by Robert Lyman
Jack Davies was aware of problems afflicting C-46’s but had been satisfied by the powerful surge of the aircraft as it took off; he made himself as comfortable as he could. Sevareid stared out the window as Neveu took them through wisps of cloud before turning south. When the plane tilted to turn he caught a glimpse of the majestic, snow-capped Himalayas, sunshine streaming through the windows and illuminating the cabin like a klieg light. As the plane gathered height Davies was struck by the intense green far below, the acres of tea gardens marching in regiments across the hills. Beside him Duncan C. Lee settled into his book as Sevareid scribbled down his thoughts. Colonel Wang Pae Chae and Lieutenant Colonel Kwoh Li looked less comfortable, turning green with each movement of the C-46. As they headed out over the vast green wilderness everything seemed to be working perfectly.
Exactly one hour later the C-46 was above the Patkoi Hills, whose highest peak, Mount Saramati, lies at 12,500 feet. As Neveu began turning the aircraft due east Sevareid, who had been lost in thought, was startled by Corporal Stanley Waterbury tripping over his outstretched legs as he rushed down the fuselage.
“Know what?” the young man yelled in his ear. “The left engine has gone.”
2
BURMESE DAYS
Thirty minutes after leaving Chabua and climbing over the northern reaches of the Patkoi Range, Harry Neveu entered Burmese airspace. His plan was to fly just on the eastern edge of the Patkois for a hundred miles or so before turning left and heading over the Chindwin River and the lower reaches of the Hukawng Valley in an easterly direction toward China. The hills of the Patkois were populated by Nagas. Once the jagged mountains had flattened out into the hills and river valleys of northern Burma, the area became the territory of the Kachins, whose largest settlement was Myitkyina, lying in the center of north Burma.
Burma’s 261,200 square miles is the size of Texas.a The distance between its border with northern Malaysia (then Malaya) and the Pangsau Pass, which traverses the northern edge of the Patkoi Range into India, is about 1,750 miles (2,800 kilometers) by road, a distance comparable to that between Paris and Moscow or New York and Phoenix, Arizona. The country is surrounded on its northern and eastern sides by rugged mountains and is bordered on the western side by sea. The Himalayas guard its northern extremities and then flow deep into the heart of the country, petering out into a thick belt of high, precipitous, and tangled hills. Of these, the Naga Hills in the northwest and the Chin Hills in the center boast heights of between 8,000 and 12,000 feet, and the Arakan Yomas in the south form a natural barrier between central Burma and the coastal strip to the north and south of Akyab. In the east, bordering Yunnan, the mountains reach double that height. The Chinese name for the Naga Hills, in a hint of their distant fearsomeness, translates as “Savage Mountains.”
The country has been called Myanmar since 1989.
Wide, prairielike plains in the center of the country offer sharp contrast to the tropical jungle in the south and east. Vast rivers—the Irrawaddy, Chindwin, Sittang, and Salween—split the country like giant wedges. The Irrawaddy flows more than 1,300 miles from the northernmost reaches of the country and the Salween even farther. The Chindwin starts in the far northwest, meandering from its watershed in the Himalayas south through the vast river valley with the green, mist-shrouded mountains that separate Burma from India reaching into the sky on its western flank. The huge distances of this country were made even more formidable by the paucity of roads or railways. In 1941 most inland trade and communications were conducted largely on the great rivers. The few roads and railways that did exist in Burma tended to run north–south with the grain of the country, following the line of the rivers. Only one road of significance ran into China, the 1,500-mile-long Burma Road. The few tracks that existed were not suitable for all-weather use, particularly by vehicles, and were liable to interruption by floods and landslides during the monsoon. The best way of getting around was by airplane.
The British had been rulers of this ancient country since their defeat of the last Burmese king, Thibaw Min, in 1885. In early 1942 this period of colonial rule came to an ignominious end when the Japanese occupied the country following an extraordinarily successful invasion, driving out and defeating the humiliated British in a lightning advance that mirrored the German blitzkrieg in France in 1940. Japanese generals had visited France, escorted by their exultant German hosts, to learn the secret of the Wehrmacht’s success. The Japanese invasion was designed to protect the “back door” of its advance on Singapore and to sever the famous Burma Road that ran American supplies 1,500 miles from Rangoon into Yunnan. The Burma Road was the lifeline for Chiang Kai-shek’s beleaguered nationalist Chinese, who had been fighting the Japanese since the start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. The Chinese were at the time tying down twenty Japanese divisions, about half of the fighting formations of the Imperial Army. By the end of 1940 the Burma Road was the only external source of supplies for the Chinese and a considerable hindrance to Japanese ambitions, even though, because of theft and corruption, only a third of all the American lend-lease supplies arriving in Rangoon ever reached Chungking. The most effective way for the Japanese to halt US support to the Chinese would be to seize Rangoon and thus close the Burma Road. Until late 1940, however, British assessments of the threat limited Japanese action to the occasional air raid on Burma’s capital city. The British did not consider a Japanese invasion possible, or probable.
In 1941 the forty-two-year-old Connecticut-born, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Leland Stowe was in Burma’s capital city. He had been something akin to an Old Testament prophet in his warnings about the enemies that threatened American somnolence in the years leading up to World War II. Even from the perspective of 1941, his prescience was remarkable. He had argued to an uncomprehending West for nearly a decade that the world was an ugly place—and about to get much uglier if those countries that had the wherewithal to control the bullies in the European playground did nothing about it. A hostile, militaristic state lay like a dangerous cancer in the heart of Europe, intent on both domestic political subjugation and territorial expansion and driven by a grotesque and racist ideology. However, this state—Fascist Germany—was surrounded on all sides by democracies that were intent on keeping their heads resolutely in the sand. At best they refused to accept the political realities staring them in the face; at worst they wanted to guarantee their security through a policy of appeasement, whatever the risk to their principles. Shocked by the rampant militarism of the Germany he had observed firsthand during a visit in 1933, Stowe attempted to awaken the West to the danger it faced. He was rebuffed by a solid wall of complacency on both sides of the Atlantic. He wrote newspaper articles warning of German militarism, but they were ignored by editors unwilling to be labeled alarmist—or to upset the Germans—and even the book Stowe wrote on the subject, Nazi Germany Means War, was a flop. People didn’t want to spend money on a book persuading them, after the recent trauma of the Western Front, that war was once more imminent. After observing firsthand the German invasion of Norway in April 1940 and the role played by Quisling’s Fifth Columnists in the bloodless capture of Oslo, Stowe found himself in Rangoon at the end of 1941, reporting for the Chicago Daily News on what he was later to describe as “the greatest racket in the Far East”: the Burma Road.
Two days before Christmas 1941 he heard the approaching sound of massed aircraft. The noise brought last-minute Christmas shoppers onto the streets, despite the midday heat (it was an almost unbearable 111°F) to observe this unusual sight. There were few aircraft of any type, civilian or military, based in Rangoon at the time, although they included fourteen American P40 Tomahawk fighters, with their distinctive tiger teeth painted on the engine cowlings, flown by the mercenaries of the American Volunteer Group (AVG) who called themselves the “Flying Tigers” and operated on behalf of the Chinese Army. Alongside these the British possessed a mere sixteen fighters, obsolete Brewster Buffaloes. There were no bombers. “They mu
st be British reinforcements,” thought some as they watched the slow-moving, high-flying aircraft arrive overhead in a tight, disciplined formation. It had been two weeks since the shocking news had arrived that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and simultaneously launched invasions of Hong Kong, Malaya, Borneo, and the Philippines. The Japanese had even occupied a point on the distant southern tip of Burma. The British governor, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith (known irreverently to some as “Dormouse-Smith”), had assured the population that the country was well protected; after all, Burma was part of the British Empire, over which the sun never set. The great fortress of Singapore was nearby and would provide military aid in the unlikely event that it was required. In the next few moments the sound of whistling filled the air before loud explosions began to reverberate across the city of half a million inhabitants. The aircraft were Japanese.
At Mingaladon Airfield, to the north of the city, Chuck Baisden, an armament technician in the AVG, stood watching the oncoming aircraft high in the sky while one of his colleagues started counting them. When he got to twenty-seven he shouted, “Hell they are not ours, we don’t have that many.”
There was an immediate mad dash for some slit trenches a few feet from where we had been standing. One group of the bombers targeted our field and laid their pattern precisely down the runway and through our dispersal area. I remember those black dots getting larger and larger accompanied by a whoose-whoose sound and thought they were all aimed directly at me. It was nothing compared to the shock of the bombs as they walked up the field with the noise getting louder and louder. The concussion bounced us around in the trench and from the smell someone had voided in his trousers. I know one 21 year old that grew up in a hurry.
In the city large numbers of native workers stood looking in wonder at the silvery flight of aircraft far above them and became tragic casualties of unheralded aggression. With no expectation of attack, a grotesque complacency by the authorities and no public air-raid shelters (although Dorman-Smith had one for his own family and staff, recently completed at considerable cost to public funds) caused some 3,000 casualties and the mass panic of the population. It was not merely the docks, where some 85,000 tons of American lend-lease supplies awaited transport to China along the Burma Road, that were targeted, but both residential and city-center locations. By the end of the day vast numbers—perhaps the bulk of the population—were clogging the roads northward in an attempt to escape the horror. A second attack was launched the following day, Christmas Day. Many vital civil and administrative functions ceased, and a paralysis in government and administration set in. Public hysteria was followed by widespread lawlessness. At a stroke the city lost its entire labor force. All essential services ceased. Some staggered on for the next few months before the Japanese arrived at the gates of the city in early March, whereas others stopped completely. The railways and buses; electricity, telephones, water, and sanitation; post; and mortuaries as well as private enterprise, especially food supply, never recovered from those two first devastating air raids. Scores of thousands fled north, perhaps three-quarters of the entire population, with whatever possessions they could carry to what they believed to be the safety of central Burma. The US war correspondent Alfred Wragg watched Rangoon empty like a bathtub of dirty water after that first attack: “It was an exodus on foot. Men, women and children. Pitiful in their terror, their lack of food supplies and equipment. Pathetic in their urgency to escape. Their sudden determination to walk home [to India], to walk a thousand miles—two thousand miles! That night, Rangoon was a city of the dead.”
These attacks and the invasion that followed precipitated a human disaster for hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children for whom the end of British protection meant extreme danger. Colonial Burma had been populated for decades by many scores of thousands of low-paid Indian workers fulfilling menial but essential jobs in an economy dependent on large-scale manual labor. They had followed the British in the good times as the empire had expanded. These foreigners had helped maintain British rule and repress nationalist ambitions among the subjugated Burmese. In any case, Burma in 1941 was divided along ethnic and tribal lines. Little love was lost between the ten million or so indigenous Burmese, who populated the coastline and the lowland plains, and the seven million people of the tribes who occupied the hill country away from the river valleys: the Shans, Karens, Chins, Kachins, and Nagas. Many Burmese were strongly nationalistic; a significant minority actively opposed the British (and what they regarded as the colonial rulers’ Indian lackeys) and, when war came, openly sided with the Japanese against their hated colonial overseers. The people of the hills, by contrast, tended to be anti-Burmese and, consequently, pro-British. Unsurprisingly, until 1937, when Burma received its independence from India (it remained a British colony, with a governor reporting to London), the local Burma Army recruited almost exclusively from the tribespeople and those Indians and Gurkhas who were domiciled in Burma.
Try as they might, no correspondents could get the magnitude of the disaster past the British government censors, so the world remained largely unaware of Burma’s predicament. “Damage was slight and casualties few,” reported those newspapers across America on January 1, 1942, that even bothered to run the story of the bombing of Rangoon on Christmas Eve. The attack had an immediate impact, however, on at least two American families. The Corsicana Daily Sun in Texas reported that the secretary of state—Cordell Hull—had informed the family of Neil G. Martin, a former football star of the University of Arkansas and a pilot in the AVG, that he was missing following the attack, but that no further information was available. His father refused to believe he was dead. “We can only hope for the best until we receive further word,” he told the newspaper. Martin’s death was confirmed within days, however. He had been shot down in his fighter plane. Another American, twenty-one-year-old Henry Gilbert, died in aerial combat with the invaders on that fateful Christmas Eve. Like Neil Martin’s aircraft, his P40 was destroyed as he engaged the overwhelmingly superior Japanese force.
Journalist O. D. Gallagher estimated that by the end of Christmas Day, 300,000 men, women, and children had fled the smoke-shrouded capital. The exodus became dramatically magnified when news began to seep through that the Japanese were advancing from the south and that nothing seemed able to stop them. It has been estimated that nearly a million people were on the move in Burma during the first five months of 1942, most of whom were heading north with little more than what they could carry in an attempt to escape the advancing Japanese. Numbers remain hard to ascertain, but perhaps half a million or more attempted to walk all the way into India, with as many as 20 percent of these pitiful refugees dying in the attempt. No one really knows, but it was a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions. News of the barbarity with which it treated anyone whom it considered to be its enemy had long gone before the Japanese Army, fanning the flames of panic. In mid-February 1942 the government had ordered the compulsory evacuation of Europeans and selected Asians: those who had worked for the colonial power and would be vulnerable if left behind. Fear fueled their every step. Stephen Brookes, who was eleven years old at the time, described the sight as people attempted to escape from Myitkyina, the sound of gunfire in the distance:
The road we followed was a wide cart-track cut out of the thick jungle, which rose on either side like a green curtain fifty feet high. Within this gloomy corridor moved a stream of refugees, thousands of them as far as the eye could see—Indians, British, Chinese, Eurasians; troops, civilians, government officials; parents and children, the sick and the dying. There were families pushing barrows laden with children and heavy sacks of food and bedding; bullock carts swaying with the weight of people crowded on their flimsy frames; lorries, cars, bicycles, army trucks, jeeps, cattle and the occasional elephant—all loaded to breaking point with people and belongings. And entwined in this curious procession were thousands more on foot: plodding, sleeping, cooking, giving birth and dying in the jungle. O
ur family was a mere grain of sand in this dust-storm.
If they couldn’t get out by sea or upcountry by the now thoroughly disorganized train service (which went as far as Myitkyina, 750 miles north in Kachin territory) or by road transport, they had no choice but to walk. The prospect was a terrible one. The journey from Rangoon to Imphal, in the eastern state of Manipur, was 750 miles, but for much of this route the refugees would be at the mercy of indifferent roads (there was no formal road between Burma and India), the vagaries of the weather (the monsoon season arrives in late April each year and runs until October), disease (malaria was rampant), and lack of food. Even worse was the fact that law and order had broken down in many parts of the country—including much of Rangoon, and the hostility of the Burmese population and marauding companies of dacoits (bandits) who plagued the countryside during times of disorder proved a danger to those making their way to safety. For those unable to take the route to the Burmese border at Tamu on the Chindwin, the alternative was to travel north from Mandalay to Myitkyina and from there to attempt to make their way through the Hukawng Valley, a dangerously malarial stretch of remote country in the extreme north of the country. If hostile Burmese didn’t get them, disease, exhaustion, or starvation would. Alfred Wragg called his book—referring to all who died across southeast Asia as a result of the Japanese invasion—A Million Died! It seems as reasonable an assessment as any.
The last inhabited area on the Burmese side of the Hukawng Valley was the Naga village of Shingbwiyang, 160 miles northwest from Myitkyina. From there traders’ tracks extended a further sixty miles into India, crossing the 3,727-foot-high Pangsau Pass on the way. This was to be the point from which the new Burma Road would in due course be built, but in 1942 Shingbwiyang was where the innocent detritus of Burma washed up, many never to leave, their mortal remains rotting along pathways in the remote jungles. Stephen Brookes, who reached there on June 19, described it as “the gateway to India for about 45,000 refugees and Chinese soldiers. Most of them died in the village, others on the track to India, but no one cares any more. It was merely a side-show in the great scheme of things.”
