The Airmen and the Headhunters Page 15

  Somehow, Makahanap found out about the young lovers' secret correspondence and bribed the postman in Taruna (at the only post office on the island) to give him the letters that Herman sent Theresia. When he had collected a few, he took them to Theresia's father, who forbade his daughter to continue the correspondence. Makahanap knew that Theresia never loved him as she had loved Herman, but she eventually consented to an engagement to Makahanap when she turned nineteen. When she could delay it no longer, she married him in 1935, when Makahanap was twenty-six and she was twenty-five.

  Makahanap loved her enough to make up for the lack of reciprocity, and he knew she was a good woman who would never betray him. His own faithfulness was another matter. While he and Theresia were studying at the Kemah Injil schools in Makassar in preparation for assignment to Borneo, William had an affair with a Celebes Muslim woman, by whom he had a son, Hassan. Makahanap still did not know why he had done it. Perhaps because he felt insufficiently loved by his wife. Perhaps because it was always hard for him to stay on one side of any question. He was like a gambler who always needed to hedge his bets.

  But this time, he told himself, this time, with the blood of so many Japanese already on his hands, this time, he prayed to God, this time he would prove worthy to be Mama's husband and God's servant. He would do right and not count the cost.

  With that vow in mind, he arrived in Long Berang, eager to pursue the war against the Japanese. The visit to his wife in Punan Silau had confirmed that the Japanese had not yet given up trying to find him. He would be unable to hide himself or avoid danger to his family much longer. The best defense would be to attack.

  As for his American charges, he could not make up his mind which option made the most sense: To use them as fighters or to hide them where they would be safe. For the moment they were a distraction, so he decided to move them across the river to the Presswood house.

  Still focused on his vow to continue the war, he took advantage of the presence of so many Dayaks in Long Berang to summon a mass meeting of the inhabitants of the Mentarang, Pa' Paru and Kinaye rivers. To the crowd lining the near bank of the Pa' Paru a short distance outside of town, the district officer declared there was no longer an alternative to fighting. The killing they had done already meant the Japanese would show them no mercy.

  He warned the people that anyone who opposed or refused to carry out his orders would have to be regarded as a deadly enemy. There was no room left for standing aside. Now that the people of his district were directly involved in the war, it was better to die fighting than to wait to be tortured and killed by the Japanese. He said this would be a guerrilla war and explained that, in a guerrilla war, the advantage would be clearly with the Dayaks, who knew the jungle. They could hide, whereas the Japanese could not.

  Makahanap knew his Bible. As he looked over the crowd, he must have been reminded of Gideon's selecting his Israelite forces for the battle against the Midianites. The D.O. knew many men of this part of Borneo personally and easily picked out a hundred strong men to be fighters and another fifty who were smart and reliable, but not as strong, to be messengers and informants. He divided the fighters into two groups, placing fifty under the command of Pangeran Lagan and the other fifty under Christiaan's command. He called on the two commanders to organize oath takings. "Dogs must be killed again," he declared. As for the others present, they were ordered to return home, but to see to it that the troops were fed. The meeting broke up without dissent.

  The next day, Makahanap wrote a letter to be sent to the Japanese headquarters at Malinau:

  I, William A. Makahanap, acting on behalf of the whole people of the district Mentarang, herewith decree that we are not willing to be governed by the Japanese Imperium. We have decided to fight hand in hand with the Allied forces who at this moment are already in our district.

  We, the people of Mentarang, in cooperation with the Allied forces, now are ready to crush the Japanese Imperial Army.

  On behalf of the people of Mentarang,

  The Chief Commander,

  [signed] W. A. Makahanap

  He also wrote to the heads of the Krayan District and other nearby administrative regions that "We, the people of Mentarang, herewith inform you that we are no longer under the Japanese government. It is forbidden for strangers to enter our district without permission. He who guides the Japanese heitais to our district will be regarded as our enemy."

  The four American airmen whose presence had sparked the armed rebellion against the occupying power were unaware that it had begun. The day Makahanap wrote his letters of defiance, Phil's diary speaks only of Christiaan giving them their first haircuts and shaves in more than two months. Phil and the three other Yanks were also unaware that a head feast to rival the one they had seen in Long Metuil was taking place just across the bridge. Phil's diary notes, "Some Dayaks from other villages were in town for a celebration, parading and chanting throughout the afternoon, and a goat and several pigs have been killed. So I guess they had a big feast." The Americans also had a great dinner that night, with wine presented by one of the Chinese merchants and Christiaan's specially prepared chicken (described by Phil as "next to Mother Hartman's, the best I've ever had").

  Phil, who had written to Tom Capin and John Nelson and Franny Harrington after Makahanap had brought news of them, now wrote another letter to Tom urging him to join them. Christiaan, armed with Phil's own .45 automatic, agreed to take the letter to Capin and bring him back.

  Phil, Dan, Eddy and Jim were all feeling well enough to be restless. They were spending their time "eating, sleeping, reading the five or six English books here and swimming in the river," Phil wrote. By January 31, he wrote in his diary that he hoped that they would be leaving soon, "because, although it's been a valuable experience in a way, I feel that so much time is being wasted when you sit for hours at a time doing nothing."

  Just before Makahanap's letter reached Malinau, the Japanese there received a concrete piece of evidence that they had lost control of the Mentarang District. A Chinese working for the Japanese administration reported seeing the bloated body of the taicho floating past the absent ken kanrikan's office. That body plus the absence of news from the other sixteen men meant that Japan's occupation of Borneo's interior was being put into question for the first time. The administrators in Malinau sent to Tarakan for troops to come up to join in an attack on Long Berang. Knowing that Pangeran Lagan was the most influential Dayak in the region, they held him responsible. They had been hunting for him for weeks, ever since the taicho had decided to move to Long Metuil. Now they would try to smoke him out by taking hostage some of the Lun Dayeh children in the Japanese-run boarding school in Malinau.

  Mustapa al-Bakri, the Malay official technically in charge of the Muslim community of Malinau District but who was merely acting as an aide to the Japanese administrator, protested against the arrest of the students. He argued that this was a bad way to try to obtain cooperation from the Dayaks, who were devoted to their children. Eventually, as the days passed with no sign of Pangeran Lagan or any other indication that the Dayaks were ready to cooperate, the Malay's arguments prevailed. After a week, the Japanese authorities released the children, who fled home to their families.

  Mustapa al-Bakri's advice had been sound. Already, the jailing of the students had done damage to the Japanese image among people who, for the most part, had been ready to tolerate the foreign occupation. The arrests had also frightened many of the other students into fleeing the boarding school. Malay police rounded up the students and brought them back, but rumors continued to circulate that the Japanese had killed the child hostages.

  On the afternoon of February 1, Makahanap and Christiaan returned home with a strange-looking redheaded giant in a loincloth: Tom Capin. The other Yanks were amazed to see the change in him. In some ways Capin seemed more Dayak than Yank. For the first few days, he often broke into Lun Dayah and at times stumbled for the right word in English.

  Tom brought
welcome confirmation that John Nelson and Francis Harrington were alive and well. He said he had learned that they were being cared for somewhere in the north where it was safe and that they were hesitant to come down south to join the others.

  Makahanap, although he had agreed to it, now wondered if having Tom Capin with them might be a mistake, since every additional airman added to the risk for them all. He was still unsure what to do with the airmen but was coming around to the idea that their safety should be his first priority. When he and Christiaan had stopped off at Punan Silau on their way to Pa' Ogong to collect the other airman, Mama had burst into tears at not being able to cook for the Yanks. She told her husband again: "Americans dead, you dead. Americans alive, you alive." William always took what Mama said seriously.

  Now that he had time, Makahanap tried to explain to the Americans what had been going on in his district and that he was leading a guerrilla war to push the Japanese back to Tarakan. For a few days he had the airmen stand guard duty at night as part of a Dayak-manned twenty-four-hour watch for miles beyond Long Berang.

  While Makahanap wrestled with his problem, Eddy Haviland wandered up one day into the attic at the Presswood house, trying to find a little privacy. Eddy was the most intellectual of the crew members and longed even more than the others did for a quiet place to think. He was now seeing well enough to be able to keep an eye out for insects and snakes. Instead, he found a true treasure trove: piles of old American magazines.

  Paging through Reader's Digest for June 1939, Eddy must have been amused to find an article giving various national columnists' views on whether the United States should enter the war. Heywood Broun (syndicated in 41 papers with nearly three million readers) favored entry, arguing "There are no caves in which men can hide when their fellows cry out in agony." Westbrook Pegler (in 117 newspapers with a combined circulation of more than six million) had another view: "Perhaps the American people, if consulted, would say that if Britain and France must fight such a war, that is just their hard luck and, after all, only another war in the long series of wars between jostling European countries." Pegler ended with the comment: "For God's sake don't anybody blow a bugle now."

  Eddy shouted to the others to come upstairs and see what he had found. The airmen pounced on the magazines. For the first time in ages, the thought of their next meal was not uppermost. Jim sat blissfully amidst a pile of Popular Mechanics.

  In an issue of National Geographic from 1939, there was an article entitled "I Kept House in a Jungle," by a young American woman whose perspective was a bit different from the airmen's. Her problem was that apples were unavailable and the oranges were neither orange nor sweet. The airmen would have found it hard to sympathize, nor could they appreciate comments like, "The people of Venezuela ... have the happy hearts of children." But there was a long piece in another 1939 issue by another American woman who had traveled throughout the eastern part of the Dutch East Indies, starting in Bali. What a pity that their parachutes had not brought the airmen there. It sounded so beautiful and so interesting.

  The next day, the men's spirits sank briefly after a squadron of seventeen B-24s flew directly overhead. When they first heard the planes in the distance, they had spread out their chutes and had used mirrors to reflect the sunlight in the hopes of attracting the attention of the squadron but, as Phil wrote in his diary, "I guess not one of the 170 men up there was looking down."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Navy Crashes In

  John Nelson and Franny Harrington were the first of the Coberly crew to hear the news. A Lun Dayeh hunting party came back to Long Nuat with word that yet another planeload of Americans had landed—near Limbang, a bit inland from Brunei Bay in northern Sarawak. By the time the news of these other downed airmen reached John and Franny, this second group of Americans had been in Borneo for more than a month. A lot had happened during that time.

  Shortly before noon on Saturday, January 13, 1945, a U.S. Navy Liberator (called a PB4Y) was eight thousand feet above Brunei Bay between two layers of clouds, flying as part of Squadron VPB-101. This flight was scheduled to be the last for the Liberator's ten-man crew before a long-awaited forty-five days of home leave. Starting out that morning from their air base on Morotai, the navy men had had the unglamorous task of dropping "Liberation" leaflets on communities in the oil fields of northwest Borneo just south of Brunei Bay. Three months had passed since the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and things were quiet in this corner of the war. In fact, this crew had not fired a shot in anger during its entire eighteen-month tour of duty with the 101st. When the last of the pamphlets had slipped out of the bomb bay, a cheer went up as the copilot, Lt. (j.g.) Robert J. Graham, turned the plane northeast, back toward Morotai. Having completed the mission, they were now due for a rest.

  Bob Graham had been married only a few weeks when he had shipped out for this tour of duty, and seeing his wife again was uppermost in his thoughts—when he could stay awake. The sun was streaming in, it had been a long day already and he was a bit sleepy. He needed a sandwich, a smoke and a stretch. He asked the pilot, Lt. Cdr. Marvin "Smitty" Smith, to take the controls for a bit and accepted one of the sandwiches that the nose gunner, young Sheridan Poston, was handing out.

  Smitty was not only the pilot of this plane but also the executive officer for the whole squadron. He was glad to have a turn flying the Liberator. But he had barely taken over the controls when two pairs of Japanese fighter planes suddenly emerged from the clouds. A shout came through the intercom from waist gunner William John Fischer: "Bandits, bandits at twelve o'clock." Within seconds, enemy aircraft knocked out two of the Liberator's four engines and hit nose gunner Poston in the legs. The plane's artificial horizon was also destroyed. With the plane rapidly losing altitude, Smitty steered away from the populous towns along Brunei Bay, where the Japanese were known to be in force. He looked for somewhere soft and flat to crash-land the plane. While he peered downward, two of the enemy fighter planes reappeared above. The top turret gunner Reuben Lloyd Robbins and waist gunner Bill Fischer got solid hits on one of them. Avoiding a mountain in his path, Smitty found a flat, wet rice paddy. The PB4Y skidded 150 yards in the mud and came to a complete stop—a perfect belly landing.

  But Smitty was painfully aware that they were not as far away from the Japanese-held coast as he had hoped to be. On the plus side, except for Poston, who was hemorrhaging from the bullet wounds in his legs, they all seemed to have come through without injury.

  As soon as the plane shuddered to a halt, some of the crew moved quickly to destroy all documents that might be of use to the enemy while others broke out a one-man rubber raft to lower Poston down from the wrecked plane. Grabbing a silk map of Borneo, a Malay/English word list, two first-aid kits and a radio set, they headed for the shade of some trees that lined the rice paddy. Just before they reached the trees, Poston died in the rubber raft.

  The crew was down to nine: In addition to Smitty and Bob Graham, Fischer and Robbins, there were aviation chief machinist's mate Talmadge Cyrus Thurmond; 2nd radio Kenneth R. Platte; sea gunner Melvin Joseph Roth; navigator Alvin Marvin Harms and 2nd mechanic James Ronald Shepherd.

  Smitty was tall, well built and red haired. Another pilot described him as the "kindest man I met in the service. He wasn't flamboyant ... I never saw him drunk or loud." His men had always felt ready to follow him anywhere, and now they were about to do so.

  As they sat under the trees—out of the midday sun but still in the sultry heat—Smitty explained what he had in mind. Like Phil Corrin, he knew he and his men must try to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the northwest coast where, thanks to the oil fields, the Japanese were present in fairly large numbers. He had heard that the occupiers had the more-or-less willing cooperation of the Malays and of some of the natives near the coast, and the reluctant support of the terrified Chinese. He guessed this was true all along the Borneo coast. He had no idea what the people of the interior were like, except that h
e had heard that they all were—or had been—headhunters. Still, the interior natives were less likely to turn the airmen in, because, it was thought, there were fewer Japanese in the interior.

  On the other hand, Smitty thought their best plan would be to get off this island and back to their base as soon as possible. The briefers had told him that there was usually an Allied submarine waiting off the north coast of Borneo near Kudat, ready to pick up stranded airmen. But it would take weeks to walk northeast through the mountains to reach that part of the coast and, once on the north coast, they would have to dodge the Japanese. But he saw no other valid option than to head inland and then north to Kudat while trying to avoid running into the enemy. The others agreed.

  They were wearily gathering up some tools to dig a hole to bury Poston when they noticed that they were being observed. A pair of natives had appeared. They wore loincloths, carried blowpipes with spearheads, and each had a knife belt holding a machetelike knife. The natives called out in Malay to the airmen, stuck their blowpipes in the mud and approached with offerings of sticky rice.

  The flyers, with the help of the Malay/English word list they had rescued from the plane, managed to convey their wish that their dead comrade be buried. The natives agreed but seemed anxious not to stay too long with the airmen. They urged the Yanks to move on quickly away from the coast, away from the Japanese.

  Using the silk map of Borneo he had been issued, Smitty showed the crew that the simplest way to Kudat seemed to be to follow the Temburong-Trusan river system southeast across eastern Brunei and northern Sarawak up into the Crocker Range, which was just inside the British-protected state of North Borneo. Their guides indicated the best crossing place would bring them into North Borneo just south of the village of Pa' Matang. From there, they could follow the Matang and Tomani rivers due north to the Padas River, continuing north past Kemabong and Tenom to the coast and Kudat.