Cruiser (64 page)
Authors: Mike Carlton
Jap guards were all around and as we walked in they gave us each a punch or a kick to put us in our place. We spent the next six weeks on the stone floor of the cinema wedged in so tightly that we had to sit between each other's legs. It was unbearably hot, and at night time we had to lie against each other like rats in a cage. It was a horrible experience. There was one particular Jap captain who was especially nasty. He kept telling us we should be ashamed, and if we had any courage we would shoot ourselves.
All we got to drink was a cup of rank water and some dirty
boiled rice each day with a bit of miso soup slopped over it, so we were all half-mad with thirst and hunger. We were not allowed to exercise, and our toilet was a bucket which was constantly overflowing. The stench was unbearable. Dysentery was rife, and many of the men dropped down dead, or just simply didn't wake up. There was no medicine of any description.
I had a badly infected ear which was probably due to the oil we floated in after we were sunk. I was going insane with the pain, so one day I levered a piece of stone out of the wall and prodded inside my ear with the sharp end. About an egg cup full of pus shot out, giving me enormous relief.
4
Again, Stening and the Sick Berth Attendants Jock Cunningham and Andy Mitchell did their best. But without drugs, or even clean water, malaria and dysentery began to spread, and those with burns or wounds were essentially beyond medical help. By day and night, the theatre echoed with cries of pain and distress. Bill Bee's right leg had swollen like some grotesque balloon, with black blood spurting from the shrapnel wound whenever he moved. Stening arranged for him to be transferred from the cinema to the jail, where they had heard there were two doctors from the
Houston
. Commander Bill Epstein, rescued by the Australians at Topper's Island, and Lieutenant Clement âButch' Burroughs, another US Navy surgeon, took one look at the leg and, to Buzzer's consternation, began honing a hacksaw blade on the concrete floor:
I recall being held down whilst someone grabbed my right foot, forcing my right leg back to the straight position, while at the same time an excruciating pain shot through my body. At this point I passed into oblivion and remember nothing until regaining consciousness in what turned out to be the local morgue â¦
â¦it appears that everything was set for an amputation, but with the timely appearance of a native doctor on the scene a change of plan was decided. He suggested that an attempt
should be made to clean out decayed flesh and look for the piece of metal rather than remove the leg altogether. Evidently this chap's visit to the gaol was only a fleeting affair and unfortunately I never had the opportunity to meet and thank him for what turned out to be the correct decision. Without x-ray equipment or anaesthetics, limited supplies of dressings and only home made surgical instruments at their disposal the doctors' task was a most unenviable one.
5
Waking in the morgue, surrounded by naked corpses, Buzzer found that his leg had been saved and the wound sewn back together with string from a rice bag. The pain had subsided to a dull ache. Perversely, some Japanese soldiers, amazed at his recovery, plied him with cigarettes and fruit. Two American sailors carried him back to the jail, where he was found a rough stretcher to sleep on and a bamboo cane that allowed him to hobble to the latrine. Young and fit, he began to recover.
In both the theatre and the jail, the Serang days ground on in boredom, spiked with the pangs of hunger, thirst and longing for home. Men daydreamed of days past and better days to come. Fred Lasslett decided to escape. A former reservist, he was 22 years old, from the Melbourne suburb of Footscray. He had been in
Perth
since her Mediterranean days, working as a wireman â the navy term for an electrician. Another of
Perth
's diarists, he wrote in the form of letters to his girlfriend, Nola Caldwell, who was a singer at the famous Leggett's Ballroom in Prahran. On the night of the sinking, Fred had been in the electrical repair party in the Plot behind the bridge and he dived overboard from the fo'c'sle after the abandon-ship order. A buzz going around the Serang theatre reckoned that Australian troops were still fighting in the hills of West Java, and he decided to join them. He chose his moment. In a tropical downpour on the night of Friday 20 March, he jumped a wall behind the theatre and set off to walk the 100 kilometres east to Batavia.
Ducking through the streets of Serang, then weaving his
way through paddy fields and groves of coconut and banana palms, he made good progress all that night and the next day. A friendly rice farmer cut open a coconut for him to eat. But, that afternoon, hiding in some bushes, he found himself surrounded by local villagers:
Dear Nola
Once again, I start my weekly letter â¦
Out into the ring of gesticulating natives I crawled, and when I rose to my feet I was confronted by a crowd of roughly 40 to 50 men, women and children. Imagine my relief when, instead of a native rushing at me with a knife, one of them offered me a coconut which I gladly accepted.
After I drank the milk and ate a portion of the coconut, the procession started across the paddy fields towards the village with the proud and haughty prisoner in the lead. Or something like that.
During the walk I asked the leader as to whether he was going to hand me over to the Japanese, and with many signs and the little English he knew, he told me that he and his friends hated the Japs and were going to hide me.
6
For another day, they did hide him, but it was too good to last. Eventually, a village headman decided it was safe no longer. He was given up at a Japanese police station, returned to the Serang theatre and hauled into a room for questioning by five army officers. One officer bashed him and demanded to be shown where he had jumped the wall. Then they beat him again, and he was frogmarched down to the jail and thrown up against a wall:
People say that during the last moments of a person's life, flashes of their past deeds and misdeeds appear before their eyes. Well, personally speaking, my mind was a blank. I couldn't think of a single thing. My only thought was what a lovely day it was.
Fred stared at his guards, unflinching. They stared back. Two soldiers raised and cocked their rifles. The Sergeant began to count:
ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi â¦
â¦and stopped at the number eight. There was what seemed to Fred an endless silence. Then the soldiers lowered their rifles, grabbed him by an arm and threw him into a solitary-confinement cell. A day later, his reprieve was confirmed. When the Japanese found out he was a wireman, they gave him the job of jail electrician.
The
Perth
men stayed for six weeks in Serang, but their numbers were dwindling. On 4 April, five of their officers, including Polo Owen, Sam Stening and John Harper, were suddenly taken away to Batavia for interrogation, and a day later they were put on a ship for Japan. On 13 April, and again on the 15th, trucks ground up to the jail and the cinema. The remaining prisoners, Australian and American, were loaded aboard to the now-familiar chorus of snarled orders and driven the 100 kilometres east to Batavia to what had been a colonial army barracks. They would call this place the Bicycle Camp, because the Dutch had kept a battalion of troops with bicycles there.
As they clambered down from the trucks â some ravaged by dysentery, all filthy, hungry and thirsty â they heard Australian accents. The camp was full of men from the AIF's 7th Division who had also been captured in Java. Some of the diggers still had their army rations, and there were tinned sausages for dinner that night, with a block of Cadbury's chocolate and 20 cigarettes per man. The buildings were of brick and concrete, airy and spacious, with red-tiled roofs and verandahs, and, more surprising still, there was electric light, running water and sewered toilets. After the nightmare of Serang, this was a big improvement.
The Turnbull boys from Brisbane found each other. John, the Petty Officer Stoker, ran into his younger brothers Bill and Ken, privates in the army's 2/29th Battalion. He had no idea they'd been in Java.
At first, the Japanese ran the Bicycle Camp with a light hand, even setting up a canteen where staples such as soap and toothpaste and small amounts of food â some eggs or vegetables â could be bought with Dutch colonial guilders. The prisoners largely managed their own affairs, under the eye of the senior Australian officer, Brigadier Arthur Blackburn, who had won a Victoria Cross in the First World War and had formally accepted the surrender of the Vichy French at Damascus in this one.
Blackburn and his men were also the victims of a piece of gross political expediency masquerading as military necessity. Exactly like the men of
Perth
, they had been ordered into a trap. Three thousand men of the 7th Division, including his own 2/3rd Machine Gun Battalion, had been on the way home from the Middle East in the troopship
Orcades
when they were diverted to the defence of Java late in February. This despite the fact that most of their equipment was on another ship heading for Fremantle. Blackburn was hurriedly promoted from lieutenant-colonel to brigadier and his men were hurled into the fighting south of Batavia, with the inevitable result. It was all over in ten days. Disgusted at the useless sacrifice â some hundred of his soldiers were killed or wounded â Blackburn reluctantly ordered the rest to surrender when the Dutch capitulated.
The
Perth
men stuck together. They were moved into Hut Eight, about 300 of them, and with the better food and sanitary conditions their health improved. After a few weeks, they were sent out on working parties â or
kumis
, as they learned to call them â often to Tanjung Priok, to clean up bomb damage or to unload ships. This was a treat â not for the work itself but because the trips outside the camp provided the chance for a little theft and horse-trading. The Javanese would sell them bananas or coconuts, sometimes cigarettes. Fred Skeels nicked a hubcap from a Mercedes car, which he cleaned and used as a plate â the only utensil he had.
After a couple of weeks, there was another stir when a new bunch of Americans arrived. These were some 500 men of the
2nd Battalion of the US Army's 131st Field Artillery, almost all of them Texans who, by coincidence, had been shipped to Australia in one of the convoys escorted by
Perth
before Christmas 1941. They, too, had been compelled to surrender when the Dutch threw in the towel. To the Australians, they were a glittering sight, still in full uniform, toting heavy kitbags and, as everyone quickly and correctly assumed, loaded with cash.
It was an opportunity too good to resist. In Hut Eight, the sailors set up a makeshift evening bazaar and a cafe to relieve the Yanks of their greenbacks. Elegantly lit by candles pilfered from the wharves at Priok, little stalls and shops sold whatever their proprietors had managed to beg, buy or steal on the working parties. You could make a good profit on a fried egg or a tin of jam or condensed milk, and cigarettes were almost beyond price. Isaac âIzzy' Herman, a young Jewish able seaman from North Perth, doubled his money selling biscuits and used the proceeds to help feed his mates. There was a difficult moment when the Americans bought what they thought were new flints for their Zippo cigarette lighters only to find out they were snips of ordinary fencing wire, but that was smoothed over as just a bit of an Aussie joke. In fact, the Australians and the Americans got on well, better with each other than they did with the Dutch, who, they thought, could sometimes be stand-offish and cold.
Some people organised classes and lectures on everything under the sun, from sport to French lessons, and, after they had settled in, they put on concerts. Fred Lasslett used his electrical skills to rig the stage lighting. Fred Skeels was an enthusiastic onlooker:
There was some excellent talent amongst the different nations of men, including a young Dutch soldier who had a beautiful voice. He was a bit effeminate and took the role of the leading lady in the various stage plays. At other times, some of the prisoners were good actors and would put on shows with transvestites or
others dressing up as the girls. We saw several shows including
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, and thoroughly enjoyed the string orchestra and brass band. The Japanese officers even used to come in and demand a front seat, so of course we obliged. They could then hear better when we finished up each concert by singing âGod Save the King'. Strangely, they didn't react to the provocation.
7
These must have been surreal occasions on an aromatic Java night: hundreds of prisoners, scrawny and unshaven, most clad only in shorts or the ubiquitous G-string, squatting in the dirt; a swaggering parade of sleek Japanese officers; rouged actors in the glow of the footlights, in wigs teased out of hemp from old rice bags and costumes designed by Frank Purtell, a soldier who had worked for the famous theatre company J. C. Williamson's; a lusty round of âKiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major' and âRoll Out the Barrel' before the British and American national anthems closed the show. The Japanese were so impressed that they produced a piano. Surreal, certainly, but precious and long remembered because, for those lingering moments, the sordid reality of camp life could be kept at bay.
Sport was another diversion. There was a volleyball competition between the Americans, Australians and the Dutch, won by the Texan artillerymen. The
Perth
boys had a couple of handy boxers in their midst, Jack âBluey' Ralston and Stan âJesse' James, who put up a show with Frank âGoldie' Pistole, a
Houston
man and light heavyweight champ of the US Asiatic Fleet. Jesse beat him.
Those were the good days. But violence and brutality were ever present, liable to flare at any time. In late April, a new camp commandant, Captain Suzuki, decided that the regime was too soft. As more and more Japanese guards were called up to fight on the front lines, they were replaced by Koreans who had been forcibly conscripted into the IJA. Treated brutally by their masters, the Koreans in turn vented their hatred on the prisoners. Many were out and out sadists who seemed to be
under orders to bash at will for such minor crimes as a man refusing to bow deeply enough.