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.

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.