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

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СКАЧАТЬ route had come. They were tea planters, and their Indian labourers. We will describe their work in more detail shortly, but let us say for now that the Hukawng Valley would become the second main evacuation route from Upper Burma after Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur. It is estimated that 20,000 went through (soldiers and civilians), of whom 5000 died.

      One other route had been talked of in Myitkyina.

      On 3 May, before the bombing of the airfield, a group of Burmese officials had flown to Dinjan to suggest this route. Its main – and only – attractive feature was that it lay about as far to the north as you could go in Burma, so was well away from the Japanese advance. But officials in Assam had ruled it out because they knew the terrain to be impassable on the Assamese side. It was decided therefore to send radio messages to Myitkyina warning against this route and urging use of the Hukawng Valley instead. But the receiving station at Myitkyina had closed down. Therefore letters were sent by plane conveying the same warning to the Deputy Commissioner of Myitkyina, but it seems these were never delivered. That Deputy Commissioner was a man called McGuire. He was the immediate superior of John Leyden, and the frowned-upon route in question was the Chaukan Pass.

       The Railway Party

      Exhausted after crossing the Dapha river on the evening of 31 May, John Leyden finds that his head reels every time he stands up. Night is descending rapidly. Despite having a wife and young children (all safely evacuated from Burma at an earlier date), Leyden tells Millar – a single man – that he must save himself and go on without him. He also urges Millar to do this on behalf of the people they are trying to save.

      Who were these people?

      They were a party of government officials and engineers; they were mainly British, but their number also included Indians, Anglo-Indians and a pregnant Burmese woman and her six-month-old mixed-race baby. Their de facto leader was Sir John Edward Maurice Rowland. In the summer of 1942, Sir John was sixty years old. He was an engineer, and the top man on Burma Railways: the Chief Railway Commissioner no less. In the Warrant of Precedence, the formal social hierarchy of the country, he stood at number sixteen, on a par with army officers of the rank of general, and he had been knighted in 1941. So he would be very indignant at finding himself starving to death in the jungle.

      Sir John was not only head of the ordinary Burma Railways; he also ran a side project, which he called ‘The Burma China Construction’. This was a railway meant to run parallel to the Burma Road, and for the same purpose: to keep China supplied in its battle against the Japanese. The railway would run from Lashio, a hundred or so miles north of Mandalay, to Kunming in China, through some of the most disease-ridden country in the world, so it would have been as much a medical as an engineering feat … if it had ever been built. There is something strained about the future tense used in an article on the line that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on 27 November 1941: ‘As the Panama canal’s construction was a triumph of medical strategists, so will the completion of the Yunnan–Burma railroad be a victory of malaria, and the potential of plague and cholera.’ The author stated that 250,000 coolies would build the line, which ought to be finished in fifteen months’ time ‘if all goes to schedule’. Just as the Burma Road would be closed by the Japanese invader, so the Burma–China railway would be stopped. It has gone down as one of the great ghost railways of the world, like the plan for a railway under the English Channel in the 1880s, or the early twentieth-century German pipe dream of the Berlin–Baghdad railway.

      Having been distracted by this futile endeavour, Sir John found the ordinary railways of Burma to be in what he frankly called ‘a damnable mess’ at the time of the invasion. He used the phrase in a letter. We know from the same letter that he asked for and obtained from the man he called ‘HE’ – His Excellency, the Governor – ‘dictator powers’ to facilitate evacuation north by rail.

      Sir John began, as he put it, ‘hare’ing all over’ north Burma from his base at Maymyo, the hill station and hot-weather resort, from where he was ousted by the enemy on 27 April. ‘The Army had legged it a day and a half before. I had been promised 72 hours notice to evacuate [railway] personnel …’ As it turned out, Sir John was given twelve hours’ notice, and he underlined the word ‘twelve’ in his letter. The railway employees – mainly Indians or Anglo-Indians – would be pitched into ‘sauve qui peut’, for which Sir John blamed ‘the cracking up of the 5th and 6th Chinese armies’ (which had been dispatched by Chiang Kai-shek to protect the Burmese infrastructure). The reader is now perhaps beginning to get the hang of Sir John. He was not a man lacking in confidence, or opinions, and he had a paternalistic concern for ‘his people’, the ‘railway folk’.

      By the end of April he had shifted 4000 of these to Myitkyina, where he attempted to shift them further – by the above-mentioned airlifts to Assam. But the airlift was so very ‘meagre’ that ‘we had to send thousands of men and women trekking on foot out of Burma’. It had been observed at the Myitkyina airfield that, while some young and able-bodied men were putting their wives and children on the planes before themselves returning to duty or starting the dangerous walk to Assam, others had been boarding the aeroplanes along with their wives and children. On 22 April, permission was given for all men over forty-five to fly out. Being sixty, and a very senior man in the administration, Sir John – whose wife had already been evacuated – could have taken advantage of this, but, as he wrote in his letter, ‘I had a seat on a plane which I refused, my remark being, “Having brought all these women and children to Myitkyina, and as they are forced to walk out, so will I.”’ The phrase ‘my remark being’ is very typical of Sir John, who continued, ‘Having brought them here, many of them to die, I would lose all self respect and would never be able to look a woman in the face again if I escaped by plane leaving them to their fate.’

      By early May, a party had crystallized around Sir John, and it comprised the following:

      Edward Lovell Manley. As a captain of the Royal Engineers, he had worked on the railways built by the British in Mesopotamia from 1917. After demob, had risen to become the Chief Engineer of the Eastern Bengal Railway, whose motto was Ex Fumo Dare Lucem (‘From Smoke Let Light Break Out’), and whose crest depicted elephants and palm trees, but that didn’t mean Manley was used to living in their midst. In 1942, he was fifty-six years old, and on secondment to the Burma–China construction. He had been living with Sir John, and Sir John’s wife, in Rangoon. He had been Sir John’s guest, in other words, and Sir John felt a particular duty to get him safe out of Burma. As they entered the Chaukan Pass, Sir John would designate Manley his number two.

      Eric Ivan Milne. He was another senior railway official, aged forty-three in 1942, and the District Traffic Superintendent of Burma State Railways. He was a keen amateur cricketer who, in his final game before the Japanese invasion – railwaymen against an RAF team – had scored seventy-six not out.

      (Both Manley and Milne were married men, and their wives and children had already left Burma.)

      C. L. Kendall. A surveyor on the Burma–China construction.

      Captain A. O. Whitehouse of the Royal Engineers. We do not have his age. A photograph shows a mild looking man of about thirty in horn-rimmed glasses and pork pie hat.

      E. Eadon. An Anglo-Indian ‘anti-malarial inspector’ on the Burma–China construction. (His wife and three children – with the very Anglo-Indian names of Fred, George and Isabelle – had already left Burma.)

      N. Moses. He was a railway surveyor (among other things), rather rudely referred to by Sir John as ‘Dutch Jew’. But then Moses carried the stigma of having directed Sir John and his party into the Chaukan Pass, as we will see.

      There were also three Indian railwaymen, СКАЧАТЬ