Ship of Ghosts (35 page)

If any of the Navy company or the Texans of the Lost Battalion ever took their families for granted, if they ever assumed that the good meals they had enjoyed and the hopes they had nourished had been the natural result of their industry, foresight, and clean living, Bicycle Camp was there to set them straight. They escaped by talking about the convertibles they were going to buy, the college degrees they were going to pursue, the farms they would inherit and run. There was little talk of girlfriends. As hunger and disease got to them, thoughts of the fairer sex faded from the picture. When they slept, aromas from imaginary kitchens seasoned their dreams. Awake, they brainstormed menus, recited lists of ice cream flavors, made a competition of waxing eloquent on hamburgers they had known. They remembered the little things about home, once so familiar as to be unremarkable but like revelations now that they were impossibly out of reach. The hopeful among them learned to revalue their gifts and aspirations.

O
n July 4, Ensign Smith returned to Bicycle Camp with his dockyard working party. As they entered the gate and passed the guardhouse, Smith noticed that all of the camp’s prisoners were lined up at the Japanese commandant’s office. “As I marched my troops up and halted in front of the guardhouse the officers were called out separately and a note stuck under my face which said, ‘If you do not sign the oath, your life will not be guaranteed.’” The prisoners’ refusal stood. Smith wrote:

A guard held up a sign restating the ultimatum of a few weeks before: “If you do not sign the oath, we do not guarantee your lives.” That the Japanese imposed written legalities on their prisoners was rather rich in view of their government’s own refusal to ratify the Geneva Convention. It may seem absurd that the Japanese expected a duress-induced promise to trump a man’s wartime instinct for survival. And it certainly seems quaint that the prisoners risked torture by refusing to sign a contractual nullity. But that is just what they did. After several weeks of reduced rations, restricted access to cooking facilities, and confinement of officers and senior NCOs, not to mention threats of death, the responsible officers of the various POW factions finally advised their men to sign the agreement. Extracted under duress, it would be void in any event.

There were just three holdouts. Two Australian army captains and Lt. Frank Gillan, the
Perth
’s engineering officer, refused to sign the oath. “You can always be sure that some Australians will go out of their way to aggravate the Japanese,” said Jess Stanbrough. That morning the guards took the three protesters to the guardhouse, produced thick bamboo sticks and forced each to kneel on the gravel walkway with the bamboo behind his knees. They were kept in that agonizing position for six hours while half a dozen guards, including Lieutenant Suzuki, did Joe DiMaggio impersonations on them with their rifle stocks. Three or four times Suzuki unsheathed his saber and struck them with its flat side. The three men stayed conscious throughout.

Finally the senior officer in the camp, Australian Brig. A. C. Blackburn, together with Col. Albert C. Searle, the senior U.S. Army officer on Java, prevailed upon the men to sign the oath and the beatings ceased. “The three men were in obvious pain,” observed Lieutenant Hamlin, “but bore the torture with great fortitude. The men were black and blue all over, and so remained for several days.”

Signing that piece of paper meant something to the men. It hurt. “There ain’t a one of us who didn’t think we were traitors,” said John
Wisecup. “All during the war, I thought of that…. We believed actually that we were selling our country down the road.”

According to Jess Stanbrough, the dustup over the oath marked the beginning of the war. “After the Fourth of July, all hell broke loose,” he said.

In mid-August, Lieutenant Suzuki and his contingent of Japanese guards left Batavia and were replaced by a company of Koreans under a Lieutenant Sonai. Abused by the Japanese, they vented their frustrations downstream on the prisoners. “The Brown Bomber was our first infamous one,” Stanbrough said. “He’d go pick out somebody, and usually the taller you were the worse you’d get it.”

As the prisoners would soon well understand, the Koreans’ position in the Imperial Army pecking order was but a half notch above the captives themselves. Nicknames made it possible to discuss them in a common shorthand. The guard nicknamed “Snake Eyes” had a beady look. “Pock Face” was fighting eczema. “Hollywood” was busy with his hair all the time. His fastidious dress did not keep him from being one of the nastiest guards in Bicycle Camp. The “Brown Bomber” bore a certain resemblance to Joe Louis. The Korean named “Liver Lips” because of his heavy facial features was “the worst one that we ever ran into,” said Charley Pryor. “He just went through there from one end to the other bashing and hammering and clubbing with his silly rifle…. I think he was just about the meanest and orneriest rascal that we’d ever run into. You didn’t have to provoke him. He’d just see you, and he was provoked.”

For a variety of reasons there was never serious talk of escape from Bicycle Camp. They could have managed it, could have scurried over the concertina wire, made it back into the jungle. But then what? As the crow flew it was five hundred miles to Australia. Java was Japanese-held, as were its skies and surrounding seas. The jungles were alive with unfriendly natives. The well-traveled men of the Navy company had a better handle on these realities than artillerymen of the Lost Battalion. “A soldier might tell you, ‘Yeah, we’ll get a boat and go,’” said George Detre, “but…not the sailors, no, we never seriously entertained escaping.”

I
n early October, seven months into the prisoners’ tenure as guests of the Imperial Empire, an uneasy order had settled over Bicycle Camp. That was about to change. Rumors began surfacing that a move was afoot. The Japanese guards, in their guttural pidgin, spoke of vacations in a green, mountainous land full of sunshine.

On October 8, the first of several groups of prisoners was marched out of Bicycle Camp, taken down to the Tanjung Priok waterfront, and mustered in the shadow of an old freighter, a coal-burning five-thousand-tonner named the
Kenkon Maru
. Sprayed with disinfectant, the men were herded up the gangway and led to their stowage, hundreds upon hundreds packed in each hold.

Pack Rat McCone’s reputation was well established by then. Having honed his talent at dockside requisition, he was, according to historian Gavan Daws, “the only man who could make five-gallon cans invisible to the Japanese.” Up the gangway he strode, hauling a beggar’s ransom in surplus: two tires, a gang of pipe, containers useful for capturing water, and several sacks of other valuables slung over his back. “Man, he had some gear,” said John Wisecup. “The ‘Gunner’ was really loaded.” The Japanese guards laughed out loud at the sight of it. “They seldom laughed,” said Wisecup, “but they did this time.” “He became a sort of hero, or whatever you want to
name him, but he was the one who controlled an awful lot of water aboard that trip,” Howard Charles said.

This first group, known as the “Black Force” after its senior officer, Australian Lt. Col. C. M. Black, consisted of 191 Americans and 600 Australian soldiers and sailors. Its senior U.S. officer was Capt. Arch L. Fitzsimmons, the commander of the Lost Battalion’s Headquarters Battery, leading most of the Americans to call Black Force the Fitzsimmons Group. It included three of the 131st’s superb second lieutenants, James Lattimore, David Hiner, and Roy Stensland, as well as nineteen members of the
Houston
’s Marine detachment, including Howard Charles, Jim Gee, Pinky King, Pack Rat McCone, Freddie Quick, Robbie Robinson, and John Wisecup.
Houston
sailors in this group included Gus Forsman, Otto Schwarz, and forty-one others.

The remaining Americans, including all of the Navy company officers and medical staff, and a few Marines who had been overlooked in the hasty first selection, including sergeants Harley Dupler and Charley Pryor, stayed behind as the
Kenkon Maru
departed on October 8. Nominally commanded by the Lost Battalion’s leader, Lt. Col. Blucher S. Tharp, a second group of Americans, 477 strong, piled into the holds of the four-thousand-ton merchantman
Dai Nichi Maru,
fetid with the smell of animal waste. Joining hundreds of Dutch and Australians, under the overall command of Australian Brig. Arthur L. Varley, they left Batavia on October 11. Beginning with these two departures in the first half of October, at least five merchantmen made the run from Batavia northward by the end of 1942, largely emptying Bicycle Camp of Allied prisoners.

The saga of the so-called hell ships would become a grim chapter in the story of Japan’s treatment of its POWs. Ens. Charles D. Smith wrote, “The Japanese method of shipping troops is one man per ton, so on a two thousand ton ship, they transport 2,000 troops or prisoners.” There were three tiers of wooden platforms built all around the bulkheads of the hold. When the holds were jammed full, “the Japs made space,” said Julius B. Heinen of the 131st. “They just took a rifle butt and jammed it at the guy who was closest. Well, his reaction was to try to get away from the rifle butt that was coming at him, so he moved backwards with as much force as he could generate. That left another space where another man could get in.” They were packed in like farm animals, clothes soaked with their sweat and little liquid intake available to replace it. The crowding was so
bad that the Japanese merchant captain protested to Army authorities but was summarily overruled. When the rusty old
Dai Nichi Maru
departed Batavia, it was stuffed with three thousand POWs.

The act of transporting prisoners in unmarked ships carrying war matériel was against the Geneva Convention. As Rohan Rivett was herded by screaming guards into a hold on the
Kenkon Maru,
he saw that it was full of armored reconnaissance vehicles. Conditions on the ship were unfit for humans. “There had been cattle hauled in that ship, as I recall, and there was straw in the bilge,” said Howard Charles. The ship reeked of its earlier cargo. Down in the hold, the temperatures approached 120 degrees. There was no circulation, no air to breathe, nowhere for a dysentery patient to run ten times an hour. If you opened a porthole, you got as much seawater as air. Enterprising sailors got fresh water by bleeding steam from the engines of the ship’s cargo crane. They had to duck and cover whenever a perplexed engineer came looking to see why his steam pressure had fallen.

The journey out of Batavia was a short one, just three days. Fortunately for the prisoners, the Allied submarine offensive against Japanese merchantmen had yet to reach full fiery bloom. When subs roamed without hindrance later in the war, they would exact a terrible toll on these uniquely vulnerable human cargoes. By day the men roasted inside the stinking enclosure of a hull heated by the unblinking equatorial sun. At night they thrashed through haunted dreams. Those prisoners who had compasses said the ship was headed north and speculated that their destination could be Singapore or maybe even Japan itself. Because the
Dai Nichi Maru
’s skipper didn’t have charts of the waters north of Java, he sailed only by day. Each sunset he dropped anchor.
Perth
survivor Ray Parkin wrote, “It was a night of darkness and heat and drugged stupor; of entangled bodies which flung unconscious arms and legs athwart each other so that, on awakening, it was hard to tell which limbs were your own. You were conscious of having far too many arms and legs.” Men with the slightest sense of claustrophobia had raging breakdowns.

On the third morning, those few who got topside to relieve themselves could see all around them a rabble of islands and scattered islets whose rocky shores were garnished with scraggy foliage. The steep red slopes of the mainland lay ahead. The Japanese guards didn’t let them gawk for long. They chased them back down into
the hold. But the curious prisoners kept pushing topside, “like froth from a boiling saucepan,” Ray Parkin wrote.

For the men on both ships, the common mystery of their destination ended when the chunking rumble of the coal-fired steam engines stopped, the hatches opened to sky, and the men stretched their legs and climbed on deck. As the breeze caressed them, they saw they had entered a large harbor. Descending the gangway under guard, they set their sore feet, at last, on land. They were the newest tenants of proud Singapore.