The Lonely War (19 page)

As his senses returned, he realized his surroundings. The sea was littered with floating crates of vegetables, shredded clothing, silent dead bodies and screaming live ones, and everything was covered with foul, black fuel oil.

There was no wind. Clouds darkened the sky. The men drifted, clinging to anything that floated. Nothing could be seen and there was nothing to feel but the chilly water, the fiery wounds, and the burn of fuel oil as it ate at their skin. The only sounds were grisly moans from the dying and the softer babble of prayers from the living.

Without the ship as a point of reference and little light to see by, the survivors drifted into an extreme state of disorientation, but slowly the clouds parted enough to allow a streak of moonlight to peek through. A ghostly light, partly obscured by smoke, spread across a sea of floating debris.

Mitchell drifted with his head back, gasping for air. He felt a jolt and realized that a shark had bumped him. He knew that sharks were capable of speeds of over forty miles per hour and will bump their prey several times to stun it before closing in for the kill—commonly known as bump and bite maneuvers—and where there was one, there were ten, or twenty, or hundreds. Death swam beside him, and he knew that he had hours, perhaps minutes, to live.

Sadness washed over him as he thought about Kate. He wished he had married her so his child would have his name, the child that he would never see. He thought of Andrew, and he felt a wave of thankfulness that Andrew had made it ashore. But sadness returned as he thought about his two regrets: that he would never see his child and would never see Andrew again. 

He shook those thoughts from his head and reminded himself that he was not dead yet. He was an officer and others were depending on him. He tried to form a plan of action, realizing that he needed to gather the men into a group and move them across two miles of open water to the island. He yelled loud enough to be heard above the injured men’s cries.

“This is the Exec. Swim toward the sound of my voice. Everyone, swim toward the sound of my voice.”

The men paddled through poisonous fuel oil, thick as honey. It seeped into their eyes, mouths, and ears. They gagged on the putrid-tasting poison as it ate away their skin. Several men who were unable to swim out beyond the oil slick gave up and simply drifted in shock, breathing the toxic fumes and swallowing mouthfuls of the sludge.

Twelve sailors paddled toward Mitchell, and he swam through a field of oil to reach them. The oil burned his face and neck, making him realize that the crew must get free of the slick as quickly as possible. After reaching the men, he tried to see who they were, but their faces were all covered in oil and he didn’t recognize a single one. He yelled again and the twelve added their voices, drawing the survivors to them.

Out of the darkness drifted the whaleboat that Chief Baker had launched. Baker and twenty sailors were aboard and another dozen sailors were in the water clinging to the sides.

“Lieutenant Mitchell,” Baker shouted. “Is that you, sir?”

“Yes. Do you have any officers aboard?”

“Ensign Moyer is aboard, and Ensign Fisher is hanging over the side toward the bow. I’m sure as hell glad to hear your voice. Will you come aboard, sir?”

“No. If you have room, take the wounded aboard, and move away from the oil slick.”

Mitchell huddled with the men in the water. More men joined the group. A few paddled up on life rafts, but most were bobbing on the choppy waves with only a kapok life vest to keep them afloat.

Mitchell felt more nudges and bumps under the water, and he was not sure if it was sharks or the men treading water around him. He saw a man twenty yards out dog-paddling for the group; the man suddenly screamed and was dragged backward at a tremendous speed before disappearing under the surface with a jolt. Mitchell held his breath, waiting, but the man did not resurface.

Someone yelled, “Shark!” and panic raced through the group. Men clinging to the sides attempted to climb into the boat and nearly swamped the craft. The men in the boat knocked them back into the water. Mitchell yelled for the men to say calm and to huddle in a tight group. They obeyed, overcoming their fear.

As Mitchell paddled to the bow to talk with Fisher, he heard several men pleading with God, promising to stop whoring and drinking and gambling, to become church-going men, if He would only allow them to live through the night.

Mitchell found Fisher clinging to the whaleboat’s bow with a shocked expression on his face. “Monte, thank God you’re okay. We need to get the men huddled into a tight bunch and make our way to shore. You take the port, I’ll take the starboard.”

Fisher said, “We’re all going to die.” He grinned and said it again, “We’re going to die.”

Mitchell lifted his hand out of the water and smacked the ensign’s face. “Pull yourself together, man. We’ve got a hundred men here who need us to take charge.”

Fisher went silent. A moment later, he rasped in a weak voice, “You can count on me.”

Mitchell glanced up to see another swimmer fighting to join the group. He recognized Grady dragging an unconscious Cocoa through the oily water. Mitchell swam out twenty yards and helped pull Cocoa to the growing mass of survivors.

The men were tossed about the sloshing waves, and many were overcome with vomiting and diarrhea. They finally moved free of the oil slick, which helped to calm everyone.

Mitchell told Baker to keep the group moving toward the island. He scanned the water, hoping to see lights of an enemy ship that could rescue them, but he saw only blackness.
We must somehow make it to the island,
he thought,
before the sharks become more daring
.

A scream sounded back in the slick. Mitchell broke free of the group and swam toward the voice. Thirty yards out, he bumped headlong into a body. He turned the man around and saw that the sailor was dead. The face was charred beyond recognition and smeared with oil. The flesh was burned away from both hands, leaving the finger bones reaching above the water like claws. Mitchell vomited.

Recovering, he unstrapped the kapok vest and pulled the man from the vest, and the corpse sank.

Another scream a dozen yards away had Mitchell moving again. He found a man treading water; the sailor had no life vest and struggled to keep his head above water. Mitchell unstrapped his own vest and helped the sailor into it, giving him a shove in the direction of the whaleboat.

“Swim for the others. Move, man!” he croaked.

Mitchell remembered the kapok vest he’d taken off the corpse. He swam to the spot, but with no luck. Everything was steeped in oil and he couldn’t see the vest. In the dark, he drifted on the black sea. Mitchell felt completely alone. Panic pierced in his heart as he swam with all his strength for the whaleboat.

The boat was sixty yards away. Mitchell felt his body slowing with a deep and consuming fatigue. It took all the willpower he could muster to reach out, grab a handful of water, and pull himself forward. He realized that he might not be able to rejoin the group, and again, sadness smothered him as he thought about dying in this vast and lonely sea.

He felt something terribly strong grip his right leg and yank him from the world of air and sound, dragging him down. He felt it, eight hundred pounds of terror mauling him. Mitchell clawed at the water. He screamed, hearing the sound so clearly in his mind. The fish let go and circled.

What seemed only a moment later, he felt a hideous pressure clamp onto his thigh. Teeth gouged. His panic soared as he was wrenched deeper. It all happened in sickly slow motion. There was no time and no thought. It felt like he was being cleaved in two, severed. Mitchell surrendered to the horror. Locked together in this bizarre universe, he couldn’t tell where he ended and the fish began. The fish let go and circled again.

Drifting in the blackness, life seeped from Mitchell, and he felt death’s icy touch on the back of his neck.

A
S
THE
black whaleboat glided through the floating debris, Andrew perched in the center of the boat, searching. He spotted a waving arm through the gloom. He pointed and shouted at Ogden. The Chief yelled for Andrew to sit down as he pushed the tiller so the bow pointed at the waving arm.

Andrew ignored Ogden’s order and prepared to jump overboard to save the man, but Hudson swung an arm and knocked Andrew onto the thwart.

“Stay put, rookie,” Hudson shouted.

Andrew crouched in the boat. His frustration erupted from being unable to help the man in the water.

Ogden gave the order to ship oars and as the whaleboat slid past the man, he leaned far out from the stern and grabbed the man by the life jacket. With one powerful motion, the Chief hauled the man over the gunwale and into the boat. It was Skeeter Banks. His head was denuded of hair and his face and skull were covered with fuel oil. Only the whites of his eyes were not black.

Andrew clutched Banks’s life jacket and screamed, “Mitchell! Where is Mitchell? Did he make it into the water?”

Banks’s face was a mask of unrestrained horror; he’d stared at death eye to eye. His mouth moved. Andrew bowed his head so that his ear was right next to Banks’s mouth. He listened with every fiber of his being.

A spasm of exquisite relief flashed through Andrew and he turned to Ogden and pointed off to port, yelling, “Mitchell made it off the ship. He’s over there.”

The oarsmen threw body and soul into each stroke as if it were their last act on earth. The boat glided forward while the rescuers began choking on the stench of fuel oil fouling the air. They saw the main body of survivors moving toward the island, but they kept their course across the field of debris, looking for Mitchell and anybody else left behind.

Andrew balanced himself in the middle of the whaleboat, scanning the water as precious minutes dripped by. His breath came fast and his heart pounded. He had the feeling that they had missed him, that somewhere in this oily hell the man he loved was dying. He saw a shadow moving. He peered closer. It was a hand clawing at the air above the water. Andrew yelled as he leaped over the gunwale. His legs kicked wildly as he dove and took Mitchell into his arms.

They broke the surface, and the boat was on them in a heartbeat. Strong hands hauled them aboard.

Mitchell gasped for breath, that sweet delirious taste of life. He had a hideous gash on his right thigh.

Andrew found a first aid box under a thwart, and inside were gauze bandages, syringes, and packets of morphine. He ripped the officer’s pant from the injured leg, gave him a shot of painkiller, and wrapped the wound. By the time he was done, the boat had pulled alongside the large group of survivors and they began taking men aboard.

As much as Andrew would have loved to hunker in the boat and hold Mitchell, there were others who needed help. He nursed the injured until searchlights from the enemy cruiser
Aoba
stabbed through the night and surrounded them in a corona of brilliant yellow light. 

Part II
Changi Prison

At first you get in a situation where you abhor it.

You can’t stand it. It’s terrible. But you can’t get away from it.

So you stick with it. And then you get so that you tolerate it.

You tolerate it long enough, you embrace it.

It becomes your way of life.

—Lewis Haynes,

LCDR, Medical Corp,

USS
Indianapolis

Chapter Seventeen

May 25, 1942—0800 hours

F
ORTRESS
S
INGAPORE
, stronghold of the British forces controlling the trade routes between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, had a twenty-square-mile naval base that boasted docks large enough to supply their entire fleet. The British enjoyed a rather pleasant existence on their pristine emerald island, which sparkled like one of their crown jewels set within the waving blue Pacific. They believed that any attack on the island must be launched from warships, since no army could breach the dense four-hundred-mile Malayan rainforest to the north. Hence, their defenses relied on enormous guns pointed out to sea, which were useless against a ground assault.

The Japanese, however, did the impossible. Loaded with heavy artillery, they swept through the Malayan jungle like a tsunami, crushing all British forces in their path. On Feb. 8, 1942, Japanese artillery began shelling Singapore Island as Japanese troops crossed the narrow Johore Strait. The Japanese were greatly outnumbered by the island’s defenders, and they were dangerously low on fuel and ammunition, so they attempted an all-or-nothing charge. Five days later, the allied forces surrendered in a stunning defeat. Fifty thousand British and Australian troops became prisoners of war, along with two thousand civilians, many of whom were women and children, and the Malays bowed to a new master.

The majority of POWs were shipped north to labor camps on the Thai-Burma railroad. The rest were marched twenty-seven kilometers from the heart of the city to a prison built on the Changi Peninsula, which forms the extreme eastern tip of Singapore Island.

Built before the war, Changi Prison was designed to hold two thousand prisoners, but the Japanese crammed fifteen thousand POWs within its walls. Women and children were housed at a separate, makeshift camp five kilometers from the prison.

The complex was built in onion-like layers. At the center was a sunbaked courtyard, surrounded by a dozen multistory cell blocks, which were surrounded by towering walls. The south wall had a gigantic gate that, like all the cell doors, always stood wide open so prisoners could move freely in and out. Outside the gate, a road circled the four walls. On both sides of this road were rows of thatched roof sheds the prisoners called “go-downs.” Each shed was a hundred feet long and held forty beds.

There were four rows of concrete go-downs (twenty to a row) that housed the senior officers, majors and above. The other sheds were made from coconut fronds nailed to wood frames, which housed the junior officers and the overflow of enlisted men from the cell blocks.