The party set out down the river in five groups. An advance guard of four American officers occupied a single raft, which was about 20 feet long by 10 feet wide. The other four groups each had three rafts lashed together, so that the overall length was roughly 60 feet for each. All the vessels were rather loosely constructed of bamboo and vines, and each raft section had a thatched hut for protection from the sun. Colonel Williams commented: ‘On the rafts we were organized into three shifts, each of us on duty for one hour, off duty for two hours, throughout the 24. On duty we poled, paddled and steered. Off duty we slept, ate occasionally (usually once a day) and were always ready to go over the side to push the raft off a snag.’ Unfortunately, what Stilwell had intended as a somewhat relaxing experience proved to be an arduous one. Captain Jones noted that: ‘We had to pole in many places to get any forward momentum at all. Poling a boxy, homemade raft on a sluggish river under the hot, Burmese sun, is the kind of work that could cause a man to give up soldiering.’

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While the bulk of Stilwell’s party would spend two solid days negotiating the Uyu River by raft, the general had sent his mule train and porters overland to Homalin, under the care of his 14-member Chinese army bodyguard and commanded by American Lieutenant Eugene Laybourn. Stilwell and the mules would rendezvous near Homalin on May 12.

In the meantime, the rafts began falling apart in the river. On the 11th, it began raining, a sign of the coming monsoon that could unleash itself in full force at any moment. The party continued moving toward Homalin day and night. At one point a lone British bomber passed low overhead, returned and dropped wrapped packages of food onto a sandbar. It was the first indication that anyone in India had received Stilwell’s messages requesting assistance.

When Homalin was finally reached, Stilwell discovered that it had been hastily abandoned by British officials and much of the native population. No news of the Japanese was available, and no food had been left for Stilwell’s party by the retreating British. The telegraph office was shut. When Laybourn arrived with the mules, Stilwell ordered him to swim the animals across the Chindwin and link up again with the main group on the other side of the river. The general led the rest of his party through the town to a Buddhist temple a few miles north, where they spent the night, much to the disapproval of the unfriendly priests who lived there.

On May 13, it was finally time for Stilwell to cross the mighty Chindwin, which marked the last major water barrier to the party’s successful escape from the Japanese. After a two-mile walk from the temple to the river, the general and a handful of American officers stood on the bank trying to figure out how to cross it. Colonel Dorn recounted: ‘Stilwell bit down on his cigarette holder and frowned, glaring at the river as if by sheer force of will he could compel some form of river craft to appear. Suddenly, five dugout canoes and a freight boat nosed around a bend half a mile up the angry surge of water.’ The general’s Kachin guide hailed the boatmen, who immediately responded by turning toward the shore. Stilwell directed that six lines be formed, and the boats transported the group piecemeal to the west bank of the river. Once there, Stilwell waited for the mules to arrive and the porters to get organized, describing the latter activity as a ‘hell of a mess.’ Finally, the whole party moved out into the steep Naga Hills. Stilwell remained unimpressed by the efforts of some of his officers. ‘Took it easy over good trail,’ a frustrated general noted, ‘but the sissies are pooped out. They can’t take it.’

After crossing the Chindwin, for the first time the members of Stilwell’s party knew they were probably safe from the Japanese. But it was a near-run thing. Less than 36 hours after Stilwell left Homalin, a large detachment of Japanese cavalry entered the town. Curiously, Stilwell’s group felt no real elation at the thought of having escaped from the enemy’s grasp. As Colonel Dorn noted, ‘Apathy and physical weariness seemed to pervade the entire party–that and a certain element of fear at the thought of the mountains to be crossed, the peaks and high ridges to be scaled.’

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