Oppose Any Foe

by Mark Moyar

  Knowing that Americans could not pass for natives of Burma, Eifler and his staff decided to recruit Burmese personnel to produce the prescribed booms in the jungle. Detachment 101 men fanned out to refugee camps and army installations in India to find men of Burmese or Anglo-Burmese descent. Eifler set up a training base on the Assam Tea Estate, a large plantation near the Indian town of Nazira. Fearing that the Japanese had spies in the area, Detachment 101 spread rumors that the Americans were using the plantation to conduct research on malaria.

  Eifler organized the recruits into six groups and trained all of them for long-range penetration operations. The amount of time required to recruit and train the saboteurs prevented Eifler from meeting Stilwell’s ninety-day deadline; the groups would not set off for the Burmese jungle until February 1943. Burma’s western jungles were too dense and expansive to permit overland marches from India to Burma, so agents would have to be inserted and resupplied by sea or air.

  Five of the six groups were to go down in flames. One fell into Japanese hands as soon as it landed, its whereabouts divulged to the Japanese by locals of Shan ethnicity who had seen its parachutes floating down from the sky. Japanese interrogators tortured the would-be saboteurs and then executed them. Another group landed without its equipment as a result of a ten-second delay in the dropping of the equipment chutes, and both it and the team sent to rescue it were wiped out by the Japanese. Team REX, which landed by parachute near Rangoon, disappeared and was never heard from again.

  Eifler personally accompanied the team assigned for insertion near the Taungup Pass, a critical chokepoint in the Arakan Yoma Mountains of southwestern Burma. Vessels of the Royal Indian Navy carried the infiltrators across the Bay of Bengal to the Burmese coast. At the beach where they intended to land, they sighted a Japanese patrol boat and Japanese shore patrols, so Eifler directed them to move farther along the shoreline to find an undefended stretch. Pressure mounted as daylight approached, for the landing party needed to get ashore before sunup if it wished to evade Japanese air patrols.

  Near dawn, they found a section of the coast that appeared to be undefended. High swells thundered into the wall of rocks that formed the coastline, sending plumes of white foam jetting into the air. Eifler instructed the Burmese team members to swim ashore through a break in the rocks, with the first man tying a rope around his waist for the others to use as a guide. The spectacle of big waves smacking the rocks, however, had convinced the Burmese that the task was entirely too dangerous. They refused to go.

  At this point, Eifler could have taken the whole entourage back to port, returning another night to find a more auspicious location. But, like many of his American colleagues, he held the opinion that an officer should not order an action that he was unwilling to undertake himself. Looping the rope around his torso, Eifler jumped into the sea and swam toward the shore. His huge arms churning through the water like propellers, he crossed two reefs and passed through a gap in the rocks unscathed before reaching land. Sheepishly, the Burmese operators followed the rope to the shore. Within fifteen minutes, the entire Burmese team was on land, along with 1,500 pounds of supplies.

  Eifler shook the hands of the team members one at a time, warning each man to avoid getting captured alive. He then headed back toward the ships of the Indian Navy. On the way, a large wave caught him and threw him headfirst into one of the mammoth rocks, opening a nasty gash on his head. Dazed and unable to hear from one ear, he nonetheless summoned the strength to resume swimming, albeit at a considerably slower pace. The Indian sailors were about to give Eifler up for lost when they saw him clawing through the surf toward the vessel. Grabbing the bleeding hulk like fishermen hauling in an enormous tuna, they were able to pull Eifler onto the deck.

  Back on the shore, the landing force made haste to leave the beach and get under cover before sunup. In the commotion, someone dropped one of the dry-cell batteries that powered the radios. After daybreak, a local fisherman found the battery lying in the sand. The Burmese in this area, like those in many other parts of the country, had supported the Japanese invasion of Burma as liberation from the British, and were happy to help them ward off any intruders, the likes of which might be presaged by so peculiar an object as a dry-cell battery. The fisherman took the battery to the Japanese authorities, who immediately launched a manhunt across the region. The local population joined in the search, and their tips to the Japanese proved critical in finding the would-be saboteurs. The Japanese and their local friends hunted down the Detachment 101 men and killed them in groups of one or two until none were left.

  The only group that did not fail utterly was the one that infiltrated by parachute near Myitkyina in northern Burma. Landing undetected, the group split into three teams and set out to destroy three bridges on roads that fed into a Japanese air base. They planned to blow the bridges simultaneously, in order to achieve maximum surprise. One team, however, blew its charges before the others, triggering alerts at the other two bridges. The Detachment 101 teams at those bridges had to flee with their tasks unfinished. One OSS man was captured, but the others escaped to Fort Hertz, the one British base in Burma that had not fallen to the Japanese.

  These men had survived because the local population did not betray them to the Japanese and instead helped them hide. The residents of this part of Burma, the Kachins, detested the Japanese and were fond of the British, for the British colonial authorities had treated the Kachins well and given them autonomy, in one of the innumerable divide-and-conquer ploys with which the small island nation had come to dominate much of the world. The activities of British and American missionaries had further contributed to the population’s favorable disposition toward English-speaking white men.

  The ancestry of the Kachins could be traced back to Mongol tribes that had migrated from the Himalayas several centuries earlier. Most Kachins lived in the Himalayan foothills, their bamboo huts perched on hilltops to afford maximum protection against the ravenous tigers that stalked the Kachin territories. Farming for subsistence, the Kachins grew rice, beans, and corn and raised chickens and pigs. All adult males carried a sharp sword called a dah, which they decorated with jewels and other ornaments. Their reputation as mighty warriors owed not only to their prowess with weapons and their passion for battle but also to their mastery of the jungle. Their ability to find their way through dense flora and detect the presence of others from long distances would astound their American friends and Japanese foes, for whom the jungle was merely an endless sea of green.

  After the Japanese had driven the British from Burma, they attempted to subdue the Kachins by despoiling the small number of Kachin villages in the lowlands. Japanese soldiers burned down huts, skinned men alive, raped women, and castrated boys, in the belief that Kachins who survived the bedlam would pass word of Japanese ferocity to their highland brethren and advise them to bow to Japan’s will. The highland Kachins chose instead to take up arms against the Japanese. Some Kachin communities organized independent guerrilla forces, while others joined units organized by the British. Armed with ancient muzzle-loading flintlocks, along with a number of weapons of more recent vintage, including Enfield rifles, Bren guns, and shotguns, the Kachins sprang out of nowhere to ambush Japanese columns on jungle trails, then melted into the jungle as invisibly as they had come.

  The more Eifler and Detachment 101 learned about the Kachins, the more they wanted to sponsor a Kachin guerrilla force. In the summer of 1943, word reached the Americans of a Kachin leader in the snowcapped Kumon Mountains named Zhing Htaw Naw, who was reputed to have inflicted fearsome losses on Japanese forces. At the end of August, Captain Vincent L. Curl left Fort Hertz on an expedition to find Zhing Htaw Naw, taking with him nine OSS men, several Kachin guides, and a group of porters who had agreed to haul heavy loads in exchange for opium.

  Curl’s band trekked through undulating foothills and valleys toward the Kumon range, obtaining directions from Kachin travelers as they went. It took a month to reach the
place where Zhing Htaw Naw had established his latest headquarters, a village etched high upon the shoulder of a mountain. As the voyagers approached the village, a party of men sallied out to greet them.

  “You are friends, but you cannot see the duwa,” said a young Kachin, using an honorific term for their leader. After the Americans pressed for an explanation, the man said, “The duwa is sick.”

  “I can cure him,” Curl replied. The American officer actually had no idea what afflicted Zhing Htaw Naw, but he hoped that the medical supplies in his pack would contain something to remedy the illness. Persuaded by Curl’s sincerity, the Kachin guides agreed to take him to see Zhing Htaw Naw while Curl’s companions stayed at a nearby camp.

  The man to whom Curl was brought seemed anything but a mighty warrior. Huddled next to a fire, the slight man agonized in a half-conscious stupor. Curl offered Zhing Htaw Naw a greeting in the local tongue, then said in English, “I can help you.”

  Zhing Htaw Naw’s symptoms were consistent with malaria, an illness that Curl knew to be endemic to the area. Removing a bottle of quinine from his backpack, Curl gave a strong dose to the sick man. To induce a sweat, Curl wrapped the patient in a bedroll, fed him warm soup, and kept him near the fire. Soon beads of sweat were trickling down Zhing Htaw Naw’s body as it purged the malarial fever. Then he fell into a peaceful sleep, his head cool and his face serene. Curl lay down nearby and also went to sleep.

  When they awoke the next morning, a reinvigorated Zhing Htaw Naw took an immediate liking to the white man who had exorcised his misery. With the help of an interpreter, he and Curl became fast friends. Eager to join together in fighting the Japanese, they promptly cemented a partnership in which the OSS would equip and supply Kachin guerrillas. Curl radioed Eifler a request for weapons to arm 250 men, and several days later a C-87 Liberator Express showed up to air-drop cases of rifles, shotguns, Tommy guns, and ammunition.

  Word of the new alliance spread across the Kachin lands. Within a few months, the alluring combination of Zhing Htaw Naw’s leadership and American arms induced more than 1,000 more men to volunteer for what the Americans now called the American-Kachin Rangers. Curl and Zhing Htaw Naw established two new forward bases, with an airstrip at each, to which weapons for the new volunteers were flown.

  American and Kachin leaders formed the new recruits into units of fifty to sixty men. The Americans trained the Kachins in the use of the weapons, while Zhing Htaw Naw and his lieutenants provided instruction on guerrilla warfare. The Americans were amazed by the tactical expertise that Zhing Htaw Naw’s men already possessed. Ray Peers likened their painstaking preparation of an ambush site to the work of an architect planning a building. They set up positions in dense foliage without breaking a branch, making a footprint, or providing any other indicator that something was out of the ordinary. In undergrowth where Japanese soldiers were most likely to jump when attacked, the Kachin guerrillas planted bamboo pungyi sticks that had been sharpened with knives and hardened with fire.

  The Americans found the execution of the ambushes to be equally stunning. When a Japanese column entered the kill zone, the guerrillas ambushed it at multiple points simultaneously, their gunfire knocking some men down and causing others to jump into the undergrowth, where they were impaled on the pungyi sticks. If the Japanese were able to counterattack, the Kachins reconcentrated at strongpoints a short distance back, from which they would inflict additional carnage. If any Japanese withstood the mauling and were still capable of attacking, the Kachins withdrew to a prearranged meeting point miles away, employing their superior knowledge of the terrain to lose any pursuing Japanese.

  While Detachment 101’s men in the field were causing the Japanese more trouble than anyone had ever imagined, the unit was suffering from troubles of its own at headquarters. The head injury that Eifler had sustained on the Burmese coast had left him with severe and recurring pain, which he attempted to ease by consuming profuse quantities of alcohol and injecting himself with morphine. The toxic mixture of pain, alcohol, and drugs drove Eifler into bouts of rage and petty tyranny. On one occasion, he grabbed the front of an officer’s shirt, lifted him off the ground, and shook him like a rag doll. To a newly arrived man, he sneered, “What do you do? I can walk seventy-two hours without sleep or drink.” Eifler attempted to resolve heated disputes with other officers by slamming his hand into a table and cleaving it in two.

  Word of Eifler’s behavior eventually reached Donovan. On December 8, 1943, the OSS chief arrived at Eifler’s headquarters to see matters for himself. After speaking with Eifler and others in the headquarters for several hours, Donovan ordered Eifler to return to the United States. In an account published years later, Eifler claimed that Donovan had sent him to the United States temporarily, in order to tell the American people about the successes of Detachment 101, and wanted him to return to Burma afterward. Whether Donovan ever characterized Eifler’s departure as temporary is doubtful, given the lack of corroborating evidence, the fact that Eifler would never return to the unit, and the implausibility of Eifler’s memories of the ensuing events. In Eifler’s retelling, the OSS ultimately chose not to send him back to Burma because it needed him for a series of daring strategic missions, among which were the assassination of Chiang Kai-shek, the abduction of Germany’s leading nuclear scientist, and a submarine invasion of Korea that would be followed by a direct penetration of Japan. In each case, the plans were on the verge of execution when they somehow had to be aborted.

  Following Eifler’s departure, Ray Peers took command of Detachment 101. A native of Stuart, Iowa, Peers differed from Eifler in most every way. One Detachment 101 man explained that if the task were to demolish a building, Peers “would carefully remove each brick and end up with neatly stacked piles, whereas [Eifler] would get a Bull Dozer and level it.” Rather than try to do everything at the same time, as Eifler had done, Peers focused the organization on a few carefully selected tasks in order to perform them with an artisan’s skill. Peers extricated Detachment 101 from the unprofitable business of long-range penetration operations and concentrated on building up the short-range intelligence and guerrilla operations with the Kachins.

  To beef up assistance to the Kachins, Peers inserted more American personnel into Burma. He gave meticulous attention to the selection of Americans for these missions. At first, he assumed that men who had been raised on farms would be the best, owing to their familiarity with outdoor life. Over time, however, he discerned that some city boys could perform quite well, particularly those who had spent time in the unit learning the ropes from others. Peers also found that an individual’s upbringing and boyhood activities were strong predictors of success. “A boy who had stayed with scouting and had attained a high rank, up to Eagle Scout, almost invariably was well equipped for the job,” Peers observed. “On the other hand, the sheltered boy, the mama’s boy, was almost useless until the mama could be taken out of the boy and he could become one of the group. We salvaged several such boys, but under hostile conditions it was very costly in training time and effort.” Peers added, “Another type of individual we learned to treat cautiously were the braggarts. When alone in the thick jungle they tended to become tense and panic. They needed companionship to buoy their spirits.”

  The spectacular battlefield successes of the American-Kachin Rangers caught the attention of Stilwell’s headquarters at Chungking. In early 1944, Stilwell gave Detachment 101 additional equipment and manpower to expand the number of Kachin guerrillas to 3,000. With news of Zhing Htaw Naw’s victories reverberating across the Kachin hill country, Detachment 101 had no trouble raising additional Kachin troops. Stilwell then directed Peers to employ the expanded force in support of a new Allied offensive against Myitkyina, in which Merrill’s Marauders and Chiang Kai-shek’s National Revolutionary Army were to provide the conventional muscle.

  As the offensive unfolded, the American-Kachin Rangers collected information, served as guides for the conventional Allied forces,
and harassed the Japanese. Too lightly equipped to fight toe-to-toe with regular units, they steered clear of the front lines and instead struck in the enemy’s rear areas, where troops were thinly spread in small groups. Flitting through the jungle like phantoms, the Kachins routinely provided advance warning of Japanese troop movements, which enabled the Marauders and the Chinese to counter Japanese thrusts and exploit Japanese weaknesses. Kachin reports on enemy troop locations provided the best information available to the Allied bombers prowling the skies over Myitkyina. Lieutenant Colonel Samuel V. Wilson, the top intelligence officer in Merrill’s Marauders during the offensive, later said that “without the assistance and support of the Kachins, we would have been licked before we even got started.”

  The contributions of the American-Kachin Rangers to the Myitkyina offensive led Stilwell to authorize a further increase in the strength of the Kachin guerrillas, to 10,000. The additional American men he sent to Detachment 101 to undergird the expansion brought the number of Americans in the detachment near 1,000. As the Allies pushed to the south and east during the final year of the war, the Rangers provided their special services to Chinese, British, and American units.