Blood Chits in Burma in WWII
Chugalug,
I never cease to marvel at the way you keep pulling these wonderful rabbits out of the hat ! (For the benefit of late joiners to our happy band, here is the relevant excerpt from my #2714 p. 136).
I quote: "It also held leaflets in Burmese, for villagers you might meet and whose help would be vital. In translation they read, so I was told, something like this":
"Dear Friend",
"The bearer of this letter is a British soldier come to save you from the hated Japanese who have caused so much sorrow in your land. If you treat him well, hide him from the Japanese, and help him to reach the British Army, you will be very well rewarded by Government".
This was all very well as far as it went, (and the Burmese were generally well disposed to us, particularly the Naga and Kachin tribes in the north), but I couldn't help feeling that if I floated down in or near a village that we'd just blown off the map, it wouldn't go down too well with "Dear Friend" - always supposing I could find one who could read".
The remarkable thing is - after the survival itself, over 70 years, of one of these leaflets from WWII Burma - how closely my memory of the English text (which I'd never seen - it wouldn't have been on the original, of course) corresponds with the real thing.
I must say, however, how suspicious it looks that sixteen lines of Burmese seem to condense into six lines of English !
I would suppose that unused leaflets would be handed back to the I.O. with the rest of the escape kit, but my stuff would be a bit battered and bloody. I certainly wouldn't have had a leaflet with me in Samungli.
**********************
Fareastdriver,
Too true ! Any aircrew would be straight for the chop. I remember a photograph of the time (taken by a Jap, but which had come into Allied hands somehow - "leaked" ?), which showed a captured Sgt-Pilot kneeling, blindfold, quietly resigned, as a Jap officer "addressed" his target with his Samurai sword much as a golfer addresses his ball before the swing.
Thank you both,
Danny.