LITMIR.BIZ

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Guy Millar felt sick.

       The Red-Hot Buddhas

      The bombing of Burma started on 11 December. The first raid on Rangoon itself came on 23 December at which point the residents would have recalled some elementary geography.

      Rangoon was towards the south of a country bounded by sea and mountains to the west, and mountains and Japanese-occupied China to the east. If the docks and airstrip were taken out of commission, the only escape from an army entering Rangoon from the south would lie directly north, along the valleys of the Chindwin and Irrawaddy rivers, and towards India, that supposedly more secure bastion of the colonizing power. But India was 2000 miles from Rangoon, and protected by a barrier of the highest mountains and the densest jungles of all. Nevertheless, that first raid on Rangoon – which killed 2000 people – marked the start of what would come to be called ‘the walkout’. Millar and Leyden were two of a million. The entire non-indigenous population of Burma would leave the country.

      George Rodger, a thirty-four-year-old British photographer and correspondent with the American magazine Life, arrived in Rangoon in the third week of January 1942, a time when most sensible people were leaving. A practitioner of foreign correspondent sang-froid, Rodger touched down on the Irrawaddy in a BOAC flying boat as a Japanese air raid screamed overhead. It was impossible to get ashore, ‘so we sat in wicker chairs on a BOAC barge out in the river, drinking lemonade and waiting for the bombs to fall in the harbour’. Rodger was – not very surprisingly – ‘the only passenger disembarking at Rangoon’, and after the all-clear had sounded, he checked into the one hotel still open, the Minto Mansions. In his memoir, Red Moon Rising (1943), he writes, ‘There in the dingy hallway, trunks and packing cases were piled high. They were addressed in bold white paint to destinations in India and were the property of those who had decided to leave Rangoon before the raids became too heavy.’ As he sat down to dinner that evening, the air raid siren sounded again. ‘Immediately all lights were extinguished.’ Rodger wasn’t going to be put off his soup by mere bombs. He determined to continue eating, albeit now in the dark, but after a few minutes he found himself completely alone in the restaurant, so he abandoned his dinner and wandered outside ‘with a few British officers to watch the progress of the raid from the garden’. Rodger was intrigued to see most of the other guests lying down in slit trenches that had been dug in the garden between tall trees. Even here, botany obtrudes: ‘I noticed the smell of magnolia and sweet jasmine in the hot night air and huge bats were flying silently in silhouette against the light of the full moon.’ From one of the slit trenches someone insisted that Burmese fifth columnists were signalling to the enemy by means of red lights, assisting the raid. Rodger did not believe it, ‘but this is how rumours are born’.

      In mid-December 1941, the Japanese 15th Army entered south Burma from Thailand (which they had entered from Malaya) and began fighting their way towards Rangoon. Columns of Indian refugees were filing into the city from the south, and leaving again from the north, either for the town of Prome, 120 miles north, or for the Burmese second city, Mandalay, 250 miles north. Among them were the Indians essential to the running of Rangoon.

      On 15 February, Singapore – the fortified island that supposedly guaranteed the security of Malaya and Burma – fell to the Japanese. In mid-February the English newspapers of Rangoon ceased publication.

      Like Birnam Wood, the jungle was coming, and the trees themselves announced the fact. On 20 February, notices featuring the letter ‘E’ were posted on the tree trunks of Rangoon. This did not mean ‘Evacuate’, but the banks evacuated once the notices appeared nonetheless. In fact, E stood for ‘Essential’: all vehicles were to be immobilized except those deemed – and marked – ‘Essential’. On 28 February, ‘W’ notices were put on the trees, and this was slightly less ambiguous. It meant ‘Warning’, and it was the cue for all but non-essential workers to leave. Most had already done so.

      European women and children were given priority on the ships leaving Rangoon for India. Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith later offered the rationale that Europeans would be worse treated by the invaders. In The Story of Burma, F. Tennyson Jesse writes,

      We made a mess of it at the beginning, as we always seem to make a mess of everything at the beginning. When we did begin to establish road convoys and air transport, there were not enough to go round, and in issuing passes for lorry or air transport we had to fix priorities; the more important the person the higher was his priority, and important persons were largely white; but even so the whites were few, for there were very few of them in Burma, and the coloured people secured the majority of the passes though not in proportion to their overwhelming numbers.

      In her book Evacuation Burma, Felicity Goodall makes the point that this was the first time the British had been refugees, and they were not very good at it. In theory, a Defence Ordnance banned European men from fleeing the country. Indian men were not allowed to board the ships as deck passengers; that is, on cheap tickets. This was an attempt to retain the poorer Indian males who manned the docks. But thousands of Indians and Europeans continued to stream ‘up country’ by road, rail or river steamer.

      On 7 March the order was given – code ‘Red Elephant’ – for the complete evacuation of Rangoon. That evening, Royal Marines began heaving cases of whisky into the docks, having drunk as much as was reasonably possible themselves. (They knew the Japanese were partial to a glass of whisky.) The Reverend N. S. Metcalf, a chaplain with the 7th Armoured Brigade (‘The Desert Rats’), ventured towards the Zoological Gardens:

      Fortified by a report that all animals of a dangerous nature had been destroyed, we made our entry [into the Gardens] only to discover that some were very much alive and outside their cages! There was a tense moment when it was discovered that a ‘tree trunk’ was really a crocodile, and a ‘rope’ hanging from a tree was a full-sized boa constrictor! There was also an orang-utang loose in the town itself, handing out a nice line in assault and battery to anyone who crossed its path.

      It was at about this time that George Rodger, once again going against the flow (this time he’d got hold of a jeep) and returning to Rangoon along the Prome Road after some adventures in Upper Burma, saw an armoured car with motorcycle outriders flashing past in the opposite direction. Inside sat Dorman-Smith. ‘Well, there goes the government,’ Rodger thought to himself. But, rather than fleeing the country, Dorman-Smith was hoping to re-establish his administration in Mandalay.

      The Prome Road was periodically strafed by Japanese fighter planes. A little thing like that didn’t bother George Rodger, and the Indians were as scared of the Burmese as they were of the Japanese. They were repeatedly stopped on their trek. Like the playground enemy who puts out his arm and demands ‘Password!’, the Burmese, armed with swords and axes, had erected illicit tolls on the dusty roads. A length of bamboo would be slung across the Prome Road – not difficult since it was a dusty one-track affair – and the Indians were charged a fee of one rupee before they could continue.

      George Rodger drove on, past the columns of refugees:

      There must have been 50,000 to 60,000 of them. Dock labourers, coolies, and bearers plodded side by side with clerks and government servants, their womenfolk and children trailing beside them. In endless streams they came – women tired out and hobbling along by the aid of sticks; men carrying babies slung in panniers from their shoulders, others carrying small children on their backs. Some of the women carried bundles of dry wood on their heads for, with such a large party, it was not easy to find fuel for their fires wherever they stopped for the night, and it was not safe to forage in the jungle where Burmans might be lurking.

      Others again carried more whimsical items: a tom-tom drum, a bicycle with the back wheel missing, a cross-cut saw. In the Chaukan Pass, Millar, as we have seen, did not have the strength to carry his favourite revolver. How much sooner would people abandon their harmoniums, oil paintings, photographic albums?

      Prome was now a giant refugee camp infested with cholera and typhoid, where thousands of Indians waited for Irrawaddy steamers to carry them north – boats that never appeared. One option from here was to break out of Burma halfway

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