Ship of Ghosts (58 page)

Shortly afterward the prearranged signal came from the mysterious Thais. “All of a sudden we looked up and here comes this clown
walking through the camp with this big grin on,” Harris said. It was a Thai guerrilla. He was carrying a saw over his shoulder. It was their signal. Harris said to Red, “Damn it, it’s now or never.”

They chose their moment carefully, waiting until the nearest Japanese guard had retired to his hut, finished lunch, and fallen asleep. As a prostitute stood by him, fanning away flies, the Americans bolted. Harris found the small tunnel they had prepared under the fence some days before, and he scurried through; Huffman followed.

Outside the perimeter, the two USS
Houston
sailors ran. Sprinting through the banana grove north of camp, alive with adrenaline, they encountered four more Thais. One of them grabbed Huffman by the hand, saying, “Come, friends, come.” As they ran, the Americans saw the smoking embers of campfires outside the camp and realized that their guides had been patiently waiting for them, perhaps for days.

Thirty-nine months after a Japanese projectile struck the faceplate of the
Houston
’s Turret Two, forcing him to dive blindly through a hatch to escape the inferno, 880 days after he listened to a war criminal on the edge of Burma’s carnivorous jungle grandly welcome him into a life of servitude for the glory of Imperial Japan, Red Huffman sprinted through a grove of banana palms hand in hand with strangers whom he had no choice now but to trust. He prayed for the jungle to swallow him.

H
arris and Huffman ran for a good four hundred or five hundred yards, through the banana grove, over a streambed, into a cornfield, and into thicker woods before one of their Thai escorts showed them to a shelter and they allowed themselves to rest and take stock of the new world they had entered. Their shelter was a spectacular natural refuge: the crown of a great banyan tree. With its network of aerial roots thickened into a rotunda of limbs, garnished by an eight-feet-high coppice of undergrowth, it provided the runaways with a nest of concealment nearly thirty feet around. Their escorts showed the Americans how to disappear into it, and told them to wait. “About twenty minutes later,” Harris said, “here come these Japs, running through the jungle with their bayonets, stabbing bushes and screaming and hollering and raising hell. I’m sitting there thinking,
Oh my God.
”

The dragon was watching over them, for the soldiers moved on. But the Americans quickly realized there was no point taking the risk of traveling by day. “We stayed under that bush until nightfall,” Harris said, “until a guide picked us up and took us to what we call a
kampong,
nothing more than a small village in the middle of the jungle. We walked to this
kampong,
and there we rested and had something to eat. Then we picked up and went to the next
kampong
.”
Moving by night, they trusted their escorts to know where to go and when to stop. Their faith was well placed. One night they stopped at a hut of some kind. The woman who inhabited it was duly awakened, and before they knew it they were being served a meal. In the dark, Huffman had no idea what he was eating, but Harris’s taste buds had a longer memory. He told Huffman that it was freshwater shrimp. Wherever they stopped to rest, the Thais piled up green leaves and set them afire, producing smoke apparently meant to drive away the mosquitoes. “They would nearly kill you with the smoke. You couldn’t get any sleep,” Huffman said. But soon he would find himself fearing larger predators.

One afternoon Harris heard a commotion outside the jungle hut he was staying in. Three or four Japanese soldiers appeared and accosted the Thais, making demands. Harris had no idea where they had come from. He couldn’t hear the conversation but saw the guerrillas point up the road into the jungle. The Japanese stormed off in that direction. When they got under way again, the escapees hadn’t gone more than half a mile before they had their first glimpse of the formidable capabilities of their escorts: Around a bend in the path they came upon the Japanese again, their bodies sprawled limp beside the trail, clothes and heads gone. There was no going back now.

Days passed in flight, a week, maybe more. One day they were tracing the route of a small but deep stream through the jungle, seeking a way across—Harris in the lead, followed by Huffman and three armed Thais bringing up the rear—when they came to a place where a fallen tree bridged the stream. Crossing it, they marched up the path on the other side when out of the bush emerged a squad of men, olive-skinned and small of frame, but well armed and “painted like Comanche Indians,” Huffman recalled. They were carrying Japanese rifles, which they leveled and aimed at the Americans’ guts. Huffman was bare-chested, with a tattoo of an eagle and an American flag all but screaming his status as an escaped prisoner. One of the newcomers stuck a big pistol right in his face. It looked like a .45, but it was no make or model the sailor had ever seen before. Harris thought,
After all this…
With unintelligible grunts and stark gestures, the Americans were ordered to fall in and follow.

Wholly uncertain of their status, they marched another two or three hours into jungle, finally coming to a clearing that was the site of a camp of some kind. Harris didn’t get a good look at it because he and his shipmate were quickly ushered to a bamboo shed and locked
inside. That evening, one of their captors opened the door and told them to come out. He took them down to a river. He reached into a bag and produced something. It was a bar of soap. “He told us to take a bath,” Harris said. Soap hadn’t touched their skin in more than three years. They rinsed the detritus of Thailand and Burma from their filthy hides. The two Americans spent that night locked up again in the shed.

Early the next afternoon they heard a commotion outside. Peering out through narrow gaps in the bamboo wall, Harris saw a dozen or so young natives—they looked like just kids—enter the compound. Wearing green uniforms and carrying sidearms and short rifles of an unfamiliar type, they were led by an older Thai man wearing a cowboy hat and carrying a .38-caliber pistol in his belt. It was this man who opened the shed, saw Harris and Huffman, drew his pistol, removed his hat, and announced, “I’m gonna take you to your friends from Texas.” Another man approached the Americans and handed them a box of Hershey chocolate bars and a carton of Camel cigarettes. Harris, partaking of the gifts, said to Huffman, “By God, there’s gotta be Americans around here
some
place.”

Of all the far-flung outposts that the OSS operated across the Asian mainland, it fell to the crew in the guerrilla camp code-named “Pattern” to be the first friendlies to lay hands on survivors of the ghost cruiser
Houston
. It was July 25, 1945, when Red Huffman and Lanson Harris, their bellies full of Hershey chocolate and their blood charged with nicotine, were taken from their bamboo hut and marched through the jungle to their rendezvous with freedom. Harris remembered hearing a motor running, then seeing in the moonlight the silhouettes of bamboo structures ahead. The door of a nearby hut opened, and two figures emerged to meet them. One was wearing U.S. Army fatigues. The other man was taller, clean shaven, and dressed in fatigues that looked foreign to Huffman.

The taller man approached the exhausted, mostly naked sailors and said, “Welcome aboard. Isn’t that what they say in the Navy?”

Huffman said, “Yes, sir.”

“Where in the hell have you guys been?” the American asked. “I sent these guys to pick you up three weeks ago.”

Their savior was Maj. Eben B. Bartlett Jr., a thirty-three-year-old OSS field operative from Manchester, New Hampshire, and the commanding officer of the Pattern guerrilla camp outside Phet Buri. A qualified parachutist, Bartlett had proven his mettle in Europe as
a Third Army liaison to the French underground. In August and September 1944 he had worked hand in hand with the French Forces of the Interior, ensuring their cooperation with advancing American units and even leading them in attacks on the Germans. The citation of the Certificate of Merit that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower awarded him for that period mentioned an incident where Bartlett and his interpreter “captured fifteen armed German soldiers and persuaded eighty-five others to surrender.”

Major Bartlett’s record of initiative in Europe suited him for the freelancing nature of OSS service in Thailand. As part of Col. John Coughlin’s operation run from Kandy, Bartlett was flown from Ceylon into Calcutta on May 19. Joined by members of his field team—Cpl. Verlin (Pete) Gallaher and a Thai radio operator known as Art—he went to Jessore, northeast of Calcutta, and on May 26, climbed into a B-24 Liberator for the seven-and-a-half-hour flight to the Pattern camp’s drop zone in a remote jungle clearing.

In the middle of June, Bartlett’s guerrilla force began gathering. Each week about thirty Thais arrived for field training. They learned to field-strip weapons, shoot, use demolitions, make maps, communicate, navigate, patrol, and scout. Bartlett lacked the tools and medical personnel to fight the maladies the newcomers brought. But he made do with what he had, fashioning bandages from parachute fabric while waiting for the nighttime supply drops to start.

Though the State Department was understandably leery about sending large caches of arms into a country that was officially at war with the United States, upon the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s approval of the operation, Lt. Gen. Raymond A. Wheeler, a logistics specialist, authorized a dozen transport aircraft to begin dropping supplies and munitions to the six OSS camps then in operation. Organized by Detachment 505 in Calcutta, Operation Salad, as the supply operation was known, used Tenth Air Force C-47s to drop more than seventy-four tons of ammunition, weapons, supplies, medical supplies, and matériel in late June. On June 21, Wheeler’s fliers floated the first crates into Bartlett’s drop zone.

Despite the fact that it was monsoon season, some nights were dry and clear. On those nights the moonlight illuminated the scattered high cirrus clouds as the planes made their runs near Phet Buri, Kanburi, and elsewhere. Prisoners in those locations, curious, puzzled, and hopeful, had dared not pray for the arrival of these aerial
messengers. They had not envisioned this clandestine war, pursued at night by men out of uniform, foreign nationals, daring aviators hauling crates, and covert Yankee entrepreneurs such as Eben Bartlett.

When a warning came from Ruth that the supply drops had been detected by the Japanese, coupled with a recommendation that they cease, Bartlett was not at all bothered. “
The way I feel about this business is you have to be a little bold otherwise it will be till doomsday before you could get in enough supplies
,” he radioed headquarters. “
One has to take a few risks if we are to accomplish our mission
.” To conceal the nature of the supply effort, he recommended that bombers, which were more frequently seen in this airspace, fly the missions instead of C-47s. But Colonel Coughlin felt the need to mollify his courageous Thai patron. On June 30, he radioed Bartlett that he was suspending the drops.

Pattern camp was armed for war. Bartlett presided over a cache of arms large enough to equip a light infantry battalion: 388 carbines, 317 Thompson submachine guns, 90 M3 carbines, 50 M1 Garands, 8 Springfields, 218 .45-caliber pistols, 14 Browning automatic rifles, 825 hand grenades, 2 sixty-millimeter mortars, and a bazooka. He wondered if he might need to tap that terrible potential. “
If Japs come in here
,” he radioed on July 3, “
shall we fight it out or take to the hills or is the decision left up to me according to the situation
?”

But headquarters wanted them to lie low. Kandy radioed Bartlett, “
Present policy is not to have any of our groups fight it out unless Ruth so orders. Meanwhile you should have escape plan and supply cache that will enable you to get away
.”