The Airmen and the Headhunters Read online

  The Airmen and the Headhunters

  Judith M. Heimann

  * * *

  A True Story of Lost Soldiers,

  Heroic Tribesmen

  and the Unlikeliest Rescue

  of World War II

  * * *

  HARCOURT, INC.

  Orlando Austin New York San Diego London

  * * *

  Copyright © 2007 by Judith M. Heimann

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may

  be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

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  of any part of the work should be submitted online at

  www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following address:

  Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive,

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  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  Maps by Helen Phillips

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Heimann, Judith M.

  The airmen and the headhunters: a true story of lost soldiers,

  heroic tribesmen and the unlikeliest rescue of World War II/

  Judith M. Heimann.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Search and rescue operations—Borneo.

  2. World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations, American. 3. United States.

  Army Air Forces. Bomb Group, 5th Squadron, 23rd—History.

  4. Airmen—United States—Biography. 5. Dayak (Indonesian people)

  I. Title.

  D810.S45B65 2007

  940.54'25983—dc22 2007009587

  ISBN 978-0-15-101434-7

  Text set in Bodoni MT

  Designed by Linda Lockowitz

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition

  A C E G I K J H F D B

  * * *

  To my son Paul, a pilot

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE • 1

  ONE: A B-24 Over Borneo • 3

  TWO: Into the Jungle • 21

  THREE: The D.O.'s Dilemma • 35

  FOUR: "Good-bye, Mister" • 57

  FIVE: Another Part of the Forest • 71

  SIX: Becoming Lun Dayeh • 81

  SEVEN: A Letter from the Japanese • 95

  EIGHT: Polecat Gulch • 109

  NINE: The Pangeran Forces the Pace • 131

  TEN: The D.O. Declares War • 147

  ELEVEN: The Navy Crashes In • 165

  TWELVE: Help from on High • 189

  THIRTEEN: SEMUT Finds Work for the Yanks • 205

  FOURTEEN: A Way Out • 225

  FIFTEEN: The Allies Arrive • 243

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS • 263

  GLOSSARY • 267

  A NOTE ON SOURCES • 273

  INDEX • 281

  * * *

  PREFACE

  We like to think of war stories from the twentieth century and earlier as straightforward accounts of derring-do, with a familiar cast of heroes and villains. There is even a subcategory of stories about how our brave soldiers managed—or died trying—to make their way home from behind enemy lines. But the circumstances of war can be more complicated. This story happened during World War II—which was truly a world war, drawing into its orbit even such normally isolated people as the headhunting Dayaks (as the tribespeople of Borneo's interior were then called), people whose mountainous tropical jungles had yet to be mapped.

  I first traveled to Borneo more than twenty years after the events described here and spent two years there as the wife of an American diplomat. Already speaking Indonesian/Malay, and with privileged access through my husband's work, I was able to visit much of northern Borneo and make a number of local friends—Dayak, Chinese and Malay. I have kept some of those friendships ever since and have also drawn upon scholarly friends and publications to feed my enduring interest in all things Bornean.

  This morsel of Borneo's World War II history has never before been told in its entirety. No single person knew more than a fragment or two of it. I came across snatches of the story of American airmen stranded in headhunter country in the last year of the war while I was researching another book about an Englishman, Tom Harrisson, who also figures in this book. But it was only when I sat in the Australia War Memorial Library in Canberra in 1992 and held in my hand a letter to Major Harrisson written in rounded Palmer Method cursive by a certain Philip Corrin, 2nd Lt., U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF), that I knew there was a story there that had to be searched out and told.

  I tried to fit it into my book about Harrisson, but it kept growing bigger as I learned more. I eventually decided to give it a book of its own. It took me ten years and three continents to collect the facts presented here and fit them together.

  My narrative draws on what various direct participants said or wrote in 1944–1945 and later. I interviewed the airmen and/or their families repeatedly and collected documents and pictures from them. An Indonesian woman who was connected to the events by childhood memories and family ties and I separately interviewed more than a dozen Dayaks who had either taken part in these events or were the spouses or children of those who had. My account necessarily has gaps. Some informants were more forthcoming than others, and some people I would have wanted to interview were already dead. So I made some educated guesses about what people at the time may have thought and the gestures they may have made, but when the narrative quotes someone, there is solid evidence that the person said or wrote it.

  Probably the most crucial written account used in this book is an unpublished manuscript dictated in 1981 by a man who was neither an American airman nor a Dayak headhunter, a man with a difficult name—Makahanap—and a complicated character. But that is getting ahead of the story....

  CHAPTER ONE

  A B-24 Over Borneo

  About twelve thirty midday on November 16, 1944, District Officer William Makahanap looked up from his draft report on the expected rice production in his East Borneo district of Mentarang and realized that for the past few minutes he had been hearing a whining noise. The overhead fan in his old office back in the Celebes used to sound like that, but here in the little settlement of Long Berang there was no electricity to run a fan. The whine could have been from mosquitoes, but it was the wrong time of day for their assault. Such a loud noise was unusual in the quiet midday period, when able-bodied Dayaks (the general term for the various tribes of inland Borneo) were away in the rice fields or the jungle, and nearly everybody else was dozing. Even the schoolchildren, curled up on mats in the schoolroom down the road, would be taking a nap while the day was hottest.

  The whine grew louder and Makahanap finally recognized what it was: the engines of a big airplane. Then, above the engine noise, he heard people yelling out in the fields. What could be disturbing the Dayaks? He stepped outside and heard them shouting that "the big thing in the sky" was "breaking apart" and "going to fall to the ground."

  Standing on his office steps, he squinted up into the shimmering sky above the jungle at the edge of the little settlement. He could see that the plane, flashing in and out of the cloud cover, had four engines and big wings, but he did not know enough about aircraft to recognize a B-24. Nor could he tell whose plane it was, Allied or Japanese. What he did realize was that the Dayaks were right. It was about to break apart and fall out of the sky.

  Standing there on his front step, blinking a
t the bright sky, Makahanap's first reaction was probably annoyance at being interrupted. But his next would have been anxiety. In his experience of the past three years, the arrival of something new was rarely a blessing for himself, his family or his district.

  He could see, though, that the Dayaks were filled with wonder. None of them had ever seen anything like this thing in the sky. He could no longer see or hear it. Had it gone down somewhere behind the mountains to the northeast? What had happened to it? Where was it now? Above all, was it Japanese or Allied?

  November 16, 1944, had begun as a routine Thursday for pilot 2nd Lt. Tom Coberly, USAAF, and the ten men of the crew of his B-24 (a four-engine bomber also known as a "Liberator"). They had been awakened shortly after two in the morning and given breakfast: a choice of hot or cold cereal, along with powdered eggs scrambled and Spam fried and liberally doused with tomato ketchup. They washed it down with tall glasses of milk and orange juice and enough coffee to wake them up.

  It was the coolest, best time of day at their air base on Moronic, a small island of the Moluccas in the Netherlands East Indies. Just south of the Philippines and hundreds of miles due east of Borneo, Morotai was built on a foundation of coral and was relatively bare. Much of its scrub plant life had been cleared away to make the coconut plantation that was now an airfield. There was nothing to do there but wait to fly out.

  Lieutenant Coberly's crew, simply called Coberly's, had been on Morotai less than a month. Their Twenty-third Squadron belonged to the Bomber Barons, the Fifth Bomb Group that was an arm of the tiny Thirteenth Air Force (sometimes called the Jungle Air Force) of the USAAF whose missions were to retake the Japanese-occupied Philippine Islands and cut off Japan's Pacific oil supplies.

  In response to the prewar U.S.-led oil embargo against Japan after the latter took Indochina, the Japanese military had launched a brilliant offensive in 1941–1942, starting with the December raid on Pearl Harbor that had destroyed an unprepared American sea-and-air armada. Next, Japan's troops had taken over the American and European holdings in the Pacific, virtually without a struggle, while America devoted most of its energies to beating back Hitler's armies in Europe and North Africa. Japan hoped its new empire—which it called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—would make it self-sufficient in the oil, tin and rubber needed for its growing industrial economy. But the effort to secure and run such a far-flung empire was making Japan the victim of its own success.

  Its forces were spread so thinly across an area that ran from China to the South Seas that it risked losing all or part of its new colonies if the natives rebelled or the Allies invaded. Lacking the manpower to match its territorial ambitions, Japan relied in part on the fear inspired by the harshness of its occupation to keep the subject peoples in line.

  Japan really needed Borneo's oil: In 1943 and 1944, it counted on Borneo for 40 percent of its fuel oil and 25 to 30 percent of its crude and heavy oils. By 1944, cutting off these Japanese oil supplies had become a major goal of the Thirteenth Air Force's bomber arm.

  Liberator squadrons of the Bomber Barons had had increasing success bombing Japanese shipping, including the ships bringing oil home from Borneo. The Bomber Barons were not just attacking transport vessels; in October 1944, some squadrons had taken part in the massive naval battle of Leyte Gulf, in which the Japanese navy had lost close to a hundred ships, including three battleships, four carriers, six heavy and four light cruisers and eleven destroyers.

  With this naval victory, the Allies began to feel that a corner had been turned. From now on, the Allies reasoned, not only would the Japanese have more trouble protecting their shipping, but they would be unable to prevent the tropical islands from being liberated by the Allies and serving as stepping stones for the planned invasion of Japan itself. Moreover, the Imperial Navy now lacked enough carrier platforms for the fighter planes needed to protect the Japanese homeland from air attack.

  Today, Coberly's squadron had been scheduled to attack a Japanese-held airfield in the central Philippines. But the previous night, after supper and a briefing on the morning's raid, the men were watching an outdoor movie when they were summoned back to the briefing tent. Their mission had changed.

  They were now told to prepare for an attack against a Japanese heavy cruiser. There might also be an aircraft carrier, which had been seen "lazing along like a fat duck in Brunei Bay." Their orders were to hit the largest ship. Coberly's plane was quickly reloaded with weapons appropriate to its new mission: five one-thousand-pound, armor-piercing bombs.

  Before the predawn breakfast that Thursday, flight engineer/gunner Cpl. Jim Knoch and armor gunner Cpl. John Nelson decided to launder their khaki uniforms using a new technique. They tied their dirty clothes to a long rope and threw them into the dark surf at the edge of the airfield, so that the ebb and flow of the waves would scrub them clean by the time they returned from their mission. Like all such busy work before a combat flight, this helped the men avoid thinking about what was to come. Some men would play a little mind game, telling themselves, "Don't worry, you're dead already; you died last week," to steel themselves for what might happen this time.

  The original crew of Coberly's had been together since June 1944, when these airmen were assigned to phase training at March Field, near Riverside, California, not far from Los Angeles. Perhaps the most striking thing about Coberly's was their youth. Tom Coberly himself, at twenty-two, was the eldest on board.

  Nineteen-year-old Cpl. Jim Knoch was the leader of the plane's seven enlisted men, because of his position as flight engineer. Jim was tall, slim but powerfully built, with dark eyes, a permanent tan and dark blond curly hair. Though he liked to laugh and could play the clown, he had an imposing presence. He had been raised in Sacramento, the son of a mechanic with the Otis Elevator Company. His father hated bureaucracy and did not like being told what to do or how to do it. An only child, Jim had inherited his father's skills and prejudices. At eighteen, he had become a crew chief, directing the grown men at McClellan Air Force Base outside Sacramento who were building the B-24, and he knew the plane intimately. Though he was one of only two in the crew from a blue-collar family, he had the respect of everyone in Coberly's for his skill as an engineer and for his spunk.

  Jim led Coberly's into practical jokes and minor acts of rebellion against authority. He had a mischievous sense of humor and did not mind flouting the rules. He had a natural gift for making things work and liked not only to repair but to prevent mechanical problems. Crewmates remembered one terrifying occasion when they had been on a training flight in a B-24 about twelve thousand feet above downtown Los Angeles. Jim was practicing pumping fuel from the bomb-bay tanks to the main-wing tanks when, without warning, all four engines quit. The plane sank like a stone to about three thousand feet before the pilot managed to get the engines restarted. The others would never forget how Jim had calmly continued the refueling until it was done.

  John Nelson, with whom Jim Knoch threw his dirty uniform into the surf at the end of a rope, was at age eighteen the youngest man in the crew, but no less experienced than most of the others. Bright enough to finish high school at age seventeen, John had immediately left his small town in Idaho to join the Army Air Forces' cadet program.

  Most of Coberly's enlisted men had the IQ and other qualifications to have become officers had they not been forced to enlist or be drafted after March 1943, when the various armed services, urgently needing replacement enlisted men, had closed down all the college-based officer-candidate programs. But they still wanted to fly. John, a woodsman who knew about guns, was invited to stay back to teach at gunnery school but he "decided that was not for me and went on my way to combat" as an aerial gunner. "Wide-eyed wonders," their seasoned, skeptical and somewhat envious sergeants at basic training camp called such enlisted men.

  Air crews, like other combat units, typically forged strong ties of comradeship, and this was particularly true for Coberly's. All four officers—Tom Coberly, Jerry Rose
nthal, Fred Brennan and Phil Corrin—came from California. So did two of the enlisted men, Jim Knoch and his boon companion, the laconic but highly competent radio operator Dan Illerich. These West Coasters set the social style for the rest—clean-cut, quiet spoken and modest. The only way most of the crew learned that pilot Tom Coberly's father owned the biggest Ford dealership in Los Angeles was when he told them that was why he had the gas coupons that allowed him to drive his car into town when he and the crew had passes to leave the base. Copilot Jerry Rosenthal did not boast of the movie stars who figured among his Hollywood lawyer father's clients. You would not have guessed that bombardier Phil Corrin was the son of the vice president for advertising of Los Angeles's big department-store chain Bullock's. Navigator Fred Brennan's father was a movie screenwriter with a big current hit, A Guy Named Joe, but the crew only learned that after months together when someone asked him what his father did for a living.

  Basically, they were all just kids. Their voices had changed, but most of them did not need to shave more than once a week. Only one of the original eleven was married, ring gunner/assistant radio operator Technical Sgt. Clarence T. Capin (known as Tom). Capin was a six-foot-five-inch redhead, a serious-minded, ambitious young man, the only child of a poor family in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He had met his wife, Betty, when she had been a student at a college where Capin was leading an aviation ROTC group marching around the campus. He spotted the attractive coed and led his column of men right into her path, forcing her off the pavement. They married shortly before he went abroad and, at his request, she moved in with his parents, so that he could visualize where she was and what she was doing while he was far away. Of the rest of the original crew, only Jim Knoch had a regular girlfriend.

  The sudden, seemingly unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor had instilled in these young men not only a patriotic desire to defend their country but an intense, visceral hatred of the Japanese. Radio operator Dan Illerich, who had Japanese American high school classmates and happy memories of buying strawberries from the Japanese farmers of the San Joaquin Valley, made a clear distinction between the Japanese he knew and the horrifying enemy he remembered from a piece in Life magazine on the Rape of Nanking of December 1937, which showed Japanese soldiers using Chinese tied to posts for bayonet practice.