Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  ‘All men march to Serang!’ he said. ‘Sick to hospital!’ I thought that was never going to happen, but we were left behind, and some pony carts came for us. They took us across a creek to a hospital at a place called Pandeglang, where there were two Indonesian doctors and a Dutch matron. The doctors had a look at my leg and placed a surgical splint on it, but said there was nothing more they could do because the break had knitted.7

  They stayed for a month in the Pandeglang Hospital, a primitive little building with just one ward and canvas stretchers for beds. Gordon Webster, the man they had last seen at the beach, two other Australians and an American from Houston were there too.

  The Dutch nurse tended them kindly, binding up their wounds and giving them what food the hospital had to offer, which was not much beyond rice and sugar. Every second night, she would walk to another village to obtain more for them to eat, and Campbell or Maher would find she had silently left some bread and jam or a tin of sausages at their windowsill. She was an angel of mercy, but they never learned her name, either. Then the Japanese came again and took the sailors off to Serang. To this day, Gavin Campbell regrets that he was never able to find her after the war to thank her.

  After his vision of dying on the sea floor, Bob Collins decided to swim to the Java shore. At the age of 21, he felt he was fit enough to make it despite the current:

  I struck out for the beach, which seemed miles away. I could see the land like a postcard in the distance, and I thought to myself: ‘There’s Java, there’s Sumatra. Start swimming.’ I ended up swimming 12 or 14 miles in two days, and I was exhausted when I came ashore at Labuhan, Java. A few of us came ashore at the same spot. We immediately flopped on the sand and went to sleep.

  As we were asleep, some of the Javanese rushed towards us, thinking we were Dutch, their colonial masters. One young Perth fellow jumped up and ran towards the water. The natives, many of whom were carrying huge knives, slashed at him and cut his head off. It was a shocking thing to witness. We were more worried about the Javanese than the Japs at that stage.8

  The murdered man was Petty Officer John Harvey, from Ipswich in Queensland. Collins fled this bloody killing. Later, he fell in with some other Perth sailors, including John McQuade, and they trekked inland to a village called Menes, where they thought they might be safer. They were not. The Japanese had arrived before them. A fat little officer with an enormous samurai sword ordered them up against a wall before a line of soldiers with light machine guns, and they thought they were about to be shot. It was apparently meant as a joke. Eventually, a truck arrived and took them, too, to Serang.

  Sangiang, the island in the middle of the strait, saved many men from being carried to their deaths. A few – the very lucky ones, or the very strong – defied the worst of the currents and got there by swimming, hauling themselves across jagged coral and rocks to flop exhausted on the beaches, skin scored and bleeding and smeared with oil. Leading Seaman Keith Gosden, a shell handler from the Y-turret lobby, Ron Bradshaw, the RAAF Corporal who’d been a fitter for the Walrus, Peter Nelson, a telegraphist, Tag Wallace and Lloyd Burgess all swam ashore at Sangiang.

  Ray Parkin had been floating in the strait for perhaps ten hours when the island loomed into sight, first as a low line of rocks and then, gradually, as a scrap of dry land edged by palm trees. The current dragged at him but he fixed his eyes upon two trees on shore, swimming for his life. His arms and legs felt like jelly, but with a superhuman effort he inched closer to a small point of land, felt something hard beneath him and then scraped across spiky clumps of coral that ripped his legs to shreds before he fell exhausted on a beach.

  Most, though, made it by boat or on a raft. When he went overboard from Perth, Petty Officer Horrie Abbott, from Frankston in Victoria, found a Japanese raft that kept him afloat for a while. Even better, in the morning light he and a handful of other men saw a partly capsized lifeboat drifting towards them. This was also from one of the Japanese transports, built of steel. They heaved themselves into it, baled it out and rowed around collecting others, maybe 30 or 40 men in all. Polo Owen was one they rescued, and Yeoman of Signals Jack Willis, and Petty Officer Edward ‘Jan’ Tyrrell, and Sub-Lieutenant Norman ‘Knocker’ White, who, against all the odds, had escaped from his action station below in the Transmitting Station. White, too, had tried to swim to Sangiang and been swept onwards. When they found him, he was barely conscious after 11 hours in the water.

  The boat had a small mast and a sail, which they rigged. With two men on each oar, heaving against the current, they brought it under the lee of the island, opposite a narrow beach where a surf was breaking. Abbott realised they would probably have only one crack at getting ashore, and he took an enormous risk. He unshipped the rudder and somehow fixed one of the oars at the stern as a sweep. Choosing a wave, shouting to the rowers to pull their guts out, bawling every obscenity he knew, he rode them in to the beach like a Bondi surfboat.

  Another group, 14 of them, turned up at Sangiang after reaching Topper’s Island. The lighthouse keepers there had given them some biscuits and water, but there was no future staying there. Picking through wreckage strewn across the foreshore, they found timber, rope and spars to make a raft, of sorts, that would carry them onwards. They also discovered the body of a US Marine from Houston among the rocks. One of Perth’s officers, Lieutenant John Thode, recited as much as he could remember of the naval burial service, and they buried the man in a sandy grave. That afternoon, they saw a clump of oily heads bobbing in the water, sweeping past in the current, and, in a remarkable feat of courage, Sub-Lieutenant Ray Barker and a sick berth attendant, Roy Turner, swam out with a rope and a lifebuoy. They rescued 12 Americans, including Houston’s doctor, Commander William Epstein.

  The raft took three days to build. Thode invited the Americans to join them on it, but they decided to wait on Topper’s in the starry-eyed belief that the United States Navy would somehow come to their rescue.9 The Australians set off and landed safely on Sangiang on 4 March, where they found Polo Owen’s group and the swimmers. They did a head count: there were 63 of them.

  The urgent need was some scran. Then shelter. The first arrivals had come across a group of thatched huts – a promise that things were looking up. There was no sign of the locals, but there were pawpaw trees, vines of wild tomatoes and, even better, tall stems of corn and a few scrawny chickens scratching in the dirt. They collected bananas and coconuts and got a fire going. Peter Nelson, who fancied himself as a bit of a cook, turned the harvest into a stew, which they wolfed down. That night, they used kerosene from a tin to wipe some of the oil from their bodies and they slept like babies, some on the rough floor of the huts, others in the long grass outside, uncaring about the swarms of mosquitoes.

  The next day brought trouble. Someone had found a sheep and butchered it, and Nelson, warming to his role as head chef, had it stewing on a fire that afternoon when the villagers returned – about 40 of them. They were not amused to discover this ruffian gang of white castaways occupying their huts and stealing their food and belongings. Shouting angrily, they brandished their parangs and the head man produced a pistol, which he pointed first at Nelson, then at Owen. Time for some fast thinking. Owen told his men to hand over a couple of wristwatches and a few rings, and it worked. The head man lowered the gun and then led his people back down to the beach, where they paddled away in a big canoe.

  Sangiang had more surprises. Ray Parkin and a mate, exploring along the shoreline, were astonished to come across two European children – a girl of perhaps nine and a boy of maybe seven – dirty and dishevelled. They had arrived on the island in a small sailing skiff, in the care of a Malay nanny and another Australian sailor, who had been with the destroyer Vendetta. The children were English, he said. They were all survivors of a small steamer, the Vyner Brooke, which had been sunk in the escape from Singapore. The sailor declined an invitation to join the Perth group, saying that he wanted to head for Australia, and with the nanny and h
is bewildered young charges he set off again in the skiff the next morning.10

  Some more exploring turned up another lifeboat wedged ashore, this one of timber planking, with a small hole in the bow. Jan Tyrrell and some of his group, 23 of them, including Tag Wallace, worked to make it seaworthy again. With Polo Owen’s agreement, they set off on 4 March to row across the current towards the mountainous blue line of the Java mainland, a distance of about ten kilometres. They were about halfway there when they noticed a Japanese destroyer charging down from the north, its for’ard gun trained directly at them. It slowed to a crawl no more than 200 metres away, officers on the bridge peering through binoculars. Then it sped off as suddenly as it had arrived. Their luck was in again, at least for that day.

  Another hour of rowing took them to a beach on Java near the town of Anjer, where they landed safely. They headed inland to a coastal road. Some decided to walk south to this place called Labuhan. Twelve of them, including Tyrell and Tag Wallace, thought they would head in the opposite direction, to the north, where they hoped there might be Dutch and Allied troops still fighting.

  The 40 Perth survivors left on Sangiang provisioned the big steel lifeboat with whatever they could find. They collected water in some containers taken from the village huts and found some cans of condensed milk. Melons and pawpaws, ears of corn, some gluey rice and a few hands of small bananas were stowed beneath the boat’s for’ard thwarts. After a breakfast of boiled rice, they set off for the Java coast beneath a grey, lowering sky that threatened rain. They hoisted the scrap of sail on the small mast and rowed double-banked, two men to each oar. Polo Owen was nominally in command, but he was a paymaster officer, not a seaman. It was John Thode and Ray Parkin, consummate sailors, who took charge. Thode, 29 years old, was a lieutenant in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve. A New Zealander by birth, he had been mobilised for duty only in October 1941, and had joined Perth less than a month later, but he had been an officer in merchant ships before the war, with a seaman’s knowledge and instincts. He and Parkin would complement each other well.

  A Japanese destroyer came down to inspect them, too, but a sudden tropical rain squall moved between them like a curtain, and when it cleared the enemy was already moving on. By midday, they reached Anjer at about the same point where the earlier boat had landed. Eighteen of them, led by Owen, decided to walk to Labuhan. The rest would go there in the boat, and, after that, on to Tjilatjap, perhaps.

  Owen’s group trooped off, bunched together to begin with but gradually separating in the heat and dust. At the first village they came to, they asked for water but the reception was sullen. As they moved on, it was clear they could expect little help from the locals. At one stage, eight men peeled away from the group to head inland. The shadows of history conceal their fate, but it appears that four of them were attacked by villagers with parangs, one of them dying later of his wounds. Dusk was falling when the remaining ten men straggled into Labuhan, to find their hopes dashed. This was no provincial harbour, no port where they might find a ship, or a fishing boat, or any vessel at all that could carry them to Tjilatjap, let alone Australia. Labuhan was a village on a muddy river, with a few dusty streets. As the night closed in, they became uncomfortably aware that a menacing crowd of local people had begun to trail them.

  But the lifeboat had arrived before them and they could see it lying not far off a small jetty. Stumbling, desperate, they waded into the water and swam to it. One man, lagging behind the rest, was bleeding badly where his hand had been slashed by a parang. They pulled to a small islet just offshore, not much more than a lump of coral, and spent an anxious night there, drenched by drumming rain.

  The next morning, there was another parting. Despite the grim experience of the day before, Owen and the majority still felt that an overland march to Tjilatjap stood a better chance of success than a journey by sea. Others disagreed. Parkin and Thode thought they could make Tjilatjap in the lifeboat, and Australia after that, and they chose eight men to go with them: Knocker White, Chief Petty Officer Harry Knight, Petty Officers Horrie Abbott and Alf Coyne, Yeoman of Signals Jack Willis, Leading Seaman Keith Gosden, and Able Seamen Harry Mee and Norm Griffiths.

  The two groups said their goodbyes, and Owen’s people, including two wounded men, went ashore into Labuhan again. There, by remarkable chance, they also stumbled upon the mysterious Eliza. She hunted up odds and ends of clothing for them, including, bizarrely, a pile of old football jumpers; she found a little chicken and rice to feed the wounded, and she convinced the local headman that they should be permitted to stay the night. But the Japanese were expected at any minute, she said, and the Australians would have to move on at first light. The headman would give them a letter explaining who they were, which should protect them from any hostility. Perhaps they should head inland for Menes.

  The headman was as good as his word. He handed Owen an old-fashioned slate with a message scratched on it in chalk. As they plodded inland through the hills to Menes – a hard grind uphill past the rice terraces – the slate worked wonders. Villagers offered them tea and little cakes of cassava root, and when they reached the town that night a Javanese doctor took them in, offered them more tea and rice and invited them to sleep on the floor of a small hospital.

  Next morning, as they climbed higher, a small car stopped beside them on the road and another Javanese, a small man in a dirty suit, got out and urged them in passable English to keep going. He seemed friendly. The Dutch were only a little way ahead, he said, and he would drive on to tell them the Australians were coming. Buoyed by that news, they were resting on a shady verandah in the next village when, from nowhere, they were confronted by a platoon of about 20 Japanese soldiers with fixed bayonets and a pair of machine guns. In anguish, then the fury of betrayal, they saw the little man from the car, puffed with pleasure, grinning triumphantly in the background. It was 8 March. Pony carts came to collect them that evening.

  Thode and Parkin and their eight handpicked souls in the steel lifeboat pulled away from Labuhan on a calm sea. The rain of the night before had cleared to steamy sunshine, but there was no wind for their scrap of a sail, so they rowed ever so slowly southwards. Out in the centre of the strait, they could see a thin plume of smoke from Krakatoa, the volcanic island, slowly disappearing below the horizon behind them. They reckoned they had travelled about a hundred kilometres south from Sangiang. Thode was keen to get to Princes Island (Pulau Panaitan) – the largest island in the strait, just off Java Head – where he thought there might be food and water available.

  Being navy, they did it in seamanlike fashion. Parkin organised them into three watches – red, white and blue – to take turns at rowing and rest, and each man was given his own space in the boat to sleep. That first evening, great banks of cumulus cloud rolled in upon them and an ominous calm became a mighty thunderstorm, memorably described by Ray Parkin in his memoir Out of the Smoke:

  Searching lances of lightning stabbed outwards and downward, spitting and hissing on the sullen sea. The thunder rolled about voluminously with the deep sonorousness of an organ in a cathedral. Out of the gloom came a roaring hiss which swept over them. They felt as if they were being beaten to the bottom of the boat with an avalanche of pebbles. It was not hail, but enormous drops of water smacking down everywhere …

  …the blackened tin in which they had cooked the rice was washed out and the boat’s cover was spread across the boat and funnelled into it. Meanwhile each man had been licking his chops, savouring the sweet water running down his face. They caught more than half a tinful …11

  The next morning, they fetched Princes Island and picked their way through reefs and shoals to a sandy beach. Foraging along the shore, they found some packing cases that had been washed up, and they broke them open in the hope, the dream, of finding tinned food. No luck: they were full of containers of ammonia. But one last case revealed something almost as good as food: a set of lifeboat sails, brand new and with sheets and halliards, which the
y could fit to their own boat. That cheered them up no end; Australia now seemed a better chance than ever. That night, they ate small shellfish and drank brackish water from a hole dug in the sand.

  For two days, they stayed on Princes, gathering coconuts and a few pawpaws and making the boat as shipshape as possible. They stepped two rough masts, with a gaff-rigged mainsail, and on a whim they christened her HMAS Anzac. Parkin, always the artist, wrote the name in charcoal on the bow. Then they set out again, to round Java Head and head east for Tjilatjap. Another fierce tropical storm nearly did for them one night, causing the boat to jibe12 violently in the blackness, but they weathered that and went on, through drenching storms and into doldrums where they moved not at all.

  Tempers frayed. Their supplies of food and water were running low. Day followed monotonous day. They clung to the southern coast of Java as best they could, but the boat had no keel, which meant that it was impossible to sail in any way close-hauled to windward. There were infinitely frustrating passages of hours and whole days when they made more distance sideways than forwards. By night, they had little idea of where they were heading, for the boat compass had no light; there was always the danger of another sudden jibe in the dark. Once, as morning rose, they found the wind had changed and they were heading back where they had come from. Another time, they nearly foundered on a foaming reef that loomed up suddenly, escaping only by a superhuman effort of the rowers and a sudden shift of wind that threw them onto a tack to claw themselves away. There was a moment of special misery when Thode, trying to check the compass one night, lit a distress flare. Part of it broke off and smacked into the sleeping body of Norm Griffiths, an A.B. from Brisbane. He was badly burned on the stomach, but all they could do for him was to cover the wound with a rag soaked in kerosene.