How 8 Australian Commandos Wiped Out 1,000 Japanese In Borneo Without Losing A Man

There is a long house at Bario. It is 50 m long. It is built of iron wood  and split bamboo and thatched with seago palm. It stands on posts that lift the floor a full man’s height above the ground. Beneath it, pigs sleep in the shade. Around it, the wet rice terraces climb the plateau in stepped ovals of green. Inside, 500 people live.

 They cook, sleep, marry, bury,  quarrel, and pray under one roof. On the morning of the 26th of March, 1945, eight men have been  added to that number. They arrived in the night from the sky at the ends of parachutes, and the senior elder of the long house  has not yet decided what to do with them. He has choices.

 He can feed them. He can turn them over to the Japanese garrison at  Loaz. 4 days walk away in exchange for salt and cloth and the goodwill of the occupier. He can order his warriors to kill them where they sit. The choice is his and he has  not made it. Two of the men are asleep.

 The other six sit on the split bamboo floor  with their weapons across their knees. They are dressed in green jungle drill. One of them wears a major’s crown  on each shoulder. The elder studies the crown. He asks what it means. >>  >> He is told through a Malayinge interpreter that it is the mark of a chief. The elder nods.

 He asks whether the man who wears it is the son  or the nephew of Raja Brookke. The interpreter passes the question. The party leader hesitates.  Then he says carefully that he is not the nephew of Raja Brookke but that he serves the same cause. The elder considers this answer. He orders rice. This is the moment at which Operation Semit 1 begins.

 Not the parachute drop in the night, not the 6-hour liberator flight from Muro, not the 18 months of planning in Melbourne and Manila  and Moro Thai. The moment at which the operation becomes real is the moment  the elder of Bario orders rice for the eight men who have fallen out of the sky.

 Because until that moment, they were not soldiers behind enemy lines, but corpses in waiting. From this moment, they are  guests. In the interior of Sarawak in the year 1945, the distinction  is absolute. The purpose of this script is to reconstruct what happened next. What happened next is one of the most improbable episodes in the whole of the Second World War.

Eight men who could fit into a single room, raised, armed, and directed an indigenous army that would within 7 months kill more than 1,000 Japanese soldiers for the loss of no members of their own team. and roughly 30 of the local gorillas they had trained. That  is the bare arithmetic of it. The story of how the bare arithmetic came to be true is a story about anthropology and about parachutes and about rifles dropped from liberators onto rice patties and about a people whose grandfathers had taken heads and

whose grandsons were being asked politely whether they would like to take heads again. It is not a simple story. It has never been well told. This is an attempt to understand why the eight men were on the long house floor at Bario on the morning of the 26th of March. One has to understand the shape of the war in the Western Pacific in the early spring of 1945.

 The Japanese Empire was contracting. The Americans had taken the Maranas the previous summer. The Philippines campaign was in its final phase. Ewima had fallen on the 26th of February. Okinawa would be invaded on the 1st of April  and the Australian First Corps under General Sir Leslie Moors Head was being tasked with the reconquest of Borneo.

  The reconquest of Borneo was called, in the language of Allied planners, Operation Obo. It had six parts numbered 1-6 and it would ultimately involve 75,000 Australian troops, more than served at Gallipoli, more than served at Tbrook. The part that mattered for the eight men on the long house floor was OBO 6.

 Obo 6 was the landing at Brunai Bay on the northwest coast of Borneo by the Australian 9th Division. It was scheduled for the 10th of June 1945  that gave the eight men on the long house floor at bario 76 days to do what they had come to do. What they had come to do was described in the operational documents that authorized the mission  as reconnaissance.

This was a euphemism. Reconnaissance was one component of the task. The other components  were the recruitment, training, arming, and deployment of an indigenous army capable of harassing Japanese lines of communication throughout northern Sowak, of gathering intelligence on Japanese  dispositions in advance of the 9th Division’s landing, of denying food and labor to the Japanese occupation force, and if possible, of tying down enough Japanese soldiers in the interior to prevent them from reinforcing the

coastal  garrisons. The operation had a code name. The code name was Semit. Semit is the Mallay word for ant. The party leader had chosen it himself. He wrote later  that the intention was for the operation to be small, biting, numerous, and everywhere at once. He wrote later in the same document that the intention was for the Japanese  never to be sure how many ants there were.

 The unit that had recruited the eight men was called, on paper, the services reconnaissance department. Services reconnaissance department was a cover name. Its members mostly never learned what the initials stood for and this was by design. In practice, it was the Australian arm of Special Operations Australia, which was the Pacific equivalent of the British Special Operations Executive, which had been created by Winston Churchill in 1940  to, in his phrase, set Europe ablaze.

The Australian version had a smaller ambition and a larger jungle. Its operators were drawn from a specialist unit called Z special unit which was in turn a subset of the services reconnaissance department which reported through advanced land headquarters at Moroai in the Halahara Islands to General Sir Thomas Blame and through Blame to General Douglas MacArthur.

 It was a long chain of command. At the far end of the chain in the long house at Bario sat eight men and one Malay speaking interpreter. There were seven other men in the party. There would be in due course others. But on the 26th of March there were only these seven and the party leader. Four of them were Australian. Two were British.

 One was a New Zealander seconded to the Australian force. Their ages ranged from 20 to 38. The youngest was a medic. He had been issued at the point of departure  with a small tablet of potassium cyanide in a rubber lined pocket of his tunic.  He had been told that if he was captured by the Japanese, he was to bite through the rubber  and swallow the tablet and die.

 Because the alternative was being tortured until he told the Japanese  where the longouses were. And the alternative to that was watching the long houses burn. He had accepted the tablet and packed it in the pocket and forgotten about it.  Six decades later, when he was interviewed by an Australian journalist, he was asked whether he had ever thought about using it. He said he had not.

 He said  he had been too busy. The plan, as it stood on the 24th of March, had been drawn up by the party leader  in consultation with two other officers, both of whom had spent time in Borneo before the war. One was a pre-war Sarawak police officer, a Britain called William Sosan.

 The other was a New Zealander, a former oil geologist named Gordon Carter. Both would command their own Semute parties in due course, Semit 2 and Semit 3 in the Barum and Rajang river valleys, respectively. But on the 24th of March, the day of the drop, the plan was for the party leader and his seven men to go in first to a high plateau in the Calibid Highlands at a place called Bario.

 Bario had been chosen for four reasons. It was high. It was isolated. Aerial reconnaissance had suggested it was inhabited. And its inhabitants, according to what little pre-war ethnographic material existed, were probably friendly. Though the pre-war ethnographic material was thin and  out of date and mostly written by missionaries with axes to grind.

 At midnight on the 25th of March, three consolidated B-24 liberators lifted off from an airfield in the Philippines. Two carried personnel. The third carried stores a they flew south by southwest across the Sulu Sea  at an altitude that put them above the mountains of northeastern Borneo and out of range of what Japanese anti-aircraft cover was known to exist.

 The flight took 6 hours over the drop zone. At approximately 6:00 in the morning local time, the first Liberator descended  to 2,000 ft and opened its rear doors. The eight men jumped in two sticks. Their parachutes were British Air Ministry pattern packed by hand in Melbourne. 2 weeks earlier, all eight canopies opened.

 All eight men landed alive. The stores were dropped separately in  canisters and were scattered over 4 km of Mountain Valley. It would take the  eight men and their new hosts 3 days to find them all. One canister  was never recovered. The liberator that had dropped the stores did not return to base.

 It is presumed to have gone down in the Sulu Sea. The crew was never found. The men who came down at Bario were not the first Europeans to see the Kellibit Highlands. Missionaries had been there. A Dutch surveyor had passed through in the 1920s. Raja Charles Vinerbrook, the third and last of the White Rogers of Sarawak, had visited once in the 1930s.

 But the eight men who came down at Bario on the morning of the 25th of March were the first Europeans to see the Kellibit Highlands since the Japanese occupation of Sarowak had begun on the 16th of December 1941. The Kellibit  had not seen a white face in 3 years and 4 months when the parachutes came down out [clears throat] of the low cloud.

The elders of Bario, according to  what the elders of Bario later told anthropologists, believed at first that the men descending from the sky  were spirits. This belief was reinforced by the fact that the party leader wore a major’s gold crown on each shoulder of his tunic. And the Kellibit  had not seen a golden crown since the white rajas had ceased to visit the interior.

 And they associated golden crowns with the rajas. And they associated the rajars with legitimate authority. very quickly and by an error of interpretation that would prove operationally decisive. The party leader was understood to be a raja. He wrote later that he awoke on the morning of the 26th of March to find himself in the perception of his hosts  a raja.

He wrote this without irony. He also wrote that he did not correct the misapprehension. The kellabit  are an indigenous people of the highlands of northeastern Sarawak and the neighboring highlands of what was then Dutch Borneo. Their population in 1945 is not known with precision, but is generally estimated at approximately 2,000 persons distributed across a dozen or so long houses on a high cool  plateau at approximately 1,200 m of elevation.

 They spoke  and speak a language of the North Borneian branch of the Aranesian family. They cultivated wet rice on terrace fields. They kept pigs and chickens. They fished the mountain streams with we hunted deer and wild pig with blowpipes. Their weapons were the pang, which is a long single-edged machete carried on the belt of every adult male.

 And the blowpipe, which is a board ironwood tube approximately 2 m in length that fires darts  tipped with the sap of the ipo tree, a paralytic neurotoxin sufficient to kill a wild pig in  6 minutes. Their social structure was hierarchical. There were three ranks. The nobility, the free commlers and the descendants  of slaves.

 Only nobles could lead. Nobles were identified by the possession of certain ceremonial objects, antique Chinese porcelain jars, glass beads bought from Sarawak coast in the 17th century and gongs cast in bronze. The senior elder of Bario possessed all three.  He was the man to whom the party leader now spoke through the interpreter in the long house on the morning of the 26th of March 1945.

 The negotiation was not brief. It took 3 days.  It was conducted over the pale rice liquor that the Kellibit called borac which is fermented in earthnware jars and drunk warm through hollow bamboo straws. It was conducted  with pauses for meals. It was conducted with pauses for the elder to consult other elders and for the party leader to consult his sergeant. There was no writing down.

There was no signature.  There was no formal agreement of any kind. What emerged at the end of the third day was an understanding. The understanding had four parts. First, the eight men would be allowed to remain at bario for as long as they required and would be fed, sheltered, and hidden from the Japanese.

Second, in return, the eight men would provide medical treatment for the Kellibit using their military medical stores at no charge. Third, when the time came, the eight men would arm and train those Kellibit who volunteered to fight the Japanese, and the arming and training would extend to any other long houses in the district that wished to participate.

 Fourth, when the Japanese were driven out, the pre-war order of things would be restored and the elder of Bario would be recognized by whatever raja or governor or authority then held power in Cuching as the preeminent chief of the Kalibit. The party leader agreed to all four points. He had no authority to promise the fourth.

 He promised it anyway. The elder of Bario accepted the promise on the strength of the golden crown on the party leader’s shoulder  and on the strength of what the party leader had said about his uncle Raja Brookke which was a thing the party leader had never quite said but had allowed to be inferred. The medical treatment began the same afternoon.

 A kellabit child with a superiorating ulcer on his shin was brought to the medic. The medic cleaned the ulcer with saline and dressed it with sulfonomide powder from his kit. The ulcer began to close within 48 hours. Word of this spread down the plateau within a week. By the middle of April,  medical patrols from Bario were visiting seven other long houses in the district.

Treating yors, treating tropical ulcers, treating goiter, treating parasitic worm infestations  that had crippled entire families. The sulfonomide powder was in short supply. It was requested by radio. It was dropped by parachute  along with rifles on the 2nd and 8th and 14th of April.

 The other long houses of the Kellibit Plateau  were visited in the same fashion as the elder of Bario had been visited. A small party would walk down the trail to a long house. A a meeting would be requested. The meeting would be conducted over Borak in the manner already established. The four points of the barrier understanding would be presented.

 the elder of the long house would consider. The elder of the long house would agree because the elder of Bario had already agreed and to disagree would be to place oneself outside the emerging consensus of the plateau. In this manner in the first 3 weeks of April, the party leader and his men brought approximately 800 calibit into the ambit of the operation.

 The 800 figure includes women and children since the pact was made with long houses and not with individuals. The fighting age male component of the 800 was approximately 240. All of them would in  due course take up arms. The pattern held as the operation extended beyond the Kellibit plateau. To the west of the plateau along the upper reaches of the Trusan River lived the Lon Bawang, a related Highland people with a similar long-house culture.

 To the east and south in the great river valleys of the Baram, the Tinja, the Rajang and the Betang lived the Kenya and the Cayenne riverine peoples whose long houses were even larger than the Kellibit long houses and whose warrior traditions were more elaborate. To the north in the coastal and near coastal zones live the Iban, sometimes called  the Sea Dak, a numerous and warlike people whose reputation for headunting had in the 19th century terrified the coastal malaise and had led to the establishment of the brook Raj in the first place. All

of these peoples fall under the umbrella term DAK. DAK is not a self-d designation. It is a term used by outsiders. In the operational documents of 1945, it is used indiscriminately for any indigenous group of the interior. In the anthropological literature, it has been used and  disputed ever since. The eight men who came down at barrier would in the course of the following 7 months bring representatives of at least 22  distinct DACK groups into the SEMmit operation.

 The most numerous of these were the Kellit, the Lun Bawang, the Kenya, the Cayanne, and the Iban. The recruitment of fighting men was concentrated in the six weeks between the beginning of April  and the middle of May. The pattern was the following. A visit to a long  house, a negotiation with its elder, a period of hospitality, a demonstration of the weapons the party had brought with them.

 An offer to arm and train those who wish to fight. In every long house that was visited, without exception, volunteers  came forward. The volunteers were perhaps 40. The youngest was perhaps 15. They came forward for a number of reasons which the operational documents do not adequately  distinguish. Some of them came forward because the Japanese had killed a brother or an uncle.

 Some of them came forward because the Japanese had confiscated a stock of rice or a supply of salt. Some of them came forward because the party leader had by his conduct convinced them that he was a raja and because to fight for a raja was in their tradition an honor and a duty. Some of them, according to the elders who were later interviewed, came forward because the party leader had told them that headunting, which had been suppressed by the Brook Raj administration in the 1880s and had been unofficially discouraged ever since,

would be permitted again  Japanese soldiers only for the duration of the war. This is a moral fact in the record. It goes here in the register in which the operational documents record it without editorial comment. In the 1880s, Raja Charles Brookke, the second white Raja, had suppressed the practice of taking human heads as trophies of warfare.

 He had done so by treaty with the interior peoples, by paying compensation for heads voluntarily surrendered,  and where necessary by punitive military expedition. The suppression had been partial. Heads had continued to be taken  in reduced numbers throughout the first half of the 20th century, particularly in the more remote areas.

 But by the 1940s, head hunting as a public and celebrated practice  had ceased. The old headous called panga among the Kenya and by other names elsewhere still stood in the long houses and still contained the smoke blackened skulls of previous generations. But no new skulls had been added to them in most districts for a generation.

 The party leader who had spent time in the interior as an anthropologist before the war understood this history. He also understood that for the interior peoples  the head of an enemy was not a curiosity. It was a spiritual object. It carried the power of the man from whom it had been taken.

 It was housed and honored  and fed with rice offerings, and it protected the long house from misfortune. To permit its resumption against Japanese soldiers was to offer the volunteers a form of payment beyond salt and cloth and rifles. It was to offer them the restoration of a practice that had been taken away from their grandfathers.

 The party leader offered it. Permission was granted for the resumption of the practice against Japanese soldiers only. It was not granted for the resumption against Malay collaborators, Chinese informants or civilians of any kind. It was strictly enforced. In the whole of the operation, no cases recorded of a head being taken from a non-combatant.

  In the whole of the operation, an unknown but not small number of Japanese heads were taken. They were smoked over slow fires in the manner of the tradition. They were carried back to the long  houses. They were placed in the headous. The headous were reopened for the first time in a generation.

 The training of the volunteers began in the second week of April.  It was conducted in a clearing above Bario at first and later at half a dozen subsidiary sites  across the plateau and down into the Trusan and Bwang valleys. The instruction was elementary. Volunteers were shown how to load a Leenfield rifle, how to work the bolt, how to sight it on a target at 50 and 100 m, how to strip and clean it, and how to reassemble it.

 Volunteers were shown how to load and fire an Owen submachine gun. Volunteers were shown how to use a Bren light machine gun,  though the Bren was scarce, and only those volunteers designated as section leaders  received instruction on it. Volunteers were shown how to pull the pin of a mills bomb, how to count to four in their  heads, and how to throw it so that it exploded above the enemy rather than at their own feet.

 This last point was emphasized. There had been in the party leaders earlier career among indigenous forces in the New Hedes,  occasions on which volunteers had held onto a grenade too long or had thrown it too short, and had inflicted casualties on their own side. It was a matter of drill.

  It was drilled until it was reflexive. The Lean Fields, the Owens, the Brens, the Mills bombs, and the ammunition were dropped by parachute from the liberators of number 200 flight of the Royal Australian Air Force. 200 flight was a specialist unit based in the  Philippines whose task was the aerial resupply of Special Operations Australia  parties across the Western Pacific between the 25th of March and the 15th of August 1945.

 Its  liberators flew more than 60 resupply sorties into the Kellibid Highlands and the surrounding operational area. The sorties were flown at night  in the early phase to avoid Japanese fighter interception. Later, when it became clear that the Japanese had no fighter cover in the interior and no anti-aircraft capability in land of the coastal towns, they were flown by day.

The drop procedure was invariable. A signal fire was lit in the appointed clearing at  the appointed time. The liberator descended to 300 ft. The canisters were pushed out of the rear doors. Each  canister carried a small drogue shootute that opened at 100 ft.

 The canisters landed within 100 m of the fire. Calabic runners collected them. The rifles  were unpacked, oiled, and issued to named volunteers. Each rifle was issued by serial number and the serial number was recorded against the name of the volunteer in a ledger kept by the party’s quartermaster so that at the end of the war the rifles  could be recalled.

The recall was a promise made to the district officers of the pre-war Sarawak administration who had insisted  on the point. The pre-war administration did not wish to end the war with several thousand leenfields  in the hands of the interior peoples. By the end of April, some 300 rifles had been issued.

By the end of July, more than 1,000. By the middle of August, when the war ended, the total exceeded 1,400 long arms and an unknown number of automatic weapons. The volunteers who received them continued to carry their own traditional weapons. In addition, the Pingang was worn on the belt at all times.

 The blowpipe was carried on operations where silence was required. The party leader wrote in an operational report submitted at the end of August that the supreme advantage of the blowpipe over the firearm was silence. A blowpipe dart delivered a lethal dose of IPO poison at a range of 30 m without a sound.

 A rifle, however skillfully handled, could be heard for 2 km in the still air of the highlands. The advantage was particularly great for the elimination of Japanese sentries at the outer perimeter of a garrison. Prior to the assault, in several actions later in the campaign, blowpipes were the primary weapon used.

 This is not a fact widely known outside the specialist literature. It is a fact. The training was compressed. The party leader had insisted in his  planning documents that the first operational contact with Japanese forces was to be delayed until the volunteers had achieved a level of tactical competence that would minimize casualties.

 In practice,  this meant approximately 3 weeks of instruction. In practice, this was insufficient by conventional infantry standards. But the volunteers were not conventional infantry. They were men who had grown up in the jungle. They knew how to move without being heard. They knew how to lie in ambush for hours without moving.

They knew how to read the ground for signs of the passage of men. They knew, in the phrase of the party leader, how to move and how to kill.  What they had to be taught was how to do so with modern weapons and in the context of a modern operation  in coordinated fashion in support of an overall operational plan.

 The teaching was rapid. The volunteers absorbed it. By the third week of April, the party leader judged that the first company of  Kellit and Lun Bawang volunteers was ready. The first ambush was mounted on the 28th of April, 1945 on a track that ran along the eastern bank of the Upper Trusan River, approximately 11 mi north of the Japanese-held village of Loaz.

 The target was a Japanese patrol of company strength, moving up river from Loas towards the interior on what was subsequently established to have been a reconnaissance mission of the party leader own base at Bario. The patrol consisted of approximately 80 men. It was commanded, according to documents subsequently captured by a captain of the Japanese  37th army.

 It was walking in loose file along the river track  in the middle of the afternoon. It had not detected the presence of the Kellibit and Lun Bawang force that lay an ambush along a 200 m stretch of the eastern bank in dense secondary  jungle uphill of the track. The force consisted of approximately 60 volunteers, three members of the Semut party, and two Bren guns positioned to enilade the track  at each end of the ambush.

 The volunteers were armed with Leenfields. The party members carried Owens. The volunteers had been briefed the previous evening. They had been told to hold their fire until the leading Japanese soldier had passed the marked tree at the northern end of the ambush zone. They had been told that the sign to open fire would be a single burst from the northernmost Bren.

 The patrol entered the ambush zone at approximately 3:30 in the afternoon. The lead soldier passed the marked tree. The Bren opened. The volunteers opened. The 200 m stretch of track was subjected to a converging fire from approximately 60 rifles and two automatic weapons at a range of between 15 and 40 m. The patrol had no cover.

The steep jungle-covered slope was to their left. The Bren at the southern end of the ambush prevented their retreat. The patrol was destroyed in approximately 4 minutes. 23 Japanese soldiers were killed. An unknown number were wounded. A small number, perhaps as  many as 10, escaped down river by throwing themselves into the water and being carried by the current beyond the killing zone.

 No members of the ambushing force were killed or wounded. The volunteers upon the sessation of firing descended to the track, collected weapons and ammunition from the Japanese dead, and in a small number of cases and with specific permission of the party leader who was present, took the heads. The heads were carried back to the long houses of the volunteers concerned.

 The leanfields were cleaned that evening. The Bren guns were oiled and stowed. The operational report on the ambush was radioed to Moritai. By the following morning, the party leader wrote in the report that the ambush had been so one-sided as to greatly heighten the already high morale of his continually growing forces.

 He did not use exclamation. The report is a matter of dry statement.  It is preserved in the archives at Canbor where it may be consulted. The trusan ambush was the pattern. In the 10 weeks between the end of April  and the beginning of July, similar ambushes were mounted on Japanese patrols.  supply columns, samp convoys, and telephone line repair parties across the whole of the northeastern Sarawwok interior.

 A partial list drawn from the operational reports gives some indication of the frequency and character of these actions. On the 5th of May, a Japanese sampo of six vessels on the Middle Trusan  was ambushed by a mixed Kellibit and Lun Bawang party under a sergeant of the Semut One team. 19 Japanese soldiers killed, no Seemit or DAK losses.

 On the 11th of May, a Japanese patrol of platoon strength on the trail between Long Semodau and Bar Kalalan was ambushed by a Lun Bawang party. 14 Japanese killed, one Lun Bawang wounded. On the 17th of May, a Japanese supply column of 40 men and 30 pack horses on the Bawang Valley track was ambushed by a mixed force. 29 Japanese killed, 12 pack  horses captured, no Semute or DAK losses.

 On the 23rd of May, a Japanese wireless intercept station at Long Bang in Dutch Borneo  was attacked and taken. 11 Japanese killed, one Kellibit volunteer killed by grenade fragments. On the 28th of May, a Japanese patrol of approximately 50 men on the upper Padis River in North Borneo  was ambushed. 34 Japanese killed, no losses.

The list continues. In the middle of May, a decision was taken to construct a light aircraft strip on the plateau at Bario so that  the fixedwing traffic that had been drop only could become two-way and so that casualties could be evacuated by air  rather than carried on the shoulders of Kellbic runners for the 4 days required to reach the coast.

 The decision was taken by the party leader in consultation with his air liaison officer and with an engineer officer of the Australian 9th division who had been dropped in as an adviser in the second week  of May. The construction was undertaken by the Kellibit of Bario using hand tools. The tools were the Parang,  the Mattok and the crowbar.

 There was no earthmoving machinery of any kind. The site chosen was a stretch of relatively flat ground below the main longhouse, approximately 500 m  in length. The rice terraces were sacrificed for it. The rice terraces were dismantled by hand. The soil was leveled by hand. The trees were felled by hand and the stumps  grubbed out by hand.

 The air strip was completed in 19 days. The first light aircraft to land on it was an ouster observation plane of the Royal Australian Air Force on the 3rd of June 1945. Piloted by a lieutenant of the Australian Corps Light Aircraft Squadron. It  landed, it turned, it discharged its pilot’s briefcase and picked up a wounded  Lunawan volunteer who required surgical attention beyond what the Seote medic could  provide.

 And it took off again. The Kellibit of Bario watched from the edges of the strip. The elder of Bario, according to what he later told an anthropologist,  said nothing. The Bario airirstrip, once operational, transformed the character of the operation. From that  point onwards, wounded men could be evacuated within hours rather than days.

Supplies could be flown in  in bulk rather than dropped in canisters. Air liaison officers could be shuttled between bario and the coastal task force. The operation ceased  to be a purely covert insertion behind enemy lines and became in a limited sense  an outpost of the Australian 9inth Division.

 Though it was an outpost that the 9inth Division had not yet reached. The party leader shifted his own base of operations from Bario to Bellawit in the Bang Valley on the Dutch Borneo side of the frontier. In the last week of May, Bellawit was closer to the coast, closer to the operational area of the Truson Valley, and closer to the developing engagements with Japanese forces around Lawas and Pensiangan.

  Bario continued to function as the main forward base for the Semit 1 operation. Its rice terraces, some of them were later restored, some of them were not. A memorial plaque at Bario today lists the names of the eight men who came down on the plateau on the 25th of March. Kellibit descendants of the original elders of the long houses of the plateau attend a commemoration ceremony there every year.

 On the anniversary, they wear formal dress. They read the names aloud. They fall silent  for one minute. While this was happening, the Australian 9inth Division was preparing in the anchorages of Morati for the landing at Brunai Bay. Operation Obo 6 had been given its final go-ahad in the second week of May.

 The landing was to be executed by the 20th and 24th Infantry Brigades  supported by naval bombardment from a task force under Rear Admiral Forest Sherman of the United States Navy.  The date, as previously noted, was the 10th of June. The intelligence upon which the assault plan was based came  in large part from the Semite and Agus operations.

 Agus was a parallel special operations Australia operation in North Borneo in what is now Saba mounted in parallel with Semit and consolidated with it through a shared intelligence net called the Stallion project. Stallion  had been implemented on the 26th of April. It collected all intelligence received by Semit and Agus parties in the interior,  cross-referenced it, transmitted it to Morotai by radio, and relayed it to the 9th division planners.

 The intelligence covered the location and strength of Japanese garrisons in Brunai, Mir, and  Syria. the disposition of the 37th Army headquarters at Jesselton, the location of coastal defense guns, the state of coastal roads, the availability of local labor and shipping, the location and condition of Allied prisoners of war, and the disposition of Japanese aircraft on the airfields at Leuan and Mirie.

 This intelligence was in the phrase of the official history of the Australian army invaluable. It was also in some respects imperfect. The interior sources upon which it was based were not in every case well placaced to observe the coastal Japanese with precision. Some of the reports overstated Japanese numbers. Some understated them.

 Some located units in the wrong villages. When the 9inth division came ashore at Brunai Bay on the 10th of June, some of the objectives it expected to find heavily defended were lightly defended and some it expected to find lightly defended were heavily defended. This is the nature of intelligence collected at secondhand across a mountain range by illiterate gerillas working with Australian sergeants who did not always speak Kellibit or Lun Bawang or Cayenne or Kenya and who were often relaying information by runner over 3 days of

trail before it reached the wireless set. The intelligence was as good as it could be. It was good enough. The landing on the 10th of June succeeded. The 9inth division was ashore at Brunai Bay by midm morning and it had linked up with the coastal fringe of the Semit 1 operational area within 72 hours. The Semute operation  from that point onwards was no longer a purely covert operation.

 It was an integrated component of the 9inth Division’s  campaign in northwest Borneo. Its role in the terminology of the operational documents was to protect the eastern and southeastern flank of the 9inth division’s advance to prevent the reinforcement of coastal Japanese positions from the interior and to harry those Japanese formations that attempted to withdraw from the coast  into the interior.

 Its role in less formal terminology was to make sure that no Japanese soldier who could not fight his way past a Kellibit ambush ever reached the Bwang  or the Trusan or the Kellibit plateau. This role was performed with tenacity. In the 71 days between the Brunai Bay landing on the 10th of June and the announcement of the Japanese surrender on the 15th of August, Semit 1 accounted for more than 600 Japanese killed on top of the several hundred already accounted for in the pre-landing phase.

 The killed included a number of senior Japanese officers, including at least one colonel, ambushed on the Sapong track in the second week of July, whose body yielded a document case containing operational orders that were immediately radioed to Moratai. The killed also included a smaller number of Japanese who were not killed in ambush, but were killed after having surrendered.

 The party leaders operational reports acknowledge these incidents in a matter-of-fact way. They record that in a number of cases, particularly in the immediate aftermath of successful ambushes,  indigenous guerrillas killed Japanese soldiers who had attempted to surrender before they could be prevented from doing so.

  They record that this was contrary to the party leader standing instructions. They record that in the conditions of the operation. Standing instructions on the treatment of prisoners were not always observable in the field. By the middle of July, Semute 1 had extended its operational area far beyond the initial Kalibet plateau.

 Armed units under its command were operating along the Lawas, Trusan, and Limbang rivers in Sarawak and had penetrated northwards into what is now Sabah as far as the Padis River with an outpost at Pensangan and forward parties at Tennom. In Dutch Borneo, an operational base had been established at Bang on the Mentoang River.

 Secondary bases were established on the Sebeong and Karan rivers. The villages of Lois and Malinau in Dutch Borneo had been secured. Patrols had reached the Cayenne River. The operational area covered by Semute 1 at its greatest extent exceeded 10,000 square miles of mountain and jungle terrain.

 The number of indigenous guerillas directly armed and directed by the operation exceeded 1,000 by the end of July. The number of indigenous persons more broadly involved in the operation providing food, intelligence, shelter, portage, and guidance exceeded in the party leaders later estimate 100,000. This last figure represents essentially the entire indigenous population of the operational area.

 The other semiute parties, meanwhile, had been carrying on their own operations in adjacent territory. Semit  2 under the New Zealander Gordon Carter had been dropped at Bario in midappril  and had moved down into the Barum Valley establishing its base at Long Aka in the heartland of the Kenya people.

 Long aka  on a bend of the Barum was reached after a march of 11 days from Bario. The Kenya of Long Aka received  Semit 2 in the same manner as the Kellibit of Bario had received Semit 1. The pattern of negotiation, feasting, and enlistment repeated itself. Semit  2 over the following months trained and armed approximately 350 Kenya and Cayenne gerillas  and carried out operations along the whole length of the Barum and its tributaries, killing an estimated 500 Japanese soldiers for the loss of some 15 Kenya and Cayenne

gerillas. See 2 captured a Japanese wireless intercept station at Long Lama on the middle bar 4 days before the 9inth division’s landing at Brunai Bay. The capture yielded useful intelligence that was radioed to Moretai on the eve of the landing. Seamut  3 under the pre-war Sarawak policeman William Soon was dropped at Long Aka in late May and moved south into the Rajang Valley, establishing its base at Balaga  in the upper Rajang.

 The Rajang Valley is the heartland of the Iban and Cayan peoples of central Sarawak  and it was there that Semmit 3 carried out its operations killing an estimated 150 Japanese in the period between June and September. Semute 4 mounted by sea entered the coastal area around Binulu in August when the war was already ending.

 Its role was to protect the flank of the other three parties and to accept the surrender of Japanese formations along the Sarawak coast. Its members are said to have been threatened on one occasion by a saltwater crocodile of substantial size while paddling collapsible canoes along the Muka River. The crocodile did not attack. The paddlers proceeded.

 The Japanese surrender was announced by radio on the 15th of August 1945. It was received at Bellawit where the party leader was then based at approximately 11:00 in the morning. The party leader consulted his second in command. He then transmitted an order by radio and by runner to all Semute 1 units in the field.

 The order was to continue operations against those Japanese formations that had not received or had not accepted the surrender order from their own chain of command. It had been immediately apparent to the party leader on the 15th of August  that there would be Japanese units in the interior who would either fail to receive news of the surrender for some  weeks or who would receive it and refuse to accept it or who would receive it and accept it in principle but who would remain in the field because they had nowhere else to

go and no way of formally surrendering to Australian forces they could not locate.  The operational judgment was that these formations posed a continuing threat to the indigenous population and that Semute 1’s obligation to its DAK allies required that the threat be eliminated by force. The judgment was upheld by advanced land headquarters at Morotai.

 Semute 1 continued to operate throughout the second half of August through September and into late October. The operations of this period were in some  ways the most difficult of the whole campaign. The Japanese formations still in the field were in general wellarmed, but  poorly supplied, disorganized, hungry, exhausted, and unwilling either to surrender or to fight in the open.

 They they tended to haul up in fortified villages or in  cave systems, to raid indigenous long-houses for rice, and to move only at night. Semit one’s task was to find them, to bring them to  combat, and either to kill them or to compel their surrender. In practice, the compulsion of surrender was in most cases the  outcome, though not without prior fighting.

 The last recorded Japanese unit to surrender to Semut One did so on the 23rd of October 1945, 10 weeks after the general surrender in the upper Bawang Valley to  a mixed Kellibit and Lunawang party under a sergeant of Semit 1 whose name is preserved in the operational reports. The Japanese unit consisted  of approximately 40 men under a lieutenant.

It had been in continuous contact with local Bang guerillas for several weeks. It had lost a number of men to the local guerillas. It had lost a number of men to disease and starvation. When it finally accepted the surrender terms and laid down its arms, the sergeant of Semute 1 noted in his report that the lieutenant had  bowed and had presented his sword.

 The sword was later forwarded along with other captured Japanese equipment to Moroai. It is now held in the Australian War Memorial in Canbora where it may be inspected. The final accounting of the operation is a matter of some dispute in the historical literature. The party leader himself, writing in 1959 in a memoir titled World Within,  claimed that the four SEMmit parties had inflicted approximately 1,700 Japanese casualties  over the course of the operation at a cost of approximately 112 Allied lives. He credited Semit 1 alone with

more than 1,000 of the Japanese killed. A later historian, Jim Truscott, writing on the basis of the operational records held at Canbor and at Q, places casualties at approximately 1,500 killed and 240 captured. He records no fatal casualties among the Z special unit personnel assigned to the four semit parties.

 He records approximately 30 indigenous guerillas killed in the course of the fighting. The 112 figure in the party leader memoir refers on close reading to the total number of Australian and other Allied personnel killed in all Special Operations Australia operations in the Pacific theater over the whole course of the war. Not to Semit specifically.

Whichever figure is preferred, the arithmetic is remarkable. An indigenous force of approximately 2,000 fighting men, armed and directed by no more than 80 Australian and British personnel across the four semit parties killed at least 1,500 and probably more than 1,700 Japanese soldiers over a period of 7 months.

 It suffered no fatal casualties among its own European cadray. It suffered at most 30 fatal casualties among its indigenous membership. The ratio of enemy killed to friendly killed exceeded 50 to1 at the low end and may have exceeded 60 to1 at the high end. There is no comparable ratio in the ledger of the Australian war effort.

 There are few comparable ratios in the ledger of the whole of the second world war. The engagement at Delwana in 1879 at which Zulu warriors overran a British column produced a ratio of some 3:1 in favor of the Zulus. The engagement at Rockstrift later the same day produced a ratio of approximately 20 to1  in favor of the British.

 Neither approaches the arithmetic of the Semite operation. The reasons for the ratio are not mysterious. They  admit of concise summary. The Semute Cadray was small, mobile, and expert. And its Australian and British personnel were drawn from a highly selected pool of volunteers. The indigenous gerillas fought on ground they knew intimately in a manner suited to their traditions and skills.

 The Japanese formations against which they fought were by the spring of 1945 under supplied,  undemanded relative to their originally scaled defensive tasks, cut off from air and naval support and in most cases unaware of the presence of a substantial hostile force in the interior. The Semit One party leader decision to arm indigenous fighters with modern rifles and machine guns while retaining their traditional weapons for silent work gave the operation a tactical flexibility that Japanese formations could not counter.

The decision to permit the resumption of headunting against Japanese soldiers  produced in the operational documents a measurable increase in the morale and aggression of indigenous guerrillas. The pattern of ambush from concealed positions along river tracks and jungle trails, followed by immediate withdrawal into ground, the Japanese did not know and could not follow into, was in every material respect a textbook application of guerilla doctrine, executed by peoples who had never read the textbook because it had not yet been

written. The doctrinal literature of guerrilla warfare from Mao’s essays on protracted war through the writings of Von [ __ ] in the following decade would later formalize the principles that the  Calibit and the Kenya and the Cayan and the Eban had in the summer of 1945 applied in nearperfect form.

 They had applied them without having heard of Mao. They had applied them without having heard of guerrilla warfare as a category of military thought. They had applied them because they were how one fought in the mountains and jungles of interior Borneo and had always been how one fought there and would have been how one fought there whether an Australian party had come down from the sky or not.

The Australian party did come down from the sky. It brought rifles. The Kellibit and the Kenya and the Cayenne and the Iban did the rest. There are some particular episodes that deserve individual mention. In the register in which this account is being written, there is the episode of the rescue of the American airmen.

 In the second half of 1944 and the first half of 1945, a small number of United States Army Air Force aircraft had been shot down over Borneo in the course of long range bombing missions against Japanese oil facilities. The surviving crews had bailed out into the jungle and had been taken in at  grave personal risk by long-houses of the Kellibit, the Kenya, and other groups.

 When Semit 1 arrived in March of 1945,  it discovered 11 of these airmen scattered among longouses on the Kellibit Plateau and its approaches. The airmen were assembled at Bario over the following weeks. They were fed. They were provided with medical care. They were interviewed for intelligence value.

  When the airirstrip at Bario became operational in early June, they were evacuated by Auster to the Philippines. All 11 survived. Their rescue is the subject of a documentary film produced in the following century which is titled The Airmen and the Head Hunters and which draws its title from the fact that the long houses in which the airmen sheltered were in a number of cases long houses in which the headous had been reopened.

 There is the episode of the Japanese wireless intercept station at Long Bang. Long Bang is a small settlement in Dutch Borneo, some 60 mi southeast of Bario as the crow flies and approximately 5 days walk over Broken Country.  In the third week of May, intelligence from local Lon Bowing informants indicated that the Japanese maintained a wireless intercept station at Long Bang, garrisoned by approximately 15 men under a sergeant tasked with the interception of Allied radio traffic in the  region.

 The party leader ordered a raid. The raid was mounted by a mixed force of approximately 40 calibit and Lun Bawang gerillas under a semit one sergeant. The force moved into position over three nights of forced march. It attacked at first light on the 23rd of May. The garrison was overrun in approximately 15 minutes.

  11 Japanese soldiers were killed. Four were captured. The wireless equipment was destroyed. Documents captured in the office of the station commander yielded useful intelligence on Japanese wireless procedures which was radio to Moroai. One Kellibit volunteer was killed by fragments from a grenade thrown by a Japanese soldier in the closing moments of the action.

 He was buried the same afternoon at Long Bang in a grave the Lun Bawang dug and marked with a cross made of ironwood. His name is preserved in the operational reports. His grave was still marked by the same cross when a visiting anthropologist located it  in the 1980s. There is the episode of the Sapong track in late July and early August.

  In the closing weeks of the pre-surrender phase of the operation, a substantial Japanese force under the command of a colonel was attempting to withdraw from the coastal area of North Borneo southwards into the interior in the belief that it might be able to establish a redout in the Highlands and continue resistance from there.

 The route of its withdrawal took it along the Sapong track  which runs southeast from the coast into the interior across a series of low ridges and river crossings. The party leader upon receiving intelligence of this movement ordered a young semit one sergeant to the Sapong track with a force of approximately 80 eban  and murut gerillas with orders to block the track by ambush and to inflict maximum casualties on the withdrawing column.

 The sergeant was Robert Griffith’s Marsh of the Second Australian Imperial Force. He had served in North Africa and  in New Guinea before being recruited to Zed Special Unit. He was 21 years of age. He was parachuted onto the Sapal track in early June. He established  his force in ambush positions along a two-mile stretch of the track.

 In the second week of July, the Japanese column entered the ambush zone in three separate serals over 3 days. Griffith’s Marsh’s force ambushed each Syrial in turn.  In the course of the three engagements, the force killed 34 Japanese soldiers and captured four. In August, following the surrender, Griffith’s Marsh took charge of blocking the track from the Saponga estate west to Mahaman in conjunction with elements of the 9inth Division  and in the course of this action killed a further four Japanese and captured six. The

citation for his military medal gazetted on the 6th of March 1947 records these facts. It also records that he showed a quick grasp of native mentality and a real ability to lead native troops. The phrasing is of its time. There is the episode of the Elder of Bario. The Elder of Bario who had ordered rice for the eight men on the morning of the 26th of March remained the senior indigenous figure of the operation throughout its duration.

 He did not fight himself. He was too old. His role was that of political head, arbitrator, and guarantor of the pact between the party leader and the Kellibit people. In the middle of the operation, an incident occurred which is preserved in the anecdotal record, but is not so far as this compiler has been able to establish recorded in the operational documents.

 A dispute arose between two Kellibit volunteers of the operation over the disposition of certain trophies taken from a Japanese ambush. The dispute threatened to fracture the local force. The elder of Bario summoned the two volunteers to the long house. He heard each of them. He deliberated.  He aortioned the trophies.

 The volunteers accepted his judgment. The unity of the local force was preserved. This is not the kind of episode that features in the operational history of the Semit operation. It is the kind of episode that if one takes the operation seriously as a work of anthropology as well as of warfare, one is obliged to record.

 The Semute operation was not a purely military operation. It was a political and social operation  conducted in a society whose political and social structures the Seamut party leader had understood and had with the elder of Bario’s consent mobilized.  The operation formally concluded so far as it is possible to identify a formal conclusion for so diffuse a set of activities in the last week of October 1945.

The party leader flew out of Bario on an Oster of the Australian Corite Aircraft Squadron on the 28th of October. He was  in the phrase later used by one of his subordinates the last man out. The remaining Australian and British personnel had been evacuated over the preceding weeks.

 The Kalibit and Lun Bawang and Kenya and Cayenne and Iban gerillas who had fought under his command had in the terms of the recall clause of the original pact surrendered their rifles. The rifles had been collected by name and serial number, checked against the ledger kept by the party’s quartermaster,  and stacked in the long house at Bario pending recovery by the pre-war Sarawak administration.

Some of the rifles were never recovered. This was accepted as a cost of the operation. The white rager did not return to Sarowak. Sarawak in 1946 was seeded by the last Rajgera Charles  Viner Brookke to the British crown and became a crown colony. It remained a crown colony  until 1963 when it joined the Federation of Malaysia.

 The elder of Bario did not live to see this. He died in 1948. of causes not connected with the war. His son inherited his position. His grandson, an educated man who read the operational documents when they were declassified in the 1970s, wrote a short memorial pamphlet about the operation which is preserved in the archive of the Sarawak Museum in Cuching.

 It contains a photograph of his grandfather. It remains to name the party leader. He has been referred to throughout this script as the party leader in accordance with the practice of the operational documents which refer to him consistently as the party leader or by his cipher A1. His name was Tom Harnet Harrison.

 He was born in 1911 in Argentina to English parents.  He was educated at Harrow and at Cambridge. He was an ornithologist, an anthropologist, a broadcaster, a documentary filmmaker, a museum curator, and in the phrase of one of his biographers, an extremely difficult man. He had spent 2 years in the new Hebdes in the 1930s, living among the peoples of Malakula and observing their social and religious practices.

 He had co-founded in 1937 the British Social Research Organization, Mass Observation. He had joined the British army in 1942. He had been seconded to Z special unit in 1944. He was 33 years of age when he came down at Bario. He was awarded the distinguished service order for the summit operation. After the war, he became curator of the Sarawak Museum and held that post from 1947 to 1966.

He was killed in a road accident in Thailand in 1976 at the age of 65. His reputation at the time of his death was contested. It has remained contested. He was a man of formidable capacity and of formidable temper. His comrades on the SET operation were in later years divided in their assessment of him.

 Some regarded him with lifelong loyalty. Some regarded him with lifelong resentment. His conduct  during the operation taken as a whole was decisive, unorthodox, and effective. It produced in 7 months of unbroken activity behind Japanese lines the results that have been described. Whether he was a good man is a question that this script does not attempt to answer.

 He was the man who was at Bario on the morning of the 26th of March 1945. He was the man to whom the elder of the long house said  through the interpreter that rice would be provided. He was the man who accepted the rice and who acted upon what came after. There is nothing more to say about him here. It is now morning in bario.

 The mist has lifted from the plateau. The rice terraces climb the slope in stepped ovals of green. Beneath the long house, the pigs sleep in the shade. Inside, 500 people go about their ordinary business. They cook, they sleep,  they marry, they bury, they quarrel, they pray. The head house at the end of the long house is closed again and has been closed for 80 years.

 And there are elders in Bario today who remember from their childhoods being told by their grandfathers what happened when it was open and what it meant and why it was closed again when the operation ended and why it will not be opened again. In the small memorial park at the edge of the settlement, a plaque records the names of the eight men who came down at Bario on the 25th of March 1945.

The plaque is polished on the anniversary. The names are read aloud. There is a  minute silence. Then the ceremony breaks up and the participants return to their ordinary lives. In the long house over the pale rice liquor, the old men talk of the operation and of the elder who received the eight men and of what came after.

They do not raise their voices.  They do not use exclamation. They tell the story as it was told to them by their fathers and by their grandfathers  in the register in which it has always been told as a thing that happened in the mountains in the year they came down out of the sky. That is the register in which this script has been written.