Official caption: “Royal Marine J Crompton of Wigan, Lancashire, attached to the British East Indies Fleet, with Puncho, the Alsatian mascot of the Marine camp, attempt to camouflage themselves.”
Photo by Hales, G (Sub Lt), Admiralty Collection, IWM A 30104
The image was taken in Ceylon in early August 1945, at HMS Rajaliya, the Royal Navy air station located at the Puttalam airfield.
Note the Marine’s late-war Enfield No. 4 with its distinctive spike bayonet and the possibly locally-acquired slouch hat worn at a jaunty angle and fitted with a braided leather band rather than the traditional pugaree linen wrap.
The base was kind of unorthodox, with lots of local flavor.
Rajaliya, set up 60 miles south of Colombo as a dispersal field in case of Japanese air raids that allowed easy overflow from visiting RN carriers, was home to the much loved “Puttalam Elephants” as depicted by a painting by Robert Taylor in the collection of the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton.
The below shows an FAA crew at Puttalam employing their elephant “Fiffi’ to drag an F4U Corsair from No.1 Corsair squadron of the Naval Operational Training Unit, South East Asia Command (SEAC), back onto the Marston mat metal runway after it slid off a slippery surface and landed in the mud.
