The Tea Gardens the War Turned Into Airfields

Through 1942, three of the busiest airfields of the Second World War were cut from the tea country of Upper Assam, at Chabua, Mohanbari, and Sookerating, and by that winter the three neighbouring fields were flying the India-to-China run together. Sookerating went in on the grounds of the Sookerating Tea Estate, one of the working gardens whose own land became the airfield. Chabua was under construction by March 1942, raised by local labour with, in the official American history's words, "the most primitive tools and methods." A fourth field at Dinjan, already flying, carried nearly the whole operation through that first monsoon while the new fields fell behind. This office certifies leaf grown on land that, for a few wartime years, grew runways instead.

The reason was Burma. Japan had cut the overland Burma Road, the last route by which the Allies could supply China, and Assam's tea country, flat enough to grade, close enough to the front, and already threaded with the estate roads and rail sidings the trade had built, was the nearest ground that could take a landing strip. The airfields fed an operation the crews called the Hump: cargo flights over the eastern Himalayas into China, flown in whatever the Army Air Forces had, heavily loaded, over some of the worst mountain weather in the world.

What the estates became

Turning a tea garden into a military airfield was not a clean piece of engineering. The Army Air Forces' official history² records that the workers at Chabua, Mohanbari, and Sookerating, many of them women, broke stones by hand and moved earth in baskets carried on their heads; it grades that labour "cheap" and "unskilled," blames it in part for a construction programme that fell far behind schedule, and notes that the heavy machinery and labour troops promised from the United States never materialized. That is the colonial administration grading the very labour it had drafted, not a judgment this office repeats. It is also the plainest evidence that the fields were not built by any army alone. They were built by hand, and the tea trade organized much of the workforce: the US Army's own history counts Indian Tea Association labour units, raised by the planters of Assam, and local tea-garden workers among the crews that built the theatre's roads and bases.

Once running, the scale dwarfed anything the estates had shipped before. In July 1945 the India-to-China route landed 71,042 net tons of cargo, and on a single day that August, crews flew 1,118 round trips⁴. The operation involved some 34,000 military personnel and drew on over 47,000 local civilian workers¹ to keep it running, fuel drums shifted, aircraft loaded, runways kept clear through the same monsoons that had grown the tea. Over the airlift's 42 months the official count ran to 594 aircraft lost⁶, a figure the record-keeping almost certainly undershoots, and 1,659 aircrew killed or missing at the low end of the estimates. The crews themselves just called the route the Hump, with the flat understatement of people who flew it daily.

The half million walking the other way

While the airfields went up, the same tea country was filling with people moving in the opposite direction. As the Japanese advanced through Burma in the first months of 1942, an estimated half a million residents of Indian descent¹¹, clerks, labourers, shopkeepers, whole families, set out on foot for India rather than wait for the occupation. Two routes stayed open. The southern one, through the Tamu Pass to Imphal, was hard. The northern one, up the Hukawng Valley to Ledo¹², a rail town in the middle of Assam's own tea belt, ran through jungle so punishing that survivors and later historians both settled on the same name for it: the Valley of Death.

The monsoon that opened the airfields closed on the evacuation route at almost the same time. May rains turned the Hukawng's rivers into torrents, washed out what passed for a trail, and left thousands stranded with the wrong season ahead of them. How many died has never been settled. Estimates run from the tens of thousands to nearly 100,000¹³ out of the half million or so who made the crossing, a spread wide enough that this office will not pretend to certify a single figure. What the record agrees on is that the dying was concentrated in this one season, in this one stretch of hill country, at the same moment three tea gardens a short march away were being paved for the war effort.

The tea agent who used his elephants

One rescue out of that season is documented in enough detail to certify in full, and it belongs to the tea trade specifically. Gyles Mackrell was 53 in 1942, a supervisor in Assam for Octavius Steel & Co., a Calcutta tea firm, with charge of elephant transport. Elephants, not trucks, were how goods and people moved through this country before the war, and the man in charge of a working herd of them was a man the tea trade already relied on.

On 4 June 1942, refugees who had managed to cross the flooded Dapha River⁹, near the Chaukan Pass on the Burma-Assam border, reached Mackrell with word that many more were trapped behind them. He took his elephants in. The first attempt failed outright: contemporary film of the rescue shows the animals fighting the current up to their tusks, unable to make headway against water that would not be crossed until it briefly dropped before dawn. Mackrell and his riders kept at it through the following weeks, ferrying exhausted and often sick people across the river in relays and holding a camp on the Dapha to receive them. He fell seriously ill with fever during the operation, withdrew to Assam to recover, and went back to the river once he could stand the trip again. By the time the rescue ended in September, he and his team had brought out roughly 200 people, soldiers and civilians both, the last of them against instructions from the administration in Assam, which had ordered him to pull out on intelligence that later proved wrong.

The British press of 1942 made him famous for it, calling him "the Elephant Man." The George Medal followed, gazetted on 29 January 1943⁸ with a citation this office can certify at first hand: 68 sepoys and 33 other persons taken across the flooded river to start, "over 200 persons" saved by the end, in "appalling weather," over "a route hitherto considered impracticable." A 2013 biography, Andrew Martin's Flight By Elephant¹⁰, retold the story in full for a modern readership.

What got remembered, and what did not

Two hundred people is a real number, and every one of them is a person who lived because a tea agent had elephants and used them. It is also a small fraction of the roughly half a million who fled Burma that year, and a smaller one still against a death toll that ran into the tens of thousands at minimum, with some historians' estimates approaching 100,000. Mackrell's rescue was filmed, medalled, and eventually made into a book. The larger dying on the same routes, mostly among Indian labourers and clerks with no press attached to their retreat, took decades longer to draw the same attention, and historians now write about it explicitly as a forgotten chapter next to the one that was not.

Nothing here diminishes what Mackrell did with his elephants on the Dapha. The gardens that grew the tea in your cup once grew a runway to China. The hill country a short march from those runways swallowed a death toll nobody ever finished counting.