Flight by Elephant Read online

  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’.

  Whereas the Japanese 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 placed along the route, all of whom worked in the same profession: the same one as that from which the volunteers who staffed the Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur 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 – mai
nly 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.’