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The
Password Was Mandaly
By
Lieutenant Colonel James Warner Bellah
Seven months of backbreaking, mind-searing work ended that
last morning. Only hours were left, slow hours until take
off. Jerry Dunn talking about death and I kept shutting him
up. He’d smile and say: “If you talk about it, it
won’t happen.”
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There were two open spaces on the
map,, open spaces ringed with jungle and mountain. Nobody had
been on the ground at either place, but there were photographs.
The troop-carrying gliders would start down into those places
shortly; they had to be taken and held at all costs, because
the gliders couldn’t go back.
You would hit the ground and go into action, and behind you
in wave after wave would come British troops and American engineers
and bulldozers and graders and mules to build and airfield between
dawn and dusk, so that the next night troop-carrying aircraft
could land the army.
At our base there were voices from London and Liverpool Brooklyn
and Caroline, Texas and Nepal. But suddenly nobody seemed to
have any nationality. Phil Cochran must have felt that loss
of all the non-essentials of life. He closed the briefing with,
“Tonight you are going to fine out you have got a soul.
Nothing you’ve ever done counts now. Only the next few
hours. Good luck.”
Dunn and I lay on the ground in the shade of a glider wing.
We were to be first wave. Dunn talked about his wife in London.
Every now and then as he talked the whole thing would surge
up inside me like a dental appointment when I was a lad. The
time drew on. “See you,” Dunn said and walked back
to his glider.
John Alison came running over, he was fighter pilot but on this
fight he was Cochran’s second-in-command with the job of
making an airfield out of a jungle clearing in twelve hours.
He got in; co-pilot Doc Tulloch and climbed aboard and the detachment
filed in behind us. Everyone was in full field kit and armed
to the teeth with riffles, tommy guns knives and grenades, a
pirate crew, Wingate’s army and Cochran’s air commandos,
in mottled camouflage suits, with broad brimmed, rakish, paint-dabbed
jungle hats.
There was no babbling to quieten screaming nerves, no bravado,
for this was no quickly cooked-up raid. This was an army, filling
the great gliders behind us, a force in heavy strength with
hundreds of miles of night flying ahead of us over trackless
jungle and jagged mountains, and over a formidable Japanese
force.
The gliders were towed in pairs on long ropes. Seese was flying
the left glider in our tow, with Brigadier “Mad Mike”
Calvert and most of one of the Brigade staffs aboard. We came
up over the trees fighting to get height for the mountains in
our path. We settled to the long flying hours ahead-long, cramped,
smokeless hours with God-knew-what at the end of them.
Soon all we could see was the blue blob of exhaust from the
tug’s starboard motor. All we could feel was the breathing
of tightly packed men and the animal shudder of the glider as
it swung into the propeller wash and out again, weaving on its
long snaking tow rope. All we could hear was the thundering
noise of our thrust through the air, for towed gliders are as
noisy as powered planes.
We were alone as far as we could see, but we knew that the rest
of the wave was behind us. Now we were at 8,500 feet and across
the frontier into Burma, with the mountain behind us. If the
Japanese had even one good night fighter pilot we could all
be done in like sitting birds, for we were sneaking in without
fighter cover and in unarmed planes, counting entirely on audacity
and surprise.
The moon was bright and high over Burma. We crossed the Irrawaddy
River and passed within a few miles of a Japanese airfield.
We plastered our faces to the windows watching for tracers or
pursuing fighters. But they let us through that bottleneck,
they must have thought us a night bombing mission.
“Target in twenty minutes.” We broke from our tight-packed
cramp-locked huddles. Bolts snicked sharply as rounds of ammunition
snapped into chambers. Men got their packs adjusted, heavy jungle
packs that would supply us if we had to get out on foot.
Ahead, the tug banked lazily and suddenly John Alison called
out, “They’ve got the smudges lit!” The first
glider was already down, then. Half-way round in the banking
turn, Alison hit the tow-release at 1,000 feet and we were gliding
free. We were off, in complete darkness into a blind clearing
at better than 100 miles an hour, howling down the night wind,
deep in the heart of enemy territory, with little John Alison
fighting the controls.
Trees and we were over them! A long flat shadowland ahead and
we leveled off, sank towards it, struck it and bounced. The
skids tore into the dust and suddenly we had stopped. The doors
flew open;’ the security party was off on the run fanning
out towards the jungle that could have burst into enemy fire.
“Gliders!”
Another tug was over us with its gliders cut off. You could
see them over the distant trees, losing altitude fast, diving
towards us, one of them with death reaching for it. Before it
quite cleared the trees there was a splintering, crushing thunderclap
echoing through the night and the glider was gone.
We start running towards the sound of the crash, passing the
word back for the doctor. We cut party way into the tangled
growth and called, but no answer came back. Not a sound but
the roar of more motors over head and the slicing sigh of two
more gliders cut free, and again two, until the air seemed full
of them.
The word was passed that buffalo wallows and a log or two had
taken wheels off some of the landed gliders, all hands manhandled
them and cleared the landing space. But a big glider with one
wheel off and skids dug in was a damned thing to move. Fifty
men strained at the wreck but she didn’t budge.
“Gliders!”
Two more were howling down over the trees towards the congestion.
One saw it in time, zoomed with the last of its speed and ploughed
in safety just beyond. But the other crashed head-on and welded
two gliders into a ball of scrap. Screams tore the night and
the wrecker crew clawed into the wreckage with bare hands to
get at the injured. A doctor was already inside doing something
under torchlight, after his morphine had stilled the screaming.
There was a quiet North Country voice in there, “Don’t
move me, this time is where I landed, and this where I die.”
John Alison was rerigging the lights to give the second wave
of gliders a runway to come in on that would avoid the wrecked
gliders. Indefatigable John, tearing all over the place.
Brigadier Calvert had his command post set up in the jungle
edge and his security patrols out. One distant shot, but no
enemy as yet. Doc Tulloch’s dressing station began to fill
up. Men hobbled in singly or were carried in on stretchers.
There was no sound from them. There seldom is after the first
shocked screams.
Again the roar of aircraft filled the night skies, and again
the gliders swooped in two by two. One with a bulldozer aboard
missed the strip in the darkness and dived headlong between
two trees taking off both wings and howling onward into the
clear. The bulldozer was torn loose inside. It slammed forward
unhinging the nose, heaving pilot and co-pilot into the air,
ricocheting out under them and letting the two men drop back
unhurt.
With the first light, the bulldozers began to growl and the
sappers were at it to make an airport for powered planes, grading
and filling, leveling off hummocks, cutting the rank buffalo
grass, hauling disabled gliders under the trees.
A captain hobbled in on broken foot. He had found his way in
from a deep jungle crash with his sergeant, both of them dazed.
Two were alive, they said, so Doc Tulloch got the position and
with stretcher-bearers he started to make his way in to them.
Late in the forenoon they came back. Alone. The captain had
been too dazed to keep his directions straight.
Brigadier Calvert roughed in the casualty list and it was amazingly
small for what it had purchased. In another six hours thousands
of troops would pour in to this airport that these first-wave
men had died to secure.
There was the hum of light motors in the sky and over the treetops
came a formation of tiny planes, come to take out the injured.
We got one to cruise over the jungle and locate Doc’s crash,
and after an hour we found them. Two men had survived to say.
He had been wrong. When you have appointment with death, you
will keep it, whether you talk or not.
The engineers toiled on throughout the long, steaming afternoon
lengthening the airstrip. These sappers, with shovels and machine
guns, and the toughest jobs in war, have the holy fires of something
in their souls, something only sapper can understand.
The sun was sinking to the treetops and shadows were pooling
deep across the clearing, that clearing so far in enemy territory
that when you looked at it on a map you couldn’t quite
believe you were there. But you were. And it was no longer deep
in enemy territory; it belonged to us. It was an airfield, test-lighted
for the troop-carrying planes. A wrecked glider was the control
tower, and John Alison was ready in it with his control radio.
There was a motor roar far up in the evening sky. The first
of the troop ships. They came in and circled for Alison’s
landing beam and got it, roaring down to disgorge the army.
They came in so fast that you lost count, and the figure was
unbelievable, it still is if you look it up in the official
records.
General Wingate’s Army. Phil Cochran and his men flew it
over the mountains in the bright moonlight and put it down deep
in the heart of Japanese-held Burma, and the password was Mandlay.
Condensed from US Air Services
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