It is from this vantage point that a young Rudyard Kipling, towards the end of his whistle-stop tour through Burma, saw a youthful lady “lookin’ lazy at the sea” and momentarily considered tearing up his ticket back to London and professing his love for her.
Later, in the confines of Yangon’s Pegu Club, Kipling scribbled out his poem “Mandalay” and forever immortalised in the minds of dreamy Europeans the seductive lilting syllables of “Moulmein” and “Mandalay.”
Myanmar is beautiful and is seductive but it also has horror in its recent history.
For many foreigners, the name “Burma” will conjure images not of “tinkling bells” but Aung San Suu Kyi and the junta. And for others, the first thought will be of the jungle warfare and fierce-fighting of the Burma Campaign in the Second World.
Lost Warriors
When the Japanese Imperial Army entered Burma in 1941 and drove out the British, the country became the central battleground in Asia as the Allies Fourteenth Army desperately attempted to both secure the road to China and to prevent the Japanese from entering India.
Thanbyuzayat, 64 kilometres south of Mawlamyine, was the Western Terminus of the “Burma-Siam Death Railway” built to connect Rangoon with Bangkok.
Japanese engineers estimated that it would take 5 years to build the 410 kilometre line, but due to the forced, hard labour of POWs, the railway was completed in 13 months. A Japanese ‘comfort’ train inaugurated the track.
It is estimated that over 80, 000 Asians died in the construction of the railway line, as well as over 12, 000 Allied POWs, the majority being British and Australian.
Only one prisoner is known to have escaped; a Briton named Ras Pagani who was to take refuge with pro-British Karen guerrillas.
While attempting to make his way up to the Indian border, Pagani briefly teamed up with Hugh Seagrim, a British officer who had stayed undercover living amongst Karen guerillas.
With almost no contact with the outside world, Seagrim has been tasked with sustaining the loyalty of the Karen soldiers and keeping them poised for the return of the Fourteenth Army.
Pagani and Seagrim were never to see each other again after they parted ways in the thick jungle of Karen State. However by coincidence they both spent time locked up in cells in the dreaded “Rangoon Ritz” after being captured by the Japanese.
“Rangoon Ritz” was the nickname of the city’s New Law Courts which was used as a jail for Allied soldiers during the Japanese occupation. While Pagani was to survive his tenure in this impromptu prison, Seagrim was shot as a spy in 1944 along with eight of his Karen comrades.
Forgotten Allies
On Remembrance Day in 2017, at Yangon’s Holy Trinity Church a plaque was unveiled in memory of the sacrifice made by Hugh Seagrim.
Although well deserving of such an honour, when we look back at the Burma Campaign it is important that the local soldiers who also made sacrifices are not forgotten. In many ways, the men of Myanmar who fought with the Allies were doubly heroic as their families were living in the midst of occupied Burma and they could not be sure that the British would ever return to reward their loyalty.
I had been invited to the service at the Holy Trinity Church in 2017 as a guest of Grammar Productions who were in the process of making the documentary Forgotten Allies, recording the stories of some of these Myanmar veterans who had fought for the Allies in the Second World War and subsequently been forgotten.
The Burma Campaign was not just a battle between the British and the Japanese but a score of ethnicities from within Myanmar as well as a variety of nationalities from almost every continent of the globe.
It was the diversity of the Fourteenth Army that provoked Jack Masters to write in his book “The Road Passed Mandalay”:
“No one who saw the 14th Army in action; above all, no one who saw its dead on the field of battle, the black & the white & the brown & the yellow lying together in their indistinguishable blood on the rich soil of Burma, can ever doubt that there is such a brotherhood of man;or fail to cry, “What is man, that he can give so much for war, so little for peace?”
When travelling around Myanmar today, as well as appreciating the beauty that Kipling saw at Kyaik Than Lan, it is important also to see the sacrifice and the pathos.
Bertie Alexander Lawson is the Managing Director of Sampan Travel. Sampan’s Forgotten War Tour will be departing in March. For more information please email: [email protected].