Flight by Elephant (6 page)

There are, but even Captain Tainsh couldn’t list many in the Bengal Club of Calcutta, and he was a man obsessed with emergency nutrition, to the point where his autobiography is entitled
Fungi in Peace and War, 1917–47
.

The fact is that Millar and Leyden did not have time to be smoking meat or nibbling plants to see whether they were poisonous. Instead they were in a great hurry, because they formed an advance guard, a breakaway from a party of British and Indian evacuees whose ability to proceed through the mountainous jungles of the Chaukan Pass and beyond was considered less than that of Millar and Leyden. In short, if Millar and Leyden did not get through, many people behind them would die.

In coming to Myitkyina, the British had reached the end of the line – literally, in that it was the last stop on the sparse Burmese railway network. It was also a dead end. Mountainous jungle lay to the north and west, occupied China to the east, Japanese soldiers to the south. The only way out short of entering those jungles was by air, and there
was
an airfield outside the town. It was just a clearing in the trees with a bamboo hut, like a cricket pavilion. Evacuation flights – to Dinjan, Assam – had been shifted there as airfields to the south were successively abandoned to the Japanese.

Life
correspondent George Rodger had stopped off at Myitkyina airfield before he himself walked out of Burma. He took a photograph and sent it to
The Times
where, to the annoyance of the British government, it was published on 15 April 1942. 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:

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’.

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,

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.