Major Tom Harnett Harrisson was a figure who could inspire books and movies. An esteemed British polymath, Harrisson was an archetypal Renaissance Man born in 1911 in Argentina to British parents. Harrisson’s father, Geoffrey, worked as a railway engineer and later as a railroad manager. In 1914, when Britain went to war, Geoffrey uprooted his family and went home to the UK to fight.
Geoffrey Harrisson had a natural gift for war. He was decorated for valor in combat and ended WW1 as a Brigadier-General. However, while Geoffrey was off fighting on the continent, Tom’s mother, Marie Ellen, became bored and distant.
Tom and his brother William subsequently raised themselves without friends or toys. They entertained each other, tearing up the countryside, exploring nature. Tom actually taught himself to read using books on natural history. In 1919, with the war over, Tom’s parents abandoned the boys at the Eastacre prep school and returned to Argentina without them.
A Suboptimal Childhood For Harrisson
Aside from a single year in 1922, Tom and William were wards of their boarding schools. That year they spent back in Argentina with their parents. Tom later described his time in South America as the best year of his youth. There, he learned to hunt, fish, and climb at his father’s direction. However, afterwards, he reluctantly returned to England to complete his education.
While at the Harrow School from 1925 through 1930, Harrisson’s quirky personality blossomed. He had few friends but maintained a card index of the other boys in his class, documenting their interests and personalities. He developed a passion for ornithology and wrote and published a book about local birds before completing high school.
Harrisson eventually attended both Cambridge and Oxford sequentially. In 1932, he spent 6 months on an expedition to the northern Sarawak region of Borneo with the Oxford University Exploration Club. He later spent two years from 1934 to 1936 on a longer exploration of the New Hebrides. Along the way, he also worked in broadcasting for the BBC. His time in Borneo would eventually open some fascinating doors.
The Ornithologist Goes to War
When war broke out, Harrisson joined the Army, as did almost every British male of appropriate age and fitness. In November 1943, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Reconnaissance Corps. Afterwards, in a nondescript hotel room in Northern Ireland in 1944, he met a retired British cavalry Colonel who worked for the British Special Operations Executive. The bird-loving anthropologist was about to become a spy.
I’ve glossed over Tom Harrisson’s extraordinary personality. Though I never met the man, he was described as exceptionally opinionated and abrasive. His father disinherited him, and his autobiography was ultimately titled The Most Offending Soul Alive. Fiercely independent and resourceful, this widely-read, grouchy curmudgeon was the perfect special operator.
Harrisson On The Battlefield
Borneo is the third-largest island on the planet. A nearly impenetrable mass of jungle and disease, Borneo had little to appeal to either the Japanese or the Allies, save one thing. It sat atop vast reserves of crude oil. At a time when Japan was facing down the relentlessly advancing Allied juggernaut while starving for fuel, Borneo became a lifeline to the Axis war machine in the Pacific. The Japanese occupied the island and terrorized everyone and everything on it, just as they did everywhere they went.
The SOE called the subsequent operation Semut. Semut is Malay for ant. Harrisson later described his 8-man special ops team as biting ants. Their mandate was to parachute into Borneo and raise an indigenous army to make life unbearable for the occupying Japanese. Their combined Anglo/Australian unit was called Z-Force.
Death from Above
Harrisson and his seven team members eventually parachuted from an American B-24 Liberator bomber after a six-hour flight from the Philippines. Their first two insertion attempts had been foiled by bad weather. However, on the night of 25 March 1945, Harrisson and his team successfully touched down on Borneo soil. As he was a white man who descended from the sky, the local Dayak tribesmen naturally revered him as a god.
Not just anybody could drop into the remote jungles of Borneo and thrive. The Dayaks were headhunters and legendarily fierce warriors. However, Tom Harrisson had been here before and studied both the land and the people. He understood their customs and knew how to push their buttons. In short order, he had organized an indigenous army some 100,000 strong. He later claimed that, throughout the war, he did not have a single man desert or run.
Unconventional Warriors
Two more Semut teams jumped into other parts of the enormous country with a similar mandate to sow mayhem. Harrisson, for his part, set up a radio relay network to gather and disseminate intelligence and began training his troops. In teaching Stone Age tribesmen the art of modern war, Harrisson said, “We never had to teach a Kelabit or Murut how to move or kill. But there was always an appreciable danger that in moving they might kill themselves, with things like hand grenades; or kill each other, instead of the enemy, by a combination of over-enthusiasm and the automatic lever on a carbine or Sten gun.”
Weapons poured in from the skies, and his headhunting acolytes took to the work with verve. In addition to airdropped carbines and Sten guns, his indigenous troops also employed bows and arrows as well as deadly blowguns. On their first ambush patrol, Harrisson and his motley mob attacked a sizeable Japanese force and killed them to a man. Thusly emboldened, Harrisson’s guerrillas took their show on the road.
The Refined Art of Killing
Throughout it all, Harrisson remained monotonously difficult. His fellow Z-Force special operators later attested that he was indeed a royal jerk. The anthropologist-turned-warrior trampled on local customs when that was what it took to kill the Japanese most efficiently. However, the man was also undeniably brave and maddeningly charismatic. So long as he got results, his SOE handlers just kept dropping in guns and ammunition and stayed out of his way.
On 19 June 1945, 23,553 Australian troops landed in Borneo at Brunei Bay to push the Japs off the island. At that point, Harrisson and his maniacal band of half-naked cutthroats began organizing and executing supporting attacks designed to fragment the Japanese defenses. On July 1st, a further 21,000 Allied troops landed, and the Japanese began to flee inland. Of that time, Harrisson wrote, “Semut ceased to be engaged in intelligence and sabotage, and decreasingly in administration. Instead, we devoted the greater part of all effort directly to killing Japanese.”
The Butcher’s Bill
By war’s end, Harrisson and his irregulars were credited with having killed more than 1,000 Japanese troops. Many more were so harried and harassed as they attempted to flee into the jungle, pursued by these screaming headhunting savages that they took their own lives. Often they hanged themselves from trees by their Army belts. Harrisson wrote, “Years later, skeletons were still being found; several times single skulls strangely dangling, ghostly jokes in a land so long scarred by head-hunting.”
After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most Japanese resistance finally evaporated. However, one Japanese captain took a 560-man contingent deep in the jungle to continue the fight. Tom Harrisson and his indigenous troops ran them down. On the last day of October, nearly two months after the war ended, Harrisson finally accepted the Japanese officer’s sword in surrender. To celebrate, the acerbic British special operator seduced a female Japanese Army nurse who was found among the surrendering unit.
The Rest of the Story For Harrisson
Tom Harrisson left the military after the war and took over as curator of the Sarawak Museum from 1947 through 1966. This was the oldest such museum in Borneo. Along the way, he led multiple archaeological forays into the jungle, eventually discovering several sets of human remains in the Great Cave at Niah that were purportedly radiocarbon dated to 40,000 years old.
In 1962, with the onset of the Brunei Revolt, Harrisson disappeared yet again into the jungle to organize indigenous fighters. He eventually commanded some 2,000 warrior tribesmen and played a critical part in cutting off the rebel forces’ escape into Indonesia. Once that war was over, Harrisson resigned his curatorship at age 55 and moved to Ithaca, New York, to take a position at Cornell University. He later went back home to England to work at the University of Sussex.
To Conclude
Tom Harrisson was a legendarily hard man. In many ways, he was just a product of his environment. Across his many adventures, he made time to be married three times and father a son. He married his last wife, a Belgian sculptor named Christine Forani, in 1971.
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In 1976, Tom and Christine were visiting Thailand. Harrisson had always had a wanderlust and never seemed to stay in one place for long. On 16 January, he and his wife were traveling through rural Thailand in a bus when it was struck by a truck. Both Tom and Christine perished in the crash and were cremated in Bangkok in keeping with local customs. Tom Harrison–ornithologist, explorer, journalist, broadcaster, soldier, guerrilla fighter, ethnologist, museum curator, archaeologist, documentary film-maker, conservationist, and writer–died at age 65 as he had lived, chasing life to the full.
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