A Covert Affair (22 page)

Koke would tell her later that another acquaintance from her Bali days, a cantankerous hotelier called Manxy, was also rumored to have escaped the hands of the Japanese. Manxy's real name was Muriel Pearson, and she always claimed to have come by the nickname because she was from the Isle of Man. Don had bankrolled her small Beach Hotel (“merely because he found her so amusing”) and had even bought her a bright yellow Rolls-Royce, the only one of its kind in Bali.
“She was pure Celt,”
Jane recalled, “with periwinkle blue, slightly crossed eyes, short and dumpy.” According to Koke, Manxy had recently resurfaced in Surabaya in East Java, where she was broadcasting for the radical guerilla armies under the name of K'tut Tantri, though the Allies had dubbed her “Surabaya Sue.” There were all kinds of rumors that she had survived the occupation by offering herself as one of the so-called “comfort women” to the Japanese officers, but no one knew if there was any truth to the stories. Perhaps whatever abuse she had suffered at the hands of the Japanese had sparked her revolutionary fervor, for she was known for her bloodcurdling speeches for the cause. No sultry Tokyo Rose, she was a passionate and committed player in the propaganda war, her nightly broadcasts rallying opposition to the Dutch and British
colonial rulers and support for the Indonesian revolution. It was a weird, improbable metamorphosis for the plump, gypsy-like woman with long batik dresses and dyed-black hair Jane had last seen arguing with impecunious guests on Kuta beach.

The flight to Java the next morning proved to be another of one those trips that wreaked havoc on her nerves. It was not exactly reassuring when the navigator emerged from the cockpit carrying a map and asked if she could help them locate Batavia. The Japanese still controlled the airport, so there was no radio contact, and consequently they were “flying blind.” Her extensive travels in Indonesia during her married days had done nothing for her grasp of aerial geography, so in the end they had to resort to the rather primitive method of staring out of windows on opposite sides of the plane. When they finally sighted land, the navigator announced his intention of buzzing the Allied POW camp to buck up the prisoners and let them know the cavalry was coming. With a little effort, she was able to help him pinpoint the location with information she had from captured enemy documents. He flew in so low that it terrified her, but she quickly realized his instincts had been right:
“We could distinctly see the poor men, naked from the waist up, barefooted, wearing ragged shorts, waving and screaming and jumping up and down.”
Afterwards, one of them said to her, “Ma'am, we never saw anything as beautiful in our lives as that big bird with the U.S. Air Force insignia.”

There were scores of armed Japanese soldiers roaming the airfield. They looked “surly” but did nothing but stare as she hurried past. She took a jeep to the Hotel Des Indes, which was guarded by more Japanese soldiers. It was September 16, a month and a day after the capitulation of the Japanese emperor, yet to all appearances nothing had changed. The Japanese military, which had been in control during the wartime occupation, was very much in control of the peace. Japanese patrolled the streets, imposing “security measures” against the rebellious natives and insisting that all Allied personnel remain within the Des Indes and its eleven-acre enclosure. If they left, they had to be escorted by the Kempeitai,
“the dreaded Japanese Gestapo.”
The Japanese attempted to further restrict their activities by stating that they, the Japanese, could
not be held accountable if Allied personnel ventured into certain “unsafe” areas. The ambiguous nature of this warning opened the way for all manner of mischief on the part of the Japanese, who, as far as Jane could tell,
“occasionally seemed to forget that they had lost the war.”

If it had been possible immediately upon Japan's surrender to send the British occupation force to Java, the Allies would not have been in quite such a mess. As it was, the shortage of available ships delayed the landing of troops for six long weeks, leaving the conquered Japanese temporarily in control and providing the Indonesians with the perfect opportunity to seize the reins of power. As a result, much of the internal government of the country, especially the services, was now being run by Sukarno's Indonesian republic. The only thing that seemed clear to Jane was that the situation in Batavia was dangerously confused and bordering on
“explosive.”

HMS
Cumberland
had dropped anchor in Tanjung Priok harbor the day before, carrying the first postwar Allied Military Mission to Java. The military mission, totaling fifty in all, including a small force of Royal Marines and civilians and headed by Rear Admiral W. R. Patterson, deputy to Mountbatten, was to negotiate with the Japanese for the carrying out of the surrender terms and to disarm the Japanese as soon as British reinforcements arrived. Also aboard the
Cumberland
was Dr. Charles van der Plas, representing the Netherlands and chief of the Netherlands Indies Civil Administration (NICA), organized to administer the colony. Major Crockett, who led the four-man OSS team, made up the U.S. part of the mission.

The major had no command function and had a carefully defined humanitarian mission: to see to the release and repatriation of American personnel. Freddie Crockett, a trim, alert man of middle age, was tough, very self-assured, and a good raconteur. He was classic OSS. As a twenty-one-year-old Harvard graduate he had become an expert sled-dog driver and joined Admiral Byrd's famous expedition to Antarctica. Predictably, in Donovan's pipe-smoking old-boys' club, he was a long-time pal of S. Dillon Ripley, the Harvard zoologist who had been Jane's intelligence chief in Colombo. Crockett had gotten rich prospecting for gold in the southwest, and he and his anthropologist wife had organized
a series of expeditions (with Ripley) to the islands of the South Pacific and western Pacific in the mid-1930s, concentrating on New Guinea. He had spent most of the war building runways in Greenland. He knew little about Java, did not speak the language, and was more than happy to give Jane a free hand in negotiating with the Japanese. He was especially tickled by the fact that the Japanese officers felt that dealing with a woman was beneath their dignity, saying each time he sent her in,
“That'll l'arn 'em.”

Their first task was to get the four to five hundred American POWs—including army, navy, and air force personnel, along with some two hundred civilians—out of Java. Most of them were from the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery, the so-called Lost Battalion, or were survivors of sunken cruisers from battles in the Java and Coral Seas. Twice a week, a U.S. Air Force plane would make the trip to Singapore, each time carrying as many people as it could hold. American POWs had priority, followed by American civilians. The British took care of flying their own people out in their own planes. Jane's unit had no authority to fly out non-U.S. personnel, which unhappily left the Dutch internees stranded until their government sent planes. While the Japanese, who still controlled the airport, did not interfere actively in the evacuation efforts, small, unexplained problems cropped up with suspicious regularity.
“The pilots had an unusual amount of trouble, with the engines sputtering and misfiring all the time,”
she recalled. Later, the Americans found out that the Japanese had “the nasty habit of putting sugar in the gas tanks.”

While they waited for the U.S. Air Force DC-3s to return, Jane's OSS team went into the camps and did what they could for the men while taking down their statements of war crimes.
“The prisoners were really in pitiful shape,”
she recalled. “We would interview them one by one and give them food, scotch, and cigarettes.” A young American naval commander, appointed by the Japanese to be the head of the POWs, was so emaciated he was down to almost half his normal weight. He was a tall man, and his skin “hung on him in folds,” reminding her of a baby elephant she had once seen in Ceylon. Even though he was “yellow from malaria,” nothing the flight surgeons said would induce him to leave until the last other POW was on the plane out.

Jane worked twenty hours a day, listening to the prisoners' descriptions of forced labor, grueling conditions, degradation, meager rations, and poor medical care, along with mental and physical torture, routine beatings, and occasional beheadings by samurai sword. Some had survived forty-two months of captivity and told of watching friends die slowly. What emerged from their stories, she noted, was that the inhumanity of Japanese guards was “not due to a deliberate systematic policy of extermination,” as with the Nazis, but was more apt to involve individual acts of cruelty. For example, the deprivation suffered by the prisoners was in some sense shared by the common Japanese foot soldiers, as they were issued the same frugal rations. The difference was that the prisoners, weakened by disease and despair, could not live on “a bowl of rice a day.”

Despite the litany of horrors she transcribed daily, Jane refused to give in to the hatred of the Japanese that seized so many of her colleagues. She had spent too many years in Asia to blacken an entire race as evil because of the excesses of war. As far as she could see, the “obvious criminals” of the Kempeitai had fled Batavia to escape the Allies, and most of the remaining Japanese they encountered were “simple soldiers and officers who had not taken any part in the atrocities.”

A
case in point
, she believed, was the decent, hardworking Japanese army officer who had been assigned as aide-de-camp. “Poor Captain Oshida!” she recalled. “We communicated in Malay, of course. I would say to him, ‘Captain Oshida, I need a fully furnished house by nine o'clock next morning for the Air Force personnel coming in to pick up prisoners. I want a housekeeper and a cook for it, enough food for six men, two cases of real scotch, and a Cadillac. And you'll get another Cadillac for our use by three this afternoon.' Captain Oshida would bow and say, ‘It will be done,
Nonja
,' and he would always come up with the necessary.”

One day, she happened to observe one of their POWs—a smalltime crook named Tommy who had been hanging around Southeast Asia when the Japanese interned him—giving Oshida two cartons of cigarettes. Astonished, she had taken him aside and demanded to know what he was thinking. “You don't mean it!” she told him. “You want to give cigarettes to a Japanese?” Even though he had spent three and a
half years in a prison camp, Tommy was still good-hearted enough to spot “a nice guy” when he saw one. Seeing Oshida's face light up with joy and gratitude at Tommy's unexpected generosity, Jane reflected, “It was my first experience of the phenomenon that former enemies who had got to know each other personally had less resentment towards each other than those who had never had any contact.”

The women POWs, many of them Dutch refugees from Malaya, were kept in a separate camp composed of small huts surrounded by barbed wire. The conditions were unbelievably squalid. One of the first women Jane interviewed was a gaunt twenty-five-year-old American who had been newly married to a Dutch executive with Shell Oil when they were caught and interned by the Japanese. Intelligent and articulate, the women was able to give Jane a calm, collected account of her four-year ordeal at the camp.
“Some of the Japanese treated us very well and some were simply indifferent,”
she told Jane. “But we had a commander who was a sadist, and, whenever there was a full moon, he would go crazy, order the women out and beat them.” The only good thing she could say of him was that none of them was ever raped.

Her clothes had long since disintegrated. A primitive bra and the briefest of shorts hung from her bony frame, both garments painstakingly pieced together from old sacking. While still in Ceylon, Jane had read in the intelligence reports that the women prisoners in Java had no clothes, so before leaving she had taken up a collection among all the OSS women, filling three large body bags (the kind used for corpses) with their castoffs. Jane gave this woman all the best things from her friends in Ceylon, as well as many of her own clothes. It was a poor excuse for a trousseau, but the woman needed something to wear when reunited with her liberated husband in Singapore. “She was practically a young bride,” recalled Jane, who just wanted to help her “to look pretty.”

Like the young naval commander, the woman insisted that Jane see to the old and sick first and adamantly refused to leave the camp until the others had been moved out. The worst off was Sister Muriel, a seventy-year-old Protestant missionary who was lying semiconscious on her side on the floor. She was covered in lice and sores and had the swollen belly and skeletal limbs that Jane recognized as the classic signs
of starvation. The woman was urgently in need of medical care, but Jane was not authorized to remove any of the female prisoners until all the POWs had been airlifted to Singapore. Those were the British orders, and the Japanese had no reason to countermand them on her say-so. But the sight of the nun's frail body curled up on the floor defied all reason. Remembering the small .32 tucked away in the shoulder holster under her left arm, Jane took it out and strode off in search of the Japanese camp commander. Confronting him with the old woman's precarious health, she told him flatly, “I'm taking Sister Muriel out.”

“You're not without the express permission of Admiral Cunningham,”
he retorted.

With a kind of desperate bravado, Jane countered, “Don't you dare tell
me
what I'm going to do or not do!” She waved the gun back and forth, keeping it a good foot in front of her in case it went off accidentally. “This woman is dying,” she insisted. “I'll wait for no permission, and if you persist in this attitude, I'll put you down as a war criminal.”

They tried to stare each other down for a few moments, and then the commander, for whatever reasons of his own, decided to let her go. Jane whisked the old woman into the Cadillac and took her straight to the hotel. On the recommendation of the flight surgeons, she doused her with DDT and scrubbed her from head to toe in the shower. She had been warned not to give the woman too much to eat too quickly, so she fed her a small meal of a banana and a bit of rice. Exhausted, Jane tucked her in the spare bed next to hers and then collapsed. She got little rest, though, as Sister Muriel carried on thanking the Lord and singing hymns all night. Luckily, Jane found room for her on a plane leaving the next morning.