Flight By Elephant: The Untold Story of World War II’s Most Daring Jungle Rescue
In the summer of 1942, Gyles Mackrell, together with twenty elephants, and a team of mahouts (elephant riders) performed heroic rescue-missions in the hellish jungles of Japanese-occupied Burma.At the age of 53, Mackrell – a decorated First World War pilot, then overseeing tea plantations for a company called Steel Brothers – went into the ‘green hell’ of the Chaukan Pass on the border of North Burma and Assam. Here, in what became a three-phase mission, he rescued Indian army soldiers, together with British civilians and their Indian servants, from the pursuing Japanese, directing his elephants through jungle passes and over raging rivers, through territory previously unseen by any white man and infested with sand flies, horse-flies, mosquitoes and innumerable leeches. Those he saved were all on the point of death from starvation or fever: the whole of that summer was spent in a fight against time.The most astonishing aspect of Gyles Mackrell’s heroics is that they have yet to be fully dramatised. Now in Andrew Martin’s hands they are given the shape of a suspenseful adventure, a wartime rescue whose facts are the stuff of Commando Comic-fiction. But he has also made a classic in the kingdom of animal fiction, with a starring species as awesome as literature’s most powerful horse, as exotic as its most elusive whale, as loveable as its most faithful dog. And finally Martin has pointed a portrait of war and of jungle-survival from an historically under-nourished point of view; a picture of fading British imperial virtues at their most dignified and robust. This book’s appeal will embrace together for the first time those happy disciples of adventure, history and the elephant.
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FLIGHT BY ELEPHANT
The Untold Story of World War II’s Most Daring Jungle Rescue
ANDREW MARTIN
CONTENTS
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
Also by Andrew Martin
(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.
