Ship of Ghosts (57 page)

I
n February 1945, a photo of five Marines and a Navy corpsman planting a flagpole on a western Pacific mountaintop graced the front pages of hundreds of newspapers worldwide. After a month more of bitter fighting, Iwo Jima finally fell. In April, as troops were going ashore on Okinawa, the bombing of the Burma-Thai Railway reached its peak and Allied aircraft began to tip the balance in their race to destroy the bridges faster than the Japanese could force their slaves to repair them. With their weak air defenses and lack of appreciable aerial striking power, the Japanese garrison in Southeast Asia resembled nothing so much as the Allies in Java in February 1942.

On April 13, news began circulating that would touch the heart of every
Houston
sailor wherever he was and whenever he received the news. That day the joint Army-Navy casualty list was led with a prominent name: “Roosevelt, Franklin D., Commander in Chief,” who had died the previous day. In May, a world away, Germany surrendered. As fate would have it, a member of the Rooks family was involved with the negotiations with the Nazis at the highest levels. On the morning of May 12, 1945, Maj. Gen. Lowell W. Rooks, fresh from his assignment as commander of the Ninetieth Infantry Division in the Ardennes, was sent to Flensburg in his new capacity as head of General Eisenhower’s SHAEF
*
Control Party, the job of which was “to impose [Eisenhower’s] will on the German High
Command.” On a passenger ship in Flensburg’s harbor General Rooks interviewed Admiral Doenitz and his
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
braintrust. According to a U.S. Army colonel who witnessed the events, “If ever a man with a field marshal’s baton looked unhappy, Doenitz did (after he came out). Rooks must have taken almost no time to deliver his message. The Germans were marched off and put into cars to take them home to pack.”

Freedom was in the air. In June, the prison camp at Kanburi closed. Officers were segregated from the enlisted men and sent to Nakhon Pathom, forty-five miles west of Bangkok. The Japanese seemed to be concerned that prisoners in camps along the railway, lying in the likely path of invading forces, might form a fifth column against them. If the prisoners were held in a conspicuous place, it might make it difficult to hold them hostage, use them for blackmail, or carry out the “disposition” that the army command was preparing for.

The Japanese struggled to raise their battlements against the bombers. In the spring, a large number of
Houston
and Lost Battalion men were transferred from Kanburi and Tamarkan to the town of Phet Buri in Thailand’s south. Their job there was to construct an airstrip, as if the starving empire could do anything against the silvery fleets of bombers now crossing the skies at will. Phet Buri’s Cashew Mountain Camp was a huge concentration camp on southern Thailand’s agricultural coastal plain. About a dozen large
atap
-roofed barracks each accommodated about two hundred men. Red Huffman was part of the large group of prisoners there whose job was to break rocks and move earth to make a serviceable landing strip. Since boarding a cattle car at 114 Kilo Camp and leaving the cholera-infected jungle behind, Huffman had mastered the art of the cushy work detail. At Tamarkan, one of the
Houston
’s Chinese mess cooks, Marco Su, had gotten him a job in the guards’ cookhouse, where he showed up to find Pinky King and a number of other familiar faces already at work. When the bombing attacks forced Tamarkan to close, Huffman had been sent next to Chungkai, where he maneuvered himself into another cookhouse detail.

When he arrived at Phet Buri, he had to find a different skill set to exploit. Opportunity knocked when a Japanese soldier approached Huffman and asked him if he knew how to drive a bulldozer. The fact that he had never touched a bulldozer before didn’t keep him
from answering, “Hell, yes.” The Japanese had brilliant engineers but a severe shortage of men with daily experience in practical mechanics. They had a Caterpillar tracklayer but no idea how to start it. It took Huffman only a few minutes to see that the vehicle used a separate gas engine to start the main engine. Thus did a farm boy become an airfield grader. Setting to work patching over holes in the earth caused by the removal of trees, Huffman, joined by his shipmate Lanson Harris, who as a pilot and aviation machinist’s mate was also technically adept, helped them build one fine airfield, which was referred to as Tayang.

When they weren’t working the tarmac, the two Americans were detailed to a truck depot near the camp’s perimeter. Because the guards seemed to consider the two men reliable, they were allowed to work with minimal supervision. About a half mile outside the main camp, the Japanese had gathered a dozen old vehicles in poor repair. Huffman and Harris cannibalized six of them so the other six could run. Flat tires were patched with tree gum. Though there was a guardhouse about four hundred yards from the truck depot, whenever Harris was feeling brave and the guards were occupied with their lunch, he would sneak out and explore the perimeter. “Anything to get the hell out of camp and scrounge around for something to eat,” he said. He found a grove of banana palms near the fence and took to raiding it as often as possible.

His second or third week at Tayang, Harris was in the banana grove when he noticed a trio of strangers on the other side of the fence. He wasn’t sure what to make of them. They were wearing sarongs and looked like Thai locals, but he knew that didn’t prove anything. The Japanese were known to recruit natives as collaborators, tempting their prisoners to break military law. Harris thought,
Oh God, I’m going to be caught by these damn
Kempeis. His alarm intensified when one of them approached him and pulled out a weapon that looked a lot like a Japanese service pistol. The man handed the weapon to him to examine. It turned out to be a German Luger. Harris was befuddled. “These guys were trying to communicate with me, but couldn’t speak the language,” he said. “I assumed he wasn’t a Kempei policeman, but I didn’t know who the hell he was.” Harris returned to camp full of questions and uncertain of the wisdom of treating the strangers as friendlies.

Harvesting bananas a few days later, Harris again encountered the
trio, but this time they were accompanied by a fourth man. The man conveyed the idea to Harris that he wanted him to go with him. When or where or how was beyond Harris’s grasp. Then the man unfolded a piece of paper from his coat and showed the American a drawing of a box hanging from a parachute. “This didn’t mean a damn thing to me,” Harris said, “but he kept pointing to this picture of the parachute and pointing out in the jungle, like he wanted me to go somewhere where there was a parachute. Well, I had enough smarts to know there were no parachutes out in the damn jungle anyplace.

“When you’re associated with people under these conditions, never,
never
do you trust anybody. If you’re gonna do something you never say anything about it, because there are guys who would turn you in for damn near nothing, and all kinds of problems can result from this.” Still, he felt he could trust Red Huffman. “I knew Red very well. So I told him what had happened. He couldn’t figure it out and I couldn’t figure it out.

“I said, ‘Red, tell you what you do. Tomorrow morning when we go on that working party, you come with me and we’ll see if we can find those guys out in that banana grove.’” That’s what they did. And once again, the strangers were waiting for them. The mysterious Thais gave the Americans pause. They looked young, in their thirties perhaps. They also looked to have quite a drug problem. They would put a grayish powder in a little U-shaped tube, put it in their nose and inhale. “Every hour and a half they’d do it. Their eyes were blood-shot. They were higher than hell,” said Huffman. “They would get all calmed down and squared away when they’d snort.”

They were slipping Huffman and Harris handwritten notes with messages like, “Come with us and we will take you to your friends,” or “Anytime you want, run away and we will grab you by the hand.” From the strangers Harris got the idea that they were planning to infiltrate one of their men into the prison camp. They managed to get across to the American that if their man was carrying a large saw over his shoulder, that would be the signal to make their move and escape. The plan seemed deeply suspect to the Americans, but they were hard pressed to think of better alternatives. They knew the price of loose lips. Still, the plan leaked within a very small circle of prisoners.

They entrusted their secret to yeoman John C. Reas, who with another yeoman, John A. Harrell, had been faithfully keeping a forbidden
register documenting the whereabouts of the
Houston
’s men. Such a list would be as valuable as gold when the final reckoning was made. Harris and Huffman saw that if they could get that list out of camp and give it to American authorities, their shipmates might be saved all the faster. “We brought Reas into our confidence and he agreed to give us this diary,” Harris said.

The
Houston
men knew the risk they were running in letting word of the plan spread. “You never tell anybody you’re gonna escape,” Huffman said. “In all the time we were there, to my knowledge, nobody had ever made a successful escape.” Any number of prisoners had gone gallantly to their deaths for attempting it. More than a few Americans at Phet Buri witnessed what the Kempeitai did with escapees. It went beyond simple execution. Lloyd Willey had seen the Japanese secret police tie up natives, jam hoses into their mouths and flood their innards with water. They shot them, poured scalding water on the tender skin behind their kneecaps, drenched them in gasoline and hit them with lit matches. Once, looking on dumbfounded with Huffman as a Kempeitai agent poured scalding water into a man’s nostrils, Willey asked, “What are they trying to do, burn him to death?” Huffman said, “Hell I don’t know, but we’re going to have to get out of here.” Yet even stout hearts such as Roy Stensland, Jimmy Lattimore, and Gus Forsman had gone under the wire, entered the jungle, then thought better of it while the opportunity for a second thought still existed. At the very moment Harris and Huffman were struggling to figure out their destiny, Gus Forsman was languishing at Outram Road, enduring solitary confinement for a far lesser offense.

One day in the second week of June, Lanson Harris and Red Huffman were working out at the truck depot installing a radiator. Harris was sitting on one fender of the truck, Huffman on the other. Harris, cut off from news and living with a three-year-old worldview, thought Hitler and Tojo probably owned the world. He considered what they were about to do and said to Huffman, “This is really stupid.” On the face of things, it was. But what were the alternatives? Huffman replied, “You know, it’s been three years. We could die in here.” The willingness to take death-defying risks often arose from having nothing to lose. Here was a chance, for the first time in years, to take charge of their fate. Huffman realized that these strangers might be offering him the only chance at life he was going to get.

From several individuals they learned that word of the escape plan had leaked beyond their immediate circle of confidants. A U.S. sailor with a lower tolerance for risk had talked about informing the Japanese. When Huffman discovered the threat, he considered terminating the plan. But then he learned that another shipmate, chief water tender Archie Terry—a dependable, “4.0” guy, Huffman said—had pledged to kill the would-be informant if he didn’t keep his mouth shut. That seemed to recalibrate the wavering sailor’s assessment of risks, and nothing was ever said to the Japanese.

Harris and Huffman were debating how to play their hand when they received an omen. The rains were frequent on the coastal fringe of the summer monsoon, but that day out of the clouds fell a driving rain of fish. Red Huffman has never been able to forget the moment when the heavens turned loose the silver-scaled torrent. “I don’t think you could see the ground, there was that many of them,” he said. “It poured down.” Outside the camp’s perimeter, kids ran around picking them up and impaling them on bamboo sticks to dry and eat. At least one rationalist found a ready explanation for the phenomenon. Dr. Epstein, the senior American officer at Phet Buri, said it must have been the product of a waterspout off the coast. In a Christian’s worldview, it might have seemed downright apocalyptic. But the Chinese had several centuries of lore that told them otherwise.

“You ever seen it rain fish?” Huffman asked Marco Su, the mess cook. Su said that the fish storm was a sign of the arrival of the dragon. In the annals of Chinese serpent-worship the species of “spiritual dragon” known as the
shen lung
is the god of rain and water, a common man’s deity who responds to prayers by exhaling clouds over farmers’ fields and sprinkling them with fertilizing moisture. In some versions of the legend, the dragon—half animal, half divine—rains its own scales, like those of a carp, over the fields, heralding the coming of better days.

Unexpectedly blessed with the piscine shower, the prisoners turned out and gathered as many of the fish as they could. In the camp kitchen that day, the cooks made a fine stew. Three and a half years of submitting to foreign laws of war may have predisposed the Americans to accept alternative laws of nature, and hear their messages too.