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By Root 1499 0

after his ship was destroyed, after two weeks at battle stations and thirteen hours fighting Sunda’s currents, Otto Schwarz was retrieved by a Japanese landing boat and deposited on the beach. So tired he could scarcely stand, the eighteen-year-old from Newark, New Jersey, joined a group of about nineteen other Houston sailors. He cast off his life vest, leaving himself wearing only his khaki pants, and tried to seat himself on a crate. Almost immediately a Japanese guard ran up to him and bashed him to the ground. An officer took him behind some palm trees, leveled a pistol at his head, and asked, “Do you want to see your family again?” He demanded to know how many airplanes the Americans had, and how many battleships. A seaman second class never knew much, but any Allied sailor in the theater would have laughed at the idea that battleships or aircraft had a prominent place in early-1942 Allied orders of battle. Schwarz said as much. The officer grew belligerent but shoved Schwarz back to his group, where they all became stevedores for Gen. Hitoshi Imamura’s beachmasters.

Prodded at bayonet point and bashed by rifle butts, the group of twenty Americans, including Schwarz, Lt. Cdr. William Galbraith, Ens. John Nelson, and Marines Charley Pryor and Howard Charles, spent three days and four nights hauling pony carts full of food, supplies, and ammunition from barges to depots ashore. A Japanese officer who could manage a little English said, “You are prisoners of war. Your lives will be spared.” But reassurance wasn’t what Pryor, for one, needed. “I had no fear of these people. It didn’t worry me from one minute to another whether or not they wanted to line me up and shoot me.”

As it happened, the beasts that had been earmarked to pull those carts had gone down with one of the merchantmen sunk the night before. So the Americans worked in their stead late into the night. The asphalt road ground their bare feet raw. Schwarz developed a huge single blister running from toe to heel. Taken to a local schoolhouse, he was allowed to rest a bit, then a Japanese soldier approached him with a pair of tweezers and tore off the blister and doused the wound with iodine. “All my life I was the kind of person who just went from one event to another. I never worried about the door closing behind me,” he would say. “I always took everything day by day. I realized life was not going to be pleasant after that. I found out in quick order what it was going to be like to be a prisoner of war.”

Capture was an anticlimactic end to grandiose plans to evade and escape. When Ens. Charles D. Smith, Red Huffman, and Sergeant Lusk came ashore, they had tried to avoid the well-patrolled coast road, cross the mountains, and reach Dutch lines. But at midday on March 3, after two and a half days of subsisting on rainwater and growing weak from the deprivation, they encountered a native whose wary hospitality got them a meal of fish heads and rice but not much more. As they were eating, he evidently hailed a Japanese army patrol nearby. They scarcely had time to duck into the bushes before they were rounded up without a fight. Shackled as a chain gang and marched through a village, they realized they might be better off with the Japanese than with the natives. In the village, the locals were waving small flags emblazoned with imperial rising suns. The Japanese officer in charge of the prisoners assigned a guard to protect them.

Thoughts of escape gave way to the reality of their physical limitations, to exhaustion and the absence of routes to Allied lines. All roads led to prison. Taken to the nearest villages, they were packed into local jails emptied for use as POW pens. Into Pandeglang came Lt. (jg) Leon Rogers and Lt. Joseph Dalton, similarly betrayed by natives, Otto Schwarz and the beachside work party, and John Wisecup and the rest of the men from Lieutenant Weiler’s raft. Most of the prisoners were finally force-marched or packed in trucks and driven to Serang, the largest town west of Batavia. Except for the preponderance of olive-green Japanese