The war in Asia ran more or less in parallel with the war in Europe, but not quite at the same times. It ran from 1937–45 for the Chinese and Japanese governments, 1934–49 for the Chinese Communists, 1941–5 for the Americans, the British and the Dutch, 1940–2 for the French: the dates give a faint initial notion of the complexity of the problems. The reader who wants more detail can still be referred to Renouvin for the historical background, Calvocoressi and Wint for an accurate summary of the campaigns. What made complexity almost infinitely dense for MIS-X and MI 9 was the attitude of the Japanese towards any prisoners they took: this was so hostile, and the distances of Asia and the Pacific are so vast, that in MIS-X it was at first believed that there would hardly be any opportunities for the section to work there.
Time brought opportunity, but not with ease: infinite hardship and suffering were the lot of prisoners in Asia. For the Japanese held a still more honour-ridden concept of warfare than did their opponents of European origin or descent. Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen alike were brought up to believe surrender to be un-thinkably dishonourable. The rigid rules of their society had come to decree that if anybody nevertheless did surrender, and survived, and returned home, he would not be received back into the community; his own wife, his own children would reject him. So they hardly ever surrendered, unwounded, till very late in the war; and looked with abhorrence on any opponent who had brought himself to commit an act that so disgusted them. Officer prisoners from the Allied forces, even senior ones, were indulged little if at all; 292other ranks got still shorter shrift. Their prisoner of war camps were strictly guarded, by sentries who would shoot a prisoner with no more compunction than they would shoot a rat; and run on a system of reprisals, not stopping short of the death penalty for recaptured escapers or for any fellow prisoner who seemed to have helped in preparing an escape.
Moreover, even if someone of European descent did manage to escape from a Japanese camp, he ran into two all but insuperable difficulties. One was the sheer size of Asia – the colossal distances to be covered, on foot, across formidably severe terrain. The other was that it was impossible for a white- or black-skinned escaper to make himself look like the population round him. Unless he had extraordinary luck, short stature, dense wrappings, and darkness, he was bound to stand out in any crowd of people, to be the thing above all that men on the run always seek not to be – conspicuous. That several score people were nevertheless spirited away from occupied Hong Kong is one of the oddest tales this book has to tell. From Singapore, in the closing stages of that disastrous campaign, a few men of enterprise did manage to get away by sea; wholly on their own initiative, and often against orders. From the camps in Malaya, Burma, Thailand, hardly a soul could escape, save for one large group of enterprising Indian soldiers.
It was early clear in Whitehall how bad things were. For instance, a Foreign Office inquiry to Chungking about the accuracy of a Manchester Guardian report of killings in Hong Kong after the surrender there on Christmas Day 1941 produced an immediate reply – ‘at least three cases of torture and murder of prisoners appear substantiated.’ Three weeks later, stiffer reports were to be had: after the public execution of two officer prisoners and three nurses, ‘Other British nurses were then raped by Japanese troops. Fifty bodies of British Officers and men seen bayoneted to death in one area their hands and feet first being tied … Conditions in prisoner’s camp deplorable. Housed in wrecked huts without doors windows light or sanitation. No 293complaints possible. This studied barbarism undoubtedly employed with object of breaking morale.’
None of this was made public at the time, and as late as the autumn of 1945 it was still MI 9’s object to minimise tales of atrocity lest they cause needless distress to the relatives of those who had gone into Japanese captivity. This merciful view we are happy to accept, but after so long an interval it is allowable to instance the sort of thing that went on. For relatives’ and decency’s sake, there is no need to be specific about names.
As the Japanese despised their prisoners, they treated them with unusual savagery; except that they shrank from the final solution of genocide, they were no gentler with Europeans or Americans than the Nazis were with Jews. It was quite common for recaptured escapers to be beheaded or bayoneted to death, in public. The one method of execution the Japanese never used was shooting: in van der Post’s phrase, ‘held in some profound oubliette of their own minds,’ they beheaded or stabbed or strangled or buried alive instead. One or two more examples, beyond that of the three Voluntary Aid Detachment uniformed nurses whose Christmas present it was in 1941 to be publicly executed on their hospital forecourt, may set the deplorable tone. Three men who escaped from a camp in Java were stripped naked on recapture, lashed to the barbed wire fence round it, and slowly bayoneted to death in the sight of their paraded fellow prisoners: to discourage the rest from contemplating escape. The same fate, also in Java, awaited three men who had done nothing more offensive to the Japanese than each receive from his own wife’s hands a small parcel during a forced march.
Against this degree of sadism, only the other side’s victory is ever likely to provide a defence; and a retrospective defence at that. ‘A slow worker, that Time, and no anaesthetist’, as Stevie Smith remarked. And against that sort of enemy there was not an enormous amount that either MI 9 or MIS-X could do.
294
295Part of the trouble was that terror had its intended effect; it deterred all sorts of people from wanting to run any risk. Senior officers captured at Hong Kong were especially sensitive on this point. Either they had not read Army Training Memorandum 34, or they decided to ignore it, for they ruled that conditions in Hong Kong were such that no one was to try to get away. As an unhappy subordinate put it, ‘The most disappointing feature of the officers’ camp was the manner in which the great majority accepted their prison life and appeared to be contented with it, never entertaining any serious thoughts of attempting escape, or in any way wishing to take part in further hostilities. No doubt this was largely, if not in many cases entirely, due to the lead set by the senior officers, who were so strong in their determination that no one should attempt to escape.’ Of one officer who did get out, his colonel remarked sourly that the fellow would undoubtedly be court-martialled for desertion if he got through. The state of prisoners’ morale in the Hong Kong camps was several times described as bad by those who had managed to leave, and one or two of them dropped hints that the colony had not been defended with the vigour to be expected of a British Imperial garrison: a point that an official or a regimental history can hardly be expected to touch.
It was from Hong Kong nevertheless that there developed the British Army Aid Group (BAAG), MI 9’s altogether extraordinary contribution to the Asian war, which worked for three years in Kwangtung, the province in Hong Kong’s hinterland, and in Kwangsi, the next province to the west of it, on a combined task of rescue and intelligence. BAAG was set up by the local initiative of a single man, Lieutenant-Colonel (Sir) Leslie Ride, quite independently of MI 9’s advance base in New Delhi. This base, called GS 1(e) – later ‘E’ Group – was set up in October 1941 by Lieutenant-Colonel Robin Ridgway, in peacetime a modern languages master at Winchester.1 But Ridgway’s 296existence was at first unknown to Brigadier Grimsdale, the military attaché in Chungking, to whom Ride originally reported. Though the omission was cleared up before long, it illustrates the kind of complication with which Ride had to deal.
China was not for British official purposes a theatre of war; that was why the War Office had omitted Grimsdale from the list of those informed of GS I(e)’s existence. What indeed was China in 1942? It was an enormous, amorphous mess, nominally ruled by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek from Chungking, where the apparatus of a central government – including a diplomatic corps – was maintained. In fact Chiang’s authority did not often extend far. Several war-lords competed with each other, with the Japanese, and with the Chinese Communist party for control of south China; most of north-east China was securely – for the time being – in Japanese hands; an embryo Communist state existed in north central China already. Grimsdale and his successor Hayes, as military attachés at Chungking and therefore part of an established British embassy, had to go through the form of getting Chiang’s regime’s approval for all they did. Ride as a British officer working in an allied country had to subordinate himself to the British military attaché, and therefore to Chiang. Hence some of the worst of his troubles.
For, unknown to him, a personage of much weight at Chungking – General Tai Li, the chief of Chiang’s secret services – was passionately anti-British, and particularly hostile to the government of Hong Kong. Tai Li had visited Hong Kong in the summer of 1941, had been found by the local security authorities to be setting up what they described as a private Gestapo among the colony’s Chinese inhabitants, had been abruptly hustled out of the territory, and had sworn revenge. He therefore seized every opportunity that came his way to obstruct any initiative that seemed to stem from Hong Kong. Ride thought this was simply oriental bureaucratic delay; it is reasonable to assume malice as well.
Ride, born in Australia in 1898, had twice been wounded 297in the Australian army in 1917–18, had distinguished himself at Melbourne University and at New College, Oxford, and had become professor of physiology at Hong Kong at the age of thirty. He held his army rank as commander of the field ambulance unit of the Hong Kong Volunteer Corps, and surrendered with everybody else. It was at once clear to him that the prisoners of war in Hong Kong – including about 600 officers and nearly 9,000 other ranks – were in grave need of medical services; and that neither the Japanese, nor their own seniors, were going to lift a finger to provide them. He therefore saw his own duty clear: to get out fast, and get something set up from outside.
He managed to get smuggled into captivity five decent civilian suits. Choosing his moment and his sentry carefully on the evening of 9 January 1942, he and four friends dressed up in them; they looked utterly unlike their fellow prisoners, who were wearing scraps and tatters of uniform, and walked out of camp unchallenged.2 They benefited from one of MI 9’s soundest rules: if you escape, escape quickly. Overnight he found friends, and was outside British territory early on the 10 January. He found that ‘safety lay almost at the gates of the camps’, for the Communist guerillas who held the immediate hinterland were intensely anti-Japanese. He progressed through the territory they controlled, and through a belt run by pro-Chiang guerrillas, into an area run by more or less orderly Chungking government forces, and was in the capital by mid-February, to provide Grimsdale with some authentic tales of atrocity quoted just now. Grimsdale sent him back to Kwangtung province late in February, to organise further escapes and do what he could for those still in Japanese hands. For over three years Ride’s British Army Aid Group worked on, usually with its main base at Kweilin. As soon as he got back to his working area in early March, he found a few more service 298escapers, whom he recruited; he collected also a number of Chinese refugees from Hong Kong, who stayed with him. His eventual strength, counting in the families of these Chinese, rose in September 1944 – when he had to pull out westwards – to 248. How far this was above his establishment we shall not know till 2010, when the relevant file is to be opened; why on earth, one wonders, is it still closed? He was formally appointed MI 9 representative on 16 May 1942, with a right to call on up to £3,000 a quarter from the military attaché’s funds. By then he was already hard at work, fortified by a visit from Grimsdale and from John Keswick of Jardine, Matheson’s and SOE, who brought with them the news that Madame Chiang herself was interested in what he was doing. This was cheering, but as Ride remarked later, ‘Is it any wonder that a BAAG chit was more valuable in these forward areas than an official chungking pass?’ For his mission was soon handling about 30,000 patients a year, providing medical aid on a scale undreamed of for centuries in an area where the Chinese army ‘had no medical service at all’, and at a moment of famine in 1943 fed 6,000 people a day.
Yet he was in charge of something much more than a local honestly run welfare organisation. During the second half of 1942 he built up a ring of forward posts round both Hong Kong and Canton, the great port eighty miles up-river from it. Each post’s orders ran: ‘(i) Absolute frankness with the Chinese officials concerning our work; (ii) Nothing to be left undone which would raise British prestige; nothing to be done which would lower it; (iii) Maximum medical attention to all guerrillas, soldiers and officials in the area; (iv) Distribution of authentic war news to all official Chinese bodies and foreigners in the area; (v) Maximum help within our limited means to the Chinese Forces and their full access to our intelligence reports concerning the enemy.’ Absolute frankness was a rarity in China, and reaped large local rewards. It helped Ride to get on well with Marshal Li Tsai-sum, Chiang Kai-shek’s rival and nominal subordinate at Kweilin. He put out a weekly Kweilin 299Intelligence Summary (KWIZ), which was eagerly read by the limited circles it reached.3 It was based partly on what he learned from refugees and escapers, partly from what his agents told him. The twice-daily weather reports which his forward posts made as a matter of routine were of essential interest to Chennault’s ‘Flying Tigers’ and to all other Allied air forces in China; as important as the twice-daily weather reports from the Polish Home Army were to bomber forces in Britain.
These immediacies apart, Ride’s reports had to be issued from Kweilin by runner – it took them a fortnight to get to Chungking. Tai Li’s hand was heavy enough to ensure that Ride never had adequate wireless facilities; indeed Ride had to get Chungking’s permission for any of his officers to change his permanent post at all. This permission never took less than four weeks, might take as long as four months to be granted. The main trouble here, apart from Tai Li’s jealousy, was political. For BAAG found that ‘the most active, reliable, efficient and anti-Japanese of all the Chinese organisations’ was the Communist party, which controlled the hinterland of Hong Kong; while ‘As far as the Central Government was concerned, the reds were public enemy No. 1; the Japanese came a poor second.’ A couple of British other-rank escapers from the Argyle Street main camp in Hong Kong, Privates Daniel Hodges and Joseph Gallagher of the Royal Scots, gave their hosts some small arms instruction, as a return for the hospitality they received while crossing Communist territory. Both privates got Distinguished Conduct Medals, but for years afterwards BAAG was accused by officialdom of ‘training the Reds’. In Ride’s words, ‘Security as we know it did not exist in S[outh] China,’ in spite of six competing secret police forces; it was a daily wonder to Ride that he and his colleagues did not suffer much more than they 300did from betrayals. They managed to get a surprising amount done, on their proper front of escape and evasion as well as in providing intelligence and welfare.
Ride claimed that only two air force evaders in his territory were not picked up and brought out to safety by his rescue teams; and these two were too badly wounded to leave the wreck of their aircraft, where the Japanese found them. Thirty-eight American airmen were saved, including one who landed actually within sight of the Argyle Street camp, but was nevertheless at once spirited away. Vast local publicity attended every American evasion; the British were moved more discreetly. The ‘almost complete lack of escape-mindedness among the prisoners’ in Hong Kong itself militated against much success. Camp morale was improved by messages Ride managed to smuggle in, written in invisible ink, carried by Chinese drivers of Japanese vehicles, but the Japanese were so intensely suspicious and watchful that even this channel did not flow smoothly. It was used nevertheless for ‘very valuable’ supplies of medical drugs. In July 1943 there was a disaster. One driver was arrested; what emerged under torture implicated two more; and several officer prisoners were hauled in as well. One of these Captain Douglas Ford of the Royal Scots, underwent protracted torture for several weeks on end without breathing a word of what his enemies wanted to hear. This stoicism earned him even his torturers’ respect – they placed him on the right of two men senior to himself when all three were at last executed – and a posthumous George Cross.
Ride made a plan to seize Kai-tak airfield and carry out a sudden mass evacuation by air – ‘the unexpected always confuses and irritates the Japanese’ – but to envisage this was to build castles in the air: where was he going to get no Dakotas and a three-battalion covering party? Thirty-three actual escapes from the Japanese in Hong Kong were recorded up to the end of May 1943, including, besides Ride, two naval and two army officers and the Chinese Private Lee, of Ride’s field ambulance, who got 301out with him on 9 January 1942; and three subalterns from 5 Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, White, Clague and Pearce. (Sir) Douglas Clague stayed with Ride for many months, and stayed on with MI 9 after he left China, rising to be a lieutenant-colonel before the war’s end and doing much valuable work.
Having repeatedly failed to get prisoners of war away in any quantity, Ride decided to use his developing contacts in Hong Kong to harm the Japanese in other ways. Two important British bankers were smuggled out ‘in broad daylight and from the heart of the city’. Some hundreds of other people whose services were likely to be useful to the Crown, of British, of Indian and of Chinese origin, were persuaded to leave Hong Kong, with their families; they were routed westward, through the Portugese territory at Macao, thus leaving Ride’s military ratlines which ran north-westward uncluttered by civilian traffic. A hundred and twenty-seven of them formed themselves into a Hong Kong Volunteer Company, and fought in Burma; others helped the war effort in other ways.
The most ingeniously devised of these parties, brought out piecemeal – some scores at a time – through a Chinese agent of BAAG, consisted of the dockyard artificers, ‘matey s’ as they were locally called: most of them British, many of them with Chinese wives. Wives and children came too. The brilliance of this stroke lay in the fact that without the mateys – and almost all of them left – the value of Hong Kong dockyard to the Japanese slumped; it became in fact a liability, as skilled workmen had to be imported from Japan to keep it going. They were valuable also for intelligence they brought with them, both about the dockyard area and about the state of the Japanese warships they had handled.
Yet for intelligence purposes they were eclipsed by Ride’s Post Y, so placed in the New Territories that it could keep Kowloon, Hong Kong harbour, Kai-tak airfield, and the main POW camps at Argyle Street and Sham Shui-po ‘under constant observation’ for some months from the autumn of 1942. As Post Y had to 302work through Communist logistic support, and Tai Li got to know of the fact, the post had to be closed down early in 1943: a worse example of secret service short-sightedness it would be hard to find.
Ride’s own work was beyond price. At the moment he began, the British were regarded with greater contempt by the Chinese than had been the case for a century. His mission’s devotion, straightforwardness, and steadfastness made a strong impression, and in September 1944 when the Japanese broke through locally and advanced on Kweilin the favourable impression became stronger still. Ride had already remarked the readiness of the Chinese to run away at the first sign of an attack; he was also fully aware of the perilous nature of the province’s roads. He found that the Americans were abandoning on the local airfield a large stock of 500-lb bombs. He packed off all his staff and their families westward, got hold of some elementary engineers’ stores, and with a few friends set out to demolish every bridge, every gorge along the visible Japanese axis of advance. He gave a magnificent example of how to conduct a fighting retreat. In reward, he was summoned to Chungking to receive a rocket from Grimsdale for using demolition stores without authority.
This petty conclusion symbolised what was happening to BAAG. Its relations with SOE were, as they had been from the start, excellent. Colin Mackenzie, SOE’s head in south-east Asia – one of the most influential figures in the war there, unmentioned in any published work of history till July 1978 – knew and admired Ride, and supported BAAG’s work in every way he could. MI 6 was a good deal less favourable. Ride was given to understand that he had the monopoly for the provision of intelligence from the area where he worked; and then found MI 6 busy counteracting him. OSS offered him full cooperation; and then tried to bribe his runners behind his back, so that OSS could see what news he had from Hong Kong before it appeared in his intelligence summaries. Fourteenth US Air Force expressed itself highly satisfied with all the information 303he provided; and then set up an intelligence service of its own. MIS-X sent Lieutenant Schoyer on a voyage of reconnaissance to Kweilin in September 1943; and then instituted an elaborate Air Ground Aid Service (AGAS) to take over the whole of Ride’s work of helping evaders.
Ride had been operating, with great gallantry, skill and flair, on a shoestring. As all these various professional bodies moved in, he found himself elbowed out of the way: defeated by a mixture of malice, ignorance, jealousy, empire-building and anti-imperialism. The coup de grâce, or what would have been a coup de grâce to any less resilient unit, was applied by a newly-formed administrative headquarters called British Troops in China. Just as Tai Li’s almost interminable objections had been overborne, and BAAG had got some efficient wireless and telephone equipment – manned by Ride’s Chinese assistants, who were excellent clerks – British Troops in China laid down that all communications equipment was in all circumstances to be handled by members of the Royal Corps of Signals. At this degree of over-centralisation Ride protested in vain.
Before we leave the prisoners in Hong Kong for other Asian theatres of war, one more character commands mention: a young New Zealand naval volunteer lieutenant, R. B. Goodwin. He was wounded on 21 December 1941 and in hospital when he became a captive. As soon as he was able to stand, he started planning to escape; it took him nearly three years. Food was a main difficulty; so far as British doctors could tell, ‘on a calorie basis, PWs were all being slowly starved to death’, and when in the spring of 1944 Red Cross food at last started to arrive in bulk, the first the prisoners knew of it was when the pile of empty tins outside their guards’ quarters overtopped the fence. Petty annoyances were legion: when the prisoners levelled a sports field, the Japanese took it over; when they grew some tomatoes, the Japanese dug the crop in when it started to turn ripe; ‘it was some months before everyone had a bed’, and the bed-bugs were so bad that some still preferred the concrete of the floor.304
Goodwin’s intention to leave did not waver. At last, on the blustery night of 16/17 July 1944, he tiptoed out of his hut at Sham Shui-po and clambered over the main wire barrier. He made a dreadful noise, but no sentry came. He got to the sea wall, swam across the bay, and for some days hid in bamboo thickets by day and moved on a little each night. Once a woman came and cut at his thicket till she saw him, but did not give him away. Once he walked slap into two sentries, but ‘just walked silently backwards until completely out of sight again’ – an advantage of being barefoot, however badly his feet were lacerated. Another time, ‘he felt that something was wrong and stopped to listen. Suddenly a sentry grounded his rifle with a crash a few feet in front of him and he retired rapidly.’ At last on 27 July he met some friendly Chinese and was wafted through to one of Ride’s British officers whom he met on 3 August. By then, from strain and malnutrition, he was nearly blind; his sight took three months to recover. His was a tremendous feat of initiative and endurance, and an epitome of the spirit Crockatt tried to inculcate throughout the armed forces.
The nearest we have found to an official history of AGAS makes interesting reading. Fragments in USAF formation histories are useful also, such as a mention of Lieutenant Hogon of the 311th Fighter Group who was shot down in November 1943, presumably somewhere in Japanese-occupied China, spent eighteen months in prison, lost three close friends who died in agony, endured lice, filth, disease, thirst and hunger, and on rejoining his group in June 1945, ‘courteous, considerate and gracious as always’, made it his first business to seek out the man who had packed his parachute and thank him for having done his job properly. Unluckily the report does not explain how or whence AGAS recovered him.
In the last year of the war, several units of B-29 Superfortresses were operating over China, and there are a number of extraordinary tales of how crews managed to walk out from the edge 305of Japanese-controlled territory into Allied hands; usually with help from AGAS, sometimes with help from BAAG. These evasions succeeded because above all, in the words of a late MIS-X circular, ninety-nine per cent of the Chinese were ready to help. ‘Throughout North China, the farmers have been instructed to take care of evaders and lead them at once to the guerrillas’, whose help was to be relied on. These Communist troops ‘know what they are fighting for and the Japanese have behaved so savagely that they also know against whom they are fighting.’ Of course there were perils in the way; in Fukien province, for example, ‘In the mountainous region, tigers prowl during the hours of darkness. Be alert, and do not walk the mountain paths at night.’ By day life is safer, for ‘All Fukien has been organised to render assistance to downed airmen’; the helpers included all the magistrates and the telephone operators. (Fukien is the coastal province north-east of Hong Kong.)
An AGAS explorer who went up-country into the Lolos’ area of western China in the summer of 1944 passed successively a solitary and rather overbearing British Pentecostal missionary, a village where no white man had been for thirty years, and a few days later a place where ‘No white man has ever been in this part of the world before and the writer was like a freak in a sideshow.’ He established that ‘A crew which bails out, one hour by air from its base needs a month’s time in which to return by foot and horseback.’ One crew had fallen among some opium-eating Lolos who first robbed them – taking them for Japanese – and then got to like them, gave them a tremendous party, and in the end let them find their own way home, bearing with them to pay their way a frying-pan from one of their escape kits filled with opium. Contrast the American bomber crew, who bailed out in Burma in December 1944, were feasted by the Japanese, and then all executed next day: the Japanese thought this a great joke.
Clayton Hutton’s pocket escape kits had never run even to a Tommy cooker, let alone anything as big as a frying pan. Much more elaborate equipment had been worked out for the fresh 306requirements of the Far East. E Group and MIS-X pooled some ideas, and disposed – they hoped – of a continual trouble in Europe: people would leave their kit behind, or carry it loose in a pocket so that it fell out during a parachute drop. MI 9 found a good formula to cover this, and prefixed it to the most secret bulletin which was the intelligence officers’ Bible on escape:
He dropped into the garden and crept into some bushes. To his horror he realised he had left his food tablets, maps and compass on the wrong side of the wall, as a result of which he later suffered considerably.
This prisoner, who escaped in the Boer War, is now the
BRITISH PRIME MINISTER
BUT
THE MORAL IS STILL THE SAME.
ALWAYS CARRY YOUR ESCAPE AIDS WITH
YOU.
The RAF designed a garment called the Beadon suit, which included maps, hacksaw, compass, machete, anti-malarial tablets, and escape kit, all in buttoned pockets to avoid Churchill’s disaster. The suit was made in a material light enough to be worn over a minimum of clothing in the tropics without bringing its wearer to the boil. The Americans added a mess tin, a frying pan and a smokeless field cooker, all done up in a package called an E-kit which was attached to parachute harness. Later they devised their own suit, called an E-vest, to do the carrying.
After all, the Japanese had proved by their advance through the Malay states that the jungle which the British had thought impenetrable to troops – so impenetrable that all Singapore’s permanent defences faced seaward – was no more impenetrable than the Ardennes had been impassable to armour in May 1940. Wingate’s Chindit expeditions, aided by the volunteer company 307Ride had brought out of Hong Kong, proceeded to overtrump the Japanese in 1943–4 the jungle of north Burma. E Group and MIS-X were ready to overtrump them on a smaller scale anywhere that aircrew or ground troops could be found to rise to the challenge. The headquarter staff of each body regarded themselves simply as vehicles for passing on Crockatt’s and Johnston’s orders, and for adapting those orders to east Asian and Pacific conditions; they took no personal credit for the rescues secured by individual junior explorers at and beyond the fighting fronts, and by the dogged courage of the evaders.
It will be as well to interject who was in charge of E Group’s work. Ridgway started off in October 1941 in GS 1(d), a particularly secret corner of the New Delhi intelligence directorate. He formed GS 1(e) as an independent section in May 1942 – he and Ride got their charters to act at the same time; and he provided Ride’s channel of approach, when one was needed, to the rest of the intelligence and general staff world. He paid one valuable visit to Kweilin himself in the summer of 1943. Ride was able to provide him inter alia with a set of Japanese printers’ type, which was useful in New Delhi. Ridgway had a small efficient staff under him, including notably Major R. C. Jackman his GSO 2, who joined him in September 1942 and served useful attachments at Highgate, Beaconsfield and Washington in 1943. In June 1944 Ridgway moved on to be personal assistant to Sir Claude Auchinleck, then commander-in-chief, India; and Jackman, promoted lieutenant-colonel, took over the section and ran it for the rest of the war.4
GS I(e)’s name was changed to E Group in the autumn of 1943, when Mountbatten took over supreme command in south-east Asia. He ran his war from Kandy in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and E Group consonantly had an office there under Lieutenant-Commander Brochie, RN; there was also an operational 308headquarters at Calcutta under Clague, who by this time was a major. This dispersal of headquarter effort, imposed by the scale of Asia, was not without its hardships. A staff officer ordered to mount an operation into Indo-China complained that it was like trying to operate into the Caucasus from a headquarters divided between London, Vienna, and Sfax in Tunisia.
As there was virtually no communication with the prison camps, E Group could not hope to emulate the achievements of MI 9 and MIS-X in Europe. There was no local amalgamation with MIS-X. China apart, the American involvement in the war as viewed from New Delhi or Kandy was virtually restricted to air operations northward over ‘the Hump’ in northern Burma, and the occasional ground incursion southward into the same area by the forces of General Stilwell. And in any case MIS-X’s incursions into Asia were belated. Ridgway’s New Delhi office made up and distributed evasion kits, silk maps and blood chits; its only direct attempt at an active operation, made early, was a disaster. When Singapore and the Dutch East Indies fell in the spring of 1942, it was at once clear that the huge island of Sumatra, some 1,100 miles long, had on it a great number of prisoners of war and of civilians who had been interned, and Ridgway determined to send a small party on reconnaissance to try to get some definite news. The party was safely put ashore from a submarine; not a word was ever heard from or of it again.
Thereafter, E Group concentrated on building up by more orthodox means, such as air reconnaissance, an adequate body of information about where prisoners of war were being kept; eventually with striking success. Any data that it got were promptly distributed to the RAF and USAF, in an attempt to preserve prisoners from avoidable bombing attacks. The Japanese, not being bound by the Geneva Convention they had never ratified, quite often put prisoners’ camps alongside ammunition dumps.
The other great preoccupation was with jungle training. E Group ran two schools for this, one in Ceylon under Squadron 309Leader Puckridge who had been a Malayan planter, the other in Assam (north-east of Calcutta) under Squadron Leader D. Vint, who had long worked in Siam (Thailand). Their lectures, based on first-hand knowledge, encouraged people cast adrift in the depths of south-east Asia not to feel lost or even discouraged.
As an MIS-X note put it of a couple of light aircraft pilots who had walked out after a crash in central Burma, ‘with gun, machete, compass, canteen, halozone tablets and matches, enough clothing and plenty of good old common sense, the Burma jungle need not be a nightmare to anyone. Hang on to that chute – it’s the roof over your head and the bed under your back.’ Westerners needed to be told a few simple facts of jungle life: what to eat, what not to think of eating; how to use bamboo, as spear, staff, water-carrier, mug, fuel, raft or house;5 how to scare off snakes and animals, always much more alarmed than a confident man; how to dispose of leeches; how and when to hide and to show oneself. People who enjoy as a treat the coeurs de palmier that sometimes appear as hors d’oeuvres in expensive restaurants may like to reflect that evaders were encouraged to shin up palm trees and cut these delicious, tender shoots raw from their tops.
In principle, once the novelty of Japanese occupation had worn off, most of the populations of Japanese-held territories were inclined to help rather than to hinder Allied escapers and evaders. Japanese promises of independence proved hollow, and Tokyo turned out no more agreeable a remote imperial capital than London, Paris or The Hague. There were a few exceptions: Indians in Malaya were to be avoided at all costs, as were Arabs in the Celebes. The Menadonese in the Celebes, on the other hand, being Christians, were always likely to help. The Americans moreover were everywhere more welcome than the British. For in the only part of the combat area where they had 310any political past of their own, the Philippine Islands, they had been seen as some improvement on their Spanish predecessors, and were already known to envisage Filipino independence. Henry L. Stimson, called out of retirement to be Roosevelt’s Secretary for War, had been a popular governor at Manila in the late 1920s, not least because his wife was polite enough to wear Filipina dress at an official reception.
Yet formal activity by MIS-X came late. Johnston and Holt were eager to press on with the European war, and neither at first believed in any Asian possibilities. De Bruyne heard something of Ride’s work from Crockatt, and urged Johnston to reconsider. A joint Australo-Americo-British MIS-X headquarters for the south-west Pacific was set up at Brisbane late in 1943 under Wing Commander Lamb, RAAF, and Major Kraus, USAF, and was soon able to provide safe area maps, detailed escape briefings on local attitudes, and other useful intelligence. Kraus had had 6,171 combat aircrew briefed by the middle of March 1944. Some of its bulletins have been quoted already. It was not until 8 November 1944 that Lieutenant-Colonel Robley E. Winfrey could report to Johnston that an MIS-X staff had been set up in the Pacific Ocean Area.
This and the other Far Eastern branches of MIS-X had wider responsibilities than this book is able to encompass. For, beyond training fighting men in how to behave if by mischance they fell into enemy hands, and in how to survive if a different mischance cast them on their own resources in the jungle, MIS-X there tackled all the problems of air-sea rescue. These involved a myriad of difficulties about timing, signalling, wavelengths, maps, charts, availability of air and sea rescue craft and crews to man them, worth one day the detailed study this book cannot hope to provide.
A word or two is needed about how to behave in Japanese hands, even though one American escaper went so far as to say that any other fate was preferable, short of suicide. Several versions of the standard MIS-X lecture on the subject have 311survived. They boil down to this: be patient, courteous and respectful in quite firmly declining to give any information beyond your name, rank and number; when pressed, as you certainly will be, explain that your military code forbids you to say more. In no circumstances try to deceive your enemy, and do not dream of appearing superior to him; on the contrary, flatter him and his service. E Group added a warning not to cringe, and suggested that it was best to play dumb, and not mind that the interrogator was probably in fact dumber. The golden rules were simple: ‘Your duty on capture is to avoid being a source of information and to escape if the opportunity arises.’ RAF aircrew were eventually allowed to say a little beyond name, rank and number, provided they gave away nothing on order of battle, cipher, signals, tactics or secret equipment. An appeal to the instinct of loyalty might impress a Japanese brought up himself to be intensely loyal. A further useful tip: avoid badges of rank senior to lieutenant.
All this sort of sound advice will read oddly to survivors of the Japanese conquest of Malaya and Singapore. Wavell – by then commander-in-chief of the ill-fated Anglo-Americo-Australo-Dutch combined forces in south-east Asia – sent on 15 February 1942 an order to the local commander on Singapore island, General Percival, that gave him discretion to surrender. He added at once: ‘Before doing so all arms, equipment, and transport of value to the enemy must of course be rendered useless. Also just before final cessation of fighting opportunity should be given to any determined bodies of men or individuals to try and effect escape by any means possible. They must be armed.’ Desire outran capacity, as it usually does: the great bulk of Percival’s surviving forces became prisoners of war, and no desperate armed parties clawed their way out. Lieutenant-General Gordon Bennett, the senior Australian officer on the spot, who had commanded an Australian brigade in France at the age of twenty-eight in the previous war, broke through the Japanese lines with a party of staff officers, and got away in a 312junk from the western coast of Johore; an inquiry after the war held he had not been justified in relinquishing his command at the moment of surrender, but that ‘he acted from a sense of high patriotism and according to what he conceived to be his duty to his country’. He brought out much valuable information about Japanese methods of jungle warfare, but never held another operational command. His government evidently felt he should have shared the tribulations of his men.
For several days previously, ships filled with a mixture of civilians and of service troops and airmen who had no more local work to do had been escaping from Singapore as best they could, through seas infested by hostile aircraft and warships. To the meticulous list of them compiled by Captain David Nelson of the Singapore Volunteer Corps on the information available in Changi prisoner of war camp – as he says, ‘absolute accuracy cannot be expected’ – a little further information can be added. On 13 February small detachments from some units then engaged in the fighting were sent to the docks and told that they were to be shipped out so that they could contribute some experience of Malaya to a reconquering expedition when it was mounted – just Bennett’s aim. But the ship assigned to take them was sunk. They were then told to get away if they could, and some of them succeeded in doing so. About twenty of these evaded on the small tug Siong Aik; two gunner sergeants coaxed its broken-down engine into enough spasmodic life to bring it, a week later, to Sumatra. By a stroke of luck, ‘we were always’ – one of the evaders recalls – ‘either motionless or drifting back towards Singapore when Japanese aircraft came and took a look at us; presumably they thought we were not worth wasting any ammo on, for they never fired a shot’. They joined up on Sumatra with a few other small parties who had been as lucky, and were taken away in a destroyer the day before the Japanese arrived.
Nelson, too obedient to think of breaking away when the whole system round which his life as a municipal civil servant had 313been built collapsed at Great Britain’s imperial nadir, remained orderly even in captivity. He helped to organise among his fellow prisoners at Changi, on the eastern tip of Singapore Island, a Bureau of Record and Enquiry which established and maintained as complete a record as was possible of everybody who passed through that enormous camp. At first he was one of ninety people allotted to a solitary married officer’s bungalow: an example of the degree of overcrowding. In defence of the Japanese, it is fair to mention that – like the Germans in France twenty months before – they were surprised by the large number of prisoners they had on their hands. This can explain some of the prisoners’ sufferings, which stemmed in part at least from maladministration rather than from sadism.
People who like to cast up account-books of atrocity must reserve space for one item here: the Burma-Siam railway, hurriedly built by the Japanese with captive labour at a cost of some fifteen thousand lives of prisoners of war. This rate of casualty almost stands comparison with Hitler’s or Stalin’s concentration camps, or with what the Nazis did to Red Army prisoners of war, and makes the Sagan killings look more like a peccadillo than a crime. Conditions on the Burma-Siam line have been conclusively treated in two fiercely direct books of personal reminiscence, quite unforgettable: A. G. Allbury’s Bamboo and Bushido and Ray Parkin’s Into the Smother. Parkin, the last man off HMAS Perth when she was sunk with the USS Houston on 1 March 1942, was an imperturbable sailor whom not even the Japanese could terrify.
By sheer incompetence rather than design his captors stumbled on a device that was a deliberate feature of SS state policy in concentration camps in Germany, where it was designed to lower prisoners’ morale. Up-country in Siam there were never enough latrines, so that it was only possible to relieve oneself after wading through one’s comrades’ excreta, and one could never be rid of the smell. Cholera followed; the outbreaks were usually fatal till the devotion of Colonel Harvey, RAMC, took 314them in hand. With a warm recommendation to Allbury and to Parkin’s two books, there we must leave this melancholy subject; for there was virtually nothing MI 9 could do to help and MIS-X was not involved.
Early in 1944 Captain Bairnsfather of the Chinese maritime customs organised operation ‘Vancouver’, which with the help of Chinese army and guerrillas rescued 500 Indian troops from camps in Yunnan; but alas no more than that bare astonishing fact has so far surfaced in the records.
During the war the Japanese made spasmodic efforts at least to assert that they would stand by the general tenor of the Geneva Convention; not with much effect visible to the average prisoner. Nelson ends his book with a tribute to the humanity and courtesy of some of the enemies with whom he had to deal; this is another way of saying that the Japanese are as much human beings as the rest of us.
At least they had the collective straightforwardness at the time to behave consistently themselves. There were two large and fatal riots by Japanese prisoners of war who attempted mass break-outs and were shot down. They tried, honourably by their own standards, to sell their lives in suicidal combat, as their Kamikaze pilots did in the last year of the war. One riot, in the spring of 1943 at an internment camp at Featherston, east of Wellington, New Zealand, left forty-six dead and sixty-six wounded. The other, in the small hours of 5 August 1944 at Cowrah, west of Sydney, New South Wales, was messier still: 231 Japanese were killed or died of wounds and seventy-eight were wounded; four of their Australian guards were killed and four wounded. In neither case did anyone who, having failed to die, found himself outside the wire remain unrecaptured for more than a few hours. That one astounding party of Indians and the mateys apart, no Allied attempts at mass breakaways are on record in Asia.
What E Group could and did do after the tide of war turned in the Allies’ favour, and the reconquest of Burma was begun, was 315to develop search and rescue parties who were sited well forward, who had a call on light aircraft, and who were occasionally able to help in the recovery of aircrew who had escaped from aircraft that crashed in the jungle.6 Plenty of trouble was taken to educate the friendlier tribes, such as the Karens and the Nagas, in the value of helping airmen to return. A few almost random examples may show some of the oddities of these minor operations.
Pilot Officer Z. A. Shah, of 9 Squadron, Indian Air Force, bailed out from his damaged Hurricane at 9:20 on the morning of 2 August 1944, over the Chin Hills in north-west Burma. By four o’clock that afternoon E Group was in touch with him, and in spite of some bungled map references he was back with his squadron within seventy hours. Warrant Officer R. A. G. King of 42 Squadron RAF belly-landed his Hurricane fighter-bomber on 27 August 1944, after attacking a bridge in central Burma. He burned the aircraft, and marched out NNW in his Beadon suit, with perfect drill and discipline, exactly as briefed. He was met on 1 September by an E Group patrol that had gone out to look for him, and was operating with his squadron again by the 7 September. On that day Warrant Officer A. C. Farrell’s Hurricane force-landed slap in the middle of a Japanese unit; by daring and resource, and luck, he managed to get away. He survived for five days on nuts, raisins and vitamin tablets, and then met some locals who befriended him till E Group could collect him. All such successes depended on pilots who took the trouble to report promptly when and where other aircraft were seen to crash. Every such report was investigated, not always with useful result; but the results that were useful enormously encouraged the RAF.
One American, Lieutenant H. Erikson of the 490th Bombardment Squadron, fell down seventy feet of precipice 316after landing by parachute on 11 August 1944, and lost all his kit except his compass. Still clutching that and his parachute, he struggled through pouring rain for several days, till he collapsed. Some Nagas brought him round, and guided him to the British after they had persuaded him to leave his parachute with them; twenty-four panels of silk would clothe the whole village.
Nagas were not universally helpful. A Spitfire pilot, Flight Sergeant J. C. McCormick of 155 Squadron, met a fortnight later (5 September 1944) a couple of them, each armed with a formidable Thompson sub-machine-gun. He greeted them as his evasion lecturer had recommended with a smile, but they ‘only grunted and went on up the hill very fast.’ He was able to look after himself, and was back in the British lines next day.
Two Cameronian riflemen, separated from their unit on 6 March 1942, wandered round for nineteen months from one Karen village to another, trying to be useful and unobtrusive at once; they were shopped in the end by a Burmese pedlar, and taken prisoner on 10 October 1943. A British NCO – unfortunately also anonymous – who got out of Singapore ‘in the general disorganisation’ on 18 February 1942, and got across to Sumatra, was recaptured there three weeks later, sent to work on the Burma-Siam railway, escaped even thence in September 1942, but after six months’ work with a local guerrilla unit was quietly handed over to the Japanese by some Burmans in March 1943.
The Americans ran some Air Jungle Rescue Detachments which did lively work in Burma in the last winter of the war. The Kalagwe incident, as it was called – Kalagwe is a village ninety miles WSW of Lashio – took place in January and February 1945 and illustrates the form. A B-25 Mitchell light bomber was shot down on 5 January. The navigator bailed out separately from the rest, and took six weeks to pick his own way back to safety through friendly villages where he was hidden from the Japanese. The other four of the crew were collected, again by friendly villagers; and an air jungle rescue team caught up with them several days later. The team cleared a small airstrip. 317Three successive L-I light aircraft summoned by wireless flew into the strip; all crashed, on landing or take-off, though without casualties. E Group thereupon lent Captain Sein Tun, one of its most promising and experienced Burmese members. He parachuted in to join the party, now numbering seven besides himself. He had a cheerful and commanding presence, and at once took charge. They all set out on a westward march through the hills to the Irrawaddy, nearly forty miles away. He organised the making of bamboo rafts for the river crossing, in which one of the airmen was drowned. Just before the rest finally got through to safety, they stumbled on a hidden Japanese machine gun team. The airmen ran for it; Sein Tun took on the enemy single-handed, and was killed in action. As one of the L-I pilots put it, ‘He had more guts than any man I have ever seen.’
The coda to escape and evasion in Burma was provided in Rangoon. The town jail had been converted into a prisoner of war camp, and a highly disagreeable one: the usual complaints of little food, getting less, and no medical care applied with unusual strength. ‘In the early days PW were beaten up upon arrival as a matter of policy.’ The technical difficulties of getting out of the jail were severe, and no one had any confidence that, once out, he could get away; townspeople were much more pro-Japanese as a rule than country people. ‘Several escapes by Indian PW are reported but no details are available.’ When one British prisoner did escape, twenty were executed in reprisal. As in Hong Kong, pellagra and beri-beri were common. The annual death rate ran at over one in five, much the same as the rate on the more notorious railway.
Early on 2 May 1945 a Mosquito flew over Rangoon, high up, to make a final photographic check of the state of the defences; ‘Dracula’, a large combined operation, was about to engulf the city. There was no anti-aircraft fire, so the pilot made a second run from a much lower level. Something out of the usual caught his observer’s eye; they flew lower still. They read in large letters on the roof of the jail the clear if inelegant message 318EXTRACT DIGIT JAPS GONE. Emboldened, they landed on the deserted airfield and went into town, to find several prisoners just capable of walking who told them that the garrison had pulled out a few days earlier, taking all the fit prisoners with it. ‘Dracula’s’ covering fire plan was thereupon cancelled, and the survivors in the jail could at least feel that they had saved their countries a large expenditure in ammunition.
It turned out that on 25 April nearly 400 prisoners had been marched out eastwards for four days, at the end of which time they were told they were free and could go where they chose; between thirty and forty had already escaped during the journey. The SBO, Brigadier Hobson, and several others had the extreme bad luck to be killed in an Allied air strafing attack at this very last moment before liberation; because they were still wearing khaki, like the Japanese, and not the jungle green in which Slim’s army was by this time fighting. In spite of this, the morale of the rest was reported ‘extremely high’; so was that of their 120 ill companions, who were recovered in Rangoon.
We must pass to a more gloomy subject, the fate that befell American prisoners in the Philippines. The heroic defence of the Bataan peninsula needs no repetition from an English pen, and the death march thence to the prison compounds at Cabanatuan is almost as familiar to American readers as Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. As at Singapore and Hong Kong, the trouble lay partly in weak administration, as well as – even in some cases instead of – deliberate bloody-mindedness. Yet it was as true in Luzon as in Java or Hong Kong or Singapore or Rangoon, whence the phrase is drawn, that ‘all PW, whatever their rank, are regarded by the Japanese as inferior to their lowest ranking soldier.’ As Allbury remarked, ‘All Japanese officers N.C.O.s and O.R.s had to be saluted at all times, and didn’t they enjoy it!’ The Japanese drivers on the road to Cabanatuan who wanted to see what a human body looked like after their truck had driven over it, and who left many specimens on 319their way to encourage their victims’ comrades, were expressing their view about the nation that had dragged Japan out of its medieval seclusion into the modern world only eighty-eight years before.
Every prisoner of the Japanese had to ask himself, far more searchingly than prisoners of war needed to do in Europe, ‘What will be the effect on my companions who stay behind if I escape?’ The Japanese often threatened executions in reprisal; the sharp example of Rangoon was quoted a moment ago. There are too many public beheadings with ceremonial swords on record to prove that – unlike some of the Germans – they meant their threats.
In the Philippines they usually organised their prisoners in groups, and gave each group to understand that all the rest of them would be beheaded if any one of them vanished: an effective stopper on activity among people who had already developed comradely feelings for their companions in arms or in suffering. Ironically enough they named this scheme ‘collective security’, the name used in the west for the League of Nations system that had failed to check their imperial advance. A group of prisoners in Camp O’Donnell on Mindanao found a way round this problem. It was under the command of Major William E. Dyess of the 21st Pursuit Squadron, who reported that during the original ‘death march’, ‘One Japanese soldier took my canteen, gave the water to a horse and threw the canteen away.’ He got his next drink, after twelve hours’ marching, ‘from a nearby caribou wallow’, and next day and night marched for twenty-one hours on end; he then sat for twelve hours more in a dense crowd in the tropical sun. He also saw an officer beheaded for possessing a Japanese coin. So he was not much attracted to his captors. He made careful inquiries among the rest of his party, seven other officers, a sergeant, a private, and two Filipino murderers thrown in by the Japanese to keep the others company. They all agreed with him that the unknown horrors of the jungle were less than the known 320horrors of their camp. The whole group escaped en bloc and there were no reprisals.
Dyess was lucky in his companions. He joined the local guerrillas – he had already had some experience of infantry fighting before being captured on Bataan – and became chief of operations for a guerrilla division which had about 150 Americans in it, some of them women. It was a self-sustaining and optimistic organisation, which built a number of disguised airfields; work with it was refreshing after life in Camp O’Donnell, where the prisoners had only a little rice to eat, and could see oranges and lemons rotting on the ground outside the wire.
This paradox of dire poverty in the midst of plenty, even in a farming area so rich that five crops could be harvested with little effort every two years, much depressed Laurens van der Post at Bandoeng in Java. ‘There was not a person’, he declared, ‘in my own prisoner-of-war camp in 1945 who was not suffering from deficiency diseases of some kind; beri-beri and pellagra were, as far as we were concerned, the least of them. The ones most feared were the many and painful forms of malnutritional neuritis, which made men’s nerves burn so much with pain that they could not sleep, and in many cases deprived them of their sight.’ Only with the help of the local Chinese community, whose members smuggled in to him at enormous risk money which he could use to bribe Japanese and still fiercer Korean guards to buy food, was his camp able to survive at all.
In the autumn of 1943 Roosevelt tried to put a brake on atrocity propaganda in the American press, and Marshall supported him strongly; word had by then spread quite far along the service grapevine around the British and United States armed forces. In the spring of 1944 the Spaniards, who looked after Japan’s interests at Washington, passed on a note of 3 May which said that the Japanese government ‘cannot but express utter astonishment’ at American accusations of atrocities, made in a note to Madrid of 5 February that year; the Japanese went on to complain that their prisoners in the United States had had 321to clean latrines. Conceivably the Japanese service departments kept the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in sublime ignorance of what was really being done to American prisoners of war; there is no other honourable explanation.
There was nothing at all MIS-X could do for prisoners in the Japanese homeland, beyond having trained them in how to behave and what to look out for, as there was virtually no mail through which escape aids could be sent in or information be sent out. According to the Red Cross, ‘There is no way to send personal parcels to our POW in Japan’ as late as 21 October 1944. However, as the war reapproached the Philippines in the second half of 1944, a very little could be done, and the best American servicemen continued to behave in astoundingly brave ways under stress.
Sergeant Howard G. R. Moore, namesake of the famous Sergeant Moore in the Long Range Desert Group, was taken prisoner on Bataan at the age of twenty-seven. He came from Houston, Texas, and had a quiet military task as a headquarters staff draughtsman. This did not, he felt, exempt him from combat. He soon escaped by boat, but was recaptured at sea. He escaped for a second time, killing a sentry in hand-to-hand combat during which he was bayoneted near the eye. Next he organised guerrillas in the Zambales Mountains north of Bataan, to such effect that he claimed that he attracted a force of about 10,000 Japanese to mop up his own unit. He found spy fever so rife among the guerrillas that bands often fought each other instead of the enemy, and the Japanese caught him again. They beat him up repeatedly, through a month of questioning; he kept smiling, because he found they disliked hitting a man who put on a brave front. A court martial sentenced him to four years’ prison. By now he found the Japanese so frightful that he would take any risk to get away, and managed to break prison; for after a few days’ intensity his captors, as usual, lowered their guard, and he was able to escape from an outside working party. He went back to the hills, and in September 1944 was brought out to Australia.322
MIS-X’s advice already, on 7 September, was that ‘Chances are, airmen downed on Luzon will find it best to remain in the hills with friendly peoples until Allied troops take over.’ Winfrey was not quite happy with this, and managed to get fast enough communications with the Philippines for him to rescue, for example, some US Marine Corps survivors from the massacre in north Palawan on 14 December 1944. By the end of January 1945 he could claim in a monthly report that his people had rescued ninety-two navy and nineteen army escapers from the Philippines, and that a further sixty-eight sailors and eighty soldiers were in the category ‘rescued and remaining’ – that is, had got away into the hills and were being looked after till the islands were freed, or at least till the next boat or Catalina amphibious aircraft called.
One pilot in the 41st Squadron of the USAF, Second Lieutenant Robert C. Lightfoot, bailed out over Mindanao – the southernmost large island of the group – on 1 November 1944; remembered, as was the universal advice in all the MIS-X bulletins, not to pull his rip-cord till he was down to about 3,000 feet, to lessen the chance of being spotted by the wrong people; and hid in the hills for two days, living on his escape ration, till he was sure no hunt for him was going on. He then met four Filipino boys who were out canoeing; they took him to a house where he fed and lay up for a couple of days more. A guerrilla sergeant then took him over, and led him to a headquarters whence his safety was reported by wireless. He lay up for some weeks with an American officer who was engaged in the deadly efficient business of coast watching, and was unobtrusively picked up by a Catalina. In the whole of his report on the incident, he made no reference to the Japanese at all after the first day.
1We are particularly grateful to his widow, now Mrs Anne Grantham, JP, for access to his papers.
2Alan Birch in South China Daily News, 12 October 1973, the first of two useful articles (the other came out next day) on BAAG.
3Unhappily only the concluding number is on file (WO 208/3492); it deals with the engineering operations Ride conducted when he left Kweilin. The rest are either withheld, destroyed, or mislaid.
4 Jackman provides the main source for this paragraph and the next five.
5E Group produced an excellent illustrated pamphlet on this, attached to WO 208/3252, ‘E’ Group Bulletin.
6 An incomplete map in WO 208/3251 shows ten active operational areas, six in Burma, two in Malaya, one in Sumatra and one in Indo-China.