大象传媒

This story is contributed by Norman Davies, a navigator with 117 Squadron in Burma, and is added to the site with his permission.
At the end of the war in Burma the squadron was involved in providing transport for former prisoners of war and other passengers.

On 24th September we were instructed to take 20 passengers from base, just north of Rangoon to Saigon. We couldn't do it non stop 鈥� it was too far...so we had to land at Bangkok and take on more fuel. So we got to Saigon late on 24th of September. And on the 25th September we started back. Unfortunately there were quite strong headwinds against us....and three or four hours out of Saigon Jimmy Pink, the pilot, said we didn't have enough fuel to get to Bangkok, so we had to put somewhere. The place we put down subsequently became very famous Phnom Penh, which is now in Cambodia....it was then French Indo China. Jimmy said, we'll have to make a forced landing and we could see a little airstrip...there were some cattle on it, so we did a couple of low flights and the cattle dispersed and we landed on this strip quite safely. You know you see these war films with Japanese officers in these big Mercedes Landaus open...and in the distance we could see one of these full of Japanese officers coming towards us. I always remember the words of Mike Jennings the Sgt...he said 鈥淐hrist, I hope these buggers know that the war has finished!鈥� Because it was only the 24th of September you see and we thought perhaps they hadn't heard. There was nothing we could do about it there were only the three of us. We had our revolvers, we took the flaps off to get them ready. And these blokes there were four of five of them with full dress uniform with their swords. They drew up in this beautiful Mercedes Landau and got out and they came up to us and started bowing, and offering us their swords 鈥� which we didn't quite know what to do with. One of them could speak English very passibly and we said that we needed fuel but that we were in touch with base who were going to fly out more petrol to us, but we had to stay the night. So we were placed in this beautiful car, and taken to a very nice hotel, or some billets, and I remember that evening we had the most wonderful meal with these Japanese people....we weren't conversing very much.
..And the next day we had fresh fuel in and we flew back to Saigon and then flew back to Bangkok on the 29th with about fifteen passengers.

We were still flying mostly troops or prisoners .... we were virtually acting as a civilian airline really. This was still going on at the end of November.

At the end of December 1945 117 Sqdn was disbanded and we were then posted to 215 Sqdn in Singapore but we had a grand party in the Mess to mourn the demise of 117 Sqdn...and they'd made a sort of headstone and there was a little poem on it:

Open wide the gates to Heaven
Alas for 117,
Nought the demand
From transport command,
But regardless onward pressed
With matchless zeal and zest
And now the King God save,
Here's its grave.

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