The same day that Harrisson wrote to Makahanap, the major received a visit from the village headman from Pa' Tengoa who came with Ric Edmeades. The headman had brought with him the severed head of the chief police officer of Brunei as a present for the major. The senior Japanese official's head had been taken by Iban guerrillas during the Ninth Division's fight for Brunei Town the previous day when the attacking forces had discovered the rotting bodies of eight natives chained to stakes.
Harrisson, wishing to honor the Pa' Tengoa headman's gift appropriately, had it put on a flagpole alongside the airstrip next to poles bearing the flags of the United States, the Netherlands, Japan(!) and Sarawak and the other heads. This haphazard, impromptu line of flagpoles with their mixed collection of symbols fit in with the atmosphere perfectly. Somehow, a wildly disparate collection of people—Dayaks, N.E.I. veterans, Australians and other Commonwealth soldiers, Celebes-born missionaries and even a few downed U.S. airmen—had configured themselves into a strong but flexible fighting unit.
But now it was time for the Yank airmen to leave. Rod Cusack had appeared in Long Berang on June 7 and told Phil Corrin, Jim Knoch and the navy airman Robby Robbins that the major wanted them to leave for Belawit right away. Phil noted in his diary, "We don't know for sure but think the major is having a plane land there somehow and perhaps we'll get out. Six more days of walking. May it be the last!"
Makahanap was away in Malinau, so the airmen could not say good-bye to him. But trying to say an adequate thank-you to Mama Makahanap consumed the departing Yanks' thoughts that night, especially those of Phil and Jim. Facing Mama the next morning, Phil and Jim pledged their undying love and gratitude and told her that they hoped somehow to get the whole Makahanap family to come to the States. When Phil, Jim and Robby left the next morning, they were laden with gifts—machetes, blowpipes, loincloths, reed baskets and woven bark jackets. "Almost everyone was in tears," Phil recorded.
That left five airmen in Long Berang. (Harrisson was staggering the airmen's departures, presumably to reduce the risk of discovery by the Japanese, who were now moving inland, and to limit the catering problems for the various longhouses that would be hosting the Yanks on their way to Belawit.) The villagers of Long Berang, aware that all the Yanks would soon be gone, held a party at one of their longhouses for the five remaining airmen. "They sacrificed a water buffalo," Bob Graham recalls,
and caught its blood in a bowl, and they all took a lick from the bowl. We didn't. They brought borak and we had to sip it through bamboo straws. A couple of times was more than enough for me, but Franny went overboard and got drunk and sick. He could not cross the swaying bridge over the river and had to be brought back to the Presswood house by canoe. The natives laughed and laughed, and they came round the next day and laughed some more.
Meanwhile, Phil, Jim and Robby made good time their first day and were in Pa' Silau that night. Two days later they were in a village where they found that the Thirteenth U.S. Air Force, alerted by Major Harrisson, had dropped them a few boxes of K rations, six packs of cigarettes and seven pairs of shoes in a size that fit none of them. They merely laughed. Good ol' Uncle Sam.
A greater morale booster was the news that Seaman Harms had already been flown out from Belawit. The three airmen were told that the rest of the Yanks from Long Berang also were now on their way to the airstrip.
On June 15, the sun shone on the Bawang Plain and Chaney's little Auster landed on Griffiths's field at 10 A.M. At 10:30, Chaney took off for Tarakan with Tom Capin as his passenger, after refueling in record time to avoid the oncoming cloud cover. Chaney's last words to Major Harrisson before leaving were that the Auster service would be shut down for the next few days (presumably collecting the wounded from the Ninth Division's invasion). That was the bad news. The good news was that the Austers soon would be flying in and out from the Allies' newly won airstrip on Labuan Island, in Brunei Bay. The major had to be pleased. This would be a better location for Auster flights in every way. The distance from Belawit to Labuan was well within the Austers' range and Z Special now had an advance headquarters on Labuan, next door to the Ninth Division field headquarters. Harrisson's dream of having a good, direct air connection to Z Special soon would be realized. (The major was expecting to be in Borneo a while longer; he was focusing on the thousands of Japanese troops moving inland from the coast. It did not occur to him that the Allied objective of cutting off the oil to the Japanese had now been met and that the Ninth Division was planning to leave soon and close down SEMUT and repatriate its operatives.)
The Yanks kept straggling into Belawit on their bare, leech-swollen feet. On June 15, Corrin, Knoch and Robbins arrived, having spent seven days getting there, delayed partly due to Jim Knoch's being in the throes of his worst bout of malaria. Jim had become so weak that, one night, a Dayak woman chewed up his food for him and put it in his mouth, knowing that he was not strong enough to chew it himself. The last two navy men, Graham and Shepherd, also arrived later that same day. Because only two passengers per day could be brought out by the Austers, the major found various chores for the waiting airmen who were fit enough.
Robby Robbins was sent to help Dan Illerich, who was still assisting Bob Long. Between them, Bob and Dan had transmitted two hundred messages since they started to work together back in April.
Because Jim Knoch was so ill, he was chosen as the next man to be sent out, on June 17. When he got to Tarakan, he was flown to Morotai and spent three days waiting to reach his old squadron, which was now based on Samar Island in the Philippines. When he reached the squadron, he was still dressed in a loincloth and a bark jacket and carried the blowpipe, machete and knife holder he had been given. He looked and acted oddly enough that he was transferred to the squadron hospital for observation. But he was soon released and was flown to Guam, where his plane refueled for the long flight home.
On June 23, two Austers flew in to Griffiths's field at 11:45 A.M. By 12:45, both planes were airborne with Phil Corrin and Franny Harrington. The airmen would acquire Australian shorts and shirts on Labuan Island. A few days later, they returned to their squadron at Samar.
Eddy Haviland and Robby Robbins left for Labuan the day after Phil and Franny, but not before Eddy had been given a special task to perform. He recalled later that:
Major Harrisson had picked me to head a firing squad. There were some natives there who had sided with the Japanese, and were either Japanese spies or were telling the Japanese what was going on. And they had been captured and the major wanted them killed and so I spent one day clearing the underbrush so that the firing squad would have a shot right at them. Well, I got done and this firing squad was supposed to do its work the next day. But the next day was my turn to leave and the job was given over to one of my buddies. And he told me later the natives, instead of firing just once—they had automatic weapons and bang, bang, bang—they just held the trigger down and cut the natives to ribbons.
The condemned men were each tied to one of the trees that stood at the top of a hill near the village, and ten natives were given automatic rifles. Graham did not fire his gun but stood there, watching the only killing he saw during the war. "Shells from the bullets opened up the belly, and body parts were hanging out. The major went along with a .45 and gave the coup de grace to the back of the head." It is ironic that, by far, the bloodiest incident that the surviving airmen witnessed was this execution. It left a memory of horrifying violence that the airmen would have for the rest of their lives.
Eddy Haviland had escaped being part of the firing squad, but he still had a few anxious moments ahead. The engine of his Auster suddenly cut out while they were still over Japanese-held territory near Borneo's northwest coast. But it came back on again and the plane landed safely on Labuan Island.
Two days after the execution, two Austers appeared again. One plane flew Major Harrisson to Labuan; John Nelson flew there in the other. John had been treated with arsenic for some unspecified tropical illness by one o
f SEMUT l's medics, and there had been a time when he wondered if the medicine was going to kill him or cure him. "It came close," he recalled. He was unconscious for a while, but by June 27 he was fit enough to board the Auster. After flying over parts of the rain forest that he knew to be full of Japanese, he touched down on Labuan Island. His buddy Eddy Haviland was there to meet him, and they remained together all the way back to the States. When they landed at Morotai it was the Fourth of July. John did not bother to check to see if his and Jim Knoch's old uniforms were still being washed by the surf.
On June 28, Bob Graham and Jim Shepherd were flown out to Labuan, where they had their first meal without rice since landing in Borneo in January. By July 1, they caught up with their mate Robby Robbins at Clark Field in the Philippines.
On June 29, Dan Illerich, hating to quit while the show was still on, said good-bye to Bob Long and climbed into Fred Chaney's Auster. Dan was the last of the Yanks to leave Borneo. (The missing photographer Elmer Philipps was never found.) To honor the occasion, Dan gave the Australian flight lieutenant one of his few remaining personal possessions—his G.I. Elgin watch, which had stopped working sometime during his seven months in the jungles of Borneo.
A month later, Phil Corrin took off from Honolulu in a C-54 Transport. He recalled,
I was so excited I couldn't sleep a wink the rest of the way, even though we flew in darkness most of the twelve-hour flight. As we approached California the following morning it was so cloudy there wasn't a thing to see. About three miles from the coast, however, the clouds suddenly ended, almost as if it had been planned that way, and there before us on a gorgeous sunshiny morning was San Francisco and the Golden Gate. I believe it was the most beautiful sight I shall ever see.
The war in Borneo was still far from over, however. There were thousands of Japanese troops and auxiliaries who had moved into the jungles of the interior. And it was Z Special units with native troops such as those Makahanap had organized that were keeping the enemy from establishing fortifications inside British or Dutch Borneo.
Even after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese emperor had surrendered, some Japanese forces in Borneo did not cease hostilities. In the British state of North Borneo, Japanese soldiers were marching a column of British and Australian prisoners of war from the Sandakan prison camp on the island's northeast coast to a Japanese stronghold at Ranau. The column started off from Sandakan with twenty-five hundred POWs, but by mid-August only twenty-eight were left. (A dozen had escaped along the way, of which only a half dozen Aussies survived.) The twenty-eight still in Japanese hands were killed at Ranau more than a week after the war had officially ended.
Farther south, a renegade column of Japanese known as the Fujino Tai (Tai's company) continued to push its way inland, trying to reach the fertile rice fields of the central highlands, where SEMUT 1 had its headquarters. Major Harrisson was unable to convince the AIF Ninth Division to let him keep his operatives in place to deal with this column and protect the inland Dayak villages. The desperate, die-hard Japanese column was taking all the food and food animals in every settlement in its path and leaving famine in its wake.
Harrisson persisted in demanding a chance to rid Borneo of the Fujino Tai, and eventually was able to convince the Ninth Division's new commander to let him keep a couple of Z Special men to join with a few dozen native fighters to surround the column and get it to surrender. The column was one or two days' walk from the Plains of Bah and Bawang when Major Harrisson caught up with it. He accepted Captain Tai's samurai sword on October 28, 1945, and took 340 Japanese soldiers prisoner.
The war in Borneo was finally over. A handful of stranded American airmen, a few local missionaries, a few dozen local guerrilla leaders, a thousand or more local headhunters, a few dozen Australian special operatives, several daredevil Aussie pilots and an eccentric British army major had helped bring to a successful conclusion one of the most extraordinary campaigns of World War II.
Phil Corrin returned home to Los Angeles, went back to college and was soon in the hotel management business, but his memories of the world he had left behind in Borneo kept resurfacing as he faced the "civilized" world and remembered how much there was to admire in people some considered "savages." He researched and wrote a seventy-plus-page manuscript, "In Darkest Borneo." Completed in 1963, it was dedicated to his parents, who had spent long months suffering while he was missing in action; to those of the original crew who didn't return, Tom Coberly, Fred Brennan and Jerry Rosenthal; to the professor at Occidental College who had encouraged him in his research; and finally, "to my friends the Dayaks, may they know peace and happiness forever."
Phil, who died relatively young of lung disease, was not the only survivor who felt compelled to write out a fairly detailed report of his experiences. John Nelson, who had kept in touch with Phil, was instrumental in piecing together Phil's diary, which had been written on scraps of paper while they were in Borneo, turning it into something that could be handed to the squadron's archivist. John went into the construction business in Boise, where he married and had children and stayed involved with veterans' groups. In January 2000, he finished his own manuscript, "World War II: Wildman in Borneo." When he heard that I was planning to write this book, he provided me with every bit of help he could. He died before he could see the fruits of his generosity.
Jim Knoch hitchhiked back to Sacramento after landing at Travis Air Force Base and found strangers living in his family's home. His parents had moved away, too sad to stay in the house that they feared their son would never return to.
Late that night, Jim's girlfriend, Maggie, was lying on a cot on the roof of her family's garage, trying to get some cool air on one of the hottest nights of August. At two in the morning, she decided to go back inside the house to her bedroom and heard a knock at the front door. Her mother, assuming it was her daughter, too sleepy to realize that the front door was unlocked, went to the door, opened it and stepped back, amazed. She shouted out to Maggie, "It's Jimmy Knoch! It's Jimmy!" Maggie shouted out to her mother, "Ma, what are you saying!" But she got up and there he was, so thin—he had lost more than eighty pounds. "It was pitiful to see him like that. We went downstairs to the kitchen and started to make breakfast for him after phoning his parents to say where they could come and get him. He looked like he needed to eat. And he smelled so bad. His sweat smelled of mold, like a steamer trunk that had been left too long in the attic," remembers Maggie. She nonetheless agreed to marry him and share with him his dream of owning a ranch, where he could raise cows and chickens and be his own boss. He was a terrific farmer, inventing new brooding methods for chickens that have now become standard practice, and making everything on his farm work by use of his own two hands and his natural talent. Still a bit misanthropic, he was adored by his wife and kids, and he worked happily on his ranch until the day of his death from cancer in 2003.
Jim avoided reunions of the airmen and never spoke publicly about his adventures, after a local audience didn't believe his story. But he told many stories about the Dayaks of Borneo to his family. He told Maggie, "We're supposed to be civilized and they're savages but they don't beat their wives or rape women or even correct their children under the age of five. There are no orphans or old people left on their own. Everybody takes care of everybody." He mentioned Binum, the "very beautiful woman" who had scrubbed their clothes for them by beating them against a rock in the river. He and Maggie kept up with the Makahanap family, especially the daughter Thea, who visited them often in recent decades before her death in Jakarta of heart disease in 2006.
Dan Illerich was asked to speak to the Presbyterian church of Sacramento, which had sponsored the Boy Scout activities he had taken part in as a child. "They wanted to know if my Eagle Scout training had helped, and I said we hadn't known what to do. The food wasn't easy to find and it was not what we knew to eat. Finally, I said that if it had not been for the Dayaks we would not have survived. I think
they were disappointed to hear that, but it's true." Dan, like Jim and all the others I spoke to, had come home with an enormous respect and liking for the Dayaks and a more questioning approach to Americans' implicit assumptions that everything we did was best.
Dan went back to school, enrolling at the University of Nevada, where many of the students were combat veterans and enjoyed swapping stories with him. They had no trouble believing his tales of Borneo. Dan reenlisted in the Air Force Reserve and was given a reserve commission as a second lieutenant in June 1946. Then he went into the active service and retired as a lieutenant colonel; he is still active in veterans' groups. He stayed close to Jim Knoch and maintains close ties to a number of the SEMUT 1 men, especially his fellow radioman Bob Long. Major Harrisson made good on his private vow to get recognition for his favorite Yank: Dan was awarded the British Empire Medal for his service to SEMUT 1.
Eddy Haviland, after a postwar baccalaureate from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and a law degree from the University of Baltimore, became a lawyer and eventually made a career with the Social Security Administration in Baltimore. Thus, he fulfilled his dream of having a desk job and only going out of doors to play golf. He married and had five children. He had never spoken much of his time in Borneo until he recorded his recollections on tape shortly before he died of cancer in 1994, so that his grandchildren might someday know his story. After he came back from the war, he visited his friend John Nelson for a couple of weeks in Boise. He later said, "I always regret that we didn't stay close together and I haven't talked to him since."
The Airmen and the Headhunters Page 23