Ship of Ghosts (42 page)

The hills and rocks slowed the work, introducing new engineering challenges. High in the hills, the prisoners worked far from their sources of food and medicine, the flow of which up into the mountains was restricted like blood flowing through a calcified artery. Already inadequate supply trains had a hard time keeping up. Once a prisoner of war had dragged himself far enough into the mountains, there was no getting food to him, and no getting his half-starved carcass out. The natives who ran the canteen stores near the base camp knew better than to set up shop that far upland. The prisoners were thus forced to subsist on the rations they got from their masters, unfortified by the private market. Adding to their isolation was an administrative quirk: Captain Mizutani’s Branch Five was technically administered from Singapore, which seemed to give it a second-class status that slowed provisioning from base camp. Branch Five was going to conquer this mountain on its own.

Clearing work at 85 Kilo lasted three weeks, then the workers were moved back to 80 Kilo. The terrain there was cut through by
several tributaries feeding the Zami River. Several of the cuts were so deep that something more than ordinary cutting and filling was required. Bridges would be necessary to span the gaps.

Bridges would become the signature feature of the Burma-Thailand Railway; indeed, Hollywood would define the very concept of Allied POW servitude in Asia around their construction. The largest and most famous of them would be built by British POWs in Thailand, far to the southeast of the Burma-Thailand border, the eastern limit for most Americans working on the railway. Though most of the American prisoners did not participate in the initial construction of the so-called Bridge on the River Kwai, as the long steel and concrete structure spanning the River Mae Khlung on the Thailand side of the line became known by way of the award-winning movie, their lives would become enmeshed with it, and the film a cultural shorthand by which their ordeal could be understood.

Or, as it happens, misunderstood. In David Lean’s 1957 film, the bridge—and by implication the entire railroad—was a showpiece of British pride and know-how. It was premised on the idea that the British had engineering expertise far beyond that of the Japanese. Ripe with Western chauvinism, the film depicted the British as the teachers and contractors to the unsophisticated enemy. The reality was just the opposite. The real railway was driven from end to end by Japanese ambition and know-how. Though Japan lacked the machinery to construct it by state-of-the-art means, there was no lack of design expertise—or ruthless will. Japan would do with cold dispatch what Western colonialists had deemed impracticable.

The railway had far more than just one bridge. In had 688 of them—uncelebrated, remote, anonymous structures crossing ravines and tributaries along the way, the vast majority fashioned from timber. Only seven of these bridges were built from steel. And though the largest and most difficult bridges were on the Thailand side of the line—the rivers there would swell with runoff from the coming monsoon rains, requiring monumental efforts to span them—six of the railway’s seven steel bridges were on the Burma end of the railway, between 45 and 85 Kilo Camps.

Hard timber for bridge construction was readily available in the jungle surrounding 80 Kilo Camp. The prisoners hauled the great trunks of wood from the forest, squared them with sharpened hoes, and drove them into the earth to make pilings. Charley Pryor, with
Branch Five, helped drive pilings, cut timber, and clear the service road too. Back home in Littlefield, Texas, he had gotten good with an axe hacking mesquite trunks for firewood. With three others helping him—Sgt. Hugh Faulk, an Idaho lumberjack, and an Australian—they could do four days’ work in a day. The beauty of the detail outside camp was they could sleep in occasionally, because the guards never went looking for them in the jungle. When they were really feeling their oats, they would cut some buttery soft balsa wood and include it in the stacks too.

Once in a while, powerful machines were available to help them: elephants. One or two of the great beasts were on hand at 80 Kilo Camp to drag heavy logs out of the jungle, but they sometimes made more trouble than they solved. “An elephant’s a smart bugger,” said Pryor. “He tests these logs before he puts much effort into them, and if it seems heavy, well, he’d back off from it.” No amount of beating the beast over the head with an iron hook seemed to persuade him otherwise. Faced with a recalcitrant elephant, the Japanese often had no choice but to require prisoners to do the hauling instead.

The pilings, virgin teakwood, were selected for length and breadth from the rich forests surrounding the camp. Pryor and his fellows brought them down with old crosscut saws, used picks and poleaxes to trim them to fit, then dragged them, by hand or by
elephas maximus,
to the bridge site, where they had dug starter holes in the earth. Wherever a bridge piling was needed, a derrick (or a scaffold) would be constructed from bamboo or tree saplings secured by wire twists. The piling would be raised and lowered through the derrick, then seated into the starter hole. Then atop the scaffolding would be erected a wooden pulley mechanism, holding up a heavy weight that could be raised and lowered like a hammer to drive the piling into the earth.

Pryor called them “spider rigs.” Eight or ten men would pull on a web of ropes—“monkey lines”—fitted through a pulley atop the scaffolding. They kept rhythm by counting in Japanese—“
ichi, ni, san, shi, go
”—or by singing a song chosen by the engineers. For a time the engineers themselves stood atop the rickety derricks, directing the fall of the hammer. That arrangement lasted until some Australians found they could set the whole assembly swaying by deliberately falling out of sync on the count. Two engineers tumbled
to their deaths that day, after which the prisoners got the job of climbing the tops of the derricks. When a piling had been driven to the proper depth in the ground, they would tear down the derrick, select a new piling site, and start all over again.

With pilings driven, trusses were next, installed from piling to piling, fastened with nails where possible but more often simply tied with vines, until the rail bed reached the opposite bank at the proper elevation. Bridges crossing the larger streams in hillier terrain sometimes required several decks of wooden pilings, one standing on top of the other. “It worked,” said Luther Prunty of the Lost Battalion. “It seemed impossible, but it worked…. It wasn’t so hard once you got the hang of it. It was just like marching…. There’s nothing that manpower can’t substitute for.”

T
he first American had yet to fall when the men of Branch Three, laying rails, reached 23 Kilo Camp. Up to that point, that camp had been home only to Burmese
romusha,
and the condition of the camp showed it. It was evident why scores of thousands of the native slaves would die. It had to do not with their constitution or their knowledge of the region, but with their lack of discipline in maintaining proper hygiene. Wholly unprepared to survive in a disease-ridden aboriginal wasteland, though they were natives, the throng that died was unmeasurably large. Many responsible estimates approach a hundred thousand. It would become a human tragedy whose intensity and scale grew as the rail reached toward the mountains from each end. If anything put the lie to the rhetoric of a Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, it was in the atrocious mass crime that Japan perpetrated on its workforce of conscripts.

In the native-type huts, lice infestation was rampant and there was never enough boiled water to scald the floors clean. For the prisoners, there was never any choice about attending to the vital business of sanitation. Otto Schwarz said, “As we would go into a new working camp, the first thing anybody did was dig a couple of fire pits, put in the fifty-five-gallon drums, fill them with water, and get the water hot. Before you got your rice, you had to get in line and
dip your mess kit or coconut shell in the hot water. Blowflies were all over everything. And that’s what carried dysentery.

“We kept our structure. We had our officers, our NCO’s—our chain of command was kept intact. We always dug big ditches and put bamboo across the tops, so we could perch and do our business…. But if you went into a native camp, they’d have families of natives there on the railroad to work, but no leaders, no bosses, and no sanitation whatever. Feces were all over the place. They crapped wherever they stood. When they died, they lay there and rotted away. Disease ran rampant in those camps.”

Faithful adherence to simple procedures—such as dipping mess kits in boiling water before eating—made all the difference. “If a passing fly chose to step into your rice ration as it was about to be eaten, there was no alternative but to throw the lot into the fire and go without,” wrote Ronald Searle, a Royal Army sapper captured at Singapore. “Although such a gesture was dramatic for a starving man, there could be no hesitation.” Survival meant continued deprivation. “There were times when most of us felt that perhaps those chums who had encountered The Curse of the Fly’s Footprint were the fortunate ones.”

Hygiene, health, and morale stood in symbiotic linkage. If the prisoners in a camp got careless with the first, the other two collapsed in turn. One sip from a tempting but bacteria-hosting wayside pool, a lack of religiosity in boiling one’s mess kit, failure to see that upstream from one’s bathing area was another pool used by the dysentery-prone—a single slip ensured that a bad life would grow far worse in a hurry. Dr. Fisher already had a surplus of patients to care for. In March he admitted 464 men from Branch Three and discharged 322. An additional sixty-five from Branch Five were there already too. With the monsoon season looming, work was slowing just as it should have been accelerating, and renewed pressure came from on high to complete the job. On April 7, Maj. Gen. Akira Sasa of the Japanese Army, the chief administrative officer of all branches in Thailand and Burma, arrived at the Branch Three headquarters to take stock of the growing crisis.

On his tour of camps up the line, General Sasa was driven by truck, with Brigadier Varley and Major Fisher riding in the back as it made the bouncing ride as far as 85 Kilo Camp. Varley appreciated that the condition of the service road made it impossible to use to transport the “heavy sick.” “They would either die from the jolting
about,” he wrote, “or be so knocked about that it is far better to let them take their chances in outlying camps. Further with heavy rain it will be impassable. My previous fears voiced to Js months ago, were confirmed in my mind, i.e. that unless the rail was laid to outside camps we would not be able to maintain food supplies to these men.” Sasa had no interest in the Allied officer’s opinions. He never spoke directly with Varley and attached no value to the Branch Three commander’s concerns. He looked at the rail and the mountains, considered the requirement that the railway be finished by August, and deemed the progress insufficient.

A Japanese medical officer, Dr. Higuchi, then called a conference with Varley, Fisher, and two other officers. The Japanese commandant of 75 Kilo Camp, Lieutenant Hoshi, appeared before a muster of sick personnel on April 13 and gave a speech.

Hoshi repeated the rhetorical boilerplate blaming the Allies for Japan’s aggressions. “The number of sick has got to come down—this is not Sasa’s orders but from higher up. Japan is striving to build this railway by August. It must be finished by August…. If you die you are soldiers and dying is part of your job and you will be contributing to the greater glory of Japan…. You have sick only because you don’t try. If you are sick you only lie down all day and if you lie down you don’t need food. In future the sick will not get food even rice—the workers only will be fed. You will also be forced to go to work. Remember it is only four months.”

The speech was steeped in the conviction that the emperor’s divine will could command nature, defeat time and distance, and reach beyond the limitations of human endurance. The work would be done in spite of the vicious cycle that was whipping the prisoners from all sides: Survival depended on work, but disease conspired
against both. The Japanese medical presence was a cruel joke. According to Ensign Smith, Higuchi’s medical training consisted of a couple of years in dental school. Dr. Fisher, with the other Allied medical personnel, shared that assessment, stating that Higuchi “knew nothing of medicine and showed no evidence of clinical experience…. He was our bane in Burma.” When the rains came, an out-of-balance equation would be tipped past the failure point. The men’s dusty-mouthed pleas for water would be fulfilled with horrifying abundance. The rains would defeat the technology of medical transport, defy medicine, and overwhelm human will with bacterial scourges that have killed men since the dawn of time. The jungle would coil and strike back at the assault of the railway and road builders. The clouds would converge over the jungle and make survival itself seem an unreachable summit.