Ship of Ghosts (52 page)

I
n the end, the railway of death was its builders’ route to salvation. The ghost sailors of the
Houston
and the
Perth
and the vanquished defenders of Java and Malaya rode its meter-gauge track out of the mountains toward new camps in Thailand’s central lowlands—places like Kanchanaburi and Tamarkan, Tamuan, Chungkai and Nakhon Pathom, home to a massive hospital with eight thousand beds. The most notorious engineering project of World War II was finished. At turning points such as this, there must be numbers to assess, but numbers do nothing to account for the varying traumas of individual experiences. Nonetheless:

In Branches Three and Five, there were 1,845 dead from an original strength of 11,824, for a death rate of 15.6 percent. Overall, of 61,806 Allied prisoners forced to work on the Burma-Thailand Railway, 12,399 died, including 6,904 British, 2,815 Australians, more than 2,000 Dutch, and 131 Americans. A full 45 percent of the men in F Force at Songkurai died. Of the 525-man group known as H Force, which John Wisecup joined at Hintok and Konyu, only 116 returned. The train that carried them back had about the same number of boxcars as before, but this time there was plenty of room for all.

The railway’s overall mortality rate of 20 percent is horrendous
relative to that of Allied prisoners in other theaters. But it positively pales beside the numbers measuring the ordeal of the local Asian conscripts or
romusha.
Estimates of their deaths are conflicting but appear to approach 100,000, about one-third of the estimated 300,000 ordinary Asian civilians forced into service on the Death Railway.

The Allied survivors trickled down out of the mountains as if washed out by the last runoff of the 1943 summer monsoon. In Brigadier Varley’s A Force, about a thousand men, the “heavy sick,” went to Bangkok for hospitalization. Six thousand less severely ill found a new home at Kanchanaburi. Most of the survivors of the Burma branch were taken there in groups of two hundred and three hundred, joining thirty thousand men in a huge prison camp at Tamarkan near the River Kwae Noi, near Kanburi, where the railway’s largest steel trestle bridge stood. Some of them would go on to Saigon or Singapore for transshipment to Japan. The remaining three thousand men of A Force stayed on the railway line between 105 Kilo Camp and Konkoita, doing maintenance work, cutting firewood for locomotive fuel, and building military fortifications.

As the prisoners moved into Thailand following the railroad’s completion, the Japanese “seemed to indulge in a system of competitive bidding at the railroad station for every new group of prisoners as it arrived,” wrote Lieutenant Hamlin. The
Houston
men kept track of one another through an active news grapevine. They accounted for each other, keeping forbidden lists under floorboards in huts. Some of the men dared imagine that the ordeal would one day end. When that day came, careful records on each man’s whereabouts would be essential to a final reckoning of who had lived and who had died.

At Kanburi in January or February 1944, the first parcels from the International Red Cross reached the prisoners, courtesy of the Swiss consulate in Bangkok. There were shoes, cigarettes, field rations, chocolate, cheese, hardtack, powdered milk, tins of beans and beef stew. The sudden availability of provisions may have been driven by the progress the United States was making in the Pacific. The Japanese seemed increasingly aware that they would be called to account for their treatment of their prisoners.

“This camp was much better than anything we had seen before, because the Chinese and Thais did everything possible to get through information to us and also to bring in canteen supplies in the form of fruit, peanuts and meat,” wrote Ensign Smith, who came
down to Kanburi from 105 Kilo Camp in April. Robbie Robinson called the Thailand camps “opportunity camps” because of their ready opportunities to make a buck or improve one’s circumstances through enterprise. Charley Pryor noted that since the country’s economy depended on agricultural exports, the diet improved markedly. Slug Wright was invited to a private dinner with Henri Hekking, who had purloined some fried fish and eggs to put over his rice. To Wright it was “like dining at the Savoy in Hollywood.” Assigned to tend gardens or herd livestock along the river, they came into daily contact with native boatmen selling fruits and eggs, medicines and supplies. Pack Rat McCone, unsurprisingly, was as resourceful as any of them. He made good money trading on the river and was in turn generous in loaning out his earnings to those in need. “He lost no telling how many dollars,” Robinson said. “But that’s the type of guy he was.”

John Wisecup was put to work in Kanburi’s sick hut taking care of tropical ulcer patients. There were scores of them. He carried them in and out of surgery and assisted with amputations, the majority of them fatal. The operating table was a stretcher laid on a stack of crates out between the sick huts. When no anesthesia was available, Wisecup applied his strength to holding patients down while the sawbones went to work. “They’d chloroform the guy. We’d stand and hold him until he went out. Then they’d scrape these leg ulcers or cut off the leg or whatever they had to do, and then we’d haul him back in.” Slug Wright witnessed at least one case of bubonic plague there.

T
he diseases and the amputations were the legacy of the monsoon and the railway and the jungle. All those things belonged to the past now. But one new obstacle loomed: the bridge. This particular bridge was larger than anything they had built in Burma. In the ensuing decades it would grow much larger, large enough to span oceans and continents, to outgrow the facts of its creation and emerge as a legend itself. Spanning a river swollen by the monsoon season, it was big enough to invite attack from the American bombers that were swarming over the Burma and Thai junglescape in numbers that grew daily.

Following Major Futamatsu’s design, the railway traces the River
Kwae Noi for several hundred kilometers. During the monsoon season, the mountains of the Dawna Range require the river to do monumental work, draining the hills of their torrential runoff and channeling it into the Gulf of Thailand. The name “Kwai” is redolent of the misery the POWs suffered, far more so than the fictionalized movie that bears it. For starters, the bridge does not cross the River Kwae Noi. It crosses the River Mae Khlung, which joins the Kwae Noi between Kanburi and Tamarkan.
*

Colonel Toosey, who arrived at the bridge site in October 1942, just as the Americans of Branch Three were seeing the first of Burma, had overseen the construction of two structures that crossed the quarter-mile-wide stretch of river. A wooden bridge was built first to enable the movement of supplies and equipment across the river for the construction of its larger concrete and steel neighbor. Known to the Japanese as the “Mekuron permanent bridge,” the concrete and steel span was large, though its structure was simple compared to the multitiered timber bridges the prisoners had built farther up in the jungle. What it lacked in complexity it made up in bulk. Eleven twenty-meter steel trusses sat on concrete abutments, plus nine five-meter wooden spans on the northern end.

Building the massive concrete piers in midstream had been a technical challenge. First, temporary cofferdams were dug into the river bottom, then filled with ballast. Prefabricated concrete rings were then dropped one by one into the cofferdams, and the earth dredged from inside by hand. The work required prisoners to don old-fashioned diving helmets and work underwater inside the cofferdams, clawing the riverbed so the pillars would sink. The steel trusses themselves were reportedly salvaged from Java. The Japanese recycled them to good effect here.

Most of the British prisoners who had built the great concrete and steel structure over the River Mae Khlung at Tamarkan were no longer present when the Americans began arriving in late 1943. Colonel Toosey was sent to Nong Pladuk in December 1943, apparently under the Japanese policy that segregated officers from enlisted
men. His men were dispersed to other camps from Saigon to Singapore, making room for the newcomers washing out of the mountains.

Though their working days were not over, conditions here were much better than they had been in Burma. John Wisecup was amazed at the things prisoners had hung on to through the ordeal at Hintok. A Scotsman still had his bagpipes, a boxer his gloves. Out on burial detail, Wisecup traded odd items with Thai locals for duck eggs—watches, Ronson lighters, flints, Parker pens. Most of the survivors of the mountains were sick, awaiting transport to better hospitals. One day the Japanese raided the sick hut at Kanburi and organized a
kumi
of its fittest men to work the Tamarkan railroad bridge. John Wisecup joined the workers who put the finishing touches on the “Bridge on the River Kwai.” With the concrete piers finished, and with trains already using it, their work was limited to putting up braces, side stays, and sleepers. “They were in a hurry to finish it,” he said. “Boy, they were really rough on us.”

The bombers were rougher. As it happened, the Australians had been right: they
were
dropping thousand-pounders when they came. What none of the songsters had anticipated was that more than a few of those bombs would fall on them. Tragically, the bridge would prove most lethal not in its construction but because it attracted the full power of the United States Army Air Forces, and because the Japanese chose to locate one of the largest prisoner of war camps in central Thailand mere yards from this strategic target. When the men of the
Houston
were looking longingly to the skies for protection, Allied airpower had let them down. Now the airplanes fulfilled the sailors’ hopes all too thoroughly. They flowed over them like storm fronts.

Freedom was heralded by airpower, by multiengine planes the likes of which they had never seen before—B-24s, B-25s, B-29s, Mosquitos, Beaufighters, P-38s, and later shorter-ranged single-engine planes whose appearance suggested the proximity of friendly bases and renewed the POWs’ faltering hope. Tipped off by Allied intelligence agents that Bangkok’s dockyards had been expanded and that the Japanese were building a railway to link the port with Moulmein, Allied air forces escalated and extended their campaign to bomb Japanese railheads and bridges and rolling stock, destroying with impunity what prisoners had risked death to sabotage. The lifting of the monsoon opened the way for a new torrent of bombs. It was the nature of war, and the nature of the Japanese practice of
exploiting their prisoners as military chattel, that victory, when it came, would not be antiseptic or painless. The success of the bombers would come at the prisoners’ expense. As the bombs fell on the bridges and their approaches, the Japanese organized
kumi
s to repair them. More than occasionally, the bombs went astray and took a horrible toll from the prison camps. For survivors who had come this far on fatalism, there was little cause to care.

T
he U.S. Tenth Air Force had grown from a skeleton organization in 1942 to a powerful aerial striking force operating out of bases in India. The primary mission of its B-24 Liberators, B-25 Mitchells, P-40 Warhawks, P-38 Lightnings, P-51 Mustangs, and A-36 Apaches was to keep open the supply routes to China, including a legendarily difficult airlift corridor over the Himalayas known to history as “the Hump.” Secondarily, it was charged with blocking Japan’s supplies flowing into and across Burma. As with ABDA at the outset of the war in the Dutch East Indies, it took months of political upheaval before the varied American and British air assets came under unified command. At the end of 1943, the Tenth Air Force and the RAF’s Bengal Air Command were joined as the Eastern Air Command under Maj. Gen. George E. Stratemeyer. Stratemeyer appreciated the challenge at hand. “A resourceful, able and wily enemy must be blasted from the jungles of Burma and driven from the skies in days to come,” he wrote to his men. “We must establish in Asia a record of Allied air victory of which we can be proud in the years to come. Let us write it now in the skies over Burma.”

He was referring to all of Burma, principally its strategic central region, the wedge between India and China. But he did not neglect
the realm of the Death Railway. Over southern Burma and central Thailand, whose corduroy ridgelines gave false verdant beauty to the deathscape of the POW railway, it was his longest-range aircraft that carried the load. The flight from India was a challenge for even the best pilots and navigators. Burma featured some of the worst flying weather in the world. The mountains and valleys disturbed the circulation of the monsoons, leading to unpredictable weather. The Tenth’s Liberator pilots needed every bit of their plane’s famed endurance to make the three-thousand-mile round-trip to Tamarkan and back.