Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [79]
Gillan, an engineer, was a machine-minded westerner. His dreams were of a familiar world he had learned to love: engine rooms, roaring burner fires, hissing boilers, screaming turbines, the smell of oil mixing with sweat. Now, like the rest of the sailors in captivity, he began adjusting to a different reality, an alien and primitive one. Somewhere along the way Gillan saw fit to speak a quick, quiet prayer: “Please, God, help us and deliver us all and look after our families at home.”
The men on John Wisecup’s life raft, whose senior man was a gravely wounded young lieutenant junior grade named Francis B. Weiler, fought Sunda Strait’s currents by using pieces of flotsam as oars and making fast a bowline that was towed by several of the stronger swimmers. Weiler had a gouge near his spine and a wound in his arm deep enough to show bone in the moonlight. After a day or two soaking in bunker oil, his arm festered and began to turn gangrenous. It swelled to twice its size. Drifting with the current, Weiler used his good arm to splash water on the parched, exhausted men who were doing the paddling. They worked doggedly, but thirst and fatigue pushed them toward madness. There were some outlandish conversations on that raft. Each time dawn came, Wisecup noticed, a few faces had gone missing.
Though morning on the third day revealed no land within sight, they knew enough to keep rowing, and somehow that afternoon the tide gave them a break, steering the currents back toward shore. With Weiler still lurching around the raft with one good arm, splashing water on folks and taking no notice of his wounds, John Wisecup looked toward the bowline and saw that the swimmers towing it had somehow changed their stroke. From the way their shoulders were moving above water, in fact, Wisecup was delighted to realize that they must be standing on the bottom. They hauled the raft toward the welcoming nearby beach. Two sailors carried Weiler ashore and sat him against a coconut tree. Then several elderly Javanese men appeared with machetes. They cut the tops off some green coconuts and let the sailors drink their fill.
Few of the Houston’s survivors had seen the need to keep their shoes when they left the ship. Faithful to regulations to the end, most had placed them neatly by the gunwales before going overboard. “The deck looked like a used shoe store display,” Wisecup recalled. As the survivors pulled themselves over coral and rocks and onto land, they realized their mistake. Much later some of them would dream of the abandoned footwear as they wrapped their bleeding feet in rags, leaves, and carvings from rubber tires. Sailors from the deck force got by the best going barefoot. Months of trudging the Houston’s hot decks with holystones and hoses in hand had toughened their soles as the yeomen and radio operators could only have wished.
Survivors washed ashore at any number of scattered points. They organized themselves and tried to round up their friends, to heal them or get them healed. Pursuing varied routes of evasion and escape, they acquired stories divergent and dramatic enough to keep a Hollywood producer busy making wartime epics for the rest of his career. In search of help, they hiked mountains and dirt roads, forded streams and hailed rickshaws. But as often as not, the help turned out to be in league with the newly arriving Japanese.
Several centuries of weighty colonial administration