Weller's War

by George Weller

  We still pursued our creeping course along the shore. The captain knew the inadequacy of six lifeboats to carry a hundred times as many people and did not dare to turn to sea. The passengers, fat with life belts, clogged the passageways, uncertain whether they would be bombed from below or above.

  A burning sun beamed upon the greased lifeboat davits. I gave an unknown woman the journal of my fourteen months of wartime evacuations with the request that if her lifeboat reached shore she send it to the Daily News.

  Nine returning bombers passed, parallel to the ship. Then, before the siren could even blurt the first peep of the quadruple signal meaning air attack, machine-gun bullets and the cannon shells came directly into the main saloon below the bridge. Sixty persons were instantly upon the floor, trying to crawl under benches. Somehow I crawled into a B-deck passageway. Then came more hammering of steel and splintering of wood.

  Whether we were being shelled by a submarine or attacked by an airplane was impossible to tell. I saw a curl of blue smoke arising beside one bulkhead door from an incendiary bullet.

  “Stop pushing me,” said the little Eurasian woman ahead of me on the jammed stairs. When she discovered that I was attempting to lace her huge, mattresslike life jacket she grew quieter.

  For an interval we arose. Then came again the terrible hammering and tearing of wood, running like a xylophone the full length of the ship. No motors could be heard, nothing but explosions. Each time the corridors were jammed with bodies. As we struggled downward attacks began upon the sides of the ship, increasing our belief that we were being shelled from shore by the Japs, who had already crossed the island. Then we were machine-gunned and shelled also from the seaward side.

  Between attacks, we lay sweating and prone, some Malays and some whites, too, covering their eyes like the evil-fearing monkey curling into an embryonic ball.

  I found the whole right shoulder of my bushjacket uniform drenched with blood, which had soaked even my glasses case. But I was not wounded. Three wounded lay in the corridors, but none whom I could recognize as having been beside me. Four times the death tattoo was played upon us. The rear gunner got a bullet through his hat, another across his uniform.

  For more than an hour after the last attack, all of us lay on the iron decks and in the darkness of closed compartments. Then slowly arose bodies dented with their own lifejackets, the cork of which was in some cases torn away.

  There had been two Navy Zeros. One lifeboat was shot open. Hardly a ventilator, or stretch of canvas, but had been riddled. The Japs simply had shot all their ammunition at us.

  But nothing could make us go faster than our eight knots. The sun was still high, it was hardly noon. We crept toward shore and entered the tiny harbor of Patjitan. There were no natives visible. The captain lowered the boats and asked all who wished to row ashore to leave. He said that we had only a “slight to perhaps fifty-fifty chance” of escaping. About three hundred went ashore and were last seen trailing up a narrow path into country where the Japs spearhead was hardly twenty miles away.

  Under cover of darkness, we again crept out to sea. Eleven days of sleeping upon open decks with life belts always entwined on one arm brought us, with our American wounded, to safety.

  TELLS HOW JAVA LEVELED BASE BEFORE INVASION

  Somewhere in Australia—March 17, 1942

  How successfully Singapore's naval base was destroyed by British demolition squads remains uncertain, but Soerabaya's annihilation by the alert, well-prepared Dutch navy men was accomplished with complete thoroughness. Nothing that flames could consume, explosives rend or sea water engulf was left when the first Jap patrols entered the smoking naval base.

  Although the Dutch had failed before the war to sell the Allies on the fact that Soerabaya was the superior base, events proved the claim. Singapore's huge, empty buildings, underground oil stores and great drydock were liabilities after Jap bombers gained the upper hand and their artillery began shelling the island.

  But even after enemy bombers from Bali were pounding Soerabaya, Allied warships, limping back from the sad battle in the Java Sea, still found succor and help. British submarines long depended upon Soerabaya's big, excellent workshops for the outfitting that Singapore's yard was never able to supply. American destroyers and submarines found little lacking there.

  This correspondent paid his second visit to Soerabaya three days before demolition began and accompanied a party of Dutch naval demolitionists aboard the last ship that ran Japan's cruiser and submarine blockade south to Australia. Without panic, following a prearranged plan, they had carried out their total destruction on three separate sites—the naval airbase at Morokrembangan, the naval base at Oedjoeng, and the commercial harbor at Perak, all parts of the Soerabaya waterfront.

  With Dutch method they had divided the demolition into two phases, manual destruction and heavy destruction. Manual destruction began on Sunday, March 1, after Vice-Admiral Helfirch, formerly commander of the United Nations' naval forces in the Southwest Pacific, had left by plane carrying the Netherlands East Indies' most secret documents. Manual destruction was done by navy executives themselves. All documents were burned. With fire axes—ordinarily used to fight air-raid fires—file cases, desks and chairs were smashed into small kindling. Telephones and switchboards were smashed into bits with heavy hammers.

  The radio workshops alone employed 250 mechanics. Hammer in hand, the superintendent walked down the line of scores of big American-made radio tubes, each worth more than $500, shattering them like wine glasses. The office staffs ended their work by sprinkling kerosene over the interiors of old buildings.

  The heavy destruction occurred on Monday, March 2. Fifty specially deputized members of the naval police carried out the task in 6½ hours.

  On the Sunday, Jap fighters and bombers had been sent in nine raids over the base, each time attacking from a different direction, like spokes running in toward the hub of a wheel, with characteristically careful synchronization. The flames from Monday's demolition told the Japs that destruction was afoot on a far greater scale than they could accomplish and they took their bombs elsewhere.

  With cotton in their ears, Dutch naval police first destroyed the coastal guns, exploding dynamite within the barrels. The drydocks were a harder problem. First the pumps in all were destroyed. The fifty-ton little dock for the use of seaplanes was quickly demolished. Next two floating drydocks of 2000 and 3000 tons were disabled—they are so heavy nothing on earth can float them—and sunk.

  A 1500-ton floating drydock proved a harder nut because, not being so heavy, it was unsinkable after the pumps were ruined. A disabled Dutch destroyer was placed inside. Eventually the sides were blown open with bombardment shells from the submarine drydock. Then it sank.

  Next came the 4000-ton drydock at Perak. A disabled Allied destroyer was placed within. Water was allowed to enter, causing the destroyer to turn slowly upon its side and sink within the drydock. Then the drydock itself was submerged, both sinking together to eternal rest on the sea bottom inside their harbor home.

  At exactly 10 o'clock, the magazines on the island of Madura were exploded in 62 huge concussions. An air-raid warning sounded so that all precautions would be taken to protect children against the blasts which, it was thought, might get out of control. Five great hangars, long the mother-sheds for the American Navy's PBY flying boats, were blasted. The engine workshop, after the lathes and motors were all smashed, blew heavenward. Once 2000 of the base's 16,000 men worked there.

  Torpedo magazines holding from five to six hundred torpedo shells each were exploded individually, while N.E.I. submarine commanders—forced only the night before to the sea bottom by cavalcades of Jap destroyers preceding their convoys—watched with set faces. One sub commander told this correspondent that he had lain upon the sea floor, in 150 feet of water, from six Saturday evening till noon Sunday, while depth charges made his little submersible, which looks like a toothpick beside American subs, shake until its gaug
es were all smashed. Overhead passed the churning propellers of 34 Japanese transports, accompanied by 11 warships. The destroyers lingered above him, depth-charging for eighteen hours.

  Once charges of picrine were laid, the flames began their work. The smoke grew into monstrous billows, carried westward across Java by a high wind till the long funeral train spread the entire length of the shore. Black clouds shut out the sun. Those who had seen the destroyed oilfields of Tarakan and Balikpapan (both in Borneo) and Palembang (capital of Sumatra) said they had never witnessed anything comparable.

  Thus the Dutch carried out punctiliously, systematically and completely the final destruction of their greatest eastern fortress. Few naval officers had time even to see their families. A train was waiting to take them to Tjilatjap. Their wives and children are in Jap hands—and some are known to be dead—but their war goes on.

  A ‘TRAVELER’ OF ARKANSAS IS JAVA HERO

  Perth, Southwest Australia—March 20, 1942

  A grey-haired Yankee doctor whose fourteen years of fighting malaria in the Orient has not deprived him of his Ozark Mountain twang was awarded the United States Navy Cross in record time here.

  Lt. Commander C. McAlmont Wassell, the 58-year-old physician, brought out the last American Navy wounded from Java on the same little inter-island steamer on which this correspondent escaped.

  The doctor was standing by the wounded in the hospital at Jokjakarta, to which they had been transferred to provide safety from the incessant bombing raids on Soerabaya. There, under Dr. A. C. Zwaan, famous surgeon of the Netherlands East Indies, wounded sailors, three of them unable to walk, were given “as careful, efficient and thoroughly modern care as the best hospital in the United States could've offered,” Dr. Wassell said.

  But the American Flying Fortress base, where all machines had been concentrated after the destructive surprise raids by Jap fighters on Malang, was also at Jokjakarta, and Jap reconnaissance soon discovered this. The Army Fortress command, when it departed from Java on Sunday, March 1, at six o'clock, had the cabins of its ships crammed with ground personnel and the original hope to fly the wounded to Australia was of necessity abandoned.

  The morning after the last Fortress left, Dr. Wassell's wounded lying in their beds heard a big Jap bomber fleet pound the deserted field to bits. The Japs were approaching overland to cut Java in the middle.

  After repeated attempts to telephone the American embarkation party at Tjilatjap, Dr. Wassell decided to take the initiative. Amid the beds of the wounded he explained that if they remained they would become prisoners and asked how many could endure the hundred-mile journey over mountain roads to Tjilatjap.

  Every hand was raised except that of a single yeoman, obviously unable to move. Most of the wounded were survivors of bombings on their cruisers. Several of their shipmates had already been buried in Tjilatjap.

  With the unfailing, cool cooperation of the Dutch authorities, Wassell managed to obtain automobiles and gasoline and the agonizing journey began.

  This correspondent first saw Dr. Wassell on the morning of March 3, shortly after I arose from my billiard-table bed. “If you can get my wounded aboard your bow you'll be doing me a great favor,” the doctor said to me in an unmistakable Arkansas drawl.

  The Dutch authorities at first demurred at the risk because the ship was already chartered for a demolition party from Soerabaya and sinking was considered probable. But, through Dr. Wassell's efforts, consent was finally obtained. It was fortunate because the ship, although fiercely shelled and machine-gunned by the Jap Navy Zeros, was the last to run successfully the cordon of Jap submarines and cruisers in the Indian Ocean exits from Java.

  Dr. Wassell stayed loyally with the wounded during the raid, helping the Dutch Red Cross men bind up new casualties among the approximately six hundred passengers. “What I think was most interesting was that I gave out more than five hundred glasses of water after the planes left,” said the doctor. “That shows how fear makes human bodies exude perspiration.”

  Again, when the Dutch captain sneaked his vessel into the little Javanese inlet of Patjitan and half the passengers accepted his offer to place them ashore, Dr. Wassell put the question to the American Navy men, recumbent upon the bulkheads, whether they wished to take the risk of being sunk by the Japs. Unanimously they decided to risk the open sea, even though the Dutch gun crew, machine-gunned in the action, decided for the shore.

  When the Dutch doctor was obliged to stay behind with the non-American wounded, Dr. Wassell became the ship's physician and served as such throughout the eleven-day trip to Australia.

  Dr. Wassell's investigations in preventive medicine, particularly malaria, have brought him three Rockefeller fellowships, one being held at Peiping [Beijing]. Despite his hillbilly accent, this Arkansas traveler speaks flawless Chinese and his war career, like MacArthur's, is just coming to public notice.

  DYING JAVA'S LAST MESSAGE PICKED UP BY

  FLEEING SHIP—MALAYAN YOUTH STAYS AT POST

  Perth, Western Australia—March 24, 1942

  Java's last faint message still lingers in the minds of those who were able, by luck or providence, to slip through the Japanese cordon of cruisers, submarines, destroyers and aircraft carriers that before and after the Java Sea battle sank several Allied warships including the U.S. gunboat Asheville, south of the Indonesian island barrier in the Indian Ocean.

  The message was heard aboard the little inter-island Dutch freighter carrying a naval demolition party and this correspondent. The naval party had aided in the destruction of Soerabaya. The freighter, the radio of which caught the weak valedictory, was itself attacked by Japanese fighters and now proves to have been the last vessel escaping from Java, subsequent vessels being many days overdue.

  The radiogram was sent by one of these Malayan youths, westernized in dress and speech, whom the Dutch, as the English in Malaya, used to carry the burden of fighting fires after air raids, succoring the wounded, sounding alarms, enforcing blackout restrictions, delivering messages and doing everything else that required quick, intelligent action and a self-sacrificing spirit. They were impressionable teenage youths, eager to serve long hours and trustful that the British and Dutch leaders would protect them, as they had filled their minds with western culture.

  In Malaya, many such Eurasian “Andy Hardys” had passed what corresponds to American college entrance examinations and, although barred by preferential standards and financial handicaps from further advancement, were intellectually at the same level as English public school boys entering Oxford and Cambridge, having passed identical London-made examinations.

  In Java and Sumatra, a more liberal Dutch policy sent many such young men to Holland for advanced study and, provided they had even a touch of Dutch blood, gave them full citizenship.

  Java, Sumatra, Celebes and Borneo were covered by a network of air-raid listening posts, mostly upon the beaches of outlying islands and promontories, manned by these young men.

  Binoculars in hand, they would stand on lookouts, watching Jap planes from Kendari, Balikpapan, Macassar, Bandjermasin, Palembang and Bali concentrate upon their home island. In scores of lonely outposts like Madura, Billiton and Bangka Islands, with only a little knapsack of food beside them, in camouflaged huts, they waited by an automatic radio. When Jap bombers and fighters appeared, they transmitted the height, distance and direction of the flight, enabling the handful of American fighters to meet the attack.

  The dialogue that our freighter's radio feebly picked up was between one of the three chief Dutch air-raid warning headquarters—in western, central and eastern Java—and a youth who was sitting in a beach hut directly at the point where the Japs were making one of their supplementary landings after the first triple invasion. Here's how the interchange went:

  “I see enemy transports with troops getting into barges offshore. What shall I do?”

  “Remain at your post. Continue sending details.”

  “Many barges are now
approaching shore. I have no revolver. What shall I do?”

  “Remain at your post. Continue sending.”

  “The Japs have begun firing at my hut. I cannot escape.”

  The dialogue ended there. Whether the young man, who remained at his post like Herculaneum's famous sentry, until the end came, was killed or captured was not revealed.

  Unless the United States can promptly begin political as well as belligerent activity in the South Pacific, what will happen to 5 million such youths, among 70 million Malays, after the Japanese take over the responsibilities the English and Dutch have been forced to surrender?

  JAPS TOOK 900 TEXANS IN JAVA, REFUGEE REVEALS

  Guerrilla Band in Java Awaits Allied Invasion

  Somewhere in Australia—October 13-14, 1942

  Somewhere between 800 and 900 American soldiers, chiefly members of the Texas National Guard, were taken prisoner in Java, together with some few of the Army Air Corps. Furthermore, a certain number of Navy men, survivors of the cruiser sinking in Sunda Straits, are known to have been held in Java.

  A handsome Dutchman in his late twenties provided this correspondent with the first authentic account of what has happened to prisoners in the East Indies since the triple Japanese landings, under an umbrella of bombers and fighters backed by a heavy cruiser and destroyer force, overwhelmed Java.

  This boyish-faced infantry leader, who cannot be named for reasons of security, is one of the most remarkable officers who has yet emerged from the war scene. His modest, gentle manner and his dark, sensitive, lean and rather un-Dutch face belie his astonishing adventures.

  His escape from Java was his second successful flight from an Axis prison camp. He was captured by the Germans in the invasion of Holland and was first incarcerated in a Silesian prison camp in eastern Germany. From there he escaped last spring and traveled on foot completely around the bayonet-guarded borders of the Bohemian protectorate, through Saxony and Bavaria into Switzerland, thence across France, Spain and Portugal to England, joining the Free Dutch forces there.