Elephants have been a companion of man since ancient times, and as men waged war against one
another, elephants became a part of the bloodshed. Men rode upon elephants' backs and showered their
enemies with arrows while the elephants trampled and gored. With the advent of gunpowder, however,
the elephants' hides and manmade armour failed them. They could withstand small
arms fire to a degree, but they stood no chance against cannonballs. Thus, they were
withdrawn from the front line and employed for transportation purposes alone. You might think,
with the arrival of motor vehicles, that elephants were free from man's battles forever.
But that wasn't the case, and in this video, we're going to tell the tale of James Howard Williams'
Elephant Company and its vital contribution to the Allied war effort in the green hell
that was Burma. More than anything, this is a story of trust and love—between animal and man.
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James Howard Williams, born in Cornwall, England, in 1897, discovered his affinity for animals at a
young age. In Vicki Croke’s Elephant Company, a biography on Williams, Croke writes, "Williams
loved every creature he came across, and, with very rare exception, they seemed to like him, too.
He spent so much time observing animals that he felt he could anticipate their impulses and
movements. He developed a knack for framing the world as they did." This knack followed Williams,
now a "tall, clean-shaven youth," into the Great War, in which his truest companion
in the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East was his camel, Frying Pan.
After the British Army demobilized Williams in January 1920 at the rank of captain, he found
himself knocking back drinks with one of his human comrades, who mentioned a teak logging company
known as the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation. In the knotted jungles of Burma, the company employed
Asian elephants, rather than machines, to do their heavy lifting. If the idea of a jungle adventure
hadn't already piqued Williams' interest, the idea of becoming an elephant wallah had.
He signed a contract with Bombay Burmah on the 7th of July 1920.
Entering Burma through Rangoon, Williams ventured north and then followed the Chindwin River
upstream to the Myittha River valley in Upper Burma. Rife with disease and jungle nasties,
many other men would have called this place hell. But for Williams, it quickly became home.
Employed as a "forest assistant," Williams' job was to oversee the elephants, the men,
and the camps where the work was done. Simply put, in non-monsoon seasons, the elephants
dragged harvested teak logs into waterways such as creeks. Come monsoon season, the rains bloated
the waterways and carried the logs downstream into the immense Irrawaddy River. Another part
of the elephants' jobs was creating elephant bridges so they could pass over creeks. Learning
to speak Burmese and intently watching the local elephant wallahs tend to their beasts, Williams'
became obsessed. In his own words, "Everything of interest became elephants, elephants, elephants.
They are the most lovable and sagacious of all beasts ... the most magnificent of animals."
He wasn't entirely happy with how Bombay Burmah was running the show, however.
With elephant mothers hauling teak, calves were left to fend for themselves and often died.
Adult elephants procured by Bombay Burmah could become troublesome and violent, too, occasionally
pulverising the humans for whom they worked. Risking his job, Williams approached his boss
with some alternatives. After some convincing, Williams got the thumbs-up for an elephant school,
in which the calves and their wallahs could learn their trade together, and later, an elephant
hospital. Williams thrived, and in 1928, he was promoted from forest assistant to forest officer.
Williams wasn't merely his job, however. In the early 1930s, he found love with a woman named
Susan Rowland, whom he married in September 1932. About two years later, disaster struck, with the
death of their first baby, Jeremy, and it would be tragedy after tragedy for a while after that.
Husband and wife watched the rise of the Nazis with anxious hearts, and their anxiety only grew
when Imperial Japan punctuated its entry into the Second World War with an attack on Pearl Harbor.
Williams stuck with his original decision, though: he would not enlist to fight, as he believed that,
quote, "teak would be as important as steel" in this global conflict. He also believed that they
would not be safe in Burma, rightly predicting that he would be deeply involved with the war.
The Japanese Empire began bombing Rangoon on the 23rd of December 1941,
and on the 20th of January, the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation
ordered the wives and children of its employees to evacuate Burma for Manipur, India.
This was a journey that they would have had to make on foot, were it not for Williams
and his elephants. On the 23rd of February, some 110 elephants set out for the border,
bearing the evacuees' supplies and those evacuees unable to walk. After a gruelling journey,
a journey that not everyone survived, Williams waved goodbye to Susan across the India–Burma
border and returned to Burma, eager to save his elephants from the encroaching Japanese Army.
As the British Army, failing to stave off the Japanese invasion, withdrew,
Williams worked with the Burmese wallahs to hide their elephants in the depths of the jungle,
where the Japanese could never hope to find them. It was not uncommon for the
Japanese to seize the poor beasts and use them in support of their campaign in Burma.
In typical Imperial Japanese fashion, they treated the elephants atrociously, allowing,
for example, batteries to leak over their backs and corrode their flesh. The Japanese utilized
elephants in such numbers that the Royal Air Force legitimized the beasts as aerial targets.
Soon, Williams had to withdraw from Burma too, walking all the way back to the Indian border.
While Williams was in India, British General Noel Mackintosh Stuart Irwin summoned him,
having heard about Williams' work with the elephants and interested in bringing Williams
and his elephants into the fold of the British Armed Forces. Serving in Force 136 of the Special
Operations Executive or SEO, Williams' objective would be to see how many elephants had fallen into
Japanese hands and how many were available to bear supplies and build bridges and other structures
for General William Slim's Fourteenth Army as Slim fought to regain ground in Burma. Williams agreed.
Returning to Burma in November 1942, Williams made an intelligence network of the Burmese,
who helped him and his team, in Croke's words, "sneak elephants right from under the noses of
the Japanese." According to Williams, "The Japs were very angry because I had been taking their
elephants away, and ... there was a price on my head." Williams also rallied the Burmese
wallahs and their elephants to his camp and treated wounded and sick elephants.
"To inspect the ... elephant casualties ... pained me as much as a ... field dressing station
filled with the wounded men." Once Williams had his Elephant Company behind him, he got to work
paving a way for Slim's Fourteenth Army. In Slim's words, "They built hundreds of bridges for us,
they helped to build and launch more ships for us than Helen ever did for Greece.
Without them our retreat from Burma would have been even more arduous and
our advance to its liberation slower and more difficult." Williams' work throughout
this span of the war earned him the nickname "Elephant Bill" from his British comrades.
By early 1944, the Japanese were gearing up for a reckless assault on Imphal and Kohima
over the Indian border. Having deemed Williams' Elephant Company a vital asset, HQ ordered
Williams to evacuate the elephants from Burma to Assam in India. To get there, they had to cross a
series of treacherous mountain ranges, along which the elephants might have lost their footing and,
panicking, thrown themselves to their deaths. And there weren't just Williams'
53 elephants and their 90 wallahs, either. As the evacuation party progressed, they picked up over
60 refugee women and children and 40 ethnic Karen soldiers, too. The party's greatest challenge,
however, was a sheer 82-metre or 270-foot wall of rock which the elephants could not circumvent.
Rather than backing down, Williams rose to the challenge, employing the help of a nearby village
to cut steps into the rockface and build an elephant stairway. To guide an army of
elephants from the base of the rockface to its summit, a gruelling three-hour journey in which
every footfall was life or death, vast amounts of trust between beast and man were required.
With Williams' favourite elephant, a tusker named Bandoola leading the way, the party
bested the climb without casualty. Later, Williams had the following to say about this
incredible achievement: "I learned more in that one day about what elephants could be got to do
than I had in twenty-four years. It was a moment of greatness."General Slim spoke highly of it too:
"This is the story of how a man, over the years, by character, patience, sympathy and courage,
gained the confidence of men and animals, so when the time of testing came that mutual trust held."
Having defeated the obstacles in their way,
the party reached safety in late April and were able to rest in safety from the war for a time.
Speaking of time, Williams' time with Elephant Company had essentially come to an end.
For his contributions to the Allied war effort, he was mentioned in the dispatches twice and
awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1945. By early 1946, he was back in England,
where he worked as a gardener and author and lived with his wife, second son, and daughter. In 1958,
at 60 years of age, Williams perished during an emergency appendectomy.
While Williams' elephants may not have charged the enemy frontlines,
crushing skulls and flipping tanks, they were no less crucial to the Allied war effort in Burma
and well-deserving of our attention. Had you heard of them before today, though? How vital do
you think Williams' elephants were to the Allied war effort? Do you know anything about them that
we didn't cover in this video? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.