While they waited for the U.S. Air Force DC-3s to return, Jane’s OSS team went into the camps and did what they could for the men while taking down their statements of war crimes. “The prisoners were really in pitiful shape,” she recalled. “We would interview them one by one and give them food, scotch, and cigarettes.” A young American naval commander, appointed by the Japanese to be the head of the POWs, was so emaciated he was down to almost half his normal weight. He was a tall man, and his skin “hung on him in folds,” reminding her of a baby elephant she had once seen in Ceylon. Even though he was “yellow from malaria,” nothing the flight surgeons said would induce him to leave until the last other POW was on the plane out.
Jane worked twenty hours a day, listening to the prisoners’ descriptions of forced labor, grueling conditions, degradation, meager rations, and poor medical care, along with mental and physical torture, routine beatings, and occasional beheadings by samurai sword. Some had survived forty-two months of captivity and told of watching friends die slowly. What emerged from their stories, she noted, was that the inhumanity of Japanese guards was “not due to a deliberate systematic policy of extermination,” as with the Nazis, but was more apt to involve individual acts of cruelty. For example, the deprivation suffered by the prisoners was in some sense shared by the common Japanese foot soldiers, as they were issued the same frugal rations. The difference was that the prisoners, weakened by disease and despair, could not live on “a bowl of rice a day.”
Despite the litany of horrors she transcribed daily, Jane refused to give in to the hatred of the Japanese that seized so many of her colleagues. She had spent too many years in Asia to blacken an entire race as evil because of the excesses of war. As far as she could see, the “obvious criminals” of the Kempeitai had fled Batavia to escape the Allies, and most of the remaining Japanese they encountered were “simple soldiers and officers who had not taken any part in the atrocities.”
A case in point, she believed, was the decent, hardworking Japanese army officer who had been assigned as aide-de-camp. “Poor Captain Oshida!” she recalled. “We communicated in Malay, of course. I would say to him, ‘Captain Oshida, I need a fully furnished house by nine o’clock next morning for the Air Force personnel coming in to pick up prisoners. I want a housekeeper and a cook for it, enough food for six men, two cases of real scotch, and a Cadillac. And you’ll get another Cadillac for our use by three this afternoon.’ Captain Oshida would bow and say, ‘It will be done, Nonja,’ and he would always come up with the necessary.”
One day, she happened to observe one of their POWs—a smalltime crook named Tommy who had been hanging around Southeast Asia when the Japanese interned him—giving Oshida two cartons of cigarettes. Astonished, she had taken him aside and demanded to know what he was thinking. “You don’t mean it!” she told him. “You want to give cigarettes to a Japanese?” Even though he had spent three and a half years in a prison camp, Tommy was still good-hearted enough to spot “a nice guy” when he saw one. Seeing Oshida’s face light up with joy and gratitude at Tommy’s unexpected generosity, Jane reflected, “It was my first experience of the phenomenon that former enemies who had got to know each other personally had less resentment towards each other than those who had never had any contact.”
The women POWs, many of them Dutch refugees from Malaya, were kept in a separate camp composed of small huts surrounded by barbed wire. The conditions were unbelievably squalid. One of the first women Jane interviewed was a gaunt twenty-five-year-old American who had been newly married to a Dutch executive with Shell Oil when they were caught and interned by the Japanese. Intelligent and articulate, the women was able to give Jane a calm, collected account of her four-year ordeal at the camp. “Some of the Japanese treated us very well and some were simply indifferent,” she told Jane. “But we had a commander who was a sadist, and, whenever there was a full moon, he would go crazy, order the women out and beat them.” The only good thing she could say of him was that none of them was ever raped.
Her clothes had long since disintegrated. A primitive bra and the briefest of shorts hung from her bony frame, both garments painstakingly pieced together from old sacking. While still in Ceylon, Jane had read in the intelligence reports that the women prisoners in Java had no clothes, so before leaving she had taken up a collection among all the OSS women, filling three large body bags (the kind used for corpses) with their castoffs. Jane gave this woman all the best things from her friends in Ceylon, as well as many of her own clothes. It was a poor excuse for a trousseau, but the woman needed something to wear when reunited with her liberated husband in Singapore. “She was practically a young bride,” recalled Jane, who just wanted to help her “to look pretty.”
Like the young naval commander, the woman insisted that Jane see to the old and sick first and adamantly refused to leave the camp until the others had been moved out. The worst off was Sister Muriel, a seventy-year-old Protestant missionary who was lying semiconscious on her side on the floor. She was covered in lice and sores and had the swollen belly and skeletal limbs that Jane recognized as the classic signs of starvation. The woman was urgently in need of medical care, but Jane was not authorized to remove any of the female prisoners until all the POWs had been airlifted to Singapore. Those were the British orders, and the Japanese had no reason to countermand them on her say-so. But the sight of the nun’s frail body curled up on the floor defied all reason. Remembering the small .32 tucked away in the shoulder holster under her left arm, Jane took it out and strode off in search of the Japanese camp commander. Confronting him with the old woman’s precarious health, she told him flatly, “I’m taking Sister Muriel out.”
“You’re not without the express permission of Admiral Cunningham,” he retorted.
With a kind of desperate bravado, Jane countered, “Don’t you dare tell me what I’m going to do or not do!” She waved the gun back and forth, keeping it a good foot in front of her in case it went off accidentally. “This woman is dying,” she insisted. “I’ll wait for no permission, and if you persist in this attitude, I’ll put you down as a war criminal.”
They tried to stare each other down for a few moments, and then the commander, for whatever reasons of his own, decided to let her go. Jane whisked the old woman into the Cadillac and took her straight to the hotel. On the recommendation of the flight surgeons, she doused her with DDT and scrubbed her from head to toe in the shower. She had been warned not to give the woman too much to eat too quickly, so she fed her a small meal of a banana and a bit of rice. Exhausted, Jane tucked her in the spare bed next to hers and then collapsed. She got little rest, though, as Sister Muriel carried on thanking the Lord and singing hymns all night. Luckily, Jane found room for her on a plane leaving the next morning.
Most of her time and attention those first few days was focused on the POWs, but Jane could feel the political climate subtly shifting, particularly in Batavia. She had not been back to the quaint Dutch town since since skipping out on her marriage six years earlier, and the colonial outpost looked much the same, with most of the fighting having been pushed beyond its broad, tree-lined boulevards and handsome, white-stuccoed buildings. Its citizens had clearly been through the war, however, and Batavia had emerged from its tropical languor, its streets now roiling with riotous crowds steeped in the hatred born of oppression and racial bitterness. Three and a half years of Japanese occupation and intensive anti-Western and anti-imperialist propaganda had made an impression.
The Indonesians had greeted the Allied mission with cautious optimism, though it was clear from the first that they resented the presence of the Dutch and the English, which smacked of a return of their old colonial masters. The red-and-white nationalist flag was flying over every building where the Japanese and Allies were not in residence, and as far as Jane could see it was “the only flag of any kind in evidence.” Everywhere they went, the once-familiar streets were covered in revolutionary slogans: “Government of the People, by the Peopl
e, for the People” and “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” These legends and many more, lifted from the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence, were crudely painted in three-foot letters on buildings, buses, and the sides of houses all over downtown Batavia. The nationalists had established their own newspaper, Soeara Indonesia Merdeka (Voice of Free Indonesia), and a radio station that broadcast anti-Dutch programs.
As a precaution, Jane had painted big American flags on the sides of the Cadillac they drove to the camps, because it was obvious that “Americans were the only Allies liked by the Indonesians.” The Indonesians thought the Americans were their liberators—not the English or Dutch. The United States had defeated the Japanese and would now help them secure their independence. “In the event,” Jane noted, “they thought wrong.”
Four days after her arrival, she filed her first impressions to her control, Lloyd George, the civilian reports officer assigned to funnel her intelligence to OSS Washington. Stating that in the past few days the political situation had grown “increasingly tense,” Jane summarized recent developments, drawing on intelligence gathered by both herself and her main local contact, an Indonesian OSS agent* code-named “Humpy.”
The city is full of rumors, many over-exaggerated, and all difficult to check. The three opposing forces—the Allies, the Japanese, and the Indonesian nationalists—are largely unaware of each other’s intentions. The Japanese, being under orders, seem to be the only ones who have a definite program of action; they are required to keep law and order, and to facilitate Allied demands. To all appearances they are complying to the “letter.” However, incidents are reported hourly. Dr. van der Plas, ranking Dutch official, has been temporarily removed to the HMS Cumberland in protective custody. On September 17, a group of nationalists attacked Tjideng internment camp (European women and children) and two Japanese guards were reportedly killed by the nationalists; a policeman was beaten and then jailed by the nationalists after trying to break up a meeting; a Japanese ordered a nationalist flag removed from a building and was killed by the crowd.
The two main sources of tension appeared to be public resentment of the Allies’ dependence on the Japanese for maintaining order and the Dutch intransigence in regard to Indonesian demands, but Jane foresaw far more serious problems. She identified four main areas of potential conflict. First, it was clear that throughout the Indies, but particularly in Java, “the great mass of the people are violently anti-Dutch.” Second, her “Source” (“Humpy”) maintained it was certain that the Indonesians wanted “nothing short of independence.” Although the Indonesians disliked the Japanese intensely, they cared for the Dutch even less. The view held by the educated classes was that they had always known the Japanese promises were “phony,” but at least the Japanese had declared Indonesia independent, which was more than the Dutch were willing to do. Third, the Indonesian president, Sukarno, and his vice president, Mohammad Hatta, had been the two chief “Japanese puppets” during the occupation. One of her sources had confirmed reports that the Dutch planned to execute both men as traitors who had collaborated with the Japanese. Both men had run afoul of Dutch authorities before: Hatta had been exiled and Sukarno jailed for inciting Indonesians to riot against their colonial masters long before the beginning of the war. Meanwhile, their supporters were ready “to resist by force of arms a return of Dutch rule.” There were secret political meetings every night, caches of weapons all over, and the organization and training of an armed force.
While Sukarno was still at large, on September 19 he managed to organize a mass meeting of his followers in the Koenigsplein, the main public square in front of the Governor-General’s Palace. Afraid the rally might touch off an uprising, Admiral Patterson ordered the Japanese military police to stop the meeting. When the Japanese advised that this might prove even more inflammatory, Patterson commanded them to make sure the meeting was conducted in an orderly fashion. The rally came off as scheduled and was a completely peaceful gathering. Sukarno briefly addressed the crowd, and they all sang “Indonesia Raja,” the new national anthem, and shouted “Merdeka!” (Freedom!). Even though Sukarno stated that although united in their desire for independence, the Indonesians wanted no bloodshed, the nervous Europeans sent in troops. “With a supreme lack of political acumen the Allies, i.e., the British and the newly liberated Dutch, had the Japanese tanks surround the rally with their guns,” Jane reflected later, “which certainly made a very bad impression on the Indonesians.”
Her fourth point, and the one she knew was of keen interest to Washington, concerned the collaboration of the nationalists with the Japanese. To Jane, it looked as though the position of the Japanese was “ambiguous” at best:
On the one hand they are reported to be depressed and demoralized as they are afraid they will not be able to keep order or protect Allied nationals (Source; Col. Dewer). On the other hand, the situation is one which they have been advocating and preparing the Indonesians for throughout the whole war. Source maintains that they are at present providing the nationalists with money and arms, and the nationalists are awaiting word from the Japs to side against the Allies when the occupation forces arrive.
Jane added that she herself had observed Japanese officials riding around in cars flying the nationalist flag. Based on all the intelligence she had gathered, Jane concluded, “It looks as if [the Japanese] are playing the double game: promoting strife subversively and at the same time making sure they are not held responsible for it by cooperating to the fullest extent with the Allies and obeying implicitly all Allied demands.”
Jane attached a separate memorandum outlining practical concerns relating to her agent (Humpy). She included details of how he had secretly slipped back onto the island, sustained an injury in the process, but still managed to make his way to Central Java, where he landed a job as a driver for the Kempeitai. He knew a great deal about what was going on, and what is more had a number of contacts who he said would be willing to work for them. Crockett had recommended, and she concurred, that Humpy be sent to Singapore and interrogated by Major Koke. She added that he wanted to leave Java, as he had blown his cover on a number of recent occasions, including coming to the hotel for their first meeting, and felt that his position there was “precarious.”
Ten days after they arrived, Crockett declared their quarters too cramped and commandeered the Governor-General’s Palace. Admiral Cunningham had decided to remain on board his ship, so the place was up for grabs. A huge, marble colonial mansion, it held out the promise of living in “royal splendor.” Just before they were scheduled to move, however, they all ended up barricaded in the Hôtel des Indes—“waiting (like dopes) for all hell to break loose,” Jane reported to Lloyd George. She noted that the property request (i.e., the task of protecting American property belonging to former POWs) that came through that day was “practically laughable,” given that they “couldn’t even find out what was happening in the street let alone in Pladjoe.”
She reported that the POW situation was under control. All the internees had been brought out, except for a few who were remaining by choice and were being taken care of. The outer islands had not been “cased completely,” as their C-47 junket plane had been grounded, but it would get done. She indicated that she had not finished the POW depositions, explaining that the delay was due to the fact that they had no confidential secretaries and she had to type up all the classified material herself. “All in all the thing is like a stage set by Dali, and I expect the Rockettes to dance out of Des Indes dressed as Kempei,” she wrote. “And we wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
A group of British and American journalists arrived and managed to arrange a conference with Sukarno. Jane and Major Crockett attended the no-holds-barred question-and-answer session. The nationalist leader proved to be a cool customer. He had an answer for everything. One correspondent asked him what he meant when he had said in a radio broadcast six months earlier that he, personally, “would drive the
British and Americans back into the sea if they tried to invade Java.”
“The broadcast was prepared by the Japanese,” Sukarno replied with equanimity. “There was nothing I could do about it.”
“What was your attitude toward Allied fliers forced down over Java?” asked another correspondent. Jane had heard terrible stories about the fate of Allied planes lost over the jungle. In some cases, patrols reported finding the fuselage intact with all of its occupants butchered by Indonesian guerillas, leading some pilots to say they would prefer to pull into a high dive and “finish the job quickly.”
“I wasn’t able to take care of them,” Sukarno, unruffled, explained. “I had no underground organization, no way of acting.”
The reporter pointed out that there had been underground organizations in Thailand and Malaya, not to mention most of the European countries that were occupied during the war, that they had all managed to aid Allied fliers, and that people in those countries who had cooperated with the enemy to the extent Sukarno had were now on trial for their lives. At this, Sukarno shrugged and spread his hands.
Afterward, Crockett met with Sukarno and informed him that the American headquarters was “neutral” and he could call on them whenever he had a problem to discuss. The major reminded him that he had “no authority to act” and should be considered only as “blotting paper,” willing to listen and absorb anything he had to say. Sukarno called the next day and continued to do so, coming himself or sending one of his cabinet members almost daily over the next few weeks.
A Covert Affair Page 17
