Ship of Ghosts (55 page)

One day down at the docks, the guard in charge of a dock party unloading a barge called a break and marched down into the barge and stood among the prisoners. He sat down on a crate and told everyone to relax. He spoke excellent English, and he had a message for his charges. “You know, you Americans think you’re smarter than the Japanese, but we watch a lot of your gangster movies, and we know just how you people operate. Now I’m going to show you what you look like to us.” He went into a little act, a comic improv portrait of an American prisoner casing the waterfront, peering hither and yon as if keeping a lookout for the guards. Then he went to a crate and opened it, removing a can of condensed milk. He looked around, removed his hat, and covered the can with it, then set it down and raced to the other end of the barge as if to make sure the coast was clear for his getaway. When he returned to pick up the covered stash of contraband, though, he found nothing underneath the hat. In the seconds he had left it alone, one of the POWs had swiped the milk, writing another ending to the guard’s little performance.

He flew into a rage, called a
tenko,
and summoned more guards. In the lengthy ordeal of searches that ensued, the can never turned up. Finally, the guards conceded defeat. The prisoners marched out of the dockyard back across the street to their camp. As they passed through the gate to the street, the guard was standing there, glowering
stonily, still fuming at his humiliation. Then, as the Americans filed past him, spinning out from within their marching ranks came the missing can, rolling over the ground and swiveling to a stop right at his feet. Otto Schwarz said, “That was the American answer to him for telling us how we looked.”

C
ommander Al Maher and the rest of the prisoners at Camp Omori in Tokyo ushered in 1945 with a fireworks display to remember, and even the terror at being within the radius of the escalating B-29 strikes couldn’t keep some jubilation from leaking through. Frank Fujita, transferred to Omori in October 1943, wrote in his diary, “Most of us stayed up to see the new year in and it came in with a bang! Just as the clock struck 12:00 mid-night one B-29 dropped incendiaries that burst directly above the camp, scattering chemical incendiaries in all directions. That’s what I call a Happy New Year.” He noted that had the bomb been a high explosive model he would not likely have survived.

On February 25, the air commands on Saipan and Tinian sent against Tokyo a daylight raid comprising 170 Superfortresses, the biggest thus far. Within a few short weeks, the bombing of the imperial capital city entered the realm of phantasm. In an incendiary perfect storm on the night of March 9, Tokyo ignited like metropolitan-scale tinder. Fujita seemed to relish the spectacle of Hades arising to swallow him. He had lost the capacity for terror, chronicling the horror as one might recount a baseball box score: “The Saturday morning raid was sure a rooter—over 250,000 family units destroyed—over 50,000 casualties and over 1,000,000 people left homeless— Big raid on Nagoya last night and over 20,000 homes burned—here in Tokyo we see it all—action on all sides almost to our very walls—it’s just a matter of time until they burn us out— Come on Boys! Come on!” Before the night of March 9, fewer than 1,300 of the city’s residents had died in air raids. In that one attack, however, fatalities numbered some 100,000 people. It was a disaster that compared to the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. Huge swaths of Tokyo, as well as of Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe, were left in cinders.

In Japan’s frozen north, at an iron ore mine in Ohasi, Jess Stanbrough, Pops Early, Red Reynolds, and Jack Feliz smelled smoke on the breeze. They had overheard a Japanese guard returning from Tokyo saying that he couldn’t find his family, couldn’t even find his
neighborhood. Judging by the terrible smell in the air, the neighborhood might well have found him. “It smelled like a fireplace burning pine wood, and it just darkened,” Stanbrough said. “The sun became a dark orange, like it does when you look at it through a smoked glass filter.” Japan was choking to death on the fumes of the hemisphere-wide wildfire it had started three and a half years before. One day at Ohasi the Japanese decreed that the big motors that drove the ore-crushing machinery were to be operated without oil in their journals. They didn’t seem to grasp the consequences of their conservation effort. Anyone who had ever driven a car knew that unlubricated bearings would run only briefly before they overheated, smoked, and seized.

At Camp Omori, Commander Maher saw signs of the aftermath of Tokyo’s incineration: a clot of big logs floating down the river into Tokyo Bay. Meant for shipbuilding in a city that could no longer sustain the trade, they found alternative uses as reinforcements for bomb shelters. With their railroad work sites incinerated, the prisoners filled their days building structures to protect their captors from the attacks. Maher seemed to understand that a war as terrible as this had to end with such a grim reckoning: “We more or less accepted it philosophically.”

In Thailand, rumors flew that American secret agents were trying to incite an insurrection among the rebel paramilitaries. The war was moving into the shadows now, like a preview of asymmetric campaigns to come. And in the volatile political climate of wartime Thailand, a war of ideas was beginning, a complex mix of nationalism and communism that began to play out as the Japanese stranglehold over the country gave way. As Lloyd Willey remembered it, that war flared every Wednesday when a B-24 flew over Phet Buri, known as Cashew Mountain Camp, dropping leaflets. “I imagine they had an air gun up there,” Willey said. “You’d hear a boom and you’d just see a cloud of leaflets coming down and the Japs were running everywhere in the confusion trying to track down these leaflets and confiscate them.” Captioned in Thai characters, the illustrations told the whole story: pictures of Mount Fujiyama with American bombers flying by, or pictures of a sinking Japanese ship in a submarine’s periscope. Everywhere they rained down, POW morale rose. The prisoners could save their Bibles for praying now. They rolled their cigarettes using the leaflets instead.

Unlike Java, where natives were hostile, even murderous, the local
Thai population had a deep distrust of the Japanese. As early as September 1942, curious civilians were probing the edge of the fence line at the Tamarkan camp, exploring rumors of prisoner abuse. The industrious, conscientious Thais could not tolerate the predations of the Japanese. Several courageous individuals—K. G. Gairdner, who worked for the Siam Architects Imports Co. until the Japanese interned him in Bangkok, E. P. Heath of the Borneo Company, and R. D. Hempson of the Anglo Thai Corporation—formed the core of a black market in pharmaceuticals and foodstuffs that gave thousands of prisoners a chance at life. Gairdner’s secret weapon was his wife, Millie Gairdner, who as a Thai national enjoyed the freedom to move and develop familiarity with the camps along the railway. Her web of contacts matured into a humanitarian network that brought food, medicine, and information into the camps. The move into Thailand was a huge relief in this respect. It was a return to civilization.

The former mayor of Kanchanaburi, Boonpong Sirivejjabhandu, turned his Japanese-sanctioned franchise supplying camps with canteen goods into a goodwill effort. As his fleet of river barges ferried food, medicine, and cash to camp commandants all through the River Kwae Noi’s lowlands, his store in Kanburi became a principal black-market trading post for prisoners. His political savvy kept him square with the Japanese, though the dreaded Kempeitai secret police operated constantly in the shadows, setting stings for suspected black marketeers.

Interred at Tamuan, Charley Pryor got wind of a Kempeitai entrapment operation. They were smooth operators, dressing like natives and conversing easily with locals. Pryor recognized them as Japanese, but what were they doing? Caution was the word of the day. In dealing with black marketeers, you learned to keep your exposure limited and your contacts personal. Direct contact with prisoners was terse, broken off altogether whenever a suspected Kempeitai loomed near.

“The Kempeitai spent the day seeking excuses for bashing the troops,” wrote Dr. Fisher. Their methods reached from mundane punching and kicking to assault with rods and swords to exotic and creative techniques of torture that led frequently to death. The Kempeitai would take hoses, turn them up to full pressure, and force them into the victim’s mouth. As the prisoner’s stomach bloated with water they would kick him in the abdomen. At Phet Buri,
Lloyd Willey witnessed the “Kempeis” try to impress some Indian prisoners into the Imperial Army. When they refused, they were taken to the jungle, buried up to their necks in the earth, and doused over the head with sugary syrup to draw carnivorous ants.

In 1938, after its nationalist movement forced Siam’s king to abdicate, the country had become known as Thailand, or Muang Thai. The name Siam had a mythic allure that harked back to ancient empires. But it also had racial connotations—deriving from the word
sajam,
” meaning “the dark race”—that this proud people found pejorative. The new name, though derived from the native name from the kingdom, was far more modern. Muang Thai meant “the kingdom of the free.”

Freedom came to the country on the strength of its proud nationalists and on the wings of aircraft braving enemy airspace on moonlit nights. Pryor remembered hearing the hum of well-tuned radial engines as he lay in his hut before sleep. It was clear they were American planes, but he couldn’t fathom their mission. They never dropped any bombs, and reconnaissance flights were only ever flown in daylight. Their mission remained mysterious until Pryor got his first inkling that some kind of clandestine military operation was percolating out in the jungle. Perhaps the nighttime flights had some relation to it.

One day Pryor was startled to find that barely an hour after the bombers had come over dropping their pamphlets written in Thai, they had been translated into English and distributed within the camp. He learned from a British prisoner that a suspicious-looking Thai had approached a work party near the edge of the camp, reportedly saying to the POWs, “I am your friend. I am with your friends. Your friends are not far away. Your friends are within fifty-three kilometers.” The Thai said he wanted a prisoner of each nationality to attempt an escape with his aid. The Brit, Pryor recalled, was skeptical. He told the Thai that the Japanese would undoubtedly kill them all if such a reckless plot were discovered. The Thai said he didn’t think so. Motioning to the edge of the jungle, where a squad of heavily armed Thais appeared, he said, “If we run into Japanese, it will be bad for Japanese.”

W
hen the
Houston
and Lost Battalion men were moved into Thailand, they found themselves in the midst of a political struggle for the postwar soul of Asia. The Thai nationalist movement, well armed and broadly supported, had forced the collaborationist junta running the country to the precipice. On July 22, 1944, the militarist Pibul government, which had declared war on Britain and America, fell. The overthrow was in part occasioned by the fall of the Tojo cabinet in Japan. The Japanese were losing their grip on the Kingdom of the Free. As 1944 passed, an audacious covert American plan was under way to kindle an anti-Japanese insurgency.

The effort was the brainchild of Gen. William J. Donovan, a Columbia Law School classmate of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a former Wall Street lawyer, and the founder of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the organizational forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1919, as assistant secretary of the Navy, FDR had tapped Donovan, a returning World War I hero and Medal of Honor recipient, to head the Office of Naval Intelligence. The president grew to rely on the savvy aide, employing Donovan as his own secret eyes and ears, sending him to report on events in hot spots around the world. An internationalist like FDR, Donovan believed the United States needed to engage itself with the political life of Southeast
Asia. He feared that Thailand was an “intelligence blind spot” in the midst of Japan’s mainland empire. Correcting that would have any number of benefits: General Stilwell in Burma needed to know about Japanese forces heading his way through Thailand; the Tenth Air Force wanted data on targets from Burma to Bangkok to Saigon; diplomats in Washington aimed to gauge the mind of the Thai people and their willingness to take up arms against Japan. A couple of radio-equipped agents in the right places could make a difference. The capital city of Bangkok, a communications center large enough to have strategic targets worth bombing and strategic intelligence worth stealing, topped the list of espionage priorities.

The agency’s ambitions went beyond mere espionage. General Donovan’s planners were aiming to set up a network of secret guerrilla bases situated all through the Thai backcountry. They would free Thailand of Japanese oppression and, in Donovan’s vision, serve as “the opening wedge for postwar American economic and political influence in Southeast Asia.” To that end in late 1942 a cadre of 214 American field officers, working with 56 hand-picked Thai agents, began recruiting and training guerrillas. The goal was to develop a dozen battalions of Thais, each five hundred strong. The OSS was not authorized to deal with the Thai government on behalf of the United States. But because the State Department had yet to formulate an official policy with regard to the tumultuous state, Donovan’s men were turned loose to fill the void.