Ship of Ghosts (32 page)

On March 4, near Buitenzorg, the 131st, two and a half miles behind the Australian front lines, went into action supporting friendly infantry, firing till dark. During the next couple of days the artillerymen played hide-and-seek as Japanese patrols sought to locate them. Maj. Winthrop H. (“Windy”) Rogers, the battery’s commander, told Sergeant Thompson, “There’s only a few hundred of them over there. We’ll have them wiped out by tomorrow noon, and within a week there won’t be a Jap left on Java.”

On March 5, scouts from D Battery came across a large, modern hotel, the Savoy, and parked their command car by the entry. Dozens of Dutch officers in dress uniform milled about, escorting women in fine formal wear. A good orchestra was playing, a seven-course dinner in progress. “We entered right off the road, dressed in our fatigues, dirty and bearded, and carrying our .45 pistols. We were utterly amazed to see this big party going on with bright lights blazing with a full-scale war going on just down the road,” said Jess Stanbrough. The Americans sat down and gorged themselves.

Two days later a courier arrived from the front with a message for Colonel Tharp: “The Australian Brigadier says it’s getting pretty hot up there. He advises an immediate withdrawal. The first line of Japs already have crossed the river. We can’t possibly stop them—we’re outnumbered at least 100 to 1.”

Tharp ordered his batteries to retreat and join him in Buitenzorg as Dutch engineers blew up bridges over Java’s western rivers. “The impact of this hit us like a ton of bricks,” wrote Kyle Thompson. “At last we fully realized that the war had caught up with us.” One moonless night, the Texans began pulling out. Because Thompson’s command car had radio equipment that needed to stay hooked up to the command post, he was the last one out. With Japanese forces
advancing directly behind him, he raced through the night, headlights blazing in violation of blackout orders.

At his command post, Colonel Tharp gathered his men on the morning of March 8 and said, “Well, men, it’s quite obvious that we aren’t running the Japs off the island and we aren’t likely to. It looks like this whole thing will fall through. We are under the direct command of the Dutch, and what they say, we have to do. I think they will surrender by the tenth at the latest. We have one chance left. There may be a ship down on the south coast. We’ll try to make it through to it.”

With Japanese bombers controlling the skies, the Imperial Second Army took Batavia and Tjilatjap, overcame light resistance outside Surabaya, and was converging on the old ABDA headquarters at Bandung from two sides. At nine
a.m
. on March 8, as Tharp’s men were still aiming to escape, General ter Poorten announced that the Dutch fight for Java was at an end. Two hours later, a Dutch messenger reached the 131st’s headquarters on a motorcycle. He was carrying a message: “We are forced to surrender. It is useless to try to hold out any longer. You are ordered to surrender immediately with your men and equipment, unconditionally, to the Imperial Japanese Army. You are to wait with your men and equipment at Goerett.”

“On whose orders?” Colonel Tharp asked.

“The Governor General’s office, Batavia, sir. I am also instructed to tell you that it’s useless to attempt an escape. There is no way out.”

Allied leadership would be as fractious in surrender as it had been in battle. “We were stunned, speechless,” wrote Kyle Thompson. “Some of us were crying out of fear of an uncertain future.” A few slipped out of camp against orders and headed for the coast in hopes of escape. But there was none. Instructed by the Dutch to surrender their equipment in good order, the battalion rebelled. The Texans depressurized the recoil mechanisms on their artillery pieces, buried their small arms, rolled hundred-dollar bills into cigars and smoked them. They drained the oil pans of their trucks and held a morbid competition to see which make lasted longest without engine lubrication. The Ford died first, then the Dodge, then the Chevy.

Word came that some Americans had been able to evacuate at Tjilatjap. The soldiers had heard rumors that the
Houston
and perhaps other ships were standing by to take them off the island. “We
still had this eternal hope, prayer for the
Houston,
” Sgt. Wade H. Webb of the 131st said. “We lived on that, and actually we lived on that right up until they capitulated. Even a few days after, there was talk of breaking to the coast on the south…We clung to that possibility that we would get on the
Houston
and get off Java.” They knew nothing of the Battle of Sunda Strait, the heroism of Captain Rooks, or the stoutness of Sergeant Standish’s heart. They could go south and take their chances there, or surrender and roll the dice with the enemy.

Though some newspaper reports back home would describe the capture of the Lost Battalion as if it had been a repeat of the Alamo, the reality was far less dramatic. For the duration of the war it would burn the Texans that they had been cashed out by the Dutch and forced to submit with scarcely a fight. Rounded up at Goerett, they were taken to a train station and presented to a Japanese officer who made a welcoming speech. “I guess that was the first time I’d seen a Jap or heard them speaking,” said Staff Sgt. Roy M. Offerle. “He would scream and holler and yell, and then the interpreter would say, ‘The commander says he is very happy to see you.’ Then he would scream and holler like he was threatening to kill us, and then they would say, ‘You will soon go to a camp.’” On April 1, they were imprisoned at Batavia’s port district, Tanjung Priok.

Six weeks later, the artillerymen were marched to Bicycle Camp, where they came face-to-face with the sailors who were supposed to have been their rescuers. The sailors stared back, reciprocal expectations evident in many eyes. Through no fault of their own, each had let down the other. All were disappointed, if not altogether surprised, to find that they were not the only Americans who had failed to turn back an ambitious emperor’s bid for control of the Asian world.

C
apture was a crucible that turned the dynamics of success upside down. Strengths became weaknesses, weaknesses strength. Where at the Naval Academy a well-developed aura of entitlement and patrician self-esteem could propel one to success, now those traits were potential paths to ruin. A disdainful look in the eye or a failure to submit, so carefully inculcated in children of privilege, got you beaten. A harder upbringing, on the other hand—a lifestyle of rural labor, of daily brinksmanship with an abusive stepfather—could produce a psychological carapace that enabled survival amid horrible adversity. Such improbable strength was not uncommon among the hardscrabble kids who enlisted in the military in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The trick to living in Japanese captivity was to navigate the divide separating subservience and defiance. Independent-minded boots who once thought the world revolved around their own tough selves might have wondered at the calculated brutality of their drill instructors. They would learn soon enough the higher purpose behind it all.

Otto Schwarz had left Newark at sixteen in the summer of 1940, joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, and worked on road construction crews in the Sierra Nevadas. After a Navy recruiter visited his work site one day, Schwarz asked his mother to sign his enlistment
papers. She seemed to know that the military offered him a chance for a better life. Howard R. Charles grew up in Kansas fantasizing about killing his abusively tyrannical stepfather. Ultimately his method of coping was to run away. By the time he reached Bicycle Camp, he knew how to take a punch. “That’s the way I handled myself with my stepfather. ‘Howard,’ he would say, ‘I’m gonna fix you, you little sonuvabitch.’ And then he would beat me, always in private, sometime with fists, sometimes with that blacksnake whip, promising to kill me if I ever so much as breathed a word about it to my mother particularly, or anyone else…. I reacted to the guards who beat the prisoners as I did to my stepfather. I would never deliberately antagonize them. I would let them get their kicks from beating me, and I would wait, and one day…”

There were times when the Japanese seemed vulnerable to a surprisingly effective group countermeasure devised by the prisoners. It worked like this: when one of their number was taking a bashing, rather than cower, they gathered as an audience. They would call each other’s attention to the victim and point and laugh at him. “Hey, old Joe’s really getting a pounding…!” In effect it turned the offending guard into a performer on the prisoners’ stage. This psychological aikido could have striking results. “That really embarrassed the Japanese,” said Seldon Reese. “It had a hell of a psychological effect on them…. They got to where they didn’t really hound the Americans and Australians and Scots nearly as much as the English and the Dutch…. They got far worse bashings than us guys that laughed.” It was a bit like slowing the progress of a forest fire by burning down the woods in its path. But it paid dividends, at least initially, at Bicycle Camp.

E
very morning at daybreak, after
tenko,
the Japanese sent the prisoners down to the dockyards at Tanjung Priok and to other military and industrial sites to salvage useful things from the rubble of war. At the Dunlop tire factory, they stacked tires and loaded them onto ships. Out at an airfield, they moved gasoline and oil drums. At the partially scuttled Shell Oil Company refinery, they used hand pumps to move gasoline from the few storage tanks that the Dutch hadn’t ruined with sugar into fifty-five-gallon drums, then rolled them onto trucks for transport to a makeshift storage area out on a golf course. There were plenty of smaller drums of grease and oil to
queue up on the docks. Autos were cannibalized for their carburetors and spark plugs and sheet metal. Industrial machinery—large gears, small nuts and bolts, generators, refrigerators—was crated up and shipped to the home islands. What furniture and other treasures could be looted from Java’s Dutch mansions and villas were likewise jammed onto cargo ships and taken to Japan.

A barge sunk in the harbor was found to be full of gin, whiskey, and spirits. Japanese divers retrieved much of it, selling bottles in camp for two guilders. Prisoners could usually flip such delicacies for a profit, though if a guy got caught doing arbitrage the penalty was severe. “In Bicycle Camp, you tried to get out on a working party rather than get out of work,” Paul Papish said. “It was survival. You had a chance to get something to eat.” Prisoners assigned to stack sacks of sugar learned to tear open a sack and leak some into their boot. A ship’s cook used the contraband to make candy with coconut and peanuts.

The Batavia waterfront was a scavenger’s paradise, and the prisoners benefited from it as surely as their masters did. They snatched anything at hand that offered some potential use in captivity: nails, paint, medicine, Vaseline, kerosene, gasoline, gin. Service in a warship’s closed universe made Navy men resourceful. John Wisecup fashioned a prison mess kit out of some old peach cans. Bamboo stalks became spoons or chopsticks. He could take a beer bottle, tie string around the middle, and set the string on fire. When it burned through, he would tap the bottle on concrete and break it around the middle, then sand down the edges to make a serviceable drinking glass. Two sailors, Blackie Strickland and Manuel Castro, found some timbers and built a four-sided vat. Mixing sugar, available from locals for a price, and a sweet fruit that looked like a long peanut, they brewed beer. Amassing a stash of several dozen bottles, they were loath to sell right away, at least until a sailor named Jack Burge arranged a change in their market outlook.

Burge occupied a cubicle across from Strickland and Castro’s, affording him a clear and tempting view of the fermented treasure trove. Apparently the temptation got to him. One day Burge said to George Detre, “Well, I think we’re going to have a big sale on beer tonight.” Detre didn’t think so. He didn’t sense the brewers were eager to sell just yet. “I think they will tonight,” Burge offered. “Why?” “Because I just started a rumor that the Japs are going to raid the place.” When he knew word had gotten around, Detre
approached Strickland and Castro and asked how much they wanted for the beer. A bargain was struck and Detre took the whole supply. He tipped off Burge, and the two sailors spread a blanket under the fruit tree that night and drank until the sun came up.

Marine Sgt. James McCone’s nickname was “Gunner” before his creativity and resourcefulness in Bicycle Camp earned him a new moniker. As Howard Charles wrote, “He’d see a tin can—‘Oh my God, this is a container. This is not a tin can. This is a container. This can hold things, house things.’ He’d see a bit of twine: ‘We’ll sew somebody up with this someday. This can be very, very vital.’” He was intense about it, became focused every waking moment, it seemed, on gathering useful things for himself and his fellow prisoners. His buddies started calling him “Pack Rat.”

The Japanese were leery of McCone’s eccentricities. “They’d look at him and kind of shake their heads a little bit and just leave him alone,” wrote Charles. Pack Rat was hard to intimidate. He maintained a vacant, vaguely bemused posture somewhere between spaciness and menace. He walked with a bouncing lope that Charles suspected was phony and affected. “I don’t know what there was in that man,” Charles said. “I don’t know what got him that way. He’d been a loner all his life. He grew up on this huge Montana ranch. His dad wasn’t there. The Japs were scared of him. They were afraid of anybody who was crazy. And they thought he wasn’t of sound mind.” If the Japanese didn’t know what to make of McCone, most of his shipmates didn’t either when they learned he was the son of a prominent Montana politician, the late state senator George J. McCone, who had gotten a whole county named after him. They wondered: The kid could have gotten his card punched through family influence, and he joined the China Marines? In captivity, McCone was one of the most resourceful of survivors. He quietly assembled a crew he called “the Forty Thieves,” whose ingenuity and generosity would keep many a man alive through the worst of the ordeal.