Even without a diploma, Harrisson came to prominence in Britain in the late 1930s by helping to found a social-survey organization called Mass-Observation that drew on his bird-and cannibal-watching techniques to discreetly observe and make notes about Britain's working class. When World War II began, he adapted these techniques to help Whitehall gauge the morale of the man on the street in 1940 to 1941 as Hitler's bombs blitzed Britain. Hard drinking, fast moving, articulate, original, outrageous and a charismatic leader, Harrisson had managed to use his prewar Borneo experience to get himself an assignment to Australia's special operations organization. He spent months in England learning how to kill silently and unarmed, how to use invisible ink and how to parachute out of bombers. A year in Australia followed, where he learned how to avoid being tailed in a Melbourne street and how to walk barefoot carrying a heavy pack over snow-topped mountains.
Makahanap left Punan Silau with Phil's letter on April 3 and headed west for Belawit. Taking three days instead of the usual five, he reached Belawit and met up with Maj. Tom Harrisson and his New Zealander second in command, Capt. Ric Edmeades. Harrisson, wearing an American visored cap with a major's star on it, was now being addressed as Tuan Mayor. (Tuan, literally "lord," was the polite Malay title for any white man and mayor, pronounced my-or, was the Kelabit for major. )
Makahanap had met Englishmen before, but this one had a vibrancy of voice, a brusqueness of manner and an intensity of gaze in his pale eyes that were almost frightening. The major was not fully at ease, either. In the mission house in Belawit, he was no doubt missing the soothing effects of the borak that his Plain of Bah hosts had served him.
Harrisson was to discover that meetings with leaders from the Dutch part of Borneo would not be as easy or relaxed as were those with their counterparts in Sarawak. Harrisson had immediately felt at home among the noisy, rough and ready, less Christianized native inland people of Sarawak, people who had experienced only the lightest touch of a colonial British presence and who tended to regard white people as their equals, though higher in rank. In contrast, the Dutch East Indians had been accustomed to the formality and deliberation of the Dutch and found this English major unpolished and abrupt, even rude.
But both sides, Harrisson and the local leaders in Dutch Borneo, realized they had no choice but to work together. During that evening with Makahanap and Aris Dumat, Harrisson and the others pooled their intelligence to figure out how to protect the downed airmen and fight the Japanese.
Harrisson took a few minutes to write a letter in reply to Phil's. He gave it to Makahanap to bring back to Punan Silau, along with various "comforts" and weapons for the airmen. Makahanap left early the next day with a group of porters to help him. He flew downhill a day faster than he had climbed up.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SEMUT Finds Work for the Yanks
Phil opened the letter from Harrisson three days after it was written.
April 6, 1945
My dear fellow,
(As an Englishman I had better start like this.) Your note is greatly welcome. I have brought in a party of eight (Australians, New Zealanders and a Siamese) not only to bugger up the Japs but also, and specifically, to look for lost whites and help them to get out in any way we can. I am sending you what stores I can by bearer. We can, and of course will, supply you with everything you need that we have. We are also in a position to supply arms etc. to natives and can bring planes over to drop us stuff.
There are two immediate difficulties for you:
1. Your area is virtually unmapped and I don't think a plane could find you. It was hard enough to find our very obvious plain we dropped in. (It took four attempts from Mindoro.)
2. I am at present responsible for all guerilla activities in this area, and I am sure you will agree that they should be coordinated. I know the military plans for landings* and we want to synchronize our efforts with these, in one well-organized blitz.
For these two reasons, I think it most necessary that you come and meet me at Belawit in the upper Bawang. It is an ideal dropping place, known to our planes, and at the same time I can discuss with you:
a. a guerilla plan for the area.
b. how to get you blokes out as quickly as possible. I will readily, after seeing you, allocate some blokes and arms to Long Berang. I am 100% for this. I know you will realize it has to be done carefully though. I have had some experience with guerilla work elsewhere, and it can easily develop into large scale shambles.
I would also like your radio man to come over. He could be invaluable to us, on loan, till we could get you out. Anyone else who cares to join my circus is more than welcome. Our base is safe, comfortable, etc.
I will signal your names and numbers the day after tomorrow, so your relatives will know you are O.K. I will also signal your position as far as it is known, in case a plane can find you.
Believe me, I want to help you all I can. I wish to God I had more stuff with me to send you. I'll bring over my bottle of Scotch to celebrate our meeting. If you simply can't make it, send someone else (or bring all).
By a strange coincidence on January 161 was on a recce over here, with Navy search, and we were looking all around Brunei Bay for the lost Navy B-24 of January 13th.
You know, maybe, you Yanks have taken Iwo Jima and landed on another island 300 miles from Japan.
Colossal raids on Tokyo. Negros taken. B-24 ships on Palawan. Jolo taken. In Europe, Montgomery and Patton over Rhine, Russians near Berlin. Roosevelt, Winchell, Dorothy Parker and Eisenhower all alive.
Yours sincerely,
Tom Harrisson (Major)
Reconnaissance Corps
As Makahanap watched, the Yanks hugged one another and laughed out loud while tears rolled down their cheeks. Phil noted in his reply that "our friend Makahanap returned to us this morning with your note and the news of your party and, of course, all hell broke loose immediately and lasted for quite some time." With the letter had also come porters laden with several Austin 9-millimeter submachine guns, some pistols and the comforts the major had mentioned in the letter. From the major's comforts, Bob Graham had his first cigarette in three months. Makahanap killed a goat, which was roasted for dinner, and Mama made fried bananas with chocolate sauce for dessert.
Meanwhile, in Long Nuat, the two navy men who remained with the Mongans had begun recovering from their most recent attack of malaria when Harms had a setback. Leech bites in his left foot became infected, and his foot swelled to twice its normal size. The Mongans and Robbins had no way to help Harms. The Lun Dayeh villagers treated his foot by piercing it in numerous places with sharp skewers of bamboo to drain the pus. At the same time, Harms's right foot developed a purple knot, which also exuded pus. Between the two infections, Harms was unable to walk for the next nine weeks. Then, on April 9, Long Nuat had a visit from Sgt. Fred Sanderson, who had been sent by Harrisson to bring medical supplies.
Sandy, the part-Thai sergeant, had set off on April 7 from Bario with two Kelabit porters carrying medicine and silver coins for the two Yanks, and sarongs and gold coins for the Mongans. He and his party had spent five days on the road to Long Nuat, slowed down because of a painful tropical ulcer on Sandy's ankle. After stopping at various longhouse villages overnight, the party reached the top of the huge rise above Long Nuat the morning of the fifth day, and Sandy saw "there, way below, a stream running through the native settlement. It looked like paradise and it took us all day to reach it."
Sandy found Robby Robbins and Alvin Harms bathing in the stream with the villagers. When he introduced himself, one of the Yanks said, "We were told in America that if we were ever lost and there were any Australians in the area we could count on being rescued." Sandy felt suddenly very proud of his slouch hat and his country.
After giving the Americans Aspro, Atabrine and sulfanilamide tablets, plus a handful of Dutch silver coins, Sandy stayed up all night exchanging information with the airmen and the Mongans. Thanks to the medicine Sandy had br
ought, Robbins immediately started to recover and even Harms began to improve.
Following the major's instructions, Sandy and William Mongan headed back to Bario the next day. Walking had become an excruciating ordeal for the SEMUT sergeant, who by now also had a painful lump in his right groin. Nonetheless, they kept a rapid pace and were over the mountains and at SEMUT 1 headquarters in Bario by 2 P.M. on Friday, April 13.
That date did not augur well and, indeed, they found Major Harrisson at his most irritable. Hungover from a borak-filled night of consulting with visiting penghulus from all over northern Sarawak, the major also was suffering from an ulcer on his leg, which had him horizontal on a hammock in his hut when he most wanted to be up and about. He also was nervous about the forthcoming arrival of another pair of Australian B-24s bringing eight more SEMUT operatives—headed by a New Zealander major who was Harrisson's rival and senior in rank. The planes were expected that day, but Harrisson had had no news from them in some time, a worry that added to his annoyance.
He greeted the limping sergeant by complaining that Sandy was half a day late, and made clear that he now had no interest in talking to William Mongan. To Sandy's enduring chagrin, the major sent this Good Samaritan back to Long Nuat with no thanks or anything to show for his pains. Sandy was ordered, despite his limp, to go up the hill to the wireless and operate the hand generator for the signals man, Sgt. Doug Bower. Knowing better than to argue, Sandy went up the hill.
Judging by what Major Harrisson wrote about Sandy to his superiors, he respected and liked the sergeant enormously, finding him to have "real brains and a perfect absorption of the job in hand ... a first class man in every respect." But he would never let Sandy know what he thought of him. Harrisson had always claimed that he had kept his Oxford expedition to Sarawak in order when he was its leader twelve years earlier by getting the members of the party to share one strong emotion—hatred of their leader. It had worked well then, and he may have been trying to do the same thing now with his odd assortment of brave but quarrelsome Aussies and Southeast Asians.
The Americans, knowing little about the major except what they had read in his letter, started out from Punan Silau for Wy-Agong on April 10 to meet Harrisson. They were barefoot and dressed in the shorts Mama had made for them out of old sacking. With them were Makahanap, his wife's brother Uncle Louie (from Long Sempayang) and his son Christiaan. The Yank party consisted of Phil Corrin as senior officer and Dan Illerich and Tom Capin as radio operators, who were responding to the major's request for help with SEMUT l's communications with its overseas headquarters.
Each night was spent in a different longhouse village, the biggest and best one in Long Sempayang, where the schoolchildren sang hymns in four-part harmony and played on instruments made from bamboo that sounded like a cross between a xylophone and a recorder. The airmen and their escort left there regretfully to continue their journey.
On the evening of April 13, after walking up and down steep hills all day in blinding rain, the party reached the meeting place near the border mountains, Wy-Agong, which Phil described as "just one big mud hole." They spent that night in a longhouse. While Phil and Dan were playing chess the next day on their Dayak-made set, a big head in a slouch hat poked up through the ladder hole. It was not Major Harrisson but SEMUT 1 Warrant Officer Rod Cusack, who met them on the major's behalf.
Cusack, a six-foot-six, burly AIF veteran from Brisbane with a cheerful, positive manner, climbed onto the veranda. He seemed bigger than life and drew the admiration of these young airmen, who had never taken part in a land battle, when they had the chance to draw him out on his war experience as they smoked real cigarettes. With his broad Queensland accent and his slouch hat worn at a jaunty angle, Cusack was the Yanks' idea of what an Aussie soldier should be.
The Yanks were pale and painfully thin from their long stay in the jungle. The kindly veteran took into account their obvious poor health and brought them and the weary Makahanap by easy stages to Belawit. By the afternoon of the next day, they were on the southern end of the high Bawang Plain. For the first time since arriving in Borneo, Phil and his men saw wet rice paddies, with their beautiful patchwork made up of bright green, gold and watery silver, each square showing a different stage of maturity of the rice crop. They learned that the Lun Dayeh of the Bawang Plain and their Kelabit cousins of the Plain of Bah across the mountains in Sarawak had the only fields in interior Borneo that could grow rice this way. In addition to being beautiful, the wet rice paddies could produce two or more crops a year, almost always creating a surplus, whereas hill-rice farming as practiced by the other Dayaks produced only one rice crop a year, just enough to feed the community. If that crop failed, the people went hungry. They arrived April 18.
Aris Dumat, the pastor from the Celebes whom the Yanks had met before, made them welcome at his house. The food was good and the school orchestra played "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" on bamboo instruments, though Cusack insisted the song was "God Save the King." Next came three exhausting days of sliding up and down in the wet to cross into Sarawak's Plain of Bah, to Major Harrisson's headquarters in Bario.
Phil was delighted to finally meet the major, whom he described in his diary as "a swell guy." The major gave the Yanks the fullest real news from the outside world that they had received since parachuting into Borneo five months earlier. Phil was shocked to learn that President Roosevelt was dead. But more important to their immediate situation was the news "that the Australians are due to invade Tarakan in a week and the Americans [bringing landing craft in support of the Australian Ninth Division] are going to hit Brunei."
Harrisson gave the Yanks the promised bottle of George V Scotch as well as chocolate, cigarettes, cookies and peanut butter. Better still, he sent Doc McCallum to them with medicine for "the itch." The itch, the medic explained, was from scabies and he dosed it with the new wonder drug, penicillin. Harrisson noted in his diary that he found the Americans "all anemic, the D.O., too," but he was glad to have the Yanks there. He had fulfilled his orders from Z Special to try to find them, and now they might prove useful to his team.
The next day, he divided his rapidly growing native force into five platoons and put Phil in charge of training Platoon No. 4 with eight rifles, five hand grenades and ten blowguns. Phil was happy to be acting like a soldier again.
The same day, Dan Illerich was asked if he could help with sending and receiving messages on SEMUT l's Boston wireless transmitter-receiver (W/T) radio. The major had learned from the eight new SEMUT arrivals—who had finally dropped into Bario April 16—that his first signals man, Doug Bower, had a very bad "fist" as a transmitter. One of the new arrivals, radioman Warrant Officer Bob Long, told Harrisson that Bower's messages had not been understood and that Z Special advance headquarters in Mindoro wondered if the radio had been taken over by the Japanese. Harrisson's solution was characteristic; he commandeered the services of Long, who had been dropped in to work for Harrisson's rival, Maj. Toby Carter of SEMUT 2, and released Bower for other duties.
Dan, who had maintained the best health of any of the Yanks, made his way up the steep hill to the radio shack to serve as Warrant Officer Long's assistant. He was happy to have a chance to put his skills to use after such a long period of enforced inactivity. He found Bob Long sweating and cursing under his slouch hat as he struggled with the Boston wireless set. Long was being helped by two Kelabit men, who were armed with machetes and blowpipes. These Dayaks spent the day guarding the little W/T lean-to that barely kept out the rain. In the evening, before they went down to the longhouse, these Dayaks helped wind the hand generator.
Long, a sociable creature as well as a conscientious signaler, was glad to have the Yank's company, but his pleasure increased as Dan's competence became evident. The corporal's fluency in Morse code had not suffered during his time in the jungle. After only one day with Dan on the team, SEMUT l's signals had improved by "at least 90 percent," the major noticed. After that, Harrisson's enthusiasm for
Dan's contribution to his operation never flagged.
Dan had been on the hill only a day when a message came from the major ordering Bob to close down the wireless station that night and to tell Z Special's transmitter in Darwin that the set would be on the air two days later at 8 P.M.
The two radiomen spent the night alone on the mountain. They both had hammocks that were hung as high up as possible. But the act of getting themselves into their hammocks was tricky until they got the knack of it. At first, they ended upside down on the rubberized cover meant to protect the sleeper from rain. Spilling out of the hammock onto the jungle floor in the dark, though, would have been worse.
Breakfast came from the longhouse with the men who wound the generators, but the food held little appeal: unsalted boiled rice and very tough half-cooked pig meat that tasted of the human excreta that the animal had fed on. At Dan's suggestion, they sacrificed some of Bob's canned butter to fry a handful of grasshoppers. The two soldiers agreed that the grasshoppers were not bad, "if you didn't think about 'em."
Bob and Dan got on well together from the beginning, and Dan's presence made it possible for the warrant officer to leave Dan at the closed-down W/T site with the two Dayak helpers while he went down the hill the next morning for his first break from his radio duties since landing in Borneo a week earlier.
When Bob Long got to Bario, he found that all seven operatives who had jumped in with him on April 16 except Doc McCallum had been scattered by the major to other parts of northern Borneo. Missing his buddies, Bob was not impressed by Bario but he was entranced when a near-naked young girl "stepped forward, slim and brown, and commenced her dance" to honor his visit. Her movements were sinuous and elegant. "The setting was fantastic; she danced only a few feet away in the gloom and smoke, highlighted only when the flames flared. No modern stage production could have arranged the light and dark to the dancer's movements better."
The Airmen and the Headhunters Page 19