An Ordeal to Forget

The first official notification my mother received concerning the whereabouts of her husband, then-Lieutenant Commander Thomas A. Donovan (U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1928) was a letter from the Navy Department. He had been last seen in a pilot boat with three natives, it reported, a mile off Christmas Island, south of Java, on 28 February 1942. She received a second letter in August; no further word had been received, it stated, but it indicated that Donovan could be a prisoner of the Japanese. Later that month, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox declared him missing in action. Official word that he had been captured came in a Navy Department letter in December 1943.

No other information from or about my father surfaced until June 1945, when my mother received a letter from the U.S. Prisoner of War (POW) Bureau in Washington, D.C. It cited a propaganda intercept from Japan's Tokyo Rose that carried a message from Lieutenant Commander Thomas Donovan in Java. Included was a transcript of the message, indicating that he was alive and well and receiving fair treatment. In August, we received two POW postcards that we determined had been written in May 1944, based on the message content they contained.

Then, on 2 October 1945, Vice Admiral Louis Denfeld informed my mother of my father's release from prison camp in the Dutch East Indies. He returned home that November, almost five years to the day since he had last seen his family. This is when we first began to learn of his extraordinary ordeal, in his own words.

After the sinking of the USS Langley (AV-3) on 27 February 1942 and the rescue of her crew by the USS Whipple (DD-217) and the USS Edsall (DD-219), the two ships requested permission from ABDA (American, British, Dutch, and Australian) Command in Java to disembark the survivors in Australia. Permission was denied, however, and they were ordered to proceed to Christmas Island—about 200 miles southwest of Java Head—for a rendezvous with the oiler Pecos (AO-6). The Pecos was to take the survivors to Freemantle, and the Whipple and the Edsall were to return to Java following the transfer.

Early the next day, the two ships arrived off Christmas Island, with the Pecos looming on the horizon. As they awaited the arrival of the oiler, the division commander and the commanding officer of the Whipple received word from the Christmas Island pilot that a Japanese submarine had been sighted off the island the previous afternoon. With this information, the officers in charge, including the commanding officer of the Langley, decided to change the original plan. They determined to conduct an under way transfer, with one ship patrolling, while the other transferred survivors. They also felt that any communication to the Pecos might compromise the new plan if the Japanese submarine became aware of the intention. Therefore, they decided to send me in the Christmas Island pilot boat to the Pecos so that I could inform her commanding officer of the change.

Japanese aircraft began flying over and dropping bombs. With their appearance, all three ships scattered out to sea, not realizing that I was still in the small boat. To complicate matters, a line from the boat had fouled the propeller and killed the engine. So the boat—with me as a passenger—was adrift and abandoned.

Once the native crew of the boat unfouled the propeller and started the engine, they headed for a lonely beach about two miles from the town jetty, fearing that a landing there would draw fire from the Japanese. So they beached the boat, removed the distributor from the engine for some unknown reason, and ran into the jungle, leaving me alone in the boat. Not caring to follow the natives into the jungle, I sat in the boat on the beach for about two hours, until the boat crew returned. They reinstalled the distributor and started the engine, and, with the Japanese airplanes gone, we all went ashore at the jetty in town.

Since the island was being administered by the British, I reported to the British district officer. I learned that the three U.S. ships had not returned. That afternoon, a radio message went out to Australia, informing them of my presence on the island. This communication apparently was never received or acknowledged. The next morning, the Japanese attacked from the air, making direct hits on the radio station and powerhouse, leaving the island with no electricity and thus no communication with the outside world.

The district officer invited me to stay with him until I could leave the island. Things went along smoothly for a time, until sometime between 1 and 11 March 1942, when a boat arrived with seven Australian sailors, survivors of a ship that had been sunk by a Japanese submarine. The island had a fort manned by three British officers, with a complement of about 30 Hindu soldiers and a police force of a dozen Sikhs. At about 0500 on the morning of 11 March, the district officer and I were awakened by two of the Indian soldiers. During the night, the complement of the fort had killed the three British officers and were in town at that moment, rounding up the company doctor (from the phosphate company on the island), the company manager, and the seven Australians. All of us were to be taken into the fort and executed.

The Indian soldiers marched us into the fort, where other Caucasians from the town soon joined us. As they lined 11 of us before a firing squad of machine guns and rifles, the district officer began arguing with the Indian Subadahr in Hindustani. As long as he kept talking, we stayed alive. The talks continued for about an hour, while we remained lined up for execution. At the end of the conversation, the district officer informed us that the Indians were delaying the execution until they had a chance to discuss it among themselves. In the meantime, they had hauled down the British flag and replaced it with a white sheet to avoid further Japanese bombing.

Having discussed our destiny, the Indians marched all 11 of us back to the district officer's quarters, where we were told we were to remain, under guard. We were allowed, however, to walk into town, also under guard, and gather tinned foods. We lived from day to day, with no indication of our fate, until 31 March. Early that morning, a Japanese task force appeared off the island and prepared to land. Japanese cruisers began bombarding the island (despite the white flag flying) and continued for three hours. No one on the island returned fire, and at about 0830, Japanese soldiers appeared. Immediately, the Indians turned us over to the Japanese, who started questioning us right away. They gave us no food and ordered us to bed down in one of the native houses on the island at about 2100.

Early the next morning, 1 April, the Japanese broke us out and marched us to the beach to assist in unloading landing gear. After about a half-hour, a Japanese courier arrived on a motorcycle and asked for "the American," which, being the only one on the island, I presumed to be me.

He took me to the commanding officer of the landing force, who told me I was to be evacuated from the island within the hour. Since I had no gear to gather, I had to admit that I was ready right then. With that, I boarded a small boat at the landing and headed for one of the cruisers. That evening, we steamed for a destination unknown to me. The Japanese on board told me that I was fortunate to be alive. They had seen the white flag, but they fired on the island anyway. Had anyone returned fire, the landing party had been ordered to kill everyone they found.

Over the next three days, an English-speaking officer questioned me from time to time. My treatment was humane; they even put me up in the ship's unoccupied flag officer quarters and treated me to a pre-dinner cocktail with the commanding officer each evening. Since I was the only U.S. naval officer on board, I received a lot of unsolicited attention, especially from men eager to try out their high school English on me.

Finally, we arrived off the port of Tjanjong Priok, where I was transferred to a Japanese transport and taken to Makassar, Celebes, an island in the Dutch East Indies, where I was incarcerated on 6 April 1942. Some Americans already were on the island. Some were survivors of the destroyer USS Pope (DD-225), and others were from the submarine Perch (SS-176). As it turned out, I was at the moment the senior ranking officer in the camp, held responsible by the Japanese for any activity they did not like. On 9 April, I was beaten 16 times with a baseball bat for interfering with the punishment of an enlisted prisoner. Often, the young enlisted men on work parties were caught picking bananas, avocados, other fruit, and anything else at all edible. For these offenses, the Japanese beat them—and me—upon their return to the camp.

In order to keep some semblance of structure among the prisoners, we thought each individual should wear appropriate insignia for his rank or rate. This would, we thought, show the Japanese that we were still proud and presented a potential threat if pushed to the absolute limit. So we made the insignia from whatever materials we could scrounge. Depending on the situation, I wore cloth shoulder boards or a set of hand-shaped yellow collar devices--sometimes both. In addition to the rank markings, all prisoners wore hand-made dog tags, listing name, blood type, religion, and prisoner number. Mine was 7941. None of the prisoners was given additional or replacement clothing, so our basic "uniform" consisted of whatever we had been wearing when captured. Many had only shorts. Fortunately for us, we were confined in a warm climate and did not suffer the fate of those transferred to the north.

Officers and enlisted prisoners were treated pretty much the same. The major difference was that enlisted men were taken into town in work parties, while officers worked inside the camp. One of my jobs was to clean the open sewers, which reinforced for the Japanese their contention that even the senior prisoner was inferior to them. Although initial treatment was comparatively not too bad, it worsened as Japan's situation in the Pacific deteriorated.

In spite of the obvious consequences if we were discovered by our captors, we would steal usable items wherever we could find them, especially when work parties left on in-town assignments. From some of these rescued parts, we were able to construct a radio receiver, which we built in such a way that it fit into a pair of the Dutch wooden shoes we each had been issued. When we felt it was safe, we connected them, hooked them to a "speaker," and listened to foreign news broadcasts about the ongoing war. This raised our morale, but it was obviously dangerous. Had the Japanese discovered us, we would have been executed for communicating with their enemy.

To keep my mind working, as well as trying to fool our enemy in every possible way, I completed a project on Makassar in which I designed and drew plans for my retirement home in southern California. Lacking any suitable paper, I used what was called toilet paper. I laid out, in a Mexican design, a two-level home, with many bedrooms and leisure rooms. It was to be built in the California beach community of La Jolla, even though I knew I could never afford to live there.

For some reason, I was transferred in September 1943 from Makassar to a camp near Batavia on the island of Java. My new prisoner number was 16248. This camp was far more primitive, and conditions were horrible. Prisoners were housed in a former juvenile reformatory designed for 300 boys. During the war, from 3,700 to 5,600 men were imprisoned there. Space was so limited that men had to lie down head-to-toe. The one meal a day we received, served at "lunch time," consisted of bread and rice, and once a month, boiled hog entrails served on rice was the treat.

In an attempt to supplement our meager diet, we were sometimes able to "buy" produce through the fence from the locals. We made some pretty creative dishes, and I enhanced my cooking talents markedly. I even developed a taste for rice, something for which I had a real distaste before the war.

A Dutch doctor was with us on Java, but the only medications he had available to him were boric acid, some quinine, and mercurochrome. If the war had lasted much longer, only a few would have survived these conditions. Of course, the usual beatings and mistreatment persisted.

During my time as a POW, I received only two Red Cross packages. This was not to say that the packages were never sent—quite to the contrary. The packages did, indeed, arrive regularly; the Japanese just would not distribute them. Just before the war was over, they became noticeably more humane in their treatment and handed out a few of the packages. After the war, we discovered several warehouses filled with Red Cross shipments. The Japanese had hoarded the packages, not even thinking to use the contents for their own benefit. Obviously, they were attempting to keep us in a subjugated state.

Eventually, the war ended, and we were released. Rather than return home immediately, I remained behind to be debriefed about my entire time as a prisoner. I wrote reports on camp conditions and the treatment we received, and I reported the names of our Japanese hosts, both those who had mistreated us and those who did not. And I recommended military recognition for those of us who had performed commendably while we were prisoners. One in particular received the Medal of Honor for stepping forward during the "punishment" of a young enlisted man who was being beaten to near-death. Then-Lieutenant Richard Antrim stopped the beating, telling the Japanese to turn the man loose and complete the job on him. This action alone was an executable offense, but the torturers were so stunned that they stopped and walked away, amazed at the actions of this officer. Both were allowed to live.

Antrim told me later that he had recommended recognition of me for similar actions in camp, but because I was a better letter writer, he said, mine sailed through and his did not. So he received the Medal of Honor, deservedly so, and I received the Bronze Star and the Legion of Merit.

A complete field medical exam found me to be less-than-healthy. My teeth were in deplorable condition from lack of proper nutrition and care. I had lost most of the hearing in my left ear from beatings I had received. And I had a severe vitamin deficiency, having lost 100 pounds during the ordeal. When I disembarked the airplane in New York City, my wife Christy, who had come from California to meet me, walked right by me, with no sign of recognition. After five years, it was difficult for me to recognize her, too.

While I was a prisoner, many of my U.S. Naval Academy classmates had been promoted to full commander, so I was one, too, when I put on my new uniform. Some 40 days later, I was promoted to captain. Following many months of medical treatment in New York and Maryland, the Navy determined that I was fit enough to return to regular active status.

I simply could not believe my first active-duty assignment. The Navy, in its eternal wisdom, had selected Japan. I would have quit the Navy before I would go to Japan, or have anything to do with the Japanese, so I stormed into the detail office and raised hell. My brother-in-law, also a captain, had spent the war in Pacific assignments and indicated a desire to meet "the real Japanese people." So we were able to convince the detail office to swap our orders. He would go to Japan, and I would serve as Commander, Pacific Petroleum Office, in Hawaii. I thoroughly enjoyed this assignment, and it gave me time to get reacquainted with my family, the Navy, and the world. The changes in all three were overwhelming.