The Bushmen of Borneo, Shrunken Heads, and the Americans Who Kept Theirs

By C. Bernard Bambury

“They are canoes, Ralph! Whether war-canoes or not I cannot tell; but this I know, that all natives of the South Sea Islands are fierce cannibals, and they have little respect for strangers. We must hide if they land here, which I earnestly hope they will not do.”

– “The Coral Island,” Mid-19th Century Children’s Book

In studying WWII history, it is always fascinating to discover the two very separate and very differing wars fought by the Allies against the Axis in the European and Pacific theaters of war. In Judith Heimann’s “The Airmen and the Headhunters,” we see the radical differences in people, customs, and geography faced by a crew of B-24 U.S. Army airmen who parachuted to terra firma, not onto the Axis occupied fields and towns of Europe, but into the howling, untamed, unforgiving dark jungles of Borneo. With an exciting collection of near misses with Japanese pursuers, a deadly dank jungle world, and an uncertain native population, the reader experiences the loneliness, fear, and privation suffered by the surviving crewmen.

The ordeal begins on a “routine” Thursday of November 16, 1944, on the small Pacific Island of Morotai.  The crew of eleven airmen (four officers and seven enlisted) start their day at zero-two-dark-hours with a breakfast of “a choice of hot or cold cereal, along with powdered eggs scrambled and Spam fried and literally doused with ketchup.” After engine troubles grounded the crew’s tired and true B-24, a quick bit of decision making had the crew aboard a brand new, fresh off the assembly line, B-24, quickly dubbed “Lucky Strike” (a most inappropriate sobriquet). In charge of the B-24 and the oldest onboard was 22-year-old 2nd Lt. Tom Coberly, U.S. Army Air Force, who initially piloted the airplane. Nineteen-year-old Corporal Jim Knoch, the flight engineer, was in charge of the plane’s seven enlisted men.  Despite his age, Knoch was more than up to the task: “he knew the plane intimately. Though he was only one of two in the crew from a blue-collar family, he had the respect of everyone for his skill as an engineer and for his spunk.”

Departing their small atoll 100 miles due east of Borneo on a mission to sink a lone Japanese cruiser, the crew encounters what is, in fact, almost the entire remaining Imperial Japanese fleet. A new and inexperienced squadron commander led the seven B-24 Liberators of Twenty-Third Squadron straight into the teeth of the still formidable Imperial Navy’s warships and remaining fighter aircraft. The “Lucky Strike” was quickly struck with a huge naval shell, blowing the aircraft’s nose clean off.  2nd Lt. Coberly’s leg was instantly shattered and “shrapnel from the same shell had hit the back of navigator Fred Brennan’s head and blown off his face … Copilot Jerry Rosenthal had a big wound on the side of his face.  His left ear was gone.” Flying the mortally wounded bird for over an hour, away from the enemy and the shark infested water, Rosenthal got the Liberator over the mountainous jungles of Borneo before the mighty battlewagon finally gave out. Rosenthal called over the plane’s intercom: “This is it, guys. Hit the silk!”

Nine of the eleven crewmen made it out of the falling B-24, with Jerry Rosenthal remaining at the controls ensuring the rest safely jumped, and ultimately, selflessly going down with the plane. What follows are the stories recounted by the mostly separated crew members who parachuted into the 150-foot treetops (some mortally wounded, some without even a scratch).

Soon gathered up, fed, and hidden from the Japanese by the friendly and self-sacrificing native “Dayaks,” the assorted groups of men experience epic tales of excitement and danger, often staying in native “longhouses” filled with the heads of defeated tribal enemies (and not a few unlucky Japanese). The in-place network of the jungle commandos of SEMET 1 (seven young Australians in the charge of a salty British Army Major, Tom Harrison) shortly come to the aide of the downed airmen but it takes months of jungle trekking and avoiding furious Japanese patrols, hell-bent on revenge, before any of the crewmen reach safety, and ultimately rescue.

While much of the months spent in the jungle emaciated and weakened the surviving crewmen, there were rare moments of levity, hilarity, and kinship shared between the Americans, the Dayaks and the Australians of SEMET 1. Much of this came with the help of “borak,” the fermented alcohol the Dayaks began making by the gallon to help their homesick guests celebrate holidays like Christmas and New Year’s. Major Harrison of SEMET 1 was often bent into mercurial moods after all-night borak bouts with his Dayak counterparts (where the native “heavies” would frequently offer their daughters in marriage. Which he without question always refused, though not without some chagrin.). And it was not unusual for the Dayaks to coyly invite pairs of Japanese soldiers into a longhouse for ample and greedily consumed amounts of the much sought-after borak. Shortly after becoming legless, these unfortunates, soon became headless.

Some of the uninjured crewmen even “go native,” joining the tribesmen on hunts. “Looking back on the day, Tom [Capin] experienced a moment of pure elation. Barefoot, loin-clothed, moderately competent in the Lun Dayeh language, able to stay still enough so as not to scare away game and carrying deadly weapons he knew how to use (blowguns with poison arrows), Tom had been able to act like a man again, in control of his own life. He had not felt like this since he had jumped out of the B-24 more than a month earlier.”

Judith Heimann’s “The Airmen and the Headhunters” is an interesting and rare glimpse into a little-known footnote of WWII. For the downed American airmen, their fight against the Japanese is over the moment their B-24 is struck by Japanese naval gunnery, from that moment on their only fight is a fight for survival.  Survival against bloodthirsty Japanese soldiers, rotting jungle sores, poisonous snakes, and initially, due to not altogether inaccurate misconceptions, natives whose status and stature grew as their headcount (literally) grew. The tale speaks of relentless bravery, affliction, danger, violence and a tremendous degree of goodwill and sacrifice. If tanks, generals, military strategy and tactics are not your cup of tea, perhaps the story of the downed airmen, and the headhunters who came to their aide, just might be.