As each day passed the men gradually learned more of the efforts being made to rescue them. On Saturday, April 7, they received another typewritten note from McKelway stating that the rescue party, traveling overland from Mokokchung, would arrive on or about August 15. Sevareid wondered about the guards dispatched for “protective purposes,” not suspecting that, under Sangbah’s control, they were already in place. Sangbah ordered that new shelters be built in good time to prepare for the arrival of what looked likely to be a large rescue party. On Monday, August 9—a full week after the crash—a number of new faces joined the encampment, settling in with Chingmak and Sangbah and disdaining the Pangsha Nagas. One distinctive member of this group wore a leopard skin, obviously the prize of a previous encounter in the wilderness that denoted his prowess as a hunter. Unknown to the men, this was Tangbang, Sangbah’s brother, who delighted in demonstrating his skill with the crossbow. It was a powerful weapon, its foot-long arrow astonishingly accurate out to seventy-five feet and so powerful that it required the user to lie on his back and cock it with his feet. Tangbang had been managing the “protective” party along the Langnyu River, positioned there to act as an early warning of an enemy approach. The Japanese were as close as three days’ march away in Burma; if they found out about the survivors and determined to pursue them, the Nagas would have very early knowledge of their approach.
Otherwise, life settled into something of a routine. It could even have been enjoyable if it weren’t for the fleas that plagued some of the men at night, the endless rain, and the nightly temperature drop. On August 9, in a letter to his wife, Jack Davies captured something of the situation:
It is afternoon and it is raining, as it does most of the time, for this is monsoon season. I am sitting on a piece of a parachute on a blanket on a ground sheet on the ground and leaning against a sapling post which forms one of the uprights to our palm and weed thatched hut. I can hear the stream 100 yards back of me rushing down the steep side of the mountain. Across the valley strata of lndia-silk mist are drifting along the face of the opposite slope, whose peaks are lost in the pale gray overcast. Duncan [Lee] is sitting opposite me with one shoe off and one shoe on reflectively scratching his leg. Eric [Sevareid] lies rolled up in a blanket fast asleep at the other end of our nine-man basha.
One night, under a clear, cold moonlit sky, the men sat around the campfire singing songs from home. “At such moments,” Sevareid admitted, “I love it here, wouldn’t be elsewhere.” The place was beautiful and atmospheric. Despite their predicament, the men felt that they were among friends. “Layers of white mist would creep over the dark hills like glaciers in motion, and once at midnight we were transfixed by the sight of a perfect rainbow by moonlight.” Feeling something of a fraud, as he hadn’t stepped inside a church for years, Sevareid led the “Church Parade” on Sunday, April 8, fashioning it as a memorial service for Charles Felix, who was now known, since the rescue of Lemmon, to have been the only casualty of Flight 12420.
On one occasion a high-flying Japanese reconnaissance plane flew overhead; on another a flight of what they thought were Zeros went racing down the valley. The survivors’ obsession with their own predicament didn’t allow them to consider that the Japanese would not be interested in them: with the massive American effort along the Brahmaputra and the Ledo Road, the Japanese had bigger fish to fry, but the flights nevertheless caused them some anxiety. A further cause of anxiety was an article in the Statesman, published in New Delhi, that was dropped to them. It described their predicament and mentioned some of them—including Sevareid—by name. If the Japanese were close by and looking out for downed fliers, this was a security breach of an entirely unnecessary kind. A slit trench was dug so that if they were attacked, Oswalt at least would be protected from bomb blasts. A message from Brigadier General Alexander at Chabua asked them to keep an eye out for Japanese activity, but the truth was that there was precious little to see, hidden away as they were in this mountain vastness. The closest Japanese presence to Pangsha was at the Naga village of Khamti, thirty-eight miles as the crow flew to the southeast on the Chindwin. A number of scattered villages lay in between, but Japanese patrols from the Eighteenth Division rarely ventured into these hills. A determined patrol, with Naga help, would take three days to cross the hills to reach the survivors. Flickinger nevertheless got the men to rehearse preparations for an attack.
When the weather allowed, the daily air drop began to equip the survivors for the next stage of their journey: the strenuous march over the mountains. Socks and boots swung down under cotton parachutes—silk was too scarce to use for the supply bundles—and although the ’chutes worked reasonably well, a number of Naga young men were nearly injured by these loads, which fell unexpectedly faster than those attached to their silken cousins. Flickinger, to the great amusement of the watching Nagas, tried to organize calisthenics for the men in an attempt to prepare them physically for the long march to come. To relieve any latent boredom he also organized a spear-throwing contest with the Pangsha men. Amazingly, Richard Passey turned out to be an athlete of note (a ski champion in his native Utah, Sevareid believed) and very nearly won the contest, almost beating the Pangsha warriors at their own game. Satisfactorily, for political reasons at least, a chuckling Naga won and scuttled away with his prize—three tin cans—clutched to his chest.
Sevareid observed that they had by now been able to identify a range of personalities among the Pangsha Nagas. Most, he considered, were “very friendly, laugh loudly, love practical jokes.” He was particularly struck by the man they all called “Moon-sang,” whose child Flickinger was treating with antibiotics. He clearly was a leader who generated considerable respect in the village. Sevareid described him as a man with a cultivated face and “expressive, intelligent eyes.” It would have been no surprise to Sevareid to learn that this was the man who had led Pangsha for many years to head-hunting glory. He was not intimidated by the white men, merely intrigued by the power of their machinery, the efficacy of their medicine, their determination of purpose, and their self-confident representation of a new and extraordinary world outside the borders of Pangsha’s self-contained green kingdom. As a man who knew about power, he was impressed with that which these men epitomized: the masses of material goods that fell almost daily from the sky; the skill of the hands that had so lovingly and perfectly shaped the great silver kepruos in the sky (even if they were occasionally to crash, which signified only that, great as these men were, they were not infallible); and their obvious unity of purpose.
Mongsen was an intelligent, inquisitive, and pragmatic man. He wanted to learn about the outside world, one that had forced itself on him so astonishingly six years before. Before then stories of the white man, of guns, of medicine, and of the trappings of civilization that had washed into the far reaches of Assam in the late nineteenth century had been merely apocryphal: heard and talked about but never seen. The extraordinary effort that the white men in the sky were making to sustain the survivors on the ground and the quick arrival of Chingmak and the Chingmei Nagas, obviously under instruction from the sahib of Mokokchung, demonstrated to him that he and his fellow villagers were spectators in a much bigger and fascinating story. He was convinced, correctly, that his family and the wider tribe were honorable participants in this narrative by virtue of the care they had provided for their uninvited but welcome guests and their obedience to the instructions he had received months before to protect—rather than to behead—any parachutists who floated down from the skies. He was content that this should be so. Quietly and patiently, Mongsen awaited the arrival of the sahib of Mokokchung, whom he had last had cause to meet, in different circumstances, in 1939.
Then, without warning, as Friday, August 13, was drawing to a close, after nearly fourteen days in the wilderness (and two days before they had been told to expect deliverance), the noise of a large approaching group of Nagas, made distinctive by the cadenced chant of their marching song, could be heard rising and falling in the far distance, penetrating across the valley and through the low-hanging mist to the ears of the startled survivors. The noise grew gradually louder. The survivors gathered together and stood in quiet expectation. Out of the valley emerged their deliverers, climbing strongly and purposefully, their war chant announcing their arrival with gusto and immense pride in their authority and self-evident power. Sixty Naga warriors in their native accouterments, but brandishing ancient shotguns, led a train of forty Naga porters carrying their distinctive matted conical packs on their backs. At their head, in a blue polo-necked shirt, long, dark blue flannel shorts, and heavy brogue walking shoes, carrying a thin bamboo cane, was the sahib of Mokokchung himself. It was at once impressive and humbling. The chanting died down, and all was momentary silence. Even the chattering Pangsha children stood still, hushed by the spectacle before them, drinking in a scene of wonderment. It was another Livingstonian moment. But it didn’t last long. With a splurge of self-conscious energy the 100-strong column spilled into the survivors’ encampment, taking over and asserting their authority noisily and pompously.
Sevareid, for once in his life, had nothing to say. Standing in front of him was a slim, fair-haired young man, quiet and calm in demeanor, who was “king of these dark and savage hills.” He had a natural authority, derived as much by his calm intelligence as by his position as the emissary of the king-emperor and the small army he had brought with him. “Adams was unforgettable,” he was to tell Reader’s Digest in 1944. “Soft-spoken and with a genuine Oxford accent, he came with savage guards, with scores of coolies, with peppermints and a chess set. He had the air of one dropping in for tea. He was the ‘sahib of Mokokchung’ whom Sangbah had often mentioned to us in reverential terms as the real king of these wild hills.” Sevareid, for all his contempt for the British Empire and his disregard for British colonialism, could not but wonder at a system that was able to transplant a young man from the fields and villages of Sussex, via the University of Cambridge, into a situation where he was responsible for administering life on the edge of the world. It was almost surreal, but in fact very real.
With Adams came a handful of emissaries of the other great empire to which most of the survivors themselves belonged, the United States of America. These were men who were part of the USAAF’s aircraft warning scheme in the Naga Hills far to the south of the Patkoi Hills a hundred miles east of Kohima, which watched over the Chindwin for Japanese aircraft en route to Allied targets farther north. Lieutenant Andrew “Buddy” LaBonte had come with a radio, with which the survivors for the first time could talk to the world they had left behind on August 2. He was accompanied by Staff Sergeant John Lee DeChaine.aa These men were already vastly experienced in looking after themselves in the Naga-inhabited hills above the Chindwin (albeit in territory that was on friendly terms with the British administrators), having been part of the aircraft warning unit since it had been established in late 1942. Adams’s Mokokchung-based factotum, Emlong, who had accompanied the first expedition in 1936, was described by Sevareid as a potbellied and powerful man “who wore a leopard skin, spoke a few words of English, and was a famous tiger hunter.” The Naga guards were mercenaries recruited from the Konyak people in the villages close to Mokokchung; most were desperate for a piece of martial glory. They all knew, of course, of the previous expeditions to these parts and wanted to be part of the opportunity to demonstrate their superiority over those distant “savages” in the Patkoi Hills. Managing them was going to be a task in itself. Unlike the situation in 1936, when a full company of the Assam Rifles was able to accompany Mills and Fürer-Haimendorf, no disciplined troops were available in 1943. The Assam Rifles were scattered across the eastern Naga Hills, supporting the Assam Regiment in protecting the approaches to India from the Japanese across the Chindwin in Burma. Eager but relatively ill-disciplined bands of young Naga men recruited from the western hills for the duration of the expedition would have to suffice.bb
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.
aSome 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.
bIt 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.