Beyond Lion Rock

by Gavin Young

  ‘Were you never worried, Vera?’

  ‘I tell you, we were too busy to worry.’

  Too busy to worry in the air, that is – but on the ground one thing made them worry a good deal: the constant possibility of offending Syd de Kantzow. Vera recalled, ‘When I worked in our ticket office in the Pen, Syd and Roy Farrell used to come in. Roy, very tall, slim, polite, was always smiling. Syd was very strict. You sat up straighter. You always wanted to be neat and tidy with Syd.’ And as she spoke, two visions came to my mind: the pukka wartime Syd in a well-pressed drill uniform; and the new Syd in his Hong Kong sales office, the respected martinet, master of himself and his own airline, controlling by example men, women and a fleet of expensive machines. ‘He didn’t talk to you much, you know – he would just look across at you from a table in the office and say quite quietly something like, “Get hold of Marie Bok, will you, please?” – by telephone to the Chater Road office, he meant.’ Vera made a wry expression and laughed. ‘Believe me, you didn’t wait for him to say it twice.’

  *

  ‘An enigma,’ that’s what Chic Eather, who respected him, said of Sydney de Kantzow. And looking back at Syd’s unusual story, not having known him, I am reminded of that literary classic of the 1930s, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Night Flight, and of its leading character, Rivière, the introspective, enigmatic director of a South American airmail network, a driven, solitary man who tolerated no flinching and could seem severe, even inhuman. Rivière in reality was anything but insensitive: launching his beloved planes ‘like blind arrows at night’s obstacles’, he needed as much courage to issue orders as his pilots needed to carry them out. Yet whenever Rivière entered his office, in overcoat and hat ‘like the eternal traveller he always seemed to be’, a sudden zeal possessed the staff: the secretaries began bustling about, the typewriters began to click. I see Syd as Rivière – someone who constantly reminded himself, ‘You must keep your place. Tomorrow you may have to order this pilot out on a dangerous flight. He will have to obey.’ Behind the enigma Chic and others tried to fathom, behind the ‘good fellow’ and the moody, retiring disposition, the real Syd de Kantzow might easily have been silently agreeing with Rivière – ‘Love the men you command – but without telling them.’

  CHAPTER 7

  CPA’s ‘Burma campaign’ had a distinctly Errol Flynn atmosphere about it, even if the Company’s fliers were not actually at war with anyone. It was certainly an adventure and there were plenty of flying bullets; too many for some. It began in early 1948 and was to continue until the announcement that enough was enough at the Company’s Annual General Meeting in April 1950 – nearly two years after a new Cathay Pacific Airways had been born under the aegis of the great Hong Kong-based commercial house of Butterfield & Swire. So it covered a longish period of time.

  ‘Swashbuckling’ is a good description of the Burma story: it has a wonderful Boys’ Own Paper air about it: you expect to find Biggles in it as well as Errol Flynn. More than any other part of the pre-Swire history of Cathay did it qualify de Kantzow’s air crews for the nickname ‘Syd’s Pirates’. In November 1947, Millard Nasholds – a man so laid back (as they didn’t say then) that Chic Eather believed ‘he could sleep on a barbed wire fence in a typhoon’ – arranged for a private Burmese company called Air Burma to charter CPA planes to help solve that newborn country’s transport problems. And no one, certainly not he, could have foreseen that Syd’s planes and crews would soon be caught in the crossfire of a lively civil war.

  Burma had left the British Empire in June 1947 to become a republic, with a Prime Minister in Rangoon called Thakin Nu, and a Deputy Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief called Ne Win, who would later rule the nation as President for many years. The new government had problems. At first the fledgling Burmese Army, largely composed of Christian Karens, a stocky warrior people who dwelt in the eastern uplands and despised the ruling Buddhist Burmans of the plain, found itself fighting a haphazard hit-and-run war with at least two indigenous Communist guerrilla organizations. Quite soon insurgency moved into a far more serious phase when the Karens themselves rebelled against Thakin Nu’s central government. The Communists alone, well equipped with a variety of discarded Second World War weapons, had created a major inland transport problem by blowing up railway tracks and bridges, mining roads and, equally important in a country that depends a great deal on water transport, by shooting up barges and sampans on the Irrawaddy and Chindwin Rivers. Now, with the Karens in revolt, the situation was critical. Would Cathay Pacific – for a very reasonable fee – provide the government with some air transport? Cathay Pacific would and did.

  To start with, Roy and Syd bought two Avro Anson transports, relatively luxurious aircraft capable of operating into short up-country airstrips. The Burmese airstrips were not only short, they were often little more than muddy clearings left over from the recent war with the Japanese. Even so, there weren’t enough of them and extra strips had to be created. This was done with eight-foot-long, eighteen-inch-wide perforated steel platforms known as PSP, an invaluable legacy of wartime invention. As Chic Eather says, PSP could transform a soggy paddy field into a usable runway in a matter of minutes.

  Eather, as like Biggles as any of CPA’s daredevils, loved Burma – but not everybody in Cathay fell in love with it. It is easy to see why. The two Ansons and their crews were based at Rangoon in barely tolerable conditions, and pilots’ tours of duty were limited to three weeks. Those who stuck it out there boast about it over their beer to this day like proud men obsessed.

  Take Bob Smith. He went to Burma as Station Engineer – indeed he says he was the only licensed engineer at Rangoon – and describes a startling situation there. There were no hangars for a start. ‘A hangar? Never!’ He throws up his hands in derision. ‘Nothing but a small storeroom. We did all our work out in the open – and you know what the monsoons are like. We had to put up a sheet of green canvas and stick a light under it to see by. Talk about hot! A million insects got under there with you.’

  Bob had been with Trans-Australia Airlines in Melbourne when a friend said, ‘Why not join Cathay Pacific for £32 a week?’ He was only earning £11 a week then, so he moved over to Cathay in Hong Kong and thence to his stint in Burma. Bob is a big, tough, no-nonsense old Aussie, with a collection of Cathay mementoes in his bungalow on Lake Macquarie outside Sydney that could fill a fair-sized museum, and a memory of Burma he will happily share with anyone prepared to drink beer and eat plum cake with him and his wife. One recollection has never faded – that of his living and eating quarters (‘If you could call ’em that,’ he said). The address came out pat, as if he was giving me his own. ‘102 University Avenue, Rangoon. That was the mess. And a den of iniquity, I can tell you.’ Photographs of it showed a crumbling, colonial-style porticoed entrance, a high ceiling, and off-duty CPA pilots with bare, damp chests and long, old-style, wide-legged shorts, lolling in wicker chairs reading mail from home under inadequate fans. It was, Bob says, ‘the only place anywhere you could catch amoebic and bacillary dysentery at one and the same meal. Although you could get equally exotic bugs at the real Palace of Germs, as we called it – the restaurant at the airport. As for our office – 4 Strand Road behind the Strand Hotel! Big rats. Big girls, too.’

  But there were more serious hazards, potentially lethal ones, in the countryside – particularly with the Karens in rebellion. ‘We were really joining in a civil war,’ Bob Smith says. ‘That was the British Embassy’s view, anyway.’ And the Embassy was right. Many of the air operations Cathay Pacific undertook were purely humanitarian – dropping salt, rice and flour to remote villages or army posts cut off by Karen or Communist guerrillas. But too often cargoes turned out to be soldiers, weapons and ammunition needed by the Burmese army for immediate military operations. On one terrifying occasion at least, a cargo of pre-war gelignite was wheeled up sweating with age and therefore so unstable that a goodish bump might easily have set it off. The pilot, Captain John P
aish, promptly ordered it to be off-loaded despite hysterical threats by a Burmese officer to shoot the entire Cathay crew.

  It was not long before the two Ansons proved too small and too underpowered to carry the large loads of military equipment that the Burmese government wanted transported round the country. In any case one of them was written off by the fleet captain, Morrie Lothian, when he undershot the runway at a small field on the coast of the Bay of Bengal. The second Anson was promptly withdrawn from use and left on a disused runway at Rangoon. Syd then sent three DC-3 Dakotas – the old dependables – into the firing line. One of them was Betsy.

  That the war risks were no joke can be seen from the number of times Cathay’s aircraft were hit by rebel bullets. Captain Jim Harper, Cathay’s Operations Manager in Burma, got a bullet through the foot and another through his lower intestine while flying his Dakota at what he imagined was a safe height. How he managed to land it no one will ever quite understand. Sometimes Bob Smith worked on aircraft well into the night, with tracers and flares all over the place, and once a bullet ricocheted onto the steps where he was sitting. ‘I kept it for some time,’ he says, ‘as a souvenir.’ Bo Egan, another engineer, once drove a Dodge truck to the airport under heavy Karen fire, desperately waving an Australian flag as a sign of peace and neutrality. Naturally some Cathay crews balked at all this; it was not what they had signed on for. Others thrived on danger and look back on Burma with affection.

  One pilot who joyfully joined Cathay at this point from Air Burma was Dave Smith, an ex-RAF man who had flown Mosquitoes and later DC-3s during the Berlin Airlift; he became Cathay’s Operations Manager in Hong Kong and a director. Dave had piloted the Deputy Prime Minister, Ne Win, about the country and even survived a bad attack of amoebic dysentery. He remembers that when Cathay planes in Burma carried ‘humane’ cargoes – food for example – CPA stencils were used on the fuselages; when the same aircraft carried troops and ammunition, possibly the same afternoon, they were marked with Air Burma stencils, although, absurdly, the Hong Kong registration letters remained the same. In Hong Kong, Uncle Moe Moss worried that planes registered in the Colony were becoming part of the Burmese government’s war effort, and that their crews would be taken for common-or-garden gunrunners.

  One thing was obvious – before long the question of danger money would come up. Sure enough, a group letter was drafted in Bob Smith’s sweaty little office and sent to Hong Kong.

  ‘Danger money! What’s all this about danger money?’ Syd snapped – but he dispatched Captain Dick Hunt, his Operations Manager, to Burma to investigate this preposterous proposal. Chic Eather relates what happened.

  On the morning of 5 March he arrived at Mingaladon [Rangoon] to fly out with Captain John Riordan and see conditions for himself. He unceremoniously told John to ‘hop into the right-hand seat’ and they took off for Meiktila in eastern Burma. All the way he lectured John on ‘how bloody frightened you blokes have become, using every pretext to lever more money off a struggling impoverished company.’ At Meiktila the airfield signals were correct, indicating the place was still under government control. As the engines stopped he said, ‘Look, John. Must be a VIP coming back with us. We’ve got a guard of honour.’

  John looked and said, ‘Yes, we have. And they look like Karens.’

  ‘Bloody rot!’ replied Hunt.

  Riordan went down to open the cargo door and as it swung back he received a precise salute from a diminutive officer whose serious expression was replaced by a grin as he said, ‘I am a Karen.’

  ‘I thought so,’ Riordan said, returning the salute. He returned to the cockpit with the good news.

  Hunt, in a subdued whisper, asked what they should do.

  ‘Just what they tell us,’ Riordan said.

  The Karens locked the crew in a room…. At dawn the officer came and casually told them his assignment for the day was to capture Maymyo, about 65 miles north-north-east of Meiktila on the other side of Mandalay. Hunt and Riordan, he said, had been given the honour of assisting. They would fly troops to the airfield at Anisakan whence his men would proceed to Maymyo five miles on. They would go at once.

  ‘What if we refuse?’ Hunt snarled. The still-smiling officer unholstered his revolver, blew down the barrel and said quietly,

  ‘Now, Captain, I hope you are not going to be difficult.’

  The Karens captured Anisakan calmly and casually, according to Chic Eather’s account, and then moved on to take the important hill town of Maymyo. Hunt and Riordan were not asked for any more help. They spent two further days as honoured guests of the Karens, and when they were released found their DC-3 had been spring-cleaned and shone like a new pin. Attaching Riordan’s Cathay Pacific wing to his own breast, the smiling Karen officer said, ‘When we capture Rangoon we’ll make you the first Marshal of the Karen Air Force.’ Chic Eather ends the story: ‘Captain Hunt returned to Hong Kong and reported that the Burma operation did entail a certain amount of risk to the crews. They all got a 50 per cent pay rise and something like 30 rupees an hour danger money.’

  The Cathay crews in Burma had to put up with all sorts of other hazards: atrocious weather, for instance, and, as Dave Smith recalls, the habit of certain ‘little Burmese rascals who would wait till you were going through the engine checks in the cockpit, then slip a few friends on board, pocketing the money. Once, finding it difficult to lift off the aircraft, I stopped and found fifty on board. We were licensed to carry thirty-eight or so. There was probably a crate of arms, too.’ Perhaps John Riordan was a victim of such sharp practice, or perhaps it was a drastic shift in wind direction that made him ‘run out of airstrip’ on take-off at Anisakan. At any rate, he wrote off a DC-3 and left Burma and Cathay at the same time.

  Before me lies a photograph taken by Bob Smith many years ago. It was sent by a former Cathay radio operator called Peter Smith, and shows a typical Burmese airstrip at that time: an almost treeless plain, wiry grass, a group of Burmese admiring the streamlined nose and shiny engine cowlings of a parked Cathay Pacific DC-3, and, in the foreground, in the shadow of the port wing, two barrels of fuel and two fire extinguishers crammed into an ox-cart, the ‘engines’ of which – two yoked oxen – are sleepily ignoring the camera. ‘Refuelling detail. Upcountry Burma’ is written on it in pencil, and it reminds me of Betsy’s narrow escape from fiery oblivion in 1949 near the Chinese border at Bhamo. Morrie Lothian was the pilot, and he was starting Betsy’s engines with no co-pilot to help him. Betsy’s starboard engine burst into flames during the starting procedure, but because he was alone and in the pilot’s left-hand seat Lothian was unable to see this. Chic Eather says, ‘Morrie then taxied the now merrily burning aircraft the full length of the runway, turned into the wind, and presumably made the mandatory magneto check. Just as he was about to commence the takeoff run, the starboard engine fell off …’ In due course Betsy was fitted with a new engine and Bob Smith, with amazing ingenuity, attached a new starboard wing.

  Of course, there were laughs in Burma, too. How could there not have been with such a Laurel and Hardy pair as the outsize Captain John Moxham (‘Mox the Ox’) and slim First Officer Mike Russell, who detested each other but time and again, by some quirk of destiny, found themselves flying side by side. When their mutual antipathy was really on the boil they would only communicate in the cockpit by scribbling notes to each other – even to such orders as ‘Gear up’ or ‘Gear down’. On good days, according to Bob Smith who flew with them as Flight Engineer, they were able to channel their intense dislike into a dialogue of exquisite politeness – thus:

  Mox to Mike (in an exaggerated whisper): ‘Michael, don’t you think the cylinder-head temperature on the port side is a little high?’

  Mike: ‘Yes, John old boy, I do believe you are right. What would you like it to read?’

  Mox (after considering the matter): ‘Well, Michael, the starboard engine is reading 190 degrees. What about making them even?’

  Mike (having adjusted th
e output reading to the desired figure and beaming at his commander): ‘I do hope that is satisfactory, John, old chap.’

  Mox: ‘Ah, thank you, Mike. That’s much better. I feel happier now.’

  And it was Bob Smith – although few had thought he had a syllable of poetry in him – who put Rudyard Kipling in his place on a world-famous point of literary geography. Chic Eather tells the story well.

  Captain Johnnie Paish and Smith were flying home to Mingaladon at about 8,000 feet, when out of nowhere and without preamble, Smith declared, ‘Rudyard Kipling is wrong.’ Paish didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he recited: ‘By the old Moulmein pagoda, looking eastward to the sea.’ He said that if the pagoda faced eastward it would face right into the middle of China. It couldn’t possibly face the sea. He raised such an argument that Paish got fed up, and said they would go across and see. He landed at Moulmein on the other side of the Gulf of Martaban and proved Smithy right and Kipling wrong. Smithy was so pleased he bought them a curry lunch at a little native eatery just below the Pagoda. The meal was first class. When they went to re-start, they couldn’t get a peep out of the starboard engine, and found that a Karen bullet had sheared the connecting drive of the starter. A replacement starter had to be flown over next morning.