Rangoon Battalion: The Pocket Hitler of Myohaung Station - Part 8

PART 8
The Pocket Hitler of Myohaung Station

If you look at a good map of Burma you will see that the vital crossroads of the railway system, that is, the point where the Rangoon, Lashio, Myitkyina and Yen lines all meet and cross, is at Myohaung and not at Mandalay. Apparently the Japs did not realise this, because had they raided Myohaung on the same scale as they raided Mandalay, the railway system would have been well and truly “bitched”. As it was, the wiping out of Mandalay station was merely a blasted nuisance and it did not affect our ability to operate the railway system effectively. It merely meant that Myohaung became the centre of operations instead of Mandalay and everything we had previously done at Mandalay we now did at Myohaung. The difficulty was, of course that Myohaung with its very small goods yard was ill suited and inadequate for the volume of traffic with which we had to cope. Not only did all trains start and finish at Myohaung but loadings of all supplies which had previously been done at special sidings in the Fort now had to be done at Myohaung. Thus Myohaung became, overnight, a most important place and I, as RTO Myohaung, became quite an important official.

I have often since wondered why it was that when Myohaung suddenly became by far the busiest and most important station on the whole railway system the higher authorities did not put one of their senior trained RTOs there. I think the reason was that they appreciated that the terrific amount of work to be done at Myohaung could not be got through by means of the normal “red tape” methods that the regular RTOs were accustomed to use and they thought that I, not knowing so much of the red tape, would be more likely to use my own gumption and get the jobs done no matter how unorthodox the methods. One of the main difficulties was that Myohaung, four miles south of Mandalay, was completely out of touch with Mandalay as all telephone lines had been blown up in the bombing I was thus, of necessity, given a very free hand and, in fact, I became the vest pocket Hitler of Myohaung. No person or goods could be moved without my knowledge and consent. With telephone communications in Mandalay completely destroyed I was also the liaison between Movement Control HQ at Mandalay and the Railway Operating Company at Ywotaung and the Director of Movements at Maymyo. So, as you can imagine, I had my hands more than full.

Of all the aerodromes in Burma, the one at Myitkyina, the northernmost point of the railway system, was the only one now functioning for the evacuation by air of civilians and wounded. We ran a daily train from Myohaung to Myitkyina and this train was the curse of my life. The civil evacuation authorities were supposed to send me not more than 250 evacuees daily to be got away by this train and they invariably turned up 500 or 600 strong. Similarly the military evacuation people would send me several hundred soldiers’ families and all these, added to a few more hundreds who arrived at Myohaung on the daily train from Maymyo had, somehow or other, to be got away in five coaches which was all the space I could spare for civilians on the train which every day left with a maximum possible load. You can imagine the daily chaos! Somehow I got them all away, but the discomfort on their journey, which at that time usually took five or six days against the normal two days, must have been indescribable.

Then Army Headquarters and Government House decided to move from Maymyo to Shwebo so, utilising practically all the coaching stock we had left, they all came tumbling down to Myohaung to be pushed across the Ava Bridge. And in the middle of it all began our biggest bugbear — derailments. At one time at the height of all this frantic scramble we had all lines firmly blocked except the line from Maymyo, which was only being used to pour stuff down to Myohaung. There were big derailments solidly blocking my Myitkyina line, my Monywa line and the south bound line which latter was used to shove Chinese down to the battle front. The derailments were, of course, the work of our friends the fifth columnists, of whom HE The Governor of Burma has since assured the world that there were so few. (Incidentally that exalted personage must have been already on his way to England to make his extraordinary speech to the House of Commons in which he said that there were not more than 4,000 disloyal Burmans in the whole of Burma, when an army of 6,000 rebel Burmans were marching on Kalewa from Pakkoku!) Thus for three days we were stuck and I had to jam every available siding with packed trains and queue them up until the lines were cleared.

All this meant that my tiny filthy station was constantly thronged and besieged by masses of people of all sorts and descriptions. This rather worried me because nothing was more certain than that Myohaung was going to be bombed at any minute and without warning. The Japs were systematically going for the railway communications and had already bombed Mandalay, Thazi, Meiktila and such places out of existence. We therefore knew that the most vital crossroads at Myohaung would sooner or later get it and, in fact, I was very surprised that we survived several days before the Japs decided to bomb Myohaung. I had a certain number of Burma Rifles troops about the station every day to provide the necessary armed escort which all trains had to have. So in order to keep the station as clear as possible of evacuees who would have been slaughtered when the station was bombed I used to conduct a daily morning and afternoon sweep just before the hours in which the Japs usually did their bombing. I would string my troops out in a long line and with fixed bayonets get them to herd the teeming masses well away from the precincts of the station. If I wanted to clear the platforms quickly, all I had to do was run along them. To their poor panic stricken minds the sight of anyone running could only mean one thing — bombers coming, and there would be a mad rush away from the station.

My first real scare at Myohaung occurred only a couple of days after I had taken up my duties there. A formation of Jap bombers came in low over the station and I dived for the nearest trench. It was only then that I realised that I had been badly shaken by the explosion in Mandalay on 3rd April, for I found that my nerves were rather jagged, whereas normally during bombings they had been reasonably steady. Fortunately, however, on this occasion the Japs were only following the railway line up to Maymyo which town they pasted fairly heavily. A day or so later they were over again and this time they unloaded another packet on Mandalay. Why they bothered to do this I don’t know because they dropped their bombs in the same area as before where almost everything destroyable had been destroyed. The only explanation I can give is that they must have been exasperated to learn that I was still alive after they had bombed me more than 30 times and blown up a wagon load of bombs in front of my face, and, not having heard that I had moved to Myohaung, they were still seeking me out.

Almost invariably the Japs used to do their bombing between 10.00 a.m. and 1.00 p.m. Now that the RAF in Burma had been knocked out and there was no longer any opposition to their daylight raids, they had given up night bombing. I therefore used to so arrange my programme that I was away from the station and making out my reports at HQ during these danger hours. My subterfuge, however, did not work out because when at last the Japs found out that I was at Myohaung they came for me at 3 o’clock in the afternoon! Fortunately we then had a couple of 3.7’s not far from the station and these must have upset the Japs’ aim because all their bombs fell harmlessly in paddy fields about 800 yards from the station.

So the next morning they came again and this time they succeeded in hitting the station but did very little damage. Only four goods wagons caught fire and there was no damage to the track apart from very slight damage to our main set of points caused by an AP bomb. The first intimation I had of the points being out of action was when one of the railway staff came running to me and reported that there was an unexploded bomb alongside the points and would I please do something about it! There was no other military authority around so I had no option but to investigate it myself. I approached the points with great trepidation and was very thankful to find that it was only the peculiarity of the very small crater which an AP bomb makes which had led the railwayman to believe that it was an unexploded bomb. The slight damage to the points was thereafter soon repaired and we ran all the usual trains that night.

After dark that night several large fires broke out around the station. The first of these started close to where two large petrol tank wagons were standing in a siding. I spent most of the night supervising the shunting of scores of wagons away from the scenes of the fires. As soon as we shifted one lot away from one fire a fresh fire would start up dangerously near to their new positions. Luckily, however, we lost no more wagons but it took an awful lot of work the next day to sort out the jumble. The fires were nowhere near where the bombs had fallen during the morning and were undoubtedly the work of local saboteurs. The Chinese were then in occupation of Myohaung village and I am glad to say that that night they shot about a score of Burmans, including a Hprongyi (Burma Monk) whose body they left lying by the side of the road leading to the station for a couple of days as a warning to others. Funnily enough, these were the only two attempts the Japs made to wipe out Myohaung and they were both singularly unsuccessful. I was rather pleased with my policy of periodically clearing the station of evacuees because there were no casualties on either occasion.

At times the Chinese were a confounded nuisance. They had their own peculiar methods for getting what they wanted and they were very difficult to manage if what they wanted happened to be something which we had no authority to give them. They usually won. From the middle of April onwards they were in full occupation of Myohaung village so I saw quite a lot of them. I was very greatly impressed by all the Chinese troops I saw — they definitely were keen and very much alive. Their capacity for moving large bodies of men without transport carrying everything themselves, including huge cooking pots, seemed to be the best answer to the Jap methods.

One morning the railway controller at Myohaung came to see me and reported that all work had stopped because Chinese soldiers were swarming all over our one and only shunting engine and would I please come along and do something about it. I went down to the engine and sure enough it was surrounded by Chinese soldiers one of whom was on the foot plates sticking a rifle in the back of our terrified engine driver. They spoke no English so I searched for and found the Chinese commander who spoke good English and with whom I had become very friendly. I explained the position and politely asked him to call off his pack. He at first refused point blank, saying that he himself had given orders for his men to secure an engine as he had a party who wanted to go to Lashio. Now, I had strict orders that no Chinese were to be allowed to proceed northwards, so this put me in rather a dilemma.

I argued solidly for an hour and a half endeavouring to convince the Chinese commander (I believe he was a General) that if he wanted to move any of his men by rail he could only do so with the consent of Movement Control and he most certainly could not go about just commandeering my engines. The little Chinaman, very friendly and very smiling, said “yes” to everything and wound up the interminable wrangle by agreeing with everything I said but told me, nevertheless, that he had a party to go to Lashio and he was accordingly going to take one of my engines. I started from the beginning again and explained that the engine he had commandeered could not, in any case, go to Lashio as it was only a shunting engine whereas only engines of a special type could climb the hills on the Lashio line. The Chinaman thanked me profusely for this information and told me that he would in that case only keep my shunting engine until I gave him one which could go to Lashio. It then took me another hour to convince him that (a) it took four hours to get steam up in an engine, (b) the only suitable engine I had was booked to take my usual night train to Lashio, and (c) if he did not release my shunting engine nothing would leave Myohaung that day.

After arguing, in the most friendly manner imaginable, for most of the morning I finally won the day and the Chinese commander at long last agreed to come back to the station and call off his men. Even then he wanted to have lunch first and cordially invited me to share his messy meal. I politely refused and finally got him down to the station where we found quite an uproar around the still idle shunting engine. Apparently the Chinese sentry on the footplates had got rather tired of standing sticking his bayonet in the back of the engine driver for the hours we had been arguing, and he wanted a bit of action. So he accused the engine driver of having tried to hit him and demanded the right to shoot the engine driver and also, for good measure, he insisted that a couple of innocent passers-by, a BOR and an RAF Sergeant, must also be shot, why I could not quite fathom. So we argued for another hour at the end of which the engine driver managed to slip off the footplates on the opposite side and bolted for the jungle. I never saw him again.

Then began a lengthy discussion in Chinese with everyone (except me) talking a once, and after that was over I gathered that the whole matter would be solved and honour satisfied if I was shot! This was most definitely not my idea of a satisfactory solution and, fortunately, the Chinese commander was inclined to agree with me. After more discussion it was finally agreed that nothing could be done unless I went back to Mandalay to fix things, so, after cordial handshakes all round, I left the station and reported to Movement Control HQ that it was impossible for me to carry out my duties unless they stationed a senior Chinese Liaison Officer at Myohaung to stop the Chinese from interfering. This they did.

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