Ship of Ghosts (39 page)

A 1939 report commissioned by the Japanese Army had concluded that two regiments of railway engineers would need a full year to connect the existing rail lines. Prepared by a civilian consultant, the study attracted new interest once Burma emerged as a theater against the Allies in India. With the demands of war sapping the availability of labor and matériel, newer estimates showed the project would actually take five or six years to complete. The sudden and unexpected surplus of Allied war prisoners and local coolies, or
romusha,
had changed that calculus altogether. An army of slaves would compensate for Japan’s deficiencies in mechanization.

Though it had established its brutal pattern of treatment of POWs in China through the 1930s, Japan had haltingly committed itself to the principle that prisoners should not do work that was militarily useful to their captors. Japan had ratified the Hague Convention of 1907, and in 1928 it signed (but a year later refused to ratify) the more expansive 1929 Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War. The Imperial Army pressured the Japanese privy council not to ratify the convention because it was unlikely to bring reciprocal benefits: Bushido warriors did not become prisoners. Japan’s refusal to ratify the Geneva Convention would provide the cover it needed to deny that its prisoners of war were entitled to legal protections.

In March 1942, the commander of the Southern Field Railway Group in Saigon ordered preparations to begin for construction of the railway. On June 20 came the Army’s formal decision to proceed. Given the pressures of wartime, they needed it done fast—in twelve months. The job was assigned to the Fifth Railway Regiment in Thanbyuzayat, Burma, and the Ninth Railway Regiment in Ban Pong, Thailand. It would fall to a civilian engineer named
Yoshihiko Futamatsu, who worked for Japan’s national railway, to bring to fruition the most ambitious and notorious of World War II’s civil engineering projects.

Futamatsu, promoted to major in wartime, determined that the best route for the railway was to follow the Kwae Noi River west from Ban Pong. That plan would run headlong into nearly insuperable obstacles of terrain, not to mention weather. A landscape broken by rocky ridges and snaking jungle rivers and tributaries would require exhaustive rock cutting, bridges, and viaducts along sheer cliffs. Moving north and west from the rice paddy plains of central Thailand, the terrain grew jagged and steep. As construction bogged down in the spring monsoon season, workers’ lives would be at risk from a mélange of tropical diseases and breakdowns in supply. Less difficult paths were available, but the route along the Kwae Noi had one surpassing advantage: The river, with its barge traffic, made heavy transport much easier. Large bridge trestles and heavy loads of ballast and other materials could be carried upriver from Ban Pong or cut or quarried locally. Heavy construction equipment was unavailable, but a swarm of manual laborers could more than make up the difference.

By the end of June 1942, the project’s infrastructure was taking shape. Twelve hundred British prisoners from Singapore began building base workshops and storage facilities around the town of Nong Pladuk, on the Thai end of the line. With its foundries, forges, engine shops, power stations, and an oil refinery—much of it scavenged or pillaged from Malaya, Sumatra, and Java—the town of Kanchanaburi in Thailand, often called Kanburi, became the headquarters for the entire line. Meanwhile, plans were afoot to bring prisoners to Burma to begin work from the northwest. A huge workforce of Burmese, Chinese, Tamil, Indian, and Malay natives—as many as 350,000 of them would be lured into imperial servitude—had built a chain of work camps every three or four miles along the right of way. They were joined by sixty thousand Allied prisoners of war, who rounded out the workforce and constituted its trained and disciplined core. Under their captors’ plan, they would build the railway simultaneously from either end, inland from coastal Burma and central Thailand, joining the two lines near the mountainous border with an imperial golden spike.

Such a trial had never confronted American fighting men before. Pressured to perform five years of work in twelve short months, they
would be given over to the jungle and left to wrestle it toward civilization. They would contend with all its elements—its hardwoods, rocks, and vines, its predators both mammalian and bacterial, under the lash of their enemy and assault from the elements. The work would harden some and consume others. They would forget all but the most basic memories of home, picking their way through a life in captivity that would become the grist for sleepless nights ever afterward.

H
ow does one build a railway through an impassable jungle? How does one do it without industrial equipment, without hydraulics, steam, or mechanized tools? The task begins with an imperative: that it
will
be done. It will be done whether people go hungry, suffer disease, or are beaten to death with sticks. The imperative, enforced with martial ruthlessness, drives everything, but it comes with a cost. The Imperial Japanese Army was good at enforcing imperatives, if generally unmoved by the costs.

A railway begins with a survey, a right-of-way, and a cleared path. The path is staked out by engineers and cleared through forests and hills. In mountainous terrain such as the jungles of Burma, the challenge then is to tame that path, to make dangerous, jungle-draped elevations flat and level and passable by train. Long climbing stretches of earth must be leveled, ravines built up, hills knocked down, valleys filled. The railway must be squeezed through gaps between cliffs and rivers, carved as a channel through hard rock, bridged over a river system’s innumerable feeders and estuaries.

Then the path is shoveled up into a raised earth embankment, a base for a layer of broken stones, known as ballast, that allows the embankment to bear a crosshatched layer of wooden ties, or sleepers,
and steel rails, and ultimately the weight of the freight trains themselves.

Like a collective embodiment of fabled John Henry in the mine, the prisoners would do with thousands of hands what should have been done by machine. In Burma, those hands were Australian, Dutch, and American. In Thailand, on the southeastern end, they were predominantly British. The British had gotten started in June 1942, just as the Japanese carrier fleet was trounced in the Battle of Midway. By the turn of 1943, as the fight for Guadalcanal was shifting in the Americans’ favor and General MacArthur was beginning the assault on New Guinea, work on the railway was in full swing. News of these victories would take months to reach the prisoners and kindle hope in their souls.

After the men in Fitzsimmons Group were marshaled at the leper’s prison at Moulmein, they were loaded into trucks and driven twenty-six kilometers into the countryside to the site of their first work camp. Since the work camps in Burma were named for their distance in kilometers from the Thanbyuzayat headquarters, this camp was known as 26 Kilo Camp. The Burma half of the railway was loosely structured around these kilo camps, each with its own Japanese commander, sited on the rail right-of-way from Thanbyuzayat (0 Kilo Camp), all the way up to Three Pagodas Pass on the Thai border, or 114 Kilo Camp. It was at 26 Kilo Camp that the story of the Americans on the River Kwai Railway began.

The 191 men of Captain Fitzsimmons’s group were loosely attached to a larger force of three thousand Australian prisoners under the leadership of Brig. Arthur L. Varley of the Australian Army. This group, who gathered at Thanbyuzayat in October, was the nucleus of the construction unit working on the Burma side of the line. The Allies would refer to it as “A Force.” In the Japanese scheme of organization, it was known as the “Number 3 Thai POW Branch” or “Branch Three.”
*
Its commander was Col. Yoshitida Nagatomo.

The Americans who arrived later, in January on the
Dai Moji Maru,
were greeted by Colonel Nagatomo and put under separate command in a unit known as Number 5 Thai POW Branch, or Branch Five, commanded by a Japanese army captain named Totare Mizutani. This group would work independently of, and have little
contact with, the prisoners of Varley’s Branch Three. They began work at Alepauk, or 18 Kilo Camp. From the moment of their arrival, they leapfrogged their counterparts in Branch Three as expediency required, en route to their designated base camp at 60 Kilo Camp.

The kilo camps, built in advance by parties of
romusha,
were of primitive design, consisting of several long, open-sided bamboo huts roofed with interwoven palm leaves—nepa, sugo, or coconut;
atap,
they called it. There was no metal in their construction, no nails or other hardware. The bamboo joints were fastened with strips of bark. A door at one end opened into a dirt center aisle on either side of which was a six-foot-deep sleeping platform made from bamboo branches. There were about a hundred men per barracks.

Each man got a one-by-two-meter-long bamboo platform for personal space. They slept shoulder to shoulder, ate there, stashed their stolen possessions there. Rough-hewn though this life was, it was, at first, far more tolerable than the hell ships. A contingent of twelve to fifteen guards and Japanese Army engineers lived in their own hut across camp. The guards who oversaw the individual camps made it abundantly clear, as Colonel Nagatomo himself did, that death was the penalty for escape. The camps had no discernible perimeter. No walls were needed. The surrounding jungle was its own prison. The tall trees, dense bamboo undergrowth, and predatory animals were as confining as a concertina-topped fence with guard towers.

With the survey done and elevations calculated, the Japanese engineers stretched lines from tree to tree, marking sections of earth to be cut and others to be filled, and the prisoners got to work decapitating hills and filling ravines to lay the embankment of the railway. In the early going, cutting and filling were the principal tasks. The Japanese gave them all the work they could handle and more. The engineers set a daily quota of dirt for each prisoner to dig. At the beginning of the project it was one cubic meter per day. This turned out to be far more work than it might first have seemed. The men had not only to dig the dirt at the cutting site but also load it and carry it to a corresponding area needing a fill.

During the dry season, in the coastal foothills, the work was as easy as it would get. They shoveled and dumped, shoveled and dumped, loading sacks that were suspended from long poles and hauled to whatever depression or ravine needed filling. The poles, known as yo-ho poles for the rhythmic chants the native workers
sang while working with them, were long bamboo rods from which hung a rice cloth sack large enough to hold several bucketfuls of earth. Each end of the springy pole, whose bounce seemed to make it easier to bear the loads, was carried by a prisoner. They would march several hundred yards with a fully laden yo-ho pole straining from their shoulders, spill and fill, and march back to do it again.

“You might spend a whole month making one fill in one place,” said
Houston
sailor Howard Brooks. “There were relatively short distances. But there might be stones close by where you start breaking up stones and putting fill in, putting stones on top for the ties you’re going to lay on it. You might do that and then you might do it in reverse another place. Then you might leave and go on down to the next camp and start the same thing over again.”

The cuts could be 150 yards long and sixty to eighty feet deep. “There was a lot of rock—a tremendous amount of rock—that you had to go through, and this was all done by hand,” Gus Forsman said. The scope of the work didn’t bow them. There was almost always immediately to hand a smaller objective, a quota enforced with the rod, to concentrate their minds.

Their tools were primitive when they had tools at all. There were no bulldozers or bucket loaders, no graders. The prisoners were all those things. They were dump trucks. They were steamrollers. They packed the railroad embankment by the percussion of their bare feet walking over it. Their shovels, made from soft metal, bent and broke when struck too vigorously into the root-infested earth, “like a pork and bean can on the end of a stick,” Howard Brooks said. “We got beat up more for bending a shovel than we did for not working at all.” They learned, in other words, to rely not on their tools but on their own hands. And as they did so, extending the railway into the mountains, every so often they would notice what appeared to be old survey markings from some earlier effort to carve out a right-of-way. Rational minds had come before them, labored briefly, and declined to proceed. Now such discretion was no longer available. When the prisoners lost track of the old markers, they set their own course into the unsurveyed jungle.

S
taying mostly at his headquarters at Thanbyuzayat, Colonel Nagatomo kept a studied distance from the backbreaking exertions of his charges up the line. Brig. Arthur Varley’s challenge was to build rapport with his counterpart and cultivate an ability to prevail upon him to treat his prisoners with as much humanity as possible. But Varley could see a hopeless situation settling in as the size of Branch Three swelled, en route to a number approaching ten thousand men later that spring—mostly Australian and Dutch, with a sampling of British and Americans in the mix. He had seen the worst of war’s foul enterprise, having received two Military Crosses for conspicuous gallantry as a young lieutenant in World War I. But nothing he had seen during that earlier conflict could have prepared him for the ruthlessness of the Japanese now. Several months before the first Americans arrived, Varley’s men had been working near Tavoy, constructing airfields for the Japanese. Eight Australians were caught trying to escape and were brought before Nagatomo. He coolly ordered them executed. Varley’s pleas went nowhere. The death sentence was inflexible. The only thing that struck Varley more than the camp commander’s cold-blooded allegiance to the Bushido code was the good-natured, downright cheerful way the Aussie “diggers” conducted themselves as they were led blindfolded
to their graves. “They all spoke cheerio and good luck messages to one another and never showed any sign of fear. A truly courageous end,” he wrote in a secret diary that he kept, at considerable risk to his life, from the beginning of his time in Burma.