The Airmen and the Headhunters Page 16

  The airmen set off without guides. Except for worries about being seen by the Japanese or their collaborators, the trip looked relatively straightforward, judging from the silk map. But the path turned out to be not nearly so smooth.

  To avoid getting lost, they stayed close to the rivers. Smitty sent Bob Graham ahead to see if he could locate a village where a guide might be found. At the first village, Graham, word list in hand, was kindly received by the village chief, but the chief said that the Japanese were certain to make reprisals if they learned that he or his villagers had helped the airmen. He let Graham bring the others to spend the night on the dirt floor of his hut and made sure they were given rice to eat, but he was clearly anxious for them to move on. The airmen were loaned a guide to take them to the next village, but no farther. This pattern continued at each place the navy men stopped.

  Smitty had been right to worry about landing so near the coast. Not only were he and his men much nearer to the Japanese than Coberly's crew had been, but the terrain they passed through, well into the rainy season, was full of malarial mosquitoes, and dysentery was widespread among the villages where they paused for the night.

  For thirteen days, they walked twelve hours a day with only rice to eat. Some of the men got dysentery, and most of them had attacks of malaria after the Atabrine wore off. After crossing the steep and slippery Crocker Range and arriving inside North Borneo, the nine utterly exhausted navy men reached the village of Long Pa' Sia on the Matang River. Here, the people lived in longhouses and the Malay word list was useless.

  Smitty and his party stopped at the first longhouse they came to. Bob Graham went in ahead, as usual. Inside the dark and smoky longhouse, Graham saw a picture on the wall of Jesus having his feet bathed. The lieutenant drew out the G.I. New Testament that he carried in his shirt pocket and showed the natives the identical picture. Immediately, the Tagal tribesmen warmed to him. They seemed to be asking if he was a missionary. Graham tried to indicate that there were no missionaries in his party but that they were surely in need of help. The Tagal longhouse chief seemed to understand and took pity on them. He agreed that they could stay in his village until they were strong enough to travel.

  The navy men were lucky to have come into North Borneo so far inland from the north coast. The airmen did not know it but, unlike the Lun Dayeh whom the army aviators had met, the Tagal tribes of the Padas River system were divided in their thinking as to how best to deal with the Japanese occupation. The upriver Tagal were mostly Christians and were generally pro-Western. But the downriver Tagal, who lived near the coast, where the Japanese were in control, were anxious to get along with the occupation authorities. Some of the northern Tagal were actively collaborating with the Japanese against the Allies.

  To avoid discovery and to reduce the burden on their hosts in an area of food scarcity, Smitty split his crew up into three groups of three. He had lost his .45 in the plane crash and so Graham lent him his nickel-plated .32 revolver. Graham, who still had his G.I.-issue .38, took Harms and Robbins, the two sickest of the crew, south so that they could recover a bit farther from the coast before rejoining Smitty's group to make the trek north. With guides to help them, Graham's party got across the border to Long Tefadong, a Lun Dayeh village in Dutch Borneo.

  Smitty and the other five remained at Long Pa' Sia. During this pause to rest up for the journey north, Smitty's group got sicker from malaria and dysentery. The Dayaks offered the Yanks hot water with wood ash in it for the malaria, but this cure did not work.

  On February 12, the Tagal chief at Pa' Sia came to Smitty ashen faced and managed to make him understand that the Japanese had followed the airmen's trail across the Crocker Range. There was now a party of thirty Japanese in Pa' Matang, just an hour's walk north. Smitty, with no time to contact Graham in the south, rounded up the other five airmen in Pa' Sia and prepared to leave immediately. The Pa' Sia chief gave them guides to take them north as far as Kemabong.

  Smitty figured it might take his group as much as a month's hard walking to reach Kudat. He looked his crew over; the men were in dreadful shape, especially Jim Shepherd, the assistant crew chief, who was too weak from malaria to walk at all.

  The Tagal chief arranged for Shepherd to be brought to one of the huts in the rice field and promised to see that he was fed and cared for until he was well enough to join Smitty or Graham's group in the south. With that, Smitty and his remaining four men and their guides began the trek north along the Padas River. By dint of sheer will and their guides' help, they got halfway to Tenom in twelve hours without being detected by the Japanese. As night fell, their Pa' Sia guides handed them over to the care of other Tagal tribesmen.

  Smitty and his men had left Pa' Sia just in time. That afternoon, a seven-man Japanese patrol arrived from Pa' Matang and occupied the same quarters that Smitty had slept in the night before. Jim Shepherd, lying in his hut in the rice field racked by malaria, could hear the Japanese soldiers. One party passed within three hundred yards of where he lay. He ignored the sand fly bites as he willed his body to be utterly still.

  Six days later the Japanese left. The villagers carried Shepherd back to the longhouse. For the next week, a Tagal husband and wife took turns watching over him, putting rice in his mouth whenever he seemed able to eat. Finally, on February 26, Shepherd could stand up for the first time in nearly a month. He asked his hosts to take him south by dugout canoe to where Graham, Harms and Robbins were hiding.

  Though a Japanese patrol was heading in roughly the same direction, Shepherd and his Tagal oarsmen successfully reached Long Tefadong, the little Lun Dayeh border village where the Graham group had gone. But once there, Shepherd found only Alvin Harms and Robby Robbins. They told him that Lieutenant Graham had heard that there were other downed American airmen in Dutch Borneo a few days' walk farther south, and he had gone to try to find them before going on to Kudat. Graham had left behind a .38 pistol (the only gun they had) and seventeen rounds of ammunition. They were waiting for his return.

  Jim Shepherd looked at his two crewmates; they were in worse shape than he was. In Graham's absence their health had deteriorated. Harms was dehydrated from dysentery. The intestinal cramps were excruciating and made it impossible for him to sleep for any length of time. Robbins was in even worse shape, with a tropical ulcer on the base of his spine that was some four inches in diameter and exposed the bone underneath. He was exhausted by the pain and delirium, and he could not retain food.

  Shepherd had no choice but to wait with them for Graham's return. As the days passed with no news from the lieutenant, morale among the three airmen fell. At one point, Robbins became so lifeless that Shepherd started to dig a grave for him.

  The Lun Dayeh villagers did everything they could to help the sick airmen. One of the women tried different foods for Robbins, to no avail, until she gave him rice fried in wild boar fat. He managed to keep that down. The grease slid the rice through his damaged lower intestinal system without causing any harm. From then on Robbins stopped losing weight and even regained some, though the pain from the ulcer persisted.

  Other people gradually learned of the navy men's presence, including a Chinese Christian named Thomas Koh. Koh, who was working in Lawas, Sarawak, as a rice-purchasing clerk for the Japanese, whom he had come to loathe, was on a trip upriver into Lun Dayeh and Tagal areas to buy rice when he heard of the airmen, who were now walking north in North Borneo.

  Koh, because he traveled so widely, knew that the Japanese were building a headquarters at Tenom, directly in the airmen's reported path. He sent a message via his most trusted Dayak to the airmen telling them to turn around and head back into Sarawak to Long Lopeng, where they would be safe. But when Koh's messenger reached Pa' Sia, the Japanese patrol was in residence and Smitty and his four airmen had already left.

  Smitty and the others got about halfway to Tenom and had been handed over by their southern Tagal guides to two northern Tagal guides, who took them as far as Tomani, four h
ours' walk south of Tenom. The navy men were by then so ill, so tired and their leech-infected feet in such bad shape, that they agreed to the suggestion of Tomani's two Tagal longhouse chiefs to stay in Tomani, after which the chiefs promised to provide guides to Kemabong, just south of Tenom.

  Unaware of the new Japanese headquarters at Tenom and also not knowing that the northern Tagals did not share the anti-Japanese views of their fellow tribespeople to the south, the five navy men gladly accepted the offer of a few days' respite in Tomani.

  They had been there just two days when a native porter for the Japanese came to the village and spoke quietly to the chief of the Tomani longhouse where the airmen were staying. Within minutes, all the Dayaks dashed outside. Within seconds, the airmen heard a fusillade of bullets hitting their longhouse.

  The Japanese, firing blindly into the bamboo walls, did not hit any of the airmen. Then a mixed patrol of two Japanese, six Malays and eight Chinese rushed the longhouse. One of the navy men ran out, heading for the jungle, and was killed by a Tagal spearhead. Two other airmen tried to make a dash for it. One (probably Smitty) reached the jungle and disappeared into the brush, but the other one was shot dead as he climbed down the log ladder through the longhouse veranda floor. The remaining two unarmed navy men surrendered.

  The patrol stayed in Tomani with the two prisoners for the next week while the American in the jungle continued to elude his would-be captors—though he was no more able than Tom Capin had been to find food in the wild. Eventually, a Tagal working for the Japanese army tracked the man down and guided the Japanese patrol to where he was hiding. The patrol fired away from a distance without hitting the target, until all the ammunition was spent. The patrol leader then returned to the longhouse compound and convinced one of the two captive airmen to persuade his friend in the jungle to give himself up. The Japanese said that if the airman succeeded in bringing his friend back, all three of them would be well treated.

  The man in hiding then gave himself up, undoubtedly in the hope of saving his two crewmates. But when the two airmen returned to the longhouse, they found the bodies of their two dead crewmates dismembered and burning in a fire, and the remaining prisoner being whipped with rawhide. Too angry to care anymore about their safety, the two returning navy men fought the Japanese patrol hand to hand. A red-haired man (Smitty) was seen picking up a Japanese by the leg and swinging him against a tree, killing him in the process. After that—one version of the story has it—all three surviving airmen were trussed up and marched off to Beaufort, North Borneo, where they spent a month as prisoners before being marched to Jesselton, where the trail ends. Another version—one more likely to be true—says the men were murdered on the spot and buried at Tomani on or about February 20.

  Bob Graham, having left his two sick companions in Long Tefadong, had gone to find the other downed American airmen who, he had been told, were being hidden farther to the south, at Long Nuat. He and his Lun Dayeh guides traveled at a terrific pace farther into Dutch Borneo through the mountainous area along the Kemalu River. They reached Long Nuat in late February.

  There to meet Graham were the astonishingly fit and well-rested Franny Harrington and John Nelson. While he waited to be presented to William Mongan, his wife Maria and their three wide-eyed children, Graham glanced around at the civilized little village with its church and a few Dutch colonial houses and gardens, and was thoroughly taken aback. So, too, were John and Franny. This ragged, desperate navy lieutenant was a reminder that the war that had receded somewhat from their consciousness was still very present in northern Borneo.

  Perhaps because he now felt safe, Graham collapsed from exhaustion, hunger and malaria. While his Long Tefadong guides returned home, the Mongans and the army airmen worked hard to help Graham get well, though they were in no hurry to have him go back to the other navy men. Their wish to keep the lieutenant with them was strengthened when Mongan learned through the native grapevine that three of the village chiefs who had hosted the navy airmen up north had been taken away, tortured and then killed by the Japanese.

  Bob Graham slowly recovered and resumed eating proper food, cooked by Maria Mongan. When he wasn't sleeping or playing cards with John and Franny, Bob would read from the 1933 edition of the Literary Digest, the only English reading material available, except for his G.I. New Testament. But once he started to get well, he grew more insistent about getting back to the two men he had left over the border. As the ranking airman, he obtained Franny's and John's grudging consent to their catching up with Harms and Robbins and then joining Smitty and the others on the road to Kudat.

  Early one morning during the second week of March, Bob, John and Franny bade an emotional farewell to the Mongans and the villagers of Long Nuat. It felt like leaving home.

  They had been on their way less than a day and a half when their Lun Dayeh guides suddenly began talking to one another in an agitated manner. The guides told the airmen that there was a Japanese patrol just minutes away, but the airmen saw no sign of such a patrol. Without trying to explain themselves further, the Dayaks urged the Americans to turn around and go back to Long Nuat. When the three airmen protested, the Dayaks ran away, toward Long Nuat.

  Graham and the others did not know what to think. Why had their guides abandoned them? Were the natives going to kill them after all? Or turn them over to the Japanese? Eventually, Bob decided that John and Franny should go back to Long Nuat while he went to Long Tefadong alone. If there really were Japanese patrols in the area, he argued, one man made less of a trail than three.

  Graham made his way to the border village and found not only the ill men he had left behind but also a third sick airman, Jim Shepherd. Worse still was the news about Smitty and the four men who had gone north with him—news that Robbins, Shepherd and Harms had recently been told by their frightened Long Tefadong hosts. This terrible news was what had so agitated Graham's Long Nuat guides and made them abandon the plan to continue north.

  Graham now set about trying to lead the three very ill airmen back to Long Nuat without attracting more enemy attention. He had no guides this time but, having done the trip both ways now, he felt sure he could manage it. But as much as he had benefited from the two weeks of rest with the Mongans, he could not carry all the food and equipment himself. The people at Long Tefadong had given the airmen sacks of uncooked rice and a valuable but heavy large iron cooking pot. Graham decided that he and Shepherd would go first and take turns carrying the iron pot while Harms and Robbins followed with the sacks of rice.

  It had taken Graham two days to reach his men at Long Tefadong but he now had to slow his pace to match that of the slowest man, the assistant crew chief, Jim Shepherd. Shepherd had very painful hemorrhoids. Between that and the residual effects of malaria, Shepherd no longer had the stamina to complete the journey. On the second day, they were only halfway to Long Nuat and Shepherd was swaying as he walked. He told Graham that they should just leave him and go on while they could. Twenty-two-year-old Graham knew that this was not an option for either Shepherd or for the safety of the rest of the navy airmen.

  Graham and Shepherd had little in common. Graham was from suburban Pennsylvania and a smart city boy. Shepherd had been raised on a potato farm and, in Graham's view, "was not too brainy or too worldly." Graham, searching his mind for some way to inspire or goad his crewmate to make the last necessary effort, remembered a short story he had once read. It told of a doctor and a diabetic patient being stranded in the Nevada desert after their car broke down miles from the nearest house. As they walked along toward town, the diabetic became weak and desperate for his daily dose of insulin. The doctor had nothing to give him, but he knew the man's body would produce its own insulin temporarily if whipped into a sufficiently excited condition. The doctor, who also had the diabetic's wife as his patient, invented a story that he was having an affair with the wife and told the diabetic the car breakdown had been their way to get rid of him so that the two lovers could marry. As the
doctor had hoped, the diabetic's fury kept his insulin level up until the two men reached town.

  Adapting the technique to the current circumstance, Graham said he had always known Shepherd was a coward, a weakling, a quitter and utterly unreliable. As the lieutenant had hoped, his taunts filled the crewman with a murderous rage, giving him the adrenaline to keep going.

  By the next day, though Graham and Shepherd were keeping pace, the other two were falling behind. It was mid-March, the season of some of the longest, heaviest rains, and the hikers grew not only soaking wet but cold. Harms and Robbins had recurring attacks of malaria so extreme that they had to stop and find rest and shelter. The four men were taken in for the night in a little Lun Dayeh hamlet. Robbins's malarial chills were so bad that Harms and a Dayak boy had to lie on top of him to try to keep him warm. A few hours later, it was Harms's turn to start shivering and Robbins and the Dayak boy now lay on top of him. The airmen nonetheless got up early the next morning and walked a nightmarish thirteen hours.

  Late in the afternoon of the fourth day, they reached the little village of Long Nuat, in its picturesque setting ringed by mountains. No place had ever looked so good.

  By way of greeting, Franny Harrington said jokingly to Graham, "What have you done to us? Go away!" Graham knew his bringing the new men there had increased the risk of discovery, but he also knew that "these very sick men [had] to be cared for." To add to the burden of their Long Nuat hosts, the Kemalu River chose this time to overflow its banks and destroyed the Mongans' vegetable gardens. For the first time since the army airmen had arrived there, food was scarce.