Cruiser (63 page)

For two days, they stayed on Princes, gathering coconuts and a few pawpaws and making the boat as shipshape as possible. They stepped two rough masts, with a gaff-rigged mainsail, and on a whim they christened her HMAS
Anzac
. Parkin, always the artist, wrote the name in charcoal on the bow. Then they set out again, to round Java Head and head east for Tjilatjap. Another fierce tropical storm nearly did for them one night, causing the boat to jibe
¹²
violently in the blackness, but they weathered that and went on, through drenching storms and into doldrums where they moved not at all.

Tempers frayed. Their supplies of food and water were running low. Day followed monotonous day. They clung to the southern coast of Java as best they could, but the boat had no keel, which meant that it was impossible to sail in any way close-hauled to windward. There were infinitely frustrating passages of hours and whole days when they made more distance sideways than forwards. By night, they had little idea of where they were heading, for the boat compass had no light; there was always the danger of another sudden jibe in the dark. Once, as morning rose, they found the wind had changed and they were heading back where they had come from. Another time, they nearly foundered on a foaming reef that loomed up suddenly, escaping only by a superhuman effort of the rowers and a sudden shift of wind that threw them onto a tack to claw themselves away. There was a moment of special misery when Thode, trying to check the compass one night, lit a distress flare. Part of it broke off and smacked into the sleeping body of Norm Griffiths, an A.B. from Brisbane. He was badly burned on the stomach, but all they could do for him was to cover the
wound with a rag soaked in kerosene.

After 12 days, and some 500 kilometres, Thode saw, in the afternoon sun, what he reckoned to be the tall white pillar of the lighthouse marking the entrance to Tjilatjap. Wretched and weary, drained of all strength, gnawed by hunger and thirst, they had made it. That day, 13 March, a flood tide carried them into a small harbour, past bombed and sunken ships, to a crumbling wharf blackened by fire. Then their triumph crumbled. Two Dutchmen in some sort of green uniform met them there, apparently officers, accompanied by a Javanese, who wore an armband of the Japanese rising sun. Not far away was a guard hut, where a squad of Japanese soldiers was lounging in the sun.

Heartbroken, the
Perth
men surrendered to the inevitable. To much shouting of incomprehensible orders, they were trucked away to a headquarters. A Japanese colonel questioned them briefly from the top of a flight of steps, established that they were Australian sailors and then turned them over to a corporal. He led them to a rear courtyard, where they feared they might be executed, but they were shown to a well with a pump, given soap and towels and told to wash. Soldiers brought them rags soaked in petrol to scrape away what they could of the encrusted fuel oil. More startling still, they were offered tea and cigarettes, and that evening their guards motioned them to a table for a meal of rice with bully beef and pickled cucumber and tomato sauce. Then, to their utter astonishment, they were each given a bottle of Dutch beer. This was not the sort of captivity they had been led to expect. Perhaps all those stories of Japanese brutality, of prisoners executed in cold blood, had been merely Allied propaganda, they thought.

Ray Parkin kept the jib sail from HMAS
Anzac
as a souvenir. Later, finding some ink from somewhere, he drew
Perth
's ship's crest on it, with the inscription ‘To the Memory of the Gallant Ship HMAS
Perth
', and all ten of them signed it, vowing that some day the sail would return with them to Australia.

Another group of
Perth
survivors was planning a similar odyssey. This was the party of 12 led by Jan Tyrrell and including Tag Wallace – all that was left of the 23 men who had landed at Anjer in the wooden lifeboat.

On their first day on the Java mainland, after being warned by a friendly local policeman that the Japanese were on the coastal road to the north, they decided to move inland towards the mountains. They had not gone far when a mob of local people began to chase them as they were crossing a river. The only weapons they had were some
parangs
they had found in the huts on Sangiang and some wooden clubs they had made, so they scrambled up a low hill and rolled rocks down at their attackers, which beat them off. But that violent encounter was enough. The next morning, they voted to return to the coast, to collect the wooden lifeboat and make the rest of their journey by sea.

The boat was gone. And they could see that, overnight, part of the town of Anjer had been burned and looted. Depressed, they walked south down the coast to a lighthouse they could see in the distance. It had also been looted. But there was a chart of the strait there, and some scrawny chickens that made dinner that evening, plus a steel drum big enough to boil water for a bath. And their luck got better. In a nearby creek, they saw a boat partly hidden in the vegetation, and the next morning 18-year-old Ordinary Seaman Max Jagger, from Parramatta in Sydney, and two others brought it back down to the lighthouse jetty. Wallace recorded that it was ‘an almost brand new lifeboat from a British ship, complete with a full set of oars and a barricoe of water under the stern seats'.
¹³
Dodging some angry but distant rifle fire from the boat's Indonesian owner, who had belatedly discovered the theft, they set off south down the strait. A fisherman told them that Labuhan was in Japanese hands, so they went on, fixated now on reaching Australia.

As their food ran low, they stopped on the coast to forage
for more. They were followed for several days by an enormous shark. Sleeping ashore one evening, they were awoken, terrified, by a tribe of screeching orang-utans, which hurled lumps of banana palm at them. Searching through another village, they turned a corner to find a Japanese soldier dozing on a verandah above their heads. They fled back to the boat, rowing like mad to get away.

On 11 March, after avoiding yet another Japanese destroyer, they reached Java Head, where they saw the steel tower of a lighthouse perched high on a rocky crag and decided to land at a small jetty. As they got ashore, they heard the ominous snick of rifles being cocked and two Indonesians, guns at the ready, suddenly appeared from a patch of jungle. Tyrrell explained who they were, as best he could. They were Australians, not Dutch. That changed everything. The Indonesian lighthouse keeper welcomed them with open arms, as Tag Wallace recounted:

Max Jagger remembered the lighthouse keeper's name as Mr Atmo. He and his wife and daughters gave their visitors unstinting succour: food for their stomachs, a dry place to sleep beneath mosquito nets, native pastes and potions to treat their wounds, tools for running repairs to their boat.

After five days and a tearful farewell from the Atmo family,
the
Perth
men set off again, rounding Java Head, east for Tjilatjap. After a day and night at sea, another storm snapped their mast and nearly swamped them. Later that same day, they saw another lifeboat making towards them. One of the six men in it said he was an Australian journalist; another was a Dutch colonial official. These men told them Tjilatjap had fallen to the Japanese three days earlier. The date now was Friday the 13th. Crushed, they returned to the Java Head lighthouse, a heartbreaking journey of around 150 kilometres.

Again, Mr Atmo offered them hospitality. His stores of food were running low, so the Australians tried to help out by borrowing his ancient blunderbuss and hunting for deer in the surrounding jungle. But by now the word was out that the Japanese were paying a bounty of 1000 Dutch guilders for each Allied soldier captured. On the last day of March, the Australians went to the boat to find that their laboriously gathered stores of food and supplies had been stolen in the night, and that a note in Javanese script had been pinned to a nearby tree. They gave it to Atmo to read, as Tag Wallace recorded:

Atmo suggested that Sumatra might be safer for them, and he gave them a letter of introduction to a friend there, another lighthouse keeper. Wearily, they headed north-west across the strait again. A patrolling Japanese destroyer fired on them one night – a sole desultory shell apparently only for amusement. On the Sumatra shore, they escaped yet another pitched battle with more Indonesians apparently keen to collect the bounty.

On 7 April, a Tuesday, their innings finally played out. Pulling into a small port named Kota Agung, they realised, too late, that some green uniforms on the jetty were Japanese, not Dutch. There were bellowed orders and a volley of rifle fire that just missed them. Again, the
Perth
men could only surrender, but their welcome was not so benign as it had been for the Thode and Parkin group at Tjilatjap. Tag Wallace, clambering onto the jetty, was kicked and bashed unconscious. The Japanese marched them off at bayonet point. These 12 Australian sailors had been at large, unbeaten, for five weeks. They were the last of
Perth
's ship's company to go into captivity.

In a paddock at Belconnen, then an outer suburb of Canberra, the slender masts of the new Naval Transmitting Station began to send a series of increasingly urgent radio signals:

It was 7 March. The Navy Office and the War Cabinet feared that a naval defeat worse, perhaps, than the loss of HMAS
Sydney
was about to break upon the nation. As the hours passed with only silence from the ether, the fears deepened.

The first hint of the loss of
Perth
was broadcast by Tokyo Radio the day the ship went down, Sunday 1 March. It did not reveal much, just a claim that the glorious Imperial Japanese Navy had sunk an Australian and an American cruiser in a battle off Java.
The Sydney Morning Herald
carried the Japanese announcement the next day, very briefly, with a statement from the Minister for the Navy that there had been no report from the British Admiralty of an Australian cruiser lost.

Tokyo Radio was notorious for its absurd propaganda. Nonetheless, its broadcast sent a chill through offices in Canberra
and Melbourne, for nothing had been heard from
Perth
, nor from
Houston
, since Waller's brief signal on 28 February. And the news reaching Australia from Java was unrelievedly grim: the surrender of the Netherlands East Indies was imminent.

In fact, the situation in Java was chaotic. For all the bold Dutch talk of fighting to the last bullet, Imamura's 16th Army swept aside the reluctant local troops of the Netherland East Indies Army with ease. A scratch force of British, Australian and American infantry and artillery units put up a stiffer resistance in West Java, but they, too, were overpowered as the enemy divisions moved on Batavia and Bandung as swiftly as they had poured through Malaya.

And the losses continued at sea. In a melancholy postscript to the Java Sea Battle, the wounded cruiser HMS
Exeter
and her two accompanying destroyers, HMS
Encounter
and the USS
Pope
, were sunk north of Java on 1 March after leaving Surabaya in an attempt to break out to Ceylon. Escorting a small convoy from Tjilatjap to Australia, the little sloop HMAS
Yarra
was surprised in the Indian Ocean on 4 March by a Japanese force of three heavy cruisers. Her captain, Robert Rankin, who had shared Gavin Campbell's birthday drink in Tanjung Priok, gallantly turned his ship towards the enemy: his three 4-inch guns against ten 8-inch guns. It still took the Japanese an hour and a half to sink him. Rankin went down with his ship. Of the crew of 151, only 13 survived.

Commodore Collins was ordered by Admiral Helfrich to abandon Priok on 1 March, and at just 90 minutes' notice he and his staff set off for Tjilatjap in a hastily assembled convoy of cars, trucks and buses. Arriving there that evening, he found a ragtag group of troops and civilians, including some high-ranking ABDA officers, all desperate to flee Java. He managed to organise most of them away in a handful of Australian corvettes and a small Dutch freighter. All being well,
Perth
and
Houston
should have been there, too, but there was no sign of them and nothing Collins could do. He left Tjilatjap in the corvette HMAS
Burnie
the next day and made it back to Australia.

Java fell just days later. The formal capitulation was signed in Bandung on 12 March at a ceremony in which the Japanese Area Commander solemnly promised all prisoners of war the protection of the Geneva Convention.

The Allied campaign to save the Netherlands East Indies had been as ill-planned and ultimately as futile as the battle for Malaya and Singapore. General Wavell had been perfectly correct in the assessment he had sent to Winston Churchill in late February, that anything he put into Java now could do little to prolong the struggle; it was more a question of what he chose to save. So had the Commander of the Australian Squadron, Admiral Crace, in his view that sending
Perth
to ABDA would make no difference.

Once again, a perceived political imperative had spawned a gross military failure, as it had in Greece and Crete. Again, thousands of young Australian lives were risked and squandered. Hirohito's empire stood on the brink of a sweeping triumph: the red and white flag of the rising sun flew over a great arc above Australia, from the Philippines in the east to Thailand and Burma in the west. True, there was some more fighting to be done by the Sons of Nippon in the Philippines and in New Guinea, but Nanshinron had been realised beyond the dreams of the Tokyo militarists. Japan could now begin to plunder the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The telegrams arrived at homes around Australia on that Black Friday, 13 March – the same day that John Thode and Ray Parkin and their boat crew were taken at Tjilatjap. Joan Lewis, with a day off work, was at her parents' cottage at Camperdown in Sydney when she saw the Post Office boy come cycling down Pidcock Street just before midday and stop at their gate, Number 10:

At Howick Street in Perth, the telegram to the Bee family read:

That wording went out to the next of kin of every
Perth
sailor. The telegram boys cycled down city streets, suburban avenues and country roads across the nation, bearing this shattering news with all its dreadful uncertainty. There was so much said, and so much left unsaid.

For some, like Minnie McGovern at Paddington in Sydney, the blow was all the more terrible. She had two sons to pray for, Frank and Vince, both in the ship. Vince had been killed instantly, although there was no way of knowing that. Rose Ryan at Bankstown also had two boys to worry about, Charles and Richard. So did Adelaide Delbridge at Undercliffe; her sons Charles and Fred were so close they had enlisted with consecutive service numbers. George Hatfield's wife, Alma, was carrying their baby, due in just a few months. And Florrie Turnbull, a widow in Brisbane's West End, suffered in triplicate: her eldest boy, John, 29, was a petty officer stoker in
Perth
; two younger sons were also missing. Bill Turnbull, 24, and Ken Turnbull, the baby of the family at 20, were among the ill-trained soldiers hurriedly packed off to Java in the last weeks of the island's defence. She had no news of any of them. The pain was unrelenting; most of
Perth
's families would hear nothing more of those they loved for years on end.

The news was officially released the next day, in a statement by John Curtin:

Not just sympathy; the nation was stunned. Hardly a family remained untouched, for if these blows had not affected them directly, they knew someone who had been. Coming so hard on the catastrophe of the surrender at Singapore, of the bombing of Darwin, of the unending march of the Japanese
enemy, Australians believed they were in grave peril. These were the country's darkest days. It could not be long, surely, before the Japanese would mount an invasion of Australia. The only glimmer of hope on the horizon was the much-publicised arrival of General Douglas MacArthur later that month. The Yanks had turned up at last. With his corncob pipe, the aviator sunglasses, the jutting jaw, the artfully decorated cap and every other trick of his genius for self-promotion, this American Caesar was greeted as a liberator when he arrived in Melbourne.

Perth
's survivors were now in the clutches of a monstrous tyranny. In the coming weeks, they would have their first taste of the depravity that would engulf them and hundreds of thousands of others for more than three years. Even now, in the twenty-first century, the barbarism seems incomprehensible. Perhaps it is best described by Ray Parkin's oft-quoted remark, ‘It was not as bad as you thought, but worse than you can ever have imagined.'
³

The men picked up by the Japanese destroyer and taken to the
Somedong Maru
in Bantem Bay were pleased to see other transports beached or sunk – a cheering indication that their battle had not been one-sided. With the occasional bash from a rifle butt and shouts of ‘Speedo!' snarled by their captors – a guttural cry that would become numbingly familiar – they were ordered into the hold. More men joined them over the coming days, including some American and British prisoners, until John Harper counted 246 men jammed into a dark, hot and stinking space where perhaps 50 men could have slept at full length. The only toilet was on deck, a rough wooden box suspended over the ship's side. A ‘
benjo
', it was called. Already, they were starting to absorb the language of their jailers. Food was a lump of rice in a watery soup, and each man was allowed a cup of water per day. They slept on the bare deck.

Sam Stening and some of the sick berth attendants did what they could for the wounded.
Perth
's other doctor, Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander Eric Tymms, had been lost with the ship. One day, a Japanese doctor appeared with some dressings and a few surgical instruments. But that was it. After eight days, the prisoners were herded off the
Somedong Maru
into landing barges and taken ashore at Merak. Stumbling back onto dry land, they noticed a small shed at the wharf. Stuck to its wall was a travel poster with a brightly coloured picture of the rocky outcrop of the Three Sisters – a tourist attraction in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. ‘Come to sunny New South Wales,' it said. Frank McGovern didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

A convoy of trucks was waiting for them. Packed in like cattle, standing upright, clutching each other for support, they jolted inland for about 50 kilometres along a dusty road to Serang. Some, the majority, were ordered into a cinema; the rest were taken to the local jail, a warren of crumbling concrete walls and leaky tiled roofs. Serang would be their new prison for the next month, shared with more Americans and Brits, and Dutch civilians, including women and children. Elmo Gee, like most of the Australian and American sailors clad only in a ragged G-string, without boots, still smeared with a crust of fuel oil, was one of the hundreds packed into the gloom of the cinema beneath the gaze of machine guns mounted on a balcony: