Ursula Graham Bower

Bower was born on May 15, 1914, the daughter of Commander John Graham Bower, a World War I Royal Navy veteran with a name that sounds like it was copy-pasted from the back cover of a Clive Cussler novel.  She grew up in Brighton, England, learned to shoot a .22 as soon as she was old enough to lift it, and eventually aged up into live-firing shotguns, automatic pistols, and the hard-hitting Lee-Enfield service rifle that rocketed out a .303 round the size of a soda can.  After learning to fight, shoot, administer first aid, and do all other manner of badass survival stuff, Bower then faced the greatest challenge of her life to date – her first day at one of those high-end British all-girls boarding schools where they make you walk around with books on your head and club you in the kidneys with a ruler if you can't recite large passages of Emily Bronte novels from memory while executing perfect cross-stitching technique in a corset.  Bower went to some big-time academy on the cliffs outside Brighton, fell in love with Anthropology, cultivated a dream to study it at Oxford, and then had those dreams dashed when her dad got divorced and family funding problems forced her out of school. 

Her dad remarried a short time later (weirdly, the woman who wrote all those Worzel Grummidge novels) and the family moved to Canada, but Bower's mind was set on studying Anthropology, doing hardcore field work, and not sitting around in a bunch of doily-encrusted parlors LARPing her favorite Downton Abbey episodes with a bunch of boring-ass socialites.  She got her opportunity in 1937, when, on a vacation to the Isle of Skye, she made friends with a girl named Abby who was like, "Yo, my brother's in the Civil Service in British India, let's go hang out with him for a while and see some cool stuff and ride elephants or whatever."  And Ursula Graham Bower was so in.  So, with a "have fun honey, and see if you can find a good Englishman to marry while you're over there", Ursula's family sent her off to India to have some awesome adventures.

She fell in love immediately.  It just wasn't with any prospective husband.

The ultra-British parts of India weren't all that exciting to Bower, but as soon as she got out into the countryside her mind was completely blown.  She loved the natural beauty of the place, the location, the climate, and the people – particularly the Naga people, a small tribe that lived in the Naga Hills of Manipur, deep in the jungles of Burma.  They wore vivid colors, had elaborate dances, a strong, vibrant tribal community with songs, dances, and other cool stuff, and the surrounding areas were full of awesome adventure-novel tribes with strange stories of shamans who claimed to practice black magic and performed animal sacrifices, and headhunter tribes who carried shields decorated with human hair from scalps they'd taken in battle.  Real dime-novel stuff that not only fascinated Bower, but gave her a driving compulsion and passion for the land and its people.  She HAD had to know more about them, and get back as soon as possible.

After her first taste of India, Bower was hooked.  She and Abby returned to London after their vacation, got a job driving an ambulance during the "Phoney War" in 1939 (that's what they call the period between 39 and 41 when the UK and Nazi Germany were technically at war but weren't actually shooting at each other yet), and then, later on in '39, she got special permission to return to India to study the people of the Naga Hills. 

Graham Bower arrived in Laisong Village in 1939 armed with a camera, a bag of film, and a stack of notebooks, and immediately tried to ingratiate herself with the Naga peoples.  She learned their language, their dances, cooked food, fished with them, made jewelry, and learned their laws and customs.  She taught them about medicine, helped tend to the sick, and was able to procure medical and food aid for the people from the British government, all while documenting everything with photographs, personal interviews, artwork and writings.  At first it was a bit tough – the Naga tribe wasn't all that woke and it was considered bad luck to eat any food killed by a woman – but when Ursula went out into the jungle with a twelve-gauge shotgun and came back with an armful of dinner everybody was just like, "well, actually, this one's pretty cool."  As she later recounted, “they counted me in on rather the Joan of Arc principle -- I wasn’t entirely a lady, in both senses, so I was allowed in.”

She'd spend the next three years living among the Naga, working on her great towering work of Anthropological awesomeness, taking thousands of photos, and absorbing their culture, all the while largely unaware that this small tribe and its quiet, tranquil valley were soon about to be in the middle of the most brutal jungle warfare campaign of World War II.

The Imperial Japanese Army stormed into Burma in 1942, overrunning British defenses and blitzing through the jungle towards India.  Their goal was to cut India off from China, allowing the IJA to divide-and-conquer China, and then (hopefully) to incite the growing Indian Nationalist movement to revolt against the redcoats and overthrow the British Raj.  The Naga, a people who were still hunting with bows and arrows and largely just wanted to be left the hell alone, suddenly found themselves on the front line between the rapidly-advancing Japanese invasion and the last tenuous defense of the British Empire in Asia. 

Bower knew which side she stood on, but it wasn't that easy to convince the Naga to go with her.  She met with their leaders, convinced them that they had a lot to gain by helping fight off the Japanese, and then immediately organized her best warriors into raiding and scouting parties that would move silently through the Burmese jungle, scout out enemy positions, and then report them back to British military command.  Taking command of an irregular guerilla force of tribal warriors who literally had never allowed a woman to even carry a weapon in battle, Ursula Graham Bower managed to secure a British weapons supply, scrounge up gear, and organize an effective guerilla fighting force – 150 men, equipped with one .303 Enfield, a .38 automatic, her single-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun, and 70 old-ass muzzle loader rifles that looked like something out of the Civil War might not sound like much, but this small, effective recon team was able to cover over 800 miles of jungle in their search to locate, identify, and report Japanese troop movements and positions – and fight them when necessary.

When British command heard what was going on, they were blown away, but they were so on-board it was nuts.  She was called to meet General William Slim, the British commander in the sector, and he not only immediately liked her (when she walked through the door of his office, nervous out of her mind, all he said was basically "oh good, you're not a missionary" and they immediately became friends), he assigned a really badass unit designation to her command – Bower Force.  He hooked her up with more guns, ammunition, medical supplies and radios, and set her out with orders to identify and engage the Japanese where possible.  She returned to the Naga Hills and went to work setting up a series of intricate trails, digging tunnels, setting up lookout points, establishing hunting blinds, and digging trenches for her scouting and ambush teams.  Personally leading troops into combat with a Sten gun and a .38 automatic – she claimed she didn't like the Tommy gun because the extra .45 mags were too heavy – she not only reconned enemy positions and ambushed Japanese patrols, but she also started linking up with refugees, escaped POWs, and downed airmen who were stuck behind enemy lines and then leading them back to safety.  One day she'd be making sandwiches for Burmese refugees and putting them on trains to India, and other days she'd be camped out in the jungle with binoculars and a map marking off artillery targets.  She tracked enemy foxholes, liasoned with MI6 agents, planted false intel for the Japanese to discover, and one of her guys even stole the entire enemy battle plan for the Imphal Campaign at one point.  She became so famous for her adventures that the Americans even put out a comic about her, called The Jungle Queen, and the Japanese responded by offering a large bounty to whoever could successfully decapitate her with a samurai sword.

 Through the entirety of the Burma Campaign, Ursula Graham Bower, the Anthropologist turned resistance warrior, commander a detachment of the British Army – something she wasn't technically allowed to do, either on the British side or on the Naga side.  But she didn't care.  As she later said, “I was a freak in the job, and I was always afraid that they’d find an excuse to fire me.  They said that sooner or later they’d send a British officer to replace me.” 

But they never did.

Bower had already shredded two Sten guns and was on her third SMG when she commanded a rescue mission that would change her life in 1944.  A group of British guerillas had been cut off behind Japanese lines, and Bower Force was called in to pull the survivors out.  She tracked them down, helped them shoot out of a jam, and then linked up with the guerillas, who were led by a Major named Tim Betts – a V-Force guerilla commando who also happened to be a hardcore ornithologist that studied and catalogued the birds and butterflies of India for the Bombay Natural History Society.  I feel like better matches than that don't really come along every day, so you can probably imagine that this guy and the Jungle Queen hit it off pretty much immediately.  Hey, at least she finally met that nice boy in India her parents were hoping through, except they were running through the jungle with SMGs and that's probably not how Mrs. Bower imagined it would go down.

Betts was wounded and sick, and he moved on to link up with the British forces at a place called Kohima.  Now, I wrote a whole big thing on Kohima a few months ago (it's how I came across Bower's story in the first place), so I'll basically distill it all down to this – Kohima was British India's Last Stand in Burma.  Massively outnumbered, overwhelmed on all sides, the defenders of Kohima held on to the last man, fighting the enemy so close that both armies could throw grenades into the other side's trenches.  Defeat would give the Japanese Empire control of the China-India border, cutting the Chinese resistance off from aid and giving the Japanese a clear route to strike into the heart of India.  It's probably the most important battle of WWII that nobody's ever heard of before.

And the Japanese positions, troop movements, and the best road and route for British reinforcements to traverse were all intel provided to the Allies by Ursula Graham Bower and her Naga guerillas.

Kohima held, the Japanese were defeated, Betts and Bower were reunited, and the happy couple married a few months later in a traditional Naga ceremony (followed by a Very British Ceremony, of course).  British India held off the attack, and in 1944 Ursula Graham Bower Betts published her research on the Naga and Apatani tribes, plus the first of three books she'd write on the subject.  She received the Lawrence of Arabia Medal for her anthropology and the Order of the British Empire for her asskicking, spent the late 1940s making peace between warring tribes in the Burmese jungle, and then the couple moved to Kenya where they opened up a coffee plantation.  When civil war started in Kenya, the couple moved to the Hebrides, where they raised two daughters – one of them wrote a play about Ursula's life that she performs in Naga villages a couple times a year, and one is a PhD at the University of Sydney who's written at least three books on the archaeology of the Silk Road.

You seriously can't make this stuff up.

Links:

The Naga Republic

Scroll.in

The Times

Wikipedia

Youtube Interview

Books:

Harper, Tim., and Bayly, Christopher Alan. Forgotten Armies. Harvard University Press, 2005.

MacMillan, Margaret. History's People.  House of Anansi Press, 2015.

McFate, Montgomery. Military Anthropology. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Thomas, Vicky. The Naga Queen. History Press, 2011.