大象传媒

How did a couple of conchies come to be following two tommy-gun-wielding US Army Majors through the monsoon jungle towards an unseen Japanese contingent? Tom Owen, a Welshman, of course who loved to refer to his Calvin-following compatriots as 'Cannibalistic Methodists' - and me, product of a Quaker school, nevertheless a fairly convinced atheist?

It's a long story that brought Tom from office work in Liverpool, and me from a truncated apprenticeship in an aircraft factory to join 60 others at a Friends Ambulance Unit training camp in Birmingham on January 1st 1940. The FAU was a civilian organisation set up by Quakers, so that young conscientious objectors could have a positive, constructive outlet for their energies, in line with their beliefs, and independent of the armed forces. All were totally convinced - mostly on Christian principles - of the futility of war, and all were determined to take no part in one. We awaited instructions to go, not to fight, but to offer what relief we could to those suffering in war.

But those early months of 1940 came to be known as the Phoney War; the expected air raids hardly materialised and, far from being sent off to provide ambulance cover in France, many of us found ourselves remaining firmly on English soil. We worked in hospitals, we delivered ambulances, ran Rest Centres for the bombed out eastenders, using schools from which the children had been evacuated to relative safety in the country.

It was in such a school, at the height of an air raid, with explosions going on all around, and as we were comforting the dispossessed, that the phone rang: It was my sister in Hertfordshire, informing me that our mother after a long struggle had finally succumbed to her cancer. I can never separate the sound of screaming bombs from the desperate sadness of that moment.

10,000 miles away there was another war going on between China and Japan. Forty of us volunteered our services in that field of combat. True, Britain was not directly involved... yet. But conditions were grim and medical help primitive and, whether British, Chinese or Japanese, they belonged to the same human race as we did.

An advance party of four was despatched to pave the way and make contacts, but after a couple of days, a telegram was received from Stornaway by the FAU office in Gordon Square: Bombed out stop returning quickly stop Willis took to the boats. So, they returned and a week later, they made a second attempt. The rest of us tried to gain a little proficiency in Chinese or went, as Stan Betterton and I did, to work in the Vauxhall Motorworks in Luton to learn more about the maintenance and servicing of lorries.
Stan and I were in the next party of six to board ship at Glasgow. The Maida was a 15,000-ton passenger/cargo ship. It was slow - but not so slow as some of the fifty or so other vessels that crept out from the Clyde Estuary into the U-boat-littered Atlantic that June day of 1941.

Tom's party didn't leave for another two months, but his boat took them the 'short way', via South Africa and the Indian Ocean, whereas our route was, to our surprise, through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific, calling at Hawaii and Fiji on the way. Nevertheless, we finally arrived at Rangoon, Burma, at the mouth of the River Irrawaddy some weeks ahead of Tom and the other parties.

Northwards, up the Burma Road and over the mountains was the only way to get our trucks and supplies into China, the coastal towns being occupied by the Japanese. The first job for Stan and me was to assemble our 3-ton Chevrolet trucks from the quay where they had arrived from America and to prepare them and load them up with medical supplies for the 800 mile journey up the road, 'over the Hump'.

It would be a gross understatement to say that it was an interesting road: From the tropical heat of Rangoon, it led us through near-desert in central Burma to Mandalay, then to mountainous Yunnan province in China. There were stupendous views of vast areas of mountainside, striated with countless paddy fields, and then suddenly you looked down thousands of feet into the valleys of the Salween, then the Mekong, twisting and turning round hairpin bends with sheer drop on one side and almost vertical cliff on the other. Finally to Kunming.

Stan and I completed the round trip about half-a-dozen times, each trip with a new group of inexperienced drivers as they arrived from England. Stan was convoy leader and I was at the back, as mechanic to 'pick up the pieces'. We had heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbour on December 7th and we knew that America was now at war with Japan, and we had been following with some trepidation the progress of the Japs through south east Asia towards Burma. But it was still a surprise when they actually crossed the Siam border into Burma itself. It was a terrible time for the British troops who faced them as they fought up the Malay peninsula towards Rangoon, but that's another story.

Rangoon was about to fall. Bill Brough took a truck and a couple of spare drivers and made a dash back south to load up the last of the Chevs, hoping to get them back up to China before it was too late. Stan had remained in Kunming, but Tom and I met up with Bill in Mandalay, where I was fortunate enough to acquire a stock of film for my camera.

The Chinese army was pouring down the road to confront the Japanese. They were commanded by General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, a US general and fluent Chinese speaker who now had a staff of several senior officers, based in Mandalay. A request came to us to provide ambulance support for a mobile medical team that had been set up by a Doctor Gordon Seagrave. He was an American Baptist missionary who had spent most of his life building up a hospital in Northern Burma. It sounded exactly the sort of work that the FAU should be doing - and we had expected to be doing. So Bill, Ken Grant, George Parsons, Eric Inchboard and Bill Duncomb turned their trucks south once more to find where Doc. Seagrave had got to. The next day Tom and I set off in two trucks and found them in Pyinmana, a town some 100 miles north of Rangoon, where Doc. had set up a temporary hospital in an abandoned farm.

Bill and George had already set off further south to where the fighting was going on, with nothing but their 3-ton trucks. They returned next morning with a load of Chinese casualties, and with bullet holes in the trucks and a flat tyre. Doc and his Burmese nurses immediately got to work on them in their make-shift operating theatre. Tom and I got to work on the trucks.

"Tyres first, "I said, after we had assessed the damage. "It's probably the longest job."

"And the hottest!" said Tom, stripped of all but boots and shorts. We were both right, and by the time it came to other damage, we didn't have to grovel in the dust so much, but a break for refreshment was required.

Bullet holes in the bodywork didn't matter too much. There was only one that had penetrated to a vital spot, the rubber hose to the radiator was punctured and had to be repaired with a tyre patch and a piece of useless inner tube bound in place with wire.
There was a row of holes across the driver's door. "It was just as well I dived into a ditch just before that so-and-so plane buzzed us." Bill said when he saw them.

After about a week in Pyinmana, the town was almost razed to the ground with incendiary bombs, providing us - and Doc and nurses - with much work. The Jap army had advanced to within spitting distance and it was necessary to set off north to take the remaining casualties to a base hospital, then to find a new site.

During the next few weeks, periodic instructions from Stilwell told Doc Seagrave to repeat this procedure four times and our casualty stations included a farm, a very nice verandahed bungalow and a pagoda deserted by the yellow-robed Buddhist priests.

Ultimately came the order to up sticks and join him and his HQ convoy in Mandalay. Burma was clearly a lost cause. The Japs had moved into the Shan States and cut off the Burma Road, our only way back to China.

The whole convoy consisted of a dozen trucks, including ours, several Jeeps and two Buick staff cars which were highly unsuitable for crashing through the forest. But that's what was necessary. On April 27th, we crossed the old Victorian iron bridge over the Irrawady, and then watched while it was blown up by Stilwell's henchmen. A rough road wound its way north west to Shwebo, where we found shelter for the night in an abandoned church hall.

The road deteriorated to little more than a zigzagging dirt track and it was May 5th before we had covered the 200-odd miles to Indaw for the night. After that it was a matter of driving between the trees in a westerly direction, towards India. The Buicks had already been abandoned. And then the trucks. Essentials were crammed into the Jeeps, which proceeded a few more miles, until they reached a clearing, near the forest village of Mansi. Even they could penetrate no further.

Vinegar Jo had the whole contingent - 114 of us - stand in a circle round him. But who were all these people? I knew some, of course. Our own six FAU members who had worked and sweated our way up from Pyinmana with Doc Seagrave: Tom, George, Eric, Ken and Bill Duncomb, and me. Bill Brough had been taken ill and had been flown out by the last Dakota to India. And Peter Tennant. He it was who had brought us all together in the first place, and he had come down from China to see us, and to persuade us (unsuccessfully) to return up The Road to China, where he thought we should be. But his return route, too, had been blocked.

There was Doc and his nineteen wonderful Burmese nurses, with whom, by this time, we had formed a pretty close relationship; a US Army doctor; a war correspondent; and a small number of Chinese soldiers who had got separated from their units. Stilwell's staff consisted of two generals, eight colonels, two majors, five captains, three lieutenants, four sergeants and one private. And there were numbers of "odd-bods", Chinese, Burmese, British and Indian who had begged to join the motley, well led party.

Stilwell's pep talk was concise and to the point: We were on our own - and we were going to walk, carrying nothing but bare essentials. "We're heading west to India. We walk four hours and rest for one. Whoever you are, you're under my command, and if you do as I say, I reckon we'll make it. Anyone who can't accept my discipline, had better leave now and walk by himself." No one moved. "Let's go." It was May 7th, Day One.

After days of gruelling trucking, with little sleep and not much to eat, those first miles were hot - and tough. For some of the older officers, especially, and for Than Shwe, a Shan nurse, 17 years old who had only recently been operated on for appendicitis complications by the Doc.

The bare track took us in and out of the Chaunggyi Stream, only just deep enough for Tom and me to float Than Shwe on an inflatable mattress that had been dumped by a tired walker. We fell behind. Evening came, and after hours of pushing, we began to wonder whether we had lost the party. But Than Shwe gave us courage by chatting in her limited English. "This is our ambulance, now." She said.

"Yes," I said. "It's the most comfortable one I've driven for a long time."

Late in the evening, a familiar voice called from the shore, among the trees. It was Peter, who had anticipated our predicament, and waited by the water for us.

"The whole gang is flat out just over there," he said. "You'd better join them. You'll need the sleep." ...and how! Than Shwe settled with the nurses and we found the few square yards occupied by our FAU mates.

The Chaunggyi was a tributary of the Uyu (You-you), where we found three enormous bamboo rafts being constructed by an American advance party, helped by "conscripted" local villagers. Everyone, including the nurses set about completing the job. There followed three days, rafting slowly downstream, the Seagrave unit and FAU occupying one whole raft. One of us at each end with a long bamboo pole to kept us near the middle of the river and on course for the confluence with the major River Chindwin that runs south towards Rangoon.

We were approaching the next major obstacle. The monsoon rains had hardly begun, but when they did, the waters would rapidly rise to a torrent. But a bigger worry was whether, as seemed possible - even likely - the Japanese troops had penetrated north along the river from Rangoon and were ahead of us, knowing full well that Stilwell would be heading for the river, too.

The rafts were left and orders came to spread into small groups, each led by an American officer, to make our own way towards the Chindwin. Tom and I joined a group led by Major Frank Merrill and Captain Donald O'Hara. The Chindwin was half a mile ahead. Was the Japanese army ahead of us? If they spotted us, they were certainly unlikely to show much mercy.

Tom and I walked behind Merrill and O'Hara who stalked with their tommy guns, looking right and left. We knew Captain O'Hara, and got on pretty well with him, he had been with the Seagrave unit most of the way through Burma.

"Martin," said Tom, "I have a feeling that, if someone offered me a gun, and some Japs appeared through the trees, I might just, as a good pacifist, be tempted to use it." I knew just how he felt.

But they didn't, and we arrived at the river bank. Vinegar Jo commandeered a couple of dugout canoes from a local village, and loaded to the gunwales, the whole 114 were eventually landed safely on the western bank. We weren't out of the forest yet; India was still an awful long way away.

The drone of a plane sent us scuttling for cover, and American tommy guns were pointed skywards. But as it approached low, I could see that it was a Vickers Wellington. I shouted the news out, the guns were tentatively lowered and everyone ran out of cover and waved, and from the plane came tumbling sacks and sacks of food. My former life in the aircraft industry had, at last, come in useful.

Stilwell ran out onto the pebbled river beach and held up his arms to hold everyone back, and then organised a team to collect the goodies and distribute them. Up till then, our hunger had been assuaged partly by the nurses' knowledge of edible forest vegetation.

There was, however, still a range of mountains ahead of us. It was on Day 14 that all 114 of us arrived at Imphal in Assam, having walked and rafted about 200 miles and climbed to over 8,000 feet. The girls had abandoned their sandals and walked with bare feet. I was grateful for my boots.

We stayed with Doc Seagrave who took over a Baptist mission hospital in Gauhati to receive the stream of pathetic refugees who had straggled in over routes even less congenial than ours. They were the survivors of the thousands, mostly Indian, who had set out.

But China called and we had to make the difficult decision to leave our lovely nurses and return to continue the work Peter had originally intended for us. We flew "over the hump" to Kunming in an old China Airways Dakota. Somewhere down there was the route we had trekked along. This time it took about an hour and a half.

Years later, Than Shwe wrote in her memoirs: 'The sweet FAU boys and their sense of humour kept our spirits lively and Captains O'Hara and Grindley kept our minds off our difficulties with their amusing jokes. They were golden days for me, they remain an eternal rock down the lane of my memory.'

'My most outstanding memory of all was finding that my appendicectomy had healed entirely. It was a miracle all observed when we reached Imphal. My deep faith in God and my determination to serve my country had strengthened me morally and physically.'

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