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

CONTENTS

Title Page FLIGHT BY ELEPHANT The Untold Story of World War II’s Most Daring Jungle Rescue

Maps

Principal Characters

Author’s Note

Introduction

Millar and Leyden: The Men Without Elephants

The Languorous Dream

The Dapha River

The Red-Hot Buddhas

The Man in the River

Beyond Mandalay

The Railway Party

The ‘Chaukan Club’ Sets Off

The Footprint

The Man With Elephants

The Boy Who Took Acidalia trigeminata

Sir John Meets the Commandos

The Wizard’s Domain

A Bad Start for Mackrell

War And Tea (Part One)

War And Tea (Part Two)

Captain Wilson Sets Out

Elephant Trouble for Mackrell

Mackrell Reaches the Dapha River

Sir John Encounters His Principal Enemy

The Man in Sunglasses

Mackrell Consolidates at the Dapha River

Captain Wilson Arrives at the Dapha

Havildar Iman Sing

The Commandos Despair of Reaching the Dapha

Grand Tiffins and the Squits

The Drop

Momentous Decisions

Mackrell Returns Temporarily to Civilization

Mackrell in Shillong and Calcutta

The Society of Tough Guys

A Face Like Wood: Dharramsing Decides

A Delivery of Mail

A Long Wait

Subsequently (Part One)

Subsequently (Part Two)

Late Period Mackrell

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also by Andrew Martin

Copyright

About the Publisher

(In approximate order of appearance)

Guy Millar: a tea planter. Early in the war, he had been engaged on secret ‘government work’, surveying the terrain of Upper Burma.

Goal Miri: an Assamese elephant tracker, and Millar’s servant.

John Leyden: a colonial administrator in Upper Burma; owner of a pregnant spaniel bitch called Misa.

Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith: Governor of Burma, the elegant product of Harrow, Cambridge, Sandhurst.

George Rodger: British photographer and correspondent for the American magazine, Life .

In ‘The Railway Party’ …

– Sir John Rowland: Chief Railway Commissioner of Burma (the top man on Burma Railways). In 1942, he was sixty years old, and working on ‘the Burma–China construction’, a projected railway between Burma and China. He was the leader of the ‘railway party’ of refugees, and he drove them on hard.

– Edward Lovell Manley: Chief Engineer of the Eastern Bengal Railway, he assisted Sir John on the Burma–China project. In the jungle, Sir John designated Manley his ‘number two’. He was fifty-six years old.

– Eric Ivan Milne: District Traffic Superintendent of Burma State Railways; keen amateur cricketer and committed Christian.

– C. L. Kendall: railway surveyor on the Burma–China project.

– Captain A. O. Whitehouse: officer of the Royal Engineers.

– N. Moses: enigmatic Dutch railway surveyor, sometime magician and ‘international boy scout’.

– E. Eadon: Anglo-Indian ‘anti-malarial inspector’ on the Burma–China project.

– Dr Burgess-Barnett: medical doctor and Superintendent of Rangoon Zoological Gardens. In the jungle, Sir John designated him ‘PMO’ (Principal Medical Officer).

In ‘Rossiter’s Party’ (sub-group of the above) …

– Edward Wrixon Rossiter: Colonial administrator of Upper Burma; member of the Anglo-Irish gentry, accomplished linguist and maverick.

– Nang Hmat: Rossiter’s pregnant Burmese wife.

– John Rossiter: six-month-old baby son of Edward Rossiter and Nang Hmat.

Ronald Jardine: white-bearded devout Catholic; senior employee of Lever Brothers, soap manufacturers.

Frank Kingdon-Ward: botanist, explorer and loner. (He bore the nickname ‘Old Kingdom Come’.)

Gyles Mackrell: fifty-three-year-old former fighter pilot, supervisor of tea plantations, elephant expert; the leader of the rescue.

Chaochali: Assamese; Mackrell’s chief ‘elephant man’.

‘The Commandos’ …

– Ritchie Gardiner: Scottish timber merchant and jungle wallah (a man adept at jungle-living). As one of the ‘last ditchers’ he had helped blow up the infrastructure of Rangoon to keep it from the Japanese.

– Lieutenant Eric McCrindle: timber merchant and jungle wallah.

– Captain Ernest Boyt: as above. Very gung-ho; willing to march through uncharted jungle with ‘just biscuits and cheese’.

– Second Lieutenant Bill Howe: rice trader (therefore not a jungle wallah); at thirty, he was the youngest of the Commandos, and the most ebullient.

A unit of the Special Operations network called The Oriental Mission, and a sub-group of the Commandos:

– Major Lindsay

– Captain Cumming

– Corporal Sawyer

Captain Fraser: escapee from Japanese captivity; he lost his glasses in the process.

Sergeant Pratt: escaped with the above, losing his boots in the process.

Captain Reg Wilson: tea planter, and officer in a special operations unit called V Force. A handsome, chain-smoking young Yorkshireman who ‘loved sport and loved action’, Wilson was dispatched by the British authorities to replace Mackrell as head of the rescue.

Dr Bardoloi: Wilson’s Principal Medical Officer.

Havildar Iman Sing: Gurkha sergeant and jungle wallah.

Wing Commander George Chater: RAF pilot, sometime dinner guest of Sir John Rowland.

Dispatched to attempt another rescue after Mackrell abandoned the Dapha camp: