Couchfish Day 379: War Stories Couchfish

A quick word of introduction. My name is Stuart McDonald and this is Couchfish—the perfect tub of ice-cream for the traveller stranded on the couch. The newsletter has both a paid edition which traces a fantasy itinerary through Southeast Asia, and a free one that covers, well, everything else. If you’d like to support me finding more tourism stuff to moan about, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you.
After spending New Years of 1941 in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, 75 crew boarded the Kaidai-class cruiser submarine I-66 and left port. Along with the crew, were six torpedo tubes, a deck gun, and an anti-aircraft gun. On her second war patrol of World War Two, she was bound for the Bay of Bengal via the Lombok Strait and the Andaman Sea.
As the I-66 made her way southeast, through the South China Sea, the USAT Liberty, a US-flagged freighter, was heading north. Laden with rubber and railway parts—or explosives, depending on the source—the Liberty was enroute from Australia to the Philippines—or Batavia (Jakarta), again depending on the source. With a displacement of over 13,000 tons and 70 crew, the vessel had but two small deck guns.
The I-65, the same class of submarine as the I-66. Photo: 日本海軍艦艇写真集 潜水艦・潜水母艦p70, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
You know where this is going right?
Before dawn on her sixth day at sea, around 15 km due south of Nusa Penida’s Kelingking Beach, the I-66 sighted the Liberty. She torpedoed it at 04:15, leaving the Liberty dead in the water, then made her escape. Two Allied destroyers—the USS Paul Jones and the Dutch Van Ghent—took the Liberty under tow and steamed for Singaraja on Bali’s northern coast—the primary port of the Dutch colonialists.
With the Liberty crippled, even after they’d cleared the fast moving waters of the Lombok Strait, she continued to take on water—Singaraja was to be a nautical mile too far. Deciding to cut their losses, and hoping to salvage as much of the cargo as possible, they beached the Liberty, and she capsized on Tulamben’s pebble beach on January 14. For the Liberty, the war was over, and once relieved of her cargo, she became yet another coastal rusting skeleton.
The USAT Liberty in better days. Photo: U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Some twenty and a bit years later, in 1963, Bali’s Mount Agung erupted. Windsor P. Booth of National Geographic was on Bali enroute to Sangeh Forest at the time, and later wrote in the September 1963 edition:
“There was a gentle tapping, as of rain, on the roof of our car. Oddly, no drops appeared on the windshield. Then the sky suddenly darkened.
I stepped out of the car to find that the “rain” was volcanic ash mixed with cinders.
No longer was the landscape a joyous rhapsody in green. Now all was bathed in an unearthly saffron light, because ash and clouds had blotted out the sun. Familiar objects, like trees and houses, took on grotesque shapes.”
When colleagues returned two weeks later, they wrote of the devastation, noting:
“By far the worst havoc struck a group of villages due east of Besakih. So sudden and complete was their destruction that even two weeks later officials could not be sure what happened. Many places, cut off by avalanches and lahar flows, were still too hot to be entered. Bodies were buried—or eaten by dogs—where they fell.”
The eruption took place around the greatest of all Balinese rituals, the Ekadasa Rudra. In the very readable Bali A Paradise Created, Adrian Vickers describes it as “the centennial rite of exorcism of the eleven forms of the terrible god.” An exorcism the eruption was, with thousands of lives lost, and vast tracts of land reduced to stony moonscapes.
“Acrid muck, 30 feet deep in spots, buried much of nearby Selat.” Photo: Robert F. Sisson, National Geographic.
While the Nat Geo correspondents kicked around Bali’s south and east, to the lesse