Transcript
We were only a day out of Singapore when we came cross a little merchant ship that was being bombed by some Japanese aircraft. They'd set it on fire. Our medical staff went over to the ship and they brought back in their own boat a lot of Lascar seaman. Have you heard of Lascar seaman? They're Asian [seamen]. The shipping companies employed very cheap labour and they were Indians and different races and that.
And because we couldn't anchor we had to keep moving, because these aircraft were still flying around dropping bombs around the ship. Luckily they'd run out of their big ones and they were only dropping small ones. So we had to keep underway, and their boat came alongside with all these wounded people in it and the doctor standing in the boat injecting them with morphia. And being on the quarterdeck, which was about the lowest part of the ship, so we could actually lean over the rail and grab these guys under their armpits because you couldn't stretcher them - there wasn't time.
These poor guys were in a lot of pain and they didn't speak English. We had them lying around on stretchers everywhere and as they were dying we were sort of burying them at sea. We took the ones that were still alive to Batavia [now Jakarta, Indonesia] but we don't know what happened to them. They probably finished up as POWs, too.
