Ship of Ghosts (27 page)

T
hey ran south with the currents, rowing mostly and taking whatever help the light winds could blow into the split canvas bag they used for a sail. Always within view of Krakatoa’s cone, looming in the northwest, they made the thirty-five-mile run from Labuhan to Princes Island in the southwestern end of Sunda Strait in one day. On that rocky beach they found five dozen crates that had been shoved around and scattered by the tides. Dreaming of canned asparagus, steak, beans, and beer, they tore into them but found only two types of loot, and lots of it: ammonia and bundle upon bundle of paper currency. Since the latter proved to be Japanese occupation money, and since the sailors aimed to avoid that jurisdiction altogether, they cursed the treasure and tossed the bundles into the surf. But one last box of the trove had not been opened yet. One of the sailors found it wedged in some rocks where the beach ended. He smashed it open with a pair of rocks and was dumbfounded to find what they needed even more than food: sails, a full set of them—mainsail, foresail, and jib. “Boys,” said Lieutenant Thode as the group surrounded the find, “this definitely means we’ll get home.”

Before departing they used a piece of iron binding from one of the boxes to saw down a coconut tree and feasted on its eight fruits, garnished with some periwinkles pulled from the rocks. The next morning, Friday, March 6, they set course for Tjilatjap. They would need twelve days to cover the three hundred miles to the friendly port. From there, the optimists calculated, reaching Australia would mean five more weeks at sea.

They rowed all day in shifts. The absence of wind caused their muscles to burn as surely as the sun did their oil-stained skin. When the heat became oppressive, the castaways could dip themselves in the sea, but only briefly and only so long as a shipmate could stand by, oar at the ready, to fend off the trailing sharks. The nights were clear, the moon bright between dusk and nine o’clock. On some nights the stars stayed visible longer than that, providing a fix to navigate by. But usually it rained, forcing them to sail blind. More
than once they discovered that they had wasted the night rowing in a big circle.

When morning broke on the twelfth day past Princes Island, Thode said, “If we’re lucky we’ll see a monolith at the entrance to Tjilatjap some time today.” The announcement was met skeptically—out of food, the men were growing suspicious of cheap gambits to boost morale. But early that afternoon land appeared, and as they drew closer they could see, in a gap between hills, the monolith.

The inlet to Tjilatjap harbor was a narrow passage between the mainland and the coastal island of Kanbangan. Entering it, the Aussies could see on one side of the harbor, on a faraway shore, hundreds of soldiers dressed in khaki. Were they Japanese? Weak from exhaustion and perhaps reluctant to consider the worst, Thode steered on, heading the opposite way. He tied up on a wharf next to a patrol boat flying the Dutch flag. Two Dutch officers in green uniforms met them. One carried a pistol, the other a light machine gun. “Who are you?” the latter demanded, speaking first in Dutch, then in English. Thode approached the Dutchmen, identified himself, then described their ordeal and their ambition going forward. He requested food for the journey ahead. The officer with the pistol shook his head. “Nippon is your friend. You must give up your plan to reach Australia and go to him for protection.”

Thode returned to consult with his men. “You heard what he said. What’s it to be? Surrender, or shall we have a crack at them?” The strength left in their bodies did not match the anger in their veins. Certainly they were powerless against a submachine gun and a pistol. One of them muttered, “You bastards. You yellow, fifth-column bastards.” And so at friendly gunpoint the heroes of the HMAS
Perth
surrendered the fight. Stunned as they were by the turn of events, they were more shocked still to find that their actual mortal enemy—the Japanese—was more inclined to show them kindness than their putative friends. The Dutch officers marched the captives to a makeshift Japanese headquarters in town. As imperial troops beat looters with rifle butts outside, the Dutchmen, speaking in Japanese, called out to the headquarters’ occupants. A Japanese colonel appeared. When Thode identified his band as survivors of the
Perth,
the Imperial Army officer said in clean English, “You sank our ships in Sunda Strait. Look at me. I’m still covered in oil. I can’t get the stuff off.”

The Australians were taken to a place where they could wash. When the oil residue did not come off, Japanese soldiers helped them scrub down, and at this point it struck Gosden that the unexpected generosity had to have a catch. The Japanese were known to be brutes. Yet who could deny this charity: The Aussies were fed, given tea with milk, cigarettes, and matches. They slept for a bit, then were awakened and given clothes and more cigarettes. In light of the dark rumors circulating about the Japanese, they could scarcely believe their luck.

The colonel interrogated Thode that afternoon, took down the names of his party, then made the lieutenant a surprising offer. He would be allowed to choose his prison camp. That day Thode, escorted by the colonel’s sergeant major, inspected several of them and settled on a camp outside of Tjilatjap. At the time, there was no way anyone might guess that this would be the last act of enemy-sanctioned free will that most of them would exercise for more than three years.

F
or a time, the Australians who reached Tjilatjap were permitted to think that their gallantry would win them some type of preferred treatment. The rest of the survivors, and certainly most of the Americans, had less encouraging introductions to prisoner life.

The morning after his ship was destroyed, after two weeks at battle stations and thirteen hours fighting Sunda’s currents, Otto Schwarz was retrieved by a Japanese landing boat and deposited on the beach. So tired he could scarcely stand, the eighteen-year-old from Newark, New Jersey, joined a group of about nineteen other
Houston
sailors. He cast off his life vest, leaving himself wearing only his khaki pants, and tried to seat himself on a crate. Almost immediately a Japanese guard ran up to him and bashed him to the ground. An officer took him behind some palm trees, leveled a pistol at his head, and asked, “Do you want to see your family again?” He demanded to know how many airplanes the Americans had, and how many battleships. A seaman second class never knew much, but any Allied sailor in the theater would have laughed at the idea that battleships or aircraft had a prominent place in early-1942 Allied orders of battle. Schwarz said as much. The officer grew belligerent but shoved Schwarz back to his group, where they all became stevedores for Gen. Hitoshi Imamura’s beachmasters.

Prodded at bayonet point and bashed by rifle butts, the group of twenty Americans, including Schwarz, Lt. Cdr. William Galbraith, Ens. John Nelson, and Marines Charley Pryor and Howard Charles, spent three days and four nights hauling pony carts full of food, supplies, and ammunition from barges to depots ashore. A Japanese officer who could manage a little English said, “You are prisoners of war. Your lives will be spared.” But reassurance wasn’t what Pryor, for one, needed. “I had no fear of these people. It didn’t worry me from one minute to another whether or not they wanted to line me up and shoot me.”

As it happened, the beasts that had been earmarked to pull those carts had gone down with one of the merchantmen sunk the night before. So the Americans worked in their stead late into the night. The asphalt road ground their bare feet raw. Schwarz developed a huge single blister running from toe to heel. Taken to a local schoolhouse, he was allowed to rest a bit, then a Japanese soldier approached him with a pair of tweezers and tore off the blister and doused the wound with iodine. “All my life I was the kind of person who just went from one event to another. I never worried about the door closing behind me,” he would say. “I always took everything day by day. I realized life was not going to be pleasant after that. I found out in quick order what it was going to be like to be a prisoner of war.”

Capture was an anticlimactic end to grandiose plans to evade and escape. When Ens. Charles D. Smith, Red Huffman, and Sergeant Lusk came ashore, they had tried to avoid the well-patrolled coast road, cross the mountains, and reach Dutch lines. But at midday on March 3, after two and a half days of subsisting on rainwater and growing weak from the deprivation, they encountered a native whose wary hospitality got them a meal of fish heads and rice but not much more. As they were eating, he evidently hailed a Japanese army patrol nearby. They scarcely had time to duck into the bushes before they were rounded up without a fight. Shackled as a chain gang and marched through a village, they realized they might be better off with the Japanese than with the natives. In the village, the locals were waving small flags emblazoned with imperial rising suns. The Japanese officer in charge of the prisoners assigned a guard to protect them.

Thoughts of escape gave way to the reality of their physical limitations, to exhaustion and the absence of routes to Allied lines. All
roads led to prison. Taken to the nearest villages, they were packed into local jails emptied for use as POW pens. Into Pandeglang came Lt. (jg) Leon Rogers and Lt. Joseph Dalton, similarly betrayed by natives, Otto Schwarz and the beachside work party, and John Wisecup and the rest of the men from Lieutenant Weiler’s raft. Most of the prisoners were finally force-marched or packed in trucks and driven to Serang, the largest town west of Batavia. Except for the preponderance of olive-green Japanese army vehicles shuttling soldiers and equipment hither and yon, the trading center’s bustling streets reminded some Americans of good old Manila. General Imamura had established his temporary Sixteenth Army headquarters in the municipal building there until sturdier facilities were found in a southern suburb of Batavia. Imamura liked what he heard of local cooperation with his invasion forces. His army was received as the Asian liberator foretold in Indonesian prophecy since the 1700s. The general told a village elder, “You and the Japanese are brothers. We are fighting the Dutch so that you can recover your freedom.”

P
andeglang, Rangkasbitung, Serang. To Western ears, the names were alien. But for three weeks in March these places were home to most of the U.S. and Australian survivors who straggled in from the surrounding jungles and beaches of Java. It was strange territory to them, but even to those familiar with it, the contours of this corner of the universe were in flux. The Japanese troops were on the move, consolidating a foothold in western Java and jousting with Allied forces in the east.

Amid the confusion, reunions with other shipmates had an aspect of excitement. Lieutenant Thode’s men rejoined Commander Owen and his group. The senior officer had worked his way from village to village, pleading with the village
wadanas
(or chieftains) to help his men until the inevitable betrayal. The
Houston
survivors compared notes on their last sea battle (“How many do you think we lost?”) and on who got off the ship, where, and when (“Did so-and-so make it? Have you seen him?”). One sailor reported having seen Sergeant Standish, the grizzled Marine who was thought to have fired those last bursts from the
Houston
’s toppling foremast, cleaning his .45 pistol on the beach and then vanishing into the bush. Few of the others thought that could be possible.

The municipal jail was cleared of its local felons and jammed on March 8 with as many Allied prisoners as would fit. Most of the
Houston
’s officers were imprisoned there. They compiled a muster roll of all of the known survivors from the ship. By authoritative tallies, 368 men from the
Houston
’s complement of 1,168, and 324 of the
Perth
’s 681, survived to become prisoners of war. At Serang, there was a total of about 1,500 prisoners, an odd rabble of captives that included sailors of four nations, Royal Air Force personnel, British troops evacuated from Singapore, and local Dutch, including women and children. Dressed in whatever they happened to wash ashore with—oil-stained khaki shorts or perhaps just a loincloth—they slept on hard floors in square fourteen-foot cells. The officers had a tub for a latrine, which was emptied once a day into an open drain running through the cell and outside into a small creek. The rest of the men were crammed into an abandoned movie theater, where the seats had been stripped out, leaving a sloping concrete floor as a POW campground.

Frightened as they were, the prisoners in the Serang theater had to laugh at their captors’ futile attempts to count them. During the roll calls, which the Japanese would teach them to call
tenkos,
the men were forced to sit erect and cross-legged while the guards took a count. “On the first nine occasions their counts varied between 1,620 and 1,483,” wrote Rohan Rivett, an Australian radio journalist who had escaped Singapore only to be captured on Java. “They’ve now decided after several more counts on some intermediate figure, but their system of counting is so weird and wonderful that I doubt if they really know to the nearest fifty just how many of us they’ve got jammed into this [bloody] hellhole.” But the prisoners’ laughter welled in the shadow of death. In the balcony above them, a tripod-mounted machine gun pointed out over the stage like a lethal spotlight.