Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [109]
It was a pledge not to escape. It read in part, “I will obey all orders from the Japanese.” According to Ensign Smith, “We refused to sign this document and nothing more was heard of it for a short time.” Lieutenant Hamlin tried to negotiate the language of the pledge to eliminate its conflict with American military law, which required prisoners to attempt escape. To the phrase “I will obey all orders from the Japanese” he proposed adding, “insofar as they are not contrary to my oath of allegiance to the United States.” If it was a labor negotiation, management held all the cards. The Japanese were going to have things their way.
Shortly after the no-escape pledge was foisted upon the prisoners, they got the opportunity to take their subversive radio arts to new levels, not merely to receive news but to make it, to go international, to broadcast word of their survival to a nation that still wondered at their fate. One day the Japanese invited Allied officers to write letters and read them over Batavia’s Japanese-controlled shortwave radio. Ever suspicious of propaganda, they refused, at least until cooler heads realized it might be a way to send word home and reassure family that there had been plenty of survivors of Java’s collapse.
It fell to the Australian broadcast veteran Rohan Rivett to go to the Batavia studio each day to read a letter over the air. The first was written by an Australian army captain. The second correspondent, another Australian captain, described Bicycle Camp’s conditions as “comparable to those of Dudley Flats.” The Japanese, believing the reference to Melbourne’s slum was a compliment, permitted the broadcast to go out. Quickly enough Rivett realized the value of the tool he had been given. On June 20 his own turn came and he sent the following broadcast, intended not to detail the fates of the Perth and the Houston but to offer the first indication of the damage they had inflicted and to narrate the path the ships’ survivors had taken through Serang to the Batavia compound.
At Serang were nearly all the survivors from the gallant Australian cruiser Perth and the American cruiser Houston, sunk in a terrific battle against superior Nippon forces at the entrance to Sunda Straits on the early morning of 1 March. I have heard the Nippon sailors on a destroyer which picked up some of the 300-odd Perth survivors pay a generous tribute to the wonderful fight put up by the two vessels, surrounded by great numbers of Nippon cruisers, destroyers, submarines and transports. Nippon officers themselves paid generous tribute to the deadly efficiency of Perth’s gunners, both in that last action and in the action on 26 February [sic] in the Battle of the Java Sea.
According to Rivett, “From first to last perhaps a hundred men of all ranks and nationalities had letters broadcast, while at the same time the Japanese were also transmitting the names of all those in the camp at a rate of twenty-five names every two days. It was a painfully slow business, but it was better than nothing, and those of us whose names were sent home were much luckier than tens of thousands of others in Japanese hands, whose people did not hear that they were prisoners until late in 1943.”
The broadcasts soon rippled on American shores. In early July, the mystery of Captain Rooks’s fate became what in 1942 must have passed for a minor media event. Japanese-controlled Batavia radio broadcast Rivett’s first message, stating that a thousand survivors of the Houston and Perth