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

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СКАЧАТЬ were dwarves (when they weren’t giants) in British newspapers, there was no generic image of the enemy in the Japanese mind. In the same book, Dower writes, ‘In Japanese war films produced between 1937 and 1945 … the enemy was rarely depicted. Frequently it was not even made clear who the antagonist was.’ The enemy was beneath notice. The Japanese had signed, but had not ratified, the Geneva Convention of 1929. They did not agree with the protocols concerning prisoners of war; the Emperor had banned the use of the term. Japanese soldiers would never allow themselves to be taken as prisoners – the officers would disembowel themselves whereas the privates would do the job communally, huddling around a grenade while one of them pulled the pin – so they did not see why they in turn should be hospitable to a defeated enemy. And it appeared little distinction would be made between enemy soldiers and enemy civilians.

      The Nanking Massacre of December of 1937, in which perhaps a quarter of a million Chinese civilians were murdered, many having been raped, was reported in Britain. Then the Japanese nastiness came closer to home. During their invasion of Hong Kong, Japanese soldiers had killed patients on hospital operating tables, and raped and killed civilian women. On 11 March 1942, The Times reported,

      Rarely has any Minister of the Crown had to make to the House of Commons a statement more terrible than that made by Mr Eden yesterday regarding the treatment of prisoners of war and civilians by the Japanese after the capitulation of Hong Kong, when the Japanese forces were permitted and indeed encouraged to commit atrocities seldom rivalled and never surpassed in the history of international war during the last century.

      Mr Eden said, ‘The military code of the Samurai did in fact have some influence upon Japanese military practice in the Russo-Japanese War [just as well, since we were allies at that point] … but the new Japan has no regard for the virtues of self-restraint, incorruptibility, courtesy towards honourable enemies which that code prescribed.’

      Japanese soldiers felt entitled to their racial revenge by their own racial purity, a notion underpinned by the divinity of their emperor – all of this inculcated by the ‘spiritual training’ of the Japanese soldier. In his apparent unstoppability, there was something of the automaton about the Japanese soldier. In Quartered Safe Out Here, the novelist George MacDonald Fraser, who fought in the jungles of Burma, described Japanese soldiers circling a burning tank as looking like ‘clockwork dolls’. The Japanese soldier’s smallness was deemed to fuel his rage. In 1944, the American general Douglas MacArthur, who was five foot nine, would write, ‘Some observers claim there would have been no Pearl Harbor had the Japanese been three inches taller.’ Smallness was a particular asset in the jungle. It made the Japanese soldier nimble and silent; he required less food and drink than a big man. He was super-fit; he carried a light pack, didn’t care too much about doing up his tunic buttons, or shaving; he wore his cap at an angle that might have been called – were he not a Japanese soldier – jaunty. He would creep up and kill you before you’d even seen him, although you might be alerted to his presence when it was too late by his gratuitously alarming scream of ‘Banzai!’. There was something uncanny about his sudden manifestations; he was like a goblin or a wood sprite, or a jungle nat in human form.

      The jungle might have loomed in the colonial mind as being the dark side of the country, the murky subconscious, but it was not thought of as an arena of conflict. That would be to dignify the jungle in a way it did not deserve. In The Longest Retreat, Tim Carew writes ‘in the summer of 1941 the jungle was not mentioned in polite military circles’. The Japanese could have the jungle if they wanted it, and, in early 1942, Punch magazine depicted Japanese soldiers as monkeys swinging through the trees. The Japanese had established their own jungle warfare school as early as 1934, in their colony of Formosa, where they practised on live Formosans.

      When, in 1941, the inadequate British garrison in Burma was supplemented by the arrival at Fort Dufferin in Mandalay of three battalions of the Indian Infantry Brigade, the men immediately set about training for desert warfare. The main threat to India would surely come from the Middle East. It is true that, before Pearl Harbor, the British had established a so-called Bush Warfare School in the Burmese summer retreat of Maymyo; but as Colonel ‘Mad’ Mike Calvert, Chief Instructor at the School, would write in his autobiography, Fighting Mad (1964), ‘The name Bush Warfare School was in itself a deception. We were not preparing to fight in the Burma jungle; our task was to train officers and N.C.O.s to lead guerrillas in the plains of China, a very different type of warfare.’ Given what was to come in Burma, it would have been better if the school had actually been called the Plains Warfare School, in order to disguise the fact that it was in reality a Jungle Warfare School.

      The danger of meeting the Japanese trumped the consideration that getting from Shinbiwyang, at the start of the Hukawng Valley, to the supposed safety of the route’s terminal point, Margherita, in Assam, was a matter of walking 140 miles over eight jungle ridges, each about 4000 feet high, and crossing seven or eight fast-flowing rivers and numerous streams. British officials in Burma had only ever ventured into the Hukawng Valley in well-equipped and well-armed parties. The last hundred miles were uncharted, and almost uninhabited. Almost. The territory was in fact the home of the Naga tribesmen, known to the British for their great charm and their even greater violence. In particular, they were head-hunters – but Christian head-hunters, since many had been converted by the American Baptist missionaries who, with British encouragement, had been busy on the Indo-Burmese border at the turn of the century.

      Ever since the British first arrived on the border, they had been alternately fighting against and cooperating with the Nagas, who held a romantic appeal to a certain kind of British official/anthropologist as being nobler than the Burmese or the Bengalis, both considered effete and evasive. The British took steps to protect the hill tribes of the Indo-Burmese border, requiring visitors to have a special permit, and these efforts would be increased as Indian independence, and the prospect of homogenization on the sub-continent, loomed after the war. (In Nagaland, Jonathan Glancey writes, ‘We fool ourselves if we think that just because a keen young man staring out from an old photograph in khaki and a sola topee looks like a parody of a bumptious British officer of nearly a century ago, he must have been aloof and narrow minded.’)

      At the time of the First World War, some Naga tribes had been getting on sufficiently well with the British for a unit of Nagas to have fought for the Allies on the Western Front where, it is said, they hunted the heads of German soldiers, who complained to their commanding officers at having to fight ‘savages’. The aim of the head-hunter was to capture the spirit of the deceased, and the skull of a foreigner is ideal, because the spirit does not know the lie of the land, so is less likely to escape having been captured. And any head counts: there is no taboo against taking the heads of women or children.

      In the 1920s, the British criminalized head-hunting. British officials would visit Naga villages where, emboldened by a sense of moral superiority – and fifty supporting rifles – they would opine that the dozen desiccated heads dangling from the head tree in the centre of the village were really nothing to be proud of. But head-hunting by the Nagas – mainly of other Nagas’ heads – continued to the extent that an anti-head-hunting expedition was mounted in 1937. It didn’t work, and the British were still fighting the Nagas about head-hunting and territorial questions in 1939. They were the most notorious of the hill tribes, and British and Indians undertaking the Hukawng route might have wondered whether the murderous or hospitable tendency would be uppermost.

      The other big question was when the monsoon would start. In early May, the atmosphere was oppressive enough to suggest it might be soon, but humidity was better than the things the monsoon would bring, so with luck it would hold off until most of the refugees had completed most of their treks. It did not do so. Whereas the monsoon of 1941 had started on 21 May, that of 1942 started in mid-May. Nobody (apart from the Nagas, who were already there) went into the Hukawng Valley in the monsoon.

      But in 1942 normality was suspended, and those who did undertake the Hukawng trek were assisted by teams of volunteers СКАЧАТЬ