Among the Headhunters

by Robert Lyman

  Some accounts include Captain J. J. Dwyer, Sergeant Joe Merritt, Sergeant Kenneth Coleman, Corporal Anthony Giota, and Private Frank Oropeza. Sevareid, however, who captured every detail of the rescue, was explicit that Adams was accompanied only by LaBonte and DeChaine.

  It was across these hills that the Japanese invasion of India would come in March 1944. It wasn’t turned back until June, in bloody fighting at Kohima and Imphal. See Lyman, Japan’s Last Bid for Victory.

  The arrival of the marching column was managed in a way that seemed designed to demonstrate its unassailable authority. The Naga guards exerted their superiority over the Pangsha Nagas by contemptuous looks and a haughty swagger, fingering the shotguns that denoted a power far beyond anything these Pangsha creatures could ever consider or attain. By their association with the sahib of Mokokchung they were a breed apart, and they made sure that the men of Pangsha were aware of it. The porters immediately set to work cutting bamboo to build a proper palisade around the encampment, as if to assert their role in providing protection to the air-crash survivors and to demonstrate distrust of the perfidious Pangsherites. A basha was quickly assembled for Adams’s use and his portable camp table opened outside it and laid for supper. The separation of Adams from the rest of them and the attention paid to him by his Naga factotum and his servant Shouba all delivered a series of positive images with regard to his position and prestige to the Pangsherites—if, that is, there was any doubt. He dined alone that night, both Nagas and survivors keeping a respectful distance. The dignity of the king-emperor in faraway London was reflected in no small part by the behavior of the sahib of Mokokchung, and Adams was acutely aware of this simple though profound reality. Watching all this palaver, Jack Davies quipped that he was disappointed that Adams didn’t dress for dinner.

  While the new column settled into the encampment in a fury of activity, and before it got too dark, Philip Adams introduced himself to the survivors in an almost shy, diffident way. He was far from the ignorant, bumptious colonial administrator of Sevareid’s imagination. Here was an intelligent, cultured, and empathetic man. He wore his authority lightly, but it was clear that he was immensely respected by those who knew him personally as well as those who had only heard of him by reputation. As they had heard already from Major McKelway, Adams had been sure that Mongsen and the Pangsha leaders would obey his injunctions about looking after air-crash survivors, but he wasn’t entirely sure what the men of Ponyo would do, given that they remained outside Mokokchung’s jurisdiction and no longer had any British influence from within Burma now that it was under the control of the Japanese. He had accordingly made haste to get here, the column leaving Mokokchung on Saturday, August 7. The column had made the journey across the mountains in six days and five nights. In the meantime, he had asked Chingmak to assert a strong presence in the encampment to ensure the immediate safety of the survivors.

  Adams quietly explained the recent history of both Pangsha and Ponyo, and for the first time Flickinger, Sevareid, and the other survivors were able to appreciate the potential predicament into which they had inadvertently fallen. But all, so far, was well. The Pangsha Nagas would be recompensed for their care of their visitors by a substantial gift of salt, a precious commodity that was rare in these hills. Adams was able to tell them something of Chingmak and his sons. Sangbah, now back in Chingmei recovering from a fever, had spent a short time in Mokokchung at a mission school at the urging of his father, who wanted him to understand the ways of the British. His brother Tangbang was a considerable character in his own right, a celebrity perhaps in modern parlance, who had seventeen heads to his name and a reputation as a warrior even greater than that of Mongsen. The crossbow arrow they had seen him fire was normally tipped with poison. Adams had himself been injured in the shoulder the year before by one such weapon during a skirmish and had survived only because the poison was old.

  The primary weakness of the column was the fact that the Naga guards recruited for the purpose of escorting Adams to Pangsha were themselves a volatile lot and caused him more worry, Sevareid observed, than did Pangsha. It took all his powers as a leader simply to ensure that the guards remained in order. They had come, so they thought, to join with the British to punish the men of Pangsha, and they wanted a slice of the action, as their fathers and brothers had had—with much glory—in 1936, 1937, and 1939. Two young guards, overcome by greed, snatched some tin cans from Corporal Stanley Waterbury and refused to return them. It took the threat by Adams of the confiscation of their daos before the guilty parties submitted and were punished by demotion to the ranks of the porters for two days. Adams was quiet and gentle, Sevareid observed, but was able to exercise an iron fist when required.

  Final preparations were being made for the march to Mokokchung. The daily C-47 drops provided boots and stores for those undertaking the trek—ordered through Lieutenant LaBonte’s radio (operated by a crank handle)—and salt for the people of Pangsha: one and a half tons of it in forty-pound bags, seventy-five of them in total. Again, death or permanent injury was avoided only by serendipity, as the bags came down by free drop and some close shaves were recorded among the eager young men who were tempted to run out and catch them as they fell. The Chinese officers fashioned a chair from bamboo for the immobile Sergeant Oswalt; another reluctant bull was slaughtered for a farewell feast; and by the evening of August 17 the entire party—some 120 men—was ready to leave the encampment in Pangsha the following morning. The people of Pangsha had behaved in an exemplary manner to the survivors and perhaps had enjoyed the sojourn among them of their heaven-sent guests. Jack Davies observed that “instead of decapitating us, the savages adopted us. I suppose it was because of the manner of our advent into their midst. If we had not come billowing down to them from above, if we had entered their territory on the ground, across fiercely contested territorial boundaries, we would have been ambushed and our skulls added to the village’s collection of trophies. The same might well have happened had we tried to stay on at the long house after the first night of hospitality.” One man in particular had reason to be grateful for the unexpected visit. Sevareid wrote, “As we sat on our blankets for a last smoke before retiring, a visitor came in to see Colonel Flickinger. It was Mongsen, the warrior with the gentle eyes, whose baby the Colonel had saved from death. At the Colonel’s feet he laid a beautiful crossbow of polished red wood inlaid with pieces of yellowing ivory. It was without doubt his most precious possession.”

  Jack Davies expressed genuine sadness at saying farewell to Pangsha and Ponyo:

  I left my headhunting brethren not without a twinge of regret, certainly with appreciation. They had received us with hospitality and consideration. They had been honorable in their dealings with us—they found my dispatch case and kukri and brought them to me, the case badly dented, but all the contents there. And as a spontaneous gift, one of them presented me with a scabbard for my kukri. It was made of two concave slabs of bamboo, bound together with plaited thongs of bamboo and decorated with a line drawing burnt into the slabs: an airplane, below it a parachute, and dangling from the chute, a man.

  15

  THE LONG WALK HOME

  The manna from heaven that had served to sustain the survivors during their sojourn in the bamboo encampment outside Wenshoyl, and which had served in part to buy the acquiescence of their hosts, came very close to derailing Adams’s plans on the morning established for their departure. The superabundance—even embarrassment of riches—that had rained from the skies during the previous twelve days had created raging torrents of desire for the Americans’ material possessions amongst the people of Pangsha that the survivors—in the midst of the naive obliviousness often common to those who have too much—had failed to recognize. Despite the recent emergence of their country from the Great Depression, the young Americans had no concept of just how rich they appeared to the Pangsherites, nor indeed to Adams’s mercenaries. Just as they were about to leave the survivors nonchalantly threw thei
r trash into a pile in the center of the camp. It was an attempt to clean up after themselves, but it had untold and nearly catastrophic consequences. The pile comprised rope, tins, cloth, bottles, paper, parachute silk, and any other accumulated stuff that could not be carried out or was simply no longer wanted. These items, however, represented a considerable treasure to the men of Pangsha. Adams’s mercenaries were horrified that the Patkoi “savages” should be allowed to profit from the white men in this way and wanted the detritus for themselves. An ugly confrontation resulted that, observers such as Sevareid and Davies believed, nearly resulted in bloodshed.

  Adams became aware of bickering between some of the watching Nagas and of increasingly raised voices. Suddenly, men began shouting at each other, daos were unsheathed from back scabbards, and angry insults were exchanged. Realizing what was happening, Adams immediately took control, walking boldly into the midst of an animated swarm to pull people apart. Tangbang and Emlong likewise rushed into the fray to remonstrate with the angry mob, shouting, warning, and cajoling. After what seemed like an age tempers cooled, but it had been a close thing. “Nearest we have come, I think, to general massacre,” recorded Sevareid in his diary:

  Suddenly natives were yelling, threatening us and one another with knives, one old man brandishing knife and leaping up and down exhorting others to attack. I stood by nervously holding rifle and umbrella, could see Adams gravely worried. He moved like lightning, snatching Headhunters by the hair, tossing them right and left without looking back, got guard around junk until passions cooled and he could share it out to the chiefs. A near thing, I am sure. Think if he had shown indecision or fear we would have had bad fight. Believe Adams sore at us for leaving so much stuff.

  Adams managed to calm the excited crowds by dividing the refuse and apportioning it to the leaders of Pangsha in the same way that he had already allocated the salt that had arrived as a reward for allowing the survivors to retain their heads. It was a solemn and somewhat subdued crowd that eventually began to weave its way gently down the slopes toward the Langnyu River, a little later than anticipated, for the first stage of the journey. The first night’s stop was to be at Noklak. Rain began to fall, cooling martial ardor even further.

  Almost immediately Sevareid began to feel his lack of fitness. The extraordinary supermarket-in-the-sky from Chabua had dropped fresh pairs of heavy British military boots (after first requesting the men’s individual sizes), into which the survivors had been busy hammering metal studs (thirteen to each sole) to give them better purchase on the rough terrain. But the boots were hard and not worn in, and chafing and blisters began to emerge within the first few miles. That night Sevareid had two large blisters—each the size of a silver dollar—on the balls of his feet, and the uncomfortable boots were made even worse by an errant stud nail somehow piercing his foot.

  The column, in single file, stretched for nearly two miles. From the outset the survivors, weakened by their long wait and in any case ill-prepared for the physical demands of this wild country, struggled. The march on that first day was a mere eight miles but was cruelly demanding of all their mental and physical energies. Sevareid would later conclude that although tough physically, the march demanded much more of the men mentally. He was a prescient observer of how each of his fellow travelers dealt with his first exposure to the march. Some were better able than others to cope with the psychological demands of the seven days they would experience together on the trail: “Colonel [Flickinger], who was near end of convoy, slowly drew past us, looking pale, jaws clenched, muttering to himself—sheer triumph of will, he determined to come in ahead of party, preserve his leadership. Colonel Wang collapsed two miles from Noklak, was carried rest of way. He now having coolies build him bamboo chair, seems have plenty rupees besides jewels for payment. Colonel Kwoh ashamed, feels this great loss of face for Chinese. Flick sitting head in hands when I pulled in, said: ‘This will separate the sheep from the goats.’”

  The arrival of the column was regarded as a significant occasion for the people of the sprawling village of Noklak. The largest number of white men they had seen previously was the handful of men who accompanied the previous punitive expeditions, the first of which had been in 1936. Adams’s expedition had bypassed the village when it had arrived in the area the previous week, marching directly from Chingmei to Pangsha for reasons of speed. But the news of the parachutists had traveled like wildfire around the hills, and people were eager to see what the fuss was all about. Many of the Noklak khel elders had journeyed to Pangsha to view the white men in their encampment at Wenshoyl, like specimens in a zoo. The survivors had realized that they were objects of ethnological interest to the Nagas and had noticed the almost daily arrival of new observers from ever more distant villages, eager to see what the skies had delivered into their midst. The people of Noklak, including (unusually) all the women and children, now crowded the balconies of their stilted houses to watch the column slowly wind its way through the crowded walkway that provided Noklak’s main street. The parachutists must have seemed a pitiful sight to these fit mountain people, and Oswalt’s elaborate Chinese-built bamboo litter, carried high by ten Nagas, must have seemed a quite remarkable contraption.

  The overnight respite was an opportunity for the survivors to recuperate after what had been a long but not overly demanding day—they didn’t know it yet, but much worse was to follow—and for Adams to undertake his functions as magistrate. Noklak was spread along a north-south ridge on the western edge of the broad valley that looked across to Pangsha, in the far distance, nestled on the edge of the Patkoi Hills. While Sevareid looked after his feet (and threw away his British hobnailed boots, to be replaced by the softer American shoes he had been wearing when the plane had gone down), Adams met with the Noklak elders and heard a complaint about an encroachment on their land by their neighbor, Panso, the elders of which had been instructed to meet him at Noklak. Sevareid saw the elders in the village, offering gifts of eggs, pigs, and hens to the sahib of Mokokchung. Panso, a traditional ally of Pangsha, remained an unknown quantity to Adams, despite its protestations of loyalty and public subservience to the emissary of the Raj. Mills’s interaction with the village in 1936 had been brief, not long enough to determine whether its civility was genuine cordiality or a ploy in response to the presence of superior firepower. Sevareid had heard Adams discuss a potentially dangerous pass through the hills between Chingmei and Kuthurr that was a well-known site for ambush. A disaffected village, such as Panso, could cause much trouble for the column and was evidently much on Adams’s mind. But so far as Sevareid could see, the Panso delegation was dutifully obedient at this point in time, with no evidence of hostility, despite the fact that Adams, after hearing the facts of the case, ordered Panso to relinquish the land that it had taken from Noklak.

  That night the exhausted men ate their food—carried on the backs of the porters from the stores dropped to them at Pangsha—and soon after the sun went down collapsed onto the wooden cots in a bamboo encampment just outside the village, constructed for them on Adams’s instructions. The porters and Naga mercenaries organized the stores and sat around their campfires sharing—and exaggerating, no doubt—their stories of the confrontation that morning with the uncivilized “savages” of Pangsha. This encounter was something to tell the women and children at home. The survivors, to a man, slept through the hubbub.

  The following morning, as the dawn rose, a hot breakfast of bully beef and tea fortified the Europeans before the column was once again on its way. The objective this day was Chingmei, not many miles distant but across hills far steeper than they had encountered so far. It was now August 19. The scenery was stunning, Sevareid recalled, for those not too exhausted to appreciate it. Real “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,” he wrote. Thick jungle filled the bottoms of valleys, with spectacular waterfalls spilling from high, rocky clefts in the mountainside. But this beauty had a sting in its tail: the tracks over the hillsides were so steep that they required, on oc
casion, the assistance of ropes made from vines and tied to tree trunks. For the last two miles the survivors, climbing steeply up to Chingmei’s hilltop position, required some pushing and pulling by the Naga mercenaries. It was an exhausted group that flopped down at Chingmei late that afternoon, although Adams was pleased with their progress and determined that they would not need to take the rest day here that he had anticipated.

  Chingmei, home of Chingmak, Sangbah, and Tangbang, provided a warm welcome that some of the men were to regret. They were accommodated in Naga houses and the morung and thus shared their quarters with many thousands of preexisting inhabitants: scurrying rats and the ubiquitous flea inside and rooting pigs, squabbling hens, and unctuous roosters underneath. But the hospitality was warm and genuine. Sangbah, lying in bed with fever—probably a recurrent bout of malaria, prevalent in the lowlands so in all likelihood picked up during a long-distance foray down to the Brahmaputra or Chindwin—was determined to ensure that his village entertained its visitors royally. “Afraid we are in for an evening of pub-crawling,” Adams warned Sevareid as they, together with Don Flickinger and Richard Passey visited Sangbah in a house that Sevareid noted for its cleanness. Sangbah was being looked after by a wife whom Sevareid described as having a “really lovely face, air of refinement.” It was an emotional meeting. Flickinger now recognized, from his conversations with Adams, that the safety of the survivors on the hillside at Wenshoyl had been guaranteed by Sangbah and his men, judiciously placed in the hills around Pangsha. Bedridden, Sangbah apologized for not accompanying the column to Mokokchung. His incapacity didn’t hinder him, and his visitors, from drinking a considerable quantity of zu, an activity that made them all somewhat maudlin: “Flick thanked him for all he has done for us. Sangbah shook head, said he not done enough, gave Colonel his brass head-hunter ornament, highest gift his possession. . . . Both Flick and Sangbah deeply touched at parting, both close to tears. We shall send him gifts from Mok[okchung].”