Flight by Elephant (23 page)

The previous day, despite being ill, Mackrell had tried to cross the Dapha on two elephants with supplies for the Mishmis on the other side. He tried for hours with two mahouts. Wilson had wanted to come along, but Mackrell said he would not be required. To Wilson, the mahouts were ‘not trustworthy’ and he thought a below par Mackrell would need help to keep them in line. The whole relationship between Mackrell, the mahouts and the elephants continued to baffle Wilson. He blamed the mahouts for the shortage of supplies coming through from Miao. ‘The elephants seem to go all over the place once they leave Mackrell’s immediate control … It’s a puzzle to me that Mackrell has managed them [the mahouts] but so far he has.’

Mackrell failed to cross the river on that occasion, and by the 29th they were ‘down to brass tacks’ on rations both at the new Dapha camp and at the staging posts being created on the other side of the river. No concerted forward push could be mounted without a reserve of food and more elephants.

And what of Sir John Rowland?

Both his party and that of the Rossiters were still stuck on the wrong side of the Tilung Hka, still living, or slowly dying, on their skilly soup. Sir John’s diary for the last week of June records business as usual: terrific thunderstorms, incessant rain, passing aeroplanes paying no attention to them, and the deterioration of everyone in the camp. People were light-headed, dizzy; they walked between the communal fires and their individual huts without saying a word. On 29 June there was another check on rations, and, as regards mouldy rice, the parties were found to be ‘slightly in hand’. Even so, Dr Burgess-Barnett advised Sir John that, if no help came within five days, they were finished.

On the morning of 30 June at the Dapha camp, Captain Wilson was standing next to his ‘house’ on the point with binoculars in hand, when he saw the Mishmis on the other side of the river. They had with them the anti-malarial man, Eadon, and the International Boy Scout, Moses.

To enable them to cross the Dapha, Eadon and Moses had been put on the same elephant. Its mahout was having difficulty persuading it to step into the river, which was running fast. It did enter the water, but kept stopping, seeming to reflect, seemingly sighing at the absurdity of the feat it was being asked to perform. Mackrell, still sick, was at the house on the point with Wilson. The Commandos came to the riverbank, too. The elephant teetered; Mackrell folded his arms and muttered something that Wilson couldn’t hear over the roar of the water. The elephant stabilized itself, sighed again, closed its eyes and with an air of distaste lowered itself into the water and began to swim … and so Eadon and Moses were brought over.

Howe wrote that the pair were ‘literally back from the grave’, which was very
nearly
true. ‘It made my relief and happiness considerably more to know they too were safe.’ Gardiner wrote, ‘They looked if possible dirtier and more disreputable than we did on arrival.’ They had been saved in the first place by the Gurkha Havildar, Iman Sing, who had been dispatched from the Dapha on 19 June, and had found Eadon and Moses dying in their huts as he attempted to reach the Rowland and Rossiter parties. He had then fed them and handed them over to the Mishmis.

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-feeding 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.