March 5, 1944 - The Burmese jungle - US Army 849th Engineer Aviation Battalion Camp
“Get back!” yelled twenty one year old Private Herman Perry.
He stood in the road brandishing his M1 Garand rifle.
Lieutenant Cady ignored the warning and stepped closer.
Sweating, sobbing, probably coming off an opium high, Perry was losing it; having a
breakdown.
He wasn’t going to let Cady take him into custody.
He wasn’t going to do more time at that parasite infested hellhole known as the Ledo
Stockade.
Despite Perry’s erratic behavior, Cady wasn’t about to back off.
This boy had a smart mouth, he had been AWOL-he was a troublemaker.
He needed to be punished.
Beside there was no way that Perry would shoot--that would be suicidal…
Now less than a foot away from Perry, Cady stretched out a hand towards him...BAM!
Cady jerked and crumpled to the ground.
For a split second everyone stared in disbelief at the fatally wounded Cady.
Then Perry swung his gun around and trained it on the other officers as he backed away
down the road.
As he neared the trees, he turned and ran, vanishing into the brush.
During World War II the United States segregated its Armed Forces.
Sure, there were a couple of African American combat units created mainly for political
reasons, but the majority of African Americans who served were relegated to menial tasks
including cooking, cleaning and construction.
That’s how close to 10,000 African Americans ended up being shipped to Burma.
These men are stationed there to build what will end up being a boondoggle-- a 1,072 mile
( 1,726 kilometer) supply road to run through the Burmese jungle connecting Ledo, India
to Kunming, China.
Some 5,000 white Americans are also sent to work on the Ledo road, however many of them
are officers overseeing the black soldiers.
The Burmense jungle is torturous.
It’s hot, humid, the vegetation’s dense, the terrain rough.
It’s easy to get malaria or dysentery, and hard to avoid the leeches, lice and mosquitoes.
Even worse, sometimes man eating tigers lurk in the brush.
Clothes rot and the food rations are poor.
Building the Ledo road is back breaking-- far harder than Perry’s North Carolinian
childhood of picking cotton in a sharecropping family.
The soldiers have mandatory 16 hour shifts.
Bulldozers supplied by the Army quickly break down and the GIs are forced into manual labor.
They use hoes and pickaxes to dig the muddy, rocky red soil.
Many of the black soldiers work side by side and become friendly with coolies--unskilled
native laborers.
As a result, black soldiers pick up bush lingo, Urdu and Hindi.
They trade in the local black markets for moonshine known as jungle juice.
Some soldiers, including Perry seek solace from the grim drudgery of their lives in opium
and marajuana.
When Cady was attempting to take him into custody, Perry was coming off a 2 day drug
bender.
After shooting Cady, a panicked Perry runs into the jungle.
Oh God, he killed someone!
For 3 days, Perry stumbles through the jungle in a daze.
Not knowing what to do, he veers back to the Ledo Road.
He runs into some soldiers from a different unit working on the road.
They feed him and pass along messages from his friends in the 849th Battalion--Military
police are looking for him.
Perry decides to surrender.
At nightfall, he stands by a bridge for the Namyung River.
Sooner or later, a patrol will come by and he’ll turn himself in.
While waiting, Perry sets down his rifle.
Hearing gunshots somewhere nearby, Perry gets worried the MPs are gunning for him and they’ll
kill him outright instead of arresting him.
Spooked, he slips into the jungle again, accidently leaving his gun behind.
Perry spends several days wandering in the jungle.
Luckily, he speaks some bush lingo which allows him to beg for rice from Naga farmers.
The Naga are an ethnic group native to Northeastern India and Northwestern Burma.
Some of the tribes live remotely and stick to traditional practices...including headhunting.
For the most part, the British and Americans ignore the Naga, as long as they stick to
making war on each other and not Westerners.
March 18 - Around 2 weeks after he had killed Cady and fled into the jungle, Perry runs
into some British troops.
Perry, who’s always been a smooth talker, thinks fast and makes up excuses as to why
he’s alone in the jungle.
He’s able to charm the Brits into giving him some food rations.
It’s hard going trekking through the remote Patkais foothills, but the farther away Perry
gets from the Army, the better.
One day Perry’s hiking up a dense mountain slope when he sees something spine chilling.
A basha or temporary shelter often made with bamboo.
This basha is decorated with human skulls to which water buffalo horns have been attached.
(SEE PIC) Perry has stumbled into the headhunting Naga village of Tgum Ga.
Believe it or not, Perry delights the villagers by giving them the remaining canned food rations
he got from the British.
The Ang or village chief invites him to be his honored guest.
Perry takes a liking to the Chief’s 14 year old daughter; she seems to return his interest.
Perry has a new problem.
How do you flirt with a girl and impress her warrior father when you don’t know the culture
or speak the language?
The answer is gifts.
Perry hikes some 8 miles down the mountain back to the Ledo road.
Somehow he manages to get ahold of a load of Army goods.
Most importantly, he gets an M1 Garand.
In Naga culture, tiger pelts and claws are prized.
The act of killing a tiger is seen as a virile feat of masculinity.
Compared to the clubs and flintlocks the Naga have, with his modern gun, Perry is seen as
having the ability to kill many a tiger.
The village is impressed, Perry is considered an important man and the chief allows Perry
to marry his daughter.
The first few months of Perry’s married life are pretty good.
He struggles with malaria, but due to his stockpile of Army rations, he’s rich enough
to hire servants to work his fields.
Perry spends much of his time hunting monkeys and tigers.
He grows fluent in his wife’s language.
The couple’s excited to find out that they’re expecting their first child.
Many nights the tribal musicians play flutes and drums while the tribe chants, takes psychoactives
and dances.
Meanwhile, the Army has offered a 1,000 rupee reward for information leading to Perry’s
capture--that’s upwards of $14,500 USD in today’s money.
They assume that he’d headed for the city, so they’ve been searching for him in Calcutta.
The legend of Perry is beginning to grow.
Warranted or not, he’s becoming a folk hero.
To the black GIs who stew with the resentment of daily petty racial humiliations, Perry’s
awesome.
Apropos of what actually happened, they see Perry as someone who fought back against ‘The
Man’ and won.
Eventually Perry becomes homesick.
When he was drafted into the Army, he left behind a young daughter and a girlfriend in
Washington, DC.
Also, his stockpile of rations is quickly dwindling.
He begins to hunger for Western items, especially cigarettes.
He hires runners to go down the mountain to trade at the black market in rural towns.
Finally, the Army finds a clue.
In the summer, some 5 months after Perry vanished, a coolie finds the rifle Perry accidently
left behind when he panicked by the bridge.
The Army realizes they’ve been searching in the wrong place.
They put out feelers in rural towns near where the gun was found.
Eventually a rumor reaches their ears about the chief of Tgum Ga having a black soldier
as a son-in-law.
Army brass is incredulous; they never would have expected an unarmed tenderfoot like Perry
to survive for so long in the jungle.
A runner who had gone to the town of Namyung to get rice quickly comes back to tell Perry
that there are men searching for him.
Perry leaves his wife in Tgum Ga and goes to a noksa or satellite village.
July 20th - Captain Walter McMinn and a small posse of MPs along with hired Naga guides
go on a 3.5 hour hike up the mountain to Tgum Ga.
None of the Americans speak any Naga, they use a picture of Perry and hand signs to communicate.
The posse learns that Perry’s gone to the noksa.
By the time that the posse huddles outside of the noksa making a plan, it’s twilight.
The MPs get a guide to go ask Perry to borrow his gun for a hunt.
The ploy works; it’s a common request and Perry agrees--which leaves him unarmed.
Army snipers sneak through the brush and position themselves around Perry’s basha; they have
to be careful, it would be diplomatically unwise to accidentally kill any Naga.
While eating dinner Perry sees flickers of light outside.
The Naga don’t have flashlights, it can only mean Westerners.
Perry thinks about trying to sneak into the pitch black jungle behind the village, but
tigers have recently been a problem.
He grabs a dao or short Chinese sword and lights a bamboo staff to use as a torch.
Getting up his nerve, Perry goes outside.
McMinn immediately blinds Perry with his flashlight, ordering him not to move.
McMinn fires, but misses.
Perry takes off, the soldiers chase him, shooting as they go.
Perry seems to vanish into the jungle, escaping the ambush...but then they find his body at
the bottom of a hill.
Perry’s been shot in the chest.
Around 10 pm, McMinn hikes several hours back to Namyung to get a doctor and more soldiers.
Even with the extra man power, it ends up being a 9 hour ordeal to carry the stretcher
bearing the 170 pound (77 kg) severely injured Perry down the mountain to reach the Ledo
road.
From there, an ambulance takes Perry to the Seventy-Third Evacuation Hospital at Shingbwiyang.
Perry spends the next several days recovering.
While Perry’s hyped up on morphine and other medical drugs, he’s frequently interrogated.
At first, he denies being Perry, but then finally admits his identity and confesses
to shooting Cady.
He’s coerced into signing a 3 page document that he’s told is a statement of what had
happened.
Though Perry thinks some key facts are missing or distorted, against his better judgement
he notarizes and signs the paperwork.
On August 28, Perry is deemed healthy enough to be transferred to prison.
He’s sent to the notorious Ledo Stockade--the very prison he was trying to evade when he
shot Cady in the first place.
This is his second stint in the stockade, several months before the whole shooting incident,
Perry had spent hellish months in Ledo, convicted for disobeying orders when an officer tried
to assign him extra work.
Though Perry’s sentence for disobedience was 90 days, he had been forced to serve an
extra couple of weeks in the stockade without explanation.
The army assigns Perry a lawyer, Captain Clayton Oberholtzer.
Unfortunately for Perry, Oberholtzer only has experience as a civilian lawyer and has
never handled a felony.
The fact that Perry killed Cady is indisputable, but Oberholtzer hopes to get the charges reduced
from premeditated capital murder to manslaughter, the difference being life in prison versus
execution if convicted.
Perry is also accused of desertion and willful disobedience.
Sept 4, 1944 - Perry’s court martial takes less than 6 hours.
Oberholtzer fumbles a chance to get the sworn statement Perry made while drugged tossed.
He botches explaining that the morning of the murder a distraught Perry was headed to
see Lieutenant Colonel Haitt, the commander of the camp who had an open door policy to
chat with soldiers white or black.
Cady went out of his way to accost Perry with the intent to take him into custody, consciously
seeking to prevent him from seeing Haitt who might have limited Perry’s punishment for
going AWOL.
When Oberholtzer brings up Cady’s history of abuse towards black GIs, the tribunal warns
him that Cady’s character isn’t on trial.
The vote is unanimous.
Perry is dishonorably discharged, must forfeit all pay and will be hanged by the neck until
dead.
As part of the Army’s due process, the verdict condemning Perry to death must undergo a review
by three members of the Judge Advocate General’s Department in New Delhi.
All the way across the world, Perry’s mom gets a letter from the Army informing her
that her son has been court martialed, convicted of murder and is sentenced to hang.
Bewildered and frightened, she scrapes together some money and hires the best lawyer she can
get.
Her lawyer submits a brief to the Washington based office of the Judge Advocate General's
Department.
The Washington office informs New Delhi that a brief for the Perry case will shortly arrive
in the mail.
Nearly a month later on December 15th, the New Delhi office transmits a classified message
asking about the brief--it hasn’t arrived, it’s been lost in the mail.
Meanwhile Perry has been stuck in limbo, imprisoned in Ledo Stockade.
He’s spent his time watching and memorizing guard schedules.
Also on December 15th, Perry makes his move.
Late at night, he crawls under the rear of his tent.
The sleepy soldier standing guard at the entrance to his tent doesn’t notice.
Perry only has 11 minutes before the next time the guards make a circuit.
Using wire cutters he stole while on work detail, he quickly cuts a hole in the prison
fence just big enough to wiggle through.
Protected by strips of coarse wool cut from his prison issue blanket, Perry crawls through
drainage ditches filled with barbed wire.
After that, he runs through the field at the stockade’s edge and disappears into the
jungle.
Sweet freedom.
Perry stops to catch his breath.
He’s free, but some 80 miles (129 km) of mountainous jungle separates him from his
wife and unborn child.
How’s he going to get home?
Army brass loses their minds when they realize that Perry has escaped.
The Ledo Stockade’s warden and 8 guards are formally reprimanded for negligence.
The Army again puts a 1,000 rupee bounty on Perry’s head.
They radio broadcast Perry’s description in several languages and print wanted posters.
By airplane, they drop some posters on the village of Tgum Ga.
The illiterate Naga villagers collect them, impressed that pictures of the chief’s son-in-law
are falling from the heavens.
MPs begin stopping black soldiers at random based on the chance they may be helping Perry.
Whenever they can, many black soldiers tear up the wanted posters.
They enjoy swapping tales and rumors of the ‘Jungle King’.
The law brief in defense of Perry finally reaches New Delhi on December 27.
The advocate judges review finds some of the Army’s actions questionable, but reconfirms
the verdict of execution.
In the wee hours of Jan 1, 1945 Perry is almost caught at an abandoned timber camp by a posse
of MPs who had heard rumors of a black soldier hiding there.
Luckily for Perry, he’s a light sleeper and escapes into the jungle just in time--a
bullet barely grazes hin.
The MPs recover a .45 pistol Perry accidently left behind.
February 19th - Two black soldiers, Staff Sergeant Toomer and T/4 Troxler are buying
liquor in the town of Makum when Perry suddenly storms the bootlegger’s shack.
Somehow he’s gotten a replacement .45 pistol.
He mugs the two soldiers of 95 rupees and forces the bootlegger to cook him dinner.
Perry asks Toomer and Troxler to do him a favor.
He wants them to bring him a truck stocked with rations, clothes, a tent, a knife and
ammunition in the next 24 hours.
They agree to meet Perry in Makum the following night.
Even though he stole money from them, Toomer and Troxler debate what to do.
Ultimately, they decide to tell the Army, mainly out of fear of what could happen to
them if the Army found out that they had suppressed information about Perry.
They inform Major Earl Owen Cullum, commanding officer of the 159th Military Police Battalion
at nearby Chabua camp.
Cullum decides to set up a trap.
The soldiers will arrive with the truck and the Army will ambush Perry.
Toomer and Troxler agree to help as long as the Army keeps it a secret that they betrayed
the Jungle King.
However, Perry has anticipated a trap.
A crowd of coolies show up to meet Toomer and Troxler.
The Army doesn’t see Perry, but even if he’s there, they can’t shoot without risking
a diplomatic incident.
Suddenly from among the crowd, Perry sprints for the truck and hops aboard.
He forces Toomer and Troxler to drive away down the road.
But there’s a snag, a checkpoint’s coming up.
Perry gets out of the truck to trek through the jungle around the checkpoint.
Tommer directs Perry to meet them at a grassy field on the farside.
Perry doesn’t know that this is the Army’s Plan B.
As he reaches the field, MPs fires at Perry, but again he escapes into the jungle.
This time he’s wounded.
A bullet’s nicked his right foot, he packs it full of moss so it won’t get infected--a
trick he has learned from the Naga.
Perry limps through the jungle and hides in a rice paddy.
Hours later he awakes to the barking of German Shepherds-- the Army's caught up to him.
Perry escapes yet again, this time the tip of his nose gets grazed by a bullet.
He puts moss on this wound too.
Cullum receives a scolding note from his commanding officer for letting Perry get away.
Cullum vows to capture Perry.
February 22nd - A desperate Perry hides by the side of the Ledo road.
His new plan is to board a truck, hide among the supplies and hitch a ride over the mountains.
When the truck reaches Burma, he’ll ditch it and disappear into the jungle.
But Perry’s unwell.
The gunshot on his foot’s very painful.
Also he’s had to drink river water and has caught dysentery.
When Perry tries to hop on the back of a slow moving truck, he’s too weak and falls in
the road, dropping yet another .45.
The gun skids further away as it hits the ground.
Perry realizes that a coolie has witnessed his failed hijack attempt.
Spooked, he quickly melts back into the jungle, for the third time he leaves a gun behind.
Cullum starts a mobile posse to hunt Perry.
He begins visiting town after town to question locals.
He also coordinates with the British and native police forces.
He and his posse follow Perry’s trail for over two weeks.
Cullum eventually figures out that Perry’s headed in the direction of the town of Namrup.
Perry’s following the southeastern branch of the Disang River.
It’s a long indirect route to Tgum Ga.
However, Perry’s probably taking this way because just south of Namrup is considered
the gateway to the Naga heartland.
Here Perry would be able to make friends; chances are some of the Naga tribes speak
the same language as Perry’s wife.
Cullum realizes he had only a few days to catch up with Perry before he vanishes into
a remote area again--maybe this time forever.
Meanwhile, Perry’s been growing weaker day by day from dysentery and malnutrition.
He’s surviving on stolen sugarcane and begging farmers for rice.
Stupidly, Toomer and Troxler mention their snitching on Perry to a colleague.
The Army has to evacuate them from Asia over threats of murder from Perry’s fans.
After a long, rough journey the posse arrives in Namrup.
Cullum receives a tip as to where Perry is; he’s staying at a rural farm a few miles
away.
The posse waits until nightfall before hiking to the farm.
Cautiously the posse fans out and surrounds the farmer’s basha.
They find 3 Naga tribesmen wearing traditional dhotis sitting by a fire, outside of the home.
Cullum senses that there’s something not quite right, he takes a closer look at the
men.
He then grabs one of them.
It’s Perry.
He’s cut his afro and borrowed native clothing hoping that he can pass for Naga by firelight.
For the last time, Perry is taken into custody.
Under tight security, a sickly Perry is transported to the Chabua Stockade and kept in an isolation
cell.
The Army decides not to return him to Ledo Stockade, they fear a potential racial uprising.
Perry’s interrogated by MPs who want to know where he got his guns.
Perry refuses to snitch.
He’s sorry over Cady’s death, but also says that he would have killed his pursuers
if he had a chance.
March 15, 1945 - A few days after his capture, Perry is woken before dawn and under extremely
tight security transported to Ledo Stockade.
Per his last request, Perry is allowed to write a farewell letter to his brother Aaron
and given a final cigarette before he’s quietly hanged just after 7 am.
March 17 - Perry’s mother receives a notice from the army informing her of her son’s
death by ‘judicial asphyxiation...due to his own misconduct.’
Despite repeated requests for information, she hasn't heard anything since her lawyer
submitted the brief in December.
She knows nothing of her son’s escapades or anti-hero status.
Some months later, a small group of black GIs are on an expedition through the Patkais
mountains to check for survivors of a crashed cargo plane.
They hire some Naga guides and ended up spending the night at a remote village where one of
the guide’s relatives lives.
As guests, the GIs are served a special treat for dessert--canned fruit cocktail.
One of the soldiers curiously inquires as to where the cocktail has come from.
The next morning before they leave the soldiers are taken to the only basha in the village
painted a bright yellow-orange.
It turns out to be owned by the Chief’s teenage daughter.
Inside the walls are decorated with wanted posters of Perry.
The dwelling is filled with a stockpile of Army goods.
The young mom proudly shows off her curly haired 6 month old son.
Wow.
That was a wild ride!
Now that you've reached the end of our video, why not keep the watch party going?!
For another crazy story of a soldier surviving in the jungle, check out the story of Aussie
Robert McLaren who performed emergency surgery on himself . Or if you’re interested in
famous battles, you’ll enjoy our video about the amazing Battle of the Bugle!
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