Flight by Elephant

by Andrew Martin

  A history of No. 31 Squadron states, ‘Forced landings were fraught with great danger, capture resulting in mutilation and death by various very unpleasant methods.’ In his memoir, First in the Indian Skies, N. L. R. Franks gives more detail. ‘I should mention that on the Frontier we carried revolvers to destroy ourselves in the event of a forced landing in tribal territory, as it was said that the tribal women would remove one’s genitals while still alive.’ To guard against this, Mackrell, like all pilots, would have flown with a chit written in Pashto in his tunic pocket. It promised a lot of money for his return safe and intact should he crash, and, because of the nature of the depredation to be guarded against, it was called a ‘goolie chit’.

  In early 1918, Gyles Mackrell was given command of ‘B’ Flight of a sub-division of 31 Squadron, namely No. 114 Squadron, whose badge was a cobra’s head and the motto ‘With Speed I Strike’. From late 1917 to July 1918, this squadron was operating over Baluchistan, which lay south of the North-West Frontier Province, and was then defined, by the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1910, as ‘a country within the borders of British India’, although some of its ethnic groups would have had something to say about that. Britain attempted to govern Baluchistan from Quetta, where No. 114 Squadron was based. From here it conducted operations in the summer of 1918 against the Marri, a hill tribe located in eastern Baluchistan that had a track record of raiding into Sind and the Punjab. Britannica says of this region, ‘Its climate debars it from European occupation. It is a land of dust-storms and poisonous winds; a land where the thermometer never sinks below 100 degrees Fahrenheit in summer, and drops below freezing point in winter; where there is a deadly monotony of dust-coloured scenery for the greater part of the year, with the minimum of rain and the maximum of heat.’ As before, the tribesmen were elusive. A note of April 1918 reads, ‘fifteen flocks of sheep were observed. Five bombs were dropped on them with effect.’ The pilot is not named. Nor was any pilot named in the following: ‘Nothing further of note occurred until November 1918, when the Distinguished Flying Cross was awarded to two of the Squadron’s officers.’ One of those two men was Gyles Mackrell. His DFC was given without citation; that is, no particular reason was given in public for the award of the medal, which may mean it was for general valour.

  In 1917, our young flier had married a Mary Pullen at Newbury in Berkshire. If Mary Pullen seems a fairly common name, Gyles Mackrell does not. Various English telephone directories from the mid-1930s (when telephones became wide-spread) to the mid-1970s contain the name of a Mrs Gyles Mackrell, and this looks somehow like a defiant evocation of a marriage that had ended childless and in divorce, because Gyles Mackrell was in India throughout the inter-war period. Whatever emotional pain is subtly suggested by that directory entry, it must remain private, and if we are looking for a third party in any divorce, then India itself – a country that Mackrell clearly loved – might be put forward as a candidate.

  By 1919, he had returned to civilian life as an area supervisor for Octavius Steel and Company, a managing agency for tea garden owners, and not to be confused with the above-mentioned Steel Brothers. Company head office was in Calcutta, but most of the gardens it managed were in Assam, in whose capital, Shillong, Mackrell bought a house. By the time of the Second World War, Gyles Mackrell would be glancingly referred to in The History of the Indian Tea Industry, by Sir Percival Griffiths, as ‘a well known tea man’.

  War And Tea (Part Two)

  Mackrell and all his colleagues were members of the Indian Tea Association, the trade association for the tea planters of India. It was created in 1888, the original purpose being to stop the planters poaching each other’s coolies. Unlike Mackrell, most of these people had a quiet First World War. In Green Gold: The Empire of Tea, Alan and Iris Macfarlane write, ‘The Great War of 1914–18 produced the largest crop and the highest profits yet achieved. The troops in the trenches needed tea and they were not too bothered about quality … Few planters “joined up” and the War did not touch India generally …’

  In the inter-war years, profits rose, the result of mechanisation and growth of the tea habit in Britain, which by the time of the Second World War was the highest consumer of tea per capita. The planter was insulated by prosperity from many of the hardships inflicted by Mother Nature in Assam. His Indian labourers, the coolies, were not so protected, and the rise of Indian nationalism began to make them feel aggrieved at low pay and high mortality rates. In 1927 a delegation from the British Trades Union Council surveyed the conditions of Indian labour. It was highly critical of the conditions in which the tea industry coolies of Assam lived and worked, which it described as ‘the nearest approach to slavery’. The ITA issued furious denials in the British press, and conditions did vary from garden to garden. The labourers, the planters argued, had good ‘perks’. They were given homes (they lived in rows of huts called ‘labour lines’); the gardens had resident doctors, usually Indian, and schools on site.

  The Second World War did touch the planters, and gave them a chance to restore their dented reputation. Tea was Britain’s first ally in the war effort. About 10 per cent of photographs in any book devoted to the Home Front show people drinking tea, whether served to troops in a NAAFI canteen, or by the Salvation Army in bombed-out streets, or dispensed from watering cans to shelterers in Tube stations. Furthermore, a third of the planters joined up and left their gardens. (There was never any conscription in India.)

  In March 1942 the government of India requested ITA assistance on the Burma–Assam border. The planters and their 450,000 labourers were asked, on a voluntary basis, to build motorable roads. These would be used to let the army out of, then back into, Burma; and to supply China. In addition, they were asked to provide humanitarian assistance to the refugees already flowing along the routes upon which the roads would have to be built.

  There is no doubt the planters did as they were asked, but in Green Gold the Macfarlanes are cynical about their motives. They stress the road building for the military over the humanitarian relief effort, and the suffering of the coolies who built the roads, several thousand of whom would die on the job. The Macfarlanes assert of the ITA that ‘… right from the start it was less selfless patriotism than necessity that dictated their actions’. The ITA’s labourers were being poached by the military, and for this its members were compensated. The compensation must not be jeopardized by any foot dragging on the relief effort. Furthermore, the war boosted demand for tea. The Macfarlanes conclude that the ITA ‘must avoid the stigma of being seen to be unwilling, from selfish motives, to help the war effort’.

  But surely a desire to do the right thing often co-exists with a willingness to be seen to do the right thing. The story of the two main northerly evacuation routes from Burma is a story of humanitarian effort as much as military logistics. In the case of the first route – Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur – a rough track would be widened to make a motorable, if hair-raising, 200-mile road. This effort co-existed with provision of succour for the refugees. In the case of the second route, along the Hukawng Valley, the humanitarian work caused the building of what would become the Ledo Road to be suspended.

  There was a certain constancy to the staging posts established by the ITA volunteers along the routes. They combined eastern and British hospitality: eastern in that the essential structures resembled the zayats (bamboo shelters with palm-leaf roofs) that occur in the remotest spots of Burma, built by locals for the convenience of travellers; British in the determination with which a certain warm brown beverage was dispensed. Here is a quote from an unnamed witness in Dorman-Smith’s Evacuation Report: ‘The camps consisted of a series of bamboo barracks with well thatched roofs and floors built raised off the ground. At the entrance to each camp there was on one side a stall where tea was kept permanently brewing and on the other side was a dispensary with a doctor in attendance.’

  Note that the tea comes before the doctor. The British faced, in the Japanese, a tea-drinking enemy, but th
e British considered tea to be on their side. The symbolic role of tea to the British is that it asserts normality. That is why it is always served after an accident. Part of the appeal of tea is that its aims are modest. Its serving involves a reassuring but simple ritual, easily mastered. Tea provides caffeine, but not as much as coffee; it is a narcotic, but not to the extent of alcohol. It tastes better then water, which has to be boiled, and therefore purified, when tea is made. This is the greatest service of tea to humanity: it necessitates the boiling of water. The British exploited Indian labour in their tea gardens, but in inflicting the tea-drinking habit on the indigenous population – which they made the second largest consumer after the home country – the British did India a favour. Furthermore, the British style of tea drinking, with milk and sugar, increases the energy and protein value. The more scientists understand tea, the more virtuous it seems to become. It contains beneficial vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. It may offer protection against strokes and cancer. Tea leaves applied externally can be used as antiseptic, as any monkey in the jungle knows.

  ‘On the road in-between the camps at about four mile intervals,’ the witness continued, ‘were ration dumps where coolies were sorted out and sent up the road with the supplies of rice, dhall, atta, bully beef, sausages and tea, which comprised our rations. At these ration camps tea was always ready for the wet and weary travellers.’

  There is something redolent of cosier outdoor scenarios from the mother country. The zayats did resemble shaggy bus shelters. And there is an echo of the dispensation of refreshments along the track of a cross-country run or a paper chase – kindness combined with a chivvying along. Refugees were ‘patched up’, fed only a little at a time. The mantra was ‘Keep them hungry, keep them moving’. In the early days, a little rum might be mixed in with the refugees’ tea, but it was discovered that this could be fatal. Cigarettes were not withheld. The smoking of cigarettes to calm the nerves was considered just as sensible as drinking tea – which is to say very. The tea-planter heartiness, denigrated by the more refined members of the Indian Civil Service, was now an asset. Dorman-Smith quotes an observer of the ITA’s effort:

  The work of their officers and doctors (and labourers too) at the forward camps, living as they did for weeks at a time in appalling sanitary conditions, in great discomfort, with hardly more than coolie rations, handling mobs of terrified and therefore sometimes intractable refugees, with cheery sympathy but with firmness, is a fine record of which the Association may be proud. In many cases those staffing the forward camps suffered constant ill-health, but they carried on and hardly a man went sick.

  But all this stiff-upper-lip stuff disregards the horror.

  A high percentage of the dead were found lying on their backs with their legs drawn up and their buttocks bare. It was said that 50 per cent of refugees had diarrhoea. In the later stages of the exodus, when the frailer refugees were coming through, almost all had dysentery. There was little solidarity on the routes. Sauve qui peut was about right. Older and slower refugees were abandoned by the faster and younger ones; children were left behind by parents, wives by husbands and vice versa.

  Army officers recalling the evacuation tend to suggest that their men kept ranks. But in his report, Dorman-Smith wrote, ‘The worst feature of the Hukawng Valley evacuation was the misbehaviour of some of the troops, British, Indian, Chinese, they looted everywhere and everything … the Kachins were reduced to a state of starvation through the looting of their godowns and the mischievous destruction of their crops.’

  Those of the Chinese forces who took the evacuation routes to India were brave but wild men in uniforms of ill-fitting denim without badges of rank, and wearing sandals, which they preferred to boots. The Chinese private was paid about two shillings a month and had no supply lines to speak of. So he stole what he needed. Rice dumps were plundered; the radiators of army vehicles were drained – because the Chinese soldier liked to drink his water hot. Then again, British and Indian soldiers on the walkout also stole what they needed. In the British Army this is called ‘winning’ an article … and how is stealing to be defined when there is no rule of law?

  On the walkout, all soldiers were reduced to the status of infantrymen. When those soldiers who normally proceeded in tanks, trucks or cars turned to their infantrymen colleagues and asked, ‘How do we get to India?’, the latter are said to have taken pleasure in replying: ‘You walk, mate.’

  To look briefly at the two main routes …

  The core of the Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur route was a rough track stretching 130 miles from Imphal to Dimapur. Along this, the ITA had established its camps while coolie labour widened the track. Most of the refugees were ferried along this road in lorries supplied and driven by tea planters or their Indian labourers. The more southerly part of the route was fraught in a different way.

  The first fifty or so miles, from the border town of Tamu, required more labour-intensive road building, there being less of a track to begin with. The refugees had to walk along this stretch, even as the road making proceeded. There was no jungle here, but arid, rocky mountains, and the road being scraped into these was just a winding ledge of scree.

  The oil-lit receiving camp at Dimapur was next to the railway station, but as engineers expanded the sidings, so, too, the cemetery beyond the camp grew every week. It was said that grown men would collapse with relief at the sound of the locomotives. But they were not about to board the Brighton Belle. The refugees would travel in rough and crowded goods wagons. There were no lavatories: the facilities consisted of ropes dangling from the side of the wagons, to which the refugees were expected to cling, and so the defecatory nightmare continued. But many refugees could not be put onto the trains without treatment in the hospital camp. And however busy its doctors, the Dimapur mosquitoes were busier still.

  In May 1942, Dimapur was like a nightmarish parody of a Victorian town, with its vastly overworked postmaster, railway staff and gravediggers. It was a dispersal camp, not a rest camp, and the rule of thumb was that anyone who stayed there for three days would die. The superintendent, Alexander Beattie, manager of the Woka Tea Estate in Assam, has been described as ‘a practical-minded Scot’, and he needed to be. He played host to 150,000 people, most of them ill in some way. He had brought with him the lorry from his own tea garden (about fifty miles from Dimapur), and seventy of his labourers. He ferried in vegetables, eggs and milk from his own, and neighbouring, tea gardens. His chief lieutenant was the wife of an officer in the ITA’s Scientific Institute, and she ran a team of planters’ wives and their servants.

  The Dimapur camp abutted a school building, and that was needed for storing the food, so the camp itself – and the hospital it incorporated – was of bamboo and palm thatch. There were no walls, but then the nocturnal temperature never dropped below seventy degrees Fahrenheit. The monsoon was coming, certainly, and the rain would then blow in, but it was assumed the flow of refugees would stop when that happened. But the monsoon came early and the people kept coming. Soon the floor was six inches of mud, the bamboo mats floating upon it and sanitation a lost cause. We might picture Beattie walking under the palm-leaf roof of the camp by night, the oil lamps swinging as they are buffeted by the monsoon, notebook in hand, perpetually organizing; the tea planters were great organizers, great logistics men.

  On 10 May, the town of Imphal was bombed by the Japanese, and it is said that 60,000 died as a direct or indirect result. The raid sent a surge of refugees towards Beattie, who was beginning to run a temperature himself. He would die from typhoid on 12 July. The bombing of Imphal was the beginning of the end of Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur as a route for civilians, and the relief operation would be wound up by the end of June.

  The Hukawng Valley route became the default option after the bombing of Imphal, even though it had been described, on that improvised road sign of April, as one of the ‘Valleys of Death’, and here, too, a road was being built, or at least planned: the Ledo Road, the northe
rly replacement for the Burma Road. The Indian Tea Association volunteers and their paid tea garden labourers were supposed to have been assisted in its construction by a Chinese labour force sent by Chiang Kai-shek, but such was the chaos on the Burmese side that it was not possible to muster any such force, and work on the road was put off. (The Ledo Road would be built from December 1942 by American soldiers – mainly African Americans, 1000 of whom would die – and 35,000 local tribesmen and tea garden labourers, many more thousands of whom would also die.)

  As mentioned, the starting point in Burma for the Hukawng refugees was the village of Shinbiwyang. There was a full ITA camp roughly every dozen miles thereafter, with sub-camps – manned zyats – in between. Each main camp had a small hospital, and those on the Burmese side carried out a programme of inoculation against cholera, which prevented an epidemic. The first goal for the refugees, and their reward for crossing the eight mountains and eight rivers in spate, was a village called Lekhpani, where the ITA had established its forward receiving camp. This was known as the ‘Tea Pot Pub’ because of the meal refugees were served on arrival: tea, cheese and jam on biscuits. The sight of a tea pot must have symbolized the return to civilization.