The Dayaks did their best to keep their visitors amused. They noticed that the Americans all wanted to spend as much time in the sun as possible. The Dayaks, especially the women, were puzzled at that. They kept out of the sun whenever possible to avoid darkening their skin, since light skin was regarded as more attractive. Some concluded that the Yanks might be trying to darken their skin so they would not stand out among the natives. Except for swimming, the Yanks in Long Berang had run out of things to do. Time was hanging heavily as they waited for things to happen, things over which they had no control.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A Way Out
Eight more Australian special operatives arrived in the Borneo highlands on May 26. Assigned to reinforce SEMUT 1, they were dropped in from the Philippines by two Liberators from Z Special's own "Flight 200." But due to a mix-up, Major Harrisson was waiting with Dan Illerich in Lembudut while the Flight 200 pilots had the men jump into Belawit (where Pastor Aris Dumat entertained them as best he could). After hours at Lembudut looking up and listening for the planes, the major learned from runners sent by Dumat that the men were at home with him. Harrisson stomped back toward the border to Pa' Kabak and sent Dan to fetch the reinforcements from Belawit.
The next day, as they scrambled laboriously up a sixty-degree slippery, wet, leech-filled slope, Dan grinned as the new men complained that their guides deliberately went over the crest of the mountains, rather than going around them. The new men found Major Tom Harrisson waiting for them. One of the Australian reinforcements, driver Philip Henry, remembers his first impression of his new commanding officer at that May 27 meeting. The major was
barefooted; he wore a sarong round his waist, a shirt and an American soldier's work cap with a crown [the symbol of a British army major] in the centre. The natives called him Tuan Besar [the boss]. He was very definite in his instructions, such as: If any of us had anything to do with native women he would personally shoot us!
Harrisson's erratic temper was strongly in evidence that day. He may have been annoyed at the unnecessary walk to Lembudut the day before. He still may have been recovering from a hangover earned two nights earlier, when he had drunk borak all night with his Lun Dayeh hosts. At one point that night, he had been offered a native wife, an honor (he wrote in his diary) he had "difficulty in refusing," though refuse he did.
On a more positive note, he had been passed Japanese documents found in the possession of a recently captured native police constable in Sarawak's Trusan valley. These documents showed that the Japanese were still unaware of the presence of SEMUT 1 in Borneo—they were merely issuing vague warnings to Borneans to watch out for "possible dropped spies, black or white."
After a few more remarks to the new arrivals, Harrisson gave the men individual marching orders and sent them on their separate ways. He was, as usual, scattering most of the new arrivals in a wide arc across northern Borneo.
Before they left, however, one of them passed on to Harrisson a crucial bit of news: that the long and hard-fought battle for Tarakan was winding down and that the island's airstrip was now in Allied hands. Harrisson's diary for that day records that he had received "a midnight note from Colin McPherson [one of the reinforcements], re air strip."
It was just a little scribble in the major's diary. But it was shorthand for the single-most important event to affect the future of the eleven stranded American airmen.
***
When Harrisson had first confirmed the Yanks' presence in SEMUT 1 territory, he had sent a signal to Darwin to ask if Z Special could send a small aircraft to collect the airmen—one by one if necessary—provided SEMUT 1 prepared a landing strip for the plane. The answer had been no; the only short-takeoff-and-landing plane available, the Auster (similar to a Piper Cub), had a range of just two hundred miles, whereas the nearest airstrip in Allied hands was perhaps a thousand miles away from SEMUT 1 territory, in Mindoro, the Philippines.
The major wanted a two-way transport link between SEMUT 1 and its headquarters. And Harrisson knew that the best way to sell the idea to his Z Special bosses was to point out that creating such a link would be the fastest and best way to get the stranded Yank airmen out of Borneo. And now, with the news that Tarakan airfield was available for Allied use, Harrisson could get what he wanted.
When the SEMUT 1 reinforcements were accidentally dropped into Belawit, Harrisson realized that the Bawang Plain was the best possible place to build an airstrip for a plane such as the Auster.
The morning after learning that the Tarakan airfield was liberated, Harrisson sent a wireless signal via the Boston radio to ask the Royal Australian Air Force to do an air reconnaissance of the Bawang Plateau to determine the feasibility of building an airstrip there. Not waiting for an answer, he decided to build the strip at Belawit and obtained the permission of the leader of the northern Lun Dayeh, Pangeran Lasong Piri.
The major had met Lasong Piri in early April, but the two men had not become friends the way the major had with Sarawak Dayak leaders such as Penghulu Lawai Bisara and Penghulu Miri. It was not just personal chemistry that was to blame. The Kelabit had long had an informal and friendly relationship with the whites, thanks to the policies of Sarawak's eccentric English "White Rajahs" who had instructed their English administrative officials that the natives were "not inferior, just different." The rajahs had forbidden merchants, missionaries, lawyers and the pushier tribes from farther downriver to interfere with the upriver people and had essentially left the upland people to run their own communities, once they had agreed to cease headhunting. A similar free and easy manner toward Westerners prevailed among the Lun Dayeh in areas where the Dutch colonial administration had barely reached. The Yank airmen could sense that ease in the presence of Pangeran Lagan.
But Pangeran Lasong Piri, although the Dutch administration had granted him the title of paramount chief, felt he had never been respected by the colonial officers. (The Dutch had not been respectful of Lagan either, but they had, at least, let him alone.) The colonial Dutch tended to have little regard for any native no matter what his rank, unless the native was sufficiently "Dutchified." This personal history complicated Lasong Piri's relations with any white person.
As Tom Harrisson remarked:
[Lasong Piri] could not help calculating who he was, who we were ... At any moment, Lasong Piri felt that an Englishman or Australian might start behaving like a Dutchman. But in intervals when he forgot about this, he was the bold master of thousands of willing men who obeyed him even though they disliked him.
Harrisson noticed that Lasong Piri, like some of his fellow chiefs from other areas of Dutch Borneo, was clearly "tormented by doubt and latent dislike."
But somehow Harrisson convinced him of the importance of the airstrip. And despite "the hot breath of the Japanese blowing up the wide Trusan and prosperous Bawang straight into his alertly shifting eyes...[Lasong Piri] brought in more than 1,000 volunteers to build an airfield on his own land."
The major, with his usual disregard for rank, assigned one of the SEMUT 1 reinforcements, Trooper Bob Griffiths, to be in charge of building the Belawit strip and another of the new arrivals, Lt. Jeff Westley, to be the trooper's adjutant.
Bob Griffiths was a good choice for the job. He was a tough, scrappy veteran of an Australian armored regiment. He had a history as a troublemaker that may have prevented his winning the honors he deserved, but he was not only physically strong, but also stoic when ill and a man of many talents. He had been a cook for his infantry unit before joining special operations. Later, while engaged in upriver North Borneo for SEMUT 1, he was given the local name of Tuan Ubat ("white medicine man") since he was dispensing pills, giving shots and recruiting warriors, the way Jack Tredrea had done in Sarawak and Dutch Borneo.
Like Jim Knoch, Griffiths could make things work. At one point he turned a four-gallon kerosene tin, stones, mud and a bamboo flue into a working stove. He may have been involved in the ingenious conception of the Belawit air
strip; he certainly was the man who turned the concept into a reality.
SEMUT l's clever construction plan took advantage of the Bawang Plain's wet rice fields. The builders drained an unused portion of a paddy and leveled its bottom, with the outside banks remaining intact. They made a decking of split bamboo thirty feet wide and a hundred yards long (supposedly the length needed for an Auster). The decking was anchored to the ground with sharp pegs. In case of a visit by the enemy, SEMUT's Dayak guerrillas could make a hole in the bank and flood the field so that it looked like an ordinary rice paddy. Griffiths would have preferred to use atap, the palm-leaf material used for longhouse roofing, for decking but it was too scarce. It was already a sacrifice on the part of Lasong Piri and his Lun Dayeh to let the airstrip project use so many long strips of bamboo because bamboo of that type was essential for fencing the rice fields against wandering cattle.
At Harrisson's insistence, the airstrip construction work started immediately, though it was the time of year when the dried rice stalks were burned off the paddy fields, raising the local temperature to 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
Griffiths nonetheless took to his task with gusto. With the cooperation of Lasong Piri, he got the local people to start work right away. Soon, word spread of this novel activity and volunteers poured in from other tribes.
In the smothering heat, Griffiths sat in his little lean-to at one end of the construction site with his English/Malay word book and wrote out sentences in fractured Malay such as Saya mahu bawa tanah dari disana, dan daput disini (I want earth brought from there and put here). Lasong Piri then corrected the worst of the errors and made Griffiths repeat the phrases until the trooper could pronounce them well enough to be understood.
On May 29, less than twenty-four hours after the work had begun, Harrisson's diary notes "good strip progress." The native workforce had begun clearing the area, burning off what could not be removed with sticks, hands, homemade hoes and their own feet. The men dug and flattened while the women put the excess earth into reed baskets and carried it away. The men cut down the biggest stands of tall bamboo they could find. Bamboo stems fifteen to twenty feet in length and between nine and twelve inches in diameter were sliced into two-inch strips.
The women opened the bamboo strips, flattened them out and laid them on the soft wet ground. "The bamboo was so elastic and strong, that it never really sank into the mud," Phil Corrin wrote. The strips were fastened to the ground by sharp bamboo pegs driven through machete-bored holes.
At 8:30 A.M. on May 30, a Catalina flying boat from Morotai flew over the Belawit strip, and dropped spades and other tools. Harrisson later claimed the idea of asking for these tools had come from the Yank airmen (Capin and Illerich). Harrisson had agreed and Bob Long had wired the request to Z Special, and the RAAF had been prompt to oblige.
Years later, the Dayaks still remembered the day the metal tools rained down from the sky. Many of the tools fell into the muddy paddy fields. They had been dropped from too low a height for their storepedo parachutes to open and a lot of digging out was required. But the tools mystified the Dayak workers. The women politely tried heaping the soil onto the new spades rather than using their reed baskets to carry it.
Trooper Griffiths attempted to show the women how the spades should be used. But then he realized that the sharp edges were unsuitable for anyone with bare feet. He shrugged and let the Dayaks go back to their old methods; it was hard to imagine how anyone could do the job faster than they were doing it.
On May 31, the airstrip was in good enough shape to drain off the water. Seeing that the airfield would soon be ready, Dan Illerich went to Major Harrisson and asked him if he could continue to help Warrant Officer Bob Long send and receive radio signals until the last plane was ready to leave. The major was touched by this request and recorded it in his diary, with the comment, "Fine chap." Three weeks later, Harrisson would report to Z Special headquarters that Illerich was "our pet American. I dread the day he is evacuated. I do not know what we will do without him. I do sincerely hope you will be able to get him some sort of gong [medal] for the way he has so unselfishly and tirelessly helped us."
Now the airstrip—perhaps the first split-bamboo strip anywhere in the world—was nearly ready. It ran a hundred yards, starting at the edge of a thirty-foot ravine and ending just a few yards before the deep mud of a wet rice paddy.
But who would be damn fool enough to try to fly into it? The answer: the 4 Army Co-Op Squadron. The Australian squadron had been formed in Lae, New Guinea, to escort the Allied landings. It was part of an air wing that had been cobbled together the last year of the war to help the Allies retake the South Pacific and Southeast Asia.
The air wing was an uneasy union of the air force and the army. But the squadron's mixed parentage was not without advantages for the pilots. Theoretically, the squadron was under the control of the RAAF, so that when the pilots, who basically ran their own operations, thought they were being given silly or impractical orders by army officers who did not know their way around an airplane, they would bump the problem up to the RAAF, which almost always let the pilots have their way. As for food, the squadron did better than many, because the crews flew to places where they could get fresh tropical fruits, then a rarity for servicemen posted in Australia.
The squadron had been assigned in April to assist in the liberating of Tarakan Island. The squadron's commanding officer, Flight Lt. Frederick Chaney, later recalled:
The idea of the Tarakan "adventure"—and I call it that—was that the troops would capture the island, the air strip would be lengthened and repaired and made fit to take operational squadrons, which would then enable landings to be made at Labuan, on the other side of Borneo, and also at Balikpapan in the south.
The Borneo operations were meant to cut off the island's oil from the Japanese, who were by then very dependent on it. Taking back Borneo would also help the Allies get in place for their planned offensive up the Asian mainland, from Singapore to Japan itself (an offensive that only the August atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would make unnecessary).
Tarakan Island is fifteen miles long and eleven miles across at its widest point. When the Australians got there, there were only 2,100 Japanese forces on the island. For more than two weeks, the RAAF had flown some three hundred sorties over this small island, dropping two hundred tons of bombs. Next came a two-day naval bombardment and, finally, the landing of 11,000 Australian troops.
As usual, the Japanese withdrew to the interior, leaving the coastal areas in Australian hands. But, also as usual, the interior had to be fought for inch by inch. It took four days of fighting for an Australian battalion to get two hundred Japanese soldiers to withdraw from a small knoll in central Tarakan. By then, the Australians had fired 7,000 shells and 4,000 mortar bombs, and lost 20 AIF killed, with 46 wounded.
Even at the end of the Tarakan campaign, when the Japanese were fleeing the island by raft, they resisted with rifles and grenades the crews of the Australian landing craft and patrol torpedo (PT) boats sent to rescue them. They accepted stupendous casualty rates, some 75 percent dead. It was this kind of determination by the Japanese that made the Allied forces in Asia realize that, however inevitable their victory over Japan had become, they must expect bitter battles to the end.
Harrisson had convinced his own bosses at Z Special's advance headquarters in Morotai that the Belawit airstrip was the only way to take out the Yank airmen, and that doing this would win Australian Special Operations friends on General MacArthur's staff and in other ways embellish its name among the Allies. In Morotai, Harrisson's arguments had convinced someone that the Army Co-Op Squadron's Auster aircraft had the capacity to take out the stranded Americans, one by one.
But it must have taken some eloquence to convince even such a daredevil Aussie pilot as RAAF Flight Lt. Gordon Reid to back this plan. The Austers would have to fly unarmed to save weight over enemy territory, much of it jungle, where a plane and its crew could be
lost forever. As a precaution, the 4 Army Co-Op Squadron decided to send two Austers at a time so that, if one crashed, the surviving plane would be able to tell where the other plane had fallen.
In preparation for the Austers' flights, three Liberators flew from Mindoro to Borneo's central highlands and dropped two storepedos each, full of supplies, at Belawit on June 4. The supplies fell on target at 10:30 A.M., just before the daily cloud cover moved in.
Bob Griffiths had arranged to receive the drop. The major had done his part by sending SEMUT 1 forces with Eureka/ Rebecca radar equipment, colored flares and a white calico sign on the airfield in the shape of an H. The H sign meant: "drop here, all is well." Bob Long had come down from the wireless shack with Dan Illerich to watch. He recalls,
When we were satisfied the planes were in position, about a quarter mile from us, I pressed the Eureka button and we could see that the bomb bay doors were opened and seconds later storepedos burst from the aircraft, store parachutes blossomed and we knew we were watching a perfect stores drop.
Trooper Griffiths had a hundred Dayaks still working on the strip on June 6 when Gordon Reid flew over in a borrowed American Catalina and dropped storepedos containing a hundred gallons of fuel that would be used to refuel the Austers for the return trip. The Auster's fuel capacity was fifty gallons, which, when the plane was stripped down enough, was just sufficient to make one leg of the round-trip.
Squadron Commander Flight Lt. Fred Chaney and Flight Officer Johnny White, the pilots chosen to fly the first two Austers to Belawit, were aboard Reid's borrowed Catalina that day, scouting out Griffiths's airstrip. Reid reminded them that, given the Auster's small fuel-storage capacity and its high consumption, there could be no turning back once they were halfway there. Reid also explained to his passengers that they would have to leave their radios behind, to save weight. That would add to the challenge for the pilots, who would have no margin for navigation errors. (RAAF transport planes, perhaps because of scarcity or tradition, did not carry parachutes.)
The Airmen and the Headhunters Page 21