British historian Robert Lyman has been on a lengthy mission to document the Burma Front of World War II and the stories of valour shown by the American airmen who flew “The Hump” to deliver supplies to the Chinese as they battled the forces of Imperial Japan.
“I'm trying very hard to get away from it, but it draws me back every time because it's absolutely fascinating. It's an area and a part of the war that very few people really know much about,” historian Lyman says, describing to Insight Myanmar for a podcast the 35 years he’s spent researching the Burma Front of World War II.
Check out the Insight Myanmar podcast here:
https://insightmyanmar.org/complete-shows/2023/6/25/episode-173-revisiti...
LIFETIME QUEST
After completing a PhD on Field Marshall Slim, the British commander of the Fourteenth Army who successfully fought back the Japanese occupation of Burma, Lyman became intrigued by the ethnic hill tribes living in the impacted areas, particularly the Naga who currently live on both the Myanmar and India side of the India-Myanmar border. This combined interest led to the publication of the book “Among The Headhunters”, in which this conversation is centered.
Lyman, himself, is a former officer in the British Army, and the author of over a dozen books.
The story Lyman tells is simple enough, notes Insight Myanmar: an American C-47 bound for China goes down in the Naga Hills, and a race to get the survivors to safety begins. Though obviously an adventurous plot, it is the details around this tale which stand out, and Lyman goes into the many layers underlying how it unfolded.
He sets the stage by unraveling a pivotal chapter in history: the Japanese invasion of Burma. Their main objective was to block the Burma Road, a crucial supply line for Allied forces. The Japanese army accomplished its goal in April 1942, which caused the Americans to become concerned about the perilous fate of their Chinese allies and the implications for the wider war in Asia if Chinese forces should fail. “It was very important to keep the Japanese occupied in China, and the way to do that is to feed and fuel and arm the Chinese so that they can hold down the Japanese,” Lyman
explains. “If you take China out of the war, you've got a very different dynamic now operating in the Pacific, and you have to deal with very large numbers of Japanese infantry.”
INTERESTING VIPS
However, hidden beneath the surface of this strategic choice lay a web of political turmoil. In the middle of it all was General Joseph Stilwell, a staunch critic of the China plan, arguing that a significant portion of the American supplies dispatched to China were being hoarded by Nationalist forces for the imminent Chinese Civil War, instead of used in combat against the Japanese. Yet Stilwell, who was known by the moniker "Vinegar Joe" due to his irascible temperament, found himself outmaneuvered in the debate by influential figures like American aviator Claire Chennault, a charismatic and forceful communicator. Chennault commanded the Flying Tigers, whose daring involvement in the resupply missions swayed the tide of opinion. And so, in this clash of personalities and conflicting interests, careful discernment succumbed to brash determination. But now came the harder part: implementing the plan.
“Only the Americans could have done this,” Lyman explains of the dramatic flights planned over the eastern portion of the Himalayas, which came to be known as The Hump. “I mean, I'm serious, it really was quite an extraordinary piece of thinking that went behind it! It was probably one of the greatest logistical exercises ever undertaken in human history.” Lyman also believes that the “can-do” American spirit displayed here also likely reveals why the Allies were ultimately able to prevail. “We can deliver, we can solve these problems,” he notes, describing the American attitude at the time. “Nothing's too big for us! The roads are gone, so hey, we'll fly everything and by air… and they jolly well did.”
DARING MISSIONS
Navigating the Himalaya’s treacherous skies, pilots had to wear oxygen masks on their daring missions, which wove around 17,000-foot peaks and dodged Japanese fighters determined to bring them down. Against all odds, these intrepid aviators flew a staggering 650,000 tons of vital supplies to Chinese forces over 900 harrowing days! However, this extraordinary feat came at a tremendous price. The route they traveled earned the haunting moniker, "The Aluminum Trail," a chilling homage to all the planes that never returned home.
Yet as compelling as this story may be, Lyman admits he wouldn’t have gone further with his research if the flight crew of the crashed plane had been ordinary. “It's quite extraordinary, actually,
you wouldn't have ever thought about putting all of these people in the same aircraft,” he says. “That's a fun thing for me. If these were just ordinary soldiers, then I probably wouldn't have given this subject another thought.” He recounts just some of those involved in the crash that became the subject of his book: Duncan Lee, a direct relative of Robert E. Lee, who was later revealed to have been a Soviet spy; Eric Sevareid, one of the most respected American journalists at the time; Jack Davies, the political attaché to General Stilwell who was on his way to meet Chiang Kai-Shek; and Bill Stanton, a member of the Board of Economic Warfare.
INSIGHT INTO THE NAGA
Having described the principle Western actors, Lyman turns his attention to the Naga, an ethnic group spread out along the borderlands of Burma and India. Naga origins are believed to be from Papua New Guinea, and to stretch back a millennium, and they became subdivided into a great many tribes. Their total population is estimated at about 200,000, and includes at least 17 distinct languages. When the British Empire eventually expanded into the Naga Hills, conflict soon developed.
The Naga are perhaps best known for being headhunters, a facet of their culture that Lyman delved deeper into. “Headhunters provide a spiritual benefit to the recipients,” he explains. “If you chop someone's head off, even if it's a child, you will receive the spiritual value inherent in that individual.” However, it wasn’t just headhunting that made the British sensibilities recoil: some Naga tribes were also slaveowners. “A village would often capture men, women and children out in the fields or collecting water, and they would use them as slaves. Once when they thought it was opportune, they would kill them and take their heads and stick their heads on the head poles that adorn the entrances to the villages. So slavery and headhunting were intertwined.”
Over time, as the British Empire began encroaching further into Naga territory, they became concerned that these Naga raids would have long-term, detrimental consequences for the Raj; that is, it would symbolize the inability of the giant colonial power to ensure peace in the vast and expanding territory it was acquiring. Although some Naga tribes actually sought out the British and paid them a tax in exchange for security, others avoided them altogether while persisting with their custom of raiding, headhunting and slavery. This led to a series of punitive expeditions in which the British trekked into hostile territory to burn the villages responsible for these raids.
These forays were carried out by administrators who were part of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), and Lyman goes into detail about the men who filled these positions over the years. “Many of us have
completely erroneous view about the nature of the colonial administration,” Lyman notes. “The colonial administrators in the hills tended almost exclusively to be significant anthropologists in their own right. They were there to study the people, and they wanted to preserve the cultures of the people.” He explains how these administrators were concerned that these repeating cycles of violence limited the ability of Naga people to advance. “If you want endless peace, you have to set up mechanism structures to enable that to happen,” he notes, describing the British rationale for these punitive missions as an attempt to restore order.
OUTSIDE INFLUENCES
Lyman goes on to note that there were two additional groups of Westerners who descended on Naga lands: American missionaries, and the East India Company. The East India Company’s primary purpose was trade, and they started growing tea as early as the 1840s in Assam. Located in the foothills of Naga territory, many of these tea plantations were soon subject to Naga raids. But the Company couldn’t do much about it, and so the incursions continued, until the British Crown claimed the territory. “There's a very significant change here in 1858,” Lyman explains, “[it goes] from a commercial sort of freewheeling commercial enterprise where the primary focus of life and of law and the structures of social existence were built around trade, and all of a sudden under the Raj, that the world was turned upside down, and the preeminent priorities were about civil order.”
As for the American missionaries, they arrived as early as the 1830s, but came in greater numbers after the American Civil War. “There seemed to be an American revitalized sense of itself, which sent lots of evangelical Baptist missionaries to places all over the Indo Pacific, including Nagaland.” They were wildly successful, as Nagas are 97% Christian today. However, the missionaries soon clashed with the ICS administrators, who were dismayed about how rapidly American influence was affecting traditional Naga culture, from clothing to Christian hymns. “The British colonial administration in the Naga Hills, you might describe it today as being ‘woke, ’because it was desperately keen on preserving the characteristics of an ancient culture that modernity was threatening to strip away.”
With the context and the principle characters adequately fleshed out, Lyman returns to the tale of the plane crash. While few onboard would have known much of this Naga history, there was certainly a fear of being captured by either the Japanese, or Naga tribes that were not supporting the Allied effort. The crash survivors would later learn that the site of the crash occurred near Pangsha, a Naga town that, as luck would have it, had been the target of two especially notorious punitive missions by the British, in 1936 and 1937, respectively. The Pangsha Naga were known as some of the most fearful warriors of the entire region.
DROPPING FROM THE SKY
Although some of them would have encountered white men before during British assaults on their territory from a decade earlier, few had any conception of the modern world outside their village. “All of a sudden, a whole bunch of white men come falling on top of your village in Panghsa!” Lyman describes, painting the scene. “You can imagine that they had a number of choices in their heads: what do we do with these people? Who are they? Are they angels? Or they come from the gods? Are they a gift to us?”
Ultimately, Lyman believes that their extreme strangeness and the modernity they represented was an advantage, causing the villagers to be in a state of shock more than anything else. They were enthralled by everything from the parachute fabric to the empty tin cans, and fights broke out among the Naga to claim these discarded items. “I think we can't underestimate the dramatic cultural discombobulation of the Panghsaites,” he says, “And in many respects, I think this probably explains why they behaved so benevolently to the survivors of the air crash.”
The survivors were given shelter in local villages, and American transport planes managed to get them further supplies, while a ground expedition was sent out to find them. Other than the co-pilot who was killed on impact, all the others survived. “The triumph of the story is the fact that both American survivors and Naga Pangshaites, actually were able to communicate to each other at levels of their base humanity, that enabled our both sides to survive,” he says in summary.
SADNESS OF CURRENT-DAY MYANMAR
Sadly, this sense of shared humanity is missing almost entirely from the current conflict in Myanmar. For this, Lyman is equally critical of colonial mapmakers as he is of the many disastrous decades of Bamar rule. As for the former, he notes how “it's quite hilarious when you look at their map nowadays [of the Naga Hills], there's no rhyme or reason to a lot of it!” He describes how this region was never adequately mapped by the British-run Survey of India, and that World War II put a permanent stop to whatever effort was there. So when formal borders were drawn, “maps just didn't exist.” The end result was that tribes were subsumed haphazardly into either India and Burma without any real understanding of the nations they suddenly became a part of. And to complicate matter further, some Naga preferred to stay under British rule.
As for the Bamar, he notes that the government should have been working towards establishing “a nation of all the people of the hilltribes.” Here, Lyman sees parts of the British colonial administration as something that modern day Nay Pyi Daw should aspire to. “You have to create the systems and structures and processes to enable a nation to grow, and you're never going to do that in Myanmar if you just beat up the Chins or the Karens or if you if you utilize violence,” he notes. “The really tragic thing about Myanmar is that the government doesn't seem to understand that every time they use violence… they simply create more warriors… They're not doing anything to create a long peace! It's very difficult to impose a set of structures that will enable peace to grow. And Myanmar needs to do that. If Myanmar wants peace, if it wants to create a national polity and a national identity, and there are very good ways of doing it. But stamping on and causing violence against the people in the hilltribes is not the way to do it.”
Check out the Insight Myanmar podcast with Lyman here:
https://insightmyanmar.org/complete-shows/2023/6/25/episode-173-revisiti...
