The Airmen and the Headhunters Read online

  Two days later, Punan Silau had a visitor whose news seemed like an answer to a prayer. William Mongan had come south from Long Nuat, where he was still caring for Alvin Harms and Robby Robbins. The quiet little man was visibly excited by his news. With a stick he drew an odd, mushroomlike image in the dirt below the longhouse: a parachute. As Makahanap explained to Phil and the others, Mongan said (Phil wrote in his diary) that the previous week "seven white men and one interpreter ... either landed or bailed out four days from here for the purpose of organizing the natives into guerrilla bands to fight the Japs. They say planes are dropping them supplies and that they have a radio!" This specific news was in another class entirely from the rumors they were used to hearing. Pastor Aris Dumat in Belawit sent Makahanap a note giving much the same news and noting that the new arrivals were Australians and their leader was a British major. Bob Graham scribbled in his diary: "Australian guerrillas landed in Borneo ... March 25."

  Phil, daring to hope this time that the story was true, took a few sheets of paper from one of William's lined school exercise books and wrote out a letter in his best Palmer Method penmanship:

  April 3, 1945

  Dear Sir:

  We just received word that there are seven of you who have landed in Borneo for the purpose of organizing the natives in warfare against the Japs. There are seven of us from a U.S. Army B-24 which was shot down November 16 and two from a Navy B-24 shot down January 13. We are staying with William Makahanap—a man from the Celebes who is District official for the Dutch in this area. Under his supervision the natives here have killed all Japs that have come into this area. They are anxious to carry their warfare down the river to Malinau and Tarakan and want you to come to Long Berang to help them. They need the help that modern warfare weapons can give them. And of course we Americans would like very much to see you. Several of us are in need of medical aid and naturally we would like to get out of here as soon as possible. If there is any way that you could send word out so that we might receive some supplies or possibly be picked up someplace, we would appreciate it very much. We hope to see or hear from you soon.

  Sincerely yours,

  Philip R. Corrin, 2nd Lt. AC AUS 0-776633

  The other eight airmen signed it in roughly the order of their coming under Makahanap's protection and included their ranks and serial numbers.

  This time, it was not a rumor.

  ***

  A week earlier, on the Plain of Bah, Kelabit elders at the Bario longhouse were surprised to see their men return early from the fields and forests. The men said they had seen what appeared to be two bunches of men coming down through the clouds to the earth, hanging from strings below big white tents. The longhouse headman and the Penghulu (the Sarawak equivalent of a pangeran) Lawai Bisara rounded up the other aristocratic elders and held a hasty conference in the middle of the longhouse.

  Who were these creatures? Someone suggested that they might be the angels that visiting missionaries in the old days had spoken of, but this idea was roundly dismissed. If they were men, were they friends or foes? Were they soldiers? Were they Japanese? If not, would they attract the notice of the Japanese who they had heard were down on the coast? Up to now, the Japanese had seemed ignorant of the Plain of Bah and its paddy fields of surplus rice. The Kelabit hoped they would stay that way.

  Excitable and anxious, several of the elders urged the quick killing of these creatures coming down from the sky, whoever or whatever they were. The Plain of Bah did not need this trouble. But Penghulu Lawai Bisara disagreed.

  Lawai, mild mannered though he usually was, was not only the government-appointed leader of the people of the Plain of Bah, but was also the most knowledgeable man about the outside world in upriver British Borneo. Decades earlier, he had killed a man in Dutch Borneo. To avoid a long international headhunting war of vengeance, the Sarawak authorities had sent Lawai to be jailed downriver at the kubu (administrative fort), where he had done his time as a gardener for the Englishman who was the district officer. Oddly enough, he had emerged from this experience feeling more favorable toward white men than did his less sophisticated neighbors.

  Suddenly, there was a great explosion of howling and yapping from the dogs on the outer veranda. At the top of the notched log appeared a small, slender man in a slouch hat who had skin and features not unlike their own but who acted and dressed like a white man. The newcomer spoke Malay. A brief exchange of questions and answers between him and Lawai, who also spoke some Malay, quickly revealed that the man was one of the eight soldiers who had dropped from the sky and that they were not Japanese.

  When Lawai passed this news to the Bario elders, the question remained whether to befriend this Malay-speaking foreigner and the other foreign soldiers, or to kill them all and avoid future problems with the Japanese. As usual among the Kelabit, the argument grew heated and occasionally raucous. But, also as usual, Penghulu Lawai's views prevailed. The stranger, Sgt. Fred "Sandy" Sanderson, of the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF), was an Australian-Thai veteran of jungle fighting on the Southeast Asian mainland. He explained that he was with Major Harrisson's party as Malay interpreter and contact man. Sandy was given a rolled-leaf cigar and made welcome.

  From Lawai's time in detention downriver, he knew some odd facts about white men. He knew, for example, that a white flag was a sign of nonaggression, and so he promptly had one of the longhouse's precious pieces of white cloth rigged to a length of bamboo. He told three young Kelabits to go out and wave the flag in view of the three strangers they could see standing in the muddy rice field below the longhouse. Lawai also instructed them to see if the newcomers had written material on them and if it had thin writing or thick-and-thin jabs. Meanwhile, Sandy let off a flare from his Verey pistol to alert his crew that it was safe here.

  Soon, the Kelabit envoys were back on the veranda with the three white strangers and the white flag. It was clear that the eldest one knew his way around a longhouse, even if his Malay was not as good as the tan-skinned stranger's. Though tall, the older white man kept his torso low when he reached out to shake hands. His pale eyes seemed to take in everything—from the skeletal heads hanging above, to the large dark jars by the walls—and gave every indication that he liked what he saw. He offered cigarettes to the longhouse people, using the Malay word for "please accept this," Silakan.

  British army Maj. Tom Harrisson, a thirty-three-year-old Englishman, did indeed like what he saw. He had spent his twenty-first birthday not far from where he now stood. He had been the student leader of an Oxford University expedition of undergraduates invited by the Sarawak government to record the fauna and flora of upland Borneo. Harrisson had spent months with the upriver longhouse people, with whom he had learned to communicate in basic Malay.

  It was because of that youthful experience that Harrisson, a graduate of wartime officer-candidate training at Sandhurst, had been inducted into the British Special Operations Executive (an organization created by Churchill to encourage resistance activities behind enemy lines) and sent on loan to Australia to help its equivalent organization, Z Special, insert a clandestine unit into Borneo. The unit Major Harrisson commanded was called SEMUT 1 (from the word semut which means "ant" in Malay). SEMUT 1 was supposed to go into Borneo ahead of a planned June 1945 Australian-led Allied invasion to retake the oil-rich Borneo northwest coast around Brunei Bay. Dropped from two Australian Liberators onto the Plain of Bah, SEMUT 1 was meant to gather intelligence from the natives that would facilitate the invasion.

  The other seven members of SEMUT 1, six Australians and one New Zealander, were much younger than their British major, but they had years' more combat experience—in the jungles of New Guinea and mainland Southeast Asia and the sands of North Africa. But only Major Harrisson had been to Borneo before, and he had his own ideas about how to soldier there. He had his own ideas about a lot of things. Physically tough and intellectually inventive, he had an ego as big as his accomplishments.

  The major
, with Sandy translating, was soon deep in discussion with Penghulu Lawai and the other elders. The penghulu, having learned that there were still four soldiers out on the plain somewhere, as well as packages of parachuted supplies (called "storepedos"), sent the young men of the longhouse out to round them up. Nothing this exciting had ever happened on the Plain of Bah before. David Labang, a five-year-old Kelabit visiting Bario with his father from a nearby longhouse, had been out with the Bario men when they saw the strangers dropping from the sky. He was hoisted up on his father's shoulders to get a better look. He then ran home to get his older brother Lian.

  By the time David brought eighteen-year-old Lian back to Bario, the four soldiers from the second plane had reached the longhouse, which was now in the center of a hive of activity. Kelabit youths were all over the plain helping gather up the tons of stores that had been dropped by parachute. On a hill behind the longhouse, two SEMUT 1 radio operators were wrestling with their Boston wireless transmitter-receiver, which had been damaged in the drop. At the major's request, Penghulu Lawai sent out runners for twenty miles around, and by nightfall there were some five hundred people squeezed into the longhouse eyeing the newcomers.

  Unlike the Yank airmen, Harrisson and his party had known where they were going when they dropped out of their planes. Lian later told an interviewer:

  When Tom Harrisson arrived in Bario, he had with him pictures that he must have gotten from the Sarawak Museum of people and houses from the old days in the Kelabit country. He showed these pictures of Kelabit penghulus and heads of longhouses from olden times and other pictures of Kelabit. And the Kelabit quickly decided, "This is a good man, who already knows so much about the Kelabit." And he showed them pictures from New Guinea and explained that not everybody lives in this one country, that the place the Kelabit live is Borneo and that these other people [Papuans] lived halfway to Australia and nobody of our people knew about these other places, such as Australia, at that time. They found what Harrisson said very interesting.

  That first evening, March 25, Penghulu Lawai Bisara and the people of Bario and nearby longhouses of Pa' Trap and Pa' Umor welcomed the strangers with singing, dancing and copious amounts of borak, which helped the visitors wash down the Dayak food.

  The next day, still more visitors appeared. The chief of the southern Kelabit, Penghulu Miri, arrived from his longhouse at Pa' Dali, bringing with him special treats for the foreigners. He brewed coffee sweetened with honey and he fried cassava-flour pancakes. More importantly, he produced a torrent of good advice in fluent Malay on how to win over the people of the inland highlands. He suggested sending someone through the upland who knew how to treat yaws, diarrhea and other common illnesses, to gain local goodwill and collect information.

  Harrisson quickly sensed the quality of the leadership he was dealing with and realized that, although his assignment was merely to build an intelligence network ahead of the Australian Ninth Division's invasion of Brunei Bay planned for early June, these inland people were capable of much more than merely providing information. So, exceeding his instructions (as was his wont), he became determined to create a behind-the-lines guerrilla army. He told his Bario hosts that he was ready to accept volunteers and that headhunting would be permitted, provided the heads were Japanese.

  The Kelabit, ex-headhunters like their Lun Dayeh cousins across the border, were eager to accept the major's invitation. Like the Lun Dayeh, the Kelabit were delighted to be able to return to the sacred raids of their songs and stories, even if only against Japanese.

  By the second evening, the makings of an even greater feast were assembled in the Bario longhouse. After dark, the Dayaks began dispensing more food, music and dance, and much more borak than the night before. By now Harrisson could see that it was SEMUT l's turn to entertain their hosts. When the borak had conquered his men's inhibitions, he led them in a sort of line dance the length of the longhouse interior while they sang the only songs all eight of them knew: "Three Blind Mice," "Silent Night," "She'll be Coming 'Round the Mountain" and, as an encore after still more borak, an army song best known for its chorus, "Fuck 'em all, fuck 'em all, the long and the short and the tall."

  The SEMUT 1 men, having been through months of preparation and having spent five days trying to find a hole in the clouds, were swept up in a flood of relief and borak. Ric Edmeades remarked to another of the SEMUT team, "What a wonderful way to go to war!"

  The next day, thanks to Penghulu Miri's suggestion, Australian Sgt. Jack Tredrea, a tough, handsome towhead who had been a tailor in civilian life, left Bario, to quickly become one of the most popular people in north central Sarawak. Over the next three months, he would give injections for yaws, lance boils and treat dysentery while collecting intelligence about Japanese movements. He also recruited and trained a force of thirty Iban tribesmen from the subcoastal area farther downstream, drilling them in the use of his Bren machine gun, Owen and Austin submachine guns and .303 rifles. The Iban, the notorious "wild men of Borneo," had been the most feared of Borneo's headhunters in the old days and, as Sgt. Tredrea observed their quick mastery of these new weapons of war, he could easily see why.

  A few days later, Harrisson's deputy, Capt. Ric Edmeades, an exceptionally fit and experienced young New Zealander, was sent out as well. His assignment: To walk the length and breadth of northern Borneo, obtaining intelligence and recruiting guerrillas. As the word spread, SEMUT l's guerrilla ranks quickly swelled to several hundred, with Edmeades recruiting warriors from all over upland Sarawak.

  Harrisson sent other SEMUT 1 operatives off in ones and twos with groups of Dayaks. They were ordered to stay barefoot whenever they were in or near a Dayak village so that their footprints would not be noticed. And they were given no food to take with them. "Eat what the natives do," Harrisson told his men. He established these rules for one simple reason (which he never told his men): that they would not succeed in their mission unless they had the wholehearted cooperation of the local people. So his men would have to learn to blend in and not seem like foreign occupiers. If the SEMUT operatives could not make the Dayaks like them enough to feed them, they were as good as dead. The major was making an asset of the situation that the downed Yank airmen had confronted—being dependent on their native hosts for everything.

  The SEMUT 1 operatives quickly learned how to eat, bathe, walk, track and hunt the way the Dayaks did. They communicated in the local language (having no English-speaking pals to talk to) and generally learned how to behave courteously and competently in inland Borneo. Harrisson's style of guerrilla warfare was invented by him on the spot in order to maximize the benefit of his Aussies' physical toughness while avoiding potential problems from the then prevailing Australian prejudice against nonwhites. He knew that if the Aussies under his command ever showed the contempt for nonwhites that those back home often displayed, they would be quickly turned over to the Japanese.

  Another Harrisson rule was to keep his men constantly on the move. When they finished one task and came back to report to him, he would promptly send them somewhere else. As a consequence, Harrisson knew what was going on all across northern and central Borneo. It also made it harder for the enemy headquarters on the coast to learn about—much less locate—these Allied guerrilla leaders.

  Harrisson's rule about going barefoot won him special notoriety. This was what Kibung had taught Tom Capin but it horrified the Australians' senior medical officer Capt. "Doc" Ian McCallum. McCallum arrived in mid-April with the second group of eight SEMUT operatives. Citing the risks of parasites and snakebite, Doc McCallum protested to no avail, and soon left Bario in order to get out of shouting distance from the man he and others called "the mad major."

  Within days of his arrival in Bario, Harrisson—walking barefoot—traveled around the Plain of Bah and met the longhouse leaders in their own homes. During these visits he heard from Kelabit in touch with their Lun Dayeh cousins that there were American fugitives being hidden over the border to the east. T
he major had arrived in Borneo with instructions from his Australian bosses to locate and help repatriate the downed American airmen rumored to be in northern Borneo and now he knew where they were. He set off to find them.

  On April 5, he walked across the border mountains to Pa' Kabak, and the next day he walked along the rich, irrigated rice fields of the Bawang Plain to Belawit.

  When he got to Belawit, the longhouse village chief, Pangeran Lasong Piri, was away. But there to meet him were other elders of the Belawit longhouses and the head for all Dutch Borneo of the Kemah Injil Church, the plump and genial Pastor Aris Dumat. Major Harrisson was also introduced to Bolong, Maulker, Kusoy and Sualang, the Eurasian N.E.I. soldiers whom Makahanap and the Yanks had entertained earlier. The four soldiers told him they had been looking for a rumored force of Allied troops near Brunei Bay. Instead, Maulker had been recaptured by the Japanese and had been used as a servant and interpreter for a Japanese officer. Then he had run into one of Harrisson's Australian operatives, Jack Tredrea, and had immediately changed sides. Now safe in Belawit, he and the other three were ready to join the SEMUT 1 guerrilla forces. They had more precise information about the American airmen than the major had received from the Kelabit. They could tell him that they were mostly now under the protection of the Mentarang district officer, William Makahanap.

  Major Harrisson listened carefully to what these Dutch East Indies soldiers had to say, absorbing it and quickly working out how to use this information. Harrisson was accustomed to dealing with strange people and strange places. Born into an upper-class English family building railroads in the Argentine, he had taken up bird-watching during a lonely childhood. He had been sent "home" to England to boarding school and had become a pioneer in ornithology while still a teenager at Harrow. He had dropped out of Cambridge University after little more than a year, leaving behind a reputation for being drunk and disorderly. By then, he had already been the ornithologist on Oxford expeditions to Arctic Lapland, upland Borneo and the cannibal islands of Melanesia.