Ship of Ghosts (26 page)

Ens. Charles D. Smith and coxswain Red Huffman, old hands from Turret Two, washed ashore on a small island about three
hundred yards off St. Nicholas Point. Worn beyond hope, they slept until daylight on March 2 and woke to find that five others had joined them, Marine sergeant Joe Lusk and four sailors. The presence of Japanese ships and aircraft complicated the job of reaching the Java mainland, but in the morning a rainsquall passed through, providing sufficient medium-range concealment for them to swim ashore safely by daylight. They gathered themselves on the beach, slipped across the Japanese-patrolled coast road, then climbed to high ground and looked over the other side of the hill to the sea.

About five miles down the beach, they could see six or eight transports anchored off St. Nicholas Point. Beyond them, prowling the edge of Bantam Bay, was a light cruiser, three destroyers, and some patrol boats. No doubt the Japanese were still reeling from the sudden, spectral appearance of Allied cruisers in their midst. The price the two ships had extracted from the landing operation was plain to see. Swimming ashore, more than a few
Houston
survivors saw the hulks of three large Japanese merchant ships, sunken and lying on their sides, as well as a seaplane tender or some other kind of major auxiliary vessel with its flight deck mostly awash.

The problem with the survivors’ proto-heroic efforts at evasion and escape was that ultimately there was no way out. All Allied personnel who could manage it had fled to Tjilatjap and evacuated Java a week before. Now there were no ships or planes left to catch. Though there remained some ground battles yet to be fought for control of the island, the surviving sailors were stuck well behind Japanese lines, in a terrible position to link up with friendly troops. What the location and number of the few remaining Allied units might be, no one quite seemed to know.

B
efore their ships were sunk together, the sailors of the
Houston
and the
Perth
had been no more than friendly strangers. With a wide ocean stretching between them, they waved from distant rails but seldom saw each other for the man beneath the uniform. The collective ordeal propelled them into a deeper alliance; many would end it as lifelong friends. “Those Aussies,” said Otto Schwarz. “If you ever have to get captured, get captured with Aussies.”

One of the traits the Americans seemed to have in common with the Australians was a boundless sense of the possible. Unlike the British, who struck many of the Americans as repressed by traditions and hierarchies, or the Dutch colonials, orderly and risk-averse like landed gentry, the Australians tended to be maverick optimists. While the Dutch were preparing themselves for surrender, the American and Australian sailors had fight left in them and showed it.

In fact, for some survivors of the
Perth,
it wasn’t enough merely to reach shore on Java or some barren island in Sunda Strait. There were a couple of well-led groups that hatched plans to travel like castaways all the way home to Australia. They built boats and jury-rigged them for sea. They set sail and felt their way home, navigating by starlight, convinced that their war had only begun. Going home was an option unavailable to all but the most fantasy-prone Americans. But if
the Aussies had their way, they might yet fulfill Admiral Glassford’s February 28 order sending them to Tjilatjap in preparation for a run down under.

Leading seaman Keith Gosden—who had flown suddenly and exuberantly off the
Perth
when the torpedo hit near Y turret’s lobby—refused to be rescued when he had his chance. Alongside his raft came an Imperial Navy destroyer. Already holding
Perth
survivors in custody, its crew threw down lines. One of them called, “Come aboard,” but Gosden and his shipmates saw rescue as a synonym for surrender and pushed off from the warship. A
Perth
man shouted, “You know where to stick it, mug—we’d rather drown!” The Japanese replied, “So, you say Nippon no bloody good. You wait till tomorrow.” The ship vanished.

Soon afterward the tables were turned. Gosden felt someone pulling at his legs. Startled, he looked down and saw his assailant: a swimming Japanese soldier with a rifle and in full battle gear trying to get aboard his raft. The survivors of the
Houston
and the
Perth
were not the only victims of the Battle of Sunda Strait to contend with the violent sea. All around Gosden and his fellow survivors imperial troops floundered, some facedown, dead and drowned, others struggling toward the raft, holding their rifles “like periscopes.” When the soldier grabbing at Gosden tried to say something, the sailor replied with a sharp kick to the face. The soldier reached again for the Australian sailor’s boots—he had kept them in anticipation of getting ashore, but they made fair weapons too. Gosden kicked at the face again and again until it was no longer there to be kicked. His resistance spurred his shipmates to a rather frenzied defense of the raft. Soon the only Japanese visible nearby were facedown and inert. They were Gosden’s enemy, and he would neither accept rescue by them nor do them that favor. He was going home. As he would remind himself on the difficult journey ahead:
There’s a plan for every man, and when that plan is completed that is the end. This is not my time. My death is not determined yet. I will get home.

By first light on March 1, the southerly flow through Sunda Strait was carrying Keith Gosden and his float full of survivors into the wedge of sea separating Toppers and Sangiang Islands. Gosden’s shipmate, Lieutenant Gillan, and his boys, like the Americans Hamlin and Huffman and Harris and Schwarz and so many others, were able to scramble ashore. Gosden and his mates went for a ride.

Toppers Island, near the up-current northeastern end of Sunda
Strait, was a small lump of rock that sported an important lighthouse. Survivors of both the
Houston
and the
Perth
found refuge on its compact shore. Sangiang Island, larger and more verdant, was visible as a low line of rocks, fringed by bushes and taller palm trees that enclosed a narrow inner plain full of broad-leafed swordgrass and younger banana palms. Watching the islands as they appeared to slide north along the distant mainland coast, Gosden could see that he might be missing his only chance to reach land before the current expelled him remorselessly into the Indian Ocean. He told his shipmates he was going to swim for Sangiang. They scoffed. He persisted. The argument was not settled until Gosden slid off the raft and began swimming, along with a persuadable Royal Australian Air Force corporal, Ronald Bradshaw. The waters near Sangiang’s shore whorled and ripped, sometimes bubbling like rapids. Fifty yards from the beach Gosden and Bradshaw got caught in this watery revolving door and were spun out farther from the island.

Many others had fought these currents and lost. From Lt. Joseph Dalton’s group, two American sailors, seaman first class Isaac A. Black and signalman first class Edward T. Carlyle, set out for the Java shore. They dived off the raft and rode a shore-bound current for a time, but Lieutenant Dalton could soon see that they were moving faster down-current than toward shore. Black, about a half mile south of Dalton and his men, seemed to be in trouble. He began waving and shouting, but the wind and waves erased his words. Carlyle was farther away but apparently having better luck. Somehow he had gotten on board a banca boat, which he began rowing in Dalton’s direction. But when another boat, a native fishing craft, was spotted heading in their direction, the men in Dalton’s raft took their attention away from their two distant shipmates. Pursuing their own survival, they piled from the raft into the small craft, nearly swamping it, giddily showering their rescuers with the cash they had in the pockets of their khakis. When they finally settled in, they realized they had lost sight of Black and Carlyle. “They had both disappeared,” wrote Bill Weissinger. “It is a mystery we could never find an answer for.”

Keith Gosden had better outcomes in mind for himself. Moving again toward Sangiang, he treaded water for a while to catch his breath, and as he did the current brought a body his way. The body was on its back, arms outstretched. As it drew nearer, the Australian
recognized it as a
Perth
telegraphist, Peter Nelson. As Nelson drifted nearer still, Gosden was startled to realize that he was alive—asleep in fact, and snoring robustly. When Gosden yelled and splashed water on him, the telegraphist awoke and, sleepily incensed, asked, “What’s biting you?” But the risks were apparent: they were drifting so fast that they stood to miss the island altogether. Gosden waved at Nelson and Bradshaw, indicating he was going to swim for Sangiang’s beach. Again the currents seized him, but this time he was pulled toward the island’s sheltered lee side, where the waters relaxed and purposeful swimming became possible. The Adelaide native chose a wave with the shape and strength to take him in. Hitting the shallows in an avalanche of foam, he felt the redemptive stinging scrape of live coral against his belly.

Twenty-two Australians gathered at Sangiang, eventually congregating under the leadership of Lt. Cdr. P. O. L. “Polo” Owen, the
Perth
’s paymaster. Owen took charge and split them into groups and they went right to work. Ducking the odd Japanese aircraft, they gathered corn, green papaws, tomatoes, native tobacco, and coconuts. They found some tins of kerosene and used it to dissolve the corrosive coat of bunker oil that clung to them. They scoured the beach for useful treasures, prominent among them a wooden lifeboat well stocked with provisions, oars, sails, and flares. They found three sheep shut up in a hut, slaughtered them, and made a fine pink stew. And they slept. Hard.

They rose the next day to find four of their number missing, along with the lifeboat. Someone said, “If that’s the sort they are, we’re better without them.” What was there to do but accept the frail criminality of human nature? All agreed it would be a death sentence to stay where they were.

Seeing Japanese air activity in the east, Commander Owen guessed that Batavia was an enemy hive. There was no point trying to reach it. But he felt if the men could get from Sangiang to the Java mainland, they might find transportation there to Tjilatjap and rejoin Allied forces. On Wednesday, March 4, having gorged on as much stew as they could manage with bare hands, shells, or palm leaves as spoons, they overloaded a twenty-five-man boat with food and forty-one souls and shoved off for the last battlefield in the Dutch East Indies.

Once on Java, Owen wanted to go to Labuhan by land. Keith Gosden and some others preferred to travel by sea. The seafarers,
who found a leader in Lt. John A. Thode, felt they could get all the way to Australia on their own. Owen and Thode agreed to disagree as to means, but they settled on an interim rendezvous at Labuhan. Owen and one group would walk there. Thode and his group would go by sea, hugging the coast.

Owen’s journey turned quickly into a deadly misadventure. Four of his fellow travelers, unable to keep his aggressive pace after a few miles, decided to head for Batavia instead of Labuhan. Their reward for breaking ranks was an ambush by Javanese hillmen that left three dead and the survivor badly slashed but able to tell the story. Owen and the others continued south and their line straggled out before they reached a small village. Coming to a rise in the road, they glimpsed the sea. Owen saw a lifeboat out there, oars dipping and pulling, up and down, and the sight of Thode’s crew reenergized his steps through the paddies and coconut plantations. He headed a line that stretched out now for miles.

Just before sundown, Owen came to another village and met a young man, well dressed in a linen coat and a black and orange sarong, who pointed the way to Labuhan. The man said he had worked as a schoolmaster in Batavia before the Japanese came. He warned them of armed bands of Javanese who had looted and burned Labuhan’s Chinese-owned shops. They could be relied upon to do worse to white men, he said, adding that there had not been any Dutchmen in Labuhan for some time, and that transportation to Tjilatjap was unavailable.

Marching into a sparsely developed fishing outpost, Commander Owen’s party saw out in its bay a modest fleet of small gondolas painted green and scarlet and yellow. One boat among them looked decidedly out of place. It was the lifeboat carrying Lieutenant Thode’s party. Owen called out and waved to them. As he led his men toward the beach, a score of parang-armed natives picked up their stride and started trailing them. The Australians began running. They passed through a coconut grove and reached the water. They sloshed quickly through the coral-bottomed shallows until the water was deep enough to swim. Reaching Thode’s lifeboat, they were pulled aboard and were reunited with their shipmates from Sangiang.

Discouraging though Owen’s experience ashore might have been, he held on to his wish to go over land to Tjilatjap. He pressed the issue again with Thode, and the lieutenant finally had no choice but to
stand firm. The disagreement endured. Thode returned his superior to land with some two dozen others. As Owen’s men vanished among the huts of Labuhan, Thode and his nine castaways, including Gosden, rowed their lifeboat back to sea. It was then that their mini-epic adventure truly began.