In 1942 a Dutch warship escaped the Japanese Navy by pretending to be an island. It worked. By early March 1942, the Dutch East Indies were falling. The Japanese had crushed the Allied fleet at the Battle of the Java Sea. Java was about to be overrun. The last Dutch ships still afloat were ordered to run for Australia. One of them was HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen, a small, slow minesweeper about 180 feet long. She had almost no guns that could stop an airplane, and she couldn't outrun a Japanese destroyer if her life depended on it. Which it did. She was supposed to make the escape with three other Dutch warships. Those ships were caught and sunk. Abraham Crijnssen was on her own. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Anton van Miert, came up with a plan that sounds insane. The waters between Java and Australia are scattered with thousands of islands. Many of them are just tiny specks of land with a few trees on top. So the crew went ashore and cut down trees and jungle plants. They covered the entire ship in them, from bow to stern, until she looked like a small jungle-covered island. They painted the exposed parts of the hull gray and brown to look like rock and cliffs. There was one catch. Islands don't move. So during the day, the ship anchored right up against real islands and sat completely still. The crew refreshed the wilting leaves and stayed out of sight. Japanese planes flew overhead. They saw nothing but one more island. At night, the "island" pulled up anchor and crept south toward Australia. Night after night, day after day, she slipped through waters crawling with Japanese ships and aircraft. After about eight days, the coast of Australia came into view. On March 20, 1942, Abraham Crijnssen sailed into Fremantle. She was the last Allied ship to escape Java, and the only one of her class in the region to survive. She went on to serve the rest of the war with the Royal Australian Navy hunting submarines. And she's still around today. Abraham Crijnssen is preserved as a museum ship at the Dutch Navy Museum in Den Helder, in the Netherlands.