DRIVING TO WAR

They say that war brings out the best – and the worst – in people.

 Most people come back from war with tales of horror to tell their shrink. With my grandfather, we had tales of adventure from the war (the nastier bits left out), narrated with the flair of a natural-born storyteller, told to a bunch of spellbound, wide-eyed grandchildren. One of the most interesting of his stories, for us, was his recounting of the Burma campaign in World War II.

 General Slim, the Supreme Commander of 14th Army, was to lead the British Indian Army in a campaign to recapture Burma. My grandfather, then posted to COD, Dehu Road in Pune, received orders to move to Ranchi, from where they would then proceed on to Burma.  

 “Waran!” barked Major Heptinstall, the man in charge at Ranchi. “Drive the truck with supplies to the camp!" “I don’t know how to drive, sir,” young Waran protested. “I don’t care! I have 50 trucks and only 30 drivers. You have to do it!” said Heptinstall. “I don’t even have a license,” the young Quartermaster began to explain. Heptinstall responded by making out an impromptu driver’s license on the spot, signing at the bottom to lend it the stamp of officialdom; and handing it over to young Waran.

They were to start driving from India to Burma in two days.

 For all that, Heptinstall wasn’t being unreasonable or unfair. Orders were orders, and Major Heptinstall had his orders to march. In the army, obeying orders is such a way of life that not to do as one was ordered it would have been unthinkable. Heptinstall had to finish the job, in any way possible.

In the course of the second great war that swept across the world, with everything from drivers to supplies at a premium, army men stepped up to the mark to meet impossible demands in untenable circumstances.

Meanwhile, my grandfather, who had never driven a vehicle in his life, had two days to learn the theory of driving. Fortunately, his immediate senior, the Havildar Major, who knew how to drive, was a good friend. Sitting in a stationary vehicle with the Havildar Major (they didn’t have the authorization for practice drives), my grandfather learnt the basics about the accelerator, brake and clutch, moving the gears about to learn how it was done.

It was a quirk of destiny that got a man of such unquashable optimism in just the place which needed men whose spirit could not be broken. Such things happened to my grandfather all the time – fate loves an optimist!

So he drove a motor vehicle for the first time in his life, from one country to another, in the middle of a raging war. At the wheel of a monster 3-ton truck, he drove all the way from Ranchi to Burma, the last vehicle in the convoy of 2000-odd vehicles of different shapes and sizes. The vehicles began driving at 8 am and kept driving till nearly 6 pm, when they stopped for the night and set up camp at one of the designated halts en route. They were on the move, driving through the day, every day, for one-and-a-half months. During the drive, he had to navigate with the help of map reference points, in a truck loaded with all the food and cooking vessels for all the men.

That was how my grandfather learnt how to drive.

This nerve-wracking introduction to driving might have put some people off driving. Not so my grandfather. Till he was 92, he was zipping around on his Sunny, an un-geared scooter that was hugely popular with teenagers - and people like my grandfather, ever the teenager in spirit.

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IS IT A PLANE?

The long drive through Burma led the 5th Indian Division, my grandfather's formation, deep into the interior of the country, and to better quarters and better living conditions. Luck has a way of changing suddenly, when you least expect it, and in my grandfather’s case, he caught a break.

In a small town in interior Burma, next to a famous pagoda (a Buddhist temple), the company settled down to something very like comfort. Among the local people were Indian-origin settlers. With the enterprise of the true Malayalee when he’s out of Kerala (there’s something about the southern state of Kerala in India which makes its expat inhabitants hugely proactive when it comes to the food and beverage business), the ladies would come around on Sunday mornings with traditional South Indian steamed rice dumplings (idlis) and savoury rice-flour pancakes (dosas) to sell to the home-sick Indian men. 

 My grandfather was promoted to Chief Quartermaster. He and his friend Subedar Bali, being two of the  senior-most men around, had the luxury of getting a thatched hut by way of accommodation, a definite upgrade from the tents which had served as living quarters so far. And sharing a boundary wall with an anti-aircraft unit meant that they could relax and stop worrying about the constant, ever-present threat of the German bomber planes that hovered over the Great War.

For my grandfather, who possessed the happy knack of ignoring unpleasant things and enjoying life to the hilt whenever possible, this was living the high life.                 

 For a while.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning. My grandfather and Subedar Bali sat outside their hut in the peaceful tropical surroundings and enjoying a breakfast of masala dosas, crispy golden brown pancakes filled with a spicy, savoury potato filling. There was nothing to do but eat and bask in the sunshine. They looked up lazily as seven planes painted with the Indian insignia flew overhead. The planes swooped down, raining bombs on the unit. At the first, explosive sounds of the deadly shower from the sky peppered the camp, my grandfather and Bali abandoned their masala dosas and dived into trenches.

Ironically, the anti-aircraft unit’s artillery guns were just outside the unit, but they, too, thought the, as my grandfather put it, that “the planes were ours”. It wasn’t until much later that everyone figured out that the planes were enemy bombers, cleverly disguised with the Indian insignia and flying under false colours. By the time the anti-aircraft unit realized what was going on, the planes had disappeared.

The ruse had caught everyone unawares. The camp was levelled and as many as 30 vehicles were reduced to smoking wrecks in a matter of a  minutes. 22 people died that day. My grandfather came out of the trench to find that friends and colleagues who hadn’t been so lucky were gone forever. Also gone was the prized thatched hut (which had take a direct hit) and all his worldly possessions, which had been in the hut. But things, unlike people, can be replaced; and as the Quartermaster, retrieving a fresh set of clothing and other supplies from the stores was a simple matter. Far simpler, in fact, than dealing with the sudden deaths of twenty-two people with whom he’d lived, worked and travelled for so long - a loss that cut so deeply that 75 years later, he still couldn’t talk about it.

In fact, he had been lucky again. He could have been inside his hut when a bomb from the enemy planes had landed on it, but instead, he’d been outside.

That was how my grandfather survived bombing by enemy aeroplanes in the Second World War. 

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Merci de visiter mon blogue !