If elephants, as much as humans, are devising these tasks, or certain aspects of them, this would support the idea that for the elephants, forest-based work has been a scheme of species survival. All these tasks are keeping elephants in situations where they have wild elephants’ access to the forest, but they are also interwoven into working human communities that are invested in guarding them. What’s more, some elephants’ unique skills and abilities encourage their human partners to mobilize them across agricultural and urban barriers, which in turn allows the elephants to mate with herds in different forests and mitigate inbreeding. Such skills include the elephants’ multilingual abilities and their ability to perform cross-forest and cross-mountain transportation.
Furthermore, from the standpoint of humans, the elephants’ talent for “escape mobility” makes them useful for unexpected emergency situations: an impromptu bridge that has to be built in the jungle; a drowning mahout who has to be rescued; or (as we’ll see in Chapter 3) humans fleeing a military invasion. Such mobilization increases the odds that elephants will enter into new forest areas with new reproductive opportunities. Who, then, is riding whom? By allying themselves with the forest mahouts, elephants are in a way “hitching a ride” across deforested areas that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to traverse, thus linking fragmented herds. In the village of Dambuk during monsoon, humans are isolated like elephants who inhabit lone pockets of forest. Corridors of human development obstruct elephants as much as a swollen river restricts the mobility of humans. The two situations mirror each other, with elephant and mahout switching roles on each side.
Chapter 3
MUDDY EXODUS
IN 1942, THE YEAR THE EMPIRE OF JAPAN INVADED AND occupied the British colony of Burma, hundreds of thousands of refugees, mostly British and Indian, fled the country and traveled west to India, crossing through wild rainforests and difficult mountain ranges. Asian elephants played an indispensable role in many of these escapes. Trained elephants sent into the highlands carried evacuees and their possessions across river fords and mountain passes, terrain that other types of transportation, wheeled or not, had little or no chance of traversing successfully. It is likely that thousands of refugees had some experience, during their journey, of being ferried by elephant.
The stories of three elephants in particular, fortuitously preserved in written memoirs, convey the nerve and resourcefulness of the tamed giants during this human exodus. These elephants were Rungdot, who rescued evacuees below a northern mountain pass called Chaukan; Maggie, who ferried refugees at the nearby Pangsau Pass; and Bandoola, who led a convoy of rescue elephants through a southern pass, Shenam. By examining these remarkable mass escapes and the elephants’ often heroic role in aiding them, we can get a better of sense of an activity where work elephants seem most to “come into their own”: the transportation of human beings when, due to war or weather or both, the human beings’ roads cannot be used.
THE REMOTE AND TREACHEROUS Chaukan Pass is some eight thousand feet above sea level, far above the normal range of wild elephants. Landslides and flooding can be especially severe here, due to a combination of glacial melt and monsoon rains. In late spring of 1942 a group of refugees, several hundred in number, fled from Burma through this pass. Most of them were British and Indian, though some Burmese were in the group too, as well as other Europeans. All the members of the party were from a railway surveying team that had been in Upper Burma plotting a possible route for a Burma-China railway—a British project that never came to fruition. Surveying work had been occurring throughout 1941.1
Then came the Japanese invasion, in January 1942. The British colonial government was utterly unprepared. Though rich in timber, minerals, and agricultural land, Burma did not offer a significant resource that the Japanese military and industries desperately needed, such as oil or coal. Japan already controlled the rest of Southeast Asia, including Singapore, along with large swaths of China, especially along the coast and in the northern interior. Much of the Japanese naval fleet was far off in the Pacific, where the Japanese military strategists had ordered an attack on Pearl Harbor the month before. The British high command in India and Burma assumed that the Japanese, having committed themselves to challenging American naval supremacy, were spread thin across three fronts and could be counted on to stay out of Burma.
This proved to be a grave miscalculation. For Japanese imperialists, the value of Burma was not its extractable resources but its location. British Burma was the “back door” to China. It was in effect a wide Sino-British borderland. Chinese laborers had already built a long, winding, all-weather road—an incredible engineering achievement at the time—that twisted and turned through the highlands of Yunnan and the Burmese Shan States. Dubbed the Burma Road, the hairpin thoroughfare linked British Burma to a large area of southern China beyond the Japanese military’s reach. The British had been sending arms and supplies down this new road into China from 1938 onward, to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces. The road was making it impossible for the Japanese to bury the Chinese resistance and divert field resources elsewhere. By invading Burma, the Japanese could finally cut off this supply line.
They invaded suddenly, seizing the seaports of Moulmein and Rangoon in January 1942. The occupation of the coast was itself enough to block British access to the Burma Road, since the only way British supplies could get to Burma in the first place was by sea. But the Japanese anticipated that the British would attempt a work-around by building all-weather roads from India across the Patkai Mountains and into Upper Burma. If built, such roads would create a link to the Burma Road by land. Aiming to deny the British this potential land route, the Japanese commanders had their forces push deeper into the Burmese interior. Supplied by ships from Singapore, as well as through a mountain pass from Thailand, Japanese forces were able to move up the three main river valleys of central Burma, the Irrawaddy, Sittaung, and Salween, during the spring of 1942. By May 1, they had taken the whole country, except for a tiny, isolated pocket in the far north, an area at the foothills of the eastern Himalayas called the Putao Plain. Adjacent to the Putao Plain was the Chaukan Pass.
As the Japanese swept into Burma, the railway surveying party found themselves part of a mass exodus of Britons, Indians, and some Burmese out of the country. Hundreds of thousands of refugees had no route to the sea, as the Japanese had control of the coast. Some were able to exit by air, but there was nowhere near the air capacity needed to move so many people out of the country in so short a period of time, especially as the number of British-controlled airfields in Burma shrank with the Japanese’s rapid advance north. Most would have to cross the Patkai range to get out.
The British, who’d been in control of Burma since the nineteenth century, had occasionally discussed building roads or railways through the Patkais and the Chin Hills, so as to link Burma with British Assam and with Bengal. But the high costs, due to the engineering challenges posed by monsoon, had always seemed prohibitive. Anyway, the facilitation of Indo-Burmese trade had never really been the point of Britain’s Burma colony. The British had conquered the place over the course of three wars, in 1825, 1852, and 1885, and the idea had always been to assume control of the country’s resources and funnel them southward through the port of Rangoon to the British commercial empire beyond. For the British, teak was the most prized resource of all; the wood’s naturally water-resistant properties made it ideal for British shipbuilding.2
With the Japanese occupation of Burma, British colonial officials saw their mistake in never developing transport through the mountains. They dusted off old plans to build roads through the Shenam Pass (which links the Imphal Plain of Manipur with central Burma’s Chindwin Valley) and the Pangsau Pass (which links Assam to northern Burma’s Hukawng Valley). In May 1942, though, these roads were still just ideas, and monsoon season was about to begin. There would be no fleeing Burma across the Patkais in comfortable motor vehicles. The evacuation would have to occur on foot. At the
Shenam and Pangsau passes, hundreds of elephants were put to work carrying the refugees and their food supplies across the mountains, along muddy jungle paths and across dangerous river fords.
The railway surveyors were in Myitkyina (pronounced MEE-chee-na), a city in Upper Burma that lay along the upper Irrawaddy River amid the Kachin Hills. The city had a mixed population of Kachins, Shans, Karens, Burmese, Britons, and Indians. When word spread that the Japanese were on the march from the south and rapidly approaching the Kachin Hills, large groups of Indian and British people fled into the surrounding countryside.3
British administrators in India were not giving clear evacuation instructions, and communications were generally shaky, as the Japanese had taken the major radio hub in Mandalay the previous month.4 The railway party’s inner circle of leaders debated what to do. One possibility was to head south to the Shenam Pass. To get there they would have to walk westward out of Myitkyina, along the road that went to the Hpakant jade mines. There they’d turn left, or southward, and cross the jade area until they reached the gold-mining region along the Uyu River. They could follow the Uyu to the Chindwin, and then the Chindwin Valley to the base of the Shenam Pass.5
The railway party knew there was already a reasonably well-organized evacuation route through the Shenam Pass, which had been taking refugees out of central Burma for months. James Howard Williams, an enterprising British “teak wallah”—a forest manager in the Burmese teak business—had succeeded in mobilizing hundreds of logging elephants out of the Chindwin Valley teak forests and toward the mountains, to assist in the evacuation. These elephants were carrying refugees out of central Burma toward the relative safety of British-held Imphal, in India. Though the railway party wouldn’t have been familiar with the details of the Shenam operation, the scene of this southern escape route is worth briefly describing.
In his memoirs, Williams recalled of the Shenam Pass that “in some places it was so steep that the elephants would almost be standing on their hind legs. . . . We were as high as Hannibal when he crossed the Little St. Bernard”—an allusion to Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca’s march across the European Alps with thirty-seven war elephants, in the third century B.C.6 During the initial trek through Shenam, Williams recounted, his elephants—who were carrying women, children, and the sick, as well as baggage and food supplies—had hesitated when confronted with the intimidating clifflike slopes. He had a team cut a series of steps in the sandstone bluffs, “each just big enough to take an elephant’s foot.” Once that was done, he sent for his best elephant, Bandoola, who was a huge tusker, and his best mahout, Po Toke, a Burmese. “Don’t worry,” Po Toke half-joked. “Bandoola knows how to close his one eye on the cliff side of the path.” Bandoola and Po Toke inched their way up the ascent. Po Toke was as solemn as a “pall-bearer at a village funeral”—that is, until he reached Williams, who was waiting at the crest. At that point Po Toke turned to Williams and, with something of a wink, remarked, “They’ll all follow now.” Indeed, emboldened by Bandoola, the rest of the elephants went up as well. “I learned more in that one day about what elephants could be got to do than I had in twenty four years,” the logging official Williams would later write. Throughout much of the spring of 1942, this elephant stairway through the Shenam Pass was one of the most important evacuation routes out of Burma.7
Word of the Shenam Pass escape route had spread throughout the country. But it was mostly being used by refugees from central Burma—from places like Mandalay, Taungoo, and Prome—not those as far north as Myitkyina. If the railway party made the overland trek to Williams’s elephant operation at Shenam, the journey would take them far to the south, where their chances of encountering Japanese patrols increased. The party sought other options.
Another possibility was to start out trekking toward Shenam, but then to turn right, or westward, at the Hpakant jade mines. From there, they could cross the Hukawng Valley—a region notorious for intense monsoon flooding and for its mosquitoes and leeches—and attempt to walk through the Pangsau Pass. The hills around this pass were poorly mapped and were reputed to have unfriendly tribes. A sign at the fork in the road near the Hpakant jade mines read, in regard to this rightward path: “This route is a death trap for women and children. Women and children should turn left.”8
These appeared to be the only two options: Shenam Pass to the south, where encountering Japanese patrols was likely, or Pangsau Pass to the west, where there was dangerous flooding and potentially hostile locals. But one midranking surveyor, Moses, gained the attention of the railway party’s core leadership and proposed a third option: they could head north toward the Putao Plain, the one area in Burma the Japanese did not control, then hike across the Chaukan Pass, which would lead to the Dihing River, which they could follow into Assam. Moses explained that several years before, in his personal wanderings through the region, he’d crossed through the Chaukan Pass coming from India into Burma, and the journey had taken him ten days. After some deliberation, the leadership accepted the plan.9
In subsequent reports written after the Chaukan affair was over, Moses’s colleagues wondered whether he had exaggerated his previous experience with the Chaukan Pass. The railway party’s journey through Chaukan began poorly and ended disastrously. Moses tended to get the blame. One gets the sense, from these accounts, that as the journey progressed and the monsoon rains began, the group lost confidence in Moses, who became despondent and isolated. His status as an outsider within the European circles of the railway party—Moses was a Dutch Jew while the others were mostly Anglo and gentile—appears to have contributed to this isolation.10
In late May, the huge party of refugees set off from the Putao Plain and into the hills toward Chaukan. A monsoon storm was beginning to break, and the party rushed to traverse the mountains before the heaviest rains hit. Francis Kingdon-Ward, a British botanist and explorer who’d visited the region during the 1920s, provides a stirring description of what these mountain forests could be like during the monsoon floods:
During the rainy season it is, of course, impossible to get along. . . . The swollen river fills its bed and comes galloping madly down from the hills; as it rushes along at the foot of the forest, it plasters the lower branches with flotsam. The stagnant air throbs with the roar of the flood and the rumble of grinding boulders. Pale wisps of clouds writhe through the tree-tops like wet smoke, and the melancholy drip, drip of the rain from the leaves sounds a perpetual dirge. There is a rank odor of decay in the jungle, though life everywhere is triumphant. Scattered over the dark squelchy ground are speckled pilei [mushroom caps] in flaring colors, and horrid fungi scar the bloated tree trunks. Pale, evil-looking saprophytes lurk beneath the creaking bamboos, and queer orchids peep from the bibulous soil. The atmosphere is foul with mold, yet life is at full flood.11
There was much confusion in the early days of the trek. One man, Gardiner, had managed to grab a map from the government office in Myitkyina (most of the maps had been destroyed so they would not fall into Japanese hands), but it showed the Chaukan area in considerably less topographic detail than the surrounding regions.12 No one knew which saddle-shaped passage through the green, gray, and white peaks was actually the Chaukan Pass. Moses seemed disoriented, saying the landscape looked completely different in the rain and mud than it had during his previous journey, which had been at a drier time of year. The path he remembered seemed to have been washed away, and mudslides had altered the terrain, erasing memorable landmarks. The party had no elephants. They were accompanied by local porters, who were mostly Kachins and Lisus. But upon seeing the conditions along the path, many of the porters turned back. The leaders of the party attempted to persuade them to stay, offering large sums of money, but the porters were resolute. Even if the Chaukan Pass could be crossed, they reasoned, by the time they got to Assam, it would be high monsoon, and they’d have no means of returning until the dry season, a half-year away. By this time, the war might have reached the Putao Plain, where
they all had families. The prospect of being stranded in India for months on end was unacceptable.13
The railway party sadly watched the porters depart. A few stayed, though, mostly Nungs, a clan of the Lisu. The refugees trudged through the long corridor of the pass, still nervous that they were following a “false” pass that led only to more mountains. Their spirits revived when they finally spotted the upper headwaters of an Assamese river, the Dihing—perhaps the worst was over! But just downhill from there, the party found itself blocked by a roaring river confluence, where the Dapha River meets the Dihing. By this point the rains were coming down in full force, and snowmelt from the white-tipped northern Patkais was pouring into these forbidding watercourses. The party of hundreds was deep in the wilderness, where there were no indigenous settlements to be found. Nor was there any hope of a British rescue party. In the confusion of the flight from Myitkyina, and in the party’s rush to begin their journey before the monsoon broke, no communication had ever reached British officials in Assam telling them to expect a large party of evacuees near the Chaukan Pass.14 The party was now starving and exhausted and appeared to be trapped.
JUST THIRTY MILES SOUTH, a similar exodus was unfolding at the Pangsau Pass. By late May, the sign near the Hpakant jade mines urging refugees to avoid the Pangsau had been taken down. The British had lost control of all of central Burma and could no longer advise stranded Europeans and Indians to make their way southward. S. Farrant Russell, the director of a missionary hospital in the railway town of Mohnyin in the Kachin Hills, not far from the jade-mining area, later recalled receiving a leaflet dropped by airplane in mid-May: “A suspension bridge is being built over the Namyung,” the major river near the Pangsau Pass.15 The colonial government was now telling refugees to exit through this westward route after all. The railway party had fled Myitkyina for the Putao Plain mere days before the new message was disseminated.
Giants of the Monsoon Forest Page 7
