The Hannibal of Manipur

Retracing a forgotten wartime march

- KEYA ACHARYA

A COLONIAL ENTERPRISE, the Bombay Burmah Trading Company, Limited, was established in 1863. Colonial Burma was the world's largest supplier of teak, and the BBTCL its largest exporter. It was a weighty, influential company, instrumental in felling huge tracts of natural teak forests across the country-in the late 1800s, the British army went to war with the Burmese crown to protect the company's interests. After Burma gained independence, in 1948, the BBTCL withdrew from the country, although export of teak remained legal until 2014.

(The company was then sold to an Indian industrialist family, and many decades later, it was acquired by its present owners, the Wadia family.) Hidden in this history of the decimation of a colony's natural resources is a remarkable, and sparsely remembered, story of an employee and the elephants he cared for-under the BBTCL at first, and with the British Indian Army during the Second World War-for close to three decades. James Howard Williams, a Cornishman, joined the BBTCL in 1920. He was later seconded into the British Indian Army and made lieutenant colonel. In the army, elephants helped build roads, bridges and, as Field Marshal William Slim, who commanded the British Fourteenth Army during the war, put it, "launched more ships than Helen ever did for Greece." In the early 1940s, the British were losing heavily to the Japanese in large parts of Burma and were particularly struggling near Imphal. Williams' elephants and their Burmese mahouts helped Slim's army halt the Japanese invasion of Burma.