Ship of Ghosts (51 page)

I
n the jungle, a strain of bacteria known as
Vibrio cholerae
runs rampant where hygiene is lacking, coursing through river deltas and waterways contaminated by human waste, attaching itself to small animals living in the water. When the cholera reaches a human body, it finds a home in the small intestine, stimulating it to secrete fluid until severe dehydration sets in. In its worst form it causes profuse watery diarrhea, vomiting, and leg cramps. It seizes hold of a man in an instant and wrings him dry. Victims lose body fluids so fast that they lapse into shock. Without treatment, death can occur within hours.

Rumors of cholera’s presence was perhaps the only talisman the prisoners had against the guards. The Japanese and Koreans were terrified of it and did what they could to make the scant supply of inoculations available where conditions were threatening. The disease was rare in the Burma camps. There were several cholera deaths at 60 Kilo Camp in the end of May, and Burmese
romusha
suffered an outbreak at 75 Kilo at around the same time. But its most horrifying
predations were in Thailand—at Hintok, Konyu, and later at a place called Songkurai.

A handful of Americans saw firsthand what the jungle had wrought upon the British prisoners in the camps around Three Pagodas Pass. Dr. Hekking asked Slug Wright to lend a hand at a cholera camp near 114 Kilo Camp, hit heavily by a fresh scourge. According to George Detre, 2,500 prisoners were said to have died there. When he saw it for the first time, “it was like a ghost town,” Detre recalled. “They walked everybody out of there that could walk, and the rest of them set the camp on fire. The guys that were laying there sick, they burned…. There was clothing waving in the wind, and we saw these partially burned barracks and canteens hanging there…. It was eerie. Believe me the Japanese cut a wide swath around the place.” Only a handful of Americans were witnesses to this horror. Slug Wright saw a British major shooting his own men infected with the disease. Word of the cholera-afflicted camp reached up and down the line. Soon it announced itself: “You could smell that camp for miles,” said Eddie Fung of the Lost Battalion.

O
ne struggles to grasp how some of the POWs did it, survived the round-the-clock physical and psychic assault from man and from nature. Part of the reason lies in the way they framed the experience. Those who used language carefully distinguished between suffering and enduring. “
Suffer
is a dangerous word here just now—it can induce self-pity,” wrote Ray Parkin. “
Endure
is a better word, it is not so negative. Enduring can give an aim, a sense of mastery over circumstance. I have seen so much self-conscious suffering and men dying from self-pity.”

In the midst of his ordeal in Japan, Frank Fujita kept an unshakeably positive outlook. “I find beauty in everything, even in death, you know. I always find something that’s worthwhile. And even when we were starved to death—most of us down to eighty or ninety pounds or walking skeletons—then instead of me sitting around thinking how horrible a shape we were in and ‘Oh, woe is me,’ I thought this was an absolutely marvelous opportunity to study anatomy.”

“There is a lot to grumble about; a lot to be disappointed about; a
lot to lose our tempers over; but there is also much to marvel at,” wrote Ray Parkin. “For instance, the loyalty of a man’s body—to watch a sore heal itself—to feel that pain is not so much a tragedy but a process. There is a fascination in trying to help it consciously, to try to break down any internal resistance to recovery by trying to quell devastating emotions like bad temper, hatred, fear, lust, envy.” There was enough of an enemy in nature. There was no need to allow a psychological fifth column to form up from within.

The Japanese had their own way of motivating. When the officers weren’t raiding the sick parade and the guards weren’t bashing with rifle butts, they encouraged the prisoners to sing to keep up their spirits. “It has become quite an institution,” Ray Parkin wrote of the bandstand brigade that worked at Kinsayok in September. The battalion bugler blew military marches on his cornet, at least until the workers were out of earshot of camp. The favorite of the Japanese was “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” except that the Aussies didn’t use the traditional lyrics. They substituted their own, better suited for the circumstances:
“They’ll be droppin’ thousand-pounders when they come.…”

C
olonel Nagatomo had doubtless been well briefed on the progress of the two threads of the railway, rising out of the jungle in two simultaneously constructed halves that would join near the Burma-Thailand border. On September 21, 1943, forward elements of Branch Three began arriving at 85 Kilo Camp, meeting up for the first time with their countrymen in Branch Five. A few days later, with the railway’s completion evidently within view, Nagatomo told Brigadier Varley that within a month, half of the prisoners in Branch Three would be shipped to Kanchanaburi, Thailand, including all of the sick. Was the end of the project upon them? Though few had a broad enough perspective to know, it seemed that it was. And when it came to pass, the final linking of the two railway branches about thirty-four kilometers southeast of Three Pagodas Pass was a surreal anticlimax to the Americans’ frightful twelve months in the jungle.

On October 17, the two ends of the line met on the Thai side of Three Pagodas Pass. History records no moment akin to the Russians and the Americans joining hands at the Elbe River. There was no joy in the railway’s completion, no feeling of shared achievement. As the collision of the north and south trade winds expended the last of their drenching energies, as the belt of equatorial monsoon rains collapsed
into the mountains and receded south toward the Tropic of Capricorn, the Burma-Thailand railway’s final stake was driven near the waterfalls at Nikki, the source of the iconic river that would become known as the River Kwai. At that point the sharp cries of “Speedo!” surrendered to the quiet of the jungle, and the
kumi
s of Branch Three and Branch Five were disbanded, their membership dispersed.

From August through November, 226 men were buried at 100 Kilo Camp, and 225 more at 80 Kilo Camp. In the absence of a chaplain, Lieutenant Hamlin read the burial services at 100 Kilo. Funerals became anticlimactic and were usually sparsely attended by the three- or four-man gravedigging crew, a few friends, and an officer. The
Houston
’s bandmaster, George L. Galyean, was often on hand to blow taps on an old German flugelhorn he had scavenged at Batavia. “They had the bugle going all of the time. Somebody was dying all the time—all the time,” said Roy Offerle, whose older brother Oscar, afflicted with a bad tropical ulcer, died in his arms at 80 Kilo Camp on November 18.

The horrors of 80 Kilo Camp came to an abrupt end when the camp was abolished on December 4 and its sick moved to 105 Kilo Camp, where some Australians were said to have medical supplies. The shifts between railway camps had been so routine that the thought of a final move out of the jungle seemed fantastic. Until transportation could be arranged, the prisoners camped in the sodden deathscape between 84 and 122 Kilo Camps, working as railway maintenance crews. The guards could be heard talking about the move. The prisoners, they said, were once again bound for the “land of milk and honey” promised back in Singapore. The prisoners had long ago learned to be skeptical of the guards’ pronouncements, vague and suspect on the best of days.

While some were chosen to stay in the mountain camps and maintain the railway against erosion and bombing and the varied sabotages of a defiant jungle, most were shipped to camps in western Thailand. Boarding boxcars to ride the narrow-gauge railway themselves, the evacuees thought of their efforts at sabotage, of the soft pilings they had bolted in place and the weak spots in the embankments they had cultivated, and worried those might be the instruments of their own demise. “It was more or less like a Toonerville trolley,” said Gus Forsman. “The boxcars swayed an awful lot, and
you wondered—especially when you went across a bridge or something like that—whether it would hold, or whether you were going to go crashing in.”

But Jim Gee, for one, felt blessed. As his train rumbled and squealed its way across the railway’s Thailand branch, he surveyed the starker terrain there and felt fortunate he had worked in Burma rather than Thailand. The other prisoners must have had a horrendous time of it. There were longer and deeper valleys to fill, breathtaking viaducts squeezed onto cliffside shelves along the River Kwae Noi, itself far faster, more voluminous, and treacherous than Burma’s monsoon-fed cataracts. “I think we all came to the conclusion that they had probably the rougher part of it,” Gee said. He took it all in and reflected on his experiences and arrived at a conclusion that only a humble man would make: “We were lucky.” Some of the trestles stood in three tiers, as much as ninety feet high. To the surprise of the passengers, they held. Against all expectation, the hand-made railway functioned.

O
n November 20, 1943, at 60 Kilo Camp, the steward of Branch Three, Col. Yoshitada Nagatomo, delivered a salute—a pathetically self-justifying one—to the men whose deaths he had presided over during the course of the railway project.

The next day Colonel Nagatomo had some thoughts for the living too:

For most any Death Railway prisoner it would have been easy to reflect on the memories of the past year and strip down one’s thinking to its vindictive, spiteful core. Of the people prone to seeing the world through such a lens, who could have been more likely than the Lost Battalion medical orderly who had seen it all, Slug Wright? As he was being shuttled by railcar to Thailand from the cholera wasteland around 114 Kilo Camp, he saw a Japanese train that had come up from Burma. When his train stopped and he was ordered to get
off, Wright could hear the miserable moaning of the occupants of one of the boxcars. It was full of wounded Japanese soldiers, amputees among them. A Japanese nurse saw that Wright had a bunch of bananas and a big bamboo stalk containing about a gallon and a half of water. She approached him and asked in flawless English: “Do you have anything to eat or any water? These men haven’t had anything to eat and nothing to drink?” The woman’s nerve was extraordinary, for Wright wasn’t inclined to be helpful. “I almost said, ‘Big deal! Neither have we!’ But I didn’t. I hadn’t talked to a woman, especially a woman that could speak English…. She was a nice-looking lady and everything like that…. So I handed her the bamboo, and I gave her my damn bananas.” The woman, who seemed to be a trained opera singer, rewarded him with a rendition of “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.” After everything Wright had been through, the beauty of the solo was staggering. “I stood there and bawled like a baby,” he said. “I didn’t dare tell my fellow POW’s what had happened, because they would be ashamed of me. But there is one time in my life that I am not ashamed of what I did. That was the enemy, but I just couldn’t do to them what they had done to me.”