Cruiser (61 page)

Naked and covered with oil, Fred Skeels watched from the lifeboat as the destroyer sped away. ‘If you don't want us, then we don't want you,' he thought wryly, as if that would somehow sort things out. The boat was almost full, but as they bent to the oars again, heading more or less south-east, they gathered up more wretched men. Blackened figures balanced precariously on the thwarts and gunwales – some of them familiar faces, others not. They kept note of the names and looked out for each other: Padre Mathieson; McDonough, grieving for his dead friend, McWilliam; Petty Officer Stoker John ‘Macca' McQuade, a country bloke from Merredin in Western Australia and a Portsmouth commissioning crew member who, by some
miracle, had made it out of
Perth
's Stokehold before she went down; Ernie Toovey, the 19-year-old cricketer from Warwick in Queensland, with a shrapnel wound to his leg; Frank Gillan, the Engineer Lieutenant, nearly blinded by fuel oil; Ralph Lowe, the Paymaster Lieutenant-Commander from Seaford in Victoria; Gavin Campbell, uncomplaining about the pain from his broken leg. Fred Skeels counted 73 souls as they wallowed into the next night, hoping that they might fetch up on a beach in Java.

At about two the next morning, they crunched into a reef, driving a hole through the bow. The boat began to founder but in the moonlight they could see a crescent of sandy beach not far away. It was Java. Stumbling across the rocks, carrying their wounded as gently as they could, they staggered ashore and collapsed, where they slept until the sun woke them. Stoker Claude Maslem, a 25-year-old from Manly in Sydney, shockingly burned, had died in the night. They dug a grave in the sand and buried him with a few words from the padre – a sad little ceremony under the coconut palms.

Things looked up when some Sundanese villagers appeared – teenage boys who nipped up some palms and tossed down coconuts, which they opened with their
parangs
, the big, curved Malay knife. Ravenous, the Australians drank the sweet milk and scooped out the slippery white flesh. After some debate, they decided to form two groups and head in different directions to seek help for the wounded, who would wait on the beach.

Fred Skeels's group, about 20 of them, including Gillan and Mathieson, trudged south along a baking bitumen road with rice fields and green hills rising to their left, the strait on their right. They hoped they might come across some Dutch troops who were still in the fight. Gillan was nominally in charge, but, still blind from the fuel oil, he had to be helped along in the heat and dust. Petty Officer Stoker Bill Hogman guided him like a loving father with a sick child, picking him up when he stumbled. After a few hours, they came to a village first-aid
post, where, to their gratitude, a Dutch woman bathed their eyes and found some sarongs for the naked men to wrap around their loins. She had no food, but she advised them to head into the hills, where they might be safer. That night, they fell asleep hungry by the roadside.

In the morning, they trudged on again and were given some cooked rice by a village headman, who allowed them to wash in a well. These were their last hours of freedom. The next day, they were accosted by a menacing group of villagers armed with
parangs
. There was nothing to do except bunch together for protection and wait to see what happened. After a few hours, some donkey carts turned up and Skeels noticed – they all noticed, in cold despair – that each Indonesian driver wore an armband bearing the Japanese rising sun. It was over. The carts jolted them down the road a few kilometres to a dirty little town called Pandeglang, where they were herded into a small jail. Japanese soldiers arrived the next morning.

Back on the beach, Gavin Campbell lay in the shade. Before they left, the others had taken a sail from the lifeboat and slung it beneath the coconut palms to give some shelter from the blinding light. Campbell and three other wounded men waited there for help to arrive. They shared some hard-tack biscuits from the boat and sipped brackish water from a hole dug in the sand. Sometimes, the village boys would fetch coconuts again, in exchange for a few of the biscuits. After a few days, two of the men, Ralph Lowe and an able bodied seaman (A.B.) named Gordon Webster, decided that they, too, would move on, which left just Campbell and another A.B., Danny Maher, who had a nasty wound to his shoulder. Maher, from Marrickville in Sydney, was 28 years old. He had come ashore stark naked but was now wearing one leg of Campbell's overalls as a makeshift sarong. Eventually, they decided there was no point in waiting on the beach anymore.

‘We can't just stay on like this,' Campbell said. ‘We've got to make a move or we'll die here.'

With language and some diagrams sketched in the sand,
they persuaded one of the villagers to knock up a pair of forked sticks from the branches of a tree. Maher unpicked some kapok from a lifebelt and padded the sticks for Campbell to use as crutches. Bundling up the sail to take with them, just in case, they stumbled south along the coast road. The villagers had told them to look for a small town called Labuhan, where they might find a doctor.

Their journey was excruciating, a private Calvary. Shafts of pain stabbed through Campbell's body as he hobbled along, his broken leg still in the rough splints that Bob Collins had made for him in the water. The kapok padding wore away from the crutches and the rough wood cut into his armpits, stripping the skin away to a seeping mess. They covered only a few kilometres that first day, thankful at least for a sudden tropical downpour that left muddy puddles they could drink from. Maher found a village and was given some rice on a banana leaf, but the locals made it clear they were frightened of the Japanese and wanted the white men to move on. Things turned nasty when one of the villagers produced his
parang
and demanded the sail. Campbell thought, fleetingly, of trying to fight the man off with one of his crutches, but decided he would not win that battle and handed it over.

For three long weeks, they trekked on like this, wracked with pain, tormented by hunger and thirst and an aching loneliness. Campbell would hop a few kilometres, then collapse again in agony. There were some days when he could not move at all. The fuel oil still crusted their bodies, and where it left bare patches they were red raw from sunburn and scratched mosquito bites. Not so severely injured, although still in pain, Danny Maher could have left him and gone on, but he never did. At times, he pleaded; at times, he goaded.

‘You fucking officers are all the same. Soft as butter. Haven't done a hard day's work in your fucking lives.'

‘I'll get you, you bastard.'
⁶

They stuck together, wretched but indomitable.

At last, they found Labuhan. And deliverance. A woman
in European clothing saw them staggering along a street and called out, in English, to ask if they were Australians. She put an arm around Campbell and led him and Maher to a house in a side street. Two American sailors from the
Houston
were there, and they carried Campbell inside, where the woman found some food and bathed their wounds. The Americans called her Eliza. They thought she was Eurasian but they never discovered who she was, or if Eliza was her real name. They had no time to do so. To Campbell's dismay, the Japanese arrived the next day:

They stayed for a month in the Pandeglang Hospital, a primitive little building with just one ward and canvas stretchers for beds. Gordon Webster, the man they had last seen at the beach, two other Australians and an American from
Houston
were there too.

The Dutch nurse tended them kindly, binding up their wounds and giving them what food the hospital had to offer, which was not much beyond rice and sugar. Every second night, she would walk to another village to obtain more for them to eat, and Campbell or Maher would find she had silently left some bread and jam or a tin of sausages at their windowsill. She was an angel of mercy, but they never learned her name, either. Then the Japanese came again and took the sailors off to
Serang. To this day, Gavin Campbell regrets that he was never able to find her after the war to thank her.

After his vision of dying on the sea floor, Bob Collins decided to swim to the Java shore. At the age of 21, he felt he was fit enough to make it despite the current:

The murdered man was Petty Officer John Harvey, from Ipswich in Queensland. Collins fled this bloody killing. Later, he fell in with some other
Perth
sailors, including John McQuade, and they trekked inland to a village called Menes, where they thought they might be safer. They were not. The Japanese had arrived before them. A fat little officer with an enormous samurai sword ordered them up against a wall before a line of soldiers with light machine guns, and they thought they were about to be shot. It was apparently meant as a joke. Eventually, a truck arrived and took them, too, to Serang.

Sangiang, the island in the middle of the strait, saved many men from being carried to their deaths. A few – the very lucky ones, or the very strong – defied the worst of the currents and got there by swimming, hauling themselves across jagged coral and rocks to flop exhausted on the beaches, skin scored and bleeding and smeared with oil. Leading Seaman Keith Gosden, a shell handler from the Y-turret lobby, Ron Bradshaw, the RAAF Corporal who'd been a fitter for the Walrus, Peter Nelson, a telegraphist, Tag Wallace and Lloyd Burgess all swam ashore at Sangiang.

Ray Parkin had been floating in the strait for perhaps ten hours when the island loomed into sight, first as a low line of rocks and then, gradually, as a scrap of dry land edged by palm trees. The current dragged at him but he fixed his eyes upon two trees on shore, swimming for his life. His arms and legs felt like jelly, but with a superhuman effort he inched closer to a small point of land, felt something hard beneath him and then scraped across spiky clumps of coral that ripped his legs to shreds before he fell exhausted on a beach.

Most, though, made it by boat or on a raft. When he went overboard from
Perth
, Petty Officer Horrie Abbott, from Frankston in Victoria, found a Japanese raft that kept him afloat for a while. Even better, in the morning light he and a handful of other men saw a partly capsized lifeboat drifting towards them. This was also from one of the Japanese transports, built of steel. They heaved themselves into it, baled it out and rowed around collecting others, maybe 30 or 40 men in all. Polo Owen was one they rescued, and Yeoman of Signals Jack Willis, and Petty Officer Edward ‘Jan' Tyrrell, and Sub-Lieutenant Norman ‘Knocker' White, who, against all the odds, had escaped from his action station below in the Transmitting Station. White, too, had tried to swim to Sangiang and been swept onwards. When they found him, he was barely conscious after 11 hours in the water.