Errol Flynn and the Incendiary Rat
H ' ERE,' says the blurb, 'is the story* of the remarkable adventures of a young officer of the Royal Engineers, serving with Orde Wingate's Chindits in Burma.' But the blurb, as so often, is misleading, for Mr. Denny, after a brief, involuntary and querulous tour of duty with the. Chindits, changed sides and accepted a commission in the Indian National Army. Three-quarters of the book is devoted to a highly coloured but not, one cannot help feeling, altogether frank account of his service in the ranks of the King's enemies. On their behalf he undertook to guide a Japanese force whose orders were to cut the Assam Railway north-west of Kohima. The force included a hapless element of the renegades, oppor- tunists and simpletons whom the Japanese had cajoled or impressed into the Indian National Army.
The cutting of this railway was, for reasons which need not be recounted here but which are obvious if you look into the matter at all, a vital object of Japanese strategy. Mr. Denny's book makes it clear that the Japanese did not—as has sometimes been supposed—overlook this object; but they committed to the operation a force too small and too ill-found to ensure success. And they had, furthermore, reckoned with- out Errol Flynn.
Until they reached the railWay, Mr. Denny (who had no knowledge of the area but could read a map) seems to have Performed his duties as a dragoman well. 'If,' he told the Japanese force commander, 'we start from Ukhrul, the entire journey must be made by rough tracks and paths; the distance is at least seventy miles in a direct line, and such a journey could not be managed in less than seven days : whereas by the other route it is only twenty-five miles or so along the track to the stream and little more than twenty miles down the stream to the railway.' And down the stream he led 500 starving, dysentery-ridden but still formidable fanatics, who Proceeded to dig in on a spur covering the vital railway.
At this point Errol Flynn took over from Mr. Denny, who changed sides once more, alerted an elderly officer of his own Corps ('pushing my face within about three inches of his pasty features') and the subaltern commanding 4 platoon of Gurkhas ('I brushed aside his question of "What's the matter with you? You look as if you'd about had it." '), and in no time at all thwarted a project which 'would have dealt the Allies a well-nigh mortal blow.'
* * *
Men are often judged unfairly by their fellow-men; still more often they have the illusion that this has happened. in both cases they are apt to resort to self-justification, a process which—even when indulged in by Sir Bernard and Lady Docker—produces a curiously and perhaps unfairly boring effect.
Mr. Denny's problem, basically, is to explain how, after giving himself up to the Japanese in North Burma, he came to be commissioned in the INA in Rangoon and given a posi- tion of trust in the advance guard of the Japanese invasion of India. As a writer Mr. Denny has a displeasing personality, an atrocious style and a slipshod attitude towards facts and dates; but his approach to his main problem is refreshingly bold. This is his story : Drafted as a subaltern into 16 Brigade (Brigadier Bernard Fergusson) of Wingate's Special Force in 1944, he picked up 0-11,NDIT iNDISCRETION. By J. H. Denny. (Christopher Johnson, 15s.) a four-inch-high brass Buddha on a railway station in Assam at night. The Buddha had been dropped by an Indian civilian who was in the act of handing it to a Burmese rifleman serv- ing with the Chindits. In North Burma Mr. Denny took part in the demolition of a bridge; a bit of the debris hit him on the head and knocked him out. When he came to he took refuge in a Burmese village. Here hey quickly realised. with the help of an English-speaking. Burmese girl, that the Buddha marked him out as a person of importaace in the eyes of the Japanese; its arms were arranged in an unorthodox manner, so that its bearer should be readily identifiable.
Mr. Denny knew that the village headman had sent for the Japanese, and hp awaited their arrival with comparative equanimity. When they came they treated him well. He told them that he was of French nationality and Eurasian extrac- tion and that he hated the British. They flew him to Rangoon. where at the headquarters of the INA the little statue yielded up, to magnetic treatment in the best Sax Rohmer tradition, a secret document whose contents are unspecified.
Because he was the bearer of this pregnant talisman, the Japanese. with an unusual lack of suspicion,' decided that Mr. Denny (Who was at no time treated as a prisoner of war) was just the man to lead a party of renegade Indians wearing British uniform in their operations against the railway. This task he undertook partly to save his skin and partly in the hope that when they got there he might be able to misdirect them. * * It must have been a rather pious hope, since he had no knowledge of the very difficult terrain and therefore no means of telling which was the right way to go, and which the wrong. Much later, when they were getting near their objective (for there can be no doubt that Mr. Denny did accompany the Japanese) he discerned some of the weaknesses of his scheme: 'I had abandoned the wild ideas that I had entertained of leading them away from the railway instead of towards it, knowing full well that if I was as good at map-reading as they were, then the reverse was also true. In any case their compasses would soon tell them if I led them in some direc- tion other than north.'
But that was later. Meanwhile this officer in the Royal Engineers, posing as a half-breed Frenchman and a disgruntled prMite in the RAMC, and wearing Japanese uniform, marched—not without understandable misgivings—in the van of a triumphant Asiatic army.
He felt sorry for the British prisoners whom he passed en route, but there was only one occasion before the triumphant denouement of his masquerade in which his well-concealed patriotism was able to express itself in action. Mr. Denny was. he tells us, successful in destroying, with the help of a rat, a vast store of rice on which the well-being of the Japanese forces depended. His ingenious stratagem involved releasing the rat from a trap so that, dashing through a hole in a fence, it caught its head in a noose and dragged after it into the commissariat twenty feet of twine, to the end of which our author had attached a flaming rag soaked in lighter fuel. After this the Japanese began to starve.
* * *
It is wonderful to reflect that it was to such daring expedients, hitherto ignored in commanders' despatches and official histories, that the Fourteenth Army, if not indeed civilization itself, owed in a moment of peril their salvation. STRIX
Previous page
