Lun Dayeh (also Lundayeh or Lun Daya; also formerly known as Southern Murut)—Collection of tribes (or a member thereof) that live in the upper reaches of what in 1944 was Dutch Borneo and is now the eastern district of Indonesian Kalimantan, and in neighboring upland areas of British North Borneo (now the Malaysian state of Sabah) and Sarawak (also now part of Malaysia, where the Lun Dayeh people are now usually called Lun Bawang and used to be called Murut). The Lun Dayeh, like the other upriver people of inland Borneo, were head-hunters, as part of their animistic religion, until around 1930 when the various foreign governments enforced a ban on the practice. In 1944, those Lun Dayeh who were not still animist were almost all Christian evangelical. They retained their traditional social structure, which had a strong leadership role for an inherited aristocracy, presided over by the longhouse headman. Most Lun Dayeh lived in mountainous areas, where swidden ("slash-and-burn") hill-rice cultivation was the rule. Rice was the staple crop, supplemented by some fruit and some vegetable farming, some domestic food animals (pigs, chickens, goats, water buffalo), river fish (caught in fish traps or by tuba-root poison), and the hunting and gathering of game (wild boar, deer and birds, chiefly) and wild fruits and vegetables. Subgroups of the Lun Dayeh included, inter alia, the Kelabit people of Sarawak, the Lun Bawang of Sarawak and, more distantly related, the Tagal of British North Borneo.
lun do'—Kelabit equivalent of the Lun Dayeh term lun mebala.
lun mebala—(Lun Dayeh) Literally, "good people," but commonly used to denote the highest class in Lun Dayeh society, those born into the aristocracy.
Malay—When referring to a person, in a Borneo context, it usually means a coastal native Bornean who identifies himself as Muslim and who follows more or less the same traditions as do Malays of the Malay Peninsula. It also means a Muslim Malay speaker from anywhere in the Malayo-Indonesian archipelago. When referring to the language, Malay is the Malayo-Polynesian lingua franca of Malaysia and Indonesia, where it has been spoken and has a written literature going back to the fourteenth century, if not earlier. Malay forms the basis of the official national language of Malaysia, bahasa Malayu, or bahasa Malaysia, and of Indonesia, bahasa Indonesia, and is also the official language of the Sultanate of Brunei and is one of the official languages of Singapore.
Malaya—Former name for West Malaysia (i.e., the Malay peninsula).
Malaysia—Present name for a country consisting of Malaya (the Malay peninsula) and the East Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah.
mandau—(Lun Dayeh) Machetelike sword used for everything from hacking away foliage to lopping off heads. The Malay word is parang.
mandi—Malay word for a bath in which unheated water is kept in a tank (sometimes with a faucet to refill it), from which the bather scoops water to pour over the body; the poured water drains out through a hole in the floor. The word is also used to denote the room where such a bath is located. When used as a verb, it means "to bathe," including in the river, and sometimes means to swim.
Menado—Also Manado; a city on the northern tip of the Celebes main island, with a big Christian population. William and Maria Mongan and the four Eurasian Netherland East Indies soldiers came from there.
Mentarang—District in northeast Borneo named for the river that is the main artery connecting Long Berang to Malinau, the capital of the prefecture that included the Mentarang and Krayan districts. From Malinau eastward toward the sea, the river's name changes to the Sesayap.
the Moluccas—Former name of the province of Maluku, the Indonesian island group east of the former Celebes.
North Borneo—The British protected state in northeast Borneo that is now the East Malaysian state of Sabah. It was known from 1946 to 1963 as British North Borneo.
oe—The Dutch spelling for the diphthong written in English or Malay as "u" (e.g., the Dutch spelling of Lembudut is Lemboedoet).
Pa'—(Lun Dayeh/Kelabit) Stream or secondary river; thus, the Pa' Paru is the Paru tributary of the Mentarang River. Also sometimes used to denote a village along that stream: e.g., Pa' Trap. (The apostrophe stands for the sound of a glottal stop.)
pangeran—(Lun Dayeh) Chief, appointed by the Dutch government as head of an ethnic group for a certain area. The word is derived from a Brunei noble title, pangiran. In Sarawak the word used for this position, as conferred by the Sarawak government, is penghulu. (Major Harrisson insisted on addressing Dutch-appointed Lun Dayeh chiefs by the Sarawak title.)
parang—(Malay) Machetelike sword the Lun Dayeh call a mandau.
penghulu—(Malay) Sarawak term for a chief responsible to the government for a non-Malay indigenous ethnic group or groups of a specific area or groups of longhouses. See pangeran.
perahu—(Malay) Also prau. Canoelike longboat, made from a dugout tree trunk with additional sideboards lashed to the hull to keep water from swamping it. A perahu would sometimes have ten or more paddlers and was light enough to be portaged past rapids.
Portuguese Timor—Eastern half of the island of Timor, now called East Timor.
Sabah—A state of East Malaysia; current name for the former (British) North Borneo.
Sangir—Main island of the Sangir group in the northern part of the Celebes. With a predominantly Christian population, it was the birthplace of William and Theresia Makahanap and of Aris Dumat.
SEMUT 1—Name of the first of four Australian Z Special Operations units that carried out intelligence operations and guerrilla warfare in Borneo, beginning in March 1945. The name comes from the Malay word semut, meaning "ant." The correct pronunciation is "smoot," to rhyme with "soot," though many of the foreign operatives pronounced it "see-moot."
Siam—Former name of the Kingdom of Thailand.
sulap—(Malay) Shed, hut or lean-to.
tafa—(Lun Dayeh; the Kelabit term is kawang) A swathe cut through the brush on a mountaintop, to make an open, squared-off space, usually done as part of the funerary rites in honor of a nobleman.
taicho—(Japanese) Chief military officer.
towkay—(Southeast Asian pidgin) Chinese trader, businessman or shopkeeper.
Tuan—(Malay) Literally means "Lord," but was commonly used as the title to address a white man in the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, Singapore and Borneo.
Warrant Officer (W.O.)—a rank below commissioned—but above noncommissioned—officer, used in the armed forces of the British Commonwealth.
W/T—Wireless long-distance transmitter and receiver used by the Australian military during World War II.
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A NOTE ON SOURCES
Interviews
The Airmen and the Headhunters is based primarily on taped interviews with the survivors. Five of the eleven airmen were alive when I began my research: Tom Capin, Dan Illerich, James Knoch and John Nelson (all USAAF) and Robert John Graham, USNR. (As I write this, only Dan survives.) I interviewed them all, some of them several times, over a ten-year period, and they generously provided photos, letters, newspaper clippings and memorabilia. I also was given the transcripts of interviews conducted by others of Tom Capin, Phil Corrin, Eddy Haviland, Jim Knoch and Dan Illerich. I interviewed Betty Capin as a wife and widow, and she and widows Jean Corrin Morris, Maggie Knoch, Janet Graham and Ann Haviland were all enormously responsive to my questions, and gave me new facts, insights and materials.
To get the Borneans' viewpoint, I asked William Makahanap's daughter, Dorothea "Thea" Lasut, to go to Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan) from Jakarta in 2000, at my expense. She interviewed many of the Lun Dayeh participants in the story and their next of kin, and former students of Makahanap as well as the Makanahaps' adopted son Christiaan (also known as Mugi) and his family. I was in Indonesian Borneo in 2003 and interviewed mostly the same people.
The Borneans Thea and/or I interviewed include:
Binum Bayo (widow of Pastor Yakal Bangau). Binum danced on the rock in front of the Presswood house; she now lives in Tanjung Lapang.
Yohan Pangeran (son of Pangeran Lagan), who li
ves in Malinau. He had the bombardier wings that Phil had given his father.
Christiaan Makahanap and his wife/widow Kafit (he is now dead but she resides in Tanjung Lapang). Yesley Makahanap, son of Kafit and Christiaan (Mugi), now living in Tanjung Lapang.
Buing Udan (who lives in Pulau Sapi). Buing Udan is the son of Asing (or Yasin) Buing, who followed the Yanks when they fled from the Malay messengers who brought the letter. Buing Udan, himself, was a young assistant pastor in Long Sempayang in 1945; when the time came to attack the Japanese on the Krayan River, he could not bear to kill them, because he had heard that one of them was a Christian.
Pastor Soleman Tebari, retired Kemah Injil pastor, now in Tanjung Lapang. He fought alongside the N.E.I. soldiers Sualang, Kusoy, Bolong and Maulker and knew Rev. John Willfinger.
Pastor Samuel Basar (son-in-law of Soleman Tebari), now living in Pulau Sapi.
Bapak Barnabas Baru, retired Kemah Injil pastor, now living in Tarakan, and his wife.
Ganit Sakay (Pangeran Lagan's widow).
Litun Pangeran (Pangeran Lagan's eldest son), now living in Pelita Kanaan.
Daniel Lagan Lalung, Makahanap's best student and one of the children jailed by the Japanese in Malinau, now residing in Pelita Kanaan.
Salama Lalung, one of Makahanap's girl students, now living in Tanjung Lapang.
Yari Murang, a boy student of Makahanap's, now living in Tanjung Lapang.
Malai, a student of Makahanap's, who sent his daughter to meet me, living in Tanjung Lapang.
Yudan Ngelo, a student of Makahanap's, living in Tanjung Lapang.
Mrs. Semong Soma, now living in Tarakan. She is of the Kenyah tribe and is the wife of knowledgeable Kemah Injil pastor Semong Soma, but she did not know Makahanap personally.
These interviews in 2000 and 2003 were conducted in Indonesian, and most were taped, transcribed and translated into English by Thea and me, though parts of some interviews did not get onto the tapes and appear only in my notes or my recollection. I also, of course, interviewed Thea and her sister Emma Makahanap when they stayed with me in Washington in 2000, and Thea's son Stefan Lasut when he traveled with me in Malinau and Tarakan in 2003.
For information on the missionaries, I located and interviewed Ruth Presswood Hutchins, the widow of the Reverend Ernest Presswood, whose house in Long Berang figures prominently in the story. Ruth had been in Malinau and Long Berang with her husband shortly after the war, and told me about the Lun Dayeh as they were in those days. She, with the help of her daughter, Mrs. Moore, also provided me photos from that time and clippings from missionary publications, including articles by or about missionaries working in the Mentarang and Krayan districts in the 1930s and 1940s.
For the Auster story, I was able to locate Sir Frederick Chaney's widow, Mavis, and son Fred, both of whom I consulted from Perth several times by phone.
Archives, Private Memoirs and Diaries
The Chaneys kindly allowed me to draw from the archives of the oral history program of the Australian National Library. This archive provided me with Sir Frederick's recollections—many years after the events, but in his own words—of the exploits described in this book, exploits that helped him earn the rank of Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. The Australian National Library also provided photocopies of the pages of Chaney's pilot log on the Auster, clearing up some questions about when the American airmen were flown out of Belawit. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, provided the best official information about the Navy Liberator and its crew (reference NWCTM-0505404-TKN) and also provided me the Missing Air Crew Reports (MACRs) for Lieutenant Coberly's, Major Saalfield's and Lieutenant Norris's Liberators.
Unpublished memoirs and diaries proved crucial to establishing various facts. For the Bornean view, I have relied most heavily on William Makahanap's account as told to a notary public: "A Hero in the Jungle of Kalimantan (Borneo)" (Jakarta, Indonesia, June 1981), a copy of which was given me by his daughter Thea.
Chief among the unpublished writings by the airmen are Phil Corrin's "Borneo Log," kept during the time he was stranded in Borneo, and a fuller account, "In Darkest Borneo." Copies of these were given me by Phil's widow, Jean Morris, and by John Nelson. I also made much use of brief memoirs by Dan Illerich and fuller ones by John Nelson given to me by the authors. In December 2005, James Ritchie of Kuching, Sarawak, East Malaysia, gave me a diskette with text from his draft book about Limbang that provided useful information about Lun Dayeh and Lun Bawang customs and history and also gave some new-to-me local accounts of what happened to the crew of the U.S. Navy Liberator that crash-landed near Brunei Bay in January 1945 and the consequences to Borneans of the navy men being there. For the massacre of the five navy airmen who went north toward Kudat, I relied heavily on an unsigned note to Maj. Tom Harrisson by one of his Australian Z Special operatives (in the Australian War Memorial Library in Canberra), written within a few months of the events. To check on facts and dates, I made frequent use of Tom Harrisson's 1945 manuscript diaries, also located at the Australian War Memorial Library.
Reconciling Differences
Learning the sequence of events and their exact dates proved complicated. Although I felt fairly safe relying on William Makahanap's writings to explain his actions and motives, his accounts of the dates and the sequence of events were not very reliable, having been recorded many years later. Surprisingly, his daughter's and my interviews of Borneans in 2000 and 2003, respectively, were often able to clarify the order in which things occurred. The Borneans seemed to remember a great deal, perhaps because they have a strong oral tradition, and undoubtedly because the events were so unusual in their lives. I found that, if a Lun Dayeh knew only a piece of the story, he would tell that part, and he would usually give the provenance of his assertions—himself, his father, village gossip or other sources. When sources disagreed on details, I have tended to give more weight to the Borneans' accounts and, for the airmen's side of the story, to Phil Corrin's "Borneo Log," to Tom Harrisson's manuscript diaries for 1945 and to the letters between Harrisson and Corrin because, in all these written documents, events were recorded at—or close to—the time they took place.
Published Sources
Published material is understandably scarce. The most useful to me was my own book, The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999; London: Aurum Press, 2002, 2nd ed. 2003; and, in French, Le Dernier des Derniers: Toulouse: Octarès, 2005), because, having originally planned for the airmen's story to be included in that book, I did much of the research on it then—the interviews of Kelabit, for example. Other useful published sources (in alphabetical order) were:
Bala, Poline. Changing Borders and Identities in the Kelabit Highlands. Dayak Studies Contemporary Society, no. 1. Kuching, Malaysia: University of Malaysia Sarawak, Institute of East Asia Studies, 2002.
Baldwin, R. E., and T. W. McGarry. Last Hope: The Blood Chit Story. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 1997.
Courtney, G. B. Silent Feet: The History of "Z" Special Operations 1942–1945. Melbourne, Australia: McPherson's Printing Group, 1993.
Crain, Jay B. "The Lun Dayeh." In World Within: The Ethnic Groups of Borneo, edited by Victor T. King, 160–184. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: S. Abdul Majeed & Co., 1993.
Dynes, Phil. Leyburn's Liberators and Those Lonely Special Duties Air Operations. Sandgate NSW, Australia: Hinchcliffe Printing Services, 1999.
Gerry, Allen [pseud. of a Navy Liberator pilot, USNR (ret.), from VPB 101]. Who's a Hero? Port Townsend, WA, privately printed, 1992.
Hall, Maxwell. Kinabalu Guerrillas. Jesselton: Borneo Literature Bureau, 1962.
Hamilton, Bob. Pacific Warbird: Coming of Age in World War II. Philadelphia: Xlibris, 1999. http://www.xlibris.com/bookstore/ bookdisplay.asp?bookid=213 (accessed April 6, 2007).
Harrisson, Tom. World Within. London: Cresset Press, 1959.
Hoare,
Alison. "Food Resources and Changing Patterns of Resource Use among the Lundayeh of the Ulu Padas, Sabah." Borneo Research Bulletin 34: 94–119, 2002.
Horton, Dick. Ring of Fire. London: Leo Cooper/Secker and Warburg, 1983.
Janowski, Monica. "The Forest, Source of Life: The Kelabit of Sarawak." BM Occasional Paper 143. London/Kuching: British Museum/Sarawak Museum, 2003.
Klokke, A. H., ed. and trans. Fishing, Hunting and Headhunting in the Former Culture of the Ngaju Dayak in Central Kalimantan. Borneo Research Council Monograph Series, no. 8. Borneo Research Council, 2005.
Long, Bob, ed. "Z" Special Unit's Secret War: Operation SEMUT 1: Soldiering with the Headhunters of Borneo. Hornsby, New South Wales: Australian Print Group, Maryborough, Vic./Transpareon Press, 1989.
Long, Gavin. The Final Campaigns. Australia in the War of 1939–1945, Series One: Army VII. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1963. Morrison, Hedda. Sarawak. 2nd ed. Singapore: Donald Moore Gallery, 1965.
Piazzini, Guy. The Children of Lilith: A French Exploration into the Up-river Country of Borneo. Translated by Peter Green. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1960.
Presswood Hutchins, Ruth. No Sacrifice Too Great: The Story of Ernest and Ruth Presswood. Camp Hill, PA: Christian Publications, 1993.
Reece, Bob. Masa Jepun: Sarawak Under the Japanese, 1941–1945. Kuala Lumpur: Sarawak Literary Society [1998?].
"Survival in Borneo." Naval Aviation News, February 1960, 29–31.
Ugaki, Matome. Fading Victory: The Diary of Admiral Matome Ugaki, 1941–1945. Edited by Donald Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991. (See 517–519 for entry for November 16, 1944, in Brunei Bay.)
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