THE MARINE FROM MANDALAY
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BOOKS BY
JAMES LEASOR
GENERAL
Author by Profession
The Monday Story
Wheels to Fortune
The Serjeant Major
The Red Fort
The One That Got Away (with Kendal Burt)
The Millionth Chance
War at the Top
Conspiracy of Silence (with Peter Eton)
The Plague and the Fire
The Uninvited Envoy
Singapore: The Battle that Changed the World
Green Beach
Boarding Party
The Unknown Warrior
Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes?
FICTION
Not Such a Bad Day
The Strong Delusion
NTR Nothing to Report
They Dont Make Them Like That Any More
Never had a Spanner on Her
Follow the Drum
Host of Extras
Mandarin-Gold
The Chinese Widow
Jade Gate
Open Secret
Ship of Gold
THE DR JASON LOVE CASE HISTORIES OF SUSPENSE
Passport to Oblivion
Passport to Peril
Passport to Suspense
Passport for a Pilgrim
A Week of Love
Love-all
Love and the Land Beyond
THE MARINE FROM MANDALAY
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by
James Leasor
LEO COOPER
LONDON
First published 1988 by Leo Cooper Ltd
Leo Cooper is an independent imprint of the
Heinemann Group of Publishers,
Michelin House,
81, Fulham Road,
London SW3 6RB
Reprinted 1988
LONDON MELBOURNE AUCKLAND
Copyright 1988 James Leasor
ISBN: 0-85052-442-3
Typeset in 11/13 pt Sabon by Deltatype, Ellesmere Port
Printed in Great Britain by Redwood Burn Ltd, Trowbridge
and bound by WBC Ltd, Maesteg
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge my debt to the late General Sir Leslie Hollis, KCB, KBE, RM, who first told me the story of William Doyles experiences in the Second World War.
I would also like to thank the following people who helped me in the preparation of this book: Major H. E. Affleck-Graves, RM, Secretary of the Royal Marines Corp Association; Brigadier Michael Calvert DSO; Mr Alexander J. Innes FRCS; Captain A. G. Newing, RM, Editor, The Globe & Laurel, the Journal of the Royal Marines; and the Archivist and staff of the Royal Marines Museum, Eastney, Hants.
INTRODUCTION
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THE EVENTS WITH which this story deals happened long ago and far away; in the Second World War, in Burma, but their significance increases with every passing year.
Burma was then a relatively unknown country, and so it still remains. It is one-and-a-quarter times as large as France, three times the size of England, Scotland and Wales put together, but still smaller by several thousand square miles than the state of Texas.
Burma is shaped roughly like a long and narrow hand, fingers pointing south, thumb to the east. The fingers form the delta at the mouth of the Irrawaddy, Burmas greatest river, which rises in the north towards Tibet. The thumb extends more than 300 miles south of Rangoon, the capital, into the Gulf of Martaban, east of the Andaman Islands.
From the southern tip of the country, bordering on Thailand, to its most northerly point in the Kachin Hills, the distance is about 1200 miles, as far as from London to Minsk. At its widest, Burma is 550 miles across. Much of the country is covered by jungle, most of it tropical, with mountain ranges running north to south. The towns are small and widely spaced apart.
Before the Second World War, although a relatively minor country within the British Empire, Burma exported huge amounts of rice every year, was an important producer of high-quality petrol and lubricating oil, and the worlds largest source of teak.
In late 1941 it still seemed as though war in Europe and the Middle East would leave all this unchanged. But within months, by the early spring of 1942, the Japanese flag was flying above Singapore, Hong Kong and New Guinea. Malaya had fallen to their forces, Burma was itself all but occupied, and Japanese troops were poised to invade India.
In Europe, meanwhile, the Nazi empire stretched triumphantly from the French Atlantic coast to the Black Sea. From the Mediterranean to the Arctic, Hitler held sway over more than 400 million people. Switzerland was the only remaining European sovereign state between Spain and the Ukraine. In the Middle East the detritus of Allied reverses littered the burning deserts of North Africa.
At this time of disaster and defeat in East and West, with Axis forces seemingly triumphant on every front, General Leslie Hollis, later to be knighted and become Commandant General of the Royal Marines, was Senior Military Assistant Secretary in the Office of the War Cabinet in London. In this capacity, he was in close daily contact with the Prime Minister.
One morning, coming across Mr Churchill in a mood of some depression at this sombre calendar of catastrophe, he attempted to uplift the Premiers spirits by telling him the story of Marine William Doyle in Burma.
Hollis, who had only recently heard it himself from a brother officer in the Royal Marines, felt that it epitomized and encapsulated the virtues of courage, resource and initiative on which the Corps prided itself. When Hollis had finished, Mr Churchill gave his verdict.
A remarkable tale, he declared warmly. Either the man should have been court-martialled or he should have received instant promotion and a decoration.
What had the Marine from Mandalay done that could conceivably deserve either consequence? And what happened to him as a result?
THE MARINE FROM MANDALAY
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WILLIAM DOYLE WAS dreaming. He moved weightlessly, at ease, without care, in that happy half-lit hinterland between sleep and wakefulness. He was in his bed at his parents home in Mills Street, Middlesbrough, Yorkshire. Through half-closed eyes, he made out the familiar pattern on the wallpaper on the far wall beyond the end of the bed; the photogravure picture above the mantelpiece of a stag standing, antlers raised, on top of a mountain, the equally well-known washstand with china jug and bowl in the corner. Somewhere beyond all these friendly reminders of home, in the world of the fully awake, the factory hooter at Dorman Long, the steel mill at the end of the road, was blaring. The six oclock shift was about to start; from six oclock until two in the afternoon and then from two until ten oclock at night, the two shifts worked six days a week. His father would be there he was on the early shift working as a straightener. As the white-hot rolled beams of steel came out of the furnace, he would check them for straightness on a special machine. He had done this as long as William could remember; there was something reassuring in this continuity.
William Doyle could sense rather than feel the nearness of his brother Joseph. Two other brothers, Dennis and John, were sleeping in the room beyond. As the hooter stopped, a clanging of trams began every half-hour, rattling along on their rails, the electrical pick-ups on their roofs sparking against the overhead cables.
Doyle stretched his six-foot-two-inches luxuriously in the warmth, yawned, opened his eyes fully and was in that instant fully awake.
He was not in his own bed in his familiar room in Middlesbrough, but lying on his back on grass, thick and coarse, of a kind never seen in England. The warmth he felt did not come from the closeness of his brother, but from the sun as it crawled up the burnished sky, pouring heat and a blaze of light through a filter of thick fleshy leaves above his head.
