Ship of Ghosts (38 page)
Authors: James D. Hornfischer
The name held vague meaning for them. Those who knew the Rudyard Kipling poem “Mandalay,” popularized by the Robbie Williams song “The Road to Mandalay,” had heard of the Moulmein Pagoda already. Before them now such a structure stood, an angular temple towering over the village like an ornamented gateway between jungle and sea. “We were still young and adventurous,” said Jim Gee, who had arrived with the Fitzsimmons Group earlier, in October, “and at this time still had a lot of strength. We looked at things from the eyes of an adventurer.” Scattered lights of settlements peeked through the palm-topped overgrowth. A red moon “lit the ground almost as though the sun was shining,” he said. “And I shall never forget the beauty that surrounded us as we made our way by these small boats into the landing.”
Unloaded at gunpoint, the healthy prisoners were taken up a narrow cobblestone street to a wooden building that seemed to date to the early 1800s. It was a jail. Its denizens—Burmese political prisoners and British army personnel—were moved out to make room for the newcomers, and they inspected the jail like curious ants. From conversation with natives—Donald Brain could still get by in the Burmese language—and from a few telling details, such as a mortician’s slab in the midst of the prison, the Americans learned that the facility had been used to impound lepers. For a few panicked moments, some of them envisioned a disfiguring contagion
overtaking them. Then they claimed real estate and ate a meal of hardtack and stew. From a Burmese prisoner they verified a lingering rumor: They had been brought there to build a railroad into the jungle.
Al Kopp, a
Houston
pharmacist’s mate who landed in January with Colonel Tharp’s newcomers, volunteered to stay behind at Moulmein as medical caregiver to forty-two Dutch prisoners gravely wounded in the air attack on their convoy. With no medicine or instruments to work with, Kopp would be forced to watch every last one of his patients die. Meanwhile, the rest of the prisoners milled through Moulmein’s streets, where local people tossed fruits and vegetables to them, as well as a type of cheroot that was potent enough to knock you silly if you smoked it. Taken to an open field with a railway siding, they were loaded into cattle cars. The locomotive at the head of the train chuffed to life and was soon enough pulling them south.
Their journey to this point happened to be a virtual reverse tour of Amelia Earhart’s itinerary five years before. The legendary aviator had flown her Lockheed Electra 10E from Rangoon to Bangkok, Singapore, and Bandung—fighting dysentery en route to an undocumented fate somewhere in the central Pacific. These locales, whose names were more or less familiar to some of them from their time in the Asiatic Fleet, were well-established way stations on the road to oblivion.
Their final destination—and the first stop in the new odyssey to follow—was the Burmese town of Thanbyuzayat. After unloading, they were taken to an open field ringed with guards who were busy burning brush. In the field, standing on a crate of some kind, was a stocky Japanese colonel, his sharp army uniform festooned with ribbons. The Americans would never forget the man’s stagecraft: Col. Yoshitada Nagatomo, peacock proud, chest puffed up and the brim of his cap cocked low. Notwithstanding his Napoleonic stature, he had a well-cultivated air of pomposity—“very cocky, a king-of-the-walk type,” recalled Howard Charles on witnessing the same performance when the Fitzsimmons Group arrived. Nagatomo’s outfit was dominated by his tall brown leather boots, flashy and oversized, so much so that one
Houston
sailor thought “he could run and jump and land inside of them.” Nagatomo stood before them on a sweltering field surrounded by an entourage of guards, and gathered himself to speak. With an interpreter turning his guttural roar into something
they could understand, he instructed the prisoners to listen intently. They did. They would never forget his words.
It is a great pleasure to us to see you at this place as I am appointed chief of war prisoners camp obedient to the Imperial command issued by His Majesty the Emperor. The great East Asiatic War has broken out, due to the rising of the East Asiatic nations whose hearts were burned with the desire to live and preserve their nations on account of the intrusion of the British and Americans for the past many years. There is, therefore, no other reason for Japan to drive out the anti-Axis power of the arrogant and insolent British and Americans from East Asia in co-operation with our neighbors of China and other East Asiatic nations, and to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere for the benefit of all human beings and establish everlasting peace in the world.
During the past few centuries, Nippon has made great sacrifices and extreme endeavors to become the leader of the East Asiatic nations, who were mercilessly and pitifully treated by the outside forces of the Americans and British, and Nippon without disgracing anybody has been doing her best up till now for fostering Nippon’s real power.
You are all only a few remaining skeletons after the invasion of East Asia for the past few centuries and are pitiful victims. It is not your fault, but till your government do not wake up from the dreams and discontinue their resistance, all of you will not be released. However, I shall not treat you badly for the sake of humanity as you have no fighting power at all. His Majesty the Emperor has been deeply anxious about all war prisoners and has ordered us to enable opening war prisoner camps at almost all the places in the Southern countries. The Imperial Thoughts are inestimable and the Imperial favors are infinite and as such you should weep with gratitude at the greatness of them, and should correct or mend the misleading and improper anti-Japanese ideas.
He asked them to look around them and see the sorry state of the world. Its endemic poverty and filth, not the depredations of the Japanese slave keepers, were the reasons they lacked medicine, food, and supplies. Women and children could not eat; why should
prisoners or soldiers have other expectations? Nagatomo declared that they would live according to Japanese military law, that their possessions would be limited, and that anyone attempting escape would meet “the extreme penalty.”
“If there is one foolish man who is trying to escape, he shall see big jungles toward the East which are impossible for communication. Toward the West he shall see boundless ocean.” To the north and south lay the Japanese Army. Then Nagatomo referred to the “ill-omened matters which happened in Singapore,” perhaps referring to the executions of prisoners who tried to escape, or to the thousands of Chinese who had been butchered on the beaches shortly after the Japanese seized control.
Then he got to the point.
By the hand of the Nippon Army Railway Construction Corps to connect Thailand and Burma, the work has started to the great interest of the world. There are deep jungles where no man ever came to clear them by cutting the trees. There are also countless difficulties and sufferings, but we shall have the honor of joining in this great work which was never done before, and you shall do your best efforts.
We will build the railroad if we have to build it over the white man’s body. It gives me great pleasure to have a fast-moving defeated nation in my power. You are merely rubble but I will not feel bad because it is your rulers. If you want anything you will have to come through me for same and there will be many of you who will not see your homes again. Work cheerfully at my command.
Nagatomo’s basic ethos was already emblazoned far more succinctly in German over the gates to concentration camps throughout central and eastern Europe: “
Arbeit macht frei,
” work brings freedom. Over the backs of the white man the Burma-Siam Express shall ride.
“Thanbyuzayat turned out to be the beginning of a real nightmare,” Jim Gee said. It was the northwestern terminus of one of the most notorious engineering projects in history. The prisoners did not know what awaited them, but they were quick to grasp their isolation. “At that point we learned that life was going to be pretty rugged,” Gee said. “It didn’t take a very educated man to see that conditions in this part of the world were going to be very bad. We
knew something about the climate. We knew it had a rainy season, and we knew it had a dry season. We knew that both were severe. And just the thought that we were going to be in the jungles, wearing as few clothes as we had, working under the conditions that we knew and could see the natives work, we knew that we were in for a spell of pretty rough living.”
Howard Charles, who had to this point never really feared the Japanese, heard Nagatomo’s words and felt a chill in his bones. “I knew this guy meant business…. I just had this sinking feeling that this was going to be a bad show, and if we lived through it, we were going to be very lucky.”
IN THE JUNGLE OF THE KWAI
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin’, an’ it’s there that I would be—
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
—Rudyard Kipling
“Mandalay” (1892)
I
t was all about China. A world war engulfed the Pacific because Japan had struggled to subjugate its mainland neighbor. Franklin Roosevelt’s economic sanctions and oil embargo were punishment for Japan’s assault on China, Asia’s keystone in the economic world order. Japan’s earliest offensives in the southwestern Pacific grew from its need for oil to pursue its war on the continent. Now Japan aimed to strangle China by cutting its essential lines of supply from India and Burma, kept open by threadbare British and American armies.
Japan’s ability to fight in Burma was complicated by the predations of an increasingly assertive American submarine force. In the war’s early going the best supply route to Burma was by sea, from the home islands south through the South China Sea, around Singapore, through the Strait of Malacca, and up to Rangoon. Even without a submarine threat the two-thousand-mile journey would have strained the capacity of Japan’s thump-shafted merchant fleet. As the U.S. boats extended their reach, the sea lanes became a prohibitively dangerous gauntlet for the Japanese to run. By May 1942, they had lost sixty-seven ships to Rear Adm. Ralph Christie’s Fremantle-based raiders. In short order Japan’s struggle for Burma
required a flow of arms and supplies far larger than its merchant marine could sustain.
The solution to the quandary had been drawn up years earlier: a new railway link between Bangkok and Rangoon. In Burma, well-developed lines already ran from Moulmein south to Ye. In Thailand, tracks extended from Bangkok west to Ban Pong, then turned south to the Malayan border. A great gap, held firm by the mountain ridges and impassable jungle that straddled the border between Burma and Thailand, stood between the two systems. The Japanese calculated that if a link could be forged through the 258-mile-wide gap separating them, a war might be won.