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

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      When the tribes who live in the jungle clearings enter the jungle proper to hunt, they make obeisance to the spirits of the jungle, the nats. If something then goes wrong – say, a man is bitten by a snake – that shows permission had not been asked in the right way, or had been withheld or withdrawn, and the hunters leave the jungle. Of course, Millar and Leyden had not consulted the spirits before killing the sambhur, and they did not have the option of leaving.

      They set off again reinvigorated. But an hour later, Leyden’s spaniel was no longer behind them. Misa, at least, liked the jungle, and would frequently charge off into the undergrowth, but they called, and waited and … nothing. After a long search – reckless in the circumstances – they concluded that she must have fallen into the Noa Dehing gorge. Later still, when they were crossing a small river, Leyden was swirled off his feet, and cracked his head against a big rock. He said he was all right, but Millar kept a close eye on him from then on.

      And the day still wasn’t over.

      When they lit the fire that night, Millar and Leyden discovered they had two days’ less rice than they had thought. So they now only had enough to last them until 29 May. Then again, they calculated from the only two-inch map they possessed that had not been turned to pulp that the confluence of the Noa Dehing and the Dapha couldn’t be more than six miles away. They ought to be there by the next day, the 27th.

      That was, as Millar put it, ‘a dismal mistake’.

      On the 27th, it finally stopped raining, but their eternal companion, the Noa Dehing, chose that morning to present its steepest gorge yet, requiring from Millar and Leyden ‘the skills of trained climbers … Our fears for porters carrying loads were not without cause,’ Millar adds, without going into detail. The Dapha river did not appear that day, or the next; or the next.

      On 31 May, their food had run out, ‘not a crumb of anything remained’, and there was still no sign of the Dapha. To save strength, Millar and Leyden had jettisoned everything that was not essential: cooking utensils, binoculars, cameras. On 31 May, Leyden stopped and sadly pitched his rifle into the gorge of the Noa Dehing river, then Millar did likewise with his ‘favourite single trigger gun’. A gun is the most prized asset in the jungle, second only to a decent stash of opium and a few grains of quinine. But Millar did retain a rifle, a decision that would prove of the greatest importance.

      The Noa Dehing still showed very heavy water, and remained uncrossable. They remained stuck on the right-hand side of it, with the Dapha surely looming. That river was like a prima donna, putting off its appearance to maximize the final effect. ‘I felt inwardly certain,’ wrote Millar, ‘that we could not ford it at this date.’

      At 2 p.m. on 31 May, Millar and Leyden began to hear a louder river sound; it was the sound of two rivers, almost like the sound of a rough sea. At 3 p.m., they came to what Millar described as ‘a delta’ – the vast and foamy confluence of the Dapha and the Noa Dehing, and here was the moment of truth. Both rivers were hundreds of yards wide. Both carried leaping jungle debris in the form of whole 100-foot trees, complete with all branches and roots, to the intersection where they rotated in a giant, misty whirlpool. Looking at the confluence, Guy Millar felt sick.

       The Red-Hot Buddhas

      The bombing of Burma started on 11 December. The first raid on Rangoon itself came on 23 December at which point the residents would have recalled some elementary geography.

      Rangoon was towards the south of a country bounded by sea and mountains to the west, and mountains and Japanese-occupied China to the east. If the docks and airstrip were taken out of commission, the only escape from an army entering Rangoon from the south would lie directly north, along the valleys of the Chindwin and Irrawaddy rivers, and towards India, that supposedly more secure bastion of the colonizing power. But India was 2000 miles from Rangoon, and protected by a barrier of the highest mountains and the densest jungles of all. Nevertheless, that first raid on Rangoon – which killed 2000 people – marked the start of what would come to be called ‘the walkout’. Millar and Leyden were two of a million. The entire non-indigenous population of Burma would leave the country.

      George Rodger, a thirty-four-year-old British photographer and correspondent with the American magazine Life, arrived in Rangoon in the third week of January 1942, a time when most sensible people were leaving. A practitioner of foreign correspondent sang-froid, Rodger touched down on the Irrawaddy in a BOAC flying boat as a Japanese air raid screamed overhead. It was impossible to get ashore, ‘so we sat in wicker chairs on a BOAC barge out in the river, drinking lemonade and waiting for the bombs to fall in the harbour’. Rodger was – not very surprisingly – ‘the only passenger disembarking at Rangoon’, and after the all-clear had sounded, he checked into the one hotel still open, the Minto Mansions. In his memoir, Red Moon Rising (1943), he writes, ‘There in the dingy hallway, trunks and packing cases were piled high. They were addressed in bold white paint to destinations in India and were the property of those who had decided to leave Rangoon before the raids became too heavy.’ As he sat down to dinner that evening, the air raid siren sounded again. ‘Immediately all lights were extinguished.’ Rodger wasn’t going to be put off his soup by mere bombs. He determined to continue eating, albeit now in the dark, but after a few minutes he found himself completely alone in the restaurant, so he abandoned his dinner and wandered outside ‘with a few British officers to watch the progress of the raid from the garden’. Rodger was intrigued to see most of the other guests lying down in slit trenches that had been dug in the garden between tall trees. Even here, botany obtrudes: ‘I noticed the smell of magnolia and sweet jasmine in the hot night air and huge bats were flying silently in silhouette against the light of the full moon.’ From one of the slit trenches someone insisted that Burmese fifth columnists were signalling to the enemy by means of red lights, assisting the raid. Rodger did not believe it, ‘but this is how rumours are born’.

      In mid-December 1941, the Japanese 15th Army entered south Burma from Thailand (which they had entered from Malaya) and began fighting their way towards Rangoon. Columns of Indian refugees were filing into the city from the south, and leaving again from the north, either for the town of Prome, 120 miles north, or for the Burmese second city, Mandalay, 250 miles north. Among them were the Indians essential to the running of Rangoon.

      On 15 February, Singapore – the fortified island that supposedly guaranteed the security of Malaya and Burma – fell to the Japanese. In mid-February the English newspapers of Rangoon ceased publication.

      Like Birnam Wood, the jungle was coming, and the trees themselves announced the fact. On 20 February, notices featuring the letter ‘E’ were posted on the tree trunks of Rangoon. This did not mean ‘Evacuate’, but the banks evacuated once the notices appeared nonetheless. In fact, E stood for ‘Essential’: all vehicles were to be immobilized except those deemed – and marked – ‘Essential’. On 28 February, ‘W’ notices were put on the trees, and this was slightly less ambiguous. It meant ‘Warning’, and it was the cue for all but non-essential workers to leave. Most had already done so.

      European women and children were given priority on the ships leaving Rangoon for India. Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith later offered the rationale that Europeans would be worse treated by the invaders. In The Story of Burma, F. Tennyson Jesse writes,

      We made a mess of it at the beginning, as we always seem to make a mess of everything at the beginning. When we did begin to establish road convoys and air transport, there were not enough to go round, and in issuing passes for lorry or air transport we had to fix priorities; the more important the person the higher was his priority, and important persons were largely white; but even so the СКАЧАТЬ