Bob left the next morning for his new radio transmission site, above the village of Pa' Main. The warrant officer and his party got to the Pa' Main longhouse that afternoon and began the arduous trip uphill to the new W/T hut. Bob's porters from Bario, mostly young women who were dressed in short black woven-bark skirts and little else, had to take the heavy wireless equipment straight up a steep mountainside, assisted only by bamboo treads that were placed on the ground two feet apart and held in place by wooden pegs. Cursing his aching leg muscles, Bob finally reached the hilltop, which had been cleared in preparation for his arrival.
A small hut with three sides and a roof stood under a clump of large trees. It was just big enough for a bamboo bed and the small bamboo table that held his transceiver and signal pad. His Kelabit porters cooked some meat for him on a small, smoky fire, shook his hand repeatedly to say good-bye and left with the erstwhile generator winders. For the moment, Bob Long was alone and wishing he had not left Dan behind. He went to work setting up the Boston so that he could have communications back onstream by 8 P.M. the next evening.
The next morning, Bob Long was awakened by the chattering of monkeys overhead. He drank a mug of black tea made from a tea tablet he had brought with him, ate some of the leftover meat and rice from the night before, checked his carbine and his .32 automatic and looked over his new surroundings. The ground dropped away into dense jungle on three sides. The only possible access was from the fourth side, up the almost vertical path down to Pa' Main. Confident that he was as safe as he could make himself, he spent the day alone, reassembling the hand generator and putting up the aerial in the tall tree that sheltered the hut. Then he plugged into the transceiver a pile of messages that needed to be encrypted. Aside from a short break to eat at midday, he worked steadily on the outgoing messages until dark.
That evening, with their path lighted by flaming damar resin torches, four sturdily built young men appeared, each dressed in a bark-cloth loincloth and carrying a blowpipe, a poison-dart box, a bamboo cigar container and a machete. They climbed up the five-hundred-foot hill to take turns winding the generator, making it possible for Bob to keep his promise to his Z Special audience in Darwin, Australia. While one of these men wound the generator, Bob tuned the set for a tense moment. If the set did not work, Z Special would probably give up on SEMUT 1, assuming the team had been captured—the fate of most of Australia's special operations in the Far East. Long remembers: "Luck was on our side for, at the appointed time, I sent the call sign IRK and Darwin replied with the letter K, which was to go ahead with any traffic I had."
After the first message was sent, another Kelabit took a turn. It was exhausting work. While one Dayak wound the handle, his large brass earrings jangling, the other three were making and smoking local cigars.
Bob began receiving messages after all the outgoing messages had been sent, a welcome change for the Dayaks; receiving took only half the energy that sending did. By the time the last incoming message arrived, the Dayaks had been working hard for four or five hours. At about 11 P.M., they finished. The men shook Long's hand, relit their torches and headed back down the mountainside for Pa' Main. Before they left, they managed to indicate that they would be back every evening as long as they were needed.
In a week or so (presumably after the major had decided the new W/T post was safe), Dan joined Bob above Pa' Main, and another bamboo bunk was built for him in the small hut. Dan, after a week without his usual bath in the river, was missing one of the few pleasures he had enjoyed during his months of waiting to be rescued. The busiest time was in the evening, so he thought, Why not go down to the river and get a proper bath that morning? Bob, who had been making do with occasional showers from water collected by the Dayaks in bamboo tubes, thought about it and decided there was no reason not to.
There seemed to be no one around when they got to the riverbank. They quickly stripped and waded into the water, which felt wonderful against their bare skin despite being very cold. Bob knew that it was unwise to leave their weapons on the shore next to their only set of clothes, but he was growing confident, since there had been no threat of a Japanese visit since they had arrived.
Bob and Dan soon found that they were not alone. They had got only waist-high when a young Kelabit from the nearby longhouse joined them. Undoubtedly sent ahead to make sure that the foreigners were safe, the youth swam the length of the river pool to show Dan and Bob the local swimming stroke, a cross between an overarm and a butterfly. Dan and Bob demonstrated they knew how to swim. But when they wanted to get out of the water—which seemed colder than ever—they looked up and had what Bob called "one hell of a shock."
On top of the rock face overlooking the river pool were eight young Dayak women gazing down at them. The women had noiselessly appeared, each carrying empty bamboo tubes that they used to transport river water back to the longhouse. Bob remarked to Dan that it looked as if the village had run clean out of water at just this time. Still, he conceded later, it could have been worse. It could have been Japanese soldiers looking down on them.
Tom Capin had joined Major Harrisson with Dan, since he also had had some radio training. For the moment, though, the tall redhead's feet were in as bad shape as Harrisson's, and the two men spent the next days talking in side-by-side hammocks. Harrisson no doubt told Capin of his colorful life up to then and the improbable-though-true events of his extraordinary career. Capin was more struck with the major's arrogance than with his accomplishments. Harrisson, however, welcomed Capin's ability to understand Kelabit and Lun Dayeh.
By April 25, both Harrisson's and Capin's feet were better and the major had an assignment ready for the redhead. A bunch of storepedos had arrived packed with English .303 Enfield rifles, and so he asked Capin if he could take some of the Dayak guerrillas out and show them how to sight in, load and shoot these guns. Capin agreed. He had infantry training before he transferred to the air corps and felt entirely comfortable doing this. Harrisson caught up with him several times that day and, clearly liking what he saw, told Capin, "I'm going to send you to a place, Pa' Dali, that will need your language." Capin went eagerly. Finally he was getting into the war.
"It was good traveling," he recalled. "I killed a wild boar that crossed our path with my .38 Police Special belly gun. I was carrying one of the Enfield rifles over my shoulder but I never thought of using it." Upon reaching the longhouse at Pa' Dali, he found two ex-members of SEMUT 1: Doug Bower, who was very capable in the bush though he had proved a poor radioman, and medic Doc McCallum.
Capin, though he—following the advice of his Iban friend Kibung—also insisted on staying barefoot, was soon in his element working for McCallum, who later described the Yank sergeant as having spent months as "second-in-command of all medical services" for much of northern Borneo. Dressed in a pair of Australian shorts and a wool shirt, Tom Capin helped Doc treat all the sick natives in the region who came to Pa' Dali.
He did occasionally wish that he was in a real hospital, with an elevator that went to their sleeping quarters, which were located out of the village and up a cliff on the other side of the river. Going from there to work and back was every day a horrendous trip, but the distance was judged necessary to minimize the danger to the people of Pa' Dali. Still, despite the climb, Tom knew there was nothing on earth he wanted to do more than what he was now doing among the upland people he had come to love during his months at Pa' Ogong.
On April 27, William Makahanap was back at Punan Silau. He passed the word to Mama and the others that the Australians had promised to get the Yanks out of Borneo within six weeks. Meanwhile, he told them, the major was preparing to move his SEMUT 1 headquarters over into Dutch Borneo. Lieutenant Graham wrote in his notebook that this was "the best news we've heard yet."
Soon, at the major's request, Warrant Officer Rod Cusack came down to see the remaining Yanks at Punan Silau. (Navy airman Robbins was there with the others by then, having recovered his health sufficiently to leave L
ong Nuat on April 22.) Cusack had good news for them. First of all, SEMUT 1 now had a guerrilla force of some five hundred men. Second, Tarakan Island, with its air base, was to be invaded by the Allies that week. And, best of all, the Aussies planned to have the Yanks out of Borneo within a month. Hard as it was to believe, the Yanks knew that, this time, it was almost certain to be true. The main question was: What was the best way out? A Black Cat seaplane had sufficient range to reach them and return to the Allied-held parts of the Philippines, but there was no stretch of water big enough or calm enough for such a craft to land in this part of Borneo.
If the Mentarang-Sesayap river system was free of Japanese and their collaborators, the Yanks could go downriver by perahu past Malinau to Tarakan Island and fly out from Tarakan airfield once it was liberated. For now, though, Tarakan was still in Japanese hands, as was the river route to the sea. The Yanks, having waited so long with little hope, were finding it hard to continue waiting, now that hope had been rekindled.
Cusack set out on April 30 to gather more intelligence. By May 7, he had Makahanap's Dayak forces working for him. Thanks to the storepedos dropped to SEMUT 1, Makahanap's men now had uniforms (shorts and shirts), carbines, grenades, food and cigarettes. Cusack and the four Menadonese soldiers—Bolong, Sualang, Kusoy and Maulker—trained these Lun Dayeh in the use of the new weapons. Cusack sent them north to Lumbis, near the border with North Borneo, to check out rumors of Japanese troops at Pensiangan and Sapulut. On May 9, he sent Makahanap's men to Mensalong, due east of Long Berang, to watch for troop movements up or down the Sembakong River. As with all the forces that SEMUT 1 had enlisted, they were not supposed to let the people downriver know that any of the Allies had arrived. They were also supposed to avoid combat if possible until the Allied invasion along Brunei Bay, which was scheduled for June 9 and 10. But meanwhile, this strange coalition of SEMUT l's Dayaks, Makahanap's Dayaks and downed American airmen seemed to be working well.
With the help they were getting locally, Harrisson's SEMUT 1 team could control the central highlands of upriver Borneo against the Japanese. So the major decided that it was time for the Yank airmen staying with Mama Makahanap in Punan Silau to move back to Long Berang, where they would be more accessible when it came time to move them to the coast on their way back to their home base in the Philippines.
On May 12, Jim Knoch, John Nelson, Franny Harrington, Eddy Haviland, Bob Graham, Jim Shepherd and Robby Robbins accompanied Mama and the children, and various helpers and porters including Binum and Iwak, on an eight-and-a-half-hour walk to Pengutan, where they spent the night. This was the trip that had taken Cusack less than four hours. The next day, they reached Long Berang. This time, the Yanks stayed in the Presswood house, and it really felt like they were returning home.
But it was not a time of peace. Jim Knoch, who was the Coberly crew's hero when he helped keep their Liberator flying over Borneo and away from Brunei Bay, now tried to keep busy drilling the Long Berang Lun Dayeh in the use of what few modern weapons they had. Bob Graham, who had single-handedly brought three of his crewmen to the safety of Long Nuat, wrote in his notebook that he and the other airmen at Long Berang were "waiting for the major to arrive," adding wistfully, "plenty of fighting near here."
On May 15, they looked out the window to see Phil Corrin limping toward them on the swaying suspension bridge. From the way Phil walked, they could tell that his feet were in bad shape but that the rest of him was somehow more grown-up, more self-assured than when he had left with Makahanap, Dan Illerich and Tom Capin to meet the major a month ago. Over Mama's hot cocoa, he told them what he had been doing since leaving the major's headquarters in Bario.
Phil had spent a week in Bario helping train a Dayak platoon in the use of modern weapons. Next, he was assigned by Harrisson to return to Long Berang with some porters bringing twenty .303 rifles to help strengthen Makahanap's forces. Starting out, Phil was accompanied by Harrisson's second-in-command, the New Zealander Ric Edmeades. On April 30, the night before they left Bario, they drank borak with the Kelabit. Phil judged the Bario hooch to be superior to what he had drunk on the Dutch Borneo side and was amused that, instead of being teetotal, the Kelabit invariably prayed before drinking and that the Bario Kelabit women liked to hold your glass and empty the contents down your throat.
The next morning, May 2, Ric had left Phil and headed down the Trusan river system, with orders to collect intelligence and recruit fighters as he went. Phil's travels without Ric were less amusing, and the endless walking in such inhospitable conditions was taking its toll. Phil had the itch quite badly (he had not had time to get enough penicillin to cure it) and leech bites were making his feet sore as he headed to the next longhouse, where he found many of the Dayaks sick with boils, dysentery and fever—as was often the case toward the end of the rainy season. He dispensed some of the medicine he had been given by the major and enjoyed a chance to chat with the people there, though they were no doubt sorry to learn from him that the Japanese occupation money probably would not be honored when the Allies won. One man, shrugging off his disappointment, offered Phil a Japanese occupation guilder to roll his cigarette with.
By May 3, Phil was having trouble finding porters because so many of the people in the longhouses on his route were ill. "The poor carriers I do have are overloaded," he wrote in his diary before he left Pa' Omong the next morning with "women, children, and anybody not sick" helping to carry his load.
A few hours into that day's walk a gratifying event occurred. The porters spotted a great hornbill and asked Phil to shoot it. He had never been a crack shot and so, when he pulled the trigger on his .303, he had few expectations. But he hit the great bird foursquare. "It couldn't have been a better shot if the thing had been sitting on the end of the barrel." All velvet black except for white tail feathers and a yellow throat, the bird was as big as a turkey, with a wingspan of some six feet and a curved beak at least a foot long. The porters cooked it for lunch and Phil discovered that the meat tasted a bit like chicken liver.
Two days later, his feet desperately sore, Phil was at Long Sempayang again. He stayed at a native Christian schoolteacher's house. As instructed, he cached some of the goods the major had given him. He attended services at the church that the Dayaks had built before the war. Although his feet were so swollen he could hardly walk, he could not help laughing inwardly when he recognized that the tune being played by the bamboo band was "Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag."
Phil sent the guns ahead to Long Berang with porters the next day and decided to stay another day at Long Sempayang in the hope that he would be able to walk better after a day's rest. A day turned into a week and, on May 13, with one of Long Sempayang's schoolteachers to escort him, he finally left for Long Berang. He arrived there two days later, on the day that (the airmen soon learned) the Japanese had been forced out of Malinau. Three B-25 bombers had been directed there from the ground by SEMUT l's Sgt. Jack Tredrea, who was hiding nearby with his Iban irregulars. The air attack had killed as many as thirty-five Japanese, and the others had fled into the jungle. One of the Allied bombers, however, was shot down and another flew too low and crashed into a hill, killing everyone aboard.
Now that Malinau was no longer in Japanese control, the airmen began to think it might be safe to follow the river to the coast and across to Tarakan Island. But the airfield there was still in enemy hands. And so they waited.
At the Presswood house, young John Nelson was glad to be back with his favorite buddy, Eddy Haviland. The two of them had blowpipe contests trying to hit objects across the longhouse.
Bob Graham spent a lot of his time playing hearts with the other guys. He now had time to think about his bride, Janet. Bob was so bright that he had finished high school at age sixteen but had hung around the school, learning typing and business skills until he was old enough for college. He had been sitting in a typing class when Janet, a fifteen-year-old high school kid, pointed out "this cute-looking guy over t
here" to a girlfriend and said, "I'd like to marry him someday." They had dated for the next four years while he became an officer in the navy, marrying only when he knew he was heading overseas. He worried about her and the missing-inaction message she would have received.
Between bouts of malaria, all the airmen spent time swimming in the river, fishing, eating and waiting. The prewar Reader's Digests had lost their charm and were now used to supply cigarette papers. The men played "Stardust" and "Lullaby of Broadway" over and over on the phonograph that Jim Knoch had repaired months ago. It seemed as if they had spent their whole lives waiting.
Jim, now reduced to wearing a loincloth, seemed to take the waiting hardest. He had always been happiest doing things that were useful, and now he found nothing useful to do. News came from the major that the war in Europe had ended on May 9, and it felt as if the war ought to be over in the Mentarang District, too. Perhaps because he could now think of things other than survival, Jim began to have amorous thoughts about the beautiful Binum. He got in the habit of going up to her when the Yanks and the Dayak girls were in the river together, and pinching her on the buttocks underwater. Binum just laughed. But Jim's crewmates found nothing funny about it. They made it clear that they would restrain Jim physically if he continued to threaten their safety by forcing his attentions on Binum. They had been told that the first Japanese to be beheaded had been those who had approached the young women of Pangeran Lagan's longhouse.
The Airmen and the Headhunters Page 20