Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [81]
Leading seaman Keith Gosden—who had flown suddenly and exuberantly off the Perth when the torpedo hit near Y turret’s lobby—refused to be rescued when he had his chance. Alongside his raft came an Imperial Navy destroyer. Already holding Perth survivors in custody, its crew threw down lines. One of them called, “Come aboard,” but Gosden and his shipmates saw rescue as a synonym for surrender and pushed off from the warship. A Perth man shouted, “You know where to stick it, mug—we’d rather drown!” The Japanese replied, “So, you say Nippon no bloody good. You wait till tomorrow.” The ship vanished.
Soon afterward the tables were turned. Gosden felt someone pulling at his legs. Startled, he looked down and saw his assailant: a swimming Japanese soldier with a rifle and in full battle gear trying to get aboard his raft. The survivors of the Houston and the Perth were not the only victims of the Battle of Sunda Strait to contend with the violent sea. All around Gosden and his fellow survivors imperial troops floundered, some facedown, dead and drowned, others struggling toward the raft, holding their rifles “like periscopes.” When the soldier grabbing at Gosden tried to say something, the sailor replied with a sharp kick to the face. The soldier reached again for the Australian sailor’s boots—he had kept them in anticipation of getting ashore, but they made fair weapons too. Gosden kicked at the face again and again until it was no longer there to be kicked. His resistance spurred his shipmates to a rather frenzied defense of the raft. Soon the only Japanese visible nearby were facedown and inert. They were Gosden’s enemy, and he would neither accept rescue by them nor do them that favor. He was going home. As he would remind himself on the difficult journey ahead: There’s a plan for every man, and when that plan is completed that is the end. This is not my time. My death is not determined yet. I will get home.
By first light on March 1, the southerly flow through Sunda Strait was carrying Keith Gosden and his float full of survivors into the wedge of sea separating Toppers and Sangiang Islands. Gosden’s shipmate, Lieutenant Gillan, and his boys, like the Americans Hamlin and Huffman and Harris and Schwarz and so many others, were able to scramble ashore. Gosden and his mates went for a ride.
Toppers Island, near the up-current northeastern end of Sunda Strait, was a small lump of rock that sported an important lighthouse. Survivors of both the Houston and the Perth found refuge on its compact shore. Sangiang Island, larger and more verdant, was visible as a low line of rocks, fringed by bushes and taller palm trees that enclosed a narrow inner plain full of broad-leafed swordgrass and younger banana palms. Watching the islands as they appeared to slide north along the distant mainland coast, Gosden could see that he might be missing his only chance to reach land before the current expelled him remorselessly into the Indian Ocean. He told his shipmates he was going to swim for Sangiang. They scoffed. He persisted. The argument was not settled until Gosden slid off the raft and began swimming, along with a persuadable Royal Australian Air Force corporal, Ronald Bradshaw. The waters near Sangiang’s shore whorled and ripped, sometimes bubbling like rapids. Fifty yards from the beach Gosden and Bradshaw got caught in this watery revolving door and were spun out farther from the island.
Many others had fought these currents and lost. From Lt. Joseph Dalton’s group, two American sailors, seaman first class Isaac A. Black and signalman first class Edward T. Carlyle, set out for the Java shore. They dived off the raft and rode a shore-bound current for a time, but Lieutenant Dalton could soon see that they were moving faster down-current than