THE AMERICAN SOLDIER WHO MARRIED A

HERMAN PERRY : NAGA PRINCESS

HERMAN PERRY: THE AMERICAN SOLDIER WHO MARRIED A

NAGA PRINCESS
PRELUDE:

This story is based on “Now the Hell Will Start,” - an epic World War II
manhunt story written by Brendan I. Koerner,about the quest to find Herman
Perry, a black soldier who went to India to help build a road to China via
Burma, shot and killed a white commanding officer, then disappeared into
the jungles of Naga hills of Assam, where he joined a tribe of headhunters
and eluded capture for months. This story is an amazing piece of reporting—
part thriller & part history. It gets its start as a Slate "Explainer" (detailing
which offenses, when committed by military personnel, are punishable by
death). When Koerner wrote the column back in 2003, he came across an
account of an Air Force translator who'd been charged with spying for Syria
and if convicted of the spying charges, he could face the death penalty. As
Koerner researched this "Explainer", he encountered the following tidbit
about “Pvt. Herman Perry, murderer who long evaded capture by living with
Burmese tribe, 1944-1945." Koerner's curiosity was piqued and he started to
search for survivors where the action took place. He spent five years talking
to the survivors of the road’s construction and poring over yellowed military
documents to piece it all together. Most of the principals in this story are
dead, but Earl Cullum, a self-aggrandizing
Texan officer stationed in Burma who was
obsessed with Perry’s capture, committed
much of his memories of the episode to paper
in the hope of getting it published.

HERMAN PERRY - ORIGINS:

Herman Perry was a 19 year old meat cutter

from Washington D.C. who was first made to
undergo compulsory military service for giving
a false birth date to his employers at the
slaughter house in 1942. In July 1942, when
Herman Perry came out of the training camp in
South Carolina after induction into US Army, he
donned his dress uniform for the first time and
posed for the photograph (Fig -01)—a souvenir
for his family and his girlfriend, a skinny-
limbed beauty named Alma Talbot.
 THE AMERICAN SOLDIER WHO MARRIED A
HERMAN PERRY : NAGA PRINCESS

He and scores of other black GIs were packed into the crowded, poorly
ventilated lower decks of a commandeered ocean liner and shipped around
the world to work for the US Army throughout allies’ forces locations.

AMERICAN SOCIAL STRUCTURE AROUND WW-II:

Fig 01
During the Second World War, the United States
was clinging to a curious policy of racial
stratification in its armed forces. The government used to make a concerted
effort to make sure thousands and thousands of black men registered for the
draft. But the military brass bolstered by pseudoscience those days held the
belief that, because the Afro-American skull undergoes ossification prior to
that of Caucasian skull and hence has a low cranial capacity in comparison,
black people were cowardly and dimwitted and hence there was a desire not
to rile up white servicemen by forcing them to work alongside Negros – who
supposedly were loath enough to be put into combat situations. Most of the
Negro soldiers would find themselves in inferior positions compared to a
white soldier and would only be inducted into supporting roles to the main
combating army, behind the war’s front lines – more often to work as manual
labours. Besides those were the times when back in states, Negroes could
have been lynched by angry white mobs with impunity. The vast majority of
GIs, who like Herman Perry were African-American, were assigned to
segregated labor battalions run by white officers. Blinded by Jim Crow of the
Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA, the War Department
wasted the talents of thousands of patriotic Americans.

THE AMERICANS AT THE INDO-BURMESE-CHINESE WAR THEATRE:

This almost forgotten theatre of world war-two where thousands of brave

Americans, many of them black, toiled and died in virtual anonymity is at the
famous trisection between India, Burma and China – while India was still
under British control, Burma - newly independent but mostly under control of
advancing Japanese Army and China, under control of dictator Chiang Kai-
Shek – at loggerheads with Mao’s revolutionary army but having the support
of allies.

Perry's unit, the 849th Engineer Aviation Battalion, was dispatched to

the Indo-Burmese wilderness to help build the ill-fated Ledo Road, named
after the town near its mile zero in Assam. The road was designed, as
planned by allies’ strategists, to keep Nationalist China flush with supplies
after the Japanese had severed access to the more southerly Burma Road in
1942. But building the road was a far more arduous task than its planners
 THE AMERICAN SOLDIER WHO MARRIED A
HERMAN PERRY : NAGA PRINCESS

had predicted. An aide

to Chiang Kai-shek had
initially estimated that
the highway would take
just three months to
build. It instead took two
and a half years and
incurred so much of Fig 02
casualties that the
Americans nicknamed it
"the Man-a-Mile Road"
on account of its
lethality. As the war
dragged on, the
justifications for the road became looking increasingly flimsy. Winston
Churchill said the road was “an immense, laborious task, unlikely to be
finished until the need for it has passed.” But President Roosevelt and the
military brass at the war Department dug in their heels. They never could
bring themselves to curtail the road's construction, even as its potential
usefulness diminished with the increase in cargo flights between India and
China. To halt the construction was to admit the defeat and they were
probably too afraid of losing face, no matter the human toll.

HARDSHIPS AT THE LEDO ROAD:

The Ledo Road had a low priority in Washington, so equipment was scarce.
The Americans were assisted by thousands of indentured labourers, known
as "coolies" in the politically incorrect lingo of the 1940s. Many had
previously worked on the tea plantations of Assam, the remote Indian
province where the town of Ledo was located. The coolies were forced to
slash through the jungle with hoes, pickaxes, and even their bare hands.

The broiling Indo-Burmese jungle receives up to 200 inches of rain per

year, so the soldiers' huts were perpetually awash in mud. Vast arrays of
Ants and lice swarmed over the sleeping GIs, and Anopheles mosquitoes
made malaria endemic. Red or green or chocolate brown in color, the slimy
annelids drooped from trees or neck-high grass, waiting to gorge on the
blood of passers-by. The leeches had a particular affinity for the body's most
sensitive areas- the orifices like, eyelids, nostrils, and especially the groins.
Unexploded artillery shells would detonate and rip men in half. Others were picked
off by snipers. The monsoon rains drove tigers to higher ground, and in lieu
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HERMAN PERRY : NAGA PRINCESS

Fig 03

Fig 04

of livestock they preyed on humans working

on the road. The food was rotten. And then there were the Naga, a group made up
of jungle-dwelling tribes who took particular pleasure in headhunting. Several
unfortunate souls working on the “quixotic” project perished while those who
survived were usually paid the equivalent of 16 cents a day, though
sometimes their compensation amounted to nothing more than a few fistfuls
of rice. Many of the laborers thus supplemented their incomes by peddling
"native intoxicants"—opium and marijuana—to GIs. Herman Perry was one of
their most avid customers.

THE CRIME:

The jungle's harsh conditions caused many soldiers to suffer mental

breakdowns, and Herman Perry was among the afflicted. Perry's drug habit
further warped his already tattered psyche. Perry would smoke weed and
opium to cope with the stresses of his miserable life in the jungle, and he
slowly lost his grip on reality. He created an alternate world in his head in
which he was back in D.C., married to his girlfriend in the States. On March 4,
1944, 21-year-old Perry was placed under arrest for insubordination as he
had missed reveille after spending a night on an opium bender. But Perry ran
away from his captors - scared and with tears in his eyes, and he finally
snapped, when an unarmed white lieutenant confronted him, he shot the
officer to death by the side of the road. And then things really got crazy.
Perry immediately fled into the jungle in a haze, with his military-issue
carbine over his shoulder, fearing that he'd be lynched if captured by the
 THE AMERICAN SOLDIER WHO MARRIED A
HERMAN PERRY : NAGA PRINCESS

military police. A
dead-or-alive
reward of 1,000
rupees was posted
(Fig 04). He spent
days roaming in
and around the Fig 05
parts of the jungle
that Westerners
avoided at all costs.

While the MPs

combed the
brothels of
Calcutta, Perry ran
deeper and deeper
into the Patkais, the forested lower Himalayan mountain range that lines the
Indo-Burmese border. He eventually stumbled upon a village inhabited by
Nagas, members of an ethnic group known for its zeal for headhunting.
Against all odds, the charming Perry managed to befriend the tribesmen.

THE EARLY AMERICAN EXPOSURE OF THE NAGAS:

Though the Nagas were

historically suspicious of
outsiders, the Americans
turned many of them into
allies during the war. As in
present days, Nagas were
then particularly fond of shiny
tinned American food and
beverages - particularly
syrupy fruit cocktails. A
detachment of the Office of
Strategic Services, the
forerunner to the CIA, sent
agents into the jungle with Fig 06

gifts of tin and opium in order

to win the Nagas' loyalty. These bribes convinced some tribesmen to assist
downed American pilots, who would otherwise have perished in the
wilderness. Perry actually followed the OSS's game plan to some extent: He
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tapped sympathetic black soldiers to help him by sneaking in and out of

American camps to steal rations from Army depots and gave this food to the
Nagas. The Army’s continued inability to catch Perry became an
embarrassment for the military brass, but among the black GIs, he was a folk
hero - The Jungle King. The black GIs, who would give him the tins of food
(and ammunition) before his slinking back into the opaque, forbidding jungle
also knew, that his capture meant a hanging at the hands of angry white
officers.

Yet even the ostensibly friendly Nagas could still be violent when
provoked - especially if a GI dared get too close to one of their women. And
as much as they adored opium, the Nagas prized skulls even more highly.
Still, mysteriously, Herman Perry not only befriended them but he slowly
became a revered member of his Naga village, so much so that, after some
initial period of a ritual courtship he even managed to marry the fourteen
year old daughter of the tribes’ headman, who bore him a son. He, then,
started a small farm in the Patkais, raising rice and marijuana. From here, the
tale of Perry's flight and the Army's ensuing manhunt is one of cruelty,
madness, and survival.

THE ENDGAME:

During the Perry manhunt, work on the road continued. On Jan. 12, 1945, the
road's first
ceremonial convoy
set out from Ledo.
Despite the racial
makeup of the
project's work force,
the convoy was an
entirely white affair
for its first 268
miles. But a reporter
for the Chicago
Defender, a black
newspaper,
Fig 07
complained about this
when the convoy
reached the town of Myitkyina in northern Burma. Ten African-American
soldiers were thus brought in from India to head off negative publicity.
 THE AMERICAN SOLDIER WHO MARRIED A
HERMAN PERRY : NAGA PRINCESS

On Feb. 5, the convoy finally reached the Chinese city of Kunming,

which was ruled by a one-eyed, opium-addicted warlord named Long Yun. To
celebrate the convoy's arrival, Long arranged for operatic soprano Lily Pons,
to perform at his palace. The 10 African -American GIs were not invited to the
show; instead, they were sent back to India within 48 hours, as Madame
Chiang Kai-shek had insisted that no blacks set foot in China.

While the convoy lurched toward China, Perry was fleeing through the
backwoods of Assam. He was captured in the summer of 1944, then court-
martialed and sentenced to death on Sept. 4. But he escaped from the
stockade just before Christmas—a jailbreak likely abetted by a fellow inmate.
Perry thought he could rely on the kindness of other African-American GIs to
get him out of Assam, but he miscalculated—a pair of black soldiers
eventually played a key role in the manhunt's endgame. His death sentence
was eventually carried out.

While the Perry drama played out in the wilderness, the road's
beleaguered workers kept plugging away. The highway didn't officially open
until May 20, 1945—12 days after Nazi Germany's surrender. Less than three
months later, on the day of Japan's final capitulation, word came down from
Washington - The road was to be abandoned immediately and all
construction materials either scrapped or sold for whatever value these
could fetch. Thousands of men had died for a project that contributed
virtually nothing to the Allied war effort.

THE ROAD TODAY:

In 1946 itself, a reporter for

the New Republic visited
the road. Most of it was
then in bad shape and un-
motorable. "The jungle, like
a selfish woman, was
stretching its green fingers
out to take back the Road,"
he wrote. "The rains had
washed so much of the
earth away that there were
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large bites in the Road, looking as if they had been made by some giant
dinosaur."

Today things don't look much Fig 08

better. Though the first few
miles of the Ledo Road are now paved and well-trafficked, most of the
highway is in dreadful
shape - particularly
high in the Patkais,
where Herman Perry
lived among the
Nagas. There have
been sporadic
attempts to make the
road navigable once
again, but they've all
come to naught. Partly
because of deep
suspiciousness of
military junta ruling
Burma, which fears
Fig 09 that a revitalized road
would make life easier
for ethnic freedom fighters, and partly by the Indian government’s fear of
increase in insurgency and drug – trafficking.

A few miles short of the Indo-Myanmar border, even today is present

this wartime cemetery, which is filled with cracked stone crypts and
overgrown with jungle vines. No one knows how many bodies of the
casualties of the construction army of Ledo road are buried there. Nor does
anyone seem to know what happened to Herman Perry's half-Naga son.

REFERANCES:

i. Now the Hell Will Start - by Brendan I. Koerner

ii. American Army Institute Archives
iii. World press inc