The story of how a British tea planter and a team of elephants with their Indian drivers rescued hundreds of refugees fleeing the Japanese invasion of Burma, the former name of Myanmar, during World War II was revealed on Monday when Cambridge University published contemporary film of the rescue on its Web site.
Even with extraordinary stories from the war nearly three-quarters of a century ago still surfacing almost weekly, the story of Gyles Mackrell, called by contemporary newspapers the Elephant Man, has been largely forgotten until now, but has been brought back to vivid life with the placing of 13 minutes of film footage from his expedition on YouTube.
“The story is a sort of far eastern Dunkirk, but it has been largely forgotten since the war,” said Kevin Greenbank, archivist at the Cambridge Centre of South Asian Studies, where Mackrell’s papers and film footage have been restored and are being stored.
Illustration: Mountain People
“Without the help of Mackrell and others like him, hundreds of people fleeing the Japanese advance would quite simply never have made it,” Greenbank said.
Mackrell, a 53-year-old tea exporter in the Indian province of Assam, acted after he heard in the summer of 1942 that refugees from the Japanese invasion had been trapped on the other side of the border in Burma by the Dapha river, which was swollen by monsoon rains and melting snow water from the Himalayas.
He hurried the convoy of about 20 elephants and their handlers to the river — a journey of more than 160km through jungle, braving leeches — in less than a week and waded across the river to rescue troops in danger of starvation, capture or drowning.
Elephants were the only reliable means of making the crossing — and even then the river rose up to their tusks — but Mackrell knew the area and its local hill tribes and knew hot to handle elephants.
The dangers involved with such an operation were immediately evident to Mackrell. When he arrived, he saw a group of 68 soldiers who had been trapped on an island in the middle of the river when the waters had risen. Even the elephants could not reach them until the river level fell, but only briefly, early the next day.
In his diary, Mackrell wrote: “We tried over and over again but failed to get the elephants anywhere near them and the Kampti mahouts [elephant drivers] took terrible risks of being washed away and broken to pieces trying to get over.
“At last at dark we were forced to give up and I shall never forget the lines of dejected figures crawling and stumbling back to their meagre grass shelters. They had been so full of relief and hope when they saw us first and had been on the island and without food for seven days with that raging torrent making it smaller each day as the sides were eaten away,” Mackrell wrote.
“At 2am a different tune in the roar of the water brought me wide awake and I found the level falling. By 4am it was down to 3 to 4ft [0.9m to 1.2m] and was free of the logs and drift that had been such a terror to the elephants before ... by midday we had the whole 68. Within two hours of the last elephant and man to reach my camp, the snow water came down again and the whole island ... was swept by a roaring torrent in which no human being could have survived,” he wrote.
Some of the rescued men were in a desperate state. In his diary, which is in the centre’s collection, railway engineer John Rowland described how his party ate fern to survive.
“There is no nutriment in the diet. At all events it forms bulk and with luck it is hoped to spin out the rations for 24 days, after which if no relief party or aeroplane arrives with rations, it is recognised that we must die of starvation,” Rowland wrote.
Fortunately, a plane spotted his group and dropped supplies to them.
Mackrell’s operation is thought to have saved more than 200 lives. It continued throughout the summer, even after the British administration in Assam ordered an end to the rescue because it wrongly believed the stragglers had been picked up. He was awarded the George Medal, the honors committee having estimated that his risk of death during the rescues was “very roughly” 50 to 80 percent. Mackrell retired to Suffolk, southeast England, where he died in 1959.
His archive, which includes 20 minutes of film footage he shot during the rescues, showing the elephants battling through the torrents, has been placed with the Cambridge centre by Mackrell’s niece. His papers, including diaries and accounts written by some of those he rescued, will be available to researchers.
“It’s a remarkable story of courage, spirit and ingenuity that took place at a time when no one was sure what the consequences of the war in the far east would be,” said Annamaria Motrescu, a research associate at the Cambridge centre. “It deserves to be remembered.”
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