Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [111]
On July 4, Ensign Smith returned to Bicycle Camp with his dockyard working party. As they entered the gate and passed the guardhouse, Smith noticed that all of the camp’s prisoners were lined up at the Japanese commandant’s office. “As I marched my troops up and halted in front of the guardhouse the officers were called out separately and a note stuck under my face which said, ‘If you do not sign the oath, your life will not be guaranteed.’” The prisoners’ refusal stood. Smith wrote:
I was then taken by the Japanese guard into the rear room of the guardhouse and put in a room where I found the senior officers and hut commanders all ready [sic] there. We were not allowed to talk or smoke and we stood there at rigid attention for about forty-five minutes. At the end of this period we were lined up outside and marched under guard across over into the Japanese side of the camp and into a garage where we all found the officers from the camp waiting. The Japanese made a great show of loading their rifles and cocking their pieces as if they thought that they could bully us into doing things by force.
A guard held up a sign restating the ultimatum of a few weeks before: “If you do not sign the oath, we do not guarantee your lives.” That the Japanese imposed written legalities on their prisoners was rather rich in view of their government’s own refusal to ratify the Geneva Convention. It may seem absurd that the Japanese expected a duress-induced promise to trump a man’s wartime instinct for survival. And it certainly seems quaint that the prisoners risked torture by refusing to sign a contractual nullity. But that is just what they did. After several weeks of reduced rations, restricted access to cooking facilities, and confinement of officers and senior NCOs, not to mention threats of death, the responsible officers of the various POW factions finally advised their men to sign the agreement. Extracted under duress, it would be void in any event.
There were just three holdouts. Two Australian army captains and Lt. Frank Gillan, the Perth’s engineering officer, refused to sign the oath. “You can always be sure that some Australians will go out of their way to aggravate the Japanese,” said Jess Stanbrough. That morning the guards took the three protesters to the guardhouse, produced thick bamboo sticks and forced each to kneel on the gravel walkway with the bamboo behind his knees. They were kept in that agonizing position for six hours while half a dozen guards, including Lieutenant Suzuki, did Joe DiMaggio impersonations on them with their rifle stocks. Three or four times Suzuki unsheathed his saber and struck them with its flat side. The three men stayed conscious throughout.
Finally the senior officer in the camp, Australian Brig. A. C. Blackburn, together with Col. Albert C. Searle, the senior U.S. Army officer on Java, prevailed upon the men to sign the oath and the beatings ceased. “The three men were in obvious pain,” observed Lieutenant Hamlin, “but bore the torture with great fortitude. The men were black and blue all over, and so remained for several days.”
Signing that piece of paper meant something to the men. It hurt. “There ain’t a one of us who didn’t think we were traitors,” said John Wisecup. “All during the war, I thought of that…. We believed actually that we were selling our country down the road.”
According to Jess Stanbrough, the dustup over the oath marked the beginning of the war. “After the Fourth of July, all hell broke loose,” he said.
In mid-August, Lieutenant Suzuki and his contingent of Japanese guards left Batavia and were replaced by a company of Koreans under a Lieutenant Sonai. Abused by the Japanese, they vented their frustrations downstream on the prisoners. “The Brown Bomber was our first infamous one,” Stanbrough said. “He’d