Ship of Ghosts (49 page)

On June 18, Colonel Nagatomo had to acknowledge that his headquarters was no longer tenable. Rail yard operations at Thanbyuzayat ceased. Nagatomo’s men broke down his headquarters and began moving it, along with all personnel and prisoners, from Thanbyuzayat up the railway line to 4, 8, and 18 Kilo Camps. They moved just in time. Over the next few weeks the Liberators came with a vengeance, hammering the Thanbyuzayat railhead, the old workshops, the camp, and the line, rolling up track like wire with their blasts.

The last five months of the railway’s construction, from June to October 1943, were the hardest for each of the nationalities out on the line. In June, on the Thailand side of the Dawna Range’s borderland ridges, through a short chain of camps around a place called Songkurai, there was a frightful cholera outbreak. The railway had no horror more lurid than what the British and Australians in F Force confronted just southeast of Three Pagodas Pass. The men were force-marched from Nong Pladuk 185 miles into the mountains, arriving seventeen days later at Songkurai No. 2 Camp, where they went to work on a major bridge. There, in the midst of cholera-laced waters, thousands of British and Australian prisoners died, as many as fifty a day at its peak. Some of the subgroups in F Force faded away nearly to a man. According to a British chaplain who gave last rites to a great many of these dead, “No medical officer or orderlies ever had to contend with such fantastic, sickening, soul-destroying conditions of human ailment.” Hundreds were cremated in a large open fire outside the camp. As the heat cooked the sinews, the pile came alive with limbs stretching and gesturing momentarily before returning to peace. “I thought at first they were trying to climb out,” the chaplain wrote.

I
nspecting 105 Kilo Camp, Brigadier Varley discovered a Japanese sergeant “blitzing the sick parade,” forcing the sick to grab shovels and shuffle off to the embankment. When Varley confronted him, the sergeant said Colonel Nagatomo had ordered it. Varley responded by calling his own muster and asking Nagatomo to make an inspection in his presence.

When the colonel showed up, he was confronted with hundreds of prisoners with suppurating tropical ulcers, drawn and enfeebled by dysentery, skin clinging to bones like loose tent canvas. “Nagatomo was astonished,” Varley recorded in his diary. The Japanese commander seemed to have a change of heart. “He ordered that numbers going to work be left to [the doctors] and he asked what medicines and drugs &c were required.” That night, arrangements were made to transfer the sickest patients all the way back to 55 Kilo Camp, within reach of the camp supply train. During the first week of July, 7,824 patients moved to what became the Burma branch’s principal base hospital, Otto Schwarz among them. Flooded immediately with 1,500 patients suffering advanced pellagra, dysentery, malaria and tropical ulcers, 55 Kilo was, according to Fisher, “one of the worst, if not the worst camp dignified by the name of hospital on the whole length of the line.” The death toll for July would be the worst yet on the Burma side of the railway.

In his continuing parleys with Japanese officers, Brigadier Varley noticed more than once that they were referring to a document written in Japanese. From what Varley could tell, it was a fresh copy of the pertinent articles of the Geneva Convention. If Colonel Nagatomo came around to embracing international law, it is doubtful that his superior, General Sasa, ever did. In any case, by July 1943 it was far too late for a sudden embrace of prisoners’ rights to make any difference. The Wet had hold of them and disease was raging throughout the camps.

It was in July when Allied airpower began making its presence felt farther up the line. On July 11, Varley saw reconnaissance aircraft of “a type not seen before.” They were “twin-engined and dual body and appeared to be fast.” Every day just before noon a plane believed to have been a P-38 Lightning would range down the length of the railway at high altitude taking pictures. Jim Gee said, “He was as regular as clockwork, and he flew down and we’d get outside and we would wave to him and holler at him, and he, of course, was 32,000 feet high…That old boy will never know how much courage he gave us.”

The trick to preserving hope was to parcel it out in packages no larger than necessary to sustain yourself for three months at a time. The ninety-day interval was long enough to contain visions of significant progress in the war, yet short enough for the imagination to cycle around and revise or extend. The stoutest prisoners were
optimists. When the rains abated, they imagined great Allied armies uncoiling and coming for them, suddenly free to move over dry ground. When the monsoon came back, they saw salvation in the rain-swollen rivers, newly navigable to boats carrying their liberators. “I guess they’re going to wait for the rains so they can get their boats up in these rivers,” Jim Gee told himself, knowing full well that the high hopes were but a gambit aimed at bucking up his buddies. He knew that his survival would be up to him and no one else.

I
n Japan, near Nagasaki, at Fukuoka #2 Camp, the Japanese guards realized as early as February 1943 that one of their American captives was a son of Nippon. Somehow the issue didn’t come to a head until the guard who ran the
tenkos
at Frank Fujita’s barracks got the inkling to show off his language proficiency by reading the barracks roster.

Fujita presumed that he had gotten by up to that point because his olive skin, high cheekbones, and angular facial structure looked like the product of Filipino or Mexican heritage. But as his crewmates had warned, eventually there was no disguising the pedigree of his surname. Encountering it on the muster roll, the guard puzzled over it, then looked up, demanding: “
Fu
-ji-ta. Where is this
Fu
-ji-ta?” He approached the American artilleryman and began pawing him, running his hands over his face, inspecting the texture of his skin and hair. “Oh, this is fantastic,” the guard exclaimed. He disappeared and returned with the sergeant of the guard, abuzz about his discovery.

The next day they let Fujita off work and the camp commander brought an interpreter with him to help question the unusual captive. Why had he joined the U.S. Army? Had the Americans
conscripted him against his will? They showed more pity than outrage. “A Japanese who can’t speak Japanese—how terrible,” they seemed to think. In an apparent effort toward rehabilitation, the commandant made Fujita his private servant. As he went about preparing the commandant’s meals, an English-speaking corporal was assigned to teach him Japanese.

Fujita used his position to scrape up leftovers for the sickest men in the POW barracks. Meanwhile, the Japanese continued to coax him to switch sides. In exchange for his loyalties they offered him the rank of captain and as many geishas as he could handle. “They got mad as hell when I laughed at them and told them they were doomed.” Fujita asked them why anyone would want to join a military that was busy losing a world war. That kind of talk got him well acquainted with their rifle butts.

Fujita saw trouble in learning the language of his father’s homeland. “I figured my best bet is to keep my head where it belongs—on my shoulders—and not to learn anything. So I kept playing stupid.” When the corporal assigned to tutor Fujita began to receive beatings from superiors for failing in the task, he began to threaten his understudy in turn. He would rush the American in a rage, back him up against a wall, and furiously whip his saber in front of his face, so close that Fujita could feel the breeze. Fujita was fearless and defiant, boasting to his captors how with E Battery of the Second Battalion, outside Surabaya, he had killed Japanese soldiers in battle, five of them, and had helped shoot down a Zero fighter plane. The daily threats of death inoculated him to fear and deadened the impact of physical abuse.

The Japanese must have realized this, because they responded to his bragging with renewed entreaties and protests. “You’re Japanese,” they would say. “No, I’m
American,
” Fujita replied. “No, the Americans are enemies.” “No.
You’re
the enemy,” the Texan said. The Japanese officers listened to the words coming from the mouth of the son of a Nagasaki native and shrugged. What could be done about this wayward samurai?

In time Fujita was something of a sideshow, if not a celebrity. When dignitaries visited camp, the commandant would bring him out and put him on display. “Look what we have here. A Japanese who doesn’t want to be a Japanese.” Meanwhile, the enlisted men—most of them were Koreans, eager to settle scores with Nippon on
the best of days—seethed, cherishing the thought of getting Fujita alone one day, a Japanese whom they would have license to beat.

It happened on August 6, 1943, when the officers and the sergeant major were away at a meeting in Nagasaki. The guards seized their chance. Word went out to get Fujita. Two guards grabbed him and took him out to the guardhouse. A guard known as “The Jeep” pulled a large club from a rack of clubs the guards kept handy for setting prisoners straight. He bashed Fujita for all he was worth. They hit him with fists and rifle butts, from all sides, from front and back. Fujita fought to keep on his feet. “I was bound and determined those sons of bitches weren’t going to get me on the ground,” he said. Beatings could turn lethal if a prisoner fell. They beat him from the guardhouse, forcing him to stagger outside toward a fifty-foot cliff. He held his head high as the blows rained down. Somehow he avoided going over the cliff into the bay. The Koreans beat him back in the direction of the guardhouse. Finally tiring, or perhaps growing bored, they stopped, shoved him to the ground amid a throng of POWs who had gathered in witness, and disappeared. The American sergeant missed the next three days of work at the shipyards because he could not see through the swelling in his face.

P
rison life in Japan was static. Prisoners worked in fixed locations, in mines or at shipyards. In contrast, the fluid nature of the Burma-Thailand railroad kept prisoners on the move. A lifetime ago, at Changi, the Australians had taken to calling themselves the “Java Rabble.” Colonel Nagatomo picked up the phrase at his welcoming lecture in Thanbyuzayat—“the rabble of a defeated army.” They witnessed the rabble gathering and moving, slogging up the line in loincloths, strung out on the march, skeletal from hunger. Proud British units—Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Gordon Highlanders, and First Manchesters—traveled with tough Australians, veterans of the Syrian campaign, the Texas artillerymen, and the men of the
Houston,
the few men who actually put up a fight for Java.

From time to time, Japanese used the road, marching toward the front in Burma. Timor ponies pulled carts full of their gear. Sometimes it was the soldiers who did the pulling. Word passed that they had eaten their ponies as their rations failed. Clyde Fillmore
saw a platoon of young Japanese infantrymen, “small, illiterate, absurd little creatures” marching along to the front near 83 Kilo Camp. “Ragged, hungry and bewildered we saw them pass, part of a drama they neither desired nor understood.” They would ask for drinking water from time to time from the staff in the Japanese camp kitchen, and whenever they were refused, the imperial soldiers approached the prisoners. Sometimes the POWs shared the precious fluid. “They thanked us with bows and soft Japanese words, which we were not accustomed to,” Fillmore wrote.