Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [99]
Like the Houston survivors, the Lost Battalion had tangled with the Japanese and come away monstrously frustrated. Sailing westward during the countdown to war, embarked on the SS Republic and escorted by the heavy cruiser Pensacola, even the experienced troops among them had wondered, “How could there be so much water in the world?” Under way for the Philippines, they were redirected to Brisbane, arriving three days before Christmas 1941. There they ran into some locals who greeted them boisterously, “Hey, Yanks!” The artillerymen responded, “Hey, ANZACs!”* When the protest came, “We’re not ANZACs, we’re Australians,” the Guardsmen replied, “Well, we’re not Yanks, we’re Texans.”
On January 11, 1942, they landed at Surabaya, Java, eventually to deploy around Camp Singosari, an airstrip amid the muddy tapioca fields outside nearby Malang. The artillerymen worked as the Nineteenth Bombardment Group’s ground support unit, as their mess, their equipment maintenance, communications, and air defense staff. They rigged their World War I–vintage seventy-five-millimeter field guns for antiaircraft duty, planting them in pits to improve their firing angles. They sprang into action whenever they heard the drum signals of native spotters along the coast warning them of inbound Japanese planes.
Like their naval counterparts within ABDA, they had been poorly employed under multinational command. Perhaps no one invested any great hope in them. On January 18, Field Marshal Wavell himself inspected them and did not seem impressed. There was little they could do to protect the home of the overmatched, overworked B-17 Flying Fortress crews at Singosari. On February 27, what was left of the Nineteenth Bombardment Group, ravaged by Japanese air attacks, withdrew from Java. The Second Battalion was released, too. “We were still in an Alice in Wonderland world,” said Jess Stanbrough, a technical sergeant and radio specialist with the unit. “It was just another Louisiana maneuver. Nobody was frightened of the situation. We certainly didn’t realize how bad it was. We thought there were a lot of other people around to help.” Like the sailors on the Houston, they idled and wondered when the Japanese amphibious assault would finally come.
The commander of ABDA’s ground forces needed artillery. Dutch Lt. Gen. Hein ter Poorten had two Australian infantry battalions, the 2/3 Machine Gun and 2/2 Pioneers (combat engineers) under Brigadier Arthur S. Blackburn; twenty-five British light tanks of the Third Hussars; and 25,000 Dutch troops, the majority of them ethnic Indonesians with a low level of readiness and training. What he lacked was artillery. The Americans filled the bill. When the fight for Java was joined on the ground, the 131st’s E Battery was assigned to clean up the battalion’s equipment and then withdraw to Surabaya. The rest of the battalion went west to fight alongside the Australians.
As they departed, the Americans drove their trucks in circles to convince Japanese observers there were more of them than the four hundred or so there actually were. “We would pass through a village, make a wide sweep, rearrange our vehicles and enter that village from another direction,” remembered Kyle Thompson, a sergeant with Headquarters Battery. “It all seemed useless to me, but then the idea was to make the people think they had tons of support from the United States Army.”
The 131st dug in new positions in a rubber plantation outside the Dutch governor’s grounds at Buitenzorg (now Bogor). Soon they withdrew to Bandung. The plan was for Brigadier Blackburn’s Australians,