Flight by Elephant

by Andrew Martin

  Eadon and Moses had entered a camp where tea was once again drunk without milk or sugar; there was little else but rice left, and much of that was mouldy. Almost all Wilson’s political porters had absconded. On the 29th, most of the remaining porters were sent back to Miao for more rations. None of those sent would return.

  As mentioned, Major Lindsay of the Oriental Mission had departed the Dapha camp on 21 June, with his leg up on a special elephant pad. He intended to pull some strings in order to get a food drop started from the air, and he was armed with an accurate map position for the Dapha camp, and a more or less accurate one for Sir John and the Rossiters (provided they stayed put). As further moral blackmail he planned to invoke Rossiter’s pregnant wife, Nang Hmat, and her baby boy, John.

  Mackrell and Wilson obviously had faith in Lindsay’s persuasive powers because, within two days of his departure, they had laid out on their unfurled white ‘T’ the message ‘DROP MESSAGE HERE’. They made the letters using small stones; each one was about six feet high, but they did not need to write out those three words in full. Instead, they used a three-letter code taken from the code book used in that particular theatre of war, and designed to speed up the sending of Morse messages. Pre-arranged three-letter codes existed for such elemental messages as ‘DROP MESSAGE HERE’, and, as a pilot trained in the days before radio, Mackrell would certainly have known them. As well as bags of food, they wanted information about what, if anything, the authorities intended to do about Sir John and the Rossiters.

  The thirtieth of June was fine, in fact very hot. Even so, Mackrell kept to his tent. In mid-morning a plane came over the camp. It ignored them; it was the Chungking Taxi. In the afternoon, another plane came over. It was a DC3 like the Chungking Taxi, but this had no Chinese writing on it. Instead it carried the RAF roundel, and the RAF called their DC3s Dakotas. The Dakota circled the camp twice, then sacks began spilling from it. The men at the camp had to dodge the sacks, but nobody tried to catch one (as one all too grateful refugee in the Hukawng Valley had done: he died six weeks later in hospital). One sack landed with a tremendous whump two yards from the tent in which Mackrell lay. A few seconds later, another landed directly on top of the first. Mackrell put his head out of the tent, and in spite of everything he looked pleased. It was like Christmas. Wilson counted sixty-nine sacks on the ground, and each one contained another sack, folded over, with food in it: tea, sugar, rice, tins of sausages, baked beans, Marmite, Klim, cigarettes. Wilson wrote, ‘About 30% of tins broken, but it’s a good lot just the same.’ Actually, having the previous day been on the point of starvation, he now became something of a gourmand: ‘Only 1 tin of marmalade, which is a pity …’ Some of the sacks landed on the ‘DROP MESSAGE HERE’ ground, but there was no message in any of them.

  We will follow that Dakota as it continues east.

  The pilot was Wing Commander George Chater, and he had taken off half an hour or so before from Dinjan airbase near Dibrugarh, Assam. After the Dapha drop, he followed the course of the Noa Dehing for sixty miles or so, looking out – in conference with his navigator – for its junction with the Tilung Hka. Here they turned left, descending over jungle towards what looked like a tribal village: a collection of bamboo and palm-leaf huts, two smouldering piles of bamboo, a white sheet on a bamboo flagpole. Chater descended to about a hundred feet; he circled deafeningly four times, so that people began to come out of the huts – thin, dazed people, British, Indian, Anglo-Indian, and in the case of one woman holding a baby, Burmese. The wing commander couldn’t help noticing that falling sacks had almost killed some men at the Dapha camp, and so he was now alerting these new recipients of his largesse. As a further precaution, he planned to drop the sacks on the margins of the camp, half in the jungle. He had also noticed that many of the earlier sacks had burst, so he descended lower, to about a hundred feet, apparently skimming the tops of the tall trees (the pilots regarded a jungle drop as a sporting challenge, and it was not unusual for Dakotas that had done them to return to base with foliage in their undercarriages). The men in the cabin behind Chater opened the side door, and begin hauling and kicking out the sacks.

  The next day, 1 July, was still hot, but raining again. At 6 a.m., the Commandos left the Dapha camp for Miao, riding on three elephants spared by Mackrell from ferry duty on the Dapha. Kendall, the surveyor, had left earlier in the morning, carried on a litter by four of the remaining Dapha porters. On 3 July, Wing Commander Chater once again approached the Dapha camp in his Dakota. He dropped more sacks, and Captain Wilson noted, ‘It looks as though Major Lindsay has been busy.’ It seems the man who had left Dapha for Miao and civilization on 21 June had indeed pulled strings, and he had pulled them hard. This time, Wilson was pleased to see tinned and dried fruit in some of the sacks, this being ‘just what Mackrell wants’. Mackrell had been lamenting the absence of fruit in the camp, but the man himself was still keeping largely to his tent with a high temperature and a severe headache. Dr Bardoloi had told Wilson that Mackrell ‘did not react to quinine in the normal way’. If he had done, he would have been better within a week, but he had now been ill for ten days. And just because the quinine was not helping him does not mean that it wasn’t producing its familiar, charming side effects: persistent nausea, headaches, ringing in the ears. Wilson himself was also feeling ill, and his arms and legs had gone septic with leech bites.

  As before, there was no message from Wing Commander Chater, so Mackrell and Wilson still did not know whether Sir John and the Rossiters had been fed as well. (What Mackrell and Wilson had received in the 1 July drop was a teddy bear, presumably meant for Nang Hmat’s baby.) Also as before, Wing Commander Chater flew on east, following the big river. Sir John’s camp was found again, and more sacks or, as Sir John wrote, ‘Manna from the skies’, were sent down. He does not say ‘from heaven’. Sir John had disapproved when his colleague Eric Ivan Milne had proposed saying prayers for their deliverance. According to Milne, Sir John ‘couldn’t pray if he tried’, but after Chater’s first drop he had made what Milne described as ‘a sort of speech thanking the Almighty’, and he hadn’t objected when Milne had then led communal singing of ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’. But many sacks were lost deep in the jungle, or in the Tilung Hka river, and it was a slow process to round up the remainder, owing, as Sir John wrote, ‘to the extreme weakness of most of the party’.

  There was ‘still another happy surprise’ late in the evening of 3 July. The intrepid Gurkha Havildar Iman Sing – who had been dispatched by Mackrell from Dapha on 19 June, and had rescued Eadon and Moses on his way to Sir John – walked into the camp, explaining that he was the vanguard of a relief party that would soon be mounted, and telling Sir John all about Mackrell and Wilson. Iman Sing also brought cigarettes, which were particularly gratefully received by Milne, who’d been reduced to smoking bamboo leaves. So ended what Sir John called ‘a day of miracles’.

  Sir John now had a month’s rations for all (even if baby John did not have his teddy bear). Early in the morning on 4 July, Sir John and Edward Rossiter jointly composed a chit to Mackrell and Wilson. It was headed ‘Camp’, with the salutation ‘My dear Mackrell or Wilson’. It listed all the people in the camp – ‘25 persons, which includes … Rossiter’s wife and an eight months old baby’. It said that, although they were now receiving food, they were still too ill to move, and their joint parties would need porterage of between sixty and seventy men to take them through the jungle to the Dapha. It concluded, ‘So will you please rush through transport here immediately in charge of someone responsible to get us to safety (your camp) as quickly as possible’. Then came the hopeful salutation: ‘Au revoir and good luck’, and there was a PS. ‘Should there be any long delay in getting transport for our move forward, would it be asking too much to contact the nearest aerodrome for a further supply of rations to be dropped here.’ And a PPS: ‘Also please a few tins of Glaxo for the baby – by plane.’ Being pregnant, Mrs Rossiter would not have been breast-feed
ing her baby, and it seemed she considered Glaxo tinned milk superior to Klim.

  This chit was handed to two of what Sir John rudely called the two ‘Gurkha coolies’ who had come in with Havildar Iman Sing, and they set off back to the Dapha camp, with Sing himself remaining at Tilung Hka. The two Gurkhas would deliver this chit to Mackrell on 12 July. By then, however, Mackrell and Wilson knew that Sir John’s party were being supplied from the air because on 5 July, not long after the two Gurkhas left Sir John, Wing Commander Chater came along the Noa Dehing once more in his Dakota …

  Chater was evidently a man who did things in his own good time, and now he did drop a message on the ‘DROP MESSAGE HERE’ site laid out by Mackrell and Wilson at the Dapha camp. It was a chit in a tin, taped up in a cloth bag. It stated firstly that ‘the Chaukan Party’ had received food drops since 30 June. It then asked a series of numbered questions that could be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’. While Chater circled above the camp, Mackrell – still ill – went to his tent and retrieved his aeroplane Morse signalling lamp, which at the press of a trigger emitted a light bright enough to be seen in daytime. Mackrell first signalled the number of the question, then gave his answer. To ‘Do you have enough people to rescue Sir John?’ Mackrell answered ‘No’. ‘Would thirty more porters be useful?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Is it possible to get them [Sir John’s party] out during the rains?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Or should we wait until after the rains?’ ‘No.’

  Chater then flew on to Sir John’s camp, where he dropped more food – ‘fairly bombarded’ them, Sir John noted with approval – and also a message addressed to Sir John himself, summarised by the latter as being on the following lines: ‘Not to worry … we’re on the job, soon get you out, etc etc’ and signed ‘George Chater, RAF’. Sir John was doubly reassured to see that name, because he realized that he knew George Chater socially. He was ‘Terence’s friend’ (whoever Terence was), and Sir John and his wife had had him to dinner a couple of times in Rangoon. Now George Chater was giving them dinner, so to speak. But that message of his might have signified bravado as well as bravery. It was becoming more dangerous every day to fly that Dakota. As the humidity rose to its peak in early September, unpredictable thermal currents were fermented. And Japanese Zeros occasionally flew over Assam in the summer of 1942; they were fighter planes and the Dakota was not. No more food was dropped on the Dapha camp after 5 July; and there would only be one more drop on the Tilung Hka camp. Many of the dropped sacks had been lost, and despite the newly arrived food, a serious vitamin-deficiency problem was developing on the banks of the Tilung Hka. Nonetheless, Wing Commander George Chater had forestalled starvation, and there was more good news at Sir John’s end of the jungle: the weather was getting better.

  Momentous Decisions: Mackrell Leaves the Dapha Camp Just as Sir John Decides to Strike Out for It

  … That is to say, the rain had eased … but the heat and humidity were rising, and more or less everyone at the Dapha camp was ill. The larger amount of food had brought a larger number of insects and dysentery was rife. There was a shortage of porters, and a shortage of elephants. More of either went to the base at Miao than ever came back from it. The porters would abscond even if they were owed money.

  The Mishmis were also fleeing. Mackrell and Wilson might have been able to keep more of them if they’d had more opium, but in early July they only had the small amount that Commando Boyt had brought with him, which prompts the question of whether Boyt himself ever put two and two together and smoked the opium he carried in the pipe that he also carried. Another difficulty with the Mishmis was that their headman, the one who had originally guided Mackrell to the Dapha for ten rupees, was now severely ill with dysentery. He was attended by Dr Bardoloi, but did not improve because, Mackrell wrote, ‘he refuses to diet’. He was too ill to command his men, and they would not take orders directly from Wilson or even Mackrell.

  The ninth of July was a particularly grim day at Dapha. The air was unbreathable; the camp was swarming with insects, attracted by the spilled food sacks. And one of the few remaining porters, a Naga, who was working on the east side of the river, stocking the camps along the track towards the Tilung Hka, died that day. His brother, also employed at Dapha, confronted Mackrell and said that his brother had died because he had been pressed into portering some of the way for Iman Sing, bearer of the chit for Sir John. This surviving brother said he would wait until Iman Sing returned, and then he would ‘cut him up’. Mackrell eventually talked the Naga man down, and he (the Naga) left for Miao that evening, as did the very ill Mishmi headman.

  The next day, two elephants arrived at Dapha from Miao. Sitting up behind the mahouts were a Lieutenant Colonel Pizey and a tea planter called Black, a senior man in the Indian Tea Association. They were emissaries from the government bungalow at Margherita. Word had reached Margherita that Mackrell and Wilson were ill, and Pizey and Black had come to talk them into leaving Dapha and reconsidering the rescue effort.

  Tea was served beneath the big tarpaulin, and a conference was held. Mackrell was happy to agree to the proposal as long as ‘reconsidering’ meant establishing the effort on a stronger footing. That night Black and Lieutenant Colonel Pizey stayed at Dapha. Both were kept awake all night by sandfly bites. The next day, Pizey left, taking Captain Wilson with him.

  Mackrell insisted on lingering at Dapha because he was sure that Iman Sing would be back imminently with a reply from Sir John (an expectation he had concealed from the porter who wanted to murder Iman Sing). The senior ITA man, Black, insisted on staying at Dapha in case Mackrell’s fever, which was generally abating, should incapacitate him once again. And so Black was kept awake for another night with sandfly bites.

  On 12 July, as already noted, Iman Sing’s two men did return to Dapha, carrying the chit from Sir John and Rossiter. In his diary, Mackrell speaks highly of the two Gurkhas. They had done the trek from the Tilung Hka in just eight days, and on very little food. They were brothers, and he records their names: Tami and Gunga Bahadur. Mackrell made a meal for the brothers and pondered the chit in which Sir John said he was being fed from the air (which Mackrell knew by now) and that he was staying put, being in want of sixty or seventy porters. So Sir John was not expected imminently. It seemed a few days could be spared in which to return to base, and solicit help for a bigger and better rescue attempt.

  On the evening of 12 July, the senior ITA man, Black, left the Dapha camp for Miao. The plan was that everyone remaining in the camp would then leave with Mackrell.

  On the 14th, Mackrell and Dr Bardoloi were attending to the stores in the camps on the east side of the river – it was the familiar chore of rigging up the sacks in the trees so they would be out of the reach of wild elephants. This was a precautionary measure. Nobody was expected at the river in the immediate future, but that had never stopped people turning up. Suddenly a plane came low over the trees, and it was not the sociable George Chater in his Dakota; this plane did not display the RAF roundel. It displayed the red Japanese rising sun. Mackrell and Dr Bardoloi walked briskly – they did not run – into the jungle ‘in case of machine gunning’. The plane circled twice, went away, then came back.

  It circled two more times before heading east.

  On the 15th, half a dozen elephants came through from Miao, and these would enable Mackrell to quit the Dapha. Before doing so, he rearranged the white stones that had spelt out the code for ‘DROP MESSAGE HERE’ so as to spell out the code for ‘PROPER TO ABANDON POST AND MARCH WEST’. This was to forestall food being dropped on an empty camp. On the 16th, he saw another plane approaching, and he was pretty certain this was RAF. To underline his rearranged message, he threw kerosene on some of the bamboo huts and set fire to them. They burnt fiercely as the plane circled above.

  Mackrell left the Dapha camp on 17 July. It was a very hot day, and, as his elephant awaited, he lit his pipe and gazed at the burning bamboo huts, the collapsed tents, the hundreds of sacks, many containing rotting food from split ti
ns, each sack surrounded by a cloud of flies. As he puffed on his pipe, he reflected knowledgeably on the insects and their associates. This, after all, was the boy who had taken Acidalia trigeminata: ‘Early dim-dams, then huge horse flies, all day leeches, at dusk midges and at dark and onwards sandflies in myriads and some mosquitoes. No wonder this area is uninhabited.’

  But of course it was inhabited, and he had just listed its inhabitants. As Mackrell and the mahouts, the remaining Rifles and porters and Dr Bardoloi trailed away through the hot mist, its rightful owners regained possession of the Dapha camp.

  As Mackrell departed from the Dapha river heading west on 17 July, Sir John Rowland was beginning to consider approaching it from the east. He was tired of being ‘in the blue’, which is how he referred to deep jungle. True, on 3 July he had received the chit from Iman Sing saying help was at hand, but that help seemed to be a long time coming, and Sir John had rather lost faith in rescue parties. By the 17th, two weeks had passed since he and Rossiter had dispatched their reply to Mackrell and Wilson, and for all they knew that reply had never got through.

  The two parties had enough food for a few more weeks, but much of it was mouldy and illness was rife. Most of those encamped on the Tilung Hka had the first signs of the condition called wet beriberi, the vitamin deficiency disease that would have been avoided if they’d been eating brown rather than white rice. The symptoms were swollen ankles or fingers and a loss of mobility, and the condition could cause heart failure if left to develop. But it would be rectified by the early restoration of a proper, balanced diet and Sir John – who had swelling of the fingertips – wanted to move while he still could. He was also suffering intermittent bouts of malaria.