Flight By Elephant: The Untold Story of World War II's Most Daring Jungle Rescue

Description

The incredible story of Gyles Mackrell and his Burmese, elephant-assisted wartime rescue mission. In the summer of 1942, Gyles Mackrell, together with twenty elephants, and a team of mahuts (elephant riders) performed heroic rescue-missions in the hellish jungles of Japanese-occupied Burma. At the age of 53, Mackrell - a decorated First World War pilot, then overseeing tea plantations for a company called Steel Brothers - went into the 'green hell' of the Chaukan Pass on the border of North Burma and Assam. Here, in what became a three-phase mission, he rescued Indian army soldiers, together with British civilians and their Indian servants, from the pursuing Japanese, directing his elephants through jungle passes and over raging rivers, through territory previously unseen by any white man and infested with sand flies, horse-flies, mosquitoes and innumerable leeches. Those he saved were all on the point of death from starvation or fever: the whole of that summer was spent in a fight against time. The most astonishing aspect of Gyles Mackrell's heroics is that they have yet to be fully dramatised. Now in Andrew Martin's hands they are given the shape of a suspenseful adventure, a wartime rescue whose facts are the stuff of Commando Comic-fiction. But he has also made a classic in the kingdom of animal fiction, with a starring species as awesome as literature's most powerful horse, as exotic as its most elusive whale, as loveable as its most faithful dog. And finally Martin has pointed a portrait of war and of jungle-survival from an historically under-nourished point of view; a picture of fading British imperial virtues at their most dignified and robust. This book's appeal will embrace together for the first time those happy disciples of adventure, history and the elephant.

Andrew Martin grew up in Yorkshire. After qualifying as a barrister, he won The Spectator Young Writer of the Year Award, 1988. Since, he has written for The Guardian, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, the Independent and Granta, among many other publications. His columns have appeared in the Independent on Sunday and the New Statesman. His Jim Stringer novels - railway thrillers - have been published by Faber and Faber since 2002.

From the reviews of 'Flight by Elephant': 'A delightful, true-life Boys' Own adventure, brilliantly told with delicious, dry with by a writer in full command of his subject' James Delingpole, Mail on Sunday 'Andrew Martin's 'Flight By Elephant' is defiantly Boy's Own stuff ... a great adventure' Ben East, Observer 'Martin's book is spirited, readable account of a daring rescue straight out of a Boy's Own adventure' Financial Times 'Flight by Elephant is at its best in the occasional flashes of scene-setting' James Owen, Daily Telegraph