No Better Friend, page 14
She swam strongly in circles around the raft. White was puzzled by her behavior until he saw a dark shadow pass under him, sweeping the sea floor. His first thought was that a Japanese submarine had somehow found them. Then he realized he was watching a large shark, most likely a deadly tiger shark, cruise by.
Judy kept barking. She would have been a tasty snack for the mammoth shark, but either he wasn’t hungry or he was disquieted by the ruckus. Either way, White sped for the nearby beach and soon ran aground, with Judy bounding from the surf just ahead of him.
“I was quite sure Judy had sensed the danger and did what she could to protect me,” White later wrote. “She was clearly at the shark’s mercy, but true to her nature, she dove right in regardless.” The incident was similar to the one back in China, when Judy had warned Charles Jeffery away from a prowling leopard.
Having looked out for White’s life in the surf, Judy now turned to the rest of the survivors. She began running up and down the beach, actively sniffing the sand, at times running into the water, which was receding at low tide. After a while, one of the marines looked up from the fire he was building to yell to White.
“Hey, Chief, I think your dog has found a bone or something.”
White went over to where Judy was furiously digging at the sand. Expecting her to have found something that appealed only to dogs, he was shocked when a burble of water popped up from the wet sand.
“Water!” he yelled. “Judy’s found us fresh water!”
Indeed, a small well of lifesaving water erupted into a geyser when White joined Judy in the digging. He and several men caught as much as they could in the pots he had rescued from the Grasshopper, and the haul was rationed among the group. There was enough to make cocoa and rice for dinner. One of the party lifted his cocoa. “To Judy,” he toasted. In response, she looked around at the mention of her name, wagged her tail, and went back to snoozing, snuggled neatly between a pair of survivors.
Their most immediate worry was appeased, but the group remained unsure of what to do next. As Hoffman pondered the issue, a small whaler approached the beach and ran ashore. It was Les Searle, the sailor from the Dragonfly who had been wounded during a rescue mission in Malaya a few weeks earlier. Judy ran right to Searle when she saw him talking to the Grasshopper officers, remembering her favorite patient from the infirmary back in Singapore. Fully recovered from his wound, Searle had been sent on a recon mission to see if there were other survivors nearby, and he was overjoyed that Judy and the others were alive.
He reported that the Dragonfly was beneath the waves, and that a few of the survivors were on the next atoll over, about three miles from Posic. No officers had made it, and there were several wounded men (many of the wounded had already been lost). There was no Judy to find them fresh water, so they were on the verge of perishing from thirst.
Hoffman and White organized a party to bring the Dragonfly survivors to join the group on Posic and share their life-sustaining victuals. But there were now more people under Hoffman’s watch, which meant more mouths to feed.
The first night was spent shivering in the surprising cold and listening to the baleful cries of the wounded. The only light came from the still burning Grasshopper, a blaze that intensified into the wee hours of the morning. Robins described how the fire “had now got a firm hold and was burning fiercely, the flames making a lurid glow through the trees. Small arms ammo was going off continuously, occasionally shells would burst and seemed to whistle away into the distance. We felt uncomfortably close to her. After an hour or two of this there was a terrific explosion as the magazine blew up, the air was filled with sparks like a gigantic fireworks display and a shower of burning material came down on the trees around us.”
If White hadn’t gone aboard and discovered Judy, she would have perished in the blast.
Another man joined the party the second day—Taff Long, the sailor from the Dragonfly who had dodged the bullets in the water. He had been in the water overnight, landing on Posic on the fifteenth. He was weak from vomiting seawater, his shoulders and back were rubbed raw by his life belt, and he was nearly mad from thirst—but he was alive. He stumbled into the mob of ragged survivors on the beach. “What a shambles!” he recorded.
Wounded people were lying everywhere. There was no medical supplies—there was no food and precious little water. What water they had had been found by Judy, the Pointer bitch that had been the Grasshopper’s mascot.… There were half-a-dozen dead who had been laid some distance away as there were no tools to bury them. It had been decided to throw them in the sea and hope the tide would take them out.… I found myself a space in the sand and settled down for the night.
At this point Forbes, probably feeling invincible, decided to push his already remarkable luck. He was granted permission to swim to a promising island nearby, one he had seen during the attack, to seek help. Macfarlane and the Malay sailor, whose name is lost to history, went with him. It was a tremendous roll of the dice, but Providence and the currents were in their favor, and they reached the island. When they hauled themselves up on the beach they were swiftly accosted by natives, who were “of a mind to put me to death,” Forbes later recounted. But the Malay man managed not only to talk the locals out of killing them (given the hundreds of languages spoken along the island chains, merely being understood was a minor miracle), but also to lead the three to yet another island, where they were welcomed with beer by a Chinese man. Eventually the village headman there said he would take on the wounded from Posic.
So Forbes returned to Posic with a group of local tongkangs (native fishing craft), and the worst of the wounded were ferried to the headman’s village. Of equal import was the intelligence Forbes had picked up from the headman. The island of Singkep, the largest in the local chain, was the site of a Dutch colonial government office, and rumors were flying that a rescue operation was centered there. Forbes reported this to Hoffman and said he was ready to venture on in search of a better option than the far smaller island he had just left. Hoffman grunted his permission to depart, and Forbes sailed off with the village priest and his son to Singkep.
When this excitement had passed, there was little the others could do but wait and hope the indefatigable Forbes could deliver. Night fell with oppressing suddenness. The only light came from the stars, which shone brilliantly over the ocean, seemingly close enough to touch. The nurses on Posic were overwhelmed with tending to the remaining wounded, so White was recruited as an ad hoc nursing sister. Judy did her part to sustain spirits as well. Then the daughter of the blind woman who was part of the group came to White with troubling news—the two pregnant women, both Dutch, were about to give birth. Exactly why they weren’t evacuated with the wounded isn’t recorded, but presumably it was thought that their pregnancies were too far along to risk the open-sea journey, and they preferred to give birth on solid land—even land as remote as Posic.
As it happened, there was an experienced midwife among them. White had helped deliver a baby on board a navy ship during the Spanish Civil War and he felt comfortable doing it again. The nurses couldn’t be spared, so off he went, with only the blind woman’s daughter as an assistant. Fortunately, nature took its course, and all went well. Two boys were delivered safely and were baptized in the sea the next day. The grateful mothers named their newborns George and Leonard (White’s middle name) in his honor.
For four more days, the survivors clung to life, living basically on coconuts and the water Judy found. “The wounded were pitiful to see and suffered greatly,” according to Long. The beach camp was virtually overrun by ants, tiny sand lice, and biting fleas. The insects made life miserable for the group, who were also plagued by bold spiders and thieving lizards that went directly for the dwindling food supply. But worst was the ever-present threat of poisonous snakes. Several species of dangerous reptiles teemed across the atoll, including coral snakes, banded kraits, and several varieties of cobras and pit vipers.
Judy became a lone sentinel in the fight against the snakes. Almost hourly she would leap up and engage an unseen threat in the sand or the nearby tree line. She would buck about like a bronco, using her exceptional quickness to stay away from the flashing fangs. Generally, the reptile would retreat, but if it didn’t, Judy would strike with her paw or teeth until the snake was dead. She would then scoop it up and deposit it at the feet of a horrified human survivor. At least a few made for a decent dinner. Judy was doing her part, but if rescue didn’t come soon, the group would either perish or be forced to sail the whaler into the unknown, a few people at a time.
Then, salvation. At last, as night fell on the fifth day after the Grasshopper was sunk, a shout went up. “Boat!” A large tongkang was headed to shore. When it landed, one of the men aboard explained that the irrepressible Ian Forbes had browbeat the Dutch controller on Singkep into sending this boat, the largest available, to the rescue. Under cover of darkness, the remaining survivors were ferried off Posic in waves, destination Singkep.
Thanks to fortitude, blind luck, and the superhuman nose of a dog named Judy, they had survived being cast away on a desert island. But their hardships were only just beginning. Deliverance was still a long way off, and the Japanese could undo their efforts at any moment.
CHAPTER 12
Pompong
Frank Williams was enduring plenty of adversity of his own. Like Judy, he was stranded on an uninhabited island with scores of wounded, many of them civilians. Rescue would be problematic, given the number of castaways and the prowling Japanese, hungry for more targets. Indeed, the Tien Kwang, which had been damaged by concussive impact from the bombs but not actually hit by any, still swung at anchor just offshore, and several times during the day bombers returned to finish her off. Remarkably, none connected with a knockout blow. But many of her steel plates had loosened and been yanked askew, and she was in imminent danger of sinking.
Frank assisted in the first order of business, which was to carry the wounded to a clearing in the jungle about one hundred feet above sea level. One female survivor later described the area in the following way: “In normal times it would have been an ideal picnic site; now it resembled a small battlefield.” Pompong Island was about half a mile long and three-quarters of a mile wide, bisected by a spiny backbone of rock that loomed roughly four hundred feet over the water. The land rose steeply out of the ocean, and the rocks that plagued the abandoners of the boats made getting in and out of the sea difficult. There was only one small beach, fronting a lagoon dubbed Rocky Bay. It was here the doctors, some of whom nursed personal injuries sustained in the attack, and surviving nurses set up the island hospital.
One patient in need of immediate attention was Caithness, skipper of the Kuala. It wasn’t until he was abandoning ship that he had noticed a pain in his belly. He felt under his blouse with his fingers, and when he pulled them out they were crimson with blood. He had been badly wounded on his side, and the paralysis he had shrugged off on the bridge now partially returned, rendering him unable to swim. He managed to slide down the gangway and hang on to a side ladder. Another officer paddled in on a lifeboat and grabbed him, but he couldn’t haul Caithness, who was six foot two and powerfully built, into the boat. The others on the lifeboat held the captain above water as they made for Pompong. He immediately collapsed upon landfall and was unconscious for the next three days.
Just over six hundred people had made it to safety in two main groups, and they now collected to form a huge party. Everyone was in need of food and water. A group of crewmen took one of the small boats and rowed over an oil-slick sea out to the Tien Kwang to raid her for victuals and medical supplies, including morphine, aspirin, and tins of fruit juice. They also found an RAF sergeant named Chippendale, terrified but unhurt, cowering in the hold. Man and gear were brought back to the island. The men tested the seaworthiness of the craft but determined the ship wasn’t long for sunlight. Bowing to the inevitable, the men widened the gaps that were allowing the ocean to trickle in, and soon the Tien Kwang disappeared beneath the surface and settled on the bottom.
(Frank himself remembered to the Dutch authors Neumann and van Witsen years later that the Tien Kwang “was hit multiple times during the first attack and was heavily battered amidships. The engine room had been destroyed and the bridge was a mess.” This account contradicts multiple reports from other witnesses, all of whom recounted their stories far closer to the event than Frank, who was reflecting on this in 1970. Given the chaos of the moment, it is easy to understand the confusion—the bombing did damage the ship, after all—but it seems clear from the evidence that Frank was wrong and the Tien Kwang wasn’t struck by bombs in the first wave.)
There were plenty of tins of bully beef and biscuits on board, but there was no fresh water, save three small beakers that had been on the lifeboats. A party was formed to search for potable water, and a small spring was found near the sandy beach. It “slowly but regularly dripped drinkable water,” Frank remembered, though another survivor, a Dutchman named H. van der Straaten, reported it was “badly contaminated.” Regardless, it kept the survivors alive for days without any disease epidemic.
Wing Commander Farwell, RAF, took charge of the military men, and Reginald Nunn, the head of the Public Works Department (PWD), was elected to command the civilian government workers. Nunn was universally respected, as was his wife, Gertrude, who was on the island as well, but Farwell was not looked at so fondly. Charles Baker, the government electrician who had lost his false teeth in the attack, said of him, “Of all the damn fools I have met he was the worst.” According to Baker, who was quite familiar with the ship’s innards, Tien Kwang might have been saved, but instead Farwell’s bluster and indecisiveness cost them the ship. “He bawled and shouted”—mainly in a power struggle with Nunn—“and due to this man we didn’t get off to Tien Kwang until eleven thirty.” By then it was too late.
The Kuala’s chief engineer built a lean-to canopy of branches and vines to give the wounded some relief from the blazing sun. But despite the ministrations of the women doctors and some thirty nurses from Singapore Hospital (“They worked liked Trojans,” according to Baker), the suffering at Rocky Bay was great. Caithness would later record that “one poor man asked Lieutenant Briggs to shoot him as he was a mass of raw flesh, but Briggs had not the heart to do it. Mercifully it was only a matter of a few minutes before he passed away for which Briggs said ‘Thank God!’”
An RAF man, identified only as Bryn B., wasn’t so fortunate, as John Williams recounted. “(His) stomach had been gashed open by a bomb and his bowels literally spilled out. Still conscious, in terrible pain, he implored someone to put him out of his agony.… Bryn’s request was carried out by one of his comrades.”
One man required his leg to be amputated, and a brigadier general nearly died from a hand wound. He lost three fingers but held on for the moment. An RAF officer named Hogg lost an arm; stoically, he said, “This should be worth a few pints at the Local when I get home.” A Eurasian girl, just sixteen years old, died of peritonitis after suffering a belly wound. A newlywed named Mrs. Hawes was crippled for life by shrapnel that severed her sciatic nerve. But amid the pain and hideous suffering, there was a glimmer of light, as there had been on Posic: there was new life amid all the death. A baby was born to a Mrs. Jones, whose husband worked for Borneo Motors in Kuala Lumpur. The newborn boy’s crying was drowned out by the wails of anguish from the wounded.
Frank spent a good deal of his first day on the island working with other parties on the unenviable task of moving the many corpses that washed up on the beach. There wasn’t much deep soil to work with, and the men often had to go well into the jungle to find proper resting places, generally leaving the bodies in heavy bush when unable to dig holes.
The RAF men separated into their own group and clustered near the spring. Virtually everyone was shoeless, having lost their footwear in the attack, so even walks were difficult. There wasn’t much to do except watch the clouds pass across the azure sky and count the minutes until chow time, which would momentarily soften the rumbling in their stomachs. And little could distract them from the painful cries of the wounded, the soft weeping of the many women on the island, and the realization that they were in deep trouble.
Rations were enforced, and each survivor was given two cups of water per day. Baker estimated this volume as enough to fill “half a cigarette tin.” The bully beef was plentiful, but as it wasn’t known how long it was needed, twelve people would split a tin apiece twice a day, along with some condensed milk and two biscuits. The diet kept the survivors alive but had many scurrying for the bushes to violently relieve their bowels shortly after meals.
The first night passed uneventfully, given the situation, though the bitter cold caught the lightly dressed survivors off guard and added to the overall misery. Campfires were ruled out, as they had been on Posic, for fear of attracting enemy aircraft. The people slept clasped tightly to one another for warmth. Apathy set in as morale plummeted. One of Oswald Gilmour’s friends asked him, “How long do you think we should give it before throwing ourselves into the sea?” John Williams remembered the stench. “The smell was overpowering—mostly from corpses that were being washed up and gangrene from some of the wounded.”
Despite the hardship, the leaders were optimistic that the plethora of islands in the area and the hard-to-miss attack would ensure rescue. It was Sunday, February 15, and plenty of prayer was heard around Pompong that morning. As if in response, a British sailor soon puttered up in a local tongkang. It was Lieutenant Commander Anthony Terry, first officer from the Kung Wo, the ship that had drawn Japanese attention from above and led the bombers to the Tien Kwang and Kuala. As with Ian Forbes and so many others in the immediate area, Terry was a survivor of the Prince of Wales sinking two months earlier. Like the rest of his fortunate former shipmates, Terry had been pulled from the roiling sea, given a fresh uniform, and posted on to a new ship. And, like Forbes, Terry had now had another ship blown out from under him. While the passengers of Kung Wo (including C. Yates McDaniel, Athole Stewart, and Doris Lim) were in the process of being evacuated, Terry was scanning the area for others who had survived the onslaught. There wasn’t much room left in the tongkang, but Terry took the six youngest and most badly wounded survivors, mostly burn victims, with him, eventually getting them to Singkep.
