FOR THE NEXT FOUR DAYS, WILLIAMS AND BROWNE SET ABOUT ORGANIZING the elephants. Reserve rations were dumped at the rendezvous sites, and the uzis’ wives and children were transported by truck to safety. C. W. Hann, who had temporarily replaced Stanley “Chindwin” White, would be in charge of Bandoola’s elite group of forty-six elephants in Kanchaung, eight miles away. Browne would go up to Mintha to lead the ragtag group of thirty-three there to Imphal. The ethnic Karen uzis, who had lost their elephants during the ambush at the Chindwin, gathered at the elephant camp compound with Williams. They would be divided into two groups to assist the elephant teams.
On the morning of March 16, 1944, as the Japanese were hitting Tamu hard, everything seemed set for the elephant evacuation, and at noon, the camp phone rang. The voice on the other end uttered the secret code to withdraw. Word also came that the Japanese had crossed the Chindwin just to the north and were gaining ground quickly. The enemy would play into Allied hands, but not on the Allied timetable. Slim had anticipated their movement, though the Japanese were risking everything, coming earlier than expected and in greater strength.
The first phase was going to be rough. The enemy, with their own strategy for victory in Imphal, plotted a three-pronged advance—from the south, east, and north. Williams could not know any of that, but he sensed from the increase in battle noise that enemy troops were marching his way. He jumped into his Jeep and raced up to Kanchaung to tell Hann and Browne they must start at dawn the next day. Williams unfolded a map and drew out the route for Hann to follow to Imphal. Hann seemed stunned by the enormity of what was being asked of him and the very real risk of being discovered by a Japanese patrol. If you can’t do it, Williams said, the only alternative is to shoot the elephants here and now. That appeared to stiffen Hann’s resolve. When Williams left, he told Hann: “Au revoir, and the best of luck. You can make it. You must. Don’t worry if you lose any animals en route, but push on with your main body.”
From Hann’s camp, Browne went on to Mintha to tell the men what the plan was. He then traveled back to elephant camp to help Williams close it down, figuring he would run up to Mintha again at dawn. He went to bed while Williams kept working. They could hear the sound of traffic as the army moved men and equipment all night. At midnight on March 17, 1944, the field phone rang: The Japanese had crossed the Chindwin to the north in strength. They were invading via two main roadways. The good news was that British soldiers were headed north beyond Mintha, where Browne needed to go.
Hann departed nearby Kanchaung on schedule, headed for Imphal. Browne left elephant camp at first light to meet up with the second group of elephants. When he reached Mintha, he would send word back. Williams had a bad feeling about the Mintha group, though he didn’t know why. In camp, he waited. It was nerve-racking. Hour after hour dragged on. He called HQ, reporting that the Kanchaung elephants were on their way, but the movement of the Mintha team remained a mystery. He was ordered to abandon elephant camp immediately and head for Imphal to prepare for the arriving elephants.
Before Williams could begin burning sensitive maps and materials, Browne returned “all bandages and lots of blood.” His truck had been cruising along at 40 mph when it “took a tree square in the nose, and a hell of a mess was the result.” The truck was totaled. He had never made it to Mintha. A passing medic had fixed him up on the spot, and warned him that no traffic would be allowed through now as “scrapping” with the enemy was expected within two hours. He had rushed back to elephant camp hoping to catch Williams. The two men called on higher-ups to allow them to drive to the waiting elephants at Mintha. Their request was repeatedly denied. The Japanese offensive made travel on that route impossible. They could not reach the elephants. Though the chance of it was remote, they hoped to connect with the group in the hills as they headed to Imphal.
Hours later, with the sounds of war raging all around them, they drove out, worried about the elephants and what the evacuation as a whole meant. “The Japs were back,” Williams wrote. “I was again on the run, and had lost touch with thirty-three elephants.” After spending the night at the midway point of Palel, they reached Imphal on March 18, 1944. The good news was the continued Allied air superiority: “Make no mistake, we control the skies in Burma,” crowed the Daily Express. But for Williams, there was only chaos and concern. He learned that the Mintha elephants had never even started their march, but had been dispersed into the jungle where they at least stood a better chance of evading the enemy.
There was no word at all from Hann and Bandoola’s party. It was beginning to look as though Elephant Company was finished, lost in the very hills the Japanese were infiltrating.
Defying orders, Williams and Browne refused to just sit and wait at Imphal. In the chaos, no one would know where they were, so they put miles on the Jeep, covering every road not yet in Japanese hands. Each time they bumped into British troops headed north, Williams would ask, “Have you seen any elephants?” As anxious as they were, this always struck the fighting men as comical.
Williams checked in at brigade headquarters and learned how close the Japanese were. On March 20, 1944, there was a titanic clash between Allied and enemy tank divisions near Tamu in which all the lighter Japanese tanks were destroyed. It was an auspicious bulletin, but not the information Williams was looking for. A brigade major manning the field phone finally hung up and turned to Williams: “Sorry, Sabu. Your elephants were mistaken for Jap elephant transport in the high bamboo, and were shot up coming down the slope from Sibong.” Williams felt sick, but it soon became clear that this was a small group of unknown elephants, and not Hann’s band. Still, time was running out. Senior officers began to think all was lost and that Williams and Browne should just evacuate. So the two men again dodged their superiors and continued their search, heading back into unsecured zones in their Jeep.
Finally, with no time to spare, Williams located Hann. He was within two days’ march of the Imphal Plain. He had been through hell, getting so close to the enemy that he had had to travel at night to evade them. But he made it, losing only one animal. Bandoola and the others were safe. Williams made sure they were on track and then drove back to Browne with the good news. At HQ, he received orders to head north and west of the Imphal Plain with the remaining forty-five elephants once they arrived.
By now Williams understood his evacuation was temporary. His elephants were prized animals. In fact, army officials estimated the value of this group in what today would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. High command wanted them far from the raging fighting. There would be no bridge building in this heated battle, but the hope was that afterward there would be much work for the elephants once again.
Getting out of the Burma-India borderland would not be easy. Between Imphal and the safety of British-held Assam were a series of five mountain ranges, five to six thousand feet high. It was wild country, rugged, dangerous, and not mapped in any detail. It was terrain Williams was unfamiliar with, and the elephants weren’t equipped for. Furthermore, there were no highways, and the few existing tracks were likely held by the enemy.
Even under ideal conditions the journey would have been nearly impossible. Williams had to plot their escape route and order supplies. Physically, he was not well. A tooth had begun to throb, and the pain in his gut that he had told no one about persisted. He needed to find transportation for the uzis’ families who could not possibly join them on this trek.
He contacted a friend doing refugee work in the area and booked safe passage for the women and children of the riders, and then advanced Browne and Hann on a five-day northwest course to get them to the outer edge of the Imphal Plain. He would meet them for the start of the real trek. In the meantime, he and Chindwin White, who had now returned to the fold, set off in the Jeep to scout out the best exit point. Williams suspected that following the Barak River from where it began as just streams in Manipur would make sense. It drained into the Surma Valley in Assam, providing water and good greens for the elephants the whole way.
At three in the afternoon, Williams and White arrived at the bridge that crossed the Barak on the Imphal–Dimapur Road. They stopped at milepost 102 and were pleased with what they found. Even if it meant dealing with waterfalls and gorges, the Barak had a lot to offer, especially since the most logical route—the Silchar-Bishenpur Track—was now unsafe for travel.
By the time they got back to camp, however, news had come in that the Japanese had just swarmed the Imphal–Dimapur Road exactly at milepost 102, where Williams had stood less than three hours before. Their planned route was now off-limits. What they had available to them was merely a foot track.
Williams then went to the corps commander. Blueprinting the escape route was a waste of time. It was best, Williams argued, if they simply packed up and left. Instead of filing his flight plan, he wanted to be free of red tape so he could head out, improvising as necessary. Permission was granted, providing that at the very least, Williams would stop in the village of Tamenglong to signal he had made it that far.
For Williams, it looked like he finally had everything necessary for a departure. But, again, the picture shifted. The Seventeenth Division, an exemplary force with Gurkha battalions, had returned to headquarters through the enemy line, bringing with them sixty-nine women and children—mainly families of Gurkha soldiers who had been in Japanese hands in the Chin Hills. These refugees also needed to get to Assam. With hot spots igniting all around, no one in the military had time to deal with them, and so they were left in the middle of a war zone. They would either have to hunker down somehow, or make their own way out, perhaps with the aid of an inexperienced soldier. The odds were against them either way.
Williams volunteered to take them, knowing full well that the addition of the fragile refugees would hamstring his effort. It was going to be difficult enough to thread a group of jungle-hardened riders, soldiers, and elephants through the unmapped, hostile, and mountainous terrain. The sick women and children would slow them down, making them more vulnerable to the swift-moving Japanese soldiers. The chances were great that they would stumble into a swarm of enemy soldiers who were notorious for their barbaric methods of killing captives. The 1942 exodus was fresh in Williams’s mind. The families had barely escaped that time; now the conditions were exponentially worse. There were fewer supplies to last them on a longer, more arduous, and unknown route. It was all too likely that in these higher elevation mountains the elephants would lose their footing, panic, and be pitched down the side of a cliff. And the half-starved human travelers would be susceptible to any jungle ailment.
Still, Williams said if five members of the group—the pregnant women and elderly, were evacuated by plane, he would escort the rest. His offer was happily accepted, and the development recast a dangerous quest into one now deemed suicidal.
The pessimism of all those around Elephant Company was summed up by the chief field doctor. He said that despite the brutal fighting breaking out all around them, if he were given the chance to leave the war zone with Williams, he’d refuse. “I’d rather stay here and starve, Bill,” he said. Even Slim wondered how Elephant Bill might avoid capture in his “trek across pathless mountains” as “the Japanese made their great bid for victory.”
Williams had faith, though, and it wasn’t centered on other people. “The more I saw of men … the better I liked my elephants,” he wrote.
He soldiered on. The elephants—including Bandoola—the sixty-four refugees, and the uzis were moved to a starting site at the farthest northwest corner of the Imphal Plain, called “one of the most forsaken spots in the world.” The whole plateau was locked away from the rest of the world by dense, jungle-covered mountain ranges.
Williams slipped back to Imphal proper in order to have his bothersome tooth extracted. He would take no chances, having suffered terribly from the bacterial infection known as trench mouth in World War I. From his commanders, he received a red parachute which he was told to spread on the ground every day so their journey could be followed by air—“someone else’s idea!” he said with well-placed skepticism. He had a massive undertaking ahead of him. But he possessed the finest elephants in the world, the most loyal riders, fifteen days’ rations, and a case of rum from an old friend, Steve Sutherland, who had told him, “Say nothing, Bill, but if there is nothing else you will need on this Hannibal trek, I am sure you will need that.” He also had twenty-five years of experience surviving the surprises of the jungle.
He was grateful that Susan was safe in India with the children. He dashed off a quick note to her, which stood a good chance of being delivered. He told her he “was commencing a trek” and said that she “should not expect to hear” from him for some time. Everything he could do to prepare was done. He left Imphal to join what was left of Elephant Company at the base of the mountains at the edge of the plain.
“I was alone again, for a short run in my Jeep to camp with my old Labrador dog Cobber,” Williams wrote. “He seemed to realise the whole situation and leaning over gave me one slobbering lick, and a cheering tail wag; he was looking ahead through the wind-screen, tongue hanging out with a broad grin, as if to say ‘Next stop, Surma Valley.’ ”
Williams, Browne, White, and Hann huddled to talk through their plans. It was agreed. At dawn the next day, April 5, 1944, they would begin their journey through the mountainous, mysterious, and inhospitable borderland.
The elephants would be loaded up with the rations, the few essentials they would need to cook and sleep, and the frailest of the refugees who could not walk. The Karen camp workers were outfitted with Stens—British submachine guns—and rifles. And the officers were given their instructions.
Po Toke approached Williams with bad news about Bandoola. He was on musth, chained some distance from the rest. From the temples of the tusker’s great head came a small trickle of liquid, which was just forming dark streaks running down toward his mouth. Po Toke and his rider would stand guard holding a spear. It was a horrible stroke of luck. “Tell him he can stay there and starve unless he wants to behave himself,” Williams said. Bandoola had an edge to him but was not acting out. When Po Toke looked at his boss, Williams said, smiling, “I’ll risk him on musth.” He pointed to the range of blue mountains to the west, and said the climb “will soon knock the musth out of him.” Williams knew the hard travel would extinguish the tusker’s raging hormones; he just hoped that in the meantime, Bandoola wouldn’t “upset the biggest apple cart I have ever had to push.”
Williams woke the next morning to familiar sounds. All around him in the predawn cool of subtropical India came the hushed stirring of people and animals. Workers were striking tents, stoking breakfast fires, and softly clanking buckets as the animals were watered and fed. Despite the foreboding of the morning, Williams was, as always, charmed by the muted poetry of an elephant camp coming to life, the way that in the morning mist, still under the dark sky, the animals loomed huge and ethereal. Just like the little elephant boy in one of Kipling’s stories, he could look up at one of his tuskers “and watch the curve of his big back against half the stars in heaven.” Permeating everything was the scent he loved: the earthy, oaty essence of the elephants.
The animals were now illuminated in the amber light of the rising sun—forty-five full-grown adults; eight babies. They were all lined up together except, of course, for Bandoola. Williams walked over to his friend and saw that “his musth glands were discharging freely down his cheek but I ignored them, for this was no time for meeting troubles half way.”
At the treeless foothills west of Imphal, with the two main roads out having been blocked by the enemy, the peculiar group began their ascent over the only passage left them—a graded mule track. Williams drew a straight line west on his map from Imphal over the uncharted range of mountains to the safety of the Balladhun tea plantation in Silchar: 120 miles, and he knew every one of them would be hell.
The unit was large in every way possible: fifty-three elephants, forty armed ethnic Karen soldiers, ninety uzis and elephant attendants, sixty-four refugee women and children, and four officers: “an extraordinary collection,” Williams noted. “What was ahead no one knew, nor did anyone discuss it.”
Williams might have been disheartened except that he was amazed by “the cheerfulness of the Burmans” and the strength of the spirited refugees. Many, if not most, were unfit for a long march, but because the elephants were loaded with supplies, only the sickest could ride. “Pity,” Williams wrote, “was a luxury we could ill afford.”
They walked all day, the last of the stragglers catching up to the main group at dusk. Williams chose a campsite by a clean, rushing river to spend the night. There was water and plentiful forage for the elephants. The animals were unloaded and walked to the river’s edge. It was easy to spot Bandoola and to see that he was placid again. “As I had hopefully predicted,” Williams wrote, “that first day’s march knocked all the thoughts of springtime or whatever musth might be described out of even Bandoola’s head and brawn.”
The next morning, they were up and out early once again, as they would be day after day. It was torture for the refugees who had begun the expedition in poor physical condition, yet they never complained. Williams was touched by their stoicism. Each morning even the lame would insist on walking. Only about seven of the sickest would mount elephants from the start. As each mile passed, the number of those riding elephants would increase so that by the end of the day, about a dozen refugees would ride into camp. But again the next morning, tired and sick women and children would gamely walk for as long as they could. For their part, the riders were so attentive to the children that they were given extra cigarette rations in compensation.
After a couple of days, Williams and White split off. Fulfilling the one promise to HQ, the men were diverting to Tamenglong to send off a signal. The two would then rejoin the main group, which was heading due west to an area Williams had identified as Haochin.
In the village, Williams and White found chaos and fear. The outpost had only thirty armed soldiers, one Indian officer, and an inexperienced civil servant. And the movement of the enemy was unknown. The men were waiting for Thomas Arthur “Tim” Sharpe, a member of the Indian Civil Service who had not arrived when expected.
Williams sent his message relaying his intended route, and he requested an airdrop of supplies for the men stranded in the area. He and White decamped as quickly as possible, unknowingly passing right under the noses of a “strong” Japanese patrol of fifty men. Williams and White made it back to the elephants, but just behind them, Sharpe, who had, apparently, been following in their tracks, was captured and, they heard, bayoneted repeatedly before being shot by the enemy.
The group climbed higher and higher, starting every day at sunup and not stopping until just before sundown. Even then there was little comfort. Nights were lashed by chilling rains. Illnesses got worse, healthy travelers became sick, hungry, and sore; everyone was dropping weight. “The cold, at the altitude we now were, brought on attacks of malaria amongst the women, and we soon had a number of fever patients to look after,” Williams wrote. “There were cases of sore feet, dysentery, pneumonia and abscesses of the breast.”
“Some of the elephants were in need of first aid as well,” he wrote. “But we could not let our invalids rest and recuperate; we had to push on. Every day we marched from dawn until after five o’clock in the afternoon, always in fear of a Japanese ambush.”
Then it got worse. The game trails petered out and vanished completely in the thick vegetation. Every step the elephants would take had to be cleared by track-cutting and digging parties. The women who felt able-bodied insisted on lending a hand—using jungle knives to slash at undergrowth and bamboos. Williams noted that the more treacherous and hard-won the travel became, the more beautiful the scenery: lush greenery, stunning vistas, mist rising up from the valleys.
They kept going. He figured they had now reached five thousand feet. “The great beasts were painfully slow in climbing,” Williams wrote, “and Browne had difficulty, owing to some of the older animals nearly collapsing.” Somehow, as always, Bandoola thrived. He was “the pride of the forest,” Williams wrote.
The map continued to fool them. Villages marked on it had long evaporated. People shifted their home base often. But graves and other clues to recent habitation allowed Williams to roughly follow the indications sketched out.
On the ninth day, Williams was scouting ahead when he came to an area “far, far off the beaten track,” where the map seemed to register an escarpment running north to south, parallel to a creek. Sure enough, he found the creek and good fodder for the elephants. The group could stop early and have a chance to rest up—something they had been campaigning for—in the comfortable, lush spot.
Since everyone else was a long way behind him, Williams indulged his curiosity. He crossed the creek and continued toward a point in the ridge that from the looks of the map seemed the most manageable spot to scramble out of the next day. He thought he might as well check it out while he had the time.
Plunging into the thick vegetation, he found it was slow going. The climb was quite steep and the bamboo dense. Unpleasant for him, it would be punishing for the elephants—but not impossible. For two miles of the reconnaissance run, he thought the route would be the way out, as onerous as it was.
Suddenly, however, he came to a withering sight: an insurmountable wall, “a sheer rock face escarpment,” 270 feet high. Williams wrote, “My heart sank.” It was taller than some of the pyramids he had seen in Egypt. Just looking up at the summit was dizzying.
The wall had to end somewhere. He turned to his left and painstakingly traced the base of the cliff heading south. After a mile there was no change, “not a single place,” he said, “where I could have possibly climbed it myself. There was no question of an elephant climbing a perpendicular cliff.”
Experienced jungle salt that he was, Williams did detect an area where the thick vegetation had been slashed probably a year before. Near it was a scree—an area of tumbled rock, providing a few footholds. He surmised that this may have been a natural exit for some agile nomad in the area. Still, while an athletic forest dweller could maneuver his way up, it simply wasn’t a place most of his party, never mind an elephant, could climb. They would have to search for a way around the impenetrable wall of stone, no matter how arduous the going.
Nonetheless, he marked the spot, slicing a large blaze on a tree with his knife, in the unlikely event they could find no better outlet. Exhausted now, he slashed his way back to the creek. Waiting for the elephants, Williams focused on their predicament—it would take at least two days to sort out their strategy, and this would be as good a place as any to rest the animals and allow them to feed and bathe.
The elephant bells were still silenced since the threat of the enemy remained, so just a faint rustling announced the arrival of the large group. The elephants appeared in single file, each with a rider, some carrying children. Slowly, quietly, methodically, the grand procession of gray gathered by the water, and the air began to hum as the elephants grew excited in anticipation of being freed from their loads. Their foreheads plumped and vibrated as they rumbled, their faces pinching into what looked like tiny, sweet grins as they squeaked.
Williams spoke to the men and the refugees, explaining the problem. His audience was initially somber, but when he announced that this would require a two-day standstill, the women cheered. Williams couldn’t help being amused by their delight, but he did explain, “that there was hard work and serious trouble ahead, not because there was no path, there had not been for days, but that it was impossible to get on until we had found an ascent and then dug a path up the escarpment.”
While the riders unpacked the loads from the elephants’ backs and brought the animals to the creek for bathing, the women gathered their clothes, even stripping off most of what they had on, to do laundry.
Before sunset, cook fires were burning, freshly scrubbed clothes were strung up, and little makeshift beds had been set out for the children. Williams, Browne, Hann, and White ate their meager rations and agreed that three parties would set off in the morning to survey the area. That night everyone slept well knowing they would stay put for a while.
At dawn the next day, the British officers, each with a band of men, were off to the escarpment—Hann would travel its base north, White south, and Browne would assess the climbing at the landslip. Williams stayed in camp, tossing a grenade in the water, providing the grateful refugees a bonanza of fresh fish.
Browne, the blue-eyed “gorilla”—so called because he was tall, strong, and athletic—slashed his way quickly to the tree Williams had marked the day before. He stood with his team at the bottom of the cliff and looked up, studying potential foot- and handholds. There wasn’t much, but he figured he’d give it a try. Scrabbling, sweating, and continually calculating his next move, he grabbed at any protruding rock and hefted himself upward. Skin scraped, knees banged, he managed to get himself to the very top of the ridge. Once up, he hiked out a way and discovered two things: a small trail that led south to the larger Silchar-Bishenpur Track and on into Assam; and a lively village of Chin people—a large ethnic minority with many different tribes and clans spread throughout the border area of India and Burma. They spoke a Tibeto-Burman language that Browne could not understand, but still, there was no better man from the elephant party to make contact with the locals. Williams always said that Browne was the Westerner beloved above all others by the people in that part of the world. He had a natural rapport. And so it was that he spoke with the villagers about the landscape and best way to travel. When it was time to find his way back down the escarpment, two men hefted their spears and volunteered to accompany him.
Back at camp, the South African recounted to Williams what he had found: It was possible to reach the top, but just barely. He worried about Williams’s vertigo—he had a horrible fear of flying in planes—and if it acted up, they’d have to blindfold him. His new friends told him that the route was, in fact, the most accessible portion of the whole escarpment. He mentioned that at the top of the ridge, they would be close enough to reach the Silchar-Bishenpur Track, the jagged but well-worn route through the mountains that connected the Imphal Plain to the town where they were headed. But both men agreed that would not be an option. In fact, “That was the one place we wished to avoid,” Williams said, “as until we had crossed over the track to the west, I could not feel that we were clear of a likely chance of meeting with a Jap patrol, and my orders were to avoid trouble, not look for it.”
Ultimately, Browne’s judgment squared with Williams’s—if White and Hann returned empty-handed, they were out of luck. Most of the humans in their party could not make it up the escarpment, never mind the elephants.
They had a long wait. The travel was such rough going, even without climbing any rock, that neither White nor Hann returned until dark. Hour after hour, mile after mile, they had spent the entire day looking for a way out. They never found one.
Apparently, the escarpment spread limitlessly, north to south, with no letup, as though the earth simply vaulted dizzyingly to a new height right there. It was no surprise that the local men were right: The slight landslip that Browne had summited was the sole accessible point. The only alternative was to turn south or go back the way they came, and both would have meant marching directly toward enemy lines. Williams didn’t know how they would make their way around the obstacle, but he knew they couldn’t retreat.
The thought of landing in the hands of the Japanese was horrifying to any soldier serving in Burma. Williams knew that even the women and children would not escape their cruelty. In Hong Kong and elsewhere, the Japanese had bound and bayoneted captured soldiers and nurses alike.
As the war went on, troops witnessed evidence of sadistic treatment of other soldiers at the hands of the Japanese. One frontline fighter in Burma said, “It’s strange: after the initial few days I wasn’t worried about being killed, but I was really concerned about being wounded and captured because they had a habit of tying our wounded to a tree, leaving them overnight, and then using them for bayonet practice the next day. On another occasion a couple of our chaps had their private parts cut away when they were captured and I can only imagine the horrors and the pain that went with bleeding to death under those circumstances.”
When they saw how “the Japs butchered all our wounded,” many soldiers would reciprocate in kind. “We were not merciful to them for the rest of the war. We didn’t take any prisoner,” one said. Another recalled finding a dozen captured Gurkha soldiers tied to trees. “They’d been slit right down the middle by the Japanese. They were cut in two and that really infuriated us. We thought, ‘Right, if we see a Jap again, there’s no mercy.’ ”
Women, just like the men, were disemboweled, too, but often raped first.
Being taken prisoner could be worse. The fate of POWs in Japanese hands was a ghastly one. In Burma, men were routinely starved, beaten, and worked to death in camps overrun with disease. By war’s end, the tallies showed that of the British soldiers captured by Germans, about 5 percent died. Of the Britons taken by the Japanese, the death toll was an astonishing 25 percent.
Years later, historians would try to explain the complicated reasons for such behavior. In part, they would conclude, it was a cocktail of harsh discipline, national fervor, religion, childhood education, a cultural embrace of obedience over individuality, and a demand for utter allegiance and bravery that was enforced with physical punishment. But to an Allied soldier in the field, it didn’t matter why. They simply never wanted to find themselves at the mercy of the Japanese.
That night, Williams could make only a couple of decisions with confidence—rations would be cut starting immediately. However they intended to get out of this mess, he knew it would add days to the anticipated travel time, and food would run out unless measures were taken preemptively. The near-starvation regimen was doing nothing for the mysterious and searing pain in his midsection that nearly doubled him over at times. But it had to be done.
He also decided that ditching the elephants wasn’t an option. It was a consideration so unfathomable to him that he never even seriously considered it. He had seen elephants that had once been in enemy hands, and he was furious about their treatment: They had been kept in poor condition and even had their tusks sawn off, right to the sensitive root, for the ivory. “The way in which the Jap had elephants ‘tipped’ was criminal,” Williams said. It would not happen to Bandoola and the other creatures he had spent his life with.
THE NEXT MORNING, THEY spread the red parachute out by the creek, as instructed by army superiors. Williams had no expectation that a passing Allied plane would spot them. Then he led the scouting party out—Hann, Browne, White, Po Toke, another senior elephant man, and the two guides from the Chin village. The group fought their way once again through the jungle to the landslip. At its base, everyone stood sweating in the heavy daytime heat, swatting bugs against their skin, and staring, heads tilted back, at the sheer rise. There was one very narrow ledge around the face of the cliff high up, and a few outcrops of rock just below it. Was it enough to do them any good?
All of them had to test the wall that day—Williams included. “I was not blindfolded,” he wrote, “but I did many crawls on all fours!” Somehow, he made it all the way up and then managed the even scarier descent.
Maybe it was desperation or an aftereffect of the adrenaline released during the climb. But back on solid ground, an idea began to surface—a preposterous solution that they didn’t even believe themselves: They would cut steps into the rock linking the natural ledges to create an elephant stairway. And they would complete it in two days’ time.
No, it was impossible.
Or was it? The cliff was composed of porous sandstone. Cutting into it was feasible.
Existing ledges weren’t ample enough for the elephants’ footing. And, yet, there was a fix for that, too. The brush sprouting from the inner wall could be hacked away, gaining make-or-break inches of width for the stairway.
An elephant stairway. In a kind of communal madness, as they talked, they began to persuade themselves it could work. They refined the plan, hashing out the details. Tentatively, they began to accept the idea, brainstorming over the calculations.
Eventually, they had to grapple with the literal elephants in the room: What would the huge, ungainly animals do? Even with the maximum amount of engineering they could render to the escarpment, would it be enough to accommodate them?
Williams had seen elephants do some amazing things, but nothing like this.