Eyewitness (20 page)

September 7th, 1945
. Today we have all been issued with Japanese military shirts, shorts, hobnailed boots, and their army-issue black rubber boots, which we call sneakers. We look like a lot of tough guys, but it is a grand feeling to have something on our feet at last. The girls say the leather boots are comfortable, though very heavy, and are a great help getting through the mud. Shockingly coloured cotton materials are coming in, so we shall soon have a wardrobe.

3 p.m. The Allies have arrived!!!

Two very young Dutch soldiers and a Chinese military man arrived today as advance guard to the Army of Occupation. They had been dropped by parachute a few days ago and were most impressed with our camp apparently, their first English words being, ‘What a bloody mess!’

They said they had never seen such awful conditions, and were amazed that anyone could live like this. It is not easy. Those men will be staying at Loebok Linngau, 12 miles away, and with their radio will report to their Headquarters in Colombo.

We are very interested to learn that Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten is Supreme Allied Commander in this theatre of war, and is in Colombo. Of course, we don’t know anything yet.

September 9th, 1945
. The Dutchmen made the Japs take them to all their local storehouses and one was found to be packed to the ceiling with large five-pound tins of Australian butter, which was transferred in trucks to our camp storehouse, a place never used by us as we had nothing to store. I was helping our rations people to divide the tins into so many per block, when over in a corner of the storehouse I saw a piece of newspaper sticking out. The thought went through my mind, ‘If that is not a piece of Melbourne
Herald
I’ll go he!’ I pulled it out, and there it was, the
Herald
, Thursday evening, with a date in August 1943. It was the page advertising the programs of suburban picture shows, including the one nearest to my home. I took this piece of newspaper back to our hut and found it to be most popular with the Victorians. We sat down and read every word.

Our Dutch paratroops came into camp again today and had quite a long chat with us in our hut. They have great hopes of getting us all out of here fairly soon. What game men! They had a revolver each and that is all to protect themselves.

September 11th, 1945
. Cheers and more cheers. We have been discovered by two young Australian paratroops who visited our camp today and came straight past everybody until they landed on the doorstep of our Hut 13. Viv, who is usually unmoved and very quiet, came rushing in, face positively crimson, and panted, ‘Australians are here!’ They were about five yards behind her. To see that rising sun badge on a beret again! It did us more good than anything we have experienced so far.

One fellow said he was ‘Bates, from Thornbury’ and the other said he was ‘Gillam, from Perth’, and the first thing we noticed, after their youth, was their very white teeth. We made these boys sit on our bali bali and then we fired our hundreds of questions.

We told them we had heard that ‘the King of America’ was dead – this from a Chinese when we were out water-carrying one day. Did it mean Mr Roosevelt had died? Who won the war? Who won the football final in Melbourne? Will we be home for the Melbourne Cup? Is the Royal Family OK? Is the
Queen Mary
still afloat? We were interested in this because most of us had sailed to Singapore in her in 1941. The answer came pat, ‘Yes, they both are.’ How and where are the 8
^th
Division prisoners? Who is Prime Minister of Australia? Is Mr Churchill still Prime Minister of England? What are the latest songs? Australia could not have sent two men better equipped with all the answers. They told us of ‘swoon’ men, and that Bing Crosby was the number one film star in Hollywood. Our remarks here were choice; we thought Bing was on the way out before we were ever taken prisoner. They told us of cold permanent waves, and we all thought we had better have one of those as soon as we could. They spoke of huge aeroplanes, ‘Liberators’, ‘Boomerangs’, ‘Mosquitoes’, ‘B24s’. We are hopelessly out of date and we can’t think when we shall catch up with all the news of the last four years.

These two boys also told us of a bomb dropped on a Japanese city which killed thousands of people and reduced the place to a shambles. We were horrified to think one bomb could do that. They then said another similar bomb had been dropped on another Japanese city that did the same thing. What amazing progress has been made while we have been Rip Van Winkles!

September 13th, 1945
. Two huge four-engined planes, the largest and most powerful we have ever seen, flew at tree-top height over us for nearly two hours this morning. We could see a man dressed in white standing in a doorway. What glorious planes they were! They were dropping parcels into the men’s camp, we are told. The plane markings are different, white and blue, no red at all. It is such a thrill not to see that horrible red blob under the wings. There is quite a strong rumour in camp that they dropped bread! Wonder what bread tastes like? How marvellous!

September 14th, 1945
. It was bread, and made at Cocos Island that day. We had half a slice each with butter and Vegemite, and it was like sponge cake. With it we had a bowl of cocoa, thick with sugar, and we all sat on the step in front of the hut at 7 p.m. and felt completely satisfied with life.

Quite a large quantity of food was dropped – boiled sweets, powdered milk, cheese, powdered egg, Vegemite, etc. Sealed dixies containing 24 hours’ ration for one person were dropped. Hundreds of South-East Asia Command newspapers, telling us about the war in Burma, were also dropped.

We are bartering with the natives the pieces of thin coloured material the Japs gave us. They are too ‘Tamil pink’ for us. We are all making quite pretty nighties from the mosquito-net material given us last week. It is thick cotton material and would have made hot, airless nets. We are also bartering the Jap shirts and shorts, since we can’t get them clean, for fruit, vegetables, eggs, chickens and ducks. Dutchy comes every day, bringing his friends, and they do some of the bartering. We buy three chickens, alive, at 11 a.m. and have fried chicken for lunch at 1 p.m.! Chris, Flo and I are the executioners. We have at least four visitors for lunch every day now, and are leading quite a social life.

The natives are looking quite smart in their khaki shorts and shirts bartered from this camp. They are so smart, in fact, that they look like our own people until we see that their faces are not familiar. We are certainly all the same colour! These natives are getting harder to deal with each day and must be doing quite well for themselves.

September 15th, 1945.
Wilma and I are the family cooks today, since Dutchy did not come. Some girl bartered her material for a huge pile of real French beans! Jess Doyle could not resist some duck-eggs a native was trying to sell her. Jess was dressed in her old ‘Black Bottom’ shorts, one of the seven pairs Win made from a nun’s gown and now worn solidly for three years, which the native definitely had his eye on. He told her she could have five eggs for the shorts, so Jess, in a desperate moment, told him to
nanti
while she dashed inside and removed the shorts. Then somebody took them outside to the native and collected the eggs. Really, these natives should pull themselves together!

Geoffrey Tebbutt

Geoffrey Tebbutt (born 1906) was the Melbourne
Herald
and Sydney
Daily Telegraph
correspondent who found himself in Borneo after escaping from Singapore and Java. Tarakan, an oilrich island, was captured by the Japanese from its Dutch defenders in January 1942, and was retaken by the Australians in 1945. Tebbutt reported from the north coast of New Guinea, at Buna, Gona and Sanananda at the end of the Kokoda campaign to January 1943. He wrote his untitled book in July 1943. It is full of fine description and astute observation – but perhaps didn’t capture enough actual action to see the light of published day during or just after the war as did those of Osmar White and Chester Wilmot.

Tebbutt’s first job was as a messenger on the Sydney
Daily
Telegraph
in 1922, and afterward he worked on provincial newspapers in country Queensland and New South Wales in order to save his fare to London. He worked for the agency Associated Press and covered the 1930 Australian cricket tour, writing
With the 1930
Australians
. He was later a feature writer with the Brisbane
Courier
Mail
, and assistant editor of the Melbourne
Herald’
s London Bureau where he covered the 1938 tour. After the war he worked for AAP and Reuters in New York, and returned to the
Herald
in 1949 as leader writer, features editor and Australian correspondent for the
Manchester Guardian
. He was remembered by young tyros at the paper as a white-haired gent walking from mahogany row with his hands clasped behind his back in the manner of Prince Phillip. A colleague said that he was easily the best-dressed journo in Australia and never failed to wear a purple cornflower in his buttonhole. Tebbutt died in the mid-1980s.

*

There were two days to wait for a Lodestar to Tarakan. The Dutch, from the concealment of Samarinda II, had been harassing the Japanese who had landed unopposed in Sarawak, attacking Miri and Kuching after the long flight in their Martins. Sometimes a hint of cover could be provided by having the fighters go ahead and refuel at an advanced field; sometimes the bombers had to go unescorted. They could go only in twos or threes or fours without, even at this early stage, dipping into their slender reserves.

The younger pilots were restive. Inactivity in the rotting air of the jungle was getting on their nerves. The morose major had to hold them back – there was a limit to what they could do to the Japanese on the northern side of the island, and that at heavy risk. He wanted to have something left when the Japanese came down from the Philippines to attack Tarakan, and round the corner to snatch at the oil of Balik Papan. He had not much to play with, there at Samarinda II – perhaps a dozen bombers and three or four fighters, and no major repairs could be done on the spot. (We took bullet-holed petrol tanks all the way back to Java for repairs.) He could not save Sarawak for the White Rajah in Sydney, nor North Borneo for the British. The best he could hope for was to jump on the Japanese with all his little strength when they stuck their necks out farther.

Chess and talk and the crushing of cockroaches filled in the time. There was a visit to a French missionary immured in the jungle and selling vegetables to the garrison to make up the funds which no longer came from home. There was a little Bols in the mess, whither came buckets of a tepid, revolting dish that had a rice basis and presumably was a bad cross between Dutch and Dyak cuisine. There was an egg thrown during dinner by a wild lieutenant at a solemn captain, provoking resentment less because of the indignity in the presence of guests than because of the scarcity of eggs. There were pilots sitting on bombs and lamenting, as I had heard them lament in France, the lack of numbers. ‘If only we could meet them on equal terms …’ There was the rigid standing to attention when Batavia radio sent the British, American, Chinese and Dutch national anthems out to the exiles. Not the Russian anthem, though the Russians alone were moving in the right direction then – Holland was not in diplomatic relations with the Soviet. Empires crumbled, but there was still protocol.

Then it was our turn for a moonlight take-off. A three o’clock call, a groping for shoes among the corpses of cockroaches, a cup of sickly coffee proffered in the operations room where the chalked scoreboard showed six Japanese ships sunk and three fighters shot down for the loss of two bombers and a fighter and three bombers damaged. Out to the strip by rough and slippery paths to the Lodestar warming up. The pulse beats slow when the belly is empty in the misty Borneo jungle at four in the morning. The Lodestar charged down the runway. The guiding lights closed their ranks as she picked up speed. She bounced over the ridge. At 4.10 she was up in the clear moonlight, a white ground-sheet covering the jungle.

The drill was to reach Tarakan Island with just enough light for landing, and for the ferry machine to be out again within a few minutes. It was no place for an unarmed transport to dawdle about. The Japanese already had been pecking at Tarakan. Bomb-craters pocked the only airfield. The burnt-out skeleton of a Brewster Buffalo fighter lay on the strip. The few other machines there were wrecks. Salvaged parts from them were put aboard the Lodestar, so desperately had the Dutch to improvise. There was a jeep to bounce us into the trim equatorial town, cool in the dawn hour.

It was doomed, and everyone there – at least every white man and the handful of women who had remained as volunteer nurses – knew it. The only question was the length of the stay of execution. No shortrange air protection. Only a battalion of infantry, mostly native, with a few armoured cars, a little artillery, some light anti-aircraft guns, and orders to fight until, the inevitable end approaching, the demolition scheme for the oil wells could be applied. Tarakan was an incitement to oil-hungry conquest, a glittering prize. The Japanese had shown their minds plainly enough.

Their attacking aircraft in the preliminary raids had laid off the oilfields which cluster about the town. They wanted their winnings intact. There was fabulous wealth in this lonely, exposed island with the forest of derricks, looking across the Celebes Sea to the falling Philippines and its own imminent fate. There were oil slicks in every ditch and puddle. For 40 years Tarakan had been yielding up its treasure. Now, seven years beyond the normal expectation of an oilfield’s life, it showed no signs of petering out.

Consider the ripples that had spread from this rain-washed, palmfringed pimple on the earth’s surface: consider what its scientists, its engineers, its coolies, had provided: what it had meant to many people, most of whom had never heard of it. Eighty thousand tons of oil a month was the capacity of the three Tarakan fields. It had built, in its time, ornate office-blocks; it had bought racehorses, yachts, mansions, mistresses; it had fattened tycoons in London, Amsterdam, New York; it had meant power for voyages and sea-fights. It had lit Nippon’s eyes with ambition, this shuttered, anxious little town under martial law, its anchorage empty of tankers now that the scorched earth policy was not a phrase in the newspapers from far away, but something that must sorrowfully be applied here and soon. Tarakan had spelt guilders, dollars, pounds, for decades. Only a sacrificial, suicidal handful of men would briefly stave off the absorption of its ruins into the Coprosperity Sphere of Greater East Asia. To walk in Tarakan was like inspecting a grave while the funeral procession approached.

The quiet, elderly commandant, Colonel Simon de Waal, gave his consent to inspection of the defences. It did not take long. It seemed that everything possibly had been done with the material that lay to hand, and that was not much. Little brown men in domed steel helmets manned the machine-gun posts and trenches that covered the approach to the oil jetty. They sprang to it happily when the cameraman wanted his shots; they would soon be springing to the real thing. In the low, leafy hills there were observation posts, winding revetted trenches and hideouts, the whole scheme designed to cover the approach to the oilfields. Repairs after the bombing were going forward at the airfield. A new runway was being made for the bombers the Japanese would not wait for. There were convicts among the toiling coolies. The convicts had bolted to the jungle after one Japanese attack, but presented themselves for work again next day. In town, a few Chinese shops remained shyly open. But life had come to a standstill. Even the film club with the wide terrace (one of those spacious cool retreats that Hollanders build throughout the Indies as surely as colonising Britons lay down cricket fields) was hushed.

A few jars of caviar, spindly Russian typography on their labels, stood in the shelves of the European provision shop as a reminder of what the old life had been. Hollanders had said to hell with anaemic sahibs’ rules of drink and diet east of Suez. Now the expansive days were going, gone. A whispering tenseness had succeeded. It was 1200 miles to Java, only a few hundred to the nearest points of the rushing Japanese conquest. The bone was pointed at Tarakan.

*

Dr Hendrik Colijn, manager of the Batavia Petroleum Company’s Tarakan fields, sat on the veranda of his white bungalow and spoke in cold, heavy tones of the plan to destroy the work of years. He was a tall, thin, sad, precise man. His father, the former Premier of Holland, was in a German concentration camp. He himself was about to be confronted with the blackmail of war. If Holland could not keep the oil of Tarakan, the Japanese should not have it. He spoke of the exceptional purity – the low ‘pour-point’ – of the Tarakan crude oil. It could be pumped from the fields into ships’ bunkers for immediate use; it could be used in the tropics or at the North Pole. There were ten distinct layers of oil on the island, all within 1500 feet of the surface.

If the defence failed, could the fields be put out of action for a long time?

‘Not only for a long time,’ said Dr Colijn, ‘but for as long as we wish. We are so prepared that we have not stopped production. We can destroy the fields at a few hours’ notice.’

It was not a hastily made plan, he emphasised. Civil and military engineers had been working on it before Holland declared war on Japan. They had no doubt.

*

The bucketing rain of the day cleared. The evening was calm with a malicious moon, and the garrison stood by for the parachute raid that might have been attempted to seize the oilfields. The staff-captain came home to rest briefly in his bungalow by the barracks. He was nervously, spasmodically gay, but anxious as the telephone buzzed in the comfortable lounge-library. He was a cosmopolitan. There were more books in English, French and German than in Dutch. His review of the situation was stark enough, unless there should be time for the hewing of more airstrips out of the jungle in Borneo and aeroplanes to use them to give close cover. But the messages coming over his telephone did not suggest time for Tarakan. He spoke of his French wife who had escaped from the Germans in Holland and reached East Africa via Switzerland, and who would now be coming to Java. He produced wine.

‘You won’t be able to get any more here,’ I demurred.

‘Drink it, my friend. The Japanese will take it from me.’

Towards midnight, the moon was blotted out. The rain came sluicing. Whenever I wakened, it was pounding, hissing. I thought of that low-lying airfield, with its best runway bombed out of service. It was still raining when we were called in the dark and the jeep heaved and splashed its way out to the airfield. The rain had eased. The faint light showed the airfield surface a series of lakes and morasses. The Lodestar should have been in from Samarinda II, but it was nearly an hour before she made the prescribed approach from seaward and the pilots began to take stock. Once, twice, thrice, studiously, they circled the airfield, deep in mud and water. They were game and good. A miscalculation would have marooned them and their waiting passengers. Any trip now might be the last to Tarakan. They slipped in over the hill and set her down. She threw up a waterspout, lurched and slowed in mud that almost submerged the wheels, and then, leaving a slipstream of ripples and a deep-rutted track, slithered to the tarmac. The freight was hustled out. We piled in. The tall, friendly corporal of the airfield guard said goodbye as though he knew no envy of anyone going back to Java, as though he did not know he would never be leaving Tarakan. They understood, on that island, the meaning of face.

We pulled the safety-belts tight and hung on, thankful for the proven airmanship of the landing. The Lodestar rocked and vibrated as first one wheel and then another struck a soft patch. Mud spattered up. At first we could see the threshing wheels. Then mud and water obscured the windows. She bounced, plunged, bounced again, and then was up in a climbing turn. When the windows cleared, Tarakan was a sad speck.

Samarinda II again, Balik Papan, Banjermasin, and back in the late afternoon to Bandoeng, weaving through the cloud-filled mountain passes. That was on January 7th. On Saturday afternoon, January 10th, the Japanese invasion fleet approached.