Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  But the day, at least, was better than the bitter night that had passed. The sinking, the struggle to escape, the searchlights, the gunfire had been a hellish nightmare. In the moonlight, Tag Wallace found his battle with the enemy had not ended, even in the water. Japanese soldiers from the sunken transports floated past him, rifles still strapped to their backs. One figure, in the remains of a white uniform, swam towards him:

  He grabbed onto the end of my piece of timber and I promptly went under, cursing the intruder after I finished spitting out salt water and the oil which covered the surface. He shouted at me in some strange foreign language and I realized that he was a Japanese sailor. The man felt down at his side and came up with a short, slender blade and, pulling himself along the timber, he attempted to stab me.

  I grasped his wrist and we wrestled for the knife. He made a thrust for my throat and I managed to deflect it so that the blade passed through my open mouth, piercing my palate, and penetrating my left nostril. This attack so incensed me that I kicked him viciously in the face and pushed him away unconscious, floating face down.1

  As the sound of the guns died away, something close to a silence fell upon them. It was broken by the slap of the waves, by men calling for help, by the cries of the wounded and the dying. They had no idea where they were or where they might be heading. For the first time in his life, Elmo Gee thought he was going to die:

  It would have been so easy to succumb to the sensation of drowning. That’s the weird part. I had this beautiful feeling of floating and being incredibly light and happy. I had no pain and no fear. I guess I was close to drowning. I remember thinking how lovely it was. Everything in your body tells you to give in and not to fight. It was just like being drunk, a revelation, really, that dying wasn’t necessarily an awful experience. Another strange memory I have of that euphoric state of near drowning was seeing my eldest sister Miriam laughing at me. That seemed to make me snap out of it, and I struggled harder than ever.2

  Elmo was rescued by Jan Creber, the Master-at-Arms, who pulled him onto a small wooden table floating in the oil. Creber himself, a man in his 40s, his strength drained, would eventually die in the strait. Death paid no respect to age or rank. It beckoned them all, warm and seductive, offering a sweet end. Hallucinations gripped them. After watching, heartbroken, as Redlead the ship’s cat floated away from him in the dark, Bob Collins also endured a near-death experience:

  Somehow I found myself lying on clear white sand on the bottom of Sunda Strait. I don’t remember how I got there. There was this huge boulder alongside me, with a bit of sea-weed curling around my body. I had on my dungarees and sandshoes, a white t-shirt, my knife and belt. Suddenly I felt I was looking back at myself, and seemed very small compared to this large boulder. A bright beam of light focused on me as I lay completely at peace on the ocean floor. I thought: ‘I can’t die here. Poor old Mum would be devastated.’ So to be more buoyant I took off all my gear except my knife, and floated naked to the surface.3

  With the sunrise, they took stock of their situation, and the leaders among them began to plan for their salvation. The experienced seamen tried to work out where they were.

  The northern entrance to the Sunda Strait near where the two cruisers went down is about 24 kilometres wide. A constant south-westerly current drains through it, rushing past a handful of islands in the strait itself, down and out to the Indian Ocean. Of those islands, the two nearest to this floating mass of men were Topper’s Island (Pulau Tampurung) and Sangiang.

  Topper’s lay at the very entrance to the strait about seven kilometres off the Java shore, a barren cone of rock crowned by a lighthouse manned by two Indonesian keepers. Sangiang, further into the strait, was larger and lower, shaped like a cashew nut, with a few small kampongs or villages dotted in jungle clearings. At sea level, Sangiang was fringed with palm trees along sandy beaches that looked as enticing as a travel poster but were guarded by reefs of rock and sharp coral.

  A lot of men decided to take their chances and to swim for these two islands, or to the Java mainland. Many never made it. Treacherous rips claimed an unknown number of lives, sweeping to oblivion tired men who were almost within touching distance of dry land.

  Pincher Martin’s forethought in loading the rafts at Tanjung Priok paid off that night and the next day, but not for the Commander himself. His voice was heard in the dark, shepherding men to safety, and he was seen again in the morning on one of the ships’ boat booms, but later they lost him. It seems likely he was carried through the strait, to die in the wastes of the Indian Ocean. Chaplain Bevington drowned in his attempt to swim to an island, and so did Percy Stokan, the much-loved Yeoman of Signals, he of the fierce black beard and the razor-sharp pusser’s dirk. Shouting that he would have breakfast ready for the late arrivals, Percy struck out for Topper’s Island and disappeared. Jock McDonough tried for both islands, was carried away each time, and was fortunate that some Australians hauled him aboard a Japanese lifeboat they had found. There, as he later recounted, he was reunited with his Walrus Observer, the baby-faced Lieutenant David McWilliam, whose life was ebbing away:

  He had been very badly crushed from being in the water when the torpedoes hit. I sat with him. I put him against my legs and held him to try to give him some relief. He was still conscious. I could talk to him a little bit. I said, ‘Hang on, Mac, we’ll get ashore …’

  McWilliam and I were very close. We had built up a friendship based on trust in each other – his ability to navigate, and my ability to fly. We had a very close bond. I thought he was the best navigator ever born. He thought I was the best pilot. The things I could tell you about when we were lost in the Pacific Ocean – they add up!

  I cradled Mac for about four hours. He died. A couple of other blokes died. It was then decided we should have a burial at sea. The padre was aboard, and the paymaster commander, too.

  There are conflicting stories about what happened with the burial. My version, and I was with McWilliam, is that it was the shortest burial ever. The padre, Mathieson, simply said, ‘God hath given, God hath taken.’4

  For Keith Mathieson, the Methodist from Victoria, there would be many more funerals to come. Grace and compassion, though, was not his alone. In the peril they faced, men reached out to each other. Bob Collins, still naked except for his belt and knife, was on a crowded raft with Gavin Campbell. In the ship, he had been no fan of gold braid and naval discipline. Now, he saw the young sub-lieutenant was in pain. Campbell had never met him before:

  I got on this raft, leg dangling, and Bob Collins came up to me and said, ‘How are you going?’

  I didn’t know him. I told him I’d broken my leg.

  He said, ‘Oh dear, you don’t want that.’

  I said, ‘No, I don’t.’

  I had my combination overall suit on. He said, ‘I’ll make you some splints.’

  There were all these floating packing cases everywhere, and he had his seaman’s knife, his pusser’s dirk, and he got these packing cases over and made splints.

  I was sitting on the raft with my leg over the side, and he cut off one leg of this overall, into strips. He put the splints on and tied the strips of overall around my leg, and that was it.5

  The lifeboat carrying Jock McDonough, holed by gunfire and low in the water, had floated free from the Sakura Maru. They could read her name painted on the gunwale. They baled it out and plugged the leaking planks, and more and more desperate men clambered into it, including Frank McGovern. As that bloody Sunday morning wore on, they could see Japanese destroyers patrolling in the strait, over to the west on the Sumatra side, chunky black shapes in the distance. One eventually came over, its for’ard gun trained at them. A voice through a loudhailer called to them in English, ‘Stop!’

  Curious Japanese faces stared down at them from the destroyer’s deck; they stared back, sweating, nervous, but trying not to show it. Each inspected the other, for what seemed like an eternity, until the destroyer Captain, again in goo
d English, called down to ask who they were.

  ‘Australians,’ replied an anonymous voice. ‘And fucking proud of it.’

  The Captain ordered them on board.

  There was a steel ladder at the side, and those who were strong enough clambered up it, many of them half-naked, all of them smeared in a filthy crust of oil. The hot steel deck burned their bare feet and exposed skin. McGovern, uninjured, wished he had kept the sandals he had thrown away. Bill Bee dragged himself up the ladder on one leg and one knee, blood spurting from the wound in his right calf.

  They were treated well. With sign language and broken English, the Japanese sailors told them to strip off their rags. They produced cans of kerosene and clods of cotton waste for the men to wipe the muck from their eyes and faces, and then water for washing and drinking. The filthy clothing vanished, and the Japanese tossed them G-strings to wear – a thin bit of cord around the waist with a strip of fabric down the front. They gave them food – strange, lumpy things like dog biscuits – which the Australians wolfed down. Some men were offered cigarettes. Lieutenant Harper asked the Captain to hose down the deck to cool it, and that brought some passing relief.

  More astounding still, the destroyer hung around for several hours, engines ticking over at dead slow. The Captain – they never discovered his name, nor the name of his ship – told Len Smith, the Torpedo Gunner, to pick a crew and to row around in the lifeboat to collect other survivors. Eventually, there were more than 200 Australians crowded on the deck. Then, suddenly, there was a jabber of orders and the destroyer went to full speed and curved away to the north, leaving behind the lifeboat with another load of men in it. A Dutch aircraft had been spotted, the Captain explained to Harper. Another destroyer would return later.

  It never did. But those men collected by the first destroyer were ever grateful for the rough humanity they were shown, in stark contrast to the brutality they would soon encounter at the hands of the IJA.

  The Sunda Strait had not yet done with Perth’s ship’s company. Those taken by the Japanese were held at first on a transport, the Somedong Maru, but the remainder would embark upon an epic struggle for survival. Their ordeal, with its pain and suffering and death, its courage and hope, became a triumph of the human spirit unmatched in Australian history.

  Naked and covered with oil, Fred Skeels watched from the lifeboat as the destroyer sped away. ‘If you don’t want us, then we don’t want you,’ he thought wryly, as if that would somehow sort things out. The boat was almost full, but as they bent to the oars again, heading more or less south-east, they gathered up more wretched men. Blackened figures balanced precariously on the thwarts and gunwales – some of them familiar faces, others not. They kept note of the names and looked out for each other: Padre Mathieson; McDonough, grieving for his dead friend, McWilliam; Petty Officer Stoker John ‘Macca’ McQuade, a country bloke from Merredin in Western Australia and a Portsmouth commissioning crew member who, by some miracle, had made it out of Perth’s Stokehold before she went down; Ernie Toovey, the 19-year-old cricketer from Warwick in Queensland, with a shrapnel wound to his leg; Frank Gillan, the Engineer Lieutenant, nearly blinded by fuel oil; Ralph Lowe, the Paymaster Lieutenant-Commander from Seaford in Victoria; Gavin Campbell, uncomplaining about the pain from his broken leg. Fred Skeels counted 73 souls as they wallowed into the next night, hoping that they might fetch up on a beach in Java.

  At about two the next morning, they crunched into a reef, driving a hole through the bow. The boat began to founder but in the moonlight they could see a crescent of sandy beach not far away. It was Java. Stumbling across the rocks, carrying their wounded as gently as they could, they staggered ashore and collapsed, where they slept until the sun woke them. Stoker Claude Maslem, a 25-year-old from Manly in Sydney, shockingly burned, had died in the night. They dug a grave in the sand and buried him with a few words from the padre – a sad little ceremony under the coconut palms.

  Things looked up when some Sundanese villagers appeared – teenage boys who nipped up some palms and tossed down coconuts, which they opened with their parangs, the big, curved Malay knife. Ravenous, the Australians drank the sweet milk and scooped out the slippery white flesh. After some debate, they decided to form two groups and head in different directions to seek help for the wounded, who would wait on the beach.

  Fred Skeels’s group, about 20 of them, including Gillan and Mathieson, trudged south along a baking bitumen road with rice fields and green hills rising to their left, the strait on their right. They hoped they might come across some Dutch troops who were still in the fight. Gillan was nominally in charge, but, still blind from the fuel oil, he had to be helped along in the heat and dust. Petty Officer Stoker Bill Hogman guided him like a loving father with a sick child, picking him up when he stumbled. After a few hours, they came to a village first-aid post, where, to their gratitude, a Dutch woman bathed their eyes and found some sarongs for the naked men to wrap around their loins. She had no food, but she advised them to head into the hills, where they might be safer. That night, they fell asleep hungry by the roadside.

  In the morning, they trudged on again and were given some cooked rice by a village headman, who allowed them to wash in a well. These were their last hours of freedom. The next day, they were accosted by a menacing group of villagers armed with parangs. There was nothing to do except bunch together for protection and wait to see what happened. After a few hours, some donkey carts turned up and Skeels noticed – they all noticed, in cold despair – that each Indonesian driver wore an armband bearing the Japanese rising sun. It was over. The carts jolted them down the road a few kilometres to a dirty little town called Pandeglang, where they were herded into a small jail. Japanese soldiers arrived the next morning.

  Back on the beach, Gavin Campbell lay in the shade. Before they left, the others had taken a sail from the lifeboat and slung it beneath the coconut palms to give some shelter from the blinding light. Campbell and three other wounded men waited there for help to arrive. They shared some hard-tack biscuits from the boat and sipped brackish water from a hole dug in the sand. Sometimes, the village boys would fetch coconuts again, in exchange for a few of the biscuits. After a few days, two of the men, Ralph Lowe and an able bodied seaman (A.B.) named Gordon Webster, decided that they, too, would move on, which left just Campbell and another A.B., Danny Maher, who had a nasty wound to his shoulder. Maher, from Marrickville in Sydney, was 28 years old. He had come ashore stark naked but was now wearing one leg of Campbell’s overalls as a makeshift sarong. Eventually, they decided there was no point in waiting on the beach anymore.

  ‘We can’t just stay on like this,’ Campbell said. ‘We’ve got to make a move or we’ll die here.’

  With language and some diagrams sketched in the sand, they persuaded one of the villagers to knock up a pair of forked sticks from the branches of a tree. Maher unpicked some kapok from a lifebelt and padded the sticks for Campbell to use as crutches. Bundling up the sail to take with them, just in case, they stumbled south along the coast road. The villagers had told them to look for a small town called Labuhan, where they might find a doctor.

  Their journey was excruciating, a private Calvary. Shafts of pain stabbed through Campbell’s body as he hobbled along, his broken leg still in the rough splints that Bob Collins had made for him in the water. The kapok padding wore away from the crutches and the rough wood cut into his armpits, stripping the skin away to a seeping mess. They covered only a few kilometres that first day, thankful at least for a sudden tropical downpour that left muddy puddles they could drink from. Maher found a village and was given some rice on a banana leaf, but the locals made it clear they were frightened of the Japanese and wanted the white men to move on. Things turned nasty when one of the villagers produced his parang and demanded the sail. Campbell thought, fleetingly, of trying to fight the man off with one of his crutches, but decided he would not win that battle and handed it over.

  For three long weeks, they trekk
ed on like this, wracked with pain, tormented by hunger and thirst and an aching loneliness. Campbell would hop a few kilometres, then collapse again in agony. There were some days when he could not move at all. The fuel oil still crusted their bodies, and where it left bare patches they were red raw from sunburn and scratched mosquito bites. Not so severely injured, although still in pain, Danny Maher could have left him and gone on, but he never did. At times, he pleaded; at times, he goaded.

  ‘You fucking officers are all the same. Soft as butter. Haven’t done a hard day’s work in your fucking lives.’

  ‘I’ll get you, you bastard.’6

  They stuck together, wretched but indomitable.

  At last, they found Labuhan. And deliverance. A woman in European clothing saw them staggering along a street and called out, in English, to ask if they were Australians. She put an arm around Campbell and led him and Maher to a house in a side street. Two American sailors from the Houston were there, and they carried Campbell inside, where the woman found some food and bathed their wounds. The Americans called her Eliza. They thought she was Eurasian but they never discovered who she was, or if Eliza was her real name. They had no time to do so. To Campbell’s dismay, the Japanese arrived the next day:

  It was the first Jap I had seen close-up. I’ll never forget what he looked like. He had a fortnight’s growth and he was carrying a sub-machine gun, shouting and carrying on. We thought ‘This is it’. The Jap bashed one of the Yanks with the butt of his gun, but then an officer suddenly turned up and restored peace.