The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II

The book is a fascinating and well told story of a crew of young aviators who were shot down during a bombing mission to Brunei Bay, Borneo, on 16 November 1944. The Japanese fleet was refitting after losing the naval engagements in the Philippines in October and the 5th Heavy Bombardment wing was sent on an air strike to further damage the fleet - flying in at about 9,000 feet - a pretty low altitude. Minutes before they would be overhead their targets, one of the aircraft was hit by a six inch shell in the cockpit area; the dying copilot managed to get the crippled aircraft over land, and the crew parachuted into the one of the most primative and unexplored areas on the planet... the middle of the highlands of Borneo. There the real advanture begins. I am the son of one of the airmen. I have known this story (most parts of it) since I found the "treaure trove" of letters, news clippings, souvenirs and photos at age 10. What I didn't know that in protecting these men, the native population started an uprising to free themselves of their Japanese oppressors, allowing the Australian troops to form up alongside a rebellion in progress. I was proud to read about my then 19 year old father and his equally young crewmates, and read how they "hid out" for over 8 months - and know about the bonds that formed between them and the natives of Borneo that lasted the rest of their lives. The unnamed airman on the right end of the photo of the crew during their jungle survival training is my father - no doubt about it, John Nelson.

This engrossing book is a thoroughly researched tale of an amazing episode of World War II in the Pacific. Ms. Heimann, a career American diplomat who herself is fluent in Indonesian (Malay), personally met with all available American and Dayak survivors as well as tapping Australian, Dutch, Indonesian and British archival sources. One hopes that she will continue to write for publication. I found the clear descriptions of the now-disappearing life and culture of the Borneo "headhunters" fascinating, and the adventure of the downed airmen themselves is engrossing from first to last. The native people protected and hid the Americans for months in the deep jungle despite grave danger to themselves from Japanese reprisal. It is good that Christian missionary work in the Borneo interior pre-WWII was such a positive influence. I am glad that this story has been told, for many reasons beyond the enjoyment and information that it will provide for its readers. It is also a pleasant reminder that we are not superior. As one of the returned U.S. airmen told his wife when discussing the people of the Borneo jungle: "We're supposed to be civilized and they're savages, but they don't beat their wives or rape women, or even correct their children under the age of five. There are no orphans or old people left on their own. Everybody takes care of everybody."

Let me preface this review by admitting some bias towards the author and the subject. One of the airmen in the book, Tom Capin, was my father's cousin. In a passage that Tom Capin is reminiscing about his youth, he mentions my grandfather. For me that was unexpected and brought back a flood of emotion. However, back to the story; the tale of Tom and the airmen has been passed down from generation to generation in our family. In fact I have a scrapbook that my grandmother (Tom's aunt) made for me and the first four pages were newspaper clippings from interviews Tom did after his return from the war. The events in the book match closely with Tom's fresh postwar accounts. I also keep in contact with Tom's widow, Betty Capin, and she has told me of Tom's undying love for the Dayak people. The family was interviewed during Judith's research for the book and from all accounts the author did not embellish or fictionalize any of the stories. Although I am a history buff and knew Tom's story I did not know anything about Major Tom Harrison and I plan on reading the author's book on him. I was also unaware of the Japanese atrocities in Borneo against missionaries, POWs, and the Dayak people. Not surprising given the brutality of war, however, reading the accounts was disturbing. The book was a very entertaining read and I thought it was well written. I would heartily recommend reading the book to anyone who is interested in WWII, Christianity, and a very human tale of sacrifice, brutality, hope, despair, and love.

This is a truly gripping tale (Hollywood should snap it up!) and only a writer with Judith Heimann's unique mix of experience and determination could have uncovered it. The native eyewitnesses were fast disappearing when Heimann travelled (twice) to Borneo where, reviving her knowledge of Malay/Indonesian from seven years living in the area, she tracked down and interviewed in their homes more than a dozen Dayak tribespeople directly involved. She also found and interviewed five of the eleven American airmen involved (of whom only one is still alive today) and collected papers, photos and diaries from the widows of still others. The book tells the story of American airmen whose two Liberator bomber planes -- one Army, one Navy -- were shot up in the last year of WW II over the jungles of Borneo, which was totally uncharted territory about which the airmen knew nothing except that the natives had been famous as headhunters. Although the airmen could not have expected it, the local Dayak tribespeople were willing to befriend them. The Yanks would surely have starved without the Dayaks' food and shelter, humble and unfamiliar though it was. Even so, the Yanks' survival borders on the miraculous. They suffered from numerous tropical ailments for which their "survival kit" proved woefully inadequate. Their clothes and boots rotted away and they walked barefoot many miles up and down steep, wet, leech-filled mountainsides during their seven-month stay in this strange world. Heimann fleshes out the details she recovered into a narrative with descriptive passages that let you share in the experience. Why did the Dayaks risk the wrath of their pitiless Japanese occupiers to protect these American strangers? It seems that this was at least in part thanks to the good will earned by North American Christian missionaries who had behaved with tact and courtesy towards the Dayaks from the 1930s up till 1942 when the Japanese took them away and murdered them, their wives and their children. In addition, for those Dayaks who had not converted to the new faith or who longed for the thrill of the headhunting raids that had been central to the old faith, the opportunity to take heads again -- even though only Japanese ones -- had strong appeal. Heimann relates her many-sided tale with great clarity, in spite of a dauntingly vast and various cast of characters that includes not only the airmen and the westernized Indonesians from other islands who were serving in Borneo as district officers and acting pastors, but also brave Dayak men and women, both Christianized and pagan (whose way of life was entirely unknown to this reader), as well as a handful of Chinese shopkeepers, daring Aussie special operations paratroops and pilots and a mad British Major! Furthermore, for once, there are decent maps that help you follow the plot, thanks to months Heimann spent with a mapmaker entering the names and river courses of this poorly charted region, Al

Author Judith Heimann provided intriguing glimpses of this unusual story in her previous work on Tom Harrisson, a Britisher living in Borneo in World War II who, despite being "The Most Offending Soul Alive", managed to organize Dayak tribesmen (an indigenous, loosely affiliated group of tribal groups) in Borneo armed with deadly blow-pipes into a small but effective army against the Japanese, eventually being credited with killing over 1,500 of the enemy. Her new book, "The Airmen and the Headhunters", is an outgrowth of her book on Tom Harrison (who coincidentally was a neighbor of hers many years ago in Borneo - he died in 1976). It is a well-written and engaging account of 11 Yankee airman who survive a crash-landing of their B-24 "Liberator" bomber in November 1944 only to find themselves surrounded by Dayak tribesmen who agree to help them escape from and evade capture by the Japanese, an adventure which takes a harrowing six months. The result is an unexpected gem of a story of survival in which the airmen (untrained and unable to survive in the wilds of Borneo) are saved by a peoples who had nothing to gain and everything to lose (through the vengeance and retribution of the Japanese) by helping them out.