Among the Headhunters

by Robert Lyman

  Beth Bootland was lucky enough to escape through Tamu into India with a party of families from Maymyo. It took a Japanese air raid to persuade her husband, Alan, to organize his family’s flight. He gave Beth a revolver with instructions to shoot the children and then herself if the Japanese managed to catch up with them. He told her, “They raped the nurses in Hong Kong and Singapore, and killed them afterwards. You might as well kill yourself straight away. Shoot Ian first, then Keith, Lotte and yourself.” Beth had no doubt that she would have done. “I didn’t fancy being raped by the Japanese,” she thought.

  They were lucky. Their small party made it to Imphal in three weeks in a group of women and children escorted by a couple of Indian policemen. Countless others were not so fortunate. Survivors’ narratives are replete with stories of starving refugees littering the hundreds of miles of trails stretching into India. Stephen Brookes saw things that still haunted him when he was persuaded to write his memoirs sixty years later: “During the weeks and months ahead I was to see hundreds of dead and dying people. I walked over them and sometimes, too exhausted to move, I slept next to them. I saw the dead in grotesque postures, rotting in the mud, the rivers and the jungle. I saw them in ones and piled up in dozens; in family groups and in whole camps. In the end, I became inured to the process of death.”

  Captain Geoffrey Tyson described one of many tragic scenes he saw along the road of death, coming across a slash-and-burn cultivation clearing (jhum) in the jungle:

  The clearing was littered with tumble-down huts, where often whole families stayed and died together. I found the bodies of a mother and child locked in each other’s arms. In another hut, were the remains of another mother who’d died in childbirth, with the child only half-born. In the one jhum more than fifty people had died. Sometimes pious Christians placed little wooden crucifixes in the ground before they died. Others had figures of the Virgin Mary still clutched in their skeleton hands. A soldier had expired wearing his side cap, all his cotton clothing had rotted away, but the woolen cap sat smartly on his grinning skull. Already the ever-destroying jungle had overgrown some of the older huts, covering up the skeletons and reducing them to dust and mold.

  It could have been a metaphor for the death of an old regime and the onset of a new. By the end of May 1942 the Japanese were the new rulers of Burma. When in May 1942 the British and Chinese had been forced back to India, their tails very firmly between their legs, the commander of the British troops, Lieutenant General Bill Slim, had asserted, “We, the Allies, had been outmaneuvered, outfought and outgeneraled.” In Lieutenant General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, who found himself commanding a ragbag of Chinese troops during the retreat, likewise observed in his no-nonsense way, “I claim we got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is humiliating as hell.”

  3

  BANZAI!

  Far below Neveu’s plane as it began its journey over Burma were the feared Japanese, specifically Lieutenant General Shinichi Tanaka’s Eighteenth (Chrysanthemum) Division, the same outfit that had successfully captured Singapore in February 1942. The fighting ability of the Japanese soldier came as a profound shock to American and European troops in late 1941 and 1942. Although there had been many reports over the preceding decades of these troops’ discipline, hardiness, and courage, their brutal professionalism came as an unwelcome surprise when combat was first joined at the start of Japan’s offensive against the American and European colonial possessions in Asia in December 1941. The Japanese troops who invaded Burma were experienced, hardy, and well prepared. The Japanese soldier fought aggressively with a single-minded determination to succeed, repeatedly shaming his less persistent opponents. He tended to despise an enemy who gave up after halfhearted resistance as an unworthy adversary. Every individual Japanese soldier owed allegiance directly to the emperor, whom they believed to be directly descended from the ancient sun goddess. Disobedience, disloyalty, or failure were inconceivable, no matter how bad the situation or hard the circumstances. His daily routine included obeisance to the emperor through a ritual and energetic exclamation of “Banzai!” (“May the emperor live for 10,000 years!”) together with bowing in prayer in the direction of Tokyo. The troops were intensely motivated. The war was widely perceived as a new dawn for Japan. There was a very real sense, sustained over many years by effective militarist propaganda, that the invasion forces were the divine instruments for securing Japan’s destiny. The spiritual purpose and motivation for the troops were overwhelming.

  Although the Japanese were arguably the toughest opponents that American troops—and British, Dutch, and Australian forces, for that matter—have ever had to fight, the almost universal attitude among the Western armies across southeast Asia in 1941 and 1942 was that the Japanese would be a poor enemy, easy to beat. Racism—and thoughtless lies that Western governments told their people about the military defenses and readiness of the region—bred profound ignorance. It was inconceivable to most Americans and Europeans in the Philippines, Malaya, Burma, Dutch East Indies, and Singapore that the Japanese Army represented a real threat to them in a stand-up fight. Most Europeans in the Far East, before the events of late 1941 and early 1942, regarded the Japanese, in the words of one Gurkha, John Cross, as “second-rate soldiers—short sighted, bad shots, afraid of the dark, so short-legged that they could not easily walk over rough ground and whose almond-shaped eyes could not see through bomb sights,” even when there was considerable evidence of something very different from countless army-to-army exchanges over recent years. “We were arrogant about the Japs, we regarded them as coolies,” said another young officer, John Randle. “We thought of them as third rate. My goodness me, we soon changed our tune.” The US military observer in Singapore at the time of the invasion of Malaya described Japanese tactics:

  The Japs show great physical endurance and ability to cross difficult terrain including streams, swamps and jungle. In encounter, leading elements immediately fan out right and left to locate flanks, and attack simultaneously with the main body when it comes up. Their attitude is consistently aggressive and they infiltrate rapidly round any resistance met. . . . A company column is usually preceded by an advanced patrol split up into groups of one or two men with tommy guns, who allow any British counterattack to pass through them and then open fire on them from the rear. . . . They show great stamina and move through undergrowth, climbing trees to avoid or ambush hostile patrols, and may lie hidden in bush or padi for hours waiting for a chance to advance or join up.

  The Japanese overran Burma in an offensive that began shortly after the surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in early December 1941. These operations began almost simultaneously with attacks against the American-run Philippines; British-run Hong Kong, Malaya, and Borneo; and Dutch-run Sumatra and Java. In Burma the Japanese were able to achieve complete and decisive victory in only five months.

  During the relentless advance of the Japanese through Burma their method of war and their single-minded determination to win, together with their savagery and wanton disregard for life, their own or their enemies’, came as a brutal shock to those entrenched in the European military tradition and its deeply rooted codes of military conduct and chivalry. To ordinary fighting men the Japanese soldier quickly gained fame as a fearsome fighting beast for which none of their training had prepared them. Lieutenant James Lunt remembered the “speed with which they seized the fleeting chance; the exploitation of every weakness; the ruthlessness with which they drove forward across terrain considered impassable; the skillful handling of their mortars; their stamina and, let it be said, their courage.” Gallagher reported on “their fanaticism—their complete indifference to death, or rather their anxiety to die for the sake of Japan.” The long years of occupation in Manchuria and China had allowed a racist virus to permeate the ranks of the Japanese Army, and its rapid moral decline could be seen in the way it treated its victims. This attitude allowed the murder—indiscriminate and often brut
al—of noncombatants and prisoners of war to flourish. Terror was an intimate part of the fighting philosophy of the Imperial Japanese Army, as was retribution, and both were applied without distinction to civilians and soldiers. Shocked at what he had seen, Gallagher wrote in 1942, “What other so-called civilized nation could produce soldiers who pose for their pictures, proudly smiling, with bayonets dug deep into the backs of stripped, Chinese peasants? Where else could you find an Army officer grinning into the eye of the camera, his right hand holding a bloody sword, his left the hair of a severed, sightless but staring head? What they did in Hong Kong, Malaya, New Britain, is also known.”

  The ferocity of their onslaught gave the Japanese an immediate psychological advantage over their more pedestrian enemies and allowed them to dominate the battlefield, creating a legend of the invincible Japanese “superman” that would take at least two years to erase. Flyers such as Harry Neveu had a very real fear of falling into the hands of “the Japs.” Pilot Lucien Ercolani told historian Henry Probert that the “thought of coming down among the Japanese was a constant anxiety, coupled with the fear of engine failure over the jungle or in the Bay of Bengal, and the fright all too often occasioned when flying in monsoon conditions—especially by night.” Much had already been learned by 1943, from escapees and military intelligence seeping back from occupied areas, of the casual brutality handed out as a matter of course to prisoners of the Japanese. Captured fliers were especially hated. Men who had managed to escape from Hong Kong told of the bayoneting of the wounded in their hospital beds and of the repeated rape of nurses, followed by their murder. During the advance down the Malay Peninsula wounded prisoners were routinely bayoneted to death, and several hundred Australian and Indian prisoners had been bound and systematically murdered at Parit Sulong. In Singapore the patients in the Alexandra Hospital, including one on the operating table, had been murdered. From the Philippines came rumors of the Bataan Death March, during which 7,000 men, American and Filipino, of 76,000 who had surrendered had been butchered as they were harried on the forty-mile march from Manila to San Fernando. This news served to reinforce years of horror stories emanating from Japanese-occupied China during the previous decade, especially the rape of Nanking in 1937 and 1938. Japanese militarism had for many years inculcated in the minds of its people, especially its military personnel, a loathing of foreigners. Under the banner of “Asia for the Asiatics” this hatred was focused especially on Anglo-Saxons. No humiliation was sufficient for those pathetic specimens of European humanity, male or female, who surrendered to the Japanese Army. In the context of the interpretation of Bushido in play during the 1930s, surrender was the worst kind of humiliation, to which the Japanese samurai (soldier) was duty-bound to respond by suicide (often by means of ritual disemboweling, known as hara-kiri).

  The extent in both type and scale of such extraordinary abuses had been reported in the American press, but the trauma that these events represented was too far away to have any direct consequence for American readers; in any case, many regarded the stories as exaggerations. “China tried to tell the world the truth about the . . . Japanese during her long war with them,” observed Gallagher, who visited Shanghai in 1937. “Few of us were interested enough to listen carefully.” The retreat north from Rangoon between March and May 1942 had already provided a substantial collection of accounts of Japanese battlefield brutality. A clear pattern emerged of not merely an apparent disregard for the rules of war but also a distinct stream of sadism that ran throughout the psyche of the entire Japanese Armed Forces. Summary beheadings and the mass execution of prisoners by bayonet for seemingly no reason except the satiation of martial pleasure were the least of these accounts. Claims of worse atrocities, such as crucifixion and deliberate cruelty to helpless captives, were widespread. Air crew, especially those of bomber aircraft, were regarded by the Japanese as especially pernicious because they dealt random death from the sky. The American newspapers in particular had begun to report horror stories from the war in the Far East as 1942 progressed, and these issues were well known to men such as Harry Neveu and his crew. Survivors from Bataan shocked American readers with the stories of barely believable atrocities perpetrated on large numbers of weakened men following their surrender. Most newspapers across the United States reported on April 22, 1942, the news that three of the eight airmen who had been captured following the first bombing raid on Tokyo (the “Doolittle Raid”) had been executed as war criminals in violation of all the accepted rules of war. Interestingly, most articles appeared to contextualize Japanese brutality and disregard for the humanitarian principles at the heart of the Geneva Conventions of 1929 by referring to the Nanking Massacre. The reporters didn’t yet know that on August 13, 1942, the military government of Japan had promulgated the death sentence for all captured fliers in its “Regulations for Punishment of Enemy Air Crews”: “Enemy flyers who have raided Japanese territories, Manchukuo, or our operational areas, come within our jurisdiction, and violated wartime international law shall be tried by court martial and sentenced to death or heavy punishment as important war criminals.”

  Later in the year, on October 5, 1942, American newspapers widely reported the news of the discovery of the diary of a Japanese soldier that described the beheading of an American pilot. In Burma Japanese mistreatment of captured flyers was routine. In but one example a Liberator bomber on radar-detection duties was shot down by a Japanese fighter forty miles southeast of Rangoon on January 31, 1945. All six crewmen managed to bail out but were handed over to the notorious military police, the Kempetai. The Japanese were furious that the Allies were using radio-detection techniques in their war effort and were desperate to gain any intelligence they could gather from the crew. They focused their attentions not on the pilot and copilot, who survived, but on the four noncommissioned officers, including the radio operator, twenty-three-year-old Stanley Woodbridge. Hours of torture failed to elicit any information from the four men. Forced at bayonet point to march ten miles into the jungle on February 7, they were made to kneel before a large pit. There they were blindfolded and their heads taken off, one by one, by a Japanese officer with his sword. Their bodies were kicked into the grave, and the jungle was allowed to swallow up the evidence.

  The Japanese invasion of Burma in 1942 swamped the country like a tsunami. Yet, as these destructive waters flowed into Burma’s hilly periphery, especially in the north—which was the territory from Myitkyina and above of the pro-British Kachins—Japanese influence, due to the wide spread of their resources, became weaker. However, this weakening did not matter to the Japanese Army. Its primary task—were it ever to be necessary—was to protect Burma from counterattack by the British from India to the east and from the Chinese in Yunnan to the west as well as to suppress any hint of local rebellion by the hill people of the mountainous peripheries of the country: the Chin, Lushai, Kuki, Naga, Kachin, Karen, and Shan.

  In the north this rebellion began almost immediately, with British-led Kachin rebels laying ambushes, killing small groups of soldiers, and taking on enemy patrols, although for much of 1943 these actions caused less harm to the Japanese than did casualties from tiger attacks and malaria. Tanaka, commander of the Eighteenth Division, placed two of his regiments (each containing three battalions), the 55th and 56th, in the Hukawng Valley and the 114th at Myitkyina.a At the time of Neveu’s flight into Burma in August 1943 Tanaka’s forces were spread thinly across this vast terrain. As they had advanced through Burma in 1942 they had enjoyed the support of large numbers of anti-British nationalists who did what they could to assist the Japanese, even to the extent of taking up arms against the hated British and harrying the exodus of soldiers and civilians as it made its difficult way to sanctuary in India. The leadership of the anti-British movement was held by Aung San, a student leader who had thrown in his lot with the Japanese in 1940 and who is best remembered outside Burma today for his Nobel Peace Prize–winning daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi. However, as the Japanese
moved into the hill country that made up almost the entirety of Burma’s periphery, the situation changed. The people of the hills generally held much less animus against the British colonialists and their Indian lackeys than did the Burmese of the plains; many in fact preferred them to the Japanese. Aung San’s Burma Independence Army made limited, if any, progress in the Kachin Hills of north Burma despite the fact that in the early months of the invasion its numbers swelled as the Japanese fanned out across the country and excited nationalists and young hotheads alike joined the movement. In the east the hostility of the ethnic Burmese movement to the pro-British Karens resulted in widespread bloodshed. Indeed, the war that erupted between the Buddhist pro-Japanese ethnic Burmans and the pro-British Christian Karens precipitated a civil war that continues to this day. In the north the Japanese were harried from the start by the Kachins, who in due course flocked in large numbers to British and American anti-Japanese guerrilla units, not least of which was Detachment 101 of the OSS. The primary Kachin-led insurgency against the Japanese was farther to the east, in the Hukawng Valley, through which thousands of hapless refugees had streamed in 1942.

  His third regiment, the 124th, together with the 35th Brigade, had been detached for duty in the Pacific theater in late 1942.