off in squares. Commander Goggins and two Dutch officers proceeded to lay out a course. It was decided to sail N. by N.W. for two days, hoping in this way to evade the Jap submarines which had already take toll of the U.S.S. Langley off the coast.
The ruse worked. So did Goggins' chart. In the two anxiety-filled weeks it took the little ship to cross the Indian Ocean, bets were made as to when, if ever, they would make Perth. Bill Goggins laid his money on 4:30 p.m. on March 15. The ship nosed up against the pier at exactly four twenty-five on that day. It was nice navigation, worthy of the U.S.S. Marblehead's exec.
At that time the defenders of Bataan were making their last desperate stand. Submarines were running from Australian ports, carrying food, drugs, and what supplies could be assembled, for the men on Bataan and Corregidor. At the storehouse in Freemantle Dr. Wassell and two chief pharmacists set up a base of medical supplies. They scoured Australia for every vitamin pill and preparation, every grain of morphine and quinine that could be bought or commandeered. These they had ready for the submarines when they started north on their relief errands.
Meanwhile, in an Australian hospital between Perth and Freemantle, the nine Americans who had come out of Java made their recovery. Not one man had become infected during that long and dangerous trip. In the fifteen days they were aboard ship, the doctor had been unable to change their dressings. "Two or three times a day I'd go over them, smelling them. I figured as long as they smelled all right, I'd leave them alone. If they got to smelling bad, all I had to use was a small quantity of sulphur and the ship's supply of butter. I'd have to fall back on the kind of medicine our pioneer ancestors used — like I saw used in Arkansas when I was a boy growing up there."
(Growing up in the same town and the same church as a boy named Douglas MacArthur.)
Not a man of them is the worse for that journey today.
