A day earlier, Fred Chaney had been sitting in his tent on Tarakan's airbase, relaxing with his boon companion and second-in-command Johnny White, when Reid had turned up. Reid had introduced himself and said, "I'm looking for a couple of volunteers to go into the middle of Borneo and pick up some Americans—and you two are the volunteers."
It was a lucky accident that Chaney was in the right place to be "volunteered" for this mission. Chaney had many hours of experience flying unarmed light aircraft, often flying cross-country at night by dead reckoning, with no light until the flares of the airstrip appeared. Chaney had been flying into battle zones all over the South Pacific for four years. He could land his light aircraft almost anywhere, and had recently collected wounded men from New Guinea in his little Auster.
But the biggest asset to the current operation was Chaney's character, a very Aussie blend of courage, self-discipline and diffidence. With a genuine modesty overlying a strong commitment to justice and fair play, Fred was a natural leader. He had signed up for the RAAF in 1940, having been intrigued by flying ever since he had watched air force planes performing aerobatics over Maylands Aerodrome near his boyhood home in North Perth. One display, in which three planes took off with their wingtips joined by ribbons, had thrilled him.
The RAAF in those days still operated like a gentleman's club. Chaney was both amused and appalled that he had to have references from three reputable citizens included in his request for admission into officer training. He had to wait eighteen months as a reservist before beginning training in August 1941, only months before the Japanese entered the war.
After the war, Fred would become a "reputable citizen" himself: Sir Frederick Chaney, KBE, CBE, AFC (see glossary), a Liberal Member of Australia's Federal Parliament from 1955, holder of various federal offices, including administrator of the Northern Territories from 1970 to 1973 and, from 1978 to 1982, Lord Mayor of Perth. But, during the war, he was a lot like many of the irregulars who made up SEMUT 1, a gallant warrior with a checkered armed services career.
Fred's great abilities would get him promotions, and then his high jinks would lead to his new rank being rescinded. On two memorable occasions, he lost his promotion to squadron leader before he had time to put the ribbons on his uniform. Fred, when accused of being heroic, or even courageous, would simply say that almost anybody would have done the same as he had. He said that during dangerous flying operations he had often been frightened, "but provided you don't panic with fear, it doesn't matter how frightened you get."
On June 6, 1945, the view from Gordon Reid's Catalina down onto the Bawang Plateau was enough to frighten Chaney and White. "It didn't look too promising," Chaney conceded, many years later. Nonetheless, Fred and Johnny (who was equally daring) planned their next day's route when they returned to Tarakan. It was annoying not having a radio, but they were going to have to keep radio silence anyway, when they brought back the American airmen, so they shrugged off the danger. Reid promised to fly alongside them in his Catalina, to show them the way to Belawit.
On June 7, the three planes took off, along with a Liberator whose mission was to drop more fuel and other stores on the Bawang airstrip. Harrisson commented in his diary that four planes overhead in one morning was probably more air traffic than those central highland skies had ever known.
Gordon Reid, when he offered to escort the Austers in, had not taken into account the low speed at which an Auster traveled. Chaney's and White's planes were flying at about seventy knots but Reid's Cat was making over a hundred knots, so Reid had to circle several times trying to keep back with the Austers.
Bob Long was looking up as the Austers approached the field. "It was now late morning and the upper level cloud had already closed in, while the ever-increasing lower clouds billowed at random like giant cotton wool balls." Between the clouds and knowing that they were almost out of fuel, the two Auster pilots confined themselves to a very brief circling of the strip before coming in to land. Johnny White came low from the west and made a perfect landing, to the satisfaction of Trooper Griffiths, the other SEMUT 1 men and the crowds of Lun Dayeh, Kelabit and other Dayaks who had gathered to see their airstrip being used.
Johnny White's Auster had barely come to a halt when Chaney's plane touched down. Chaney judged that at his present rate of ground speed he would crash right into Johnny's plane and so, halfway down the runway, he abruptly turned off the bamboo and into the soft muddy earth. One fact was now evident: The bamboo strip was too short.
Trooper Griffiths got his workforce to begin extending the bamboo decking, while Dan Illerich and Bob Long helped inspect the extension work. Major Harrisson, however, was aware that the Allied invasion of Brunei Bay was due to begin within the next few days. He was desperate to get out to Z Special advance headquarters before the "balloon went up." He cast an eye on the ever-thickening cloud cover and urged Fred Chaney, whom he had just met, to take him out to Tarakan at once.
Chaney conceded that "the only way to see if the strip was long enough was to try it" and agreed to do so as soon as his plane could be pulled out of the mud and refueled. "News traveled fast," Bob Long recalled, "and by takeoff time, villagers for miles around had gathered to witness this exciting event." The assembled throng helped pull Chaney's plane out of the mud. But when the engine roared to life, "most sightseers took a step or two back." This was, after all, the first wheeled vehicle that most of the villagers had ever seen up close. Dan Illerich and Bob Long held on to the tail until Chaney decided he had sufficient revolutions per minute. Bob Long later remarked that it was "surprising, in that almost continuously damp country, how much rubbish can be whipped up by a fast revving propeller," but he and Dan hung on grimly, the wind tearing at their clothes and hair, their eyes full of mud, until Chaney gave the signal to stand back.
The Auster moved off; Fred was obviously coaxing all the power he could out of the engine. Halfway down the strip, the wheels of his plane cleared the last of the bamboo decking. The Auster gained another two or three feet but then it yawed, lost height, and the left wheel struck a small mound. The plane fell over on its nose, then onto its back and the fuselage broke, bringing to a dramatic end the first flight out of Griffiths's field.
Luckily, Fred and the major emerged uninjured. The lengthening of the strip took on a new urgency, but the cloud cover was too heavy to make possible another flight out that day.
The unexpected presence of the two Auster pilots presented a catering problem for their SEMUT 1 hosts. When Bob Long and Dan Illerich's Dayak "cook boys" brought in the usual full cooking pot from their longhouse, these courageous Aussie pilots found they could not bear to be near the food. Bob Long recalls that "Dan and I were accustomed to native food such as boiled rice, bamboo shoots, wild pig and locally grown ubi kayu [cassava root]." Chaney, to the end of his days, insisted it was boiled monkey that he had been served "and it smelt like a dog that had been out in the wet and come in and stood by the fire in your lounge room." He and White finally managed to swallow some of the food, washing it down with borak or possibly arak. That kept them going until their hosts could find them some bananas and papayas.
That evening Chaney happened to see a little child who was crying hard—a rare event among Dayak children—and he could see that the child was in great pain. It turned out that the infant had been lying too close to a fire and had rolled into it and suffered burns all over his body. Chaney brought out his excellent first-aid kit; he lathered the child with Tannifax, and the child stopped crying. This made a great impression on the longhouse people, and the next morning there was a line of sick Dayaks outside of his hut.
In the morning, the mad major took off with Johnny White in the undamaged Auster. Chaney later described Harrisson as someone "who I don't think knew fear." The major carried instructions to Tarakan for Reid and his Catalina to drop in fabric and the waterproofing varnish known as "dope" so that the stranded Chaney could repair the other Auster.
Though Chaney thou
ght his plane looked to be "a complete write-off," he felt he had to try to fix it so he could fly the sickest Yank out. Chaney found himself trying to repair his plane in a world where everything seemed to be made of bamboo. Things could be worse, he realized. He and White had slept in a bamboo hut the night before and had found it surprisingly comfortable. He was also favorably impressed (aside from the cuisine) by the "Dyaks."
They were an amazing group of people, these Dyaks. They had irrigation laid on; the showers for their village came down from the mountains in bamboo pipes, and then they had little other bamboos, where you pulled the plug out and you got a shower of water.
Chaney was also struck by the quality of the Dayaks' workmanship:
Their longhouse, which would have done credit to any sort of building that any person would put up in Australia, was built without a single nail in it, and it was a tremendously big building ... maybe a hundred feet long, where many whole families used to live, and there was an end for visitors ... They'd sleep on mats and things which they wove out of the rushes. I don't know how they cut the timber for them, but the beams looked as though they'd been milled in Bunnings Timber Mills.
When they built their houses, they bound thin bamboo strips around wooden beams to join them up, so I, by sign language, got them to mend the fuselage of my aeroplane, to put in new struts of bamboo and bind them up and then I put the fabric that had been dropped from [Gordon Reid's Catalina] and put the dope over it.
All in all, the flight lieutenant found working with the Dayaks to be a "very very wonderful experience." Coming from a family that had coped well with a "mixed" marriage of Catholic and Protestant, Chaney had always believed that social prejudice was wrongheaded. He had been ashamed that "the majority of Australians ... thought that anyone with a dark face was inferior." Later in life, as administrator of the Northern Territories, he would work hard to get justice and respect for Australia's aborigines.
Flight Lieutenant Reid, in addition to the airplane fabric and dope, dropped blankets, pants, shirts and Atabrine (for malaria) for the use of SEMUT 1 and the Yanks in Belawit. The medicines were used to help the local people as well, and proved a great source of goodwill. But the item Chaney remembers best was an object that glittered as it came fluttering down, dangling from its own little parachute.
When it was brought back to me by the natives, it was a silver flask full of whisky, with a note attached to it from a fellow called Jim McGeoch, second in command of one of the Army battalions on Tarakan. The note read: "This flask was a present from my mother on my twenty-first birthday. It's my prized possession. If I didn't believe you were going to get out of that place, I wouldn't have dropped it to you."
By June 10, Trooper Griffiths's airstrip workers had extended the decking to a good 250 yards. It was now time for Chaney to try out his bamboo-repaired Auster, this time with Seaman First Class Alvin M. Harms, USN, aboard.
Harms, who had been the navigator on the navy Liberator, had been badly affected by malaria in his early days in Borneo. After that, he had begun suffering from badly swollen feet, the result of infected leech bites. Some improvement had resulted from the supplemental food provided by SEMUT 1 in April, but Harms still could not walk. He had been carried to Belawit on June 4, looking "bootless and vague" (according to Harrisson's diary). It was now six days later.
Chaney helped Harms aboard in a litter and the plane started down the lengthened runway. Chaney remembers:
We staggered off the ground, and then I found the aeroplane was slightly bent in the middle, but it didn't worry me much. But when I got over the mountains—which were very, very high—all of a sudden the aeroplane started to shudder tremendously and I just thought it was going to fall to bits. But what had happened was one of the screws hadn't been done up properly, and the wind was rattling it, and when I throttled back a little, the noise ceased. Then, as I opened the throttle, the noise went up again, so I thought: Well, it isn't the engine that's causing the trouble.
After several hours of going as slow as he could to avoid shaking to pieces, Chaney could see the outline of Tarakan Island ahead. The plane, however, was not yet out of danger.
They picked up this aeroplane of mine on the radar and they did not know I was in there. It was a very hush, hush operation. The Army air raid siren went and Johnny White, who had got back, suddenly thought [given the direction the plane was coming from] it might possibly be me. He rushed down to the anti-aircraft battery and told them to hold their fire until they recognized the aeroplane.
Cleared for landing, the Auster that had been so painstakingly repaired by the Dayaks touched down on the runway and immediately broke in two. Both Chaney and Harms got out unscathed. If Fred Chaney had not known he was born lucky, he knew it now.
Seaman Harms was brought to the U.S. Navy hospital on Morotai the same day, on his way home to Holly, Colorado. The first of the eleven downed Yank airmen to leave Borneo, Harms had been there for six months.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Allies Arrive
On June 10, while Fred Chaney was flying Alvin Harms to Tarakan, the mad major was at Z Special advance headquarters in Morotai, dictating a forty-page intelligence report for the Allied forces that had established a beachhead that day on the northeast coast of Brunei Bay.
The Japanese along the coast were avoiding combat and retiring to the interior, regrouping behind defensible hills or fortifications. From such redoubts, they normally would fight to the end, causing as much damage to the enemy as possible. But this time they could not.
SEMUT 1, with help from Makahanap's Dayak forces, was already established in a wide arc inland, ready and waiting for the Japanese. SEMUT 2 and SEMUT 3 and their respective Dayak forces were doing the same on the river systems farther south.
Though all the SEMUT 1 operatives complained about the mad major, some of the old-timers were beginning to notice that there were no casualties among the Z Special operatives and very few among their Dayak forces. Some Z Special veterans would later acknowledge that the major's insistence that the men try to live in the same tough way as the native people may have been crucial to helping them survive, which every single one of his forty-odd SEMUT 1 operatives did. (SEMUT l also accomplished much more, in terms of intelligence gathering and killing the enemy, than all the rest of the Australian WWII special operations put together managed to achieve, even those operations with high casualty figures.)
One of the rare battles in SEMUT 1 territory in which the natives suffered losses had occurred just one week before the Allied invasion, and had been led by Warrant Officer Rod Cusack. By the time of the battle, Cusack, N.E.I. Cpl. Bolong, acting as Cusack's adjutant, and the Dayak force raised by Makahanap had grown impatient to get into real action. Since May 20, Bolong and his "Guerrilla Troop No. 1" had been at Long Buluh on the Sembakong River, with one Bren gun, two Owen submachine guns, eight rifles, four hand grenades and three hundred rounds of ammunition. Their orders were to report all Japanese movements and kill any Japanese using the river, provided the enemy numbers were not too great. But if they were not certain to win easily, Bolong's men were merely supposed to report to SEMUT 1 headquarters everything of interest occurring downriver as far as Mensalong and upriver as far as Semelumung.
For two weeks, Cusack and Bolong waited. Finally, with Bolong to guard his back door at Long Buluh, Cusack moved with forty armed Dayaks of Makahanap's forces up the Sembakong to attack the Japanese at Long Simelumung, but there were more Japanese than expected. Cusack reported "fifteen Japanese were killed for sure, possibly more died of wounds in the surrounding jungle." That was a high total of enemy killed for a single SEMUT engagement, but it was accompanied by SEMUT l's highest total of nonenemy casualties in a single incident: four Dayak civilians from the Sembakong River area killed in cross fire and one of Cusack's own Dayak troops was killed or captured. A more typical SEMUT 1 engagement was one that Ric Edmeades led along the Trusan River on June 11, when his forces killed five Japanese
, captured twenty-five enemy auxiliaries along with documents and weapons and suffered no losses, civilian or guerrilla.
By June 13, Tom Capin was in Belawit, having walked there from his medical facility at Pa' Dali. He had been ordered to come to the airstrip so he could leave on the next Auster. Daylong rains had stopped flights after Chaney's takeoff with Harms, but Capin didn't care. He now could be confident that his departure from Borneo would be in a matter of days. The tall redhead filled this time by helping a newly arrived SEMUT 1 medic, Reuben Hirst, establish what the major would call an "excellent medical post" next to the airstrip. The improved medical facility added to the high morale already prevalent on the Bawang Plain as the foreign soldiers and the Dayaks saw their joint labors start to bear fruit. The Dayaks had adopted the airstrip as their own and brought fresh heads, as they would to their longhouses, to add to the place's spiritual power. The heads were put on poles along the airstrip's edge. The decaying flesh and its attendant odor bothered the tuans but not the Dayak warriors.
Mustapa al-Bakri, the Malay administrative aide in Malinau who had been collaborating with the Japanese, was now a prisoner at SEMUT 1 headquarters in Belawit. The major recorded in his diary that the Malay was "tearful, begging on his knees for his life and to be allowed to return to Malinau." The major sent a message to Makahanap asking if he thought the Malay's death sentence by firing squad should be carried out. Makahanap, perhaps remembering how the Malay had urged the Japanese authorities to release the Dayak schoolchildren being held in prison as hostages over the missing Pangeran Lagan, sent a long letter to the major saying that he could not bring himself to ask for the death penalty for this man he had known and worked with so long. Instead, the district officer promised Harrisson he would take responsibility for the Malay and his colleagues and make sure that they stayed in his strict custody. Meanwhile, Pastor Aris Dumat went over the documents that had been found on the Malay official, looking for anything that could be useful to the major's forces or the Allied cause.
The Airmen and the Headhunters Page 22