Ship of Ghosts (45 page)

As far as the Branch Three and Branch Five prisoners are concerned, the amount of attention that the “River Kwai” bridge commanded obscured the fact that the worst atrocities on the railway occurred further up the line from it. Of the 3,500 men who built the Tamarkan bridge, only nine died, reflecting their proximity to the base camp at Kanchanaburi and the pre-monsoon construction timeline during which most of the work was done. The atrocity was not so much this bridge as the railway that stretched 250 miles into the monsoon jungles to its northwest. And it was there that the subterfuge of prisoners bent on holding on to their dignity found its more dramatic expression, sometimes taking an unexpectedly lethal form.

“Any way you could slow the Japanese down, you tried to slow them down,” Gus Forsman said. “For a cutting, they’d want a certain slope, and if we could, we’d try to make the slope as steep as possible, knowing that when the rainy season came, you’d get a big mud slide down into it. Sometimes I don’t know whether that paid off because then we’d have to go back in and clear it out. Like I say…if you could get away with anything, you did.”

Sgt. Roy Offerle of the Lost Battalion recounted with glee the time that his Branch Five
kumi,
while trying to move a three- or four-story-tall derrick to drive a new bridge piling, managed to topple the thing over, shattering it to pieces. That little caper was as good as a perfectly executed bomber raid. The prisoners disconnected train hitches and mastered the illusionist’s art of appearing to work hard while actually doing no such thing at all. Through scrupulous inattention they left loose patches of dirt in vital stretches of embankment, laid rails a shade too wide, set aside weak timbers for the most crucial links in bridge trestles, let scarce and valuable tools slip under an alluvial flow of monsoon mud. With the ratio of prisoners to guards in most places on the order of thirty to one, it was not hard to get away with subtle failures. A well-tailored apology rooted in a façade of incompetence usually kept the recriminations from being too brutal.

“I know we Marines had a code among us that you’d do everything you could to slow this railroad,” said Howard Charles. Relating his treatment by the Japanese to the beatings he had gotten from his son-of-a-bitch stepfather, Charles had sworn to himself back at Bicycle Camp, “I would let them get their kicks from beating me, and I would wait, and one day…” Late one night he and
Pvt. Frank H. “Pinky” King sneaked out of their hut with sabotage on their minds. Things went further than they expected, however.

It began in a hut, probably near 30 Kilo Camp, where Branch Three languished, when Pinky King crawled over to Charles’s bamboo sleeping platform in the middle of the night. King’s work detail was out at the camp supply depot, near a railroad siding where the rails and other supplies were unloaded for use at the construction site. King poked Charles, waking him. He whispered, “Follow me.” “Where?” said Charles. King shushed him. “Be quiet. Follow me.”

King led Charles outside to the tool shed and told him, “The wirecutters are right in there, right straight on that wall.”
Wirecutters?
King directed Charles to get the tools while he went to the
benjo
so he could make a noisy diversion if a guard appeared.

Implements safely in hand, they saw two guards on the camp perimeter some distance away from them. As the guards paused to converse, King and Charles made their move, crawling under the barbed wire, running, staying low until the tree cover blocked the line of sight back to camp. Then, stepping softly, the two Marines went down to the roadbed and followed the line a quarter mile back to the depot, where they came upon a flatcar parked on a rail siding. Rails came into camps piled on flatcars, which rode the tracks as far as the prisoners had laid them. The heavy rails and cross ties were stacked alongside the rail bed.

Fully loaded with rails to be put down in the morning, this flatcar was attached to a caboose. “The idea,” said Charles, “was that we’d crawl under there and cut the band on the front end of that flatcar so that when the train moved, those rails in the front would come down and hit the ground, and that would unload all of those rails up there a quarter-of-a-mile from where we had to work on them.”

Though simple, the plan was dangerous, and Charles knew it. He asked King, “Why me? Why did you pick me for this?” King didn’t have a special reason for selecting him for the job. Apparently he hadn’t thought much about it. Good Marine that he was, he grabbed the handiest volunteer. “He was a quiet guy,” Charles remembered, “but if something was to be done, and he got the idea to do it—you loved to be with him, because he never showed any signs of being afraid.” King’s tool-snatching co-conspirator didn’t have quite the same amount of ice in his veins. Returning to camp, Charles executed what for him was the scariest part of the mission, returning the wirecutters to the tool shed. He slipped back into the shed
without the guards noticing, returning the tools like a thoughtful neighbor. Then they slinked back into their hut. Jim Gee noticed them crawling back into their sleeping platforms and breathed, “Where the hell have you been?”

“Out,” King said.

Charles added, “Of our
minds
.”

“We agreed not to place the burden of secrecy on anyone,” Charles wrote. “So we never revealed what we had done, particularly after what we learned the following day.”

The next morning, the Japanese started a locomotive, backed it into the flatcar to hitch it up, and began hauling the load of rails out toward the prisoners’ work site. The train had gotten up some speed when the metal bands the two Marines had cut gave out, letting loose the ends of the rails at the front of the car. They cascaded off the train in a rushing cacophony of metal and hit the ground. Digging into the earth, the rails were driven backward as the train rolled forward, the still fastened rear-end bands effectively aiming the rails straight back into the caboose. With a whine of steel on steel, and the crack of wooden caboose walls yielding, the rails penetrated the front of the car like lances, driving in amid the engineers and guards inside. According to Charles, five Japanese were killed by the thrusting of the rails. “I don’t know how many it hurt or mangled,” he said. “There were two or three guys who saw the results of it; I never saw it, but the word got back that we had really done some damage.” The next day Pfc. Bert “Bird Dog” Page happened to see them cleaning up the mess, hauling off several covered stretchers. There were no interrogations, no reprisals. It was all an unfortunate accident.

As in previous camps, sabotage pitted ultimate questions of right and wrong against the more ambiguous morality of risking collective punishment for solo acts. Their own self-interest required cooperation with the enemy, but as Sergeant Dupler had understood, cooperation could be viewed as a kind of hostility to one’s distant brothers in arms. The chain of causation was more than a little attenuated, but there could be no question that there was an Allied soldier fighting near Mandalay whose life would become much harder if the railway were successfully built. If you caused even a one-day delay in the railway getting finished, who was to say what the consequences might be? King, Charles, and Gee, and everyone else like
them were like special forces operatives—starving, brutalized special forces operatives—working behind enemy lines, doing what they could on instinct and guts. They seized their opportunities in the theater of combat operations just as any soldier, sailor, or Marine would do.

I
n May, as the Speedo period began on the Burma railway and the summer monsoon unleashed itself against the mountains, back at Singapore Japanese troops came sweeping through Changi’s barracks and hospitals, combing them for healthy candidates to send up to the Thailand end of the railway to reinforce a beleaguered unit known as “H Force.”

Not all of the USS
Houston
survivors on the Death Railway had gone north to work in Burma. Nineteen Americans, including John Wisecup and Robbie Robinson of the
Houston
and Crayton “Quaty” Gordon and Frank Ficklin of the Lost Battalion, had been left behind at Changi for health reasons. Now they joined a band of three thousand men marching to the Singapore central railway station, destined for what may well have been the most difficult phase of work on the Thailand end of the line, a half dozen work sites located from Konyu to Hintok, some 155 kilometers northwest of the Thai branch base camp at Nong Pladuk. The work sites there would acquire notoriety on par with the worst atrocities of World War II. Most who survived it would never want to talk much about it. “What we lost on that railroad made that death march look like a picnic,” Wisecup would say.

The geologic challenges found on the Thai end of the railway were
formidable. At Chungkai, a camp just a few kilometers south of the big bridge at Tamarkan, a long rock ledge had to be blasted through. At the high rock plateau at Wampo, 106 to 114 kilometers from Nong Pladuk, the river cut the narrowest of valleys through the rock, leaving no room for the railway. The only way through was to set the railroad precariously against a cliff face along the river. The prisoners were forced to cut a ledge in the cliffs more than four hundred yards long. Hanging from ropes to tap the blasting charges into the rock, they built two long viaducts against cliffs along the Kwae Noi. Great timbers sixty feet long were erected to buttress the gaps. Two thousand British prisoners from Colonel Toosey’s group finished the Wampo project in seventeen days. Like a patch of tall grass concealing a colony of ants at work in its depths, the jungle was alive from Thanbyuzayat to Ban Pong with the labor of a hundred thousand men, two hundred souls every kilometer, hunkered down and slowly starving, hammering down a railway for the Japanese Army.

At Hintok, geology conspired with epidemiology to give prisoners a double dose of misery. Through one rocky hillside they blasted a narrow slash for the railway embankment. Around the Kwae Noi’s next bend they attached the railway to the curving cliff face itself, building viaducts that were held high above the swelling river by great multitiered trestles constructed from hand-hewn timber. Though cuts and fills were needed here as elsewhere, digging was hardly possible. Dynamite did the work of shovels, but no more safely. After the explosions settled, after the rock chips ceased raining down on the men on the hammer-and-tap crews who had drilled the holes for the explosives, the men emerged to clear the shattered detritus of the rocky hills by hand.

As bad as Wampo and Hintok were, the line’s cruelest earth-moving task was farther north, at Kinsayok. The embankment there was so large—thirty feet wide by thirty feet high and a quarter mile long—that it more resembled an artificial ridgeline than a railway bed. The towering trestles and viaducts and murderous cuttings through solid rock were the Thailand branch’s unique and signature challenge. It was borne mostly by British, Australian, and Dutch prisoners. But the ordeal had a handful of American witnesses and participants too. As they were herded into boxcars at Singapore, bound north to reinforce H Force, John Wisecup, Quaty Gordon, Robbie Robinson, and their Allied mates would hammer at a mountain of stone in the driving rain.

They rode with the sliding doors of their boxcars wide open. What little water they had was supplemented with water stolen from the boiler. Disembarking at Ban Pong, they went on foot into the mountains. Kicked and beaten by guards the entire way, they marched to Kanchanaburi, over the great bridge at Tamarkan. As the macadam road turned into a muddy trail, the stragglers fell out of line and were left behind to die in the jungle. Soon, assaulted by the first torrents from the mountains, they realized they were marching straight into a trial not only by fire but by water. It took more than two weeks to walk the ninety-six miles from Ban Pong to Hintok. Ronald Searle, a British sapper headed for Konyu, recalled:

The news of the reinforcements struck the bedraggled slaves of H Force as a promising development. “This period of movement must mean something big. Perhaps it is the big push to get the railway through—but we can’t see how they will be able to work when the Wet Season really sets in,” Ray Parkin wrote in his journal at Hintok.

The Japanese insistence on speed required a greater number of slaves than the engineering needs of the project should have dictated. The timber trestlework for the viaducts was straight out of
The American Civil Engineers’ Handbook,
long edited by Mansfield Merriman, a Lehigh University engineering professor who evidently
had acquired a following in industrial Japan. Designed for heavier American freight trains, the Merriman trestles were overengineered for their purpose. The prisoners paid a heavy price for this indulgence in terms of exhaustion, disease, and injury. Had the Japanese done the prudent thing and tunneled through the rock at Hintok rather than cut straight down through its deep mass along its entire length, they would have spared their slaves hundreds of tons of rock to move. But unlike tunnels, which were made from two points, cuttings could be made simultaneously at every point along a given distance—like the railway itself. Cutting was far, far faster. And deadlier.