Three Who Came Through

Ten years after V-J day, Americans have read all about the great campaigns of World War II, and are already beginning to forget their details. Yet men are still coming forward with new stories of little-known sides of history's biggest war.

BLACKBURN'S HEADHUNTERS, by Philip Harkins (326 pp.; Norton; $3.75). Except for a coast watcher or two who greeted returning U.S. forces at Leyte near war's end, Americans know practically nothing of the men who led Philippine guerrillas in World War II. Rather than surrender with U.S. forces at Bataan in 1942, these U.S. soldiers fled to the jungle and carried on as best they could. Blackburn's Headhunters is the exciting true story of Lieut. Donald Blackburn, one of the handful of Americans to fight through on Luzon to the triumphant end. He survived by dodging north from Manila to hide out among the mountain Igorots, who used to be headhunters and were still not entirely reformed when Blackburn met up with them (other tribes in the vicinity were said to drink the blood and eat the hearts and livers of their enemies). One day when his superstitious, G-strung auxiliaries thought a red bird had flown into his jungle headquarters, Blackburn stood by anxiously as witch doctors studied the spleens of sacrificed chickens to see whether a new, unhexed camp would have to be pitched. When MacArthur finally returned, Blackburn's Bolomen mopped up the Japanese diehards who had fled to the mountains ("Every single bloody body [was left] without its head").

Blackburn put his shoes on again and prepared to fly home (he is now a major in the Regular Army), but not before the natives gave him a rousing farewell party.

Ever since, V-J day has been Aug. 14 to the rest of the world but to his friends among the Igorots it is Sept. 14--Donald Blackburn's birthday.

ACROSS THE ROOF OF THE WORLD, by Wilfred Skrede (223 pp.; Norfon; $3.50).

For reckless rambling and crazy adventure, this modern Viking's voyage to the New World might well be added to the Edda. After the Nazis invaded Norway in 1940, Willie Skrede, 19-year-old Oslo engineering apprentice, skipped to Sweden, hoping to make his way to the Norwegian air force then training in Canada.

Told to join the long line awaiting official transportation, impatient Willie set out with four friends, made his own way across Russia, Sinkiang. the Himalaya passes, India, and finally the sea. Crossing Russia by train in early 1941 was as pleasant as the champagne the travelers managed to buy in Xiptoc, a Russian village in the center of Asia. But in China's Sinkiang. "that province vhich has long since been abandoned by both gods and decent people." Willie broke his back in a truck crash. After a hefty Russian nurse helped him hobble out of Kuldsha's fly-blackened hospital, Willie caught more truck rides until the old Silk Road led him to Kashgar. on Marco Polo's route. There Britain's mountaineering consul, Eric Shipton, and his No. 1 houseboy, a "hard nut" of a Sherpa named Tenzing Norkey,* fed him well and mapped out his route through the Himalayas to Kashmir. Alone now, half starving and delirious, Willie stumbled over the 16,000-ft. passes to be welcorned by a local potentate. A Norwegian freighter, which called at Singapore as Japan's first bombs fell on Dec. 7, 1941, finally brought Willie to Canada, where he learned the comparatively humdrum business of handling fighter planes.

No. 13, BOB, by Jean Overton Fuller (240 pp.; Little, Brown; $3.50), is the gripping, troubling story of a British secret agent who played a double game with his Nazi captors. Caught the second time he parachuted into France, Captain John Starr pretended to compromise with the enemy. He accepted the Germans' invitation to stay at their counter-espionage headquarters in Paris, lettering maps (he was a commercial artist), and chatted daily with the Germans (harmlessly, he says). He soon learned that the Germans had succeeded in capturing Allied agents' radio sets and cutting them into the British network, but he was never able to warn London. After the invasion he was packed off to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Starr admits that because he never managed to alert his superiors, he failed to win his double game; his bosses hint that because he talked to the Germans he lost it. But the disconcerting fact is that Starr offers at least partial British corroboration of a recent German assertion that by 1943 hundreds of Allied drops were intercepted by the Nazis every month and that of the resistance radios operating at that time, three-quarters were in the hands of the Gestapo.

* Later famed as a member of the successful Everest expedition.

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