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Authors: Andrew Martin
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same letter that he asked for and obtained from the man he called ‘HE’ – His Excellency, the Governor – ‘dictator powers’ to facilitate evacuation north by rail.
Sir John began, as he put it, ‘hare’ing all over’ north Burma from his base at Maymyo, the hill station and hot-weather resort, from where he was ousted by the enemy on 27 April. ‘The Army had legged it a day and a half before. I had been promised 72 hours notice to evacuate [railway] personnel …’ As it turned out, Sir John was given twelve hours’ notice, and he underlined the word ‘twelve’ in his letter. The railway employees – mainly Indians or Anglo-Indians – would be pitched into ‘sauve qui peut’, for which Sir John blamed ‘the cracking up of the 5th and 6th Chinese armies’ (which had been dispatched by Chiang Kai-shek to protect the Burmese infrastructure). The reader is now perhaps beginning to get the hang of Sir John. He was not a man lacking in confidence, or opinions, and he had a paternalistic concern for ‘his people’, the ‘railway folk’.
By the end of April he had shifted 4000 of these to Myitkyina, where he attempted to shift them further – by the above-mentioned airlifts to Assam. But the airlift was so very ‘meagre’ that ‘we had to send thousands of men and women trekking on foot out of Burma’. It had been observed at the Myitkyina airfield that, while some young and able-bodied men were putting their wives and children on the planes before themselves returning to duty or starting the dangerous walk to Assam, others had been boarding the aeroplanes along
with
their wives and children. On 22 April, permission was given for all men over forty-five to fly out. Being sixty, and a very senior man in the administration, Sir John – whose wife had already been evacuated – could have taken advantage of this, but, as he wrote in his letter, ‘I had a seat on a plane which I refused, my remark being, “Having brought all these women and children to Myitkyina, and as they are forced to walk out, so will I.”’ The phrase ‘my remark being’ is very typical of Sir John, who continued, ‘Having brought them here, many of them to die, I would lose all self respect and would never be able to look a woman in the face again if I escaped by plane leaving them to their fate.’
By early May, a party had crystallized around Sir John, and it comprised the following:
Edward Lovell Manley. As a captain of the Royal Engineers, he had worked on the railways built by the British in Mesopotamia from 1917. After demob, had risen to become the Chief Engineer of the Eastern Bengal Railway, whose motto was
Ex Fumo Dare Lucem
(‘From Smoke Let Light Break Out’), and whose crest depicted elephants and palm trees, but that didn’t mean Manley was used to living in their midst. In 1942, he was fifty-six years old, and on secondment to the Burma–China construction. He had been living with Sir John, and Sir John’s wife, in Rangoon. He had been Sir John’s guest, in other words, and Sir John felt a particular duty to get him safe out of Burma. As they entered the Chaukan Pass, Sir John would designate Manley his number two.
Eric Ivan Milne. He was another senior railway official, aged forty-three in 1942, and the District Traffic Superintendent of Burma State Railways. He was a keen amateur cricketer who, in his final game before the Japanese invasion – railwaymen against an RAF team – had scored seventy-six not out.
(Both Manley and Milne were married men, and their wives and children had already left Burma.)
C. L. Kendall. A surveyor on the Burma–China construction.
Captain A. O. Whitehouse of the Royal Engineers. We do not have his age. A photograph shows a mild looking man of about thirty in horn-rimmed glasses and pork pie hat.
E. Eadon. An Anglo-Indian ‘anti-malarial inspector’ on the Burma–China construction. (His wife and three children – with the very Anglo-Indian names of Fred,
Sir John began, as he put it, ‘hare’ing all over’ north Burma from his base at Maymyo, the hill station and hot-weather resort, from where he was ousted by the enemy on 27 April. ‘The Army had legged it a day and a half before. I had been promised 72 hours notice to evacuate [railway] personnel …’ As it turned out, Sir John was given twelve hours’ notice, and he underlined the word ‘twelve’ in his letter. The railway employees – mainly Indians or Anglo-Indians – would be pitched into ‘sauve qui peut’, for which Sir John blamed ‘the cracking up of the 5th and 6th Chinese armies’ (which had been dispatched by Chiang Kai-shek to protect the Burmese infrastructure). The reader is now perhaps beginning to get the hang of Sir John. He was not a man lacking in confidence, or opinions, and he had a paternalistic concern for ‘his people’, the ‘railway folk’.
By the end of April he had shifted 4000 of these to Myitkyina, where he attempted to shift them further – by the above-mentioned airlifts to Assam. But the airlift was so very ‘meagre’ that ‘we had to send thousands of men and women trekking on foot out of Burma’. It had been observed at the Myitkyina airfield that, while some young and able-bodied men were putting their wives and children on the planes before themselves returning to duty or starting the dangerous walk to Assam, others had been boarding the aeroplanes along
with
their wives and children. On 22 April, permission was given for all men over forty-five to fly out. Being sixty, and a very senior man in the administration, Sir John – whose wife had already been evacuated – could have taken advantage of this, but, as he wrote in his letter, ‘I had a seat on a plane which I refused, my remark being, “Having brought all these women and children to Myitkyina, and as they are forced to walk out, so will I.”’ The phrase ‘my remark being’ is very typical of Sir John, who continued, ‘Having brought them here, many of them to die, I would lose all self respect and would never be able to look a woman in the face again if I escaped by plane leaving them to their fate.’
By early May, a party had crystallized around Sir John, and it comprised the following:
Edward Lovell Manley. As a captain of the Royal Engineers, he had worked on the railways built by the British in Mesopotamia from 1917. After demob, had risen to become the Chief Engineer of the Eastern Bengal Railway, whose motto was
Ex Fumo Dare Lucem
(‘From Smoke Let Light Break Out’), and whose crest depicted elephants and palm trees, but that didn’t mean Manley was used to living in their midst. In 1942, he was fifty-six years old, and on secondment to the Burma–China construction. He had been living with Sir John, and Sir John’s wife, in Rangoon. He had been Sir John’s guest, in other words, and Sir John felt a particular duty to get him safe out of Burma. As they entered the Chaukan Pass, Sir John would designate Manley his number two.
Eric Ivan Milne. He was another senior railway official, aged forty-three in 1942, and the District Traffic Superintendent of Burma State Railways. He was a keen amateur cricketer who, in his final game before the Japanese invasion – railwaymen against an RAF team – had scored seventy-six not out.
(Both Manley and Milne were married men, and their wives and children had already left Burma.)
C. L. Kendall. A surveyor on the Burma–China construction.
Captain A. O. Whitehouse of the Royal Engineers. We do not have his age. A photograph shows a mild looking man of about thirty in horn-rimmed glasses and pork pie hat.
E. Eadon. An Anglo-Indian ‘anti-malarial inspector’ on the Burma–China construction. (His wife and three children – with the very Anglo-Indian names of Fred,
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