Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [101]
Allied leadership would be as fractious in surrender as it had been in battle. “We were stunned, speechless,” wrote Kyle Thompson. “Some of us were crying out of fear of an uncertain future.” A few slipped out of camp against orders and headed for the coast in hopes of escape. But there was none. Instructed by the Dutch to surrender their equipment in good order, the battalion rebelled. The Texans depressurized the recoil mechanisms on their artillery pieces, buried their small arms, rolled hundred-dollar bills into cigars and smoked them. They drained the oil pans of their trucks and held a morbid competition to see which make lasted longest without engine lubrication. The Ford died first, then the Dodge, then the Chevy.
Word came that some Americans had been able to evacuate at Tjilatjap. The soldiers had heard rumors that the Houston and perhaps other ships were standing by to take them off the island. “We still had this eternal hope, prayer for the Houston,” Sgt. Wade H. Webb of the 131st said. “We lived on that, and actually we lived on that right up until they capitulated. Even a few days after, there was talk of breaking to the coast on the south…We clung to that possibility that we would get on the Houston and get off Java.” They knew nothing of the Battle of Sunda Strait, the heroism of Captain Rooks, or the stoutness of Sergeant Standish’s heart. They could go south and take their chances there, or surrender and roll the dice with the enemy.
Though some newspaper reports back home would describe the capture of the Lost Battalion as if it had been a repeat of the Alamo, the reality was far less dramatic. For the duration of the war it would burn the Texans that they had been cashed out by the Dutch and forced to submit with scarcely a fight. Rounded up at Goerett, they were taken to a train station and presented to a Japanese officer who made a welcoming speech. “I guess that was the first time I’d seen a Jap or heard them speaking,” said Staff Sgt. Roy M. Offerle. “He would scream and holler and yell, and then the interpreter would say, ‘The commander says he is very happy to see you.’ Then he would scream and holler like he was threatening to kill us, and then they would say, ‘You will soon go to a camp.’” On April 1, they were imprisoned at Batavia’s port district, Tanjung Priok.
Six weeks later, the artillerymen were marched to Bicycle Camp, where they came face-to-face with the sailors who were supposed to have been their rescuers. The sailors stared back, reciprocal expectations evident in many eyes. Through no fault of their own, each had let down the other. All were disappointed, if not altogether surprised, to find that they were not the only Americans who had failed to turn back an ambitious emperor’s bid for control of the Asian world.
*ANZAC is an acronym for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps, dating to 1915.
CHAPTER 29
Capture was a crucible that turned the dynamics of success upside down. Strengths became weaknesses, weaknesses strength. Where at the Naval Academy a well-developed aura of entitlement and patrician self-esteem could propel one to success, now those traits were potential paths to ruin. A disdainful look in the eye or a failure to submit, so carefully inculcated in children of privilege, got you beaten. A harder upbringing, on the other hand—a lifestyle of rural labor, of daily brinksmanship with an abusive stepfather—could produce a psychological carapace that enabled survival amid horrible adversity. Such improbable strength was not uncommon among the hardscrabble kids who enlisted in the military in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The trick to living in Japanese captivity was to navigate the divide separating subservience and defiance. Independent-minded boots who once thought the world revolved around their own tough selves might have wondered at the calculated brutality of their drill instructors. They would learn soon enough the higher purpose behind it all.
Otto Schwarz had left Newark at sixteen in the summer of 1940, joined the