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By Root 1656 0

Civilian Conservation Corps, and worked on road construction crews in the Sierra Nevadas. After a Navy recruiter visited his work site one day, Schwarz asked his mother to sign his enlistment papers. She seemed to know that the military offered him a chance for a better life. Howard R. Charles grew up in Kansas fantasizing about killing his abusively tyrannical stepfather. Ultimately his method of coping was to run away. By the time he reached Bicycle Camp, he knew how to take a punch. “That’s the way I handled myself with my stepfather. ‘Howard,’ he would say, ‘I’m gonna fix you, you little sonuvabitch.’ And then he would beat me, always in private, sometime with fists, sometimes with that blacksnake whip, promising to kill me if I ever so much as breathed a word about it to my mother particularly, or anyone else…. I reacted to the guards who beat the prisoners as I did to my stepfather. I would never deliberately antagonize them. I would let them get their kicks from beating me, and I would wait, and one day…”

There were times when the Japanese seemed vulnerable to a surprisingly effective group countermeasure devised by the prisoners. It worked like this: when one of their number was taking a bashing, rather than cower, they gathered as an audience. They would call each other’s attention to the victim and point and laugh at him. “Hey, old Joe’s really getting a pounding…!” In effect it turned the offending guard into a performer on the prisoners’ stage. This psychological aikido could have striking results. “That really embarrassed the Japanese,” said Seldon Reese. “It had a hell of a psychological effect on them…. They got to where they didn’t really hound the Americans and Australians and Scots nearly as much as the English and the Dutch…. They got far worse bashings than us guys that laughed.” It was a bit like slowing the progress of a forest fire by burning down the woods in its path. But it paid dividends, at least initially, at Bicycle Camp.

Every morning at daybreak, after tenko, the Japanese sent the prisoners down to the dockyards at Tanjung Priok and to other military and industrial sites to salvage useful things from the rubble of war. At the Dunlop tire factory, they stacked tires and loaded them onto ships. Out at an airfield, they moved gasoline and oil drums. At the partially scuttled Shell Oil Company refinery, they used hand pumps to move gasoline from the few storage tanks that the Dutch hadn’t ruined with sugar into fifty-five-gallon drums, then rolled them onto trucks for transport to a makeshift storage area out on a golf course. There were plenty of smaller drums of grease and oil to queue up on the docks. Autos were cannibalized for their carburetors and spark plugs and sheet metal. Industrial machinery—large gears, small nuts and bolts, generators, refrigerators—was crated up and shipped to the home islands. What furniture and other treasures could be looted from Java’s Dutch mansions and villas were likewise jammed onto cargo ships and taken to Japan.

A barge sunk in the harbor was found to be full of gin, whiskey, and spirits. Japanese divers retrieved much of it, selling bottles in camp for two guilders. Prisoners could usually flip such delicacies for a profit, though if a guy got caught doing arbitrage the penalty was severe. “In Bicycle Camp, you tried to get out on a working party rather than get out of work,” Paul Papish said. “It was survival. You had a chance to get something to eat.” Prisoners assigned to stack sacks of sugar learned to tear open a sack and leak some into their boot. A ship’s cook used the contraband to make candy with coconut and peanuts.

The Batavia waterfront was a scavenger’s paradise, and the prisoners benefited from it as surely as their masters did. They snatched anything at hand that offered some potential use in captivity: nails, paint, medicine, Vaseline, kerosene, gasoline, gin. Service in a warship’s closed universe made Navy men resourceful. John Wisecup fashioned a prison mess kit out of some old peach cans. Bamboo stalks became spoons or chopsticks.