Despite having a wife and three children who were hostages in the Hague, he departed immediately for the East Indies to join the colonial army. As an officer of native infantry in the area west of Solo, in central Java, he met and fought the Japs who landed near Renbang He is probably the only officer thus far among the Allies who has fought both the Germans and Japanese, surrendered to both, been captured by both and escaped from both.
After several weeks in Japanese hands, by means which he has not divulged the young captain escaped from camp and reached the shores of northwestern Java from the central Java prison camp. Being slight, dark-skinned and black-haired, instead of brown and rosy blond like most Dutchmen—even though not an “India boy” or half caste—the fugitive was able to pass as a Javanese. He joined forces with two other white Dutch army officers, one of whom, who had amateur yachting experience, managed to procure a 25-foot motorless open-cockpit catboat. The Japs had apparently discounted the possibility of any escapes after commandeering small boats, feeling secure because the prevailing monsoon wind blows away from the nearest point of Australian coast, seven hundred miles distant.
The Dutch soldiers outwitted the Nipponese by heading their tiny craft to Africa, across the waters of the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and Java, whose mastery still is disputed between the Jap, American and British navies.
Sneaking past the great volcano of Krakatoa, where the American cruiser Houston went down off Prinsen Island, and passing through Sunda Straits, using a small steamship chart torn from a tourist booklet, the trio sailed more than 2700 miles as the steamer plows and nearly 4000 miles, actually, to make their first landfall. This was Rodriguez Island, a speck about two hundred miles east of Mauritius and about six hundred miles from Madagascar.
“We had never expected to make it,” said the Dutchman, candidly. “The wind drove us along at a terrific speed. Because the Japs' patrols were out, on both the Javanese and Sumatran shores of Sunda, we could not make shore and hide. We had to sail straight through under their eyes in broad daylight.”
The voyagers were fully aware of starting off on a trip rivaling Captain Bligh's, which in sailing distance approximately equals that from New York to Italy.
“We took along forty-five days' provisions—all we could carry. A few miles south of Sunda a heavy wind suddenly snapped a mast in two and carried away our sail. Up to then we had plenty of water caught in the tarpaulin from rains. Then we had to rig our tarpaulin with blankets to make new sails. Our greatest treasure was our chronometer and two sextants, which made up for the crudity of our map.”
The voyagers lived chiefly on rice, boiled in rainwater over a small power stove. Their only other food was potatoes and corned beef. When the dim outline of Rodriguez showed over the bow of the gunwale the trio shook hands.
So that first-hand knowledge of conditions in Java be known in the three chief centers of the refugee government, one voyager started to America, another to England, the third to Australia.
Escapes from the Japs in Indonesia have been extremely rare and this is the first balanced account of what happened to the many stranded British, Dutch, Australians and Americans during the first six months of the Jap occupation.
Guerrilla forces, remnants of Allied troops who held on in Java to the last, are now battling on in the island's mountains, awaiting an Allied offensive to take over. “I believe our guerrillas would give active support to any landing attempt by the Allies but these forces can, at present, have only nuisance value and little means for offensive operations against Japan,” the Dutch officer said frankly.
Java, with its forty million people crowded upon a small island, is too highly civilized to offer more than a few mountain hideouts. The Japs hold garrisons in Batavia, Soerabaya, Rembang and cities in central Java like Jokjakarta and Solo, but prefer to avoid losing prestige in a campaign against guerrillas. The mountainous refuges above the gardenland of Java's terraced ricefields are relatively isolated and restrict the guerrillas' offensive activities. Moreover, the Japs are eager to avoid any fighting which would disturb their “peace and prosperity” campaign.
The treatment of Dutch civilians and colonial administrators was liberal and decent during the first few months, when the Japs made an intensive effort to persuade the Dutch to make a separate peace. In June, however, all white males from sixteen to sixty were snatched from their shops and plantations and herded into concentration camps. Women and children were ordered to leave their villas, and occupy houses in restricted sections closely watched by Jap-controlled police.
Japan's political plans in conquered regions where relatively large white populations exist—as in Java and Sumatra—are now clear. During the period of “rehabilitation and stabilization,” the Japs imprison the highest functionaries and military officers, along with troops, both white and native.
Complete disruption of economic life, after the conquest, means that the civilians must work for the Japs or starve. The Japs are holding out pledges of merciful treatment to enlist white civilians or retain those already engaged, especially technicians, granting them in return considerable freedom of movement, but paying them in Jap-fabricated inflationary “guilders.”
The duty of such temporary employees is to get the war-crippled public utilities, like railroads, power plants and waterworks, functioning again. If they refuse, or accede halfheartedly, they go to concentration camps and their families are forced to live from hand to mouth. If they agree, they can stay at large so long as they are useful and the Japs have no Japanese or native executives to replace them. When this period passes, all are indiscriminately packed into concentration camps and their enterprises taken over by Jap companies.
The troops are disciplined; no cases of Dutch women being molested have occurred in Java. Looting is not by force but by pumping out Jap “guilders” via a printing press. The object is to leave native or Dutch owners with their hands full of paper and the Japs with their hands full of manufactured goods. A rise in prices makes no difference because the presses simply run faster and print more money.
Like the Germans, the Japs had difficulty keeping shops open because the natives prefer to shut the doors, take what articles remain and flee to the hills, making caches there rather than to be continually cheated by this non-violent looting. The Japs have decreed that all shops must remain open and no articles be concealed. The shopkeepers, getting poorer with every Jap purchase, tried to cut down hours of business. Jap Army commanders retaliated with an order obliging all to remain open until ten at night—four hours beyond the usual closing time.
The Dutch captain described how yawning proprietors, barely able to stay awake behind their counters, are obliged to keep themselves available for Jap purchasers during all but their actual hours in bed. Once in Javanese hands the false guilders are legal tender and the Javanese are in a position to plunder each other just as the Balkan people vainly are trying to absorb huge quantities of occupational marks. Such is the first monetary phase of the Japs' imperial policy. The best that can be said of it is that looting shops prevents looting homes.
The second stage of plundering by manipulation is now opening, in which merchants are offered a chance to exchange their valueless “guilders” for yen which they need in order to make purchases of Jap goods to replenish their shelves. By comparison with the Jap guilder the Jap yen is solid gold. With the second stage of the exploitation under way, a host of carpetbagger Japs are beginning to arrive, offering to fill the empty shelves with their gimcrack products. Since there is no competition, the merchant has the choice of buying Jap or closing up his business and starving. The Jap administration, when it gets back its own “guilders,” simply pays them out again in salaries and the whole paper chase recommences.
JAP CULTURE: MALAYS FORCED TO
HANG THEMSELVES PUBLICLY
Somewhere in Australia—November 18, 1942
The Japanese invaders of the Dutch East Indies have invented a method of death through self-inf
licted torture to check Malay looters, according to a Dutch officer. This officer, an eyewitness, escaped recently from the island.
Malay looters are hanged, but instead of having their spinal cords mercifully snapped, according to the Western method, they slowly hang themselves. And they die standing up, untouched by the hands of the executioner and without their feet ever leaving the ground. The ritual is as follows:
A Malay condemned by a Jap military court is led to a public place, the favorite being the garden of Batavia's Survey Building, which has a picket fence and offers an unimpeded view to passersby A cord is knotted firmly but not chokingly around the victim's throat, and the loose end attached to an overhanging balcony or tree. Heavy weights are strapped on the doomed man's shoulders and his wrists are loosely tied behind his back. The man can stand easily and breathe normally. But he cannot slouch or relax because his windpipe immediately is constricted.
After hours of suspension the weights begin to drag him down. As his weakness grows, his knees cease to support him and sag more and more. The man thus gradually throttles to death in full public view.
“Dutchmen executed by the Japs were rather few. I cannot say whether the method of self-strangulation was used with them,” said my army officer informant. “But I saw three men forced to strangle themselves this way in Batavia. Many Malays watched them die through the fenceposts. Two were nearly dead, or rather showed only occasional signs of life after two days of this. The knees of the third were just giving and he was beginning to choke. Many, many natives are thus executed all over Java. A few tried to steal from the Dutch, as expected, but most tried to break into small Chinese ‘Toko’ shops to purloin trinkets.”
Americans, wary of atrocity stories since the other war, may well reflect upon this fully authenticated story which was not issued by any governmental propaganda machine. It is a lesson as to the character of the Japanese.
[probably somewhere in Australia]
July 9th, 1943
Mrs Bertha Bauers,
FLORENCE, KENTUCKY
Dear Mrs Bauers,
My reply to your letter of March 2nd has been delayed by my work in New Guinea. It happens that I have been writing a history of the squadron of which your son was a member. Publication has not been arranged yet, but Dr. Wassell is correct in saying that I know something about the group.
You received word on May 17th that your son had been reported missing. According to my information, your son was lost on February 28th, not February 25th [1942]. He took part in the last gallant attempt by the American fighters to stop the Japanese invasion fleet which had already landed about 70 miles west of Soerabaya.
The Japs were on the beach in the early morning and he was one of the force that went out to attack them. Nothing could give me more happiness than to be able to say to you that there existed a strong hope that he is still alive.2* You are familiar with the War Department practice in carrying men as missing until they are considered certainly to be dead.
Not until we recover Java, and perhaps not then, will we know exactly what happened to your son.
All the fellow pilots of his squadron have left the Pacific months ago. But I have unearthed a ground-crew man of the squadron who tells me that he talked to one of the pilots. This pilot said that he saw your son's plane afire and tried to signal him to bail out, but without success.
This is the second report I have had that your son's plane was seen afire in the air, but it may be a case of duplication. I give it to you for what it is worth.
You have my sympathy in your loss.
Sincerely,
George Weller
Correspondent: Chicago Daily News.
1*Their eventual ship was bombed and sunk March 7; Hancock drowned. McDougall made it to the coast of Sumatra, where he was imprisoned for three and a half years. Cuhel died in a 1943 plane crash in Lisbon, en route to North Africa on assignment.
2*In fact, 2nd Lt. Cornelius Reagan survived his crash (on March 1). He was taken prisoner and spent three and a half years in a Japanese POW camp. See “Luck to the Fighters!”
X
“Luck to the Fighters!”
The Story of the American
Fighter Planes in Java
To those in Java,
living and dead,
who await the return of America's wings
“Luck to the Fighters!”—abridged here in details but not in scope—took Weller a year to write after he escaped from Java in March 1942. During this fury of work, he was covering the war from Australia and from New Guinea, and also writing Singapore Is Silent.
Originally, the fighters saga was to be one-third of a long book about the Pacific; the other parts were to cover the fall of the Dutch Indies and the war in New Guinea (Chapter XII). A dispute with his publishers led him to set aside the larger Pacific scheme before the Singapore book even appeared. (Weller and his agent thought that Harcourt Brace held up its release so as not to compete with a book by Theodore White, then later refused to put out the Java fighters as a short book of its own for the same reason.) This kind of crisscrossing author-publisher-agent argument, due to wartime mail delays, dragged on for months. The demands of the CON, coupled with serial malaria, doomed any longer book.
By that time Weller's manuscript of the young American pilots who had saved Java for a crucial month was a year and a half old, then two years old … and soon it seemed a very remote story in a dense war producing ever more sagas, more defeats, and more courage than the purchasing public could conveniently absorb. It remains today a virtually unknown corner of the war, and of American heroes. (The “American war correspondent” rearranging beds at Batavia's Hôtel des Indes is, of course, Weller.)
In the end this chronicle appeared not as a book, but carved up as three long installments in a military history quarterly during 1944 and 1945. Weller's literary agent, Harold Ober, subsequently did his best to find a hardcover home for it, without success. By then the futile defense of Java must have seemed a long way off to any editor assessing the reading public.
It remains an eyewitness account of a dramatic chapter of the war that only Weller took the trouble to see. Among his Java dispatches are several that cover episodes from this material, but as he was scrupulous about not writing anything that could be useful to the enemy, until Java fell to the Japanese the story of the Seventeenth Pursuit was neither finished nor could be told. (He was eventually able to interview surviving pilots in Australia and New Guinea.) His frustration at not seeing it all in book form sprang from his sense of responsibility to history. “They fought unknown … Someone must speak for them.”
That might serve as a partial statement of the correspondent's duty, in any war.
FOREWORD
Official reports, personal memoirs and the dispatches of war correspondents are said to be the stuff of which history is made. If this be true, an adequate account of the American fighter pilots in Java may never be written.
For four weeks a squadron of American fliers and ground crew, cut off from all sources of supply and maintenance, held the air over Java against an enemy that was their superior in every respect but fighting ability and courage. For much of this time these Americans were virtually the only force of modern pursuit planes defending the Dutch East Indies.
Official reports of the American fighters in Java are extremely meager, fragmentary and sometimes inaccurate; the originals, such as they were, had to be destroyed in the evacuation of the island.
Finally, the eye of the war correspondent, searching for valor unrecognized and wishing also to honor those who serve humbly but serve well, passed by the Seventeenth Pursuit Squadron, Provisional. These men fought too far outside the tentacles of communication to win equal respect with those whom proximity helped on the way to recognition.
Neither general nor war correspondent ever visited the hidden runways of the Seventeenth Pursuit. They flew unrecorded. They fought unknown.
One of the inequalities of war is
that those who serve nearest the outlets of information become most familiar to the world. The work of the Eagle Squadron, the Flying Tigers, and the gallant twelve fighters of Bataan all became known. The efforts of the Americans who flew for their flag in Java were written across her coppery sunsets, but they vanished with the final fading of invasion.
While the Indies yielded little by little to their enemy's savage enterprise, the American army's Fortresses and dive bombers, the navy's big and vulnerable PBY Catalina flying boats, and this hidden hive of hard-pressed fighters all strove together to sustain the doomed and disintegrating chain of islands that stretched across from north of Australia. All fought in the vicinity of Soerabaya, 400 miles from the headquarters of General Wavell, General Brett and Admiral Hart, 400 miles from the Bandoeng radio station and the censorships military and political.
Something was told of the Fortresses and dive bombers. A little was tardily revealed of the gallantry of PatWing Ten, the émigrés of Cavite. But what the creaking “Forties” (P-40s) of the American fighters at Blimbing did to win time for General MacArthur's eventual defense of Australia has never been disclosed.
Having served as war correspondent in Java after leaving Singapore, the writer of this account felt sharply the neglect of the American fighters, in which he was himself a balked and unhappy accomplice. Although he traveled four times the length of Java, visited nearly every field where Americans touched landing gear, recorded all he could within the bounds of military and political security, and remained in Java two days after the last fliers themselves had gone, the writer felt sharply the incompleteness with which he and others in identical predicament recorded this important instant in American history.
Weller's War Page 29