Ship of Ghosts (43 page)

C
harley Pryor, who had had no trouble with his health when Branch Five started work at 18 Kilo Camp, caught a blowtorch of a fever after the move to 85 Kilo Camp. It laid him flat for more than two weeks. When his fever first spiked, Captain Lumpkin took him off the duty list. The fever wouldn’t break. A week went by, and another week. His temperature hit 107.5 degrees. The Dutch doctors at 85 Kilo, who hadn’t a drop of medicine to give him, puzzled over the fever’s persistence and diagnosed him with cerebral malaria complicated by jungle fever.

Burning up from within, Pryor begged for a wet blanket to be laid over him. With one draped across his body and another one over his head, he was still pushing the mercury to 105 degrees. He was so overheated that his vision blurred. He couldn’t see the jungle canopy a hundred feet above him. He couldn’t keep any water or food down. Once a robust 188 pounds, Pryor had by now withered down to no more than 75—“nothing but the skin stretched over the bones,” he said. After the eighteenth day, the fever broke. The day after the fever left him the Japanese decided to truck him back to Thanbyuzayat. It was April 16 when he was put on a truck with four or five other litter patients and driven down the pothole-laced service road. The jackhammering of the truck bed against his spine had him cursing the driver in four languages. It was a good sign.

Pryor got back to Major Fisher’s base hospital in time to witness the festivities attending the celebration of Emperor Hirohito’s
forty-second birthday. The Japanese marked April 29 by producing a propaganda film showing prisoners on the railway cheerfully working in the care of their most merciful captors. They circulated written instructions concerning the production, which was preceded by several days of setup and rehearsals. No-duty prisoners were turned out of the hospital to form an audience for a concert. They carefully rehearsed enjoying it. When Colonel Nagatomo realized the players weren’t fully and properly dressed, he ordered clothing for them. Missing buttons were sewn on in a hurry. A curt order was passed to the prisoners—“You will be happy”—and then the curtain rose and the show began. Guards wheeled in tables laden with fruit and meat. All of a sudden the base hospital had new sinks, racks of real surgical equipment. “It looked like an Army field hospital in there,” Jim Gee said.

Outside, a concert platform was quickly built. Trucks drove to the hospital gate unloading patients, who were then placed on operating tables surrounded by doting Japanese medical personnel. Stocks of food and medicines until now unavailable were piled everywhere, clearly labeled for the cameras. An International Red Cross team was filmed inspecting the camp. The Japanese had long been playing that organization for fools, commandeering rations mandated by the Geneva Prisoner of War Convention, seizing shipments of medicines, and dumping loads of morale-saving mail from home into open pits. The ubiquitous Dr. Higuchi, costumed in a white gown, was trotted out to examine sick prisoners for the cameras.

There were photo opportunities aplenty, with happy, smiling prisoners all around. As Otto Schwarz recalled, they were at one point instructed to sing for the cameras. Some Australians, insurgents to the end, struck up the popular tune “Bless ’Em All,” but replaced the verb with a four-letter obscenity. The Japanese captured it on film and tape, pleased at their prisoners’ happiness.

Production of the phony showcase lasted long enough for many of the prisoners to eat like kings for just one meal. Then the Red Cross departed and the fantastic dream evaporated. When the show was over, the food and the phony field hospital disappeared. The Japanese even took back their buttons.

I
t would be a puzzle of life on the railway, emerging in the midst of its horror and occupying survivors’ thoughts ever after, why some
men lived and others died. Conditions on the line were in a spiraling descent owing to the cumulative result of more than a year of starvation rations, the intensifying difficulty of the work in the mountains far from the logistical infrastructure that might save them, and the inevitable breakdowns in hygiene, momentary or systemic, that opened the door to disease. Charley Pryor’s recovery from malaria, or whatever it had been, suggested the depths of his constitution. Others were not so fortunate. In March, April, and May the Americans discovered that they were not immune from the terminal consequences of life on the Death Railway.

The regular relocations of working parties put undue strain on prisoners already teetering in illness. When an Australian working party from 75 Kilo was abruptly moved up the line, a thirty-man
kumi
under Lieutenant Hamlin was called to fill the hole at that camp. It was an onerous commute. For four days straight they marched ten kilometers every day from 85 Kilo to 75 Kilo Camp to finish an embankment. Rising before dawn and making the three-hour march, they worked all day and marched back to 85 Kilo after dark. The special duty kept them away from their huts for sixteen to twenty hours at a time. Their exertions, coinciding with an increase in the dirt-hauling quota to 2.2 cubic meters, marked the onset of a brutal period in which Lieutenant Hamlin’s
kumi
was hit with a series of deaths. After continuous protests by Hamlin, the Japanese discontinued that particular work detail. But the deaths of Lawrence F. Kondzela, James H. White, and Sgt. Joe Lusk at the makeshift hospital at 80 Kilo Camp opened a breach in the hopes of even the most optimistic of the Americans.

Lusk was Charley Pryor’s closest friend, and Pryor was on the detail that buried him at a cemetery near 80 Kilo Camp. He spread rocks over the grave and marked it with a heavy cross fashioned from a teak four-by-four carved with Lusk’s name. He measured the distance and direction to each of the other graves in the cemetery there and marked it on a map. When people came for them—and he had faith that someday they would—they’d find them all.

But it was the death of another sergeant from the
Houston
’s Marine detachment two weeks later that irrevocably changed the alchemy of the survivors’ experience and left them with questions that linger to this day. First Sergeant Harley H. Dupler had been admitted to the Thanbyuzayat hospital with chronic bacillary dysentery. Prisoners of a less clinical mind have speculated that it was the psychological
ravages inflicted by the guards that did in the
Houston
’s “poster Marine.” Dr. Fisher had treated him once already for dysentery, releasing him in early April. “He went to a working camp,” Fisher wrote, “and six weeks later returned, an almost unrecognizable skeleton.” The physician encouraged Dupler, saying that with a transfusion, some food, and rest he would make a rapid recovery. It was soon clear to the Australian, however, that Dupler had wounds that went deeper than the merely physical.

The story goes that Dupler had gotten bashed by a guard up the line in the jungle sometime in April, and at that point decided to stop eating. As a sergeant, he believed in the transforming power of roles. So long as he was investing himself in the rigors and rituals of the Marine Corps, as he had defiantly and famously done at Bicycle Camp, he was First Sergeant Dupler. Now, as a prisoner, he was something else, something that after seventeen years in the service he could not tolerate or reconcile himself to. As one survivor told it, Dupler embraced his illness as a last route to honor. According to Sgt. Benjamin Dunn of the Lost Battalion, Dupler said, “I’m glad I’m sick because I’m not going to work for the Japanese and help them fight my country. I won’t do it. I’ll die. I’d rather die.” Dupler was a dead man well before he landed in Dr. Fisher’s care. The Australian physician’s positive prognosis had cheered him for a day, “then he became depressed again,” Fisher wrote, “thanked his attendants, but said he wanted to die.” And that’s exactly what he did.

Lt. Ilo Hard of the Lost Battalion tried to split his rations with Dupler for a time, pressing on him half a can of Eagle brand sweetened condensed milk that he had stolen from a Batavia dock and saved for an extreme occasion just such as this. Dupler wouldn’t take it. Although he had the physical strength to take command of his own survival, his mind wouldn’t permit it. On May 14, within twelve hours of that decision, he passed away. “He had tried to be tough with the guards at work and had been beaten into submission,” Dr. Fisher said. “His spirit had been broken and life, to a man who prided himself on toughness, was no longer worthwhile.” In Dupler’s service records maintained by the Americans while on the railway, Dr. Lumpkin listed two causes of death in addition to chronic bacillary dysentery: The first was “psychopathia psychasthenia,” a neurotic state characterized by phobias, obsessions, or compulsions that one knows to be irrational. The second was “anorexia nervosa.”

Sergeant Dupler was buried on May 15 by six American pallbearers, with Dr. Epstein the only U.S. officer able to attend. Brigadier Varley’s Australians presented a wreath made from jungle leaves and red flowers.

The deaths of Sergeants Dupler and Lusk showed that physical strength had limits set by the mind. “They were some of the biggest, strongest guys,” said John Wisecup, who belonged to that class himself. “They should never have died. There’s no way to explain it—why they did this. They just lost the will to live.”

A
fter Sergeant Dupler died it was a short eight days before the heavens opened up and did not close. Anvil-shaped cumulus clouds had been seen over the mountain ridges now and again through April. In early May intermittent rains began. Locals called them the bamboo rains. “It is as if the Wet were a baying animal impatiently waiting over the horizon to be unleashed,” Ray Parkin wrote. “Every so often now it has sprung over the mountains, snarled at us, and been hauled back again.” Even from his headquarters at Thanbyuzayat, Brigadier Varley could sense the cataclysm soon to be produced by the collision of the Japanese will to complete the line with the onset of the monsoon and the rampant contagion he knew it would bring. “The J. will carry out schedule and do not mind if the line is dotted with crosses,” he wrote in a long diary entry on May 18, 1943. Four days later the rains came at them with their full fury.

Even the Texans had no frame of reference for the violent meteorological manifestation of the southern equatorial winter, the South Asian monsoon. The zone of turmoil produced by the collision of the southern and northern trade winds meandered on a twice-a-year frequency between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer. The stretch of hemisphere from northern Australia to southern Asia became spectacularly volatile during the season the Australians
called “the Wet.” Starting in the third week of May, the rains came and didn’t stop until the entirety of the railway, from Thanbyuzayat to Ban Pong, had been soaked through and nearly submerged by the weight of a storm that had no beginning, middle, or end but simply
was
.

The monsoon arrived and settled over them and simply stayed there, burying them in water. It was a driving deluge that would not relent until October, pouring without letup for fifty-four days and nights. Such a period of time takes discrete shape only in retrospect, and hindsight erases the demoralizing feeling of permanence that the monsoon carried with it during its peak. Rain was not an occasion. No one talked about the coming and going of storms, about Mother Nature’s wrath. “I don’t remember any storms,” said Howard Brooks. “I just remember rain pouring down in torrents.”

The monsoon season transformed the landscape. Creeks became streams and streams became rivers, their volume and velocity increasing alarmingly fast. “Within the first day and then with ever-mounting zeal,” Rohan Rivett wrote, “it widened the muddy rivers until they began to spread prodigiously and climb their jungle-fringed banks; dominating and assertive, it intruded on every conversation and even on the privacy of your thoughts; it brought change of habit to every living thing…. Now for us there was to be a testing of moral and mental strengths such as battle danger and hot-blooded action had never brought.”

The rains were a feature of the season, a steady state, like the sun’s angle of elevation during summer, like summer heat itself. It rained all the time. The men ate, worked, rested, slept, and woke under continuous rain. They had to rise in the middle of the night to wring out their blankets. Back home, violent weather had its way with you briefly. Maybe a tornado tore up your neighborhood or took away your house. It always moved on. But the monsoon oozed overhead and settled in like tar over a pit. Thunder was rare. The most frightening sudden cracks and booms came not from lightning bolts but from great trees hitting the ground. The ground, loose and light in the dry season, could no longer hold the greatest members of its arbor. “It’s awesome to hear a huge tree three or four feet in diameter fall that way in the jungle,” said Ilo Hard. “It shakes the ground.”

Here the rains caused mudslides that buried the railway. There they washed out wooden bridges, imperiling the prisoners’ already scant supply of food. Bridges were replaced on the fly by flimsy rope-railed
catwalks that the men used to haul their supplies across. “I remember on one occasion that a bridge had washed out,” Gus Forsman said, “and we strung two lines that crossed this ravine…. The train could come up to this one side of the ravine, and then we would go over there and get the supplies and go across this little catwalk deal across the ravine. Of course, the water is rushing ninety miles an hour down below you, and you’d lose your balance. Of course, if you were carrying a rice bag, it’d go over into the water—just saving yourself—and then when you got to the end, well, you’d get a bashing for letting it go. It was a really treacherous feat.”