The Lonely War

by Alan Chin

  “This is the Exec. Swim toward the sound of my voice. Everyone, swim toward the sound of my voice.”

  The men paddled through poisonous fuel oil, thick as honey. It seeped into their eyes, mouths, and ears. They gagged on the putrid-tasting poison as it ate away their skin. Several men who were unable to swim out beyond the oil slick gave up and simply drifted in shock, breathing the toxic fumes and swallowing mouthfuls of the sludge.

  Twelve sailors paddled toward Mitchell, and he swam through a field of oil to reach them. The oil burned his face and neck, making him realize that the crew must get free of the slick as quickly as possible. After reaching the men, he tried to see who they were, but their faces were all covered in oil and he didn’t recognize a single one. He yelled again and the twelve added their voices, drawing the survivors to them.

  Out of the darkness drifted the whaleboat that Chief Baker had launched. Baker and twenty sailors were aboard and another dozen sailors were in the water clinging to the sides.

  “Lieutenant Mitchell,” Baker shouted. “Is that you, sir?”

  “Yes. Do you have any officers aboard?”

  “Ensign Moyer is aboard, and Ensign Fisher is hanging over the side toward the bow. I’m sure as hell glad to hear your voice. Will you come aboard, sir?”

  “No. If you have room, take the wounded aboard, and move away from the oil slick.”

  Mitchell huddled with the men in the water. More men joined the group. A few paddled up on life rafts, but most were bobbing on the choppy waves with only a kapok life vest to keep them afloat.

  Mitchell felt more nudges and bumps under the water, and he was not sure if it was sharks or the men treading water around him. He saw a man twenty yards out dog-paddling for the group; the man suddenly screamed and was dragged backward at a tremendous speed before disappearing under the surface with a jolt. Mitchell held his breath, waiting, but the man did not resurface.

  Someone yelled, “Shark!” and panic raced through the group. Men clinging to the sides attempted to climb into the boat and nearly swamped the craft. The men in the boat knocked them back into the water. Mitchell yelled for the men to say calm and to huddle in a tight group. They obeyed, overcoming their fear.

  As Mitchell paddled to the bow to talk with Fisher, he heard several men pleading with God, promising to stop whoring and drinking and gambling, to become church-going men, if He would only allow them to live through the night.

  Mitchell found Fisher clinging to the whaleboat’s bow with a shocked expression on his face. “Monte, thank God you’re okay. We need to get the men huddled into a tight bunch and make our way to shore. You take the port, I’ll take the starboard.”

  Fisher said, “We’re all going to die.” He grinned and said it again, “We’re going to die.”

  Mitchell lifted his hand out of the water and smacked the ensign’s face. “Pull yourself together, man. We’ve got a hundred men here who need us to take charge.”

  Fisher went silent. A moment later, he rasped in a weak voice, “You can count on me.”

  Mitchell glanced up to see another swimmer fighting to join the group. He recognized Grady dragging an unconscious Cocoa through the oily water. Mitchell swam out twenty yards and helped pull Cocoa to the growing mass of survivors.

  The men were tossed about the sloshing waves, and many were overcome with vomiting and diarrhea. They finally moved free of the oil slick, which helped to calm everyone.

  Mitchell told Baker to keep the group moving toward the island. He scanned the water, hoping to see lights of an enemy ship that could rescue them, but he saw only blackness. We must somehow make it to the island, he thought, before the sharks become more daring.

  A scream sounded back in the slick. Mitchell broke free of the group and swam toward the voice. Thirty yards out, he bumped headlong into a body. He turned the man around and saw that the sailor was dead. The face was charred beyond recognition and smeared with oil. The flesh was burned away from both hands, leaving the finger bones reaching above the water like claws. Mitchell vomited.

  Recovering, he unstrapped the kapok vest and pulled the man from the vest, and the corpse sank.

  Another scream a dozen yards away had Mitchell moving again. He found a man treading water; the sailor had no life vest and struggled to keep his head above water. Mitchell unstrapped his own vest and helped the sailor into it, giving him a shove in the direction of the whaleboat.

  “Swim for the others. Move, man!” he croaked.

  Mitchell remembered the kapok vest he’d taken off the corpse. He swam to the spot, but with no luck. Everything was steeped in oil and he couldn’t see the vest. In the dark, he drifted on the black sea. Mitchell felt completely alone. Panic pierced in his heart as he swam with all his strength for the whaleboat.

  The boat was sixty yards away. Mitchell felt his body slowing with a deep and consuming fatigue. It took all the willpower he could muster to reach out, grab a handful of water, and pull himself forward. He realized that he might not be able to rejoin the group, and again, sadness smothered him as he thought about dying in this vast and lonely sea.

  He felt something terribly strong grip his right leg and yank him from the world of air and sound, dragging him down. He felt it, eight hundred pounds of terror mauling him. Mitchell clawed at the water. He screamed, hearing the sound so clearly in his mind. The fish let go and circled.

  What seemed only a moment later, he felt a hideous pressure clamp onto his thigh. Teeth gouged. His panic soared as he was wrenched deeper. It all happened in sickly slow motion. There was no time and no thought. It felt like he was being cleaved in two, severed. Mitchell surrendered to the horror. Locked together in this bizarre universe, he couldn’t tell where he ended and the fish began. The fish let go and circled again.

  Drifting in the blackness, life seeped from Mitchell, and he felt death’s icy touch on the back of his neck.

  AS THE black whaleboat glided through the floating debris, Andrew perched in the center of the boat, searching. He spotted a waving arm through the gloom. He pointed and shouted at Ogden. The Chief yelled for Andrew to sit down as he pushed the tiller so the bow pointed at the waving arm.

  Andrew ignored Ogden’s order and prepared to jump overboard to save the man, but Hudson swung an arm and knocked Andrew onto the thwart.

  “Stay put, rookie,” Hudson shouted.

  Andrew crouched in the boat. His frustration erupted from being unable to help the man in the water.

  Ogden gave the order to ship oars and as the whaleboat slid past the man, he leaned far out from the stern and grabbed the man by the life jacket. With one powerful motion, the Chief hauled the man over the gunwale and into the boat. It was Skeeter Banks. His head was denuded of hair and his face and skull were covered with fuel oil. Only the whites of his eyes were not black.

  Andrew clutched Banks’s life jacket and screamed, “Mitchell! Where is Mitchell? Did he make it into the water?”

  Banks’s face was a mask of unrestrained horror; he’d stared at death eye to eye. His mouth moved. Andrew bowed his head so that his ear was right next to Banks’s mouth. He listened with every fiber of his being.

  A spasm of exquisite relief flashed through Andrew and he turned to Ogden and pointed off to port, yelling, “Mitchell made it off the ship. He’s over there.”

  The oarsmen threw body and soul into each stroke as if it were their last act on earth. The boat glided forward while the rescuers began choking on the stench of fuel oil fouling the air. They saw the main body of survivors moving toward the island, but they kept their course across the field of debris, looking for Mitchell and anybody else left behind.

  Andrew balanced himself in the middle of the whaleboat, scanning the water as precious minutes dripped by. His breath came fast and his heart pounded. He had the feeling that they had missed him, that somewhere in this oily hell the man he loved was dying. He saw a shadow moving. He peered closer. It was a hand clawing at the air above the water. Andrew y
elled as he leaped over the gunwale. His legs kicked wildly as he dove and took Mitchell into his arms.

  They broke the surface, and the boat was on them in a heartbeat. Strong hands hauled them aboard.

  Mitchell gasped for breath, that sweet delirious taste of life. He had a hideous gash on his right thigh.

  Andrew found a first aid box under a thwart, and inside were gauze bandages, syringes, and packets of morphine. He ripped the officer’s pant from the injured leg, gave him a shot of painkiller, and wrapped the wound. By the time he was done, the boat had pulled alongside the large group of survivors and they began taking men aboard.

  As much as Andrew would have loved to hunker in the boat and hold Mitchell, there were others who needed help. He nursed the injured until searchlights from the enemy cruiser Aoba stabbed through the night and surrounded them in a corona of brilliant yellow light.

  Part II

  Changi Prison

  At first you get in a situation where you abhor it.

  You can’t stand it. It’s terrible. But you can’t get away from it.

  So you stick with it. And then you get so that you tolerate it.

  You tolerate it long enough, you embrace it.

  It becomes your way of life.

  —Lewis Haynes,

  LCDR, Medical Corp,

  USS Indianapolis

  Chapter Seventeen

  May 25, 1942—0800 hours

  FORTRESS SINGAPORE, stronghold of the British forces controlling the trade routes between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, had a twenty-square-mile naval base that boasted docks large enough to supply their entire fleet. The British enjoyed a rather pleasant existence on their pristine emerald island, which sparkled like one of their crown jewels set within the waving blue Pacific. They believed that any attack on the island must be launched from warships, since no army could breach the dense four-hundred-mile Malayan rainforest to the north. Hence, their defenses relied on enormous guns pointed out to sea, which were useless against a ground assault.

  The Japanese, however, did the impossible. Loaded with heavy artillery, they swept through the Malayan jungle like a tsunami, crushing all British forces in their path. On Feb. 8, 1942, Japanese artillery began shelling Singapore Island as Japanese troops crossed the narrow Johore Strait. The Japanese were greatly outnumbered by the island’s defenders, and they were dangerously low on fuel and ammunition, so they attempted an all-or-nothing charge. Five days later, the allied forces surrendered in a stunning defeat. Fifty thousand British and Australian troops became prisoners of war, along with two thousand civilians, many of whom were women and children, and the Malays bowed to a new master.

  The majority of POWs were shipped north to labor camps on the Thai-Burma railroad. The rest were marched twenty-seven kilometers from the heart of the city to a prison built on the Changi Peninsula, which forms the extreme eastern tip of Singapore Island.

  Built before the war, Changi Prison was designed to hold two thousand prisoners, but the Japanese crammed fifteen thousand POWs within its walls. Women and children were housed at a separate, makeshift camp five kilometers from the prison.

  The complex was built in onion-like layers. At the center was a sunbaked courtyard, surrounded by a dozen multistory cell blocks, which were surrounded by towering walls. The south wall had a gigantic gate that, like all the cell doors, always stood wide open so prisoners could move freely in and out. Outside the gate, a road circled the four walls. On both sides of this road were rows of thatched roof sheds the prisoners called “go-downs.” Each shed was a hundred feet long and held forty beds.

  There were four rows of concrete go-downs (twenty to a row) that housed the senior officers, majors and above. The other sheds were made from coconut fronds nailed to wood frames, which housed the junior officers and the overflow of enlisted men from the cell blocks.

  A hundred yards of cleared land lay between the go-downs and a snarled web of barbed wire that encircled the entire prison. Beyond the wire were guardhouses, where Indian, Japanese, and Korean guards were housed. A watchtower with machine gun posts and searchlights stood at each corner of the prison, but there was little need for these towers because there was no place to escape to.

  The Pilgrim’s survivors made the forced march from the military docks to the Changi Prison. Reduced to a ragged and filthy bunch, their bodies and uniforms were streaked with fuel oil, vomit, mud, and feces. They dragged along in a mechanical manner, the strong helping the weak, the weak helping the weaker.

  Along the city streets, natives stood at the roadside, boldly offering bananas, boiled eggs, and cups of water, but the Japanese escort kept them back with their bayonets, which glistened brightly from the barrels of their .25 caliber rifles. These offerings were heartwarming, considering the brutal treatment that their captors inflicted, but especially so for Andrew because when he looked into the faces of the sympathetic locals, he noticed that many of the eyes staring back were Chinese.

  A five-hour march brought them to the crest of a hill where the sixty-five ragged Americans caught their first glimpse of Changi. From a distance, the walls rising above a belt of green jungle looked enchanting, as if they belonged to a sultan’s palace surrounded by an oasis. But as they marched closer, Changi took on a more sinister appearance, transforming into a sunbaked scab on the jungle, the color of dried bones.

  Andrew didn’t see the walls. Having lost all vital energy, he suffered from heat, thirst, and crushing weariness. All his attention zeroed in on moving his legs while supporting his handle of a makeshift litter that carried an unconscious Lt. Mitchell.

  He held his knees stiff so that they wouldn’t buckle under the litter’s weight. If he stumbled, he risked taking a bayonet in the gut, as had three others. Bullets were a precious commodity, so the Japanese soldiers had become adroit with their bayonets. They drove the blade into the gut and scrambled the bowels by twisting the rifle with a flourish, leaving the victim screaming while dying a prolonged and agonizing death.

  Moyer, Stokes, and Hudson manned the other litter handles, and they carried the same fear. Brutish guards kicked, clubbed, and stabbed the men who faltered. Eighty-eight men were pulled from the water, but after two weeks on Guadalcanal and another week crammed shoulder to shoulder aboard a foul-smelling cargo vessel, the number had dwindled by a quarter.

  Andrew’s temple itched like crazy under a bloody bandage wrapped around his head. He yearned to reach up and scratch under the bandage, but he was too afraid to let go of the litter handle.

  Hour after hour they struggled through scorching heat, until they passed under a tower festooned with the Rising Sun. They marched through an opening in the barbed wire, up the path that led beyond the rows of go-downs, through the wall gate, and into a courtyard surrounded by cell blocks.

  Andrew lowered Mitchell and crumpled to ground. He had not had a drink of water in two days. His mouth felt cottony; his tongue hung thickly over his cracked lips. But rather than wish for death, which had become his habit, he focused on Mitchell.

  He fought back his weariness and crawled to Mitchell’s right thigh. Mitchell’s pant leg had been ripped away, showing his bare leg and shoe. The sole of his shoe was hanging on by only a few threads. The leg was swollen and had a sickly gray color. Andrew inspected the rag pressed against the wound. It was filthy, but Andrew had nothing to replace it with. Pulling the dressing away, he scrutinized the angry-red, putrid-smelling wound.

  They must have drugs here, he thought.

  Another litter was laid beside him—the one holding Cocoa. Grady, who had helped to carry Cocoa’s litter, collapsed beside Andrew. He leaned against Andrew and croaked, “We made it, Andy. Praise God, we made it.”

  Like Mitchell, Cocoa’s lower leg had been badly chewed by sharks before the rescue, and it was festered and swollen to three times its normal size. Cocoa babbled incoherently. Sweat poured from his body.

  Andrew had done his best to keep the wounds clean and dressed,
but in the tropics it was impossible to keep infection away without antibiotics. Andrew closed his eyes, feeling the intense heat rippling off the pavement.

  There were two seasons in this part of the globe: oppressively hot and monsoon wet (which was also oppressively hot). No winter and no spring, no hibernation and no renewal, there was only the monotonous heat with an occasional downpour.

  The courtyard baked Andrew’s mind, and in his delirium he began to relive portions of their torturous journey. Two weeks on Guadalcanal, slogging about a mucky hellhole with rats, leeches, blowflies, mosquitoes, maggot-infested piles of feces, and every strain of intestinal parasite, all surrounded by a bamboo fence. Andrew could still smell the pungent and indescribable stench.

  On the first day Andrew had approached a guard, bowed, and used his best Japanese to beg for medical supplies to help the wounded. The guard’s response was a rifle butt to Andrew’s gut, dropping him like a stone. The guard had pointed his bayonet at Andrew’s neck and screamed, “Yankee scum, next time you die!” Andrew crawled to his knees and bowed again, putting his face to the dirt.

  Others were also targets of gratuitous brutality. The guards’ fanatic hatred of the white race influenced their every action. They would steal anything that caught their eye: rings, watches, pocketknives, lighters. Smitty had his teeth bashed out by a soldier who noticed his gold fillings. On four separate occasions, the officer in charge became angry when a prisoner failed to understand his orders, given in Japanese. Three of those times the officer drew his revolver and shot the pleading prisoner in the head. The fourth man was knocked to the ground with a rifle butt to the face. The officer placed the tip of his bayonet on the man’s neck and plunged it to the hilt.

  Finally, they were led onto a tramp steamer and loaded into a cargo hold with floor-to-ceiling shelves three feet high and ten feet deep. They were wedged into the shelves, sitting cross-legged and hunched over, knee-to-knee and five deep. The temperature from the collective body heat quickly grew infernal in the ill-ventilated hold. Breathing became nearly impossible, and several men passed out.