"ELEPHANT MAN"

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 85, 10 April 1943, Page 7

"ELEPHANT MAN"

SAVED 200 LIVES DRAMATIC BURMA RESCUE By leading a herd of elephants in forced marches over mountain gorges, Gyles Mackrell reached and rescued 20& starving fugitives from the Japanese advance into Burma. That, briefly, is why he has been awarded the George Medal. Gyles Mackrell, who will always be known as the "Elephant Man" by those whom he rescued, left England about 35 years ago, when he was 20, and went to work on an Indian tea plantation. He loved the life. He set out to understand' the natives—their language and their customs. He became a great hunter. When the invasion of Burma came last year he was in Assam, in Northern ■ India, ■working as supervisor of tea plantations. Sepoys. and others, fleeing to the Assam frontier—a range of mountains through which the tortuous passes snake upwards for 7000 ft— were starving in the hills and pursued by the Japanese. Felt He Must Save Them Mackrell heard of their plight. These were people he knew, men whose perils he had shared • in the hunting expeditions. He felt he must save them. It was the rainy season . . . when the skies open, when for six months there is one universal and continuous deluge of rain or hail, accompanied by shattering thunder and spectacular lightning. People told him he could never get over the mountains. Cars would never get through. Mackrell, D.F.C. of the last war, said he would do it. There was one kind of transport that might prove successful—elephants. So he sec about organising an elephant convoy. Then people said the rout-3 was impracticable. Mackrell kept his own judgment and set off, leading the herd of food-laden elephants. Resting little, sleeping less, he pushed on. ' The track to the hills led through forests with danger on every side— elephants, rhinoceroses, tigers, leopards, bears, buffaloes, snakes, and, in the rivers, crocodiles. But the convoy kept on. The chief obstacle, a river, was in flood, and rolling huge boulders along its bed. Mackrell determined to get across. "At great personal risk and after many tries," says the citation, he got his convoy over. All Were Starving At last he reached the stranded refugees, high in the Chankan Pass. Some were ill. All were starving. Mackrell stayed with them and doctored them until at last 101 Sepoys and other ranks were able to go on and reach Assam. He stayed to help others. Now severely ill with fever himself, he remained to feed and tend the stillarriving stragglers. Altogether he saved the lives of 200 people, all the time risking hardships which might easily have proved fatal to a sick man. And now? Gyles Mackrell, aged 55, has gone back to his tea plantations. There were many other deeds of gallantry at that time. Altogether 54 awards were announced in the London Gazette. The citations are brief, but they paint a grim picture of the hardships that were endured. • Lieutenant-Colonel E. T. N. Taylor, India Medical Service, "checked a cholera epidemic which might have brought work on the IndiaBurma road to a standstill and resulted in great loss of life." He won the CLE. Dr. James W. Lusk took over a hospital in Mandalay where there were 200 cholera patients and a staff of one Indian doctor, one nurse and a boy. He was then put in charge of all Mandalay's evacuation centres, Avhere he brought down the number of cholera deaths from 500 a day to less than 20. He was awarded the M.B.E. Hero at Sixty Gordon S. Jury is nearly 60, and he was Professor of Philosophy at Rangoon University. He organised blood transfusion centres. He worked in cholera, segregation camps. . He worked night and day in an emergency hospital, attending to the worst cases of bomb injuries. When they offered to evacuate him by air he said "No." And when he had done all that he could do "he marched out to India through Manipur." He won the M.B.E.