by Robert Lyman
I am not in favor of the whole of the present Control Area being taken up. As villages in the control area get more civilized there comes a time when they realize how far better off and happier the administered villages really are. The outstanding example is the Sangtam villages just to the east of Mokokchung which were first administered in about 1927. . . . At that time they were so poor that they used to work for the Aos during the harvest, and other busy seasons, and in their external relations across the frontier were dominated by the Changs. Now Chare, the largest Sangtam village is one of the chief sources for the supply of rice to Mokokchung Station. Instead of the male population spending half their time on sentry duty they can work in the fields and trade and work in the plains in the cold weather.
The rest of the Sangtam tribe is continually clamoring for administration and accordingly the proposal . . . was submitted in 1939.
In a report of a tour in January 1942 Pawsey made an observation entirely at odds with the one that Sevareid was to make nearly two years later: Nagas in peaceful areas lived healthier and wealthier lives than those in territories dominated by traditional structures of village-by-village control. “What struck me on this as on other tours was the superiority in every way of our administered villages and villages of the trans-frontier people. They are much better nourished and have better physique and they look more contented. It is quite time that Sampure and Longmatrare and the villages in that area were administered. They are continually pressing for this step to be taken.” Pawsey added a caveat by noting that any extension of the Control Area would need to be with the agreement and acquiescence of the people concerned. He didn’t advocate enforced occupation: “I would be strongly opposed to the taking over of areas not fit for administration. For instance if we took over the Chang area we should have to put at least a platoon in the village to preserve peace between the khels who are bitter enemies. Any extension of the administered area should only be with the consent of the people concerned.”
Pawsey’s arguments were based firmly on facts. The title “Control Area” was an embarrassing oxymoron. It should more correctly have been called the “Uncontrollable Area” given the extent of gun-based lawlessness that characterized the sections that were effectively beyond the reach of British retribution. It was the old story: villagers would pay fines for misdemeanors if they had to, but it didn’t make any difference to the tribal way of life, in which head-hunting was an important feature.
One of the problems of this policy for managing the Administered Area, for colonial administrators and Naga villages alike, was how to apply it practically. What could the villages do, or not do? Was all head-hunting banned, or was it just large-scale massacres that were forbidden? Was individual murder allowable but large-scale transgressions not? On January 20, 1936, the subdivisional officer in Mokokchung captured this moral and political dilemma with regard to the Yungya shooting of a Hukpong man: “The transfrontier men of this area would like either to be given a free hand to wage their wars or else to have a clear order from Government that every village which takes a head will be burnt by Government.” This suggestion, of course, hinged on the villages’ expectation of the consequences of committing an infraction against distant rules that were indifferently (it appeared) applied.
Head-hunting had romantic connotations for some Europeans, and the phrase “heads taken” or “taking heads” has the tendency then and now to diminish the moral impact of what was, in plain speaking, murder. In the Administered Area, of course, head-hunting was prohibited by law, and on the whole resources were available to punish perpetrators. But in the Control Area men such as Pawsey and Mills had no choice but to turn a blind eye to murder because there was nothing that they could do about it. All they could do was respond to grievous breaches of regional stability by the sending of punitive expeditions. Some degree of hypocrisy was allowed in this environment. For instance, the “loyal” village of Chingmei was used to enforce Mokokchung’s injunctions against widespread lawlessness while accepting that it could take an occasional head when the situation allowed. Indeed, it seems as if there was official sanction of some head-taking. The reports record an occasion in 1940 when Sangbah, enforcing Mokokchung’s law against Ukha, didn’t receive the fine that Philip Adams had demanded and so took an Ukha head instead. The report noted drily, “Ukha paid rest of the fine.”
On March 27 and May 30, 1943, the troublesome village of Ukha (northeast of Tuensang) attacked two villages in the Control Area, Shakchi and Aghching. Ukha was beaten back on both occasions but used guns in the second attack—expressly forbidden in the Control Area since 1933—and Philip Adams was fearful that both villages would be exterminated. It was certainly not helpful for a large, aggressive, and armed village, friendly with Pangsha, to be allowed untrammeled freedom to exert its will in this manner. Accordingly, on June 26, Pawsey asked for a punitive expedition to be mounted against Ukha. He calculated that this village alone had caused the loss of 279 heads in this troubled area. Shillong refused permission. The village had previously been burned in a punitive expedition in November 1939 because it had joined with Pangsha and others to exterminate the village of Aghching, which had lost ninety-six heads. Guns had been used in this attack, and in 1936 Pangsha had been expressly ordered not to use guns and had taken an oath that it would refrain. Pawsey repeated his request on August 13, 1941, but again it was refused. Ukha was never pacified and continued its local reign of terror for years. In July 1944 Ukha took a head from Tobu, a village three miles south of Ukha, and followed this murder with other raids. Pawsey yet again asked for permission to march on the village but yet again was refused. The situation continued to simmer. On March 24, 1945, it was reported that the transfrontier villages would themselves resume raiding if Ukha was not stopped. Before long the entire village of Tobu had been wiped out and 400 men, women, and children killed. “This dreadful massacre was entirely unnecessary,” recorded Pawsey angrily, “and could have been easily avoided if the constant requests of the Deputy Commissioner and the sub-Divisional Officer to be allowed to interfere had been granted.”
Pawsey continued to argue the case for outlawing head-hunting entirely in the Control Area. On May 30, 1947, he wrote to Philip Adams, now secretary to the governor, “I am assuming that the stony silence which greets most of the proposals submitted to Shillong is the equivalent of non-acceptance. All proposals to extend either the administered or the control area are of course designed solely to establish law and order, the pre-requisite of which is the prohibition of head hunting.” The return of the rescue mission from Pangsha in late August 1943 energized Adams and Pawsey once again to ask Shillong to countenance an extension of the Control Area. Without it there was no way that the British could “stop head hunting, and [they] would be forced to allow the local insecurity that encouraged this practice to fester without check.” It is clear that the colonial administrators were of one mind, but it is also clear that no amount of cajoling would persuade the government of Assam, or of India, to extend its responsibilities even for humanitarian reasons. At the point at which the empire was about to shrink, and to do so rapidly, not even the humanitarian impulses of anthropologically minded colonial administrators would be allowed to expand Britain’s commitments beyond those it already had. Eric Sevareid’s head-hunting friends were on their own.
What became of the participants in these Naga dramas? Philip Mills was appointed adviser to the governor of Assam for tribal areas and states in 1935. He had been awarded the Rivers Memorial Medal the previous year “for anthropological fieldwork among the Nagas” as well as receiving the Gold Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal for “contributions to the study of cultural anthropology in India.” He retired in 1947 at the age of fifty-seven (he had joined in 1913 and served for thirty-four years in India) after suffering increasing ill health due to heart disease and because of repeated exposure to malaria (he had nearly died from the disease in 1924). The following year he began teaching anth
ropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, building up the Department of Cultural Anthropology alongside his old friend Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf until ill health forced his retirement in 1954. He died in 1960.
Charles Pawsey became famous for his involvement in the Battle of Kohima between April and June 1944, for which service he was knighted. All accounts of Pawsey’s contribution to the British victory at Kohima speak of the significant role he played in securing and maintaining Naga support for the British in their struggle against the Japanese. His friend Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf observed that one of the reasons why the Nagas remained loyal to Britain was the popularity of Pawsey and his administrators, men such as Philip Mills. One of the historians of that great battle, Arthur Swinson, remarked, “It is doubtful . . . if the Nagas would have undertaken any of this difficult and dangerous work if it had not been for the extraordinary character of Charles Pawsey, the Deputy Commissioner of Kohima. The Nagas trusted him completely; they knew that in no circumstances whatsoever his word would be broken.” He died in 1972. Philip Adams replaced Mills as secretary to the governor of Assam, Sir Andrew Clow, and remained as secretary to the first governor of Assam, Sir Akbar Hydari, in postindependence India. Bill Archer stayed in India until independence in 1947, after which he became keeper of the Indian section at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He became a noted expert on the subject of Indian art and died in 1979. Following a lifetime in India and Nepal, Dr. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf became professor of anthropology at the SOAS in London. He revisited Pangsha in 1970. Fürer-Haimendorf died, aged eighty-seven, in 1995. Major Bill Williams returned to the Seventh Gurkha Rifles from his secondment to the Assam Rifles in April 1938 and retired to Britain at independence in 1947.
On November 4, 1943, the American press announced that Eric Sevareid had passed through New Delhi en route to the United States after completing his slightly delayed visit to Chungking. He had been in China only a month, time enough for him to be unequivocally persuaded that Stilwell was right. Yunnan under Kuomintang control was a sink of graft and official turpitude in which the only winners were those who had access to US-supplied riches and the losers—the vast majority—wasted away as a result of starvation, neglect, and brazen criminality. Despite the millions of dollars being poured into China by the United States and the hundreds if not thousands of American lives being lost to keep the Kuomintang in the war by the miracle of the Hump and the new Burma Road, millions of neglected Chinese—mostly rural peasants—were dying of starvation, not the product of poor government but rather of deliberate neglect. It was as clear as day to Sevareid that the Communists had won the battle for hearts and minds and would eventually triumph. It was the commonsense view held by most rational observers of the China scene in 1943 and 1944 but not by the armchair strategists and ideologues in Washington, who didn’t have the wit to see beyond the Kuomintang propaganda and their own political (and sometimes financial) self-interest. Sevareid’s suspicions of Kuomintang perfidy were confirmed when, in Kunming, Chiang Kai-shek refused to meet him. His return to the United States offered even greater disappointment. No one in FDR’s administration seemed interested in his conclusions, and a long article that he prepared lies dormant in his archives because the War Department refused to allow anything disparaging of its gallant Chinese allies to make its way past the censor.
Sevareid reported the remainder of the war for CBS, including the Italian and Northwest European campaigns. He went on to become one of the most famous American broadcasters of the twentieth century, commenting nightly on CBS alongside Walter Cronkite before retiring in 1977. He died, aged seventy-nine, in 1992. His account of the war was published in 1946 as Not So Wild a Dream, and Raymond Schroth wrote his biography in 1995. His role as one of Murrow’s boys has been brilliantly documented by Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson.
By contrast, Jack Davies’s diplomatic career was egregiously destroyed by a McCarthy-led witch hunt in 1954, and he was not exonerated until 1969. He was awarded the Medal of Freedom for “exceptional and meritorious service in China and India from March 1942 until December 1944.” This included his involvement in the Pangsha affair. The citation noted that “the passengers on the plane in which he was flying en route from India to China were forced to bail out in territory inhabited only by savages. Mr. Davies’ resourcefulness and leadership were in large measure responsible for the eventual rescue of the party. His conduct during this period was in the highest traditions of the Service.” He died, aged ninety-one, in December 1999.
Captain Duncan Lee never got to meet General Dai Li (who died in an aircraft crash in 1945). Dai Li had the Americans neatly and tightly entangled around his little finger, helped by the egotism of Captain Milton Miles, who resolutely refused to come under any form of in-country authority. Davies always considered Miles a lackey of Dai Li, who used the American for his own nefarious ends—primarily the acquisition of equipment—without actually giving anything of substance in return. In Davies’s view, Miles and SACO, over which he presided, were little more than a state-sponsored smuggling organization, completely subservient to Dai Li, in which American expertise and equipment were subverted to selfish Kuomintang ends without any form of American control. Wild Bill Donovan, Davies concluded, “was unable to bring Miles under control because Mary was both a protégé of Admiral King’s and a captive of Tai Li’s.” He could well have mentioned that Miles was in an entirely different league than Dai Li and had no notion that he was being played like a puppet on a string. Dai Li was able to persuade a gullible Miles to accept his account of what was happening inside China with US training and equipment, and Miles appeared to accept this unverifiable propaganda lock, stock, and barrel. It was clear to those, like Davies, working in China that Dai Li was at the heart of all the intrigue and corruption in Chiang Kai-shek’s court. To his diary on July 6, 1943, Stilwell complained of Dai Li taking “graft” from the management of traffic and vehicles using the Burma Road.
The purpose of Lee’s visit to Chungking, on Donovan’s instructions, was partly to interrogate Dai Li in order to answer the questions that Jack Davies had raised about Miles’s unaccountable operation. It is debatable how much Lee would have got out of Dai Li, had he been able to meet him, given Miles’s protection of his Chinese master and Dai Li’s complete control of information about his operations to the Americans. Lee returned to the United States, where he continued to spy for the Soviet Union until 1945, when fear of exposure and the threat of execution forced him to drop his connections with Moscow and cover his tracks. The revelations to the congressional House Un-American Activities Committee of the ex–Soviet spy Elizabeth Bennett in 1948 (she had turned herself in to the FBI in 1945) made public the claim that Lee worked for Moscow, or had done so during the war. Lee energetically and publicly refuted all accusations of treachery. He was supported throughout by his friends and ex-colleagues, including Donovan, none of whom could envisage this all-American patriot ever doing anything to harm his country. They were wrong. It was only with the 1995 declassification of the Verona Project, a US counterintelligence program, and material subsequently presented by the notebooks of the Soviet Committee for State Security archivist Alexander Vassiliev that the US spy in the OSS, “Koch,” was identified as Lee. He was never indicted for treason, however. He continued to practice law until his retirement in 1974. He died, in Canada, aged seventy-five, in 1988.
Walter Oswalt was killed soon after returning to Chabua, when he died along with Blackie Porter on December 10. Some weeks later William McKenzie found his unarmed plane under Japanese attack. He parachuted to safety and marched out of the jungle for the second time. Harry Neveu died, aged sixty-eight, in 1991. Hugh Wild retired as a general in 1970, following service in Vietnam. He died in 2013 at the age of ninety-four. Buddy LaBonte was awarded the Legion of Merit for his part in the rescue. He died in 1981 at the age of sixty-three. John Lee DeChaine died, aged seventy-eight, in 1996. Don Flicki
nger was not rebuked for ignoring Alexander’s orders not to jump in to administer medical aid to the survivors of Flight 12420. He became a space physician of note, choosing the first American astronauts in 1959 for the Mercury program, which led to the United States’ first orbital flight in 1962. He retained a lifelong interest in parachute rescue, developing aircraft-ejection equipment that included a small supply of oxygen for the initial descent and a barometric-release mechanism to ensure that the parachute didn’t open until it was in air that was thick enough to breathe. He died, aged eighty-nine, in 1997.
Joe Stilwell struggled on, fighting a losing battle against history. His determined protection of what he perceived to be America’s true interests excited the intrigues of those in Chiang Kai-shek’s camp—the Generalissimo included—who clamored both publicly and privately for Stilwell’s dismissal. He survived the intrigues of 1943, however, for a short period of time, and even enjoyed the support of the Generalissimo, particularly leading up to the Cairo conference in November 1943. It wasn’t until 1944 that the reality of China finally hit home among the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. In a strongly worded memorandum from the Joint Chiefs to President Roosevelt, the strategic situation in the CBI theater was laid bare. It was clear that Chiang Kai-shek had managed to deliver nothing of substance in the two and a half years of war apart from what Stilwell had achieved with his Chinese forces; that the Chennault Plan had been an expensive mistake and had achieved none of what had been promised; that the Japanese still roamed at will in eastern China as a result of Chennault’s provocation; and that none of this would have happened if Stilwell’s advice had been taken in the first place. It was a clear vindication of Stilwell’s position and arguments regarding the relative roles of China and the United States in the war. On July 6, 1944, Roosevelt wrote to Chiang Kai-shek, setting out the conclusions reached by the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Stilwell must be appointed to overall command of the Chinese armies. But Roosevelt continued to underestimate the Chinese leader’s ability for dissimulation, and a long period of high-level dialogue ensued, during which lend-lease supplies continued to be poured into China (which Chiang Kai-shek worked feverishly behind the scenes to control). An impasse was finally reached when Chiang Kai-shek refused to deal further with Stilwell and demanded his removal as the price for further cooperation. Roosevelt reluctantly agreed, and Stilwell was recalled on October 18, 1944. He died of stomach cancer in 1946 at the age of sixty-three. His nemesis, Major General Claire Chennault, who helped Chiang Kai-shek to convince President Roosevelt to remove him in 1944, died in 1958 at the age of sixty-four.