Ship of Ghosts (46 page)

Over a three-and-a-half-kilometer stretch of railway they made six major cuttings from the heart of the rocky earth. One of these, between the last Konyu camp and Hintok, became known as Hellfire Pass. It took little imagination to coin that nickname, for Hellfire Pass was a chilling simulation of the underworld. Working deep in a rock gorge that they blasted deeper every night, the prisoners looked up at their guards standing atop its ridges, backlit by gasoline-dipped bamboo torches stuck into the earth all around the top. A couple of bamboo-burning bonfires put great volumes of smoke into the sky while the torches lit the rocky cutting like a harvest moon on a foggy night. Fearing untimely explosions and disease, the guards came no closer to the cutting area than necessary. When they were visible, it was at a distance, walking the edges of the stony ravine wearing hooded raincoats that silhouetted them like imps standing sentry. Meanwhile, in the shifting torchlight, the skeletal shadows of prisoners danced all along the cutting’s stone face.

The hammer and tap crews tried, as much as their atrophying frames would allow, to avoid hitting a toe or breaking a buddy’s finger with their heavy hammers. “The head of the man holding the drill is only a few inches from where the hammer strikes,” wrote Ray Parkin. “If you wander, or relax those tired muscles, there can be a split skull.” The Japanese engineers, who forced out to work scores of men with useless limbs and horrible sores, took considerably less care with their explosives. Their excited cries of
“Speedo, ah-hoiy-hoiy speedo, speedo!
” often came too late for prisoners to avoid the blasts. “The stones and fragments came ripping through the treetops, cutting branches and lopping bamboos like scythes,” Ray Parkin wrote. For too many men, nearly including Parkin, the bombardment of
shattered limestone had lethal consequences. Any break in the skin could easily metastasize into a flesh-rotting tropical ulcer.

Every morning, before dawn, the prisoner-patients of the morning shift made their way down to the mist-shrouded cutting site at Hintok Mountain Camp. “Occasionally we caught glimpses of far-away sunlit peaks of other mountains, rising out of the cloud that concealed the thousands of miles of jungle between us and freedom,” Ronald Searle wrote. The night shift worked by artificial light. Sleeping till noon, they awoke, prepared their bamboo torches and went out to work all night once again. The blasts and percussion of hammer on stone made for a constant din. “The daily blasting along this section is terrific,” Ray Parkin wrote, “like a war approaching.”

T
he war
was
approaching. All of the prisoners knew it at some level of fact or faith, at least in its broad outlines. Rumors of its progress were whispered up and down both branches of the line, originating reliably with the stalwarts who managed to operate shortwave sets, even in the deprivation of the jungle. With the Lost Battalion’s radio whiz, Technical Sgt. Jess Stanbrough, long since shipped away to Japan, it fell to Capt. Windy Rogers of the Lost Battalion and Gus Forsman of the
Houston
to run the radios while keeping the lowest of profiles, even among their closest peers. “The radios were dismantled and smuggled into camps all the time, all the way along the line,” Forsman said. The prisoners fashioned components in camp, making vacuum tubes from test tubes. The origins and deployments of the equipment were closely held secrets. Still, Forsman said, “I don’t believe we were ever without a radio at one time or another in the camp.” The identity of the radio keepers was kept strictly secret too, not because friends couldn’t be trusted but because fevers couldn’t be. One never knew what a man might blurt out when racked with malarial tremors.

The war news didn’t turn broadly favorable until about January 1943, and then it spread through the camps only in the most general terms: the Allies had landed in North Africa, various Pacific island
campaigns were under way. The men tried to keep a utilitarian perspective on news: “You hear it but you’re still here, so you forget about it,” said Roy Offerle of the Lost Battalion. “I lived day by day. I didn’t worry about yesterday or tomorrow. Really, to me that was the best way to keep your sanity and your wits about you—just what’s going to happen today and nothing else.”

Survival required close attention to the here and now, not to pipe dreams about great victories on distant battlefields. Near Konyu, some Australians dammed a stream and made a reservoir. Two hundred yards downstream they built a thirty-by-forty-foot system of perforated bamboo pipes held aloft on a trestle. In this way prisoners there could actually shower. Since the water was infested with cholera bacteria, they learned to shower with their mouths closed. But the path to life on the Death Railway was cleared by small victories such as this. If you kept your water boiled and your mess kits hot-dipped, if you stayed upstream of the dysentery pools and showered with your mouth closed, you might be all right.

Whether they were all right or not, the prisoners never revealed the truth when the opportunity came to send their first postcards home. The 1929 Geneva Convention provided in Article 36 that every prisoner be allowed to send a postcard to his family “within a period of not more than one week after his arrival at the camp” and that “said postcards shall be forwarded as rapidly as possible and may not be delayed in any manner.”

With Japan having declined to ratify the convention, the least of the worries occupying Colonel Nagatomo, Captain Mizutani, or anyone else in the Fifth and Ninth Railway Regiments was the timeliness of their prisoners’ personal correspondence. Reflecting their regard for the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose parcels and provisions, meant for prisoners, they were well known to have plundered, the Japanese authorities dallied in delivering the prisoners’ later mailings via the Red Cross and the Swiss Consulate General. Luther Prunty, out in the jungle one day gathering wood for the 80 Kilo Camp kitchen, turned over a log and found a whole stash of completed postcards rotting in the sodden earth.

I
f news was vital for the prisoners’ morale, information about them was no less vital to loved ones back home. The absence of word concerning the fate of their men kept alive an agonizing mystery and
extracted a heavy psychic cost. With her husband missing along with his ship, with hard facts of the where and how so damnably few, Jane Harris, at home in Los Angeles, restored her emotional equilibrium by filling her life with denial and distraction. These provided a layer of insulation between her imagination and her subconscious. It kept them from colluding in their corrosive, whispering work.

She denied the thought that a new wife’s worst fear—sudden, unforeseen widowhood—had probably already been realized. Since she could not know for sure, she went to work to keep herself productively focused, to avoid losing her mind. But at her desk in the payroll department at Bullock’s department store, she could never for long avoid thinking of Lanson Harris or the
Houston,
the ship he had called home for more than a year. Until that day came, she would suffer with a monthly reminder of the misery in her life when the allotment of her husband’s salary showed up in the mail.

She quit Bullock’s after a year, took a job with some friends at a company that made window blinds, then moved to the Continental Can Company as a contometer operator. That rudimentary computer was useful for keeping the books, but it could not begin to help her figure the unknowable odds of her husband’s safe return.

Anything less than a letter or a call from Lans himself would not satisfy her. She drove down to San Diego periodically on weekends to see old friends and to visit other wives who stood on the brink of widowhood with husbands missing in action on Bataan or Corregidor. One of her friends was married to a pilot who had flown General MacArthur out of Manila. The women all had plenty of time to contemplate the permutations of fortune that might have befallen their men.

She wasn’t forced to confront her subconscious assumptions until her friends started urging her to visit the Army hospital and file a life insurance claim. “They said, ‘You might as well go over and they’ll settle with you and you’ll get your insurance started.’” But she wasn’t ready to give up on the man she had last seen more than two years before. “I said, ‘No, because he’s not dead yet.’ They said, ‘You’re crazy. You should go over there and get the money.’”

She settled into the role of widow-in-waiting, trying to be a rock of strength for her grief-stricken family. Finally it caught up with her. She clung to her job to the detriment of her health. Saddled with sudden abdominal pains, she saw her doctor and learned she needed an exploratory procedure. But the idea of taking off work
and submitting to hospitalization was intolerable to her. “I’ve got to work, keep my mind going,” she said. She needed that contometer more than the managers at Continental Can did.

Had she known that she suffered from severe appendicitis, she might have beaten her fear of sitting in a silent hospital room where dark thoughts could emerge unsuppressed. Only when she was delirious with pain and on the brink of physical collapse—her doctor found that her appendix had burst—was she finally rushed into surgery. The ether and the anesthetic did what bromides from friends and family seemed never to do. They set her apart from the troubled earth. From within the gauzy shroud of medication she told the doctor, “Don’t let me come to.” She felt good. The weight was gone. They told her she had to wake up. She refused. She refused for three full weeks and stayed right there at White Memorial Hospital, clinging to sedation.

The emotional insulation of the work routine was finally pierced shortly before Christmas 1943 when the postman showed up and said, “Jane, you’ve got a funny-looking thing here.” It was a postcard from her husband.

The three-by-five piece of weathered cardstock was stamped with an alien-sounding name: Moulmein, Burma. It carried no date. “How it got through the censors, I don’t know,” she said. How it had gotten from the Japanese to the Americans was equally a mystery. She took it to the Navy Department, showed it to a chaplain, then to an administrator. They wanted her to turn it over to them. She gave them a copy but retained the original.

With her husband’s status indisputably converted from MIA to POW, Jane began going to the Red Cross, putting together little packages of toothpaste and other sundries and writing banal letters designed to clear the censors and reach this place, Moulmein, by whatever magical means the International Red Cross had devised to bridge the gap between warring enemies. But even as the news relieved some anxiety and made possible proactive courses of action, it raised other worries. The terse, preprinted multiple-choice messages on the card—“My health is (good, usual, poor). I have/have not had any illness” and so on—also seemed to worsen the anguish felt by Lanson’s grandfather. When he read the postcard he sat down and cried, because the confirmation of Lans’s survival also meant that his grandson was languishing in captivity. The older man passed away a
few months later. “The only thing we could figure was that he died of grief,” Jane said.

During the war, self-help books and magazines such as
House Beautiful
and
Good Housekeeping
were catering to the needs of wives whose husbands were off to war. “You come home from the station or airport or the little gray ferry and it seems like a farewell to everything about life you love. The everybody’s-home-now feeling of a man in the house. The solid companionship of two big bath towels in the bathroom, two pairs of slippers under the bed, two people talking in the privacy of their souls,” one article read. The slicks were full of coping tips for soldiers’ and sailors’ wives. It was all so clean and sane and sound. Alleta Sullivan, a mother from Waterloo, Iowa, who lost all five of her sons in the sinking of the cruiser USS
Juneau
and thereby became America’s eternal symbol of wartime grief, counseled readers of
The American Magazine
that they should discount rumors of their loved one’s death, even though it was by just such a rumor that she found out the worst had befallen her boys. She described her work touring the country visiting shipyards and factories, exhorting the workers to greater efficiency. But there was closure and finality in the brand of grief that Mrs. Sullivan had experienced. It required people to regroup and move on. Jane Harris couldn’t do that. Her husband’s survival had been established as of a certain date. But what of the intervening time? What of the future? No doubt the well-intentioned magazine editors had a bargeload of good advice for her. Still, the chemical comfort of a White Memorial recovery room was the most peaceful of all sanctuaries.

A Portland man named Fred G. Hodge, the brother of the
Houston
’s communications officer, Lt. Ernest D. Hodge, invested years in tracing not only the fate of his brother, but the rest of the crew as well. His work was rooted in his supposition that, statistically speaking, there
had
to be many survivors. He had seen a Melbourne newspaper report of Rohan Rivett’s July 1, 1942, broadcast over the Batavia radio station referring to three-hundred-odd survivors of the
Perth
at Serang, Java. In that dispatch the
Houston
was not named, but there had to be some American survivors there too, Hodge thought. The Navy’s communiqués had already detailed the parallel fates of the two ships. It complicated things that the Navy, still deeming the
Houston
’s crew roster a military secret, would not release it until after the war. Still, working with a network of sleuths—including
the family of chief radioman Harmon P. Alderman in Dayton, Ohio, who, using their own shortwave radio sets, received propaganda broadcasts from Java that disclosed the names of at least forty-seven of the ship’s survivors—Hodge made great progress.