Through the Jungle of Death

Stephen Brookes

Description

A GRIPPING SURVIVOR STORY OF ONE FAMILY'S FLIGHT FROM BURMA DURING THE JAPANESE INVASION

"As uplifting a testimonial to human courage as any to emerge from World War II."--Daily Mail (London)

"A tale of hair-raising adventure, survival, love and loss, shot through with rage, polemic, unlikely humour and a rare spiritual sensibility."--Telegraph Magazine (London)

"Unique and heartfelt . . . a tale of human resilience and bravery in the most desperate circumstances."--The Irish News

"Written with simplicity, understanding, and surprising good humour. It deserves to be read."--The Times Educational Supplement (London)
Illustrations List.

Map.

Prologue.

Soldiers of the King.

Bombers over Paradise.

Chasing the Serpent.

Sawbwa Fang of Mangshih.

Fly Me to India.

Prelude to Disaster.

The Rat Trap.

Racing the Monsoon.

The Butterflies of Kumon.

In the Valley of Death.

Through the Chinese Ambush.

The Scarecrows Arrive.

Shingbwiyang.

The Longhouse of Tears.

The Man Is Born.

I Have a Dream.

Journey's End.

Epilogue.

Acknowledgements.

Sujets

• Historical
• Lettres et linguistique
• Biography
• Burma
• Autobiography
• Nestor Burma

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 14 mars 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780471189114
• Langue: English

Extrait

Through the Jungle of Death
Through the Jungle of Death
A Boy s Escape from Wartime Burma
STEPHEN BROOKES
Copyright 2000 by Stephen Brookes. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc.
Published by arrangement with John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.
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Contents
Illustrations List
Map
Prologue
1 Soldiers of the King
2 Bombers over Paradise
3 Chasing the Serpent
4 Sawbwa Fang of Mangshih
5 Fly Me to India
6 Prelude to Disaster
7 The Rat Trap
8 Racing the Monsoon
9 The Butterflies of Kumon
10 In the Valley of Death
11 Through the Chinese Ambush
12 The Scarecrows Arrive
13 Shingbwiyang
14 The Longhouse of Tears
15 The Man Is Born
16 I Have a Dream
17 Journey s End
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
(pages 76 to 79)
My father as a 28-year-old Assistant Surgeon in the Indian army
The Major outside our home
Mum, Father, Richard and Maisie, Burma, 1924
The Brookes family shortly before the war
On the lawn with Maisie
Me and my pups
George, me and Socksie
In KOYLI kit with my Daisy air-gun at the ready
Young Corporal Brookes
Pages from Maisie s diary at Shingbwyang
The survivors at Jhansi, India
Me as a schoolboy at La Martini re College, Lucknow
In memory of my family who trekked through the Valley of Death with me: Ma Sein,William Lindfield Brookes, Maisie and George
Each day the petals fall
But the fragrance lingers ,
Filling the imagination
With eternal memories .
Prologue
In a little-known corner of Asia there was once a land as fair as any that a traveller could hope to discover. It is still there, though you would have difficulty in relating what you see now to the splendour of how things used to be before the armies of Japan, Britain and China fought over it for four years and left it broken and brutalised.
This is the country that Marco Polo and the Mongols of Kublai Khan named the Kingdom of Mien, which the British knew as Burma and which is now also called Myanmar. Once, in the springtime of its history, its kings built an eloquent capital called Pagan which was studded with over 4,000 pagodas scattered over fifteen square miles in a loop of the Irrawaddy river. Gold, silver, glazed tiles, murals and sculptures adorned the magnificent buildings. In 1287, about the same time as Edward I of England was trying to assert his will over Scotland and Wales, a Mongol army entered Burma through its border with China and destroyed Pagan. The blow destabilised the country, plunging it into anarchy for 300 years before it was reunited under strong and warlike rulers.
Early in the nineteenth century the British began to exert their influence over the Burmese king and his court. In the ensuing conflict the Burmese were defeated and the country was annexed in 1886. King Thibaw and his consort Queen Supayalat were removed from their palace in Mandalay in a simple bullock cart and banished to India for life. Thibaw spent thirty unhappy years in exile until his death in 1916, after which Supayalat was allowed to return to Burma where she died in anonymity.
Yet they found immortality of a sort in the Victorian music-halls, where the British audiences revelled in singing the words of Kipling s nostalgic Mandalay :
Er petticoat was yaller an er little cap was green,
An er name was Supi-yaw-lat jes the same as Theebaw s
Queen,
An I seed her first a-smokin of a whackin white cheroot,
An a-wastin Christian kisses on an eathen idol s foot . . .
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin -fishes play,
An the dawn comes up like thunder outer China crost the Bay!
In the days before the Second World War there were no all-weather metalled roads leading over the mountain barriers that separated Burma from her neighbours India, Tibet and China. However there were jungle tracks which traders had used for centuries leading to Assam and Thailand, besides the route to China that the Mongols had used 655 years before. It was the highway built along this route to carry Allied war supplies to China that became known to modern history in 1942 as the Burma Road .
These tracks crossed formidable terrain where landslides were common, especially during the monsoon season when torrents of water poured down the hill slopes, transforming the tiniest brook into a dangerous obstacle. Rickety suspension bridges spanned some of the gorges while bamboo pontoons on wired pulleys provided a perilous crossing of the open sections. Since the whole northern territory was a fertile breeding-ground for virulent forms of tropical diseases it is hardly surprising that, with the exception of political officers, government officials, and intrepid plant-hunters like Frank Kingdon-Ward, few foreigners used these trails.
The country, roughly the combined area of England and France, was rich in natural resources including petroleum, which was exploited by the Burmah Oil Company in 1889 long before many of the oil-fields in the Middle East were developed. Ample teak and hardwoods grew in the forests and in the ground were deposits of silver, lead, tungsten, sapphires, rubies and jade. Before the Second World War rice was grown in such abundance that Burma became the largest exporter of rice in the world.
The bulk of these products were transported by the old Irrawaddy Flotilla Company which managed one of the largest fleet of ferries, barges and steamers in Asia. Their main highway was the placid Irrawaddy river which was navigable for almost one thousand miles.
Burma was truly a green and pleasant land and its people, too, were pleasant and friendly. Unlike the Indians to the west or the Chinese to the east with their huge populations and harsh landscape, the Burmese shared much of the same culture and relaxed attitude to life as the Khmers and Mons of Thailand and Cambodia.
Tragically this peaceful scene was not to last, for on the morning of Sunday, 7 December 1941, 360 aircraft from an undetected Japanese naval force bombed the American Pacific Fleet at anchor in the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, causing substantial damage. America and Britain responded by declaring war on Japan.
The next day Japanese planes bombed Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya and the Philippines. But the severest threat to the British forces in Asia came on 10 December 1941 when the battleships HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales were sunk by Japanese aircraft off the coast of Malaya while they were attempting to intercept an enemy seaborne landing. At a stroke Burma, Malaya and Singapore were exposed. By 27 January 1942 Malaya had fallen to the Japanese. Less than three weeks later the British garrison in Singapore surrendered.
On 23 December and again on Christmas Day the Burmese capital Rangoon was bombed. By 18 January 1942 the Japanese had entered the country in strength. The following day the town of Tavoy, just three hundred miles from the capital was taken. Burma s long agony had begun.
During their thousand-mile retreat the British adopted a scorched-earth policy to delay the Japanese. Anything of use was destroyed: the docks, storage depots, railways, bridges including the huge Ava bridge across the Irrawaddy near Mandalay, airfields, roads, the oil-fields at Yenangyaung and the refineries at Syriam. Rangoon disappeared under a pall of black smoke and flames and 600 ships of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company were scuttled. Even the palace of King Thibaw at Fort Dufferin in Mandalay was destroyed when they returned four years later.
Meanwhile the Japanese bombed and burned what remained standing, using incendiary devices to destroy the wooden homes of civilians in towns such as Mandalay. The Burmese people endured the destruction of their homeland from 1941 to 1945 during the longest unbroken campaign fought by the British in the Second World War. In the event, it was here that the Japanese suffered the greatest defeat on land that their forces had ever known.
As early as December 1941, when Rangoon was bombed, the Indian workers in the docks and the municipal services tried to escape to India via the Taungup pass. They were prevented from leaving their posts by the Burma Government which cynically ordered the closure of this escape route. However when the Japanese broke through the British forces defending the capital they joined the general stampede to safety. Between 100,000 and 200,000 Indians eventually reached India via this route. Large numbers died on the way and according to one report their casualties were greater than those on the other escape routes. Meanwhile the Government of Burma departed to the safety of Maymyo in the north and ceased to have any influence on the administration or organisation of the country.
At this point the Japanese swung northwards driving a