Ship of Ghosts (40 page)

Confronted with Nagatomo’s murderous discipline, Varley pursued a continuous and ongoing negotiation with him and his deputies, Lieutenant Naito and Lt. Kititara Hosoda, bargaining to secure medical treatment for his weakest men and fair treatment from the guards. He monitored their treatments, provisions, and punishments, lobbied for the Japanese to make the payments they promised in exchange for work—a private got twenty-five cents a month, an NCO thirty, an officer forty—and pressed for the Japanese to allow the Red Cross to admit a ship into Moulmein, as the Geneva Convention provided.

Nagatomo remained relatively aloof in these parleys, insulating himself by communicating to Varley through a Dutch translator named Cornelius Punt, or through Lieutenant Naito, who knew some English. Varley and his medical officer, Maj. W. E. Fisher, the senior physician among all nationalities in Burma, wrote numerous letters to Nagatomo warning him of deteriorating health conditions. By the time the second group of Americans arrived in January, contagion was well established and various diseases had a firm foothold in the camps under Varley’s purview. Nagatomo seemed to consider the growing number of dysentery and malaria patients in the Thanbyuzayat hospital as malingerers. With a thousand beds, Thanbyuzayat was a large hospital. But the medical staff there had barely enough equipment to staff a small rural clinic. They had three thermometers and perhaps half a dozen two-inch rolls of bandages at any given time. They reboiled mosquito netting and old rags to use as dressings, covering them with banana leaves taped down with strips of latex. Varley, in his diary, documented his every meeting with the Japanese, every request for drugs, beds, rice bags and canvas, drums for boiling water. He also documented the futility of such efforts.

There were signs of empathy and decency in several Japanese officers at Thanbyuzayat. Lieutenant Hosoda, who stood in as Branch Three chief during Nagatomo’s occasional absences, wept at his first sight of dysentery’s effects on the prisoners. He ordered guards to bring in, under the cover of darkness, fruit and eggs to the patients.
There was a second lieutenant named Suzuki, a surgeon in private practice, who, according to Dr. Fisher, examined the most serious of the sick at Thanbyuzayat “competently and sympathetically, talked intelligently about surgery and expressed the hope that the fellowship of medical practitioners need not be abolished by the exigencies of war.” There were times when Nagatomo himself, having personally seen to the execution of escapees, seemed to draw close to sympathetic cooperation with Varley. “Were there any good Japanese?” Fisher asked in his diary. “The answer is yes, but so few as only to constitute an exception proving the rule to the contrary.”

On December 7, 1942, Nagatomo traveled to Rangoon and from there on to Singapore for a conference of camp commanders. His relief was Lieutenant Naito. The Allied POW commanders were uneasy about the Japanese junior officer. Though he could fight his way through an English-language phrase, something in the glint of his eye struck them as not quite right. Six days after Nagatomo’s departure, three Dutch officers were shot and executed, supposedly, Naito said, on the personal written order of the colonel from Rangoon. On January 10, Nagatomo returned to the base camp claiming to have spent twenty thousand yen on blankets, clothes, boots, hats, toothbrushes, toilet paper, and sporting goods for the prisoners. Nothing was ever seen of it on the railway.

The men exhibited the ravages of the bacterial war quickly. After Serang, Bicycle Camp, Changi, and several months with Branch Three, Gus Forsman had dropped from 145 to 80 pounds. The nutritional deficiencies invited beriberi, which revealed itself through sudden, painful swelling that if left unchecked could assault the heart. “If you poked your finger into your leg, the hole would stay there for twenty minutes to half an hour,” said Otto Schwarz. “The soles of your feet were so swollen you couldn’t stand up from the pain.” Dry beriberi was severely painful, but it was the wet variety of the disease that killed you. “When it got to your heart, forget about it. It caused progressive swelling from outside into your core,” Schwarz noted.

Mosquitoes spread malaria, leaving men with cold, sweaty, shuddering chills. In the worst cases of cerebral malaria, or malignant tertiary malaria, the body overheated enough to warm the brain and bring delirium. The prisoner felt as though he were encased in a sphere, looking out through fishbowl glass at the blurry world, an
oscillating, electric ringing in the head. “You feel like your mind is a closed circuit, not quite making contact with the outside world,” Ray Parkin wrote.

A number of Varley’s countrymen were well over fifty years old—he himself was forty-nine—and could not afford to be placed on limited duty, because limited-duty workers were not paid and men who were not paid had trouble getting enough to eat. The extent of the danger to them was apparent enough. But the Japanese seldom acknowledged the medical crisis at hand. As Varley wrote in his diary, “The J’s require absolute proof—not warnings of these dangers. Unfortunately the proof lies in the burial of a number of men who could have been saved if our warnings were heeded and necessaries supplied. It is so difficult and heartbreaking to fight for the lives of our men in all these matters and meet a brick wall on all occasions, by being told things are not available.”

The jungle’s contagions afflicted the Americans in Branch Three especially hard, because they had none of their own medics with them. When Drs. Epstein and Burroughs from the
Houston
and Captain Lumpkin from the Lost Battalion arrived in January and went upcountry with Branch Five, they had little contact with the other group. Treatments were seldom ever more elaborate than a damp cloth over the head. “A little quinine would have saved a lot of lives,” said Otto Schwarz. “We were very rarely given it, just once in a blue moon.” At Thanbyuzayat, Nagatomo’s headquarters camp, was a reasonably well-equipped field hospital, but it was a prohibitive distance from the work sites where the weakest prisoners fell, far up the line.

The pace of work on the line was driven by many things that the Japanese could control—rifle butts on bones, the withholding of rations and medicines—and slowed by the never-predictable patterns of sickness. Looming behind all those variables was the knowledge that in a few short months, by April or May, the monsoon season was going to multiply the difficulty of every task. There was pressure to get the embankment laid quickly so that grass and other vegetation could grow through it before the seasonal torrents picked it apart.

T
he disease-ripe jungle would have posed a challenge to Western medicine even under ideal sanitary conditions. Without instruments and manufactured pharmaceuticals close at hand, the best Allied
doctors were helpless. In the jungle, these shortages could turn even the smallest of wounds into death sentences.

Two Lost Battalion officers, Capt. Arch Fitzsimmons and Lt. Jimmy Lattimore, having heard that a group of Dutch physicians was based farther down the line, went to the Japanese and begged them to order one of them to join Branch Three. Just one would make the difference between life and death. They offered their watches as a bribe. As it would turn out, a gifted Dutch doctor had heard of their plight and was asking for them in turn. In April, a doctor whom some of the Americans in Branch Three had met in Singapore showed up at 40 Kilo Camp to join them as their on-site medical caretaker. His name was Henri Hekking.

Howard Charles remembered seeing Hekking back at Changi, gathered with Allied officers in one of the stucco barracks, rehashing the fall of the Dutch East Indies. Born in Surabaya to Dutch parents, Hekking felt indeed that they were
his
islands. It was his grandmother, a committed herbalist and healer, who set him on the path of studying native medicine. When he was sixteen, his father’s work took him back to the Netherlands. Though he didn’t want to leave, Hekking went there to study medicine on a Dutch army stipend, then paid for his training with a ten-year term of service that took him back to the East Indies as a medical officer in the colonial army. There Hekking continued pursuing his grandmother’s art, first at Batavia, then at a hospital in the Celebes, and finally, before his capture, at the hospital on Timor. When the Japanese seized Timor and took him prisoner, it marked the end of his fulfillment of his promise to his
oma
that he would return and use his skills to help the natives of his homeland.

On his arrival at 40 Kilo Camp, Hekking introduced himself to the camp commander, Major Yamada. After exchanging niceties, the Dutchman told Yamada, “I wish to speak to you about food. The men will need meat.”

“No meat,” Yamada replied. “Later, Nippon kill water buffalo. Boom-boom. Understand-kah?”

Hekking was not bowed. “The men must have meat and citrus—fruit, any kind of fruit.”

“No fruit,” the major said.

The flat denials moved Hekking to appeal to the Japanese officer’s self-interest. He knew Yamada had a tight deadline to complete his segment of the railway. He took a new tack. “As a doctor, I must
warn you that if you do not provide protein and citrus, these men will soon become sick, and if they become sick, how do you build a railroad?”

Yamada darkened. He asked: “You warn me, Captain?”

“Yes, I—” Hekking offered, before he found himself reeling backward from the blow he never saw coming. As Hekking found his balance and clutched his face, Yamada shouted, “You do not warn me, Doctor! I warn you! You will speak no more of food!” Yamada ordered a roll call, mustering the prisoners before him. Then he began a speech that was an angrier, more threatening version of the address his superior, Colonel Nagatomo, had given the prisoners at Thanbyuzayat. As Charles recalled it:

Yamada was just getting to the part about how his segment of the railway line would be built better and more quickly than any other when a voice began to sing. It was Freddie Quick, doing a reprise of his turn at Changi singing “God Bless America.” His voice, Charles wrote, was “a beautiful baritone, challenging [Yamada], mocking everything he stood for.”

The Japanese major’s face went crimson as he scanned the ranks for the offender, found him, and shouted for him to stop singing. Two guards seized Quick and pulled him in front of Yamada. The guards tied his hands behind his back, then, wielding bamboo poles three inches in diameter, began pounding him over the head. On demand, the bleeding Marine repeated his name, rank, and serial number, each time weaker than the last. He was made to kneel, with another pole behind his knees. The guards kept working on him, lifting and pummeling, the thick bamboo shaft whistling down and cracking him atop the head, his legs numb and starved for blood. “Stop!” Henri Hekking shouted. “You will kill that man.” The physician felt a crushing weight in his midsection—a rifle butt. The
bamboo continued to fall on Quick. The guards relented only when finally he pitched forward, unconscious.

Jim Gee, Howard Charles, and some others hauled the unconscious Marine to a hut and laid him on the bamboo platform. “Is he gonna live?” someone asked. Examining the gash in his head, Hekking said, “Oh, yes. I would sew this up if I had some way to disinfect it.” He said he needed a suture, some thread, and some cloth. Jim Gee volunteered to get some water boiled and, for a cloth, offered the shirt off his back.

T
he Lost Battalion’s Lieutenant Lattimore, installed by Major Yamada as the food and supply officer at 40 Kilo Camp, confronted the Japanese officer one day about the inadequacy of their daily ration. The Japanese had informed Lattimore that working prisoners were to get a ration of five hundred to eight hundred grams of rice each day. In actuality, they were getting half that. The rice was “rotten and unusable, all of a grade the natives usually fed to cattle,” Howard Charles wrote. Hekking realized that the prisoners were contributing to the problem by washing their rice. He insisted they stop. The “gray rice” they were served—dirty floor sweepings with a certain proportion of bugs and other foreign garnishments—was in fact an important source of vitamins and protein. They were supposed to receive 125 grams of meat. There was none to be had—and whenever there was a windfall, say if a water buffalo was killed, the guards always took the steak. Prisoners were supposed to get 250 grams of vegetables, but this came in the form of melon, full of water and with little caloric content to fuel a working man’s metabolism. As the Lost Battalion’s talented medical officer, Capt. Hugh Lumpkin, would tell an interpreter with Branch Five, based farther down the line, “Melons were only hog feed in the States.”