DETACHMENT 101

Like that of the Jedburgh Operation, the role of Detachment 101 was to give active support behind the lines to a decisive military campaign. Like the Jedburghs, the men of 101 furnished liaison between the resistance and Allied troops in the field. Unlike most of the Jedburghs, however, 101 men actually led their partisans into battle.

Originally, when OSS aid to the resistance was being planned, it was decided that the men behind the lines should do just that. Many an OSS man who jumped into the field was briefed to take command of the resistance armies. Some of them actually did, particularly during the early stages of the Italian campaign. As the resistance grew stronger in Italy however, and throughout most of the war in France, the men organized themselves, had their own leaders and staff systems, and would not have considered the idea of relinquishing their command system to an American soldier.

In Burma, it was different.

There are those who argue, and argue with some force, that the whole strange, confused campaign in Burma, the forgotten front of World War II, should never have been fought, that the American effort in that country was wasted effort. There are others who as fiercely contend that the campaign was strategically essential. The whole argument comes down to a battle between the friends and enemies of the Ledo Road, between those who claim that the road was essential to the supply of China, and those who claim that air transport would have been more efficient.

At any rate, to General Stilwell, the Ledo Road seemed one important key to the whole campaign to help the Chinese drive the Japs out of China. His plans to protect and complete the building of the road were presented to the Quebec Conference, and they were approved. Those plans called for the capture of the Burmese jungle town of Myitkyina, and especially for the capture of its airstrip. From that airstrip, according to Stilwell and his supporters, the Japs were able to threaten the transport over the hump, and to endanger the building of the Ledo Road. Therefore it had to be taken.

To that end, a force which came to be known as Merrill’s Marauders was organized. The men of the Marauders were all volunteers, battle-hardened veterans of the fighting in the South Pacific. Before the end, many of the men bitterly regretted that they had ever volunteered. The jungle fighting was very terrible, and the jungle itself proved a worse enemy than the Japanese. That the Marauders succeeded at all in their mission, was due in large part, according to their commander, to a strange entente which had been established between a small group of Americans and a tribe of short, dark, wily natives, called the Kachins. The American—Kachin alliance was part of an OSS operation which was known as Detachment 101.

The Marauders set off on their epic march through the jungles early in the spring of 1944. Simultaneously, a British airborne force, under the fabulous General Orde Wingate, had accomplished one of the most extraordinary and successful maneuvers of the war when it landed in the jungle southwest of Myitkyina, built an airfield directly athwart the Jap supply lines, and held it for months against repeated attacks by the Japs, thus sapping the forces the enemy could bring to bear against the Marauders.

From the first, as soon as the Marauders reached enemy territory, the Kachins and the OSS men with them, working in small bands, had guided them through the jungle, provided flank security, warned them of the nearness of the enemy. As the column reached deeper and deeper into enemy territory, it came to rely more and more on the Kachins and on the Americans who led them and fought with them.

Early in the campaign, one understrength battalion of the Marauders was cut off from the main body of the column, and surrounded by the Japs. For almost two weeks the battalion, dug into foxholes in the dense, oppressive jungle, had fought off each Jap attack and waited for the next. They were not forgotten—daily the planes came over, dropping the food and precious water and the ammunition. Even so, it must have seemed to many of the men just a question of time, time till the Japs could bring up reinforcements and blast them out of their prepared positions.

Somewhere off to their flank was the American lieutenant Tilly, of Detachment 101, leader of a band which he had called, romantically, “The Lightning Force.” It would have been difficult to tell that Tilly was an American lieutenant; standard 101 uniform in the jungle was a pair of shorts, British ammunition boots, an Australian campaign hat adorned by a feather, and nothing else. His Lightning Force was also an unusual military unit. It consisted of a small band of Kachin tribesmen, most of them naked, carrying a variety of weapons which had been parachuted in to them at the lieutenant’s request, and which he had trained them to use. In America, Tilly had volunteered for “hazardous duty behind the enemy lines,” and now for some months he had been living with his Lightning Force, first organizing them, and then leading them in forays against the Japs.

Toward the end of the second week of the battalion’s encirclement, the Lightning Force struck. The Kachins, knowing the jungle as only men who have lived their lives in it can know it, took the Japs by surprise, ambushed them, harried them, hit them and hit them again. The Japs tried to strike back. The officers of the battalion knew their business. While the Japs searched vainly for the elusive natives who had attacked them so viciously from the rear, the battalion escaped the encirclement, and rejoined the main body of the Marauders.

The relief of the encircled battalion by Lieutenant Tilly’s Lightning Force was not the first nor the last example of successful co-operation between the Marauders and Detachment 101. Especially for the final push on the airstrip, the Marauders leaned heavily on the OSS men and their native friends.

In May, orders came through for the final push. If possible, the airstrip was to be taken by surprise. A special force of Marauders, called the “Galahad Column,” was formed for this purpose, under the command of Colonel Charles N. Hunter.

Far ahead of the Galahad Column, in the heart of the jungle, Commander Luce of the Navy, an OSS man who now found himself in command of a force of some hundreds of Kachins, received the order to strike. Another OSS lieutenant, Jerry Larsen, tall, blond, and exceedingly handsome, who must have looked well on the dance floor at the country-club parties back home, and who commanded another Kachin force, heard the same order. Larsen struck to the north and east of Myitkyina, and the Commander to the South and East. Using all the tricks of their trade, the trade of jungle fighting which they knew so well, the Kachins ambushed the Japs repeatedly, and kept them disorganized. To quote an official report, they did such a good job of “harrassing enemy reinforcements headed for Myitkyina that they were halted and finally diverted from their objective.”

In the meantime, the Galahad Column, protected on its flank by Larsen and Luce, was inching its way through the desperate mountainous jungle of central Burma. With it was another pair of OSS officers, young lieutenants who had also been in the jungle for many months, who knew the Kachins and were their friends. The Galahad Column was no army. In numbers it was small, and it was evident that if the objective were to be attained at all, it could be attained far more easily by surprise. Through the knowledge of the Kachins, to whom the back trails were as familiar as 42nd Street or Sixth Avenue might be to a New Yorker, the two lieutenants were able to lead the Galahad forces through the thick cover of the jungle almost up to the airstrip. If, somehow, the column could get right to the airfield without warning the Japs, the final assault against a surprised Jap garrision would be infinitely easier.

As the Americans forged closer and closer to the airstrip, the job of leading them up to the actual assault was given by the lieutenants to a little Kachin, N’Naw Yang Nau. Nau was a brave man. As he led the Americans through the little known passes and along hidden trails unknown to the Japs, he was bitten by a poisonous snake. He refused to give up. Propped on a horse, his head dropping and his eyes glazing over, Nau led his American friends right up to the airfield. Silently, the Galahad Column crept into position. The Japs knew nothing, until the bushes parted, and the fire of American automatic weapons began. Surprised, the Jap garrison was quickly defeated, and the vital airstrip was in American hands. The way was paved for the ultimate conquest of Myitkyina.

To Colonel Ray Peers, commanding officer of OSS Detachment 101, Colonel Hunter cabled, “Thanks to your people for a swell job. Could not have succeeded without them.”

The support which OSS Detachment 101 gave to Merrill’s Marauders was one incident in the detachment’s long and colorful career. 101 started in 1942 as a group of 11 officers and 9 enlisted men with vague ideas for setting up an intelligence network in China. Like so many OSS projects, it underwent in the course of time a startling transformation. It ended up in 1945 as a group of more than 500 Americans, with organized guerrilla bands of 8500 native Kachins operating behind the Japanese lines in Burma.

In that one way, it was typical of OSS; it set out to do one thing, and ended up by doing something entirely different which was both more feasible and more valuable. But it was typical in that way only. For 101 was the only detachment in OSS which operated entirely as a unit, without the slightest regard for the branch lines and the branch jealousies which were typical of OSS in almost every other theater. With Wingate on Broadway, as the strip which he and his men cleared and held in the Burma jungle was facetiously called, there was for example a 101 man who had originally been recruited for the scholarly Research and Analysis Branch. He must have wondered from time to time how he ever ended up wandering about the Burmese jungles with a lot of British and undersized natives, taking pot shots at the Japs. But in point of fact, he probably never thought of himself as a research man at all, but as a proud member of Detachment 101.

It was in large part this disregard for the system of organization laid down by Washington that gave 101 its enormous esprit de corps, and made it possible for the unit to achieve some of the extraordinary things it did. Very few people in OSS had any very great feeling for the organization as a whole—it was too big, too sprawling, and it did too many things. Individual units within the organization developed their own esprit de corps—the operational groups which went behind the lines in Italy and suffered heavy casualties, the group of skiers who parachuted into Norway, especially the Jedburghs. But these people were all of the same branches, all doing precisely the same sort of job. Nowhere but in Burma, in Detachment 101, was there an over-all unit feeling, regardless of the individual’s job, as there is in units of the Army. An OSS man who had belonged to 101 was proud of it, and he let you know it at the first opportunity. He had some reason to be proud.

Carl Eifler—he was a captain at the beginning, and ended up a full colonel—started the whole thing. Eifler was one of the most fabulous characters in OSS, and the people who worked and fought under him still speak his name with awe. A great bull of a man, with a voice that was more nearly a roar, a terrifying temper, and an enormous determination combined with a shrewdness which made it possible for him to achieve what seemed impossible, Carl Eifler flew his own plane, could box like a professional, and shot a pistol so accurately that his shooting became a minor piece of OSS folklore. Eifler had been with the Los Angeles police force before he was 20, and he had served with the Mexican Border Patrol, in which he had learned a good deal about Jap methods of espionage. Early in 1942 a plan was formed to set up an intelligence net in the Far East, with the emphasis on China. Eifler had worked with Stilwell, CBI commander, on Jap espionage, and when the plan was in the formative stages, his name was suggested. At the time he was commanding an infantry company in Hawaii, and itching for action. He had never heard of COI, as OSS was then called, but when he heard that Wild Bill Donovan ran the show, he jumped at the chance. In Washington, he was told that he could have 20 men—he had wanted 125—and he went about recruiting them. Among his first two choices were Captain John Coughlin and Captain Ray Peers. Coughlin had been another company commander with Eifler in Hawaii, and the two were close friends. A West Pointer, tall, level-headed, and intelligent, Coughlin became known in OSS as one of the very few men who could “handle Eifler.” Coughlin later took command of all OSS in the India-Burma theater, and did an outstanding job.

Ray Peers was another regular army officer. He was rangy and athletic; many of the men who served under him would swear not only that he was the best officer in OSS but the best officer in the Army. He succeeded Eifler in command of 101. To Eifler belongs all the credit of setting up 101, but Peers was in large part responsible for the remarkable morale of the outfit. He recognized that it never was and never could be a regular military unit in the ordinary sense—an extraordinary thing for any regular army officer to recognize—and he was willing to allow his men all the personal eccentricities they wanted and all the scope necessary to run their own shows within the limits of the broad lines which he laid down. The men of 101 loved him.

Besides these two, Eifler eventually gathered together eight more officers and nine enlisted men. It is said that he picked up a couple of his recruits in a bar, but if so, it was a good job of recruiting. Three of the men were of Chinese ancestry or spoke Chinese, since the original plan called for operations in China. They ended up working with the natives of Burma, but they, too, proved their mettle.

Detachment 101 very nearly joined the long list of stillborn OSS operations. Eifler was the first to get to the Far East, and when at first he tried to see General Stilwell, he got nowhere. He was told that there was no chance of setting up any intelligence unit in China, and to go home and forget about the whole thing. Only a man of Eifler’s bull-like persistency could have seen it through. After months of badgering and baiting people, he got to see the General. Eifler talked persuasively. Stilwell told him that China was out, but he liked Eifler’s ideas for sabotage and intelligence behind the lines in Burma, and he told him to go ahead. As Eifler left, Stilwell said he didn’t want to hear anything more from him till he began hearing booms from behind the Jap lines. With this slightly vague directive, 101 was born.

It was the Kachins, a little known tribe, of whom most of the 101 men had never heard before, who made 101 what it was to become. 101 men are nothing if they are not individuals, but they are unanimous on two points—their admiration for Ray Peers and for the Kachin tribesmen. That the Kachins are “the greatest fighting men in the world” is almost a 101 shibboleth. Burma is full of tribes and races, and not all of them are fighting men. One man who had worked behind the lines with another racial group said of them, “It is better to lead them into battle. If you are not in front of them, you are likely to be trampled to death in the rush when the first shot is fired.” But the Kachins love a fight, and in their own country, among the towering jungle-covered mountain ranges of north Burma, they had no equal. Between these short, sturdy people and the Americans straight from the farms and offices who were sent out to fight and work with them, there developed a strange but very strong understanding. The Kachins had no great love for foreigners; they hated the Burmese, the Chinese, and the British, with varying degrees of intensity.

Many 101 men claimed that the reason the Americans got on so well with the Kachin natives was that, unlike the British, they did not treat them as “natives.” The Americans were, they said, quite natural and open with the Kachins, asked their advice, which was frequently badly needed, and even on occasion slapped them affectionately on their bare backs. The Kachins, after their initial amazement, reacted highly favorably to this treatment, and took the Americans to their hearts.

For centuries the Kachins have lived in a mountainous region of North Burma, in an area, limited by the confluence of two rivers, called “The Triangle.” They live a simple, autonomous village life, eating rice and game and poultry. They trap wild pigs, a technique which they later developed and expanded for the trapping of Japs. They are small, wiry, and very dark, and they are not much interested in clothing.

It is to the credit of the Americans who were infiltrated or parachuted in to live with them that very few were so stupid or so blind as to assume the “white man’s burden” attitude. Those who did soon learned better, soon learned that the Kachins knew more about jungle guerrilla fighting than an American could ever hope to learn. The Kachins worked out their own techniques. They whittled sharp points on bamboo poles, and stuck them at a slant beneath the underbrush on the sides of the jungle trails. As a Jap column passed them along the trail, the Kachins would fire. The Japs, instinctively, would throw themselves for cover to the side. The results, though not pretty, were effective. When the Japs caught onto this trick the Kachins—and it was their own idea—would load the spring of an antipersonnel mine with a .30 caliber bullet, and hide it under the dirt of the trail. The Japs when ambushed, fearing the bamboo spikes, would throw themselves flat on the trail. Their weight would release the spring; most often they were shot through the chest.

The Kachins, say the Americans, seemed to be able to smell the Japs. By some curious necromancy of their own, they seemed always to know where the Japs were and where they were going. On the rare occasions when they were in doubt, the Kachins would throw a hair at the junction of two trails and go in the direction the hair pointed; it always worked. Like many other OSS men who jumped to the native resistance behind the lines, the Americans quickly got over any idea of undisputed leadership. Theirs was the responsibility for the grand strategy, when to attack and when to lie low. But the tactics of jungle fighting, how to find the Japs and how to avoid them, that was the province of the wily brown men.

It also quickly became apparent to the Americans that the Kachins did not regard themselves as “natives.” If there was any condescension on either side in the mutual sympathy that grew up between the two races, it was on the side of the Kachins. They had been independent in fact, if not in name, for centuries, and they regarded themselves in a calm, unruffled way as the superiors of anyone on earth. They were utterly convinced of this superiority, and their conviction was so deep that unlike the Germans and the Japs, who were never really quite sure they were supermen, the Kachins were never obnoxious. They had the tolerance which comes from real self-assurance. If the Americans committed some heinous infraction of the Kachin code of etiquette, they would be forgiven; why get irritated with ignorant foreigners?

Many of the Americans who lived for months in the jungles with the Kachins, playing hide and seek with the Jap patrols, came to love the life. An OSS officer who had spent months with the maquis behind the lines in France once wrote, “It was the only freedom I have ever known, or shall ever know again. I loved it.” Many 101 men felt the same way. It was not an easy life. The jungle is big, and it is easy to hide in, but there were always the Japs—it was, after all, Jap-held territory. Almost worse than the Japs were the leeches, and the poisonous snakes, and above all the malarial mosquitoes. Very few of the 101 men who went into the jungle (there were, of course, as in any operation, many who had purely administrative jobs at base) escaped malaria; some had it a number of times, and a good many, after months in the jungle, had to be sent home.

Even so, many of the men who fought with the Kachin Rangers, as they came to be known, look back on the life with nostalgia. It is easy to view the past through rose-tinted spectacles, and particularly in remembering wartime experiences it is easy to remember what was fun, and to forget what was boring or irritating or uncomfortable. But life in the jungle, Japs, leeches, snakes, malaria, rain, discomfort, and all, had its compensations. The Americans were alone or in small groups with their Kachin friends. In the jungle, there was none of what the GI calls, for short, “chicken,” and it is chicken which makes the life of the ordinary soldier seem at times intolerable. There were no drills, no “policing the area,” no inspection; there was discipline, but it was discipline of a special and informal kind.

101 gradually built up a color and quality of its own, as units which have been together for a long time do. When the first set of 20 men arrived in the theater, members of a suspect semicivilian organization, sworn to an unnecessary and irritating degree of security, they were regarded by other Army men with a devastating combination of contempt and amusement. But when 101 began to demonstrate what it could do, when the intelligence reports flowed into headquarters, when the box score of dead Japs, killed by 101’s Kachins behind the lines, mounted, when the first of the downed Allied flyers were exfiltrated from the jungle, when new units arrived and 101 stayed and its men became jungle veterans, then the attitude began to change. Commendations from commanding generals piled up, the unit was put in for a Presidential Citation, and, as a final accolade, Tokyo Rose took note of 101 in her broadcasts. 101 was successful, and it was colorful. Rear echelon men sometimes spoke of it with awe—“Those people who fight with the natives in the jungle behind the lines.”

It did not happen because it was planned that way. Things rarely happen as planned in any army in any war, and they almost never did in OSS. No one decided, right from the start, “Let’s send American officers behind the lines to work with the Kachins, who are a fighting race who hate the Japs.” Such neat planning only happens in the pages of the slickpaper magazines. 101 was at first an intelligence unit. Its first operations consisted of sending in natives trained by 101, with radios, to find out what the Japs were up to. A number of these men, Burmese, Shan, Karen, and others, were killed. The work was continued throughout the existence of 101, and the information which these men sent back was consistently valuable. But that the emphasis shifted more than a little away from straight intelligence is indicated by the following paragraph from a commendation written on 101 by the Chief of Staff of the Northern Area Combat Command:

“After the cessation of the Chinese Army in India offensive in March, 1945, Detachment 101 troops, while continuing their intelligence mission, embarked on an offensive of their own against the Japanese 56th Division, an experienced, battle-hardened unit of at least 5,000 combat troops, plus normal line-of-communication units. This Detachment 101 operation forced the stubbornly withdrawing enemy to move over 170 airline miles southward, and in so doing, recovered some 13,600 square miles of enemy-occupied terrain in the mountainous Shan States area of Burma. This advance was accomplished with no aid from any other Allied ground forces.”

A remarkable accomplishment for a unit which started with 20 men and vague ideas for setting up an intelligence net.

It was one of many accomplishments. Some of the other things 101 did are worth recording.

The Kachin Rangers, organized and led by the OSS men, killed 5,447 known Jap dead, and took a total of 64 of that rara avis, the Jap prisoner. How many were badly wounded or died later nobody knows—the number has been estimated, perhaps rashly, at 10,000. For all this, only about 70 Kachin lives and 15 American were lost; a proportion of 360 certain Jap dead for every American killed.

Two hundred seventeen airmen, shot down behind the lines, were rescued, and either guided out or picked up on secret airfields.

Guides, security patrols, or flank security were provided, not only to the Marauders, but for the Mars Task Force, the British Fourth Group, the British Thirty-sixth Division, and the Chinese First and Sixth Armies.

Basically, the job of Detachment 101 was, or became, a job of working with the resistance, in this case the Kachins. But the detachment’s intelligence function was important too, and there is evidence that 101 was almost as good at getting intelligence as at killing Japs. “Detachment 101,” wrote the Acting Chief of Staff of the Northern Area Combat Command, “through its efficient net of native agents which operated behind enemy lines under the direct, on-the-spot supervision of American officers and enlisted men, kept this headquarters constantly informed (by radio nets operated from the forward agent groups of American personnel) of Japanese locations, movements, dispositions, intentions, morale, and status of supply, and of vital terrain information.”

Even General Stilwell, not usually lavish with praise, put in a good word. “Services rendered by 101,” he wrote to General Marshall, “were of great value.”

But military phraseology is colorless, and 101, whatever else it was, was anything but colorless. It was perhaps the most conglomerate mixture of races and nationalities of any unit in the history of the war. “This unit is the most heterogeneous collection of individuals ever assembled,” wrote Colonel Ray Peers, “Army, Navy, Marine, civilians, Burmese, Chinese, Kachins, Shans, Anglos, assigned, attached, detached—anybody willing to work. 101 had its private air force, which dropped supplies and men (some of whom had never jumped before) to the jungle camps behind the Jap lines.

There were even two fighting priests in the unit, who deserve a chapter in themselves. Father MacAlindon and Father Stuart evidently believed in the Church Militant, and they made a great contribution to the work of 101. They had had to evacuate The Triangle, where they had been missionaries with the Kachins, when the Japs took over the area in 1942. Somewhere in India, they heard of Carl Eifler’s plans to use the Kachins as a guerrilla force, and without hesitation they volunteered to go back. As interpreters, not only of the language but of the Kachin customs, and as guides, philosophers, and friends to the woefully inexperienced Americans, they proved invaluable. Without them the astonishingly successful partnership between the Americans and the Kachin tribes would have developed more slowly and with far more difficulty, if at all.

The work of 101 came to an end with the conquest of Burma, a matter of weeks before the final Jap surrender. There was a parade for a general, and the Kachins did themselves proud, marching well in their spruce uniforms provided for the occasion. There were speeches and farewell parties, and the Americans shook hands with their Kachin friends, and Detachment 101 had ceased to exist. Some of the Americans followed Ray Peers to China, where in the last few weeks of the war they did good work, although they still couldn’t get it out of their heads that they were 101 men. Some were sent home and invalided out of the Army with malaria. Others were sent back for discharge from the Army, and as they awaited their turn in the dreary camps, and filled out papers and answered roll call and stood in line and waited, and as they thought of the yawning mystery of civilian life ahead, they remembered almost with regret, their sturdy little friends the Kachin tribesmen, and their life in the jungle behind the Japanese lines.