Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [77]
At one point Lloyd Willey saw Rentz huddled with a sailor on the float. The kid, seaman first class Walter L. Beeson, was hanging on, head down, apparently wounded, though it was hard to see where or how badly. He didn’t have a life jacket. According to Beeson, Rentz, unhurt himself, “told me his heart was failing him; told me he couldn’t last much longer.” Gasping for breath, the chaplain said a brief prayer for the men in the group, removed his life jacket, and offered it to the young sailor. Perhaps ashamed to take it, Beeson accepted it but declined to put it on, at least not until Rentz had kicked away from the float and submitted to the sea. According to Jim Gee, “No one realized what had happened. It’s just one of those things that one minute he’s there, and the next minute you look around and you take a head count, and sure enough, he wasn’t there.” Only when the finality of Rentz’s sacrifice had sunk in did Walter Beeson pull on the life jacket. The group stayed together and drifted the rest of that night, humbled by the spirit of their chaplain right to the end.
As dawn broke over Bantam Bay on March 1, the Houston’s survivors could at last see the full extent of the Japanese landing operation and their own incidental place in its midst. “The bay was as slick as glass, not a ripple anywhere except in the wake of the landing barges plying between the transports and the shore with their loads of supplies and troops,” wrote Bill Weissinger, floating with a group of Houston survivors led by Lt. Joseph F. Dalton. “The surface was dotted with all sorts of objects: boxes, crates, lumber, all types of containers, and life jackets—some empty…some occupied.” According to John Wisecup, on another raft, “Transports lined the beach as far as the eye could see, busily discharging troops and equipment with little visible resistance.” Too tired to swim for shore, the Americans drifted, watching the barges going back and forth, wondering if one might come for them. In time, a barge hauled out in their direction.
As the thirty-footer pulled alongside, Dalton urged his shipmates to remove any insignia that might identify their ship. The Japanese engineer in charge of the craft motioned them aboard, seated them on deck, then began making “strange guttural-snarling sounds which we found out later was the Japanese language,” Weissinger wrote. With the life raft towed behind it, the barge got under way and headed for one of the large transports. The Japanese engineer and his coxswain passed around cigarettes. Then the coxswain approached Lieutenant Dalton.
“Ingeris, ka?”
English? Dalton didn’t hesitate to correct him. “No. American,” he said.
The enemy sailor dismissed this out of hand. “No America. All America finis. Ingeris.” The two men disputed the question of nationality in pidgin for a few minutes until the barge reached the transport, then the Japanese sailor gave up.
The coxswain threw over a line, went up the gangway, and conferred with the troop carrier’s officer of the deck. Then without comment he came back down and released the line. The engineer throttled up again and steered the barge toward another vessel. They had no more luck with that one. In all, four different transports refused custody of the Dalton gang. “Nobody wanted us,” wrote Bill Weissinger. The engineer was finally left with no alternative but to cast them loose again. The coxswain cut the line towing the raft listlessly behind, and indicated that the survivors were to swim for it. As they went overboard again, three rifle-armed soldiers on the large transport walked along the rail. The troopship was moving just fast enough to keep the survivors on its beam. The Americans braced for gunfire. Reaching the raft