Among the Headhunters

by Robert Lyman

  That day, as they rested on the grass in front of Adams’s bungalow, feasting on an unimaginably sumptuous meal from aluminum containers prepared in a canvas-covered kitchen 100 miles to the north and dropped from the skies, they reflected on their good fortune. They still had two more days of walking as they made their way down to the Brahmaputra Valley, but they were safe, and they had accrued memories for a lifetime. Emlong proudly showed Flickinger and Sevareid photographs of himself after the 1936 punitive expedition—taken by Fürer-Haimendorf—proudly posing with a group of heads, which, despite what he insinuated, must have been those snatched by the anthropologist from the slopes of Wenshoyl. The Pangsha dead of 1936 hadn’t had their heads removed on the battlefield by the British or any of those in the fighting column. But it made a great photograph, and Emlong’s prestige among his American friends now reached a new height. The officers and civilians clubbed together to purchase a blanket each to be sent back to Chingmei for Sangbah, and Sevareid sat down to type out a new story for UPI. It was never printed in the newspapers but formed the basis for a long article in Reader’s Digest that was published a few months later.

  On the following day blisters and tiredness were disregarded as the men began the final part of their journey. They hobbled down the bridle path from Mokokchung in the direction of the plains, walking eighteen miles to their overnight stop at one of Adams’s inspection bungalows, used for his tours into the Administered Area, situated on the road to Mariani between the Naga hamlets of Aliba and Changki. The march was made no easier by the fact that they were now walking downhill most of the time on the broad bridle path that dropped out of the mountains toward the Assam town and railway stop of Mariani. Their objective was the airfield at Jorhat, from whence they would be flown back to Chabua. The day was unseasonably wet, and the men were glad of the welcoming sight of the corrugated iron roof of the bungalow, especially Duncan Lee, who during the twelve-hour march had been startled by a tiger dashing through the bush next to the track; Roland Lee, who had to be carried because of a foot infection; Sevareid, who had caught a cold; and Harry Neveu, who had fainted and had to be revived on the trail.

  On Friday, August 27, 1943, the men walked the remaining 14 miles of some 140 that they had covered over the preceding ten days. As they emerged from the bush Sevareid had a pang of regret. It had been an extraordinary, even moving, experience. He had survived an air crash that had claimed the life of the airplane’s copilot; had lived among a tribe of people with a reputation as notorious headhunters; had made friends with Nagas such as Sangbah and Tangbang, whom he would always remember with warmth and affection; had come face-to-face with the practical reality of imperialism at work on the edge of empire through the work of Philip Adams; and had marched to safety, protected on the ground by a crowd of Naga mercenaries armed with spears, daos, and shotguns (and in the air by the ever-present Gooney Birds of the USAAF), across a range of hills that would have defeated most men. It was almost like a dream, but as he looked back at “the jagged blue lines of the mysterious mountains” from which he had just emerged, he realized how real, and yet at the same time surreal, his and his fellow survivors’ experience had been. Then civilization was upon them:

  We heard the muttering of automotive engines ahead, rounded a bend in military formation with the colonel walking at our head, and came upon a line of parked jeeps and command cars and a small crowd of smiling officers and men and newsreel photographers. The sun was crushing, and after an hour of posing with the others and trying to speak into a microphone for the film sound track, I felt as limp and exhausted as I had on any day of the long march. Within two minutes my command car had slid off the trail. After another half-hour of backbreaking work I rode on, bouncing from side to side, clinging to my seat, becoming violently sick at my stomach, feeling that my head would split. The road flattened out, there were water wheels and tired buffalo, drooping, torpid Hindus, soiled houses and heavy smells. One sweated, and the muggy air was hard to breathe. We were back in India, the India the world knows.

  In his article in Reader’s Digest Sevareid acknowledged that their rescue had been brought about by the determined efforts and sacrifices of many people, and at considerable cost. What had the Nagas thought of their unexpected guests? Sevareid didn’t know but mused that they now knew what Americans looked like and perhaps as a consequence would look after future air crews and passengers who were forced to jump for their lives over their ancestral lands. One night on the walk back to Mokokchung, one of Adams’s Naga mercenaries had said to Private William Schrandt, “India, there.” He pointed west. “China, there.” He pointed north. “America, there.” And he pointed up.

  The happy convoy moved slowly and bumpily across the rutted Assamese roads to the dusty railway stop of Mariani and then the final ten miles to the airfield at Jorhat. Their arrival at the long concrete pan with the waiting Gooney Bird brought them back into a world from which they had been absent for only a month, though it seemed several lifetimes:

  A smiling Texas army nurse stood by the steps of the hospital plane as we climbed into the cabin. We sat again in the two rows of aluminum seats, mopping our scraggly beards with our filthy bits of silk, looking again across the narrow space at one another. The same bad joke occurred to everyone: “This is where I came in.” Neveu, the pilot, looked around with a pale face and suddenly got very sick and was made to lie down on one of the suspended stretchers. I listened nervously to the engines and sweated despite the cool rush of air.

  17

  BLACKIE’S GANG

  Captain John “Blackie” Porter, a twenty-seven-year-old ATC pilot from Cincinnati, Ohio, based at Jorhat, heard of the crash of Flight 12420 first with anxiety and then with relief. By means of enormous effort twenty men had been rescued from one of the most inhospitable places on earth. But the ATC effort had been pulled together in an ad hoc fashion, using volunteers, to the detriment of the airlift to China. When aircraft went down over the Hump the crews’ friends were sometimes allowed to look for them. But the regular flights didn’t have the equipment or training to do much more than make a token attempt to find a downed aircraft lost under a canopy of green. What if rescue efforts were planned and used specially trained men and appropriately equipped aircraft?, Porter mused. He decided to lobby Alexander to set up a discrete team to search and recover downed air crews. After several weeks of waiting, permission was finally granted, along with the allocation of two ancient C-47s and two sets of dedicated air crew specially recruited for the task. The small team was soon known across the ATC in Assam as “Blackie’s Gang.” What Porter established in 1943 as a result of the crash of Flight 12420 proved to be the forerunner of the sophisticated search-and-rescue mechanisms adopted by US forces during the remainder of the war and into the postwar world. Whereas 62 percent of personnel missing from flights over the Hump were rescued in 1943, this number would increase to 77 percent by mid-1944 as a direct result of the achievements of Blackie’s Gang. By the end of the war the percentage was even higher.

  At the time of the crash of Flight 12420 Blackie Porter had been flying for only two years, but he had completed over 2,250 flying hours on a wide variety of aircraft and was very well acquainted with the dangerous vicissitudes of the Hump. Blackie’s Gang was fully operable by October 23, 1943, flying from Chabua, and a month later the two C-47s were joined by two B-25 Mitchell bombers and a few L-5 light aircraft. Sergeant Bill Blossom was operating a crash rescue vehicle at Chabua when he was approached by Porter to join his “gang.” Trained as a parachute rigger, Blossom leaped at the chance to escape the monotony of base support duties. He was impressed by Porter. A quiet, even shy man, Blossom considered that Blackie “came by his nickname honestly, with his thick black hair and dark eyes. . . . There was an inherent goodness and wholesomeness about him, but once airborne, he changed. He reveled in that environment and became a fearless dare-devil. His courage was admirable. It was easy to identify with him and he was the most informal offi
cer I ever encountered, yet the utmost respect from his men was there for him, always. He gave us a singleness of purpose! He raised our sights.”

  Porter’s search-and-rescue team began to see immediate success. He tried to have at least two aircraft available for operations each day, and ground-crew mechanics worked through the night under floodlights to ensure that no day went by without aircraft available to fly. Procedures were developed to professionalize the business of search and rescue, and the crews began to train to operate in this distinctive new role. Porter recruited Oswalt to his team. Pilots began to fly routinely just above treetop level, with everyone on board looking for the telltale signs of a crashed aircraft—signs that from a greater height would be impossible to see against the backdrop of continuous vegetation. Once the general area of a crash had been identified, and if the crash site was not immediately visible, crews learned to conduct pattern flying, checking the ground below in a systematic fashion, section by section, with all eyes in the aircraft looking hard at the ground for signs of disturbance that might reveal the place where a stricken aircraft had entered the jungle canopy. The low flying terrified Blossom, who complained one day to Porter that they had flown too close to the surface of the Brahmaputra. “It seemed to me that the props were just a few inches above the water and I knew the consequences if they would just touch.” Porter’s response was “We want to live too, Bill.”

  Many of the procedures that had been employed at Pangsha were refined further. Once survivors had been found, notes providing initial instructions were dropped to them on yellow streamers, followed by radios, weapons, and survival equipment. Where possible rescuers were dropped by parachute in order to provide aid to the injured and guide the survivors in the direction of friendly villages or to places where the light aircraft could recover them, a couple at a time. In 1944 the first helicopters were deployed in this role. The USAAF had ordered its first production helicopter, the Sikorsky R-4, in January 1943 and deployed a small number in Burma in early 1944. The first use of the new aircraft for search and rescue took place between April 22 and 23, 1944, when the composer Carter Harman, a helicopter pilot in the US Army, rescued the pilot and three wounded British soldiers from a downed L1 light aircraft. Don Flickinger’s selfless act in parachuting in to help Oswalt at Pangsha became the inspiration for a new procedure that involved dropping specially trained volunteer medics to survivors whose injuries could not be treated without expert help, including plasma and blood for transfusions in the field.

  Back at Chabua Blackie’s Gang was given its own warehouse, which the men filled with material they could drop to downed air crews. It was “run by a former New York nightclub operator named Joe Kramer,” observed Theodore White. Kramer organized the dropping of material required for immediate survival—“food, medicine, bandages, boots, clothes, compasses, maps, signaling panels, playing cards, books, Bibles and goods to barter with natives.” Thereafter, as the survivors walked or were led to safety, Kramer would organize the loads that were dropped to them on daily supply runs until they had returned to a place of safety.

  While Porter and his gang had to take constant care in flying because of the obvious dangers of the mountainous terrain, another continuing danger were the predatory Japanese fighters operating from Myitkyina Airfield. At low altitude, lumbering along the treetops looking for crashed air crews, the search-and-rescue aircraft were especially vulnerable to the pack-hunting Zeros that daily patrolled these angry skies. For self-protection the gang’s aircraft were armed with British Bren light machine guns, which they poked out through the aircraft doors and windows. Porter himself used a Bren on one occasion—November 6, 1943—to destroy a Japanese fighter on the ground. With the copilot flying the plane, the unwieldy C-47 flew past the Japanese plane at its slowest speed, firing thirty-round clips of .303 ammunition into the enemy aircraft. After several passes they left the enemy fighter a wreck and its pilot dead.

  Porter was not averse to attacking Japanese ground positions when he saw them. The ATC daily tactical summary for December 9, 1943, recorded that Porter’s B-25 had come under machine-gun fire. Porter had turned to look for the enemy: “Sighting two Jap emplacements, Porter and his crew strafed and silenced both positions. Sometime after a Japanese encampment . . . and three trucks were spotted. The trucks and party were thoroughly strafed.” But the Japanese got Porter in the end. On December 10, 1943, Porter’s B-25 was shot down by a clutch of Zeros near Fort Hertz. Only one man managed to parachute to safety before the aircraft crashed. Yet the system Porter had begun to establish continued to flourish. In the three months before his death Blackie’s Gang had found and recovered 127 Allied air crews from 58 downed planes. By the end of the war search and rescue had contributed significantly to the 1,171 lives saved from 590 crashes in this theater of war.

  What of Pangsha? On November 26, 1943, a mere four months after the crash, the region in which Harry Neveu’s aircraft had been lost erupted once more in violence. This time, however, a strange alliance took shape. The villages of Chingmei, Nokluk, Pangsha, Ponyo, Tsaplaw, and Tsawlaw, along with a number of smaller villages, all found common cause in attacking and destroying Law Nawkum, farther north along the Patkois in Burma. Between 250 and 300 men, women, and children were killed in the fighting, their heads taken to adorn the villages of their attackers. Nothing was done in response by the British authorities in faraway Mokokchung. There were now permanent USAAF watch stations in the Patkoi Hills, guarded by men of the Assam Rifles, but because no harm was threatened to them, this internecine violence was ignored despite its scale. Other American airmen who came down over the Patkois in the months that followed were treated kindly and returned to Mokokchung, the government paying in salt (to the value of 400 rupees each) for the return of downed airmen. The truth was that not much could be done about these occasional bouts of warfare, even if Shillong had had the resources to send men into the hills to put them down by force of arms. During the World War II years Britain could mount only occasional forays into the Control Area to enforce its authority in extremis. Nothing much more was possible, especially when the principal focus was on defeating the Japanese. The Nagas in the Control Area and farther afield—despite the personal desire of both Charles Pawsey and Philip Adams—were no match for the harsh realities of power and fear. The truth was that Naga villages such as Chingmei, Noklak, and Pangsha had local power over their neighborhoods, and the British didn’t. Even occasional Jovian descents from Mount Olympus such as Mills’s punitive expedition in 1936, the deputy commissioner’s and subdivisional officer’s occasional “tours,” and Adams’s 1943 rescue mission could not change the long-term reality of power on the ground.

  Charles Pawsey had been advocating the extension of the British prerogative in the Control Area for years. He was constantly frustrated that the government of Assam appeared willing to turn a blind eye to the deliberate flouting of the 1933 ban on using weapons in intravillage disputes inside the Control Area. In Pawsey’s view, the law was made a mockery of by not being enforced. It was particularly invidious that in large swaths of the eastern Naga Hills, up to and including the Patkoi Range, systematic raiding and head-hunting were allowed to continue because of government inaction. He argued repeatedly that the Control Area be extended all the way to the Burma border (thereby including Pangsha, for instance) and that the deputy commissioner be given carte blanche to enforce the law by means of punitive expeditions in event of its serious breach. On November 11, 1941, Pawsey laid out his proposition in a paper prepared for the government of Assam in Shillong.

  1.Burma now administers up to the Patkoi [Range]. We can’t allow our villages to raid Burma administered villages, nor is the idea that Burma should be allowed to take action against villages on our side of the Patkoi a pleasing one.

  2.In practice the area up to the Patkoi is controlled politically. The first Pangsha expedition in December 1936 was undertaken when Pangsha was not in the control area. This year the Rotongre colum
n will be operating outside the control area. The survey column in 1936 was operating as far as the Patkoi in the Chen area. Practically every village from Tamkhung near the Patkoi due east of Mokokchung southwards to the point where the district boundary meets the Patkoi near the Tizu has now been visited.

  3.No new commitment will be involved by the extension of the Control Area.

  4.The use of guns in the Control Area in tribal warfare is forbidden [and had been since 1933]. We can’t tolerate the present position under which villages outside the area are more advantageously placed than those who carry out our orders.

  His argument, made repeatedly in the years that followed, was based not on territorial aggrandizement—he was a colonial civil servant, not an imperialist—but on the principles of security and good governance that had already been shown to be beneficial to the villages that lay near the Administered Area. Head-hunting in the Control Area was endemic, but the evidence of many years of experience in the Administered Area was that people became more prosperous and secure even when they had been forced by the authorities to dispense with the ancient custom of head-lopping.

  Of course it was not just head-hunting that villages in the Control Area wanted to preserve but their own prerogatives of power, a desire that in large part originated in the fear that they themselves would be subject to force by others. Fear of their neighbors created perverse behaviors: villages sought to protect their own independence by deliberately seeking the subjugation of others. Fear therefore bred fear. It was an age-old conundrum, a common feature of the human condition. The adage “killed or be killed” described the problem. Pawsey realized that the only way to remove the fear of another village’s domination was to provide security for all villages but argued that this could be achieved without the wholesale application of colonial authority: