by Robert Lyman
Leaving Sangbah’s house, they went to Tangbang’s, where Adams was due to receive respect—and gifts of food—from elders from neighboring villages. Sevareid’s staccato account in his diary humorously captures some of the characteristics of the encounter:
Drank much zu in Tang-bang’s place which much dirtier, his young wife much coarser, behaved like gangster’s gun-moll trying do well before the quality. Wore dozens brass arm rings. Each time she served us, breasts hung in front of our faces, embarrassing Passey, who is proper, religious type.a Then, all somewhat drunk, we climb to Wang-do’s basha in upper khel. His wife giggled constantly, filled cups every sixty seconds. Wang-do is Arabic-looking, very strong face, gather he has rather supplanted chief Chingmak. Adams mischievously tells Wang-do he disappointed that Wang-do has but one child, means he been on trail too much, neglecting his household duties. All laugh, find keenest pleasure in jest. Flick gives his wife his silk parachute scarf, and Adams says this will ensure twins and that the “Colonel Sahib” will be part father. More giggling.
Richard Passey was a Mormon, a direct descendent, Sevareid believed, of Joseph Smith.
The third day of the march began the following morning, August 20, with the march to Kuthurr. This was the part of their journey for which Adams had been concerned about the possibility of ambush by malcontents from any of the villages who may have harbored continuing grudges against his authority. A long stretch of dark, close jungle had to be navigated, with multiple opportunities for sharpened daos or crossbows to surprise the unwary. But every man in the column was on his guard. The Naga mercenaries, denied a fight so far, eagerly clutched their fighting daos, and the survivors all watchfully gripped their M1 carbines. Before long the last men of the column had wound their way out onto the hillside and into the bright sunshine. The tension of the jungle dissipated and allowed the men to think of their physical infirmities. The sun beat down for the first time during their sojourn in these hills. Blisters caused increasing agonies for most, although many of the survivors were proving to be strong walkers and custodians of American prestige.
Who might have been a strong marcher had not been obvious at the outset of the trek, Sevareid mused. Those whom he had thought would be able to cope easily, especially those who were younger and fitter, were not necessarily those who made it through uncomplainingly or without help. He was impressed with Giguere and Passey, for instance, who were both fit and eager and kept up with Adams at the front of the column. They had what Sevareid described as “that extra something which makes a man superior—in addition to powerful legs.” Likewise, Colonel Kwoh, not accustomed to boots, kept plodding on regardless of his feet, which were wrecked by bleeding blisters. He was perseverance personified—a man, Davies suggested, who demonstrated why China would never be beaten. Bill Stanton, Duncan Lee, and Jack Davies were also impressive in different ways. None of them ever complained, demonstrating that the issue was as much “mind over matter” as much as it was physical strength. Davies was a tower of strength, made light of the difficulties they were facing, and amused the Nagas with his impressions of their dirgelike chants: “Davies and I limp along, rifle one hand, spear as walking stick in other, discussing State Department and U.S. foreign policy as though strolling down F Street [in Washington]. John has great reserves moral courage.” Davies hid his discomfort well. In a letter to his wife he wrote, “Most of the time on the trail has been busy—breaking camp, watching the scenery, the porters and the tough savage scouts, engaging in conversation with the rest of the party, wishing to hell the day’s hike were over, making camp and shooting the breeze after supper.” Duncan Lee also appeared to be enjoying himself. The others groaned in mock irritation when he jumped out of his bed every morning, eager for the day’s march. He “seems take pleasure whole affair,” observed Sevareid, “looks rather like cultured, bespectacled pirate with bandanna around head, knife and pistol on hips.”
All the while the USAAF was following their progress like an aerial mother hen. During the march to Kuthurr a note was dropped to the column, along with supplies of food, from General Alexander: “Good luck and good going. I will send you everything you ask for except pianos and violins. I take it the morale is good. We are much relieved at the safety of your party. Let us know if you need anything.” The only thing they needed, Sevareid quipped, were new feet.
The fourth day of the march—Saturday, August 21—was by far the worst as they clawed their way through tangled valley bottoms before climbing into the clouds for three hours to reach Helipong. Even the Naga porters, with their heavy loads, found the going tough: at one rest Sevareid noticed one porter’s bloodied back. They were carrying the expedition’s heavy loads while the Americans walked free of encumbrance. It was hard enough climbing the mountainside under the jungle canopy, where everything was cold, dark, and slippery, using vines to haul themselves upward, but when they climbed out of the tree cover they were hit by an unrelenting sun, although still surrounded by vicious head-high sword grass. Even proximity to this grass seemed to induce deep, painful cuts. There was no water. Each step for Sevareid was one of pain and exhaustion. “I could not do it again,” he wrote later. Somehow Oswalt’s litter was brought up the mountain—Sevareid could not conceive of how—as upward they staggered. Sevareid’s head began to swim, and he felt close to losing consciousness. He rested by the trail while Davies went on ahead to get help from Don Flickinger. It was sunstroke. Cutting some of the tall grass away from the path with their daos, the others created an area where he could rest. Flickinger’s arrival with two cans of apricot juice revived him, as did some water a porter had brought half a mile down from Helipong itself, called for by Davies. Meanwhile, Neveu struggled with a painful sore on his left leg and was helped along by some of Adams’s near-naked mercenaries.
At long last the column wound its way into the cold embrace of Helipong. The Americans’ first experience of the village was just like that of Mills and Fürer-Haimendorf seven years before: at nearly 8,000 feet the temperature was cold, but at least the sun was shining and the views magnificent. In the far distance they could see, shining, the glistening, snakelike Brahmaputra, winding its way from the Himalayas to the sea. It was perfect weather for aerial re-supply from the circling C-47s from Chabua, although the tightly constrained terrain meant that the first dispatch of free-dropped supplies of salt for the local Nagas landed directly in the village, demolishing the roofs of a couple of the houses and causing the corralled cattle to stampede. Using his hand-cranked radio, Sergeant LaBonte shouted instructions to the crews, and a second attempt resulted in yet more destruction, but this time to their own temporary bashas. To Flickinger’s great upset the basha collapse destroyed the knife, together with its intricately carved scabbard, that had been given to him by Mongsen. But at least no one was hurt, and the gifts dropped from the sky went some way toward restoring friendly relations with the villagers.
The fifth day’s march was, in comparison with the previous day’s exertions, an easy ramble. The journey to Chongtore entailed a long, winding climb down from the heights of Helipong before a gentler and shorter incline into the village. It was at Chongtore on Sunday, August 22, that Sevareid was able to transmit his first account of his adventure to the outside world, using LaBonte’s radio set, which required hand-cranking for power. The process took an agonizing three hours, but the professional journalist in him pressed him to persevere. Albert Ravenholt of UPI sat above in a circling C-47 and transcribed Sevareid’s story, and then pushed it through the notoriously difficult British censors in New Delhi. It was transmitted from India on the following day. Five days later it was published across the United States, front-page news in most papers. One can forgive some of the ethnological inexactitudes in the finished article: the censor in India was unwilling for the story to give too much away by describing the Nagas specifically. They became, therefore, “Burmese Headhunters.” “I am grinding this out on a hand-crank wireless set dropped to us by one of the rescue
planes of the air transport command,” ran Sevareid’s report. “We are in the middle of a village of Aborigines perched atop one of the 6,000 foot mountains. In another four days we hope to reach civilization.” He didn’t say that it was now raining steadily, the oppressive heat of the previous day fortunately only a memory. For the sake of positivity he allowed himself a degree of exaggeration:
Ahead of us, however, lie more mountain peaks and tortuous valley trails, but our party is in good shape, physically and morally, and we know we can make it. . . .
Many of us are covered with insect bites and sores, but it is nothing serious. Yesterday I became a victim of the heat and exhaustion, but I’m quite alright now. All in all, the civilians of the party seem to be standing up to it as well as the soldiers.
Throughout, what Davies described as their “Celestial Catering Service” dropped supplies whenever the weather allowed. At Chare it had included a case of canned beer: Pabst Blue Ribbon. Colonel Flickinger was forced to quash the rumors circulating that the immense effort the USAAF was undertaking on their behalf was only because of the presence in their midst of “big shots” such as Davies and Sevareid. There seems little doubt, nevertheless, that having celebrities such as Sevareid in the mix accelerated efforts to professionalize the search-and-rescue capacity within the ATC. “It works like telephoning the local grocery store for extra sugar,” reported one of the pilots nonchalantly in a report filed by Albert Ravenholt on August 24. Lieutenant Craig Jones had dropped rations and boots to the column that day, all ordered in advance.
The rain continued that night and into the next day as the long column wound its careful way down once more into a deep river valley and then climbed uphill again to Chare. The men walked a total of fifteen miles, utilizing for the first time the black umbrellas that had been dropped to them at Pangsha. It was almost comical, the effectiveness of the umbrellas not quite removing the feeling of incongruity the men felt in carrying them through the jungle-matted Naga Hills. It could have been Madison Avenue or Piccadilly Circus, they thought, but they knew enough of the Nagas by now to know that they prized these “bumbershoots” for their pure utilitarianism. The rain, of course, made the jungle trails all the more treacherous, and at one point Sevareid fell and broke the Naga spear for which he had bartered with the Ponyo natives back at Wenshoyl. He was more furious with himself for losing his prized spear than for the fact that he had badly wrenched his shoulder in the fall.
The men now observed a changing cultural landscape as they neared Mokokchung. The closer they came to civilization, Sevareid observed, the less noble the Nagas looked. They wore mixtures of European and native clothing; they were more prosperous and settled and had less of the savage about them. Danger no longer lurked around the next corner; this part of the world was far less wild than that from which they had just come. The new world they were entering seemed all the less attractive. “In a way, rather a disappointment,” he recorded. But there were other potential excitements. They were now in tiger country; there were still some of these beautiful creatures that Emlong and Tangbang and their like had not yet removed from the face of the earth. There was also a herd of wild elephants, which tended to roam the lower reaches of the valleys in the interior of the Naga Hills. With the end in sight, the men began to notice their extraordinary surroundings: astonishing rivers; jungle-covered hills; exotic birds and flowers, especially the orchids. Davies tried to capture some of this beauty in a letter to his wife: “The mists were lovely on the mountains and trailing through the valleys. We stopped by streams and waterfalls to drink cold sweet water and look at Rousseau-like foliage with small bright orchids—moist and vivid pink.” But the most exciting thing was that at Chare the local people were able to point out the men’s immediate destination on the other side of the valley: Mokokchung.
16
BACK TO CHABUA
From across the valley their destination didn’t look too far away—and indeed it wasn’t, even when calculated in terms of long climbs down and up mountains. With “civilization” in sight, the men were spurred to a final effort, even though they knew that there was at least a full day of walking to undergo beyond Mokokchung before they could meet the vehicle transport that would take them back to Chabua. Once past Mokokchung the survivors would meet the press: the US Army cameramen, with cameras clicking, and the few accredited journalists in the region. The men peer out from the photographs of that day with tired smiles, exhausted satisfaction rather than exuberance being the main emotion.
For Sevareid, that prescient commentator on both politics and the human condition, the moment entailed consideration—again—of Britain’s extraordinary empire. He still couldn’t understand it. As the column wound its tired way into Mokokchung the following afternoon—Tuesday, August 25—he was astonished to see Naga men and women saluting. Even more incongruously, a number started singing the British national anthem, “God Save the King”: “It made no sense, but one could not help being somewhat awed. There were sandbags in the chill gloom around Buckingham Palace, and London was brazen with stiff upper lips; here, on the other side of the world, brown men with tattooed faces and spears smiled in the sun and suggested to the white men’s great spirit, wherever he was, that he take care of their Great Sahib—wherever he was. The British Empire makes no sense, but there it is, an imposing, ubiquitous feat which will not be denied.”
Few of the others concerned themselves with such considerations. The sun was shining, and a clean-shaven, immaculately uniformed American soldier stood by the trackside taking photographs. Bizarrely, he said not a word of greeting as the exhausted men trooped past. The native population of the village had turned out in strength to welcome the returning column—and the survivors of Flight 12420—with zu. To all intents and purposes, the survivors had made it. To whom did they owe their salvation? In the immediate sense it was “the unbelievable” Philip Adams, the local emissary of a far-distant power who ruled by notebook and judgment far more than he did with rifle or jail. Over lunch in Adams’s neat bungalow, surrounded by the ordered gardens that Sevareid imagined were a direct translation from Adams’s native Sussex, Sevareid questioned the subdivisional officer about the benefits of civilization for the people of the Naga Hills. One gets the sense that Sevareid was taken with the entire romanticism of his recent experience. The so-called “Headhunters” had behaved perfectly civilly to him and his fellow travelers. They had not demanded his head in exchange for his dropping into their territory unannounced, and it seemed a shame that the trappings of “civilization” should be forced on these simple people against their will.
But Adams’s view was as unequivocal as Pawsey’s, and Mills’s before them. The Nagas in their native state lived fearful lives, dominated by daily concerns about security that limited their human experience to one not much better than survival. Sevareid got Adams wrong. His conclusion was that Adams believed “that the savages back in the hills were happy people. They were strong, cheerful, keenly intelligent, more straightforward and healthy both in mind and in body than the Indians of the tepid plains. They were men of honor and instinctive dignity. What frightened him was that up to now, wherever ‘civilization’ and its ways had crept in among the Nagas, it had harmed and debased them.” From an ethnological and cultural perspective, Sevareid was right: the colonial administrators had little time for the culture-changing impact of the missionaries and were afraid of the effect of opening up the hills to newcomers from Assam and Bengal. But in all other respects Sevareid misjudged the British colonial administrator. Adams didn’t possess any romantic notions of the noble savage living a happy and uncomplicated life if unmolested from the outside. Adams was ultimately fearful of what life without the rule of law meant for the people of the hills when the only law was power, and the utilization of such power was evidenced through the use of brutal force against those unable to protect themselves.
Adams and his colleagues had a Hobbesian vision of a lawless future for the Naga Hills i
f the villages were not taken in hand by benevolent authority. They understood from their own experience that only strong, undivided government could provide an alternative to the state of existence that characterized the lives of many powerless Nagas. Without such intervention life in the Control Area and the unadministered areas would remain one of “continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as Hobbes famously described an ungoverned world. Adams and Pawsey could see every day, as had Mills and those who had followed, the benefits that the prohibition on head-hunting and human sacrifice had had for the Nagas of the Administered Area. Despite his respect for the traditions, ancient history, and developed cultures of these people, Adams wanted more than anything else to enable them to live in peace. It was this imperative that he shared more than anything else with his predecessors and peers. When questioned in more recent times about what heritage the colonial experience had brought the people of the Naga Hills, a single response was emphatically expressed: the rule of law. This was the greatest legacy of the British colonial administrators in the Naga Hills from the time of Dr. J. H. Hutton until independence in 1947.
In a celebration of their rescue the USAAF dropped the men an extravagant cooked lunch while they were resting at Mokokchung. It was an extraordinary effort by the men at Dumbastapur, who were eagerly following the travails of their countrymen as they safely emerged from the Naga wilderness. They knew that any of them could easily have been among the survivors. Davies described the event in a letter to his wife: “The boys wafted to us by parachute the kind of Sunday dinner that mom used to cook: hot tomato soup, hot fried chicken, gravy, mashed potatoes, peas, hot biscuits, and for dessert, ice cream with chocolate sauce, coconut cake and coffee. This touching extravaganza represented considerable effort, coordination and skill, and what’s more, warmth of spirit.”
