Title

Members of the Walkout on the Chaung Gyi

Creator

Martin Davies

Preview

Creation Date

5-8-1942

Description

This photograph of the Chaung Gyi in Burma--now Myanmar--was taken by Martin Davies as he was escaping Japanese-occupied Burma in 1942. Davies was one of a group of seven British conscientious objectors know as the “Friends Ambulance Unit” who joined the Walkout led by General Joseph Stilwell in May 1942. They and 106 others fled Burma, walking about two hundred miles through the jungle from Nanantun to Litan in India. When interviewed about this experience in 1972 by Henrietta Thompson, the former “FAU boy,” Martin Davies remembered that while wading through the shallow Chaung Gyi (captured in this photograph), the group passed an elephant. The English FAU was amused by the elephant, but the Americans “lined up in ranks with their tommy-guns,” Davis recalled, adding: “we all thought, those guys with all those guns...how ridiculous!”