BOLD VOYAGE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 October 1942, Page 4

BOLD VOYAGE

PHILIPPINES TO AUSTRALIA

MADE BY TWO AMERICAN OFFICERS.

IN OLD 22-FOOT MOTOR-BOAT.

(Special Australian Correspondent.) SYDNEY, October 20.

Two American officers who have arrived in Australia after dodging the Japanese for 159 days, while escaping from the Philippines, came closest to death off the Australian coast. For fifteen minutes they lay flat in a nativebuilt motor-boat while a Japanese plane riddled their craft with machinegun bullets. The officers are Captain William Lloyd Osborne, of Los Angeles and Flight Lieutenant Damon Gause, of Georgia. Their journey began on the day on which Bataan fell. In their journey .they charted a 1,500 mile course with a compass that worked only in still water. They survived a two-day typhoon and stopped at islands to plug holes in their leaky craft.

“We are not here by navigation, but by the grace of God.” declared one of the men. For as long as sixteen days they were out of sight of land, in an old 22-foot motor-boat, whose Diesel engine ran finally on a mixture including coconut oil. collected from island natives. They had only two gallons of this left on October 11 when an Australian motor-launch encountered them and guided them to a remote harbour. For as long as three days they had gone without food and sometimes for two days without water, but both arrived in the best of health. The two officers escaped separately after the fall of Bataan. Captain Osborne lived for two months as a hermit near a volcano. Lieutenant Gause was once captured, stripped of his clothes and herded with 300 other American prisoners, but managed to escape. After some weeks the men learned of each others presence by the “bamboo wireless.” It took months of travel for them to meet and another month to plan their escape. Their sailing time to the Australian coast was 58 days. Their first meal, after 159 days of rice and coconuts, was a tin of sliced peaches. Their great worry was that the Japanese might have arrived in Australia before they did,