Among the Headhunters

by Robert Lyman

There was loot too. In addition to the leftovers and bartered goods now flooding into Pangsha—not to mention the aluminum and other salvage stripped from the wreck of Flight 12420—Brigadier General Edward Alexander also met Adams’s request for provisions to be dropped to the Nagas to pay them for their protection of the survivors and to buy their continued support on the basis that greed would trump any residual hostility that might otherwise flare into violence and even murder. At noon on Thursday, August 5, the daily C-47 dropped bags of rice for the village, an exercise that came close to rebounding on the survivors, as the bags were dropped by free fall from 200 feet and nearly struck a number of the villagers who had rushed out to ensure that they grabbed them first. The arrival each day of the C-47 from Chabua almost became a problem in itself as villagers scrambled and fought for possession of the ropes, wrapping, and parachutes, which had become prized possessions. The Pangsha elders tried to maintain discipline, but it was an uphill battle. Davies and Sevareid overcame the problem by appointing twenty Naga “retrievers,” giving them armbands and rewarding them with cotton parachute cloth at the end of each drop. The survivors didn’t complain about the extent of the largesse that their comrades at Chabua loaded into the C-47 each day. There was clearly a degree of guesswork at the air base about each load. What would be useful either to the survivors or the villagers? Two large boxes of tea had no use to the Nagas, so the tea was used as a rather fragrant form of bedding, but no rationale could be found for the three and a half pairs of socks, two pairs of underpants, and 110 undershirts that arrived that day. It looked as if the Chabua quartermaster was having a clear-out. One of the many items dropped on the men that astonished Jack Davies was canned water—American drinking water canned somewhere in the United States. It was a nice thought but entirely inappropriate in what must have been one of the wettest parts of the world. “Never mind that it was the monsoon season, that we were camped 100 yards from a sparkling mountain stream, which flowed into a cascading river at the bottom of the valley. I assume that the rescue routine prescribed dumping American water on American boys downed anywhere in the world.”

  Each day that passed enabled the survivors gradually to relax about their hosts’ intentions. Curious children became a feature of the camp, watching their guests’ every move. Jack Davies recalled waking every morning to the studied observation of “a squatting Naga or two intently watching me gather my wits. From dawn to dusk we were under observation, objects of endless wonderment.” The children particularly enjoyed listening to the strange sounds of music on Oswalt’s radio receiver, broadcast all the way from another world—San Francisco. Oswalt’s was a sorry task, as during the days of their sojourn in Pangsha he heard the desperate calls from a number of aircraft going down (most with no survivors) somewhere over the Hump.

  Flickinger was by this stage running daily surgeries for the villagers. Many suffered from ulcerated sores, which they allowed Flickinger to treat with sulfanilamide powder, an early antibiotic powder in widespread use by US forces in the period before penicillin went into mass production. This appeared to work spectacularly well, and “sulfa” tablets were also given for intestinal complaints. Jack Davies noted, however, that Flickinger was allowed to treat only “men, boys, and infants. Even in illness the women were kept away from us.”

  All the while pieces of baggage thrown from Flight 12420 during the desperate attempt to lose weight when the port engine failed were brought in, including Jack Davies’s briefcase, with its contents miraculously intact. During the air drop on August 5 a copy of instructions regarding the rescue party was also dropped to keep the survivors informed about the progress of events. It read:

  [Rescue] party, led by Lieutenant LaBonte of radio air-warning station, will proceed to Mokokchung. Here large party will form and start for scene of wreck. Porters and guards will be ready and have been arranged for. Mr. Adams, accompanied by Lt. LaBonte, will lead rescue party. Meantime, thirty guards have started to stranded party for protective purposes if necessary. Coolies to carry stretcher cases, if any, will be available. Trip in and out from Mokokchung will require between two and three weeks. Advisable to put a plane or two a day over the stranded party for moral effect on natives and to pick up messages. Two thousand silver rupees have been furnished Mr. Adams. One half-ton of salt should be dropped on village where stranded party is as reward to Nagas.

  On August 5 a pig was slaughtered for their guests by the villagers, and the following day, despite relentless rain and cloud that prevented an air drop, a young mithan bull was hauled reluctantly into the encampment, bellowing nervously as if it understood its fate. It was slaughtered after some ceremony by the Nagas, and Don Flickinger then proceeded to skin and gut the carcass expertly. It was the cause for a joint celebration. Sevareid recorded in his diary:

  Our camp given two quarters. Vast audience, festive spirit. Natives bring in two bamboo poles, tie bull’s hoof to one pole, and after another long speech thrust it upright in ground. Then Colonel [Flickinger] asked plant second pole, tying one our hoofs to it. Flick tries make speech: “We who came to you from skies . . . oh, hell, let’s sing them a song.” We gathered and sang “I Been Working on the Railroad,” “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and as afterthought the national anthem. They listened solemnly, much impressed. A gaudy ceremonial spear with dyed clusters of bright red hair on shaft stuck upright before camp. We now appear to be officially friends by treaty. Feel much more secure.

  During the festivities, they suddenly found another cause for celebration. Corporal Basil Lemmon came limping in, his arms around two Ponyo men. He was exhausted. Only after a day or so of rest was he able to tell his story. Coming down alone, he had been fearful of being in territory occupied by the Japanese and so avoided contact with humans. He had no idea where he was or of how to survive in such a hostile environment. Without food, shelter, or protection from either insects during the day or the freezing elements at night, he stumbled into a Ponyo field shelter and was found there by men working in the maize fields. He was kindly treated, warmed by a fire, fed with rice, and carried the three miles or so to Pangsha.

  14

  THE SAHIB OF MOKOKCHUNG

  As each day passed the men gradually learned more of the efforts being made to rescue them. On Saturday, April 7, they received another typewritten note from McKelway stating that the rescue party, traveling overland from Mokokchung, would arrive on or about August 15. Sevareid wondered about the guards dispatched for “protective purposes,” not suspecting that, under Sangbah’s control, they were already in place. Sangbah ordered that new shelters be built in good time to prepare for the arrival of what looked likely to be a large rescue party. On Monday, August 9—a full week after the crash—a number of new faces joined the encampment, settling in with Chingmak and Sangbah and disdaining the Pangsha Nagas. One distinctive member of this group wore a leopard skin, obviously the prize of a previous encounter in the wilderness that denoted his prowess as a hunter. Unknown to the men, this was Tangbang, Sangbah’s brother, who delighted in demonstrating his skill with the crossbow. It was a powerful weapon, its foot-long arrow astonishingly accurate out to seventy-five feet and so powerful that it required the user to lie on his back and cock it with his feet. Tangbang had been managing the “protective” party along the Langnyu River, positioned there to act as an early warning of an enemy approach. The Japanese were as close as three days’ march away in Burma; if they found out about the survivors and determined to pursue them, the Nagas would have very early knowledge of their approach.

  Otherwise, life settled into something of a routine. It could even have been enjoyable if it weren’t for the fleas that plagued some of the men at night, the endless rain, and the nightly temperature drop. On August 9, in a letter to his wife, Jack Davies captured something of the situation:

  It is afternoon and it is raining, as it does most of the time, for this is monsoon season. I am sitting on a piece of a parachute on a blanket on a ground sheet on the gr
ound and leaning against a sapling post which forms one of the uprights to our palm and weed thatched hut. I can hear the stream 100 yards back of me rushing down the steep side of the mountain. Across the valley strata of lndia-silk mist are drifting along the face of the opposite slope, whose peaks are lost in the pale gray overcast. Duncan [Lee] is sitting opposite me with one shoe off and one shoe on reflectively scratching his leg. Eric [Sevareid] lies rolled up in a blanket fast asleep at the other end of our nine-man basha.

  One night, under a clear, cold moonlit sky, the men sat around the campfire singing songs from home. “At such moments,” Sevareid admitted, “I love it here, wouldn’t be elsewhere.” The place was beautiful and atmospheric. Despite their predicament, the men felt that they were among friends. “Layers of white mist would creep over the dark hills like glaciers in motion, and once at midnight we were transfixed by the sight of a perfect rainbow by moonlight.” Feeling something of a fraud, as he hadn’t stepped inside a church for years, Sevareid led the “Church Parade” on Sunday, April 8, fashioning it as a memorial service for Charles Felix, who was now known, since the rescue of Lemmon, to have been the only casualty of Flight 12420.

  On one occasion a high-flying Japanese reconnaissance plane flew overhead; on another a flight of what they thought were Zeros went racing down the valley. The survivors’ obsession with their own predicament didn’t allow them to consider that the Japanese would not be interested in them: with the massive American effort along the Brahmaputra and the Ledo Road, the Japanese had bigger fish to fry, but the flights nevertheless caused them some anxiety. A further cause of anxiety was an article in the Statesman, published in New Delhi, that was dropped to them. It described their predicament and mentioned some of them—including Sevareid—by name. If the Japanese were close by and looking out for downed fliers, this was a security breach of an entirely unnecessary kind. A slit trench was dug so that if they were attacked, Oswalt at least would be protected from bomb blasts. A message from Brigadier General Alexander at Chabua asked them to keep an eye out for Japanese activity, but the truth was that there was precious little to see, hidden away as they were in this mountain vastness. The closest Japanese presence to Pangsha was at the Naga village of Khamti, thirty-eight miles as the crow flew to the southeast on the Chindwin. A number of scattered villages lay in between, but Japanese patrols from the Eighteenth Division rarely ventured into these hills. A determined patrol, with Naga help, would take three days to cross the hills to reach the survivors. Flickinger nevertheless got the men to rehearse preparations for an attack.

  When the weather allowed, the daily air drop began to equip the survivors for the next stage of their journey: the strenuous march over the mountains. Socks and boots swung down under cotton parachutes—silk was too scarce to use for the supply bundles—and although the ’chutes worked reasonably well, a number of Naga young men were nearly injured by these loads, which fell unexpectedly faster than those attached to their silken cousins. Flickinger, to the great amusement of the watching Nagas, tried to organize calisthenics for the men in an attempt to prepare them physically for the long march to come. To relieve any latent boredom he also organized a spear-throwing contest with the Pangsha men. Amazingly, Richard Passey turned out to be an athlete of note (a ski champion in his native Utah, Sevareid believed) and very nearly won the contest, almost beating the Pangsha warriors at their own game. Satisfactorily, for political reasons at least, a chuckling Naga won and scuttled away with his prize—three tin cans—clutched to his chest.

  Sevareid observed that they had by now been able to identify a range of personalities among the Pangsha Nagas. Most, he considered, were “very friendly, laugh loudly, love practical jokes.” He was particularly struck by the man they all called “Moon-sang,” whose child Flickinger was treating with antibiotics. He clearly was a leader who generated considerable respect in the village. Sevareid described him as a man with a cultivated face and “expressive, intelligent eyes.” It would have been no surprise to Sevareid to learn that this was the man who had led Pangsha for many years to head-hunting glory. He was not intimidated by the white men, merely intrigued by the power of their machinery, the efficacy of their medicine, their determination of purpose, and their self-confident representation of a new and extraordinary world outside the borders of Pangsha’s self-contained green kingdom. As a man who knew about power, he was impressed with that which these men epitomized: the masses of material goods that fell almost daily from the sky; the skill of the hands that had so lovingly and perfectly shaped the great silver kepruos in the sky (even if they were occasionally to crash, which signified only that, great as these men were, they were not infallible); and their obvious unity of purpose.

  Mongsen was an intelligent, inquisitive, and pragmatic man. He wanted to learn about the outside world, one that had forced itself on him so astonishingly six years before. Before then stories of the white man, of guns, of medicine, and of the trappings of civilization that had washed into the far reaches of Assam in the late nineteenth century had been merely apocryphal: heard and talked about but never seen. The extraordinary effort that the white men in the sky were making to sustain the survivors on the ground and the quick arrival of Chingmak and the Chingmei Nagas, obviously under instruction from the sahib of Mokokchung, demonstrated to him that he and his fellow villagers were spectators in a much bigger and fascinating story. He was convinced, correctly, that his family and the wider tribe were honorable participants in this narrative by virtue of the care they had provided for their uninvited but welcome guests and their obedience to the instructions he had received months before to protect—rather than to behead—any parachutists who floated down from the skies. He was content that this should be so. Quietly and patiently, Mongsen awaited the arrival of the sahib of Mokokchung, whom he had last had cause to meet, in different circumstances, in 1939.

  Then, without warning, as Friday, August 13, was drawing to a close, after nearly fourteen days in the wilderness (and two days before they had been told to expect deliverance), the noise of a large approaching group of Nagas, made distinctive by the cadenced chant of their marching song, could be heard rising and falling in the far distance, penetrating across the valley and through the low-hanging mist to the ears of the startled survivors. The noise grew gradually louder. The survivors gathered together and stood in quiet expectation. Out of the valley emerged their deliverers, climbing strongly and purposefully, their war chant announcing their arrival with gusto and immense pride in their authority and self-evident power. Sixty Naga warriors in their native accouterments, but brandishing ancient shotguns, led a train of forty Naga porters carrying their distinctive matted conical packs on their backs. At their head, in a blue polo-necked shirt, long, dark blue flannel shorts, and heavy brogue walking shoes, carrying a thin bamboo cane, was the sahib of Mokokchung himself. It was at once impressive and humbling. The chanting died down, and all was momentary silence. Even the chattering Pangsha children stood still, hushed by the spectacle before them, drinking in a scene of wonderment. It was another Livingstonian moment. But it didn’t last long. With a splurge of self-conscious energy the 100-strong column spilled into the survivors’ encampment, taking over and asserting their authority noisily and pompously.

  Sevareid, for once in his life, had nothing to say. Standing in front of him was a slim, fair-haired young man, quiet and calm in demeanor, who was “king of these dark and savage hills.” He had a natural authority, derived as much by his calm intelligence as by his position as the emissary of the king-emperor and the small army he had brought with him. “Adams was unforgettable,” he was to tell Reader’s Digest in 1944. “Soft-spoken and with a genuine Oxford accent, he came with savage guards, with scores of coolies, with peppermints and a chess set. He had the air of one dropping in for tea. He was the ‘sahib of Mokokchung’ whom Sangbah had often mentioned to us in reverential terms as the real king of these wild hills.” Sevareid, for all his contempt for the British Empi
re and his disregard for British colonialism, could not but wonder at a system that was able to transplant a young man from the fields and villages of Sussex, via the University of Cambridge, into a situation where he was responsible for administering life on the edge of the world. It was almost surreal, but in fact very real.

  With Adams came a handful of emissaries of the other great empire to which most of the survivors themselves belonged, the United States of America. These were men who were part of the USAAF’s aircraft warning scheme in the Naga Hills far to the south of the Patkoi Hills a hundred miles east of Kohima, which watched over the Chindwin for Japanese aircraft en route to Allied targets farther north. Lieutenant Andrew “Buddy” LaBonte had come with a radio, with which the survivors for the first time could talk to the world they had left behind on August 2. He was accompanied by Staff Sergeant John Lee DeChaine.a These men were already vastly experienced in looking after themselves in the Naga-inhabited hills above the Chindwin (albeit in territory that was on friendly terms with the British administrators), having been part of the aircraft warning unit since it had been established in late 1942. Adams’s Mokokchung-based factotum, Emlong, who had accompanied the first expedition in 1936, was described by Sevareid as a potbellied and powerful man “who wore a leopard skin, spoke a few words of English, and was a famous tiger hunter.” The Naga guards were mercenaries recruited from the Konyak people in the villages close to Mokokchung; most were desperate for a piece of martial glory. They all knew, of course, of the previous expeditions to these parts and wanted to be part of the opportunity to demonstrate their superiority over those distant “savages” in the Patkoi Hills. Managing them was going to be a task in itself. Unlike the situation in 1936, when a full company of the Assam Rifles was able to accompany Mills and Fürer-Haimendorf, no disciplined troops were available in 1943. The Assam Rifles were scattered across the eastern Naga Hills, supporting the Assam Regiment in protecting the approaches to India from the Japanese across the Chindwin in Burma. Eager but relatively ill-disciplined bands of young Naga men recruited from the western hills for the duration of the expedition would have to suffice.b