Orders Out
We didn't think it was going to be our last reconnaissance mission, but that's how it ended up.
We had been flying together for more than a year by then, our little anomaly in the greater pattern of the world. I was a U. S. naval officer, a naval aviator, flying in a Marine squadron in the Philippines, what was an almost exclusively Army domain. Since we answered to a Navy command, the U. S. Asiatic Fleet, we did some crazy things, but then, in those days just before the war started in the Far East, everything was a little crazy. Everyone was tense and jumpy, knowing the Japs were on the warpath, and wondering when the shooting would start.
On that morning, it was 6 January, 1942, the war was then just a month old, and we had done a lot of scrambling to stay ahead of the enemy, and lost some of our guys in the process, but had been ordered south to the Army's make-shift field at Del Monte, on Mindanao. There were just four of us there, all that were left: ONE, FOUR, FIVE, and TEN. We were flying Martin 167 Maryland light bombers, and we just called then by their number. The Major in ONE with FIVE and TEN were to depart for the Dutch field at Laha, on Ambon Island in the Netherlands East Indies to work with the Australians and the U. S. Navy's Patrol Wing TEN basing there. My assignment, that is, my crew's assignment, Number FOUR's, was to make a recon of the Jap positions at Davao and then Jolo Island, recover at Tarakan in Dutch Borneo, and report to the Dutch commander there what we found, since the enemy at Jolo clearly threatened that position.
We were off at the crack of dawn.
There were so many Japanese ships in the bay off Davao and at Malalag that we were counting groups rather than singles. It was incredible... there were easily sixty ships there, probably a dozen warship or more, the rest of them transports and freighters. No doubt about it. Japan was serious about invasion. There was no question in my mind at all. The Philippines were lost unless the Pacific Fleet arrived very quickly, and with lots of muscle.
We made altogether three passes over the harbor, medium altitude, about five thousand feet, so Sergeant Mulvane in the nose could get a good count. I told Corporal Tracy back aft in his radio compartment that I was depending on him to watch for Jap fighters. He had a single .30 caliber Browning, but his eyes were our best defense. The Martin 167 was a fast aircraft for its day, we could break 260 knots in level flight, twice what the Navy boys could do in their dawdling PBY flying boats, so in my mind our speed was our best defense. Oh, the Zero could catch us all right, but the Jap fighter pilot had to be very serious about it and willing to commit to a long chase, and we banked on them loosing us then in the clouds.
Anyway, that day was a lucky day for us. Tracy saw patrolling fighters high above us, but they didn't see us. Ha, Ha... too bad. We made our passes, counting noses, gathering our intelligence, and beat feet outta there while thanking our lucky stars.
Will put together the report. That's Sergeant Mulvane. His first name was William, went by just Will. Like I said, we'd been flying together for more than, well, a year, yea, it was a year. So things were kinda informal, though officially he always called me Lieutenant Shepherd. The third crew member was our radioman, Corporal Richard Tracy, USMC, a young kid from Florida, but a sharp Marine and a very good radio operator.
We were headed west over the southern Mindanao highlands and about the time we hit the Sulu Sea, steering for Jolo, Tracy told me that he had a response from NPO, the Navy radio station on Corregidor, up north near Manila, and that they had rogered for our sighting report and would then route it onward to various commands.
Jolo was simple, and a single pass over the anchorage told us all we needed to know. More Japanese ships, several transports and a pair of destroyers. That kept Tracy busy for a while, and Will gave me the heading for the Dutch field at Tarakan, and we scooted to get clear of the enemy. We didn't see any fighters at all, but knew they were there, somewhere. Before too much longer Tracy told me he had Tarakan Ops on the circuit and we were cleared to come in. By 1130 we were on the field and a truck led us to a secluded grassy part of the apron under a big tree and I shut'em down for a break. Sergeant Mulvane gave me his chart with out track plot, Tracy his copy of our reports, and I jumped aboard the truck for Ops. Will would see to the fueling and servicing, and we passed the fuel bowser on the way to Ops.
I recognized the Indonesian fellow driving the truck. I hadn't been in Tarakan since mid-November, but he remembered me, too. He was a sharp cookie, spoke excellent Dutch and pretty fair English, as well. I took a chance and asked him about Annaliese, knowing that fellows like that in small communities kept up on the developments all around. I was glad I asked. He told me straight out that she worked now in the headquarters building in the commander's office, and that she hadn't hardly spoken to a man since she had seen me last time I was there. He wished me good luck, with, what sounded to me like an Australian accent. Strange.
A Dutch Navy officer friend greeted me at the door, which alerted her to my presence... and I went to her desk to say hello. She seemed surprised and pleased, but uncertain what to do. She stood and smoothed her dress, her long hair flowing everywhere, and smiled her radiance to me. She was still as beautiful to me as before.
"Please have dinner with me, Annaliese, would you?" She nodded quickly with a big smile, welcoming me, and I paused at her desk a moment. As usual, her dress was conservative, though always light in the constant heat and humidity β Tarakan is just 3Β°s above the equator, about 180 miles, and on the edge of the Borneo jungle. Annaliese did not dress provocatively... that was not her. To me, a pretty girl's dancing eyes and long hair are always first rate attractions, and she was beautiful beyond measure. She was shy and hesitant, couldn't find any words to speak, but her smile and her expressive blue eyes told me a great deal. I was pleased to see here again, too.
Commander Vermeulen was waiting with several of his staff, including one of the Dutch flying boat pilots from the Naval Air Service group stationed there. Our greetings were friendly, but hurried and he was anxious to hear about what we had seen. His table was cleared waiting for our chart. He listened to my report, we all discussed the meaning we could derive from that, and he asked what my assessment might be. He knew very well that the Japanese were coming; it was only a question of when. He had, I think, two of his own Dutch Navy flying boats running patrols from Tarakan, and they were very keen on what they felt sure would be invasion convoys headed their way within a few days. That certainly seemed the probability to me as well. I did not envy them their position in the least.
The Commander was a genial kinda guy. He told me that he had a car take out cold beer and sandwiches to my crew. There was a dinner party in preparation for the evening for all the staff and their wives, and he invited the three of us as well. He had rooms prepared for us in the barracks close by and then asked what my orders were. I told him I needed to check in with Radio Ambon and Patrol Wing TEN there to be sure. He rose then with a curious expression on his face, and turned for the large window looking out over the field and beckoned me to follow him out of earshot of the others as they were departing.
He mulled over his thoughts for a moment, and I waited for him to speak.
"Will you being seeing Miss Larsen while you are here?"
It was a very fatherly kind of question, but caught me off guard because, though I could easily guess that he was aware of my liaison on my previous visits, there was no overt reason evident for him to inquire into my personal life. Between us, nevertheless, there was little need for any kind of secrecy, and to me it was no great intrusion.
"Yes," I replied, "as I passed through your outer office I met her again and asked her and she agreed to dinner this evening. May I bring her to your dinner party?"
"Please do; she is more than welcome." There was more between the lines that followed. I knew a little of Annaliese's background because she had told me during our picnics and time together the previous fall, but he could add a great deal of more recent information. She and her father were Danish, he had been a senior engineer on the oil drilling rigs, and a very good one, employed by BPM, Bataavsche Petroleum MΔ³., the Dutch company that managed the oil fields in eastern Borneo. I noticed his usage of the past perfect tense, and since I also knew that Commander Vermeulen spoke very precise English, I knew something else was coming. Sure enough, her father had died three weeks before after a difficult bout with Malaria. That left her essentially alone; a seventeen year old girl, a European in Asia, and he motioned to the east, suggesting in his motion what we both could guess was approaching. He was concerned about her safety when the Japanese came.
His ability to get her away to the south was limited; scheduled commercial air service and all shipping had already been suspended, and before that time she had refused to leave her parent's home and their memory behind. Clearly, she was distraught, he said, and her only living relatives were in Nazi-occupied Denmark, leaving her nowhere to turn. In the weeks just passed she had spoken to him of me, and had wondered if there was any possibility of me coming again. She was working on his staff now, he added, to give her something to occupy her time, and it would be, he suggested broadly, of great service to the Royal Netherlands Navy were I to find some way to assist.
He left it at that, standing silently, gazing out the window in the direction of the approaching Japanese, and allowing me complete latitude to draw my own conclusions.
After dinner that evening we sat on the bench in the darkness in front of the cozy little home where she and her parents had lived for several years. Her mother had passed away earlier, shortly after they had come to Tarakan for her father's work. When I asked her what she was going to do, it was quickly evident that she was struggling with an emotional brick wall. She shrugged, and tried bravely to smile at me, and her lower lip began to tremble. I took her in my arms and the tears soon flowed freely as she wept out her anxiety and loss and confusion and loneliness.
Her ability in English was pretty good. She had a basic working knowledge, but lacked practice and exposure. As long as we kept the vocabulary and ideas simple, she was fine. Being fluent in German myself gave me bit of an edge in other Germanic languages, like Dutch, in which I had made some progress, and in Danish, where she had caused my interest to pick up. One did not have, I found out, many Danish language learning resources in the Philippines in 1941. The one thin grammar in the Santo Tomas University library had been published in KΓΈbnhavn in 1885.
Wonderful.
During the weeks since passing through Tarakan on survey missions the previous October and November, I had thought that I had found the one girl in the world for me. I had thought about that quite seriously for weeks now, even with the intervening commencement of WWII in the Far East on 8 December, but the logistics involved with doing anything about it, as the war started and we were driven every which way by the Japanese, had left me no opportunity. Now, the chance of a lifetime had fallen right into my lap.
