Red Holiday

Rich and poor alike, the passengers in Rangoon station were in a festive mood last week as they boarded the crack Prome Express, homeward bound to celebrate waso, a Buddhist holy season. Every seat in the expensive compartments was taken, and the railroad had hitched on extra cattle cars to accommodate hundreds of poorer men and women laden down with baskets of food. At outlying stations, scores of waso pilgrims climbed aboard, further packing the train.

As if in answer to the festival mood, the sun was shining in unaccustomed brightness through the monsoon-clouded skies as the heavily loaded train headed into the jungle country some 50 miles north of Rangoon. As usual, a strongly armed patrol train chugged watchfully along on the track just ahead, against the possibility of Communist bandits.

Vain Hope. At 9:44 a.m. all was gay chatter aboard the Rangoon-Prome Express. At 9:45 an earth-shattering explosion, followed in quick succession by two more, picked up long sections of the track and shook the cars in the air like wet laundry. Gunfire poured from the trackside paddyfields and jungle as two cars of the train plowed into the disabled engine ahead. Other cars of the long train overturned in a nightmare of confusion, as tumbled, screaming passengers were impaled on splinters or crushed in the press of twisted steel.

At first, the guards in the armored train ahead tried to fight off the unseen attackers with gunfire, but after a moment they gave up and steamed away, ostensibly to get reinforcements. Meanwhile, a detachment of guards in the rear car of the express lay low, hoping the bandits would overlook them. It was a vain hope. Concentrating their aim on the rear car, the bandits pinned down the guards with a barrage of Bren and Sten gunfire, turning aside only to kill any passengers from the train who tried to escape. Then, going systematically through the cars, they stripped the dead and wounded of all their clothes and possessions, rounded up those who could still walk, and forced them to shoulder the loot and carry it off into the jungle. One young girl, thrown between two coaches and caught by the neck, was stripped naked and left to strangle to death in the trap, unaided.

Lost in the Jungle. By the time the patrol train returned with doctors and reinforcements, the Prome Express was a smoldering sepulcher for some 100 dead. Its only living passengers were 30 wounded, who lay close to death, and the still unharmed guards in the rear compartment. As doctors worked over the wounded in a makeshift roadside hospital, some of the hundreds lost in the jungle straggled back to tell of what had happened. But troops combing the countryside could find no trace of the Communist bandits, the loot they had grabbed, or the dozens of hostages they had taken.

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