Among the Headhunters Read online

  ALSO BY ROBERT LYMAN

  Slim, Master of War

  First Victory

  Iraq, 1941

  The Generals

  The Longest Siege

  Japan’s Last Bid for Victory

  Kohima, 1944

  Operation Suicide

  Into the Jaws of Death

  Bill Slim

  The Jail Busters

  The Real X-Men

  Copyright © 2016 by Robert Lyman

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, Third Floor, Boston, MA 02210.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lyman, Robert, author.

  Title: Among the headhunters: an extraordinary World War II story of survival in the Burmese jungle / Robert Lyman.

  Description: Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016006387 (print) | LCCN 2016006988 (ebook) | ISBN 9780306824685 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Burma. | World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations, American. | World War, 1939–1945—Jungle warfare. | Naga (South Asian people)—Burma. | Burma—History—Japanese occupation, 1942–1945. | Sevareid, Eric, 1912–1992.

  Classification: LCC D767.6.L953 2016 (print) | LCC D767.6 (ebook) | DDC 940.54/4973092—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016006387

  Published by Da Capo Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  www.dacapopress.com

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  Design by Jane Raese

  Set in 11-point New Baskerville

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

  TO THE MEMORY OF GORDON GRAHAM,

  1920–2015.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Abbreviations and Glossary

  Dramatis Personae

  1“Dumbastapur”

  2Burmese Days

  3Banzai!

  4The Crash

  5Vinegar Joe

  6The Passengers

  7Dr. Sevareid, I Presume?

  8Taming the Nagas

  9The 1936 Punitive Expedition

  10The Battle of Pangsha

  11Return to Mokokchung

  12Eric and the Headhunters

  13Mongsen

  14The Sahib of Mokokchung

  15The Long Walk Home

  16Back to Chabua

  17Blackie’s Gang

  Epilogue

  Map 1: The Administered Area

  Map 2: Routes Between Mokokchung and Pangsha

  Appendix A: Weapons of the Patkoi Nagas

  Appendix B: 1936 Expedition Diary

  Appendix C: 1943 Crash Diary

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  PREFACE

  In 1943 a Soviet spy, a celebrated American journalist, a top-ranking political adviser, and eighteen others—American and Chinese—survived an air crash on the mountainous and remote border between India and Burma. It was, and remains, the largest evacuation of an aircraft by parachute, and, given the fact that even the crew had never been trained in the technique, it was a miracle that so many survived. They fell with their crippled plane from the frying pan into the fire. On disentangling themselves from their parachutes, the twenty shocked survivors soon found that they had arrived in wild country dominated by a tribe that had an especial reason to hate white men. The Nagas of the Patkoi Hills on their remote and unsurveyed land were notorious headhunters, who continued—despite the feeble wrath of distant British imperial authority—to practice both slavery and human sacrifice. Their specialty was the removal of the heads of their enemies—often women and children—achieved with a swipe of ugly, razor-sharp daos. On two occasions in recent years their village, or parts of it, had been burned to the ground and their warriors killed in running battles with sepoys sent to teach the villagers a lesson and to exert the authority of the Raj.

  Nevertheless, and against all the odds, all but one of the twenty-one passengers and crew on the doomed aircraft survived. This is the story of the extraordinary adventure of those men among the Nagas of Pangsha and of their rescue by the young representative of the distant imperial power, the British deputy commissioner who arrived wearing “Bombay bloomers” and stout leather walking shoes, carrying a bamboo cane, and leading an armed party of “friendly” Nagas. In their meeting in some of the world’s most inaccessible and previously unmapped terrain, three very different worlds collided. The young, exuberant apostles of the vast industrial democracy of the United States came face-to-face with members of an ancient mongoloid race, uncomprehending of the extent of modernity that existed beyond the remote hills in which they lived and determined to preserve their local power, based on ancient head-hunting and slaving prerogatives. Both groups met—not for the first time for the Nagas, whose village had been burned twice, in 1936 and 1939, because of persistent head-hunting—the vestiges of British authority in India, disintegrating as the Japanese tsunami washed up at its gate.

  —Robert Lyman

  ABBREVIATIONS AND GLOSSARY

  ADMINISTERED AREA An area under the legal jurisdiction of the government of Assam and therefore the responsibility of a British deputy commissioner.

  ASSAM RIFLES The local militia of the state of Assam, which began life as the Naga Hills Military Police. Many of its sepoys (soldiers) were ex-Gurkhas of the British-Indian Army who now lived in Assam.

  ATC The Air Transport Command of the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) in the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater.

  AVG The American Volunteer Group, or Flying Tigers, American mercenaries recruited to fly for the Chinese government immediately before the war.

  BASHA The Indian Army term for a temporary shelter made out of canvas or local materials/vegetation.

  CBI China-Burma-India theater, the US war command in the Far East.

  C-46 The Curtiss-Wright airliner rushed into service in the CBI theater in mid-1946 and designated the “Commando.”

  C-47 SKYTRAIN The military version of the Douglas DC3 airliner, known as the Dakota by the RAF and nicknamed the “Gooney Bird” by Americans.

  CONTROL AREA An area outside the directly administered British territory in the Naga Hills in which the Raj claimed political influence. The territory was not formally administered by the government of Assam, but anything untoward that happened in it was considered to be of interest to the British deputy commissioner in Kohima and his assistant in Mokokchung.

  DACOIT The Burmese word for a marauding bandit.

  DAO The Assamese word for a machete.

  DETACHMENT 101 A unit of the OSS in northern Burma with responsibility for taking guerrilla warfare to the Japanese using local Kachin tribespeople.

  DOBASHI A British-appointed Naga interpreter. Each Naga tribe spoke its own language (not merely a different dialect), which made intertribal communication extremely difficult, although a form of Naga creole (called “Nagamese”) based on Assamese did develop as a kind of linguistic glue to facilitate communicat
ion among the separate tribes. A dobashi was provided with a red blanket to denote his appointment.

  DUMBASTAPUR Nickname, a derivation of “dumb bastard,” given by men of the ATC to Chabua Air Base, Assam.

  EAST INDIA COMPANY The London-based trading organization, known colloquially as “John Company,” which through a process of commercially inspired expansion (supported by British military power) ruled much of India from the eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. It was dissolved following the mutiny of 1857 and replaced by direct rule by the British government, known as the “Raj.”

  FDR Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second president of the United States, who died in April 1945.

  GAONBURA Headman of a Naga village, appointed by the British and provided with a distinctive red blanket, shawl, or waistcoat as a badge of office.

  HUMP The nickname given to the air ferry route established in 1942 across the mountains between northeastern India and Kunming in China. The Japanese capture of Burma in 1942 and closure of the Burma Road that ran from Rangoon to Lashio necessitated an alternative means of supplying the Kuomintang.

  ICS The Indian Civil Service, the elite administrative arm of the British Raj, which between its inception in 1858 (after the mutiny, when the British government took over the governance of India from the East India Company) and 1947 numbered never more than 1,200 civil servants appointed through competitive examination.

  KET The Kohima Educational Trust, a UK-based charity established in 2003 (www.kohimaeducationaltrust.net). Its purpose is to provide educational assistance to the young people of Nagaland, India, in order to repay the debt of honor owed to the Nagas for their unstinting help given to the Second Division and other British Army units during the battles to stem the Japanese invasion of India in 1944. The KET’s parallel organization in Nagaland is the Kohima Educational Society (KES).

  KHEL A subset (or colony) of a Naga village, similar to a suburb within a Western town. Each village is divided into several khels, primarily on the basis of geography and clan. Often khels have their own assistant gaonburas.

  KUOMINTANG The Chinese nationalist party led by Chiang Kai-shek, which governed most of China beginning in 1928. This power was contingent upon the support of many hundreds of warlords who had sprung up following the demise of the Qing Empire in 1911.

  LEE-ENFIELD The British Army’s standard service rifle, with a caliber of 0.303 inch. The weapon used by the Assam Rifles was the short-magazine (SMLE) Mark III version.

  LEWIS GUN The British Army’s World War I–era light machine gun. With a caliber of 0.303 inch, it was fed by a drum holding forty-seven rounds.

  MAHSEER A large freshwater fish common to the streams and rivers of Assam.

  MITHAN A domesticated form of the gaur, these animals browsed through foliage rather than grazing on grass. Never milked, they were grown for their meat and were the standard Naga source of beef.

  MORUNG The young persons’ dormitory in a Naga village, where teenagers (from about the age of ten) would live communally and learn the rites of the tribe.

  OSS Office of Special Services, the forerunner of the CIA.

  PANJI STICK A sharpened bamboo spike left in the ground as a trap for the unwary, often placed in large numbers. It could easily penetrate the unprotected sole of the foot and was often poisoned.

  PITT RIVERS MUSEUM An anthropological and archaeological museum in Oxford, part of the University of Oxford.

  RAJ The common name given to British rule in India (Raj means “rule” in Hindi) between the end of the mutiny in 1858 and independence in 1947. It included areas administered directly by the United Kingdom (“British India”) as well as the princely states ruled by individual rulers under the “paramountcy” of the British Crown. The region was less commonly also called the “Indian Empire,” the “Federation of India,” and the “Empire of India.”

  SACO Sino-American Cooperative Organization.

  SEPOY An Indian soldier. The sepoys in this story were soldiers in the Assam Rifles.

  SUBEDAR A native Indian Army rank between a noncommissioned and commissioned officer, equivalent to a US lieutenant.

  USAAF US Army Air Forces, a component of the US Army that was the military aviation service of the United States during and immediately after World War II and the direct predecessor of the US Air Force, which came into being in 1947.

  ZU Naga beer. Where it was plentiful, it was made from rice. In the eastern territories, such as Chingmei, where rice was scarce and extremely expensive, it was made from millet.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Persons of Historical Interest

  SIR JOSEPH BAMPFYLDE FULLER Governor of East Bengal and Assam, 1905–1906.

  MAJOR GENERAL SIR JAMES JOHNSTONE The political agent to the maharajah of Manipur, who launched the rescue expedition to Kohima from Imphal in 1880.

  SIR ROBERT NEIL REID Governor of Assam, 1937–1942.

  Persons in the Indian Civil Service

  PHILIP FRANCIS ADAMS Leader of the rescue party in 1943, Adams, whom the Patkoi Nagas called the “sahib of Mokokchung,” joined the Indian Civil Service in 1937 (undertaking the journey from England by car) and was posted to Mokokchung as the subdivisional officer under Charles Pawsey in Kohima. He was twenty-nine at the time of the rescue.

  WILLIAM “BILL” ARCHER The subdivisional officer in Mokokchung after Adams, Archer stayed until independence in 1947.

  J. P. MILLS James Philip (“J. P.”) Mills was born in 1890 and entered the Indian Civil Service in 1913. He was subdivisional officer at Mokokchung in the Naga Hills of Assam from 1917 to 1924 and deputy commissioner, based at Kohima, during the 1930s. In 1930 he married Pamela Vesey-FitzGerald. In 1930 he was appointed the honorary director of ethnography for Assam. He published well-received monographs on native peoples in 1922, 1926, and 1937. He became secretary to the government of Assam in 1932.

  SIR CHARLES RIDLEY PAWSEY Born in 1894, Pawsey resigned from the British Army after World War I to join the Indian Civil Service. He was appointed assistant commissioner in Assam in 1919 at the age of twenty-five and became director of land records in 1932. He was made a deputy commissioner in 1935. He undertook a punitive expedition to Noklu in 1937 and was deputy commissioner in Kohima during the siege of 1944. He was a recipient of the Military Cross, a British award for gallantry.

  G. W. J. SMITH The subdivisional officer at Mokokchung and in command of the 360 Naga carriers during the first expedition to Pangsha in 1936.

  Persons in the Assam Rifles

  MAJOR W. R. B. WILLIAMS Born in 1896, Major W. R. B. (“Bill”) Williams was the commandant (commanding officer) of the Third Battalion, Assam Rifles (on secondment from the Seventh Gurkhas), taking personal command of the two and a half platoons (150 sepoys) involved in the first expedition to Pangsha in November–December 1936.

  Anthropologists

  URSULA GRAHAM BOWER A pioneer anthropologist in the Naga Hills between 1937 and 1946 and a guerrilla fighter against the Japanese in Burma from 1942 to 1945, Bower was a good friend of Philip Mills, Bill Archer, and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. She became so familiar with Naga culture that she was known as the “Naga Queen.”

  G. H. DAMANT The British officiating political agent for Manipur and an ethnologist of note who was killed by the Nagas of Khonoma (near Kohima) on October 4, 1879.

  DR. CHRISTOPH VON FÜRER-HAIMENDORF A renowned Austrian anthropologist who accompanied the 1936 expedition to Pangsha in the company of his good friend Philip Mills. Mills referred to him in his letters to his wife as “the Baron.”

  DR. JOHN HENRY (“J. H.”) HUTTON A colonial administrator in the Naga Hills who arrived in 1912 and became an eminent anthropologist.

  COLONEL LESLIE SHAKESPEAR Shakespear (1863–1933) was the deputy commander of the Assam Rifles during World War I and was involved in the suppression of the Kuki Rising, 1917–1919. He wrote a history of the Lushai-Kuki people in 1912.

  Passengers and Crew of C-46 Number 41-1
2420, August 2, 1943

  STAFF SERGEANT JOSEPH E. CLAY USAAF, Air Transport Command.

  JOHN PATON (“JACK”) DAVIES JR. Davies joined the US Foreign Service on graduation from Columbia University and was posted to China in 1933. He, like Lee, had been born in China, the son of American missionaries. He became political attaché to General Joseph Stilwell in March 1942, serving under “Vinegar Joe” until the latter’s recall from China in 1944.

  SECOND LIEUTENANT CHARLES FELIX USAAF, Air Transport Command. Felix, the copilot, was the only fatality of the crash.

  STAFF SERGEANT JOSEPH “JIGGS” GIGUERE USAAF, Air Transport Command. A chef by training, he was being posted to Kunming.

  CORPORAL EDWARD HELLAND USAAF, Air Transport Command.

  SERGEANT GLEN A. KITTLESON USAAF, Air Transport Command.

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL KWOH LI Chinese Army. A young but hard-bitten soldier whom the Americans admired, he had marched out of Burma with Stilwell during the retreat of 1942.

  CAPTAIN DUNCAN C. LEE A prewar lawyer, Lee was confidential assistant to Major General William Donovan in his legal chambers. The son of American missionaries to China and a Rhodes scholar, Lee was the head of the China section of the Secret Intelligence (SI) branch in 1943 and 1944. From 1942 on he was a Soviet double agent operating under the cover name “Koch,” making him possibly the most senior source the Soviet Union ever had inside US intelligence.

  SECOND LIEUTENANT ROLAND K. LEE USAAF, Air Transport Command.

  CORPORAL BASIL M. LEMMON USAAF, Air Transport Command. He was the last parachutist to join the survivors at Wenshoyl colony after struggling alone in the bush for four days.

  STAFF SERGEANT NED C. MILLER Aerial engineer and crew chief and, at forty, by far the oldest of the US servicemen on Flight 12420.

  FLIGHT OFFICER HARRY KENNETH NEVEU A twenty-year-old pilot in the USAAF, Air Transport Command, Tenth Air Force. “Flight officer” was the most junior warrant officer rank in the USAAF.

  SERGEANT WALTER K. OSWALT Oswalt, the radio operator, broke his leg on landing and was the direct cause of the rescue jump undertaken by Don Flickinger, Richard Passey, and William McKenzie.