In 1945, headhunting enjoyed a temporary resurgence in the north central uplands of Borneo. This time, people’s heads were taken, not only in the cause of ancient tribal tradition, but in the name of a global and modern war.
Australian troops, preparing for a final assault on the Japanese, who had occupied Borneo since early 1942, were mystified when local tribesmen turned up at their headquarters with offerings of Japanese heads in June 1945. One Australian soldier wrote in his diary:
A Dyak [tribesman] who reached ‘C’ Company from the Tutong River area reported that some days ago a party of 18 Japs reached their village and asked for guides to Tutong. Result: 36 Dyaks, 18 Japs less bodies arrived at destination. The Dyaks offered to deliver the heads to the ‘C’ Company but said that they would prefer to keep them as they had a party on. Permission granted to keep heads.
Dyak Headhunters
Presumably, the Australians were rather glad to be rid of this particular gift of support from the locals, but they weren’t about to refuse Dyak assistance, however unsavory their methods. Headhunting had been outlawed by the colonial government for decades, and successfully eradicated for twenty years. Suddenly, the Dyaks had started taking heads again. what the Australian troops did not know was that many of these headhunters had been armed by British and Australian special operatives working secretly in the jungle.
In March and April, three Allied intelligence parties had parachuted into the jungles of north Central Borneo, unsure exactly what they would find. ‘Operation Semut’ had been tasked with gathering intelligence on Japanese positions in Borneo and winning the support of the indigenous people for Allied interventions. They need not have worried on this account. The locals had suffered three years of foot shortages and heavy-handed administration under the Japanese and were eager to exact their revenge – so eager, in fact, that Operation Semut quickly became a guerilla campaign, manned by indigenous fighters who were armed and coordinated – to a greater or lesser extent – but the Allied men, aimed at harassing and attacking the enemy.
Working in small groups, Semut operatives ambushed the Japanese while they went about their daily life doing such things as cooking in their camps, trekking through the forest or loading rations into boats on the river. One British soldier remembered that before the Japanese could take defensive positions in the jungle, the guerillas would rise out of the bushes and decapitate them. They were armed with their own parang (swords) and sumpit (blowpipes) because Allied weapons had been slow to arrive and ammunition was in short supply; and in any case, with only a few hours’ training, the Dyaks were not skilled gunmen. They did not all take heads, and some officers forbade headhunting, but in parts of the jungle headhunting became integral to the Allied operation against the Japanese.
Some of the Allied soldiers were little more than witnesses to the fervor of their local fighters. There are stories of tribesmen carrying out headhunting raids while their Allied commanders were still back at base camp planning the attack, such was their enthusiasm for the job. Captain Bill Sochon remembered the following scenario: ‘As we were trying to get some sense of the highly excitable natives, more Dyaks came out of the jungle. The less flamboyant of them had the delicacy to carry the gruesome spoil in their sacks – proof of battle prowess as they tipped up the sacks and a cascade of heads tumbled on the ground.’
In situations like these, commanders found it hard to persuade their men to refrain from taking heads, and in any case it did not always suit them to try. Many Allied soldiers were complicit in head-taking raids, even if they did not wield the parang themselves. They led raids when heads were taken and witnessed the decapitation of Japanese prisoners and wounded men by their Dyak men. Like the Australians from ‘C’ Company, they accepted heads as a declaration of allegiance. Some were guests of honor at traditional headhunting celebrations after a successful skirmish; others sealed alliances by giving Japanese heads as gifts to neighboring tribes or posed for photographs holding the smoked heads of their enemy. In parts of the jungle, heads became part of the currency of warfare, cementing alliances and boosting morale, and decades of colonial censure of such ‘primitive savagery’ were temporarily disregarded.
Culled from: Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found
Morbid Mirth Du Jour!
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