A Tragic and Hellish Life: Private Herman Perry

In 1931, when Herman Perry was around 8 or 9 years old, his mother decided that she'd had it with North Carolina and the Jim Crow South. She moved to the District of Columbia, which was once known as "the promised land for poor Blacks from the Carolinas and elsewhere in the South." It was better than the South, but not all that much. Even after the New Deal came in the 1930s, blacks in Washington were relegated to "busing tables or cleaning white folks' homes" and other menial labor that was, all the same, "less back-breaking and better paying than picking cotton in the Carolinas."

Flonnie Perry got a job as a domestic. Herman made it to Washington a few years later, dropped out of junior high, and eventually found living quarters on Florida Ave. N.W. He held various jobs and spent a lot of time with girls, at least one of whom he got pregnant; they had a daughter to whom he seems to have been devoted, though he drifted on to another girlfriend.

Then World War II came along, and everything changed. After a series of misadventures, Herman found himself in the Army's 849th Engineer Aviation Battalion, an all-black unit that was bound for Burma and brutal labor on the infamous Ledo Road.

His is the story of the systematic discrimination and marginalization to which the Army subjected blacks during that war. By now it is common knowledge that this mistreatment of black soldiers along with the treatment of virtually all black Americans on the home front made a mockery of American slogans about fighting for freedom and democracy and was a crucial ingredient in the formation of the civil rights movement that emerged after the war.

In the case of Herman Perry, he "knew he was likely fated to wear an Army uniform" eventually, but months went by after Pearl Harbor before the draft finally got around to him.

In the summer of 1942, Perry was sent to the Myrtle Beach General Bombing and Gunnery Range in South Carolina, but he wasn't there to learn bombing and gunnery skills; he was there to be whipped into shape and primed for Burma. Though his white commanding officer "was smarter and more compassionate than most," Perry was up against the Army's prevailing segregationist attitude regarding blacks:

"Though outwardly committed to quelling racism, the Army allowed many of its training camps to be run like antebellum plantations. Rather than learning how best to kill or outwit Nazis, black draftees instead found themselves peeling potatoes and scrubbing toilets. They were housed in the shabbiest barracks and fed cold or putrid food scraps deemed unfit for white consumption. Anyone who dared complain or protested their lot with a wisecrack was quickly punished, either tossed in jail or slapped around."

Perry's unit was ordered overseas in May 1943. He and his fellow soldiers left the States believing that they would be building airstrips, but when they finally reached Burma in September, they learned that they would be "working on a road meant to keep America's Chinese allies flush with supplies."

The jungle through which the Burma portion of it passed was dense, fetid and malarial. Perry and his fellow soldiers labored 16 hours a day and were fed "a meal of tinned corn beef ('corned willy') and rice, with bacterial water to slake [their] thirst." The "malaria rate along the Ledo Road was astronomical: 955 cases per every 1,000 men." Not surprisingly, "Herman Perry's sunny disposition quickly evaporated in the jungle, destroyed by the sweltering heat and ceaseless routine of corned willy, leeches, and toil."

He was court-martialed and jailed once, on charges of disrespect toward a white superior; "the formerly upbeat playboy from D.C. was now dour and combative, seemingly bent on inviting another court-martial."

On March 3, 1944, he finally snapped. In a confrontation with a white lieutenant, Harold Cady, who "had a tough-guy rep to uphold," Perry fired two shots into Cady's chest. As the lieutenant lay dying, Perry fled into the jungle, beginning an odyssey that lasted just over a year. Immediately, he found himself in a bind: "Giving himself up would be tantamount to suicide, but so, too, would roughing it in the hills." His "survival instinct kicked in: jungle life, however daunting, was preferable to death" at the hands of the Army, which had already started a manhunt. It was under the leadership of a captain who "reasoned that, given the inborn African American penchant for sexual voraciousness, Perry would try and whore it up as much as possible while on the lam. Since paid sex was hard to come by in the jungle, Perry would likely head for the nearest center of sin: Calcutta."

Instead, Perry, being considerably smarter than his pursuers, headed into the jungle. There he ran into a series of improbable (but true) adventures, including befriending a settlement of Naga headhunters, who "had been raiding the Assamese lowlands for centuries, sowing terror with their square-bladed daos." They took so kindly to Perry that he was given the chief's daughter in marriage. Not too long afterwards, the couple was expecting their first child.

Eventually word of a black man living in the jungle seeped out from a rice station run by the British. The Army resumed its manhunt. One night, Perry was sitting inside a village hut and spotted a beam from a flashlight. He bolted and several shots were fired. A bullet tore through Perry's chest, but he kept going. He found a slope to descend, but his pursuers were at his heels. Cornered and bleeding, he collapsed. The hunt was over, and Perry was taken into custody. At the makeshift Army hospital, Perry had to be given blood. It was blood from the black soldiers; the Army would not allow a black soldier to be given blood from whites.

Perry's court-martial began in early September 1944 at a tea plantation in Ledo, India. It lasted just over six hours. His military lawyer, Clayton Oberholtzer, had been a small-town attorney in Ohio. It was his first murder case. The verdict: guilty. The sentence: death by hanging.

Perry awaited his fateful day in the Ledo stockade shackled to a log "like a chastised dog," as Koerner puts it. The weeks rolled on, into December, because an appeal was automatic. There was further delay as the Army misplaced some documents.

Perry used his time in a manner he thought wise: He plotted an escape. In December, he vanished, compliments of a pair of wire cutters that someone had slipped to him. Army brass exploded. News of the escape spread widely. Reporters there coined a nickname for Perry: the Jungle King.

The Army turned to Earl Owen Cullum and ordered him to recapture Perry. Cullum had been a Dallas police officer before joining the military. In the Army, not surprisingly, he became a military policeman, assigned for a while to Calcutta. He was handsome, no-nonsense, liked having his picture taken, often recited military history, and was not amused at Perry's wiliness.

Cullum and his men caught sight of Perry at a woodcutter's camp on New Year's Day 1945. Shots were fired and one grazed Perry's ankle. But he escaped yet again. His elusiveness left Perry's pursuers with a feeling they were being taunted.

"A colored Houdini from USA aided by a few Naga tricks is sure playing 'hob' with the traps that have been set for him," read an article in the Assam Police Gazette, a military newspaper. "He has turned cart wheels and tap danced over and through rice paddies and tea patches with the grace and abandon of a Gypsy Rose Lee in her best strip tease. Woe be unto that colored boy when he takes off his rabbit's foot cause then he is through and I mean all finished."

On Feb. 20, 1945, Perry was spotted yet again. More shots were fired and he was wounded in his Achilles tendon. A day later, he popped up from some jungle bush after hearing yapping dogs. A bullet nicked the tip of his nose. But he hobbled away as quickly as he could.

Days later, sitting at a campfire, surrounded yet again, Perry was out of energy. "You got me," is all he said to his captors.

Shortly before his execution, Perry wrote to his younger brother Aaron, who was in basic training at the Army's Fort Meade: "I did wrong myself please don't make the same mistake its very easy to get in trouble but hell to get out of . . . " He then urged Aaron to spend as much time as he could in the upcoming days with their mother: "While I die once she will die a thousand times . . . "

The letter closed with a blunt, chilling phrase: "Don't answer."

On the morning of March 15, 1945, Perry was driven in the dark to his date with the gallows. The convoy included 17 military police officers. Army brass feared the convoy might be stopped and fired upon by those sympathetic to Perry's plight: He had come to embody, albeit in a spasmodic and murderous act, some of the frustrations of the oppressed black soldier. If there were any confrontation on the road, Army officers were told, they were to immediately kill Perry before defending themselves. The drive went off uninterrupted.

Before making his final ascent up the gallows' steps, Perry turned to his guard and uttered a grim farewell: 'Now,' he said, 'the Hell will start.'

It took several minutes for the crude noose to have its full effect. MPs waited fifteen minutes just to be sure. A black medic confirmed the sentence had been carried out.

Herman Perry's body was placed in a coffin, taken to the Army cemetery at Margherita and buried behind a hedge, about one hundred yards from all other soldier's graves. A simple white cross marked the otherwise unidentified grave.

Along with his body, the Army also buried his story. There was no official announcement. No story in the Theater Newspaper. No official record of the manhunt. If not for Lt. Col. Cullum (promoted one month after the capture) it may have remained that way for good. Years later he would recount his knowledge of the story in a book.

Six decades after his execution, Edna Wilson, Herman Perry’s sister, who lived on a fixed income, scrounged up $1,000 to have her brother’s body dug up to be cremated and brought back home to DC.

Source: One Soldier's Flight From the Greatest Manhunt of World War II by Brendan I. Koerner