Ship of Ghosts (44 page)

Up at 105 Kilo Camp, the Japanese operated three vehicles captured from the English. The six-wheel-drive Studebaker, the four-wheel-drive Chevy truck, and the six-wheel-drive Reo truck had front-mounted winches, so they could hoist themselves out of most any jam. But they had limited mobility. Even with the winches, Don Brain and a number of other drivers were able to move just ten to twelve miles a day through the mud. With limited hauling capacity, corroding spark plugs, and fuel shortages, they had short range and moved only essential supplies. “Finally they gave up on this truck thing because it was just a farce,” Brain said. “They would have been better off with a bull cart.”

To get food, the prisoners had to march five or six miles on foot to the nearest spot a truck or train could reach. Their proficiency with yo-ho poles came in handy then. They’d sling a bag of rice or a box of meat and, in Jim Gee’s words, “chug-a-lug down the road.” But eventually the sodden ground was too impassable for efficient use of yo-ho pole teams, their soaked payloads too heavy. Up near the border at Three Pagodas Pass, at a far-from-alpine elevation of 925 feet, the grade was too steep at 2.9 degrees for even a single locomotive to reach the summit. The grade didn’t do any favors either for the barefooted workers hauling the supplies.

The rains depleted the
kumi
s as men were taken back down the line to effect repairs. As they grew sick, the work parties grew smaller still, until the sick themselves were again called upon to fill the gaps. Otto Schwarz said, “You would work whatever they decided you would work—eight hours, ten hours, twelve hours or fourteen hours—then you’d drag your butt back into camp and lay down on those hard bamboo slats with the knots in them and the rain would be coming down and the thatched roof would be leaking like a sieve. Oh, God.”

They slept soaked. They kept their feet dangling off the end of the bed, unable—or, more crucially to survival, unwilling—to pull their muddy paws under the blanket. “There seemed to be no bottom to the mud in this place,” said Charley Pryor. “You just lived in perpetual wetness.”

The Japanese engineers knew all too well what the rains would do to their plans. In response they launched what became known as the “Speedo” campaign, so called because of the merciless cries of the guards, who set round-the-clock working hours, abandoned quotas, and stepped up their campaign of brutality to get the job done. Laboring from before sunrise to well after dark, the reeling prisoners redoubled their efforts. By one estimate, two men were expected to dig enough earth during the Speedo campaign to fill a whole dump truck every workday. There was a draconian unwillingness to allow a prisoner to claim no-duty status for reasons of health. “That word ‘Speedo,’” said Howard Brooks. “You went to bed at night with it ringing in your ears.” At the end of May, the Japanese ordered Branch Five to move out, and on the twenty-sixth they pulled up stakes at 80 Kilo and began climbing again.

The push farther up into the jungle to 100 Kilo Camp reflected Captain Mizutani’s fantastic indifference to the human life in his care. Mizutani told Colonel Tharp that the sick were of no use “to us or to themselves.” Accordingly, they were abandoned and left on their own at 80 Kilo Camp while the able workers marched up the line. Anyone unable to march on his own power would be left behind. Though it was a place to await death, the Japanese would call 80 Kilo Camp a “hospital.” With reduced rations and no medicine, it was less a hospital than a hospice where men too sick to work were sent to watch each other die.

The decision to establish the hospital was an act of utilitarian cruelty: With the sick segregated, it was easier to allocate food only to the fit. Though the camp was better drained than 105 Kilo, stood on higher ground, and lay adjacent to a stream that provided sanitation, its lack of food and medicine turned deadly. During its first few weeks in operation, there were no luxuries such as actual medical staff, medicines, or kitchen personnel. “The least sick of the stretcher cases had to get up and do these jobs. As a result there were many more deaths than were necessary,” wrote Ensign Smith.

With supply roads impassable, a worker’s full rice ration was cut to a hundred grams a day: half a canteen cup of rice twice daily. The
no-duty sick, who needed it all the more, got half of what the workers got. Captain Mizutani seemed to consider his rations policy as an incentive to improved health. But the only way the sick survived at all was by the entrepreneurial grace of the healthy. Men stole for them, brought burnt scrapings from the kitchen and contraband sweet potatoes into the hospital. Anything extra that turned up found its way back to the hospital. The men who catered to that grim ward had strong stomachs in addition to stout hearts.

Having fought off his fever and afflicted now with a trophy-caliber tropical ulcer, which he kept dousing with steaming water and wrapping with old rags, Charley Pryor saw the pathetic state of care at 80 Kilo Camp and decided to do something about it. He started voluntary duty as its custodian and its cemetery keeper. For several weeks he worked alone, the only fit man in a camp of the dying, until Commander Epstein arrived to handle patient care, to the extent the dying could be called patients absent any care to give them. Ben Dunn of the Lost Battalion was the only patient in his truckload of souls who walked into the camp under his own power. Pryor helped him hobble onto his bamboo platform. “I looked in that hut, and I couldn’t believe that those guys were still living. It was a horrible mess. I don’t know how they managed, but Charley did a remarkable job,” Dunn said. “When a man’s lying there with beriberi or any of those other things, and he’s so sick that he’s about to die, a fly will land on his eyeball and he won’t even blink,” Dunn said. “You know he’s not going to live very long. I couldn’t believe that could happen, but I saw it.” For his steadfast work in the morguelike squalor of 80 Kilo Camp, Charley Pryor earned the nickname “Padre.”

For Lanson Harris, the dream was always the same. There was a fabulous pink marble hall, so palatial and long that it disappeared to a vanishing point in the indeterminate distance. Down its center ran a table, bejeweled and plated in silver and gold, loaded with every kind of edible thing one might dream of. “I would try to get to this table,” said Harris, “and so help me God for three and a half years I never made it. Something would always happen. I never would get to this damn table.”

Their time as sailors seemed remote and undefined. They worried about things they had taken for granted. They cursed themselves for having ever complained about Navy chow. Hunger spurred creativity. Harris had learned to watch the monkeys. What they ate a
person could eat. “If they ate certain leaves, shoots, we’d collect these up, take them back to the camp, boil them up and eat them. It didn’t always taste the best. But they helped us get nutrition we were missing.” The tobacco available locally, known as “wog,” so full of nicotine it produced a powerful buzz, had off-label uses. Harris couldn’t remember who got the idea to use the wog as a fisherman’s Mickey Finn, but it saved more than a few lives.

He said, “We’d take little bits of tobacco and make a rice ball out of it. When we camped down on the river we’d get five or six guys across river and we’d throw these rice balls loaded with tobacco into the water. Other guys would be waiting a hundred yards down across the river with big bamboo clubs. The fish ate the rice balls, they got sick, regurgitated, and filled up with air. They would float up to the surface, and the floating fish would come by, and the guys with the clubs would whack them and throw them up on the beach. You’d do almost anything to eat.”

At 100 Kilo Camp one day, a fifteen-foot king cobra, fleeing the rains, had worked its way into the rafters of the hospital hut. It was spotted and turned into dinner for the guards. The jungle was “like a zoo without the cages,” said Roy Offerle.

Prisoners used most anything on hand to flavor their rice. Minnows, fish heads, even toothpaste filled the bill. John Wisecup crushed Indonesian peppercorns and mixed them with water and drank it, finding that it suppressed his appetite. At least it burned his stomach lining so bad he lost the urge to eat.

One afternoon, loud shouts roused the men at 100 Kilo Camp. A prisoner had gone down to the river to fetch a bucket of water and had sat down on a log to rest. When the log shifted and slithered beneath him, he got a little excited. Led by a Korean guard, some prisoners ran to the noise. The guard shot the great python and it rose up, head swaying waist high. He shot again and it fell dead into the underbrush. They measured its length at nineteen feet, eight inches, then carved it into twenty-inch tenderloins as thick as a man’s thigh. Everyone in the hunting party got a piece.

The rains were heavy and steady enough to form an actual stream running through the sick hut. The waters brought an unexpected windfall just as they ruined the livability. The hut’s residents learned to shape a crooked piece of wire into a hook, hang a small piece of rice on the wire, and dangle it through the bamboo decking
into the stream below. There was nothing at all sporting about using one’s bunk as a fishing boat, but the occasional lungfish the men pulled from the raging gullywasher under the hut was a gift they would have been fools to refuse.

The daily routine at 100 Kilo Camp, which Charley Pryor called “one of the most unlikely campsites on the whole road,” was not for the sick or the weak. It was a life of continuous work whose ritual was enforced by the fact that only working men ate. Most of the survivors found someone to lean on, to trust unconditionally, and would help him in turn along when his own prospects sagged. The relationships sometimes paid their dividends in death: to the dead came eternal peace, while the survivors got his gear. Red Huffman and a sailor named Guy Pye helped each other along for a while. When Pye’s tropical ulcer ravaged him, he was sent to a hospital hut, where a doctor removed his leg. Huffman took possession of a few valuables that Pye had himself taken from another dead man—a silver spoon, a mess kit, and an extra canteen. Huffman did his best to keep the extra canteen full of native rice whiskey.

The conditions between 80 Kilo Camp and the Burma-Thai border near Three Pagodas Pass were the worst on the entire railway. Most of the 131 Americans who died during its construction gave up the ghost at 80, 100, or 105 Kilo Camp. What they faced there was a cumulative ordeal that drew from each of the sources of misery that had plagued them to date: cruel weather, hard work, scant rations, invisible disease, and engineers and guards indifferent to their plight. For too many of the sick, these were the last insults their besieged constitutions could take.

Brigadier Varley spent May 31 to June 4 inspecting camps with Colonel Nagatomo. The road between 100 and 108 Kilo Camps was nothing but a jungle clearing, “the worst I have ever traveled on,” Varley wrote, with ruts two feet deep, miring axles and differentials in the earth. When that happened, elephants were called in to haul the vehicles, but the great beasts lacked the tenacity of the prisoners. “Elephants working in this area are worked all day pulling trucks along until they knock up as happened in our case between 102 and 105 K., which distance we walked,” Varley wrote. In the driving rain and flowing mud, he saw a wonderland of horrors. Burmese coolies lurched along the service road. Mothers cradled children stricken with cholera. Every twenty yards along the swiftly decaying
roadway there were men collapsed and buckled in pain. “These poor devils do not appear to receive any treatment and no wonder they die like flies,” he wrote. “My fears expressed so often during the past three months to [Nagatomo] that they would not be able to get food and canteen supplies through to jungle camps have been realised…. With the prevalence of cholera plus all other diseases in a force which has gradually been weakened over the past 13 months, one is alarmed and apprehensive of the future.”

According to Ensign Smith, 100 Kilo was “the worst camp we had been in. This camp was located under a mountain on marshy ground with springs bubbling up. It was necessary to build up the center sections of the huts so water would not wash completely through.” The Lost Battalion’s 1st Lt. Clyde Fillmore would write, “It got cold about five o’clock each morning and we tried to keep at least one fire going in each hut during the night. Shivering and cold the men crowded around the fire as the early morning chill drove them out of their beds…. We were now deep in the jungle, shut out from the world by heavy, grey rain clouds that hung tree-top high everywhere, and surrounded by a depressing, soggy growth of bamboo, tall trees, labyrinth of vines and lush vegetation, that fell from the sky like a green, gloomy curtain.”

Red Huffman was a fighter like John Wisecup but a bit more careful about picking his spots. Though he stayed out of the
Houston
’s brig and kept a clean service record, by his own admission he was no stranger to trouble on liberty. “I went along with the tides and kept my nose as clean as I could,” he said. He tackled life at 100 Kilo as he would a surly corporal in a Manila bar. Huffman remembers being at the head of the column when Branch Five reached 100 Kilo Camp. He was the last man to leave it. “Everybody died there,” he said. “That was my station.”

A
s hard as they worked, as much as they achieved, it gave them no pride. Some felt downright ashamed of their contributions to the Japanese war machine, as if they had a choice. Some kept their heads down and conspired to destroy what they had built.

The moral conflict that slavery imposed on the diligent military conscience had been too much for Sergeant Dupler to handle. What bothers the survivors most about David Lean’s film about the bridge over the river near Tamarkan was the fictionalized dynamic that led Colonel Nicholson to see the bridge as an expression of British superiority. As survivors of the actual railway see it, Nicholson’s self-satisfaction bordered on collaboration. The British prisoners in particular have taken umbrage at the suggestion that the judgment and integrity of the actual officer who oversaw work on the Tamarkan bridge, Lt. Col. Philip Toosey, was colored by a desire to fulfill Japanese wishes. As the actual prisoners on the Burma-Thailand Death Railway knew, the Japanese engineers understood full well how to build a bridge. As they also knew, there were indeed ways to strike back at the Japanese captors. But on the real-life railway, and all along this concatenation of 688 bridges, the striking back took on forms much more concrete and direct than the fictional Colonel Nicholson’s hollow victory of ego.