Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [86]
Pandeglang, Rangkasbitung, Serang. To Western ears, the names were alien. But for three weeks in March these places were home to most of the U.S. and Australian survivors who straggled in from the surrounding jungles and beaches of Java. It was strange territory to them, but even to those familiar with it, the contours of this corner of the universe were in flux. The Japanese troops were on the move, consolidating a foothold in western Java and jousting with Allied forces in the east.
Amid the confusion, reunions with other shipmates had an aspect of excitement. Lieutenant Thode’s men rejoined Commander Owen and his group. The senior officer had worked his way from village to village, pleading with the village wadanas (or chieftains) to help his men until the inevitable betrayal. The Houston survivors compared notes on their last sea battle (“How many do you think we lost?”) and on who got off the ship, where, and when (“Did so-and-so make it? Have you seen him?”). One sailor reported having seen Sergeant Standish, the grizzled Marine who was thought to have fired those last bursts from the Houston’s toppling foremast, cleaning his .45 pistol on the beach and then vanishing into the bush. Few of the others thought that could be possible.
The municipal jail was cleared of its local felons and jammed on March 8 with as many Allied prisoners as would fit. Most of the Houston’s officers were imprisoned there. They compiled a muster roll of all of the known survivors from the ship. By authoritative tallies, 368 men from the Houston’s complement of 1,168, and 324 of the Perth’s 681, survived to become prisoners of war. At Serang, there was a total of about 1,500 prisoners, an odd rabble of captives that included sailors of four nations, Royal Air Force personnel, British troops evacuated from Singapore, and local Dutch, including women and children. Dressed in whatever they happened to wash ashore with—oil-stained khaki shorts or perhaps just a loincloth—they slept on hard floors in square fourteen-foot cells. The officers had a tub for a latrine, which was emptied once a day into an open drain running through the cell and outside into a small creek. The rest of the men were crammed into an abandoned movie theater, where the seats had been stripped out, leaving a sloping concrete floor as a POW campground.
Frightened as they were, the prisoners in the Serang theater had to laugh at their captors’ futile attempts to count them. During the roll calls, which the Japanese would teach them to call tenkos, the men were forced to sit erect and cross-legged while the guards took a count. “On the first nine occasions their counts varied between 1,620 and 1,483,” wrote Rohan Rivett, an Australian radio journalist who had escaped Singapore only to be captured on Java. “They’ve now decided after several more counts on some intermediate figure, but their system of counting is so weird and wonderful that I doubt if they really know to the nearest fifty just how many of us they’ve got jammed into this [bloody] hellhole.” But the prisoners’ laughter welled in the shadow of death. In the balcony above them, a tripod-mounted machine gun pointed out over the stage like a lethal spotlight.
Bearding and filthy, their injuries untreated, the sailors were “packed together,” Rivett wrote, “like penguins or seals on one of those rocky beaches which the publishers of natural history books love to photograph.” Under strict orders to