town. It is estimated that 40,000 refugees were scattered into the surrounding countryside by the fall of Myitkyina, and they were the ones who’d been banking on the airlift, and who were all geared up for it, with their cotton frocks, high-heeled shoes and children in tow. They were not dressed for long-distance walking.

      The Governor, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, had himself boarded one of the last flights. He would establish a Burma government-in-exile from the hill station of Simla, India, where he would write an elegant, rueful report on the evacuation, characterizing the main theme as sauve qui peut, possibly because it sounds better than ‘every man for himself’. The military word was ‘fluid’. The situation had become fluid. This was especially the mindset post-Myitkyina. Army officers (always British) lost their men (usually Indian), and vice versa. Senior British police officers found that all their Burmese and Indian policemen had melted away. Telegraphic and telephonic communication did not exist. There was a shortage of wireless sets, which in any case didn’t work well in the mountainous terrain towards which everybody was heading. All civil and military authority collapsed.

      Given that survival now depended on a person’s ability to walk into India, some maps would have been useful. But one of the sub-divisional officers in Myitkyina had rounded up a cache of maps and burnt them, to keep them from the Japanese. Some decided to stay in the villages to the north. But most refugees felt it better to try a ‘Valley of Death’ than wait in Myitkyina, so a route to Assam began to be talked of. It had been ‘opened’ since March; it lay through the Paktoi Hills, and ran along something called the Hukawng Valley.

      The route began at a village called Shinbiwyang, which stood at the beginning of the Daru Pass, which in turn became the Hukawng Valley. Shinbiwyang was about 120 food-free miles west of Myitkyina, and the Kumon Range of mountains was in the way. Another option was to duck south of the Kumon Range, and go along a rough road considered motorable for the first thirty of its 130 miles; indeed, a ‘bus’ – that is, a dusty lorry with a tarpaulin over the back – travelled along this stretch as often as two or three times a year. The road became unmotorable at a spot called Pakhenbum where one track branched left towards a district of jungle scrub, friable red earth, dried-up river beds, jade mines and mosquitoes. Beyond the mines lay Tamu and the start of the aforementioned main thoroughfare for evacuees, the Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur route. The other, rightward pointing, track headed towards Shinbiwyang, the Hukawng Valley, and its mosquitoes. At this junction of Pakhenbum a rough wooden notice was put up in April indicating the latter track, and reading: ‘This route is a death trap for women and children. Women and children should turn left.’ (That is, towards Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur.) In other words, the Hukawng Valley was officially disapproved of as a route for refugees. But the alternative, the track leading leftwards, also led southwards, and the Japanese were to the south.

      In his Evacuation Report, Dorman-Smith wrote, ‘Little evidence is available of the treatment of those who stayed received at the hands of the enemy’, so he makes one august example stand for many: ‘… it is known that the Ven. W. H. S Higginbotham, Archdeacon of Rangoon, while trying to prevent looting, was cut down by a Japanese officer.’ On the other hand, one of the refugee administrators would write in 1942, ‘I have kept a careful watch for stories of Jap atrocities towards refugees. I have heard of none in the Shan States or the Northern Districts of Burma. In fact, the reverse is true. There are instances of refugees who fell behind Jap lines actually being given lifts in Jap lorries.’ The whole purpose of their invasion, after all, had been to get the British out of the country.

      But from the late 1930s, the Japanese had been rapidly reassessed by the British; they had graduated to the demonology. After Pearl Harbor, cartoonists were as likely to depict them as giants as midgets. Here was the Yellow Peril incarnate and the British refugees who had read the fictions of Sax Rohmer might – on a subconscious level – have been fleeing the claw-like hands of Dr Fu Manchu.

      Japan had been opened up to the world – and tied into one-sided trade treaties – by the gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Perry in 1853. Industrialization and Westernization had followed, and, at the end of the First World War, Japan was one of the big five economic powers. But the transformation was accompanied by a feeling of guilt, a nostalgia for the Togukawa period of the seventeenth century, when Japan turned its back on the Christianizing West. Japan had been seduced, violated. The Western powers had made of her an inferior version of themselves; she felt patronized, and encircled by Western imperial possessions. This triggered a militarization of society, and the doctrine of ‘line of advantage’, Japan’s own version of Lebensraum, which in turn prompted the invasion of China. The economic sanctions this brought down on her confirmed the Japanese view that international law was a conspiracy to preserve the hegemony of America and Britain, and out of this persecution complex came what John W. Dower calls in Japan in War and Peace (1993) a desire for ‘racial revenge’.

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