Johnsen wrote: “We drove to Jokja by car and had to go very near the enemy. We could see the fires of the towns that were being burned. The Nips bombed the field, destroying the B-24s. The Zeros came down and strafed us, afterward.”
They spent their last day in Java on the field at Jokjakarta, from which every coolie had fled, rolling gasoline drums out to the last Fortresses that escaped the 2 p.m. raid by Zeros. The ebullient Adkins, who had missed them at Blimbing, arrived in a carful of Dutch officers. Their roster was complete except for one corporal whom no one was able to find.
After supper Captain Lane, having consulted the bombers, said that fifteen men under Lieutenant McCartney would have to be left behind for safety of load. Sergeant Evans offered to stay. Rickmar and other enlisted men went to the bomber crews and asked them to take all. All were taken.
That Sunday night, March 1, with the Japs fifty hours landed on the teeming island, the last of the Seventeenth took off at 11:20 p.m. In dawn light they landed at Broome, halfway down the coast of western Australia. They had been raided at Jokjakarta the day of their departure; the day after their arrival a raid by Japanese long range fighters—the most costly in human life after that of Darwin two weeks before—left the waters of the harbor best known to the Japanese pearlers filled with the bodies of Dutch women and children, together with five members of the Seventeenth. Fifty-nine came out by plane, thanks to the bombers.
Forty-six had already left on the battered but still reasonably fast-footed Dutch freighter Abbekerk. After leaving Tjilatjap, Java's only port on the Indian Ocean, on the last day of February, the strong-minded captain broke convoy and—ignoring naval orders—took a course of his own. Several other members of the convoy were sunk. (This was the day before the Japanese trapped the aircraft tender Langley, with 32 more P-40s and pilots aboard, in these same waters.) Armorers and crew chiefs, pilots and men, slept on the cold decks in the rain, one blanket per man. The ship was full of dirty, bearded British and Australian troops who had evacuated both Malaya and Java. Water was rationed on the crowded decks to one canteen a man. There were two identical meals daily: canned willy, hardtack, and sour coffee.
The Abbekerk reached Fremantle on March 4, nine days ahead of an even smaller Dutch freighter of six-knot speed, the last vessel larger than a trawler to escape from Java, aboard which the writer arrived after being strafed by Zeros.
When the Fortresses from Jokjakarta came in one by one to Broome, in northwestern Australia, groaning with their extra load and riddled with the holes of eight weeks of fighting off Zeros, there were no facilities to fuel them rapidly. Moreover, the harbor was full of Dutch flying boats filled with women and children.
A big B-24 Liberator flew to Java the night of March 2 to take off the remaining air force personnel, who were to have given a pre-arranged signal from the field at Jokjakarta. The B-24 circled in darkness, saw no signal, and returned to Broome the morning of March 3. Java's wounded were loaded into it, and from the Seventeenth, as passengers, Beatty, Donoho, Foster, Rex, Sheetz, Steinmetz and Taylor. The B-24 took off, and minutes later the second worst air raid in Australian history began. Broome had neither radar, anti-aircraft guns, nor fighters. It was a defenseless bay and air field, both crammed with aircraft, both completely helpless.
Nine Zeros came in from the sea. Six began strafing the harbor, making one leisurely pass after another until flying boats and bombers, the former loaded with the wives and children of Dutch officers wanted by the Japs, puffed into flame and exploded. Three Zeros went after the B-24, which was carrying fifty passengers beside its crew, and had attained about 600 feet.
Donoho, a stockily-built armorer who in Java had taken care of Blanton's plane, was lying at the bottom of the bomb bay. “I looked up and saw what looked like an arc of electricity come into the plane. It came once, then it came again.”
The gas tanks caught fire. The passengers on top of Donoho crawled out of the bomb bay to the rear of the plane in a squirming mass, trying to escape. As the flames found more gasoline, the fire pursued them. The plane was falling.
“I figured it was all over anyway, so I lay down on the catwalk and just waited.” The next thing Donoho knew he was below the surface of the water, where the plane had landed with a crack that broke it in two, and was looking up through greenish light. He came up. The two parts of the plane were well apart, the tail sticking up vertically, the nose still afloat with men jumping out of it. There was no one discernible alive where the flames had been, in the tail, but there were fifteen or sixteen men, doctors pulling out their already wounded patients, around the nose.
Donoho found Beatty, who seemed the only one alive from the Seventeenth. They could see smoke on the horizon, but were not sure it was land. Actually, it was the planes burning at Broome. They began to swim. In twelve hours they were a quarter mile from shore. Then it was night and the heavy tide of Broome, which falls over thirty feet and leaves freighters stranded on the mud at their piers, took them out to sea. They swam all night, on their backs as much as they could, keeping together in the darkness—Beatty, the weaker, swimming between Donoho's legs. Beatty kept urging Donoho to go ashore and bring help. He complained of being cold, too. Finally, about noon next day they saw a lighthouse, with docks and fishing vessels. “Go on in, leave me,” Beatty said.
Donoho, who was twenty-nine and had worked in oilfields, still had more reserve than Beatty, who at twenty-six had spent seven years in the army. He struck on ahead. Within 200 yards of shore, the rushing tide carried him out again. “Hell, I thought I'd quit.” Then he decided to go down the coast from the lighthouse.
The next thing he heard was a slapping noise. It was waves striking rocks. He reached them, climbed up, and collapsed. Shore was fifty yards away across a channel. He made it and started walking back up the beach toward the lighthouse. It was five miles away. When he got there it was deserted and there were no docks or boats. They had been a mirage. He found water in a cistern, staggered through the reeds for hours, and finally walked into a major's arms on the air field he had left 36 hours before, a naked, sunburned and exhausted man.
By daylight Beatty was found on the beach, delirious. Flown to Perth, the nearest city, 1400 miles away, he died in hospital without returning to his senses.
The evacuees from Java, though hardly a trickle of its millions of Javanese and thousands of Dutch, were an overwhelming torrent when they touched the northwest coast of Australia, isolated by the wet season among its meager foodstuffs shipped from Perth. They remained only a day or two; yet it was enough to eat the one or two aboriginal missions and the scattering of settlers out of the little they had left. It was impossible, even after the evacuees meandered south to Perth, to send food by ship to northwestern Australia because the Japs sank the ships.
An Arkansas private by the name of Ewart managed to hold on, all the way to Perth, to a Javanese monkey. He seemed to be trying, in this way, to express the very strong attachment for Java, the Javanese and the Dutch, that almost everyone of the Seventeenth felt, the most extraordinary six weeks in the lives of any of them.
They had much to remember.
They remembered the day Morehead came burning in over the field, did a victory roll straight down the middle of the runway, then another. They remembered how he landed—he had run into nine bombers over Malang and shot down two—how he threw back his canopy before his wheels stopped rolling, stood up with two fingers in the air and shook them, grinning, and how he yelled: “Hell, you guys are crazy! Those Japs can't shoot. …” That day a Zero was on his tail as he pursued the bombers, but he just seesawed his plane up and down like a bucking horse to spoil the Jap's aim, and kept on boring in. All he got was a bullet hole in his stabilizer.
They remembered the day Egenes and Parker mistook tall cane for young rice, landed in the high green stalks, were surrounded by natives with spears who took them for Japs, saved themselves with the Javanese words Geurtz had taught them, and finally took off on a
curved tar highway, everybody happy and waving.
They remembered the day when Coss, their last commander, got his first Jap, how he could not speak but just kept smiling and smiling to himself.
They remembered combing the jungle after the Seventeenth itself lost a plane, trying to get enough parts from the wreckage to keep some other pilot's ship flying.
They remembered Sprague on their first payday in Java, when he said, “We haven't any records or finance officer yet, so you just tell me what the government owes you, and I'll pay you, only remember to be honest because I'm responsible for this,” and how he did pay them, out of the pockets of his flying suit.
They remembered the silver loving cup that the Dutch couple who took care of them had bought, inscribing with care the name of every pilot who brought down a Japanese. There had been five names on the cup, then things began to happen too fast to keep up with inscriptions. Whatever happened to the loving cup, anyway?
They remembered Kiser, one of the most cunning pilots in battle, whose strongest cussword was “by damn,” and they remembered “Stonewall” Jackson, his crew chief, an old Regular Army hand who tinkered constantly through his waking hours and chewed cigarettes because Java had no cutplug.
They remembered the Dutch pilot of a B-10, seeing his bomber as vulnerable as the early B-17 Fortress because it had no tail gunner, who painted the point of his tail black, put in a flashlight attached by switch to his cockpit, and used to wink the light at any Jap diving on his tail to simulate machine-gun fire.
They remembered the day when the three little sergeants Austin, Killian and Merriman, who looked as alike as Javanese and always went around together, found themselves on the runway at Soerabaya in the middle of a raid. A burning Dutchman came down with his landing wheels retracted and bellywhumped along the strip, a doctor ran out to help him, the pursuing Jap strafed him, the doctor ran back, the Dutchman tried to climb out, the doctor ran, brought him in, the Jap came down with his machine guns going, another Dutchman came in and crashed with his wheels down. Austin saw an unused P-40, started to run for it, angry for revenge. Killian and Merriman held him down as the Japs came in, and Austin cast them aside long enough to get his helmet off and throw it passionately after the Jap as he went by.
They remembered “Toughey” Hague who said, “The first time I saw a Nip I was so excited to get at him I wobbled my fire all over the sky.”
They remembered the rare nights of Soerabaya, at the Shanghai and the Tip Top—the officers went to the Oranje—and they remembered the look in the wet red dawn at Blimbing, of the palms and the red, yellow, blue and green sharks and dragons of the impatient planes.
Perry, with a young man's sense of what he will remember, said: “With forty millions populating Java, one could not walk more than two hundred yards through the jungle without seeing at least five native huts, or a whole village. You saw the Javanese everywhere, washing clothes on the stones in the river, dressed in their Sunday best on a day off in town, squatting along the streets and crowding around to sell you something. From a soldier's viewpoint, with the idea of returning with lots of time and money, it was a place where the best drunk, the most fun and the best chance of having the time of a lifetime were to be had. We loved it. The tropics, the romantic South Sea isles, the cities and tangled jungles filled with strange people. We liked seeing half-primitive modes of living, hearing strange words and guessing at their meaning, being able to visit exclusive bars and cafés and exert a certain amount of influence where it meant most.”
Such was the close of the work of the Seventeenth Pursuit. All their planes were lost, but for these battle-weary Kittyhawks the Americans exacted a price of at least fifty Japanese planes, nearly half of them heavy bombers and most of the rest Zeros. (The Dutch said they were certain of at least sixty-five, positively seen to crash.) And this destruction, amounting to the loss to Japan of at least two hundred trained airmen, was caused by a squadron which had only thirty-nine planes—flyable and faulty included—but which yet lost only eleven men in all, and only nine in combat with the Japanese in Java, in a period of four weeks' single-handed fighting.
And all this was accomplished without a radio warning system.
Had there been an adequate air warning system at Soerabaya and four times as many P-40s, Java might never have been taken.
As the Seventeenth was disbanded and scattered, their fortunes changed. Andy Reynolds and Jim Morehead became two of the finest fighter pilots in Darwin, where the pickings were poor because the Zeros didn't like to fight after the long fuel-exhausting run from Koepang Robert “Big” Johnson crashed in Moresby and “Toughey” Hague was lost in August on a raid in northern Papua. Many, like little Les Johnsen, went hotfoot after the records of those like Kiser, who had come back from Java laden with scalps. Dutton went to the Solomons and collected two Zeros and three medals, filling with pride a father who was an adjutant in the bomber command. Adkins and his irrepressible sidekick, the bushy-bearded Wahl, did well out of Moresby, and Turner topped all others for honors in New Guinea; while McWherter and Egenes held their own.
In far-off Washington, Princess Juliana called Willard Reed's widow and thanked her for what “Jess” had offered Java.
Many of the enlisted men who fought in Java were still carrying the battle a year later in New Guinea. Sergeant Jack Evans, the one who offered to stay behind in Java, became a Fortress bomber, won his Silver Star and Purple Heart, and joined Paul “Pappy” Gunn, the daredevil middle-aged bellwether of the Beechcraft, in low-level strafing jobs in A-20s and super-gunned B-25s.
Corporal Ollie Hale, the World War I veteran who could make a radio talk any language, was handling the earphones in General MacArthur's private plane.
Langjahr, a private in the rear rank in Java, became a Fortress bombardier, went to the Buin-Faisi retreat in the Solomons, and put two 500-pounders on the decks and two nearby a Japanese monitor battleship, one of those new high-speed, heavy firepower creatures that specialized in night bombardments of Guadalcanal.
When the Seventeenth's enlisted men crossed Australia they found newly arrived officers from the States who said there'd never been any American fighter planes in Java. Hadn't there? So they did what the army calls “a snow job” and told the Australian girls they had all been “tail gunners in P-40s.”
The story of the Seventeenth is one of the necessity of permanent American air and naval bases in Asia and Australia, like those in the Atlantic, in order that the unpreparedness they fought to remedy may never be ours or that of our Allies again.
Today the American wings over Java are folded. But someday they will be spread again. Until then, as the Dutch used to say: “Luck to the fighters!”
XI
The Defense of Australia
By his own admission, Weller arrived in Australia scared and filled with “guilt about the people left behind.” (At least one colleague “escaped and went home to suicide.”) From mid-March 1942 until the end of November 1943, Australia was his base of operations, even though he was in New Guinea for much of that time and traveled extensively through the Pacific islands. Thus for the next three chapters this book leaps around within those twenty months.
Weller seems to have produced Singapore Is Silent by August, before his first assignments in New Guinea. His 1942 datelines show that he made a long journey—almost fifteen thousand miles—around the circumference of Australia, writing all the way. “I've tried to cover more ground, both tactically and physically, than any other correspondent in Australia,” he wrote in a September letter to a friend. “This trip made me the first to make the full swing around the continent, just as I was the first to visit New Guinea's Milne Bay.”
For the Allies, Australia was the final fortress that had to be held at all costs, and the Americans poured everything they could into its defense. “A chaos that had to be experienced to be believed and even then could not be understood,” Weller characterized it at the time. Shortly after he arrived, he
was able to send in the earliest meaningful reports of the dramatic Battle of the Java Sea, which saw the Houston and thousands of tons of other Allied ships sunk in the first all-out naval action of the war in the Pacific.
This chapter concludes with the story that earned Weller a 1943 Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting: the account of an emergency appendectomy performed by a pharmacist's mate on a U.S. submarine, the Seadragon, while in enemy waters. In those days, submarines routinely did not have a doctor on board and might be at sea for a couple of months. (Much to Weller's dismay, the episode, along with his dialogue, was used without payment or even acknowledgment in a Hollywood feature film, Destination Tokyo [1943]. There was also a TV adaptation by Budd Schulberg.) The operation took place in September 1942; the award-winning article was published three months later. Weller, in Perth, heard about the story from a Navy commander, and was led to the captain and the crew, whom he had reenact the surgery several times over so he could get all the details right.
When he learned, a few months later, that he had been awarded the Pulitzer, he didn't feel triumphant—thousands of miles away, in the midst of war, it didn't feel like a victory. But one lesson of getting the story in port in Australia was that the best “adventure” he could've found had found him, in a most unlikely way.
EXCLUSIVE EYEWITNESS STORY—STORY OF
EPIC JAVA SEA BATTLE
Fight to Finish Told by Weller
Somewhere in Australia—March 19, 1942
A regulation American Navy life belt, with the Holmes floating light attached, tossed overboard from the cruiser Houston in the latter stages of the Battle of the Java Sea, not only saved the lives of 116 men but has brought back in the words of a Dutch destroyer commander the first comprehensive story of that naval combat.
Weller's War Page 36