They were tea planters, and their Indian labourers. We will describe their work in more detail shortly, but let us say for now that the Hukawng Valley would become the second main evacuation route from Upper Burma after Tamu–Imphal–Dimapur. It is estimated that 20,000 went through (soldiers and civilians), of whom 5000 died.
One other route had been talked of in Myitkyina.
On 3 May, before the bombing of the airfield, a group of Burmese officials had flown to Dinjan to suggest this route. Its main – and only – attractive feature was that it lay about as far to the north as you could go in Burma, so was well away from the Japanese advance. But officials in Assam had ruled it out because they knew the terrain to be impassable on the Assamese side. It was decided therefore to send radio messages to Myitkyina warning against this route and urging use of the Hukawng Valley instead. But the receiving station at Myitkyina had closed down. Therefore letters were sent by plane conveying the same warning to the Deputy Commissioner of Myitkyina, but it seems these were never delivered. That Deputy Commissioner was a man called McGuire. He was the immediate superior of John Leyden, and the frowned-upon route in question was the Chaukan Pass.
The Railway Party
Exhausted after crossing the Dapha river on the evening of 31 May, John Leyden finds that his head reels every time he stands up. Night is descending rapidly. Despite having a wife and young children (all safely evacuated from Burma at an earlier date), Leyden tells Millar – a single man – that he must save himself and go on without him. He also urges Millar to do this on behalf of the people they are trying to save.
Who were these people?
They were a party of government officials and engineers; they were mainly British, but their number also included Indians, Anglo-Indians and a pregnant Burmese woman and her six-month-old mixed-race baby. Their
de facto
leader was Sir John Edward Maurice Rowland. In the summer of 1942, Sir John was sixty years old. He was an engineer, and the top man on Burma Railways: the Chief Railway Commissioner no less. In the Warrant of Precedence, the formal social hierarchy of the country, he stood at number sixteen, on a par with army officers of the rank of general, and he had been knighted in 1941. So he would be very indignant at finding himself starving to death in the jungle.
Sir John was not only head of the ordinary Burma Railways; he also ran a side project, which he called ‘The Burma China Construction’. This was a railway meant to run parallel to the Burma Road, and for the same purpose: to keep China supplied in its battle against the Japanese. The railway would run from Lashio, a hundred or so miles north of Mandalay, to Kunming in China, through some of the most disease-ridden country in the world, so it would have been as much a medical as an engineering feat … if it had ever been built. There is something strained about the future tense used in an article on the line that appeared in the
San Francisco Chronicle
on 27 November 1941: ‘As the Panama canal’s construction was a triumph of medical strategists, so will the completion of the Yunnan–Burma railroad be a victory of malaria, and the potential of plague and cholera.’ The author stated that 250,000 coolies would build the line, which ought to be finished in fifteen months’ time ‘if all goes to schedule’. Just as the Burma Road would be closed by the Japanese invader, so the Burma–China railway would be stopped. It has gone down as one of the great ghost railways of the world, like the plan for a railway under the English Channel in the 1880s, or the early twentieth-century German pipe dream of the Berlin–Baghdad railway.
Having been distracted by this futile endeavour, Sir John found the ordinary railways of Burma to be in what he frankly called ‘a damnable mess’ at the time of the invasion. He used the phrase in a letter. We know from the
One other route had been talked of in Myitkyina.
On 3 May, before the bombing of the airfield, a group of Burmese officials had flown to Dinjan to suggest this route. Its main – and only – attractive feature was that it lay about as far to the north as you could go in Burma, so was well away from the Japanese advance. But officials in Assam had ruled it out because they knew the terrain to be impassable on the Assamese side. It was decided therefore to send radio messages to Myitkyina warning against this route and urging use of the Hukawng Valley instead. But the receiving station at Myitkyina had closed down. Therefore letters were sent by plane conveying the same warning to the Deputy Commissioner of Myitkyina, but it seems these were never delivered. That Deputy Commissioner was a man called McGuire. He was the immediate superior of John Leyden, and the frowned-upon route in question was the Chaukan Pass.
The Railway Party
Exhausted after crossing the Dapha river on the evening of 31 May, John Leyden finds that his head reels every time he stands up. Night is descending rapidly. Despite having a wife and young children (all safely evacuated from Burma at an earlier date), Leyden tells Millar – a single man – that he must save himself and go on without him. He also urges Millar to do this on behalf of the people they are trying to save.
Who were these people?
They were a party of government officials and engineers; they were mainly British, but their number also included Indians, Anglo-Indians and a pregnant Burmese woman and her six-month-old mixed-race baby. Their
de facto
leader was Sir John Edward Maurice Rowland. In the summer of 1942, Sir John was sixty years old. He was an engineer, and the top man on Burma Railways: the Chief Railway Commissioner no less. In the Warrant of Precedence, the formal social hierarchy of the country, he stood at number sixteen, on a par with army officers of the rank of general, and he had been knighted in 1941. So he would be very indignant at finding himself starving to death in the jungle.
Sir John was not only head of the ordinary Burma Railways; he also ran a side project, which he called ‘The Burma China Construction’. This was a railway meant to run parallel to the Burma Road, and for the same purpose: to keep China supplied in its battle against the Japanese. The railway would run from Lashio, a hundred or so miles north of Mandalay, to Kunming in China, through some of the most disease-ridden country in the world, so it would have been as much a medical as an engineering feat … if it had ever been built. There is something strained about the future tense used in an article on the line that appeared in the
San Francisco Chronicle
on 27 November 1941: ‘As the Panama canal’s construction was a triumph of medical strategists, so will the completion of the Yunnan–Burma railroad be a victory of malaria, and the potential of plague and cholera.’ The author stated that 250,000 coolies would build the line, which ought to be finished in fifteen months’ time ‘if all goes to schedule’. Just as the Burma Road would be closed by the Japanese invader, so the Burma–China railway would be stopped. It has gone down as one of the great ghost railways of the world, like the plan for a railway under the English Channel in the 1880s, or the early twentieth-century German pipe dream of the Berlin–Baghdad railway.
Having been distracted by this futile endeavour, Sir John found the ordinary railways of Burma to be in what he frankly called ‘a damnable mess’ at the time of the invasion. He used the phrase in a letter. We know from the
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