Ship of Ghosts (50 page)

A
t 100 Kilo Camp, Luther Prunty, suffering from tropical ulcers, tore a page from his Bible and rolled himself a nice cigar. He and a soldier named Worthington “had a testament each.” Prayers took many forms on the Death Railway: spoken, read, thought, puffed through the lungs. When faith failed, death almost always followed. Death seemed to be a by-product of collapsed moral strength, a slow decline, as if the patient were acclimating to the idea before the final surrender. Time and again at the 80 Kilo Camp hospital, Charley Pryor witnessed the slow atrophy of the will to live. One
Houston
sailor, in his final forty-eight hours, complained that he was having just endless trouble getting his leave arranged. He’d signed the papers but now they couldn’t find them. He needed to find them because he’d bought a bus ticket back to Arkansas and if they didn’t find them, he couldn’t go, and there was a good chance he’d get on the wrong bus anyway. He’d never get home. To top it all off, someone had swiped the dress whites he was planning to wear home. The sailor had had them pressed and laid out just so. He wanted Pryor to go to the master-at-arms and help him solve the mystery of their disappearance. It’s the kind of thing the Padre would do. No doubt the Marine sergeant told him he would.

According to Pryor, one prisoner, having seen how the Japanese sometimes excused the worst tropical ulcer patients from work, thought he’d go get himself one. He found a piece of bamboo—the stuff seemed poisonous; its scratches festered almost immediately—and began scratching a sore on himself. He worked at it over a period of days, picking at the wound with bamboo slivers, rubbing mud in it. When Pryor was working as steward, custodian, and chief gravedigger at 80 Kilo Camp, this man was among one day’s incoming litter patients. He lasted about four days.

It was usually apparent when a man was preparing himself to die. Often he would stop eating. Sometimes he would announce his despair to the world. One remedy, surprisingly effective, was tough love. Actually, it more resembled hazing. This kind of therapeutic ball busting came naturally to a guy like John Wisecup, who seemed to have a talent for getting inside people’s heads. “They’d tell you, ‘I’m finished. I’m gone.…’ So you’d slap them around or something like that. Make fun of them. That was the best way, to ridicule the guy. Curse him. Call him all kind of names. That’s the best way. Really, it’s the old Prussian system, you know…. What you’ve got to do is make a guy mad. As long as he’s feeling sorry for himself, he’s dead.” Unhealthy thoughts had to be confronted and conquered immediately. It was like scraping an ulcer, like laughing at a friend getting beaten by a guard just to prevent a necrosis from infecting the group psychology.

Paul Papish, who was laid up with dysentery and beriberi at Changi and later reunited there with the returnees from H Force, said, “It was Wisecup, I guess, who would stand back there and just berate us: ‘
Go ahead and give up! Die! I’ll get your shoes!
’ I told him one time that, by God, I was going to get out of there, and I was going to get well enough and strong enough to punch him right in the nose.” They learned to read the subtle signs that they were stoking somebody’s will to live. If a guy started trimming his beard again, it was a hopeful sign.

When Gus Forsman was on the brink of surrender, gripped by dysentery, wet beriberi, jaundice, and malaria, an old friend from the gun mount on a ship that seemed like a ghost from a lost time stepped up and saved his life. In another life, Elmer L. McFadden had been a gunner’s mate and first loader on the flight deck five-inch gun on which Forsman was a pointer. McFadden knew him well enough to threaten that if he died, he would go to Forsman’s hometown, Iowa Falls, and tell his family how he had lain down and given up. It angered Forsman so much that he got out of bed, went into the jungle, and traded his shorts for six duck eggs and some brown sugar. Properly fed, he recovered in a hurry.

Jim Gee helped bring Howard Charles around from dysentery by teaching him to play chess. “Look, Charlie,” he said, “your mind is like the muscle in your arm. Either you use it or it gets flabby and useless.” Gee described survival as a kind of dialectic. “There are three forces at work here,” he told Charles. “Like legs of a triangle.
First food. Either we have enough or we’re dead. Second, health. That needs no explanation. Third, attitude, which is probably the best medicine. Food, health, attitude. They’re interlocked, each totally dependent on the other. We have to have all three. No food, no health. Bad attitude: the triangle collapses…. Those guys who turn in early, they’re the ones I worry about.”

Capt. Hugh Lumpkin knew how to deal with them. The Branch Five medical officer knew how to give the tough kind of love that hurt initially but saved lives. Once a demoralized soldier told him he didn’t have the strength to walk to the mess line. When Lumpkin suggested the kid have a friend do it for him, he responded, “I don’t have a friend.” Sensing a potentially fatal case of self-pity, Lumpkin said, “If you haven’t made a friend, you deserve to die.” It was enough of an emotional spark to help the kid fight his way to survival.

Sometimes no psychological tricks were needed. Straight-up Samaritanship saved lives too. Two soldiers, Jesse Webb and Lester Fassio, came to Dan Buzzo, who was sick and near death, and asked him how he liked his eggs. Buzzo knew eggs were a luxury worth four days’ wages on the line, and he said, “Don’t kid me. There are no eggs within a hundred miles.” But Webb and Fassio weren’t kidding, and their bruised bodies were the receipt for the price they had paid to bring the eggs into camp. A Korean guard had caught them and gave them the de rigueur bashing, but inexplicably let them keep the eggs. Buzzo had them sunny side up, but required his benefactors to have a bite too. “I guess that was my turning point,” Buzzo would say, “those two eggs.” According to Major Fisher, the senior Australian medical officer, “Probably no single factor in the whole of P.O.W. existence saved more lives than the humble duck egg.”

People who died did so out of despair. They died cursing God. They died in a dissociating madness, protesting their circumstances then shutting themselves down like zombies.
Perth
survivor Ray Parkin captured the specter of a prisoner’s death rattle with images that do not easily leave the mind:

Sacrifices were made on the railway that were every bit as dramatic as Chaplain Rentz giving up his life jacket in the Java Sea. According to Robbie Robinson, it could be “as small a thing as hiding, from yourself, let’s say, a can of condensed milk—even have the guts to hide it from yourself for that period of time until you reach it in the jungle when your buddy lay there, and you know that he was probably gone. Then you would break it out, and it would go to him—after all of the temptations that you, in possession, had. I call that a pretty good sacrifice.” They spent their scant reserves of energy hauling their buddies from one camp to the next on stretchers fashioned from yo-ho poles.

The men of the Lost Battalion were helped in captivity, as many of
the
Houston
and
Perth
survivors were helped, by their parochial closeness. “It’s people you’ve known, gone to school with, you know their families. As long as you’ve been together, you know their families intimately—everything about them. Well, they just look at you different,” the Lost Battalion’s Sgt. Luther Prunty said. They could see through the distractions—the bloody leakings of amoebic dysentery or the ripeness of beriberi or a seeping tropical ulcer—and see the person they knew, a buddy in need of a meal.

Courageous and selfless though so many of them were, few ever dared try to escape. The thought was often on Charley Pryor’s mind. He realized how easy it would be. At 80 Kilo Camp he was largely free of supervision. For a while the guards came to verify the deaths claimed by Dr. Epstein, but once they got wind of the conditions there, they stopped coming altogether. Pryor realized it would be easy enough to fake his own death—to prevail upon Epstein to sign his death papers, then dig a hole, decorate it with a phony grave marker, and become a ghost. He could float away into the jungle. It was tempting, but the obstacles beyond the camp perimeter were still formidable. Pryor never rolled the dice.

Another trio of Americans had to learn the hard way. Gus Forsman, Roy Stensland, and Jimmy Lattimore made a bid to escape after
tenko
one night. Stensland had long ago learned to cultivate risk and exploit it through audacious, sudden action. He’d pounded a Japanese private on Batavia, had even drunk with his captors. How hard could it be to walk to freedom? The damnedest things were possible if only you tried. They thought they might make the coast and signal a submarine for assistance.

One night around ten
p.m
. they left the camp boundaries and set out into the nighttime jungle. They crossed hills and steep ridges, traversed cliff facings, and hacked through heavy scrub. They quickly ran out of water, but knew they couldn’t risk contact with Burmese hillmen, who stood to profit richly from their capture. Two hours into their flight they looked back toward camp and saw the watch fires burning. How far had they come? How far was there yet to go? From what they could tell, there lay ahead of them unimaginably dense and imponderably long stretches of jungle. Trying to penetrate it by night was more than they were up to. They weighed their chances and finally elected to cut their losses and return to camp before anyone knew they were missing.

O
n August 1, at 100 Kilo Camp, the men in Branch Five suffered their most devastating blow to date. Hugh Lumpkin, the Lost Battalion’s twenty-nine-year-old medical officer, “had the weight of the whole camp on his shoulders, because he was about the only officer capable of controlling the Japs and the Koreans,” one of his battalionmates would write. Overworked and underfed, he got careless. He obtained some native sugar and ate it without sterilizing it. From that point on, racked with dysentery and charged with caring for 1,800 men at 100 Kilo Camp, where by this time only 97 of the 410 Americans on hand were able to work, Lumpkin struggled to deal with the maladies that surrounded him. “It was hard to find anyone with such disregard for his self and such devotion to duty as this man from Artillery,” wrote a friend. “He was on the go all day and night, every day and night; nothing was too much trouble for him. His manner towards the patients never altered, always a smile and a cheering word.”

As another railway survivor tells it, Lumpkin couldn’t shake his fear of cholera. He was terrified by the news that an outbreak had ravaged one of the British camps not too far away, killing good men by the hundreds. Fear of it overwhelmed him. “Once the dysentery took a hold of him, he was so run-down from worrying about this
cholera case and trying to keep everybody alive…he went real fast,” said Roy Offerle. He refused hospitalization, asking, “What about my men?” When he did finally stay in bed it was only because he had no strength to rise. At that point he just allowed himself to die. “It was almost like a death blow to all of us,” said Dan Buzzo. “It really tore us up. He was a great man.” Ben Dunn of the Lost Battalion said it was not just fear of cholera but the disease itself that had killed Lumpkin. According to Gus Forsman, “He didn’t have it left in him because he had expended so much energy and everything toward the health of the POW’s.” After Doc Lumpkin was dead and gone even the Koreans saluted his grave.

Dr. Lumpkin’s fears were rooted in dark reality. As the Speedo campaign continued through August 1943, driving the prisoners to their limits and the railway toward completion—by the middle of the month the embankment would reach the 112 Kilo marker, with the rails laid to 83 Kilo Camp—prisoners were shuttled back and forth between the hospital camps at 80, 55, and 30 Kilo Camps, within closer reach of foods and medicines, and the work site at 108 Kilo, ever closer to the dreaded “cholera camps” on the Thailand branch of the railway.