Ship of Ghosts (31 page)

The officers and NCOs cobbled together battle reports for the actions in the Java Sea and Sunda Strait. Lt. Leon Rogers interviewed survivors and began to keep a log of their movements, disciplinary offenses, and so on. “We were professional sailors,” said George Detre, “and this was the only way we went.” Throughout the ordeal, the enlisted men would benefit from the strength and station of their officers. “If you got your brass, you got a chance. If you don’t, you’re strictly on your own,” said John Wisecup.

T
he hyperactive machismo of a guy such as Wisecup, reined in over time by the likes of senior sergeants including Walter Standish and Harley Dupler, bred the Marines’ reputation for aggressive efficiency that led so many prisoners to vest their hopes in rescue. When would it finally come? Despite a mounting impression that no one was riding to their aid, the prisoners kept an eager ear on the news.

News was a gold-standard commodity, as valuable to the mind as food was to the body. It was power. It was strength, the key to withstanding the psychic assaults of the guards at
tenko
. Somewhere along the line at Bicycle Camp, Charley Pryor found a Malay-English dictionary. He studied it like a Bible in catechism. Three weeks of cramming enabled him to talk with natives and get the scoop on the outside world. “They would tell us about great naval battles and what the Allied forces had destroyed and that they were on Ambon, or they’d landed to the north in the Celebes or on Borneo, and they were on Sumatra. Oh, it was just a matter of a few days, you know, and they’d be on Java.”

There were plenty of reasons to question the sunny outlook. On a work party out at the Dunlop tire factory one afternoon, Paul Papish was stacking tires, cussing a blue streak. “What’s the matter, sailor?” a voice behind him asked. Papish replied, “These damned Japs don’t know where they want this stuff.” Reaching for another tire, he saw out of the corner of his eye a split-toed
tabi
belonging to a Japanese sergeant.

Turning, Papish stood and looked around for the speaker. “I don’t
know where this voice is coming from, speaking just as good English as I am,” Papish said. As he realized it must have been the Japanese, shock spread across the American’s face, and the sergeant grinned and said, “That’s all right.” Papish could not have guessed how all right it was. As it happened, this soldier had more in common with a New York cabbie than with one of Tojo’s finest. He told Papish that before the war started he had in fact been a taxi driver in Manhattan. On December 8, the date of the Pearl Harbor attack in Japan, he was home visiting his aging parents. Stuck thereafter in Nippon, he was conscripted into the army and there was no looking back.

“Listen, I want to tell you something,” the sergeant said. “There’s a lot of Japanese who speak good English. They won’t be like me. Remember that.” The sergeant gave Papish a cigarette later that day, as well as some canned beef to mix with his rice. Papish asked him, “Look, tell me something. What do you think of this war?”

“Well, sailor, I’ll tell you this. You and I both know who’s going to win, but it’s going to be a long one. Yes, it’s going to be a long one.”

Paul Papish had persuaded himself that liberation was just around the corner. If denial morphed into fantasy, and the result bucked up the spirits, why not cling to it? The Japanese might have the upper hand at the moment, but it wouldn’t be for long, he consoled himself. Yet the English-speaking sergeant’s candor eroded his confidence that the war would go well. “That just kind of took the wind out of my sails,” Papish said. A Catholic, he sought out a Dutch priest and asked if he had anything he could pray with. The priest gave him a rosary.

The frightful possibilities had a few weeks to gain a foothold in the sailors’ minds before, as expected, United States troops finally appeared, marching on the gates of Bicycle Camp. But it was not the U.S. Marines who came for the
Houston
men. The Army did the honors instead.

T
he four-hundred-odd soldiers who appeared at Bicycle Camp on May 14, 1942, belonged to the Second Battalion of the 131st Field Artillery Regiment of the Thirty-sixth Infantry Division, Texas National Guard. Reaching Bicycle Camp under the command of Col. Blucher S. Tharp, the soldiers, in full dress, marched in hauling duffles and all manner of diverse equipment. The sudden commotion was a pleasant surprise to the Navy prisoners. “They sure looked good,” said Donald Brain. “They looked awfully good coming in there.” Otto Schwarz and Gus Forsman felt their hearts swell at the sharp appearance of their countrymen.

The Texans, a world away from their headquarters at Camp Mabry in Austin, had become orphans on the Army’s organizational chart shortly after their unit was placed under federal control on November 25, 1940. After conducting maneuvers in the Louisiana swamps and pine forests in the summer of 1941, the Texans were “surplused”—detached from the Thirty-sixth Division and sent to the Pacific, earmarked for a secret location named “PLUM.” They left San Francisco on board the SS
Republic
just two weeks before the Pearl Harbor raid. PLUM turned out to be the Philippines. Their mission was to support Allied forces under General MacArthur.

For the
Houston
survivors, the arrival of this sharply uniformed,
well-supplied battalion of ostensible liberators was the long-awaited moment of deliverance, the restoration of the natural order of an America-centered universe. At least it was all of these things for a few minutes. Like their dream fantasies about roast beef and fresh bread and sweet pork and beans vanishing at the end of hungry slumbers, the idea that the Army had come to free them shimmered briefly and gave way to scraping reality. It dawned quickly on the
Houston
men that the Texans were not rescuers. Herded into Bicycle Camp, they were coming to kneel alongside the Navy company in submission to Imperial Japan. Back home, their fate unknown, the unit would acquire a nickname that had the ring of legend: “The Lost Battalion.”

As the fleet-wide assignment of the Houston Volunteers showed, the Navy Department forbade its ships from having the kind of provincial identity that characterized the Lost Battalion. Each of its batteries was drawn from a single Texas town—D Battery from Wichita Falls, E Battery from Abilene, F Battery from Jacksboro, Headquarters Battery from Decatur, and so on. Though the
Houston
’s crew hailed from all across America, it had a number of Lone Star Staters, including Marvin Robinson, Charley Pryor, Jim Gee, Frank “Pinky” King, and Bert Page. A few of them actually had friends in common with the Guardsmen. It highlighted the clannish nature of the Texans—and also their greatest strength. By virtue of their selection as Asiatic Fleet flagship and the president’s private fishing yacht, the
Houston
men had developed a special sense of identity that became the basis for everything they did. But the Texans of the 131st were born with it. The Alamo spirit grew out of small-town friendships, rooted in local pride. As it happened, more than a few of the
Houston
sailors could relate to them on that level. Pinky King’s older sisters had gone to school with 2nd Lt. Clyde Fillmore’s wife back in Wheeler County. They had to meet halfway around the world in an enemy prison camp to discover it.

The first asset the artillerymen brought to camp was their number. With the arrival of the 534 Texans, there were a total of 902 Americans at Bicycle Camp. “We felt very good because we felt that in numbers there was strength. We needed that,” said Jim Gee. If some of the
Houston
Marines wondered what kind of soldiers these Guardsmen were, others had seen some of their handiwork earlier, on the long march to Serang. Charley Pryor had seen Japanese trucks burning by the roadside, trees denuded of foliage, and the odd
corpse of an Imperial Army soldier in khaki and split-toed boots. Who was doing the fighting they could hardly have known. Swift though the Japanese conquest had been, it was not a complete walkover.

The Texans, appalled by the ragged condition of the Navy “gobs,” responded with generosity that brought the sailors a step back toward humanity. Their extra clothing and gear was distributed among the bedraggled
Houston
men until everyone had gotten something. They passed around blankets, pants, shirts, smokes, cans of Spam, spoons, plates, cups, razors, and tools. “Whatever you needed, they seemed to come up with it,” said Gus Forsman. Rumors floated that the battalion’s officers had brought a considerable sum of cash into the camp. With the arrival of the 131st came, somehow, money that was used to buy supplies. The men were paid by their rank and took all opportunities to buy food from locals. The 131st brought a full field kitchen with them. Once it was set up, the Americans had the best in the camp.

Like the
Houston
survivors, the Lost Battalion had tangled with the Japanese and come away monstrously frustrated. Sailing westward during the countdown to war, embarked on the SS
Republic
and escorted by the heavy cruiser
Pensacola
, even the experienced troops among them had wondered, “How could there be so much water in the world?” Under way for the Philippines, they were redirected to Brisbane, arriving three days before Christmas 1941. There they ran into some locals who greeted them boisterously, “Hey, Yanks!” The artillerymen responded, “Hey, ANZACs!”
*
When the protest came, “We’re not ANZACs, we’re Australians,” the Guardsmen replied, “Well, we’re not Yanks, we’re Texans.”

On January 11, 1942, they landed at Surabaya, Java, eventually to deploy around Camp Singosari, an airstrip amid the muddy tapioca fields outside nearby Malang. The artillerymen worked as the Nineteenth Bombardment Group’s ground support unit, as their mess, their equipment maintenance, communications, and air defense staff. They rigged their World War I–vintage seventy-five-millimeter field guns for antiaircraft duty, planting them in pits to improve their firing angles. They sprang into action whenever they heard the drum signals of native spotters along the coast warning them of inbound Japanese planes.

Like their naval counterparts within ABDA, they had been poorly employed under multinational command. Perhaps no one invested any great hope in them. On January 18, Field Marshal Wavell himself inspected them and did not seem impressed. There was little they could do to protect the home of the overmatched, overworked B-17 Flying Fortress crews at Singosari. On February 27, what was left of the Nineteenth Bombardment Group, ravaged by Japanese air attacks, withdrew from Java. The Second Battalion was released, too. “We were still in an
Alice in Wonderland
world,” said Jess Stanbrough, a technical sergeant and radio specialist with the unit. “It was just another Louisiana maneuver. Nobody was frightened of the situation. We certainly didn’t realize how bad it was. We thought there were a lot of other people around to help.” Like the sailors on the
Houston,
they idled and wondered when the Japanese amphibious assault would finally come.

The commander of ABDA’s ground forces needed artillery. Dutch Lt. Gen. Hein ter Poorten had two Australian infantry battalions, the 2/3 Machine Gun and 2/2 Pioneers (combat engineers) under Brigadier Arthur S. Blackburn; twenty-five British light tanks of the Third Hussars; and 25,000 Dutch troops, the majority of them ethnic Indonesians with a low level of readiness and training. What he lacked was artillery. The Americans filled the bill. When the fight for Java was joined on the ground, the 131st’s E Battery was assigned to clean up the battalion’s equipment and then withdraw to Surabaya. The rest of the battalion went west to fight alongside the Australians.

As they departed, the Americans drove their trucks in circles to convince Japanese observers there were more of them than the four hundred or so there actually were. “We would pass through a village, make a wide sweep, rearrange our vehicles and enter that village from another direction,” remembered Kyle Thompson, a sergeant with Headquarters Battery. “It all seemed useless to me, but then the idea was to make the people think they had tons of support from the United States Army.”

The 131st dug in new positions in a rubber plantation outside the Dutch governor’s grounds at Buitenzorg (now Bogor). Soon they withdrew to Bandung. The plan was for Brigadier Blackburn’s Australians, combat-hardened veterans of fighting in North Africa, Greece, and Crete, to hold the Japanese from prepared positions in western Java while the Dutch troops counterattacked on the flanks.
If the worst happened, the artillerymen knew they could count on the Navy to retrieve them from the beach and carry them to safety. The British had done it at Dunkirk.

Japanese troops came ashore on March 1 and before long they seemed to be everywhere. They were too many and too swift. With Japanese aircraft controlling the skies—soldiers from the 131st were dismayed to find American fighter planes at Bandung still in crates stacked on flatcars—the Aussies and the Dutch were left fighting a piecemeal defense that never congealed into a force capable of a counteroffensive.