No Better Friend, page 13
He made his way back topside when someone yelled to him, “Look at your bloody ship!” Kuala was burning furiously, on the verge of destruction. Baker dove into the ocean as another wave of bombers swooped in. Giant waterspouts erupted as the explosions went off. Miraculously unhurt, Baker made for the burning Kuala to try to save some of the documents he had been transporting since evacuating his post in Malaya weeks earlier, but the fire was far too strong. So Baker turned toward Pompong. He was headed for a clump of women struggling in the water when the burst from a falling bomb rattled him, causing his false teeth to fly out and “sink forever.”
Toothless, he pulled three women to shore by their life belts.
Moments later, the Kuala slipped away. The bombs that hit her engine room had destroyed the steam pipes required for firefighting, so there was little anyone could do to save her. Caithness and his navigation and gunnery officer, Lieutenant Frederick George, ducked in and out of the flames to search her entirely before abandoning ship. Satisfied there was no one left alive, they jumped off as the ship broke apart and sank.
For whatever reason, the fickle ocean currents were stronger by the Tien Kwang than they were a few hundred yards away, where the Kuala survivors weren’t badly affected. Wang Hua-Nan and his armchair missed landfall and drifted past “numerous floating bodies, both living and dead” out to sea. His armchair soon broke apart. “I succeeded in getting hold of two headless European corpses, both of which had life jackets on and were within my reach,” he later wrote in a letter to his friend George K. C. Yeh. Wang used a special money belt he wore for secreting banknotes to tie himself to the dead bodies, then floated for hours in waters “infested with sharks and crocodiles.”
Another raft carrying thirty civilians from the Kuala was swept past Pompong and out into open waters, but mostly, it was the surviving radarmen off the Tien Kwang who were unable to reach shore. Some would drift for days, eventually washing up on other islands or getting picked up by fishing skiffs. Far more perished a watery death before salvation arrived. Lieutenant Briggs and most of the Tien Kwang crew made it to Pompong Island, but that was not the case for the majority of the RAF personnel. Frank was extremely lucky. Of the 266 radarmen aboard, 179 were killed in the attack. Only thirty-four of them would eventually reach safety in Ceylon. The other fifty-three, Frank included, would suffer a different fate.
The Vyner Brooke was farther south of the carnage, having had a full day’s head start on the others. Her decks full of Australian nurses, including Vivian Bullwinkel, the ship had made it through the previous night without being spotted. But on the stroke of eleven o’clock on the morning of the fourteenth, as drenched survivors of the mass sinkings elsewhere in the area collapsed on shore and the dead lapped in the surf, a Japanese spotter plane appeared from nowhere, raked the starboard side of the boat with machine gun fire, and vanished.
Captain Tubby Borton knew the Bangka Strait as well as any skipper in the region and figured he could use the extra room to maneuver his way to safety. He decided to make a break for it. Just before two in the afternoon, Borton spotted a small island at the entrance of the strait and made for it, rather than enter the waters between Bangka and Sumatra. But the shelter proved futile, for they were spotted moments later by a flight of Nell bombers, who launched their explosive cargo at the Vyner Brooke.
Borton engaged his hard-earned strategy for staying afloat under bombardment, zigzagging furiously, carefully watching the Nells line up and take turns dropping their bombs. When he saw a bomb loose from its rack, he hauled the wheel hard over. By employing this tactic, the Vyner Brooke managed to avoid twenty-nine bombs thrown her way.
But the thirtieth went directly down the ship’s funnel, exploding in the engine room. From that moment, the Vyner Brooke was doomed. “There was a terrific bang and after that she was still,” recorded Betty Jeffrey. Several more on-target bombs killed many aboard and removed any hope of rescue. Borton ordered abandon ship, and the nurses moved to evacuate the civilians still alive inside the badly damaged vessel.
As they attempted to move the living toward the lifeboats that weren’t demolished in the bombing, panic began to break out on deck. Then a high-pitched voice, one that belonged to a female but not one of the Australian sisters, cut through the pandemonium. “Everybody stand still!” the voice commanded.
The authority in the voice was so absolute that there was a moment of silence as all movement stopped. Then the voice came again, slightly lower in tone: “My husband has dropped his glasses.”
Despite their immediate future prospects, everyone laughed at the chutzpah involved. But the smiles faded as everyone went onto the water. Vivian didn’t know how to swim, so she checked and rechecked her life belt until the Vyner Brooke was almost on her side. She took off her shoes, dropped into the water, and made for a nearby lifeboat that was overturned and partially submerged. As Vivian grabbed a stray rope and held on for dear life, another nurse nearby boisterously began singing “We’re Off to See the Wizard.” Everyone joined in, their voices carrying over the wreckage, even as Vyner Brooke went under the waves and vanished. It was two twenty-five, a mere fifteen minutes after the attack began.
Vivian’s boat, along with the majority of the nurses who survived the ocean, washed up on an island called Bangka (not to be confused with the far smaller Banka, where the Kung Wo survivors, including C. Yates McDaniel and Doris Lim, washed up), a relatively large piece of land east of Sumatra. Vivian ended up as part of a large group that included two dozen nurses and a dozen servicemen, plus some civilians. They were all huddled together on a beach called Radji, debating what to do next. Not long after that, the Japanese arrived.
It was a company-sized unit of IJA soldiers. They marched the men down the beach and around a headland, out of sight. Left on the beach were Vivian and twenty-two other women, all nurses, save one elderly civilian.
“There are two things I hate the most, the sea and the Japs, and now I’ve got them both,” spat one of the ladies.
As everyone laughed, the sound of gunfire erupted in the distance, off past the headland where the men had been led. The nurses looked at each other, aghast—there was little doubt about what had just happened.
Indeed, the servicemen and male civilians had been massacred—made to tear their clothing to use as blindfolds, then gunned down by machine gun fire and repeatedly stabbed with bayonets. On the brink of the killing, one man muttered, “Here’s where we get it in the back.”
“Well, I’m going to give it a go, then,” replied a sailor named Ernest Lloyd, a stoker who had also survived the sinking of the Prince of Wales, only to be blasted by enemy munitions into the sea once again.
When the anticipated slaughter commenced, Lloyd managed to race into the water and survive the hail of gunfire sent his way (he was hit twice, but superficially). He later swam back to the beach, which had become a charnel. Lloyd’s luck soon ran out—he was later recaptured and held as a POW for the duration of the war. But he kept his life, one of only two men to do so.
After a few minutes, the Japanese detachment shuffled back through the sand toward the women. They plopped down companionably in front of the nurses and began to clean their rifles and bloody bayonets. They remained expressionless, and the women matched their stoicism. There was no sound save the metallic clicks of rounds being chambered. There was nowhere to run, no point in resistance. As a unit, the Australian women gracefully accepted their fate. “Chin up, girls, I’m proud of you and I love you all,” said an older nurse.
“We all knew we were going to die,” Vivian told the Canberra Times after the war. “We stood waiting. There were no protests.” Some historians believe that evidence points to the fact that the women were raped, although Vivian never admitted as such.
But there was no doubt about what happened next. The soldiers motioned for the nurses to stand and began to push the women into the ocean. The surf was knee-high, and several ladies stumbled as the waves crashed. The Red Cross sashes they still wore became drenched. All Vivian could think of was that she was about to join her late father, wherever he was. When the women had waded into water that reached their midriffs, the Japanese opened fire with rifles and a heavy machine gun.
“They just swept up and down the line, and the girls fell one after the other,” Vivian recalled. All were shot in the back and disappeared into the water. Vivian was hit as well, just once, and by a miracle the bullet hit her in the fleshy spot over her left hip. The force threw her facedown into the water. She was thoroughly exhausted from the last two days, she swallowed salt water that nauseated her—and, of course, she still couldn’t swim.
Yet she was not dead.
Fully realizing that any movement would bring a hail of bullets, Vivian forced herself to remain motionless, floating randomly with the current. She held her breath, badly wanting to vomit. The surf action pushed her closer to shore, and it was all Vivian could do not to kick away from the beach, to put distance between herself and certain death. But with a majestic will, she played dead, somehow sneaking occasional, hastily sucked breaths while staying facedown in the water.
She couldn’t hear properly over the crashing surf, but after a while she perceived a stillness from the beach. She worked up her courage and, chancing everything, poked her head up and looked around.
“There was no sign of anybody,” she remembered. “There was nothing. Just me.” Vivian stumbled ashore, her wound having been stanched by the long immersion in salt water. Semi-coherent, she tottered off the beach and into the jungle, where she collapsed. “I don’t know whether I became unconscious or whether I slept,” she said later.
Vivian awoke at first light, dreadfully thirsty. She discerned movement through the jungle. Japanese troops were on the beach. “My heart went to the bottom of my feet,” she recalled. She rolled into some brush and remained silent until the soldiers left. After they moved on, Vivian at last could get some water from a nearby spring. As she greedily gulped it down, a voice sounded behind her.
“Where have you been, nurse?”
A startled Vivian soon recovered her poise. The voice was faint but the accent unmistakable. It was a British soldier from Yorkshire named Private Patrick Kingsley, who, although badly wounded, had survived when the men had been shot and bayoneted.
Amazingly, two of the three people to survive the massacre (including Ernest Lloyd), were now together. But they were hardly safe. Bangka Island still teemed with Japanese soldiers and natives unwilling to cross the men with the guns. Vivian and Kingsley pushed into deeper jungle, where the nurse, despite her own pain, not to mention the mud, slime, insects, rain, and soul-killing humidity, tended to the soldier, binding and rebinding his wounds, treating them with coconut innards, ensuring he got enough water and food to live, and keeping him from crying out when he slipped into delirium. It was perhaps her most extraordinary bit of heroism yet.
Vivian and Kingsley managed to remain hidden in the jungle for twelve days. But their prospects worsened by the hour. Finally, famished and having abandoned hope of miraculous rescue, Vivian and Kingsley realized the time had come to take their chances and surrender. They clung to the idea that the Japanese would let them live—that they wouldn’t waste ammunition on such a miserable pair of prisoners. Kingsley agreed to the plan but asked for a short reprieve.
“I’ll be thirty-nine tomorrow,” he whispered, “and I’d like to think I had my thirty-ninth birthday free.”
“Time is no object,” Vivian replied, and the next day they celebrated his birthday in the jungle.
Then the hardy pair at last surrendered to the Japanese. Vivian was sent to a women’s prison camp on Sumatra. Sadly, her heroic efforts to keep Kingsley alive were in vain, as he died shortly thereafter.
The Japanese officer responsible for ordering the massacre was traced to the Manchurian front in the waning days of the war, but he committed suicide before he could answer for his war crime.
The nurses and servicemen slaughtered on Bangka were just some of the many thousands killed as part of the Japanese destruction of the evacuation fleet. An estimated five thousand people fled Keppel Harbor, with about 75 percent killed or captured. Of the myriad ships large and small that had managed to desperately escape Singapore on February 12 and 13 (one official count put the number at forty-four, though some small craft weren’t included), at least forty were sunk by Japanese planes and warships. Countless civilians and military personnel alike were drowned, burnt, shot, punctured by shrapnel, or otherwise died a cruel, mostly anonymous death.
As for the fortunate survivors, like Judy and Frank, their travails were just beginning.
CHAPTER 11
Posic
The Grasshopper and Dragonfly survivors gathered on the sandy beach of Posic, one of a group of atolls just north of Singkep. The area was small, quickly giving way to dense jungle that pressed upon the shipwrecked, one “thick with closely packed trees from which hung a tangled mess of thorns,” Robins wrote. “However careful one was it was impossible not to get scratched.” Posic appeared to be uninhabited, but Hoffman ordered the lone whaler carried by the gunboat to be manned and sent on a circumnavigation of the small island to make sure. He then barked at Forbes, who had just survived his third sinking of the war, to “Go and get help!” Forbes grabbed a Malay officer and an interpreter named Macfarlane and set off on foot.
After a few hours, it was apparent that there was not only no one living on Posic, but also no fresh water on the island. This meant the survivors faced few options, none of them good. They could wait on the sand as long as they could until they were captured or died of thirst, or they could cram as many women as possible into the small whaler and have the men swim for it, hoping to survive the sharks and the current until they found another island—one that hopefully had water. Neither plan held much appeal.
White had seen most of his stores destroyed during the bombardment, but the superstructure of the Grasshopper remained above the waves, and he hoped something belowdecks survived the attack. Hoffman asked White if he would go check out the ship once the whaler returned from its exploration. White shook his head at the delay and volunteered to swim over to the ship at once, thus breaking his policy of never volunteering for anything. Time was of the essence here. He immediately regretted his decision as he walked toward the surf. A dead shark, longer than White by about three feet, lay on the beach. It wasn’t clear if the monster fish had been killed by exploding bombs or taken down by an even larger shark, but whatever the cause of death, White was unnerved by the sight. Ever stalwart, he peeled off his shirt, hoping that this would be his lone sighting of toothy predators of the deep.
Setting his personal best in the freestyle, White covered the hundred yards or so to the Grasshopper. He made his way below, pushing into the officers’ quarters. Chest-deep in water, White recovered several things of value floating about, including pots, pans, and cutlery. But the only ingestible item he discovered was an unopened bottle of whiskey. He opened it and took a slug of Dutch courage. “For medicinal purposes,” he whispered to himself.
He made his way to the forecastle deck, where the ship’s lockers were. In near darkness, slogging through the water, White’s mind began to drift into the unknown, and he suddenly felt quite afraid, despite the warm alcohol in his veins.
Then he heard an inhuman whine, almost a moaning. The warmth of the whiskey rushed from his body, and his hairs stood on his head. “I’ve never been that scared, even when the bombs were falling,” he later said. But despite the frightening sound, duty called. He had to push through to the last portion of the locker area to complete his search. Gathering all his courage, he went into the room at the end of the partially submerged hall, when the moan was heard again.
This time, however, White’s fright was replaced by elation, for he recognized the noise—it was Judy!
In the chaos and hubbub of the bombing, sinking, and rush for survival, no one had taken note of the ship’s canine crewmember, not even White himself. During the attack, Judy had instinctively gone below to take cover. She had been in this room, which was near her usual sleeping berth, when a bomb’s concussion caused several of the ship’s lockers to slew madly against the wall. They didn’t fall entirely, which would have crushed the dog. Instead, they trapped her in a small pocket against the bulkhead, where she could sort of stand in the water, using the sunken gunboat’s angle of repose to her advantage. But she couldn’t escape. White followed the noise to the fallen lockers and ran his hands behind them. He felt wet, matted fur, then a dry ear, and then a cold nose. Judy licked the hands, not knowing or caring who they belonged to.
White managed to pin himself against the lockers, and using his weight as a lever, he moved them enough for Judy to escape the trap and splash into the open area beyond. White lifted her into a gentle carry and went up the ladder to the deck. He suspected the poor dog was hurt, scared, and exhausted. The ordeal of the sinking had nearly done him in, he reckoned. What chance did a dog have?
To his amazement, after a moment, Judy stood up, furiously shook herself dry, and ran over to White, eagerly licking his face and ready to play. To the sailor, Judy’s relief was palpable. White recalled that he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as Judy licked him.
“You silly bitch,” he said to her. “Why didn’t you bark? I’d have come for you a lot sooner.”
Then man and dog returned to the deck of the Grasshopper, where White yelled the first good news of the day to the survivors.
“Hey, I found Judy! She’s alive!”
A cheer rang out from the beach.
White constructed a makeshift raft from loose timber and piled the few treasures he could salvage aboard it. He was on his knees, trying to steer the unwieldy craft with Judy standing next to him. It was awkward, and White was doing his best to manage the current when Judy suddenly barked loudly and jumped into the drink.
