Flight By Elephant

The Untold Story of World War II's Most Daring Jungle Rescue

Andrew Martin

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780007461523
• eBook ISBN: 9780007542369
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

In the summer of 1942, Gyles Mackrell, together with twenty elephants, and a team of mahouts (elephant riders) performed heroic rescue-missions in the hellish jungles of Japanese-occupied Burma.

At the age of 53, Mackrell – a decorated First World War pilot, then overseeing tea plantations for a company called Steel Brothers – went into the ‘green hell’ of the Chaukan Pass on the border of North Burma and Assam. Here, in what became a three-phase mission, he rescued Indian army soldiers, together with British civilians and their Indian servants, from the pursuing Japanese, directing his elephants through jungle passes and over raging rivers, through territory previously unseen by any white man and infested with sand flies, horse-flies, mosquitoes and innumerable leeches. Those he saved were all on the point of death from starvation or fever: the whole of that summer was spent in a fight against time.

The most astonishing aspect of Gyles Mackrell’s heroics is that they have yet to be fully dramatised. Now in Andrew Martin’s hands they are given the shape of a suspenseful adventure, a wartime rescue whose facts are the stuff of Commando Comic-fiction. But he has also made a classic in the kingdom of animal fiction, with a starring species as awesome as literature’s most powerful horse, as exotic as its most elusive whale, as loveable as its most faithful dog. And finally Martin has pointed a portrait of war and of jungle-survival from an historically under-nourished point of view; a picture of fading British imperial virtues at their most dignified and robust. This book’s appeal will embrace together for the first time those happy disciples of adventure, history and the elephant.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Maps
• Principal Characters
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• Millar and Leyden: The Men Without Elephants
• The Languorous Dream
• The Dapha River
• The Red-Hot Buddhas
• The Man in the River
• Beyond Mandalay
• The Railway Party
• The ‘Chaukan Club’ Sets Off
• The Footprint
• The Man With Elephants
• The Boy Who Took Acidalia trigeminata
• Sir John Meets the Commandos
• The Wizard’s Domain
• A Bad Start for Mackrell
• War And Tea (Part One)
• War And Tea (Part Two)
• Captain Wilson Sets Out
• Elephant Trouble for Mackrell
• Mackrell Reaches the Dapha River
• Sir John Encounters His Principal Enemy
• The Man in Sunglasses
• Mackrell Consolidates at the Dapha River
• Captain Wilson Arrives at the Dapha
• Havildar Iman Sing
• The Commandos Despair of Reaching the Dapha
• Grand Tiffins and the Squits
• The Drop
• Momentous Decisions
• Mackrell Returns Temporarily to Civilization
• Mackrell in Shillong and Calcutta
• The Society of Tough Guys
• A Face Like Wood: Dharramsing Decides
• A Delivery of Mail
• A Long Wait
• Subsequently (Part One)
• Subsequently (Part Two)
• Late Period Mackrell
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Also by Andrew Martin
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher