BEWARE, THERE IS AMERICA

One night last summer, a small sailboat crept out of Batavia. Aboard were three Dutchmen, the first and (so far) the only white men on record who have escaped from Java since the Japs took the island almost a year ago. Last week one of those Dutchmen, safe in the U.S., told what it was like to live under Japanese military rule.

The Dutchman worked in the electric power plant. He stayed at his job on March 5, 1942, when Batavia announced its surrender. The remnants of the Dutch and Allied armies had withdrawn into the hills. That night the invaders arrived.

They came on bicycles -- runty, bowlegged little men in cheap, stained uniforms, half of them wearing spectacles, only one out of every 25 armed with a machine gun, the rest carrying .25-caliber rifles. They were drenched in old sweat -- "you could smell a troop of Japs 100 feet away . . . they smelt like hell."

The Kempei. A grinning, politely deferential squad of bespectacled officers arrived at the power plant. "Everybody was supposed to go on doing his duty, and acts of sabotage would be punished by death. Then they said that whoever would not agree with this should please step forward. They had six Jap soldiers lined up with drawn swords. Nobody moved."

Into jail went all Batavia's white police officials, heads of business firms.

They slept on the stone floor, ate rice and stringy meat, had to bow to Jap soldiers. Sometimes the soldiers slapped the Dutchmen in the face and stamped on their feet. The Kempei, Japanese version of the Gestapo, took over the police department, rounded up most of the white male population and hustled them off to camps. (Some of the prisoners were later released, but another roundup put most of them back in again. ) For eight days after the fall of Java a Bandung radio station played the Dutch national anthem at the end of every evening's broadcast. "The fellows got shot." The people listened to news broadcasts until the Japs sealed their radios.

The invading army came prepared for everything, bringing its own scrip, its own doctors and nurses, its own whores.

The Three "A"s. Dutch women were not molested. Despite incidents of Jap arrogance, the treatment of the white population was, on the whole, not brutal. Jap soldiers put on a humble, even shy manner, saluting and grinning at the whites and asking favors with a "sorry" or a "please." Ruthless brutality was saved for the native Javanese.

Natives who failed to bow properly were beaten with rifle butts. Hungry

Javanese who tried to steal rice were machine-gunned or seized and dragged into a public square. "Then they cut off his hands, or his head. This happened quite often."

Sometimes the Japs would truss a native to a tree. The Japs pulled off his trousers and gave him enough scope to walk around, but after three days or so without food or water he would collapse, choking himself to death in a noose looped around his neck.

This treatment did not jibe with the official Japanese propaganda line. The Japs had a slogan: Asia Raya, Asia Melindung, Asia Pemimpin, which means, "Greater Asia, Cooperative Asia, Harmonious Asia." The Japs tried to convince the Javanese that the white man was through. Even Dutch Nazis, who had been pining in Dutch concentration camps before the invasion and now thought their fortunes would be brighter, were flung back into camp.

The Japs seized several U.S. films in Batavia. One was Charlie Chaplin's satire on Hitler, The Great Dictator, which they showed "four or five times for a bunch of Japanese officers and they all had a big laugh out of it." Their favorite picture was 1,000,000 B.C. ("It showed the white man in a rather low state of life. They sit tearing at bones and acting like animals.")

Six "A"s. Some 60,000 Allied and Dutch troops were finally rounded up. Among them were 883 Americans ("I remember the figure exactly").

The Dutch civilians were stolidly restrained. "They were as mad as hell. I have seen some of those fellows just raging mad. They just sit at home and wish that they could get going, but then they feel, 'What the hell? We can't do anything.' You are just absolutely bound." The Dutchmen were biding their time.

The Javanese natives, scorned, beaten, cooperated in some instances with the Japs. But most of them turned the Jap propaganda back on their bowlegged conquerors. They made up their own slogans, which they passed around by word of mouth. One sample: Asia Raya, Nippon Kaya, Asia Paya, which means: in "Greater Asia" Japan will be richer but the rest of Asia will live in misery. The confident Javanese natives had their own three "A"s: Awas Ada America, which means: "Beware, there is America." The Javanese are also biding their time.

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