Ship of Ghosts (54 page)

The big B-24s generally targeted the main bridge spans, while the
smaller B-25 Mitchells, as well as Royal Air Force Beaufighters and Mosquitos, swift and light, targeted the bridge’s approaches. Later, higher up, visible by their contrails, came B-29 Superfortresses. The prisoners had never seen their like before, four-engine bombers with long tubular fuselages. From their altitude and size, they knew it was a new kind of aircraft. There were rumors that these futuristic bombers were hitting Singapore and Bangkok, and that even Tokyo itself was under assault. When fighter planes began showing up escorting the bombers, they knew friendly forces had to be close. “That little P-51 came down with the B-24s there one day—goodness!—we didn’t know what it was, but we knew whose it was,” Luther Prunty said.

And sometimes they left behind a taste of things to come. At Kanburi, right next to Tamarkan, Slug Wright was watching some bombers at work when he spotted a different sort of object falling with the payload. It hit the ground about fifty yards away from him. It was a one-gallon can with the top shorn off. He went over and picked it up, reached his finger in, and tasted the residual liquid inside—peach syrup, cold and sweet. “My friends, American airmen, flying right over, by golly, threw the damn peach can out of the damn plane after they had eaten all the damn peaches. That’s how close I was to America—tasting that peach syrup.”

Red Huffman, working to repair the damaged bridges at Tamarkan, remembered the bombers leaving a different kind of calling card. One day he was huddled in an air-raid trench when he heard the roar of engines, looked up—he could never keep himself from looking up—and saw the metal skin of an aircraft so close overhead that he could make out its rivets. When the plane had gone, he got to his feet, looked around, saw something bright and small in the dirt, and said, “I don’t believe it.” It was a Juicy Fruit gum wrapper. “I picked it up and it smelled just like chewing gum. I hadn’t smelled anything like that in three years.”

After the bombers departed, there was always work to do repairing the bridges. The Japanese engineers would buck up their wounded pride and whip together a
kumi
to head out and undo the damage. According to Huffman, “When the all-clear would go and the bombers went away, we’d get a work force together, go over there, find out what was wrong from the Japanese engineers, and do the job. We did wooden patches mostly. We’d lay spare tracks in.
I don’t know how many times the bridges, the wooden and steel bridges, were repaired.”

One time after the all-clear sounded Huffman and some others who had emerged to undertake repairs heard muffled shouts from below the earth. They found a man buried in the rubble about ten feet under. He had kept himself alive by using a handy piece of hollow bamboo as a snorkel. “He was breathing under the ground through the bamboo coming to the surface, and hollering through it, too. That’s how we knew he was there,” Huffman said. The Japanese gunners defending the bridges had their innovations too, mounting antiaircraft guns on mobile flatcars and planting mines on bridge abutments or railway embankments and detonating them by remote control as bombers flew by. These tactics were throwbacks to the days of Richthofen’s barnstormers, but within a very short time technology would show the way to an even more destructive future.

It was a largely uncelebrated technical achievement—the Allied nations’ first smart bomb—that made it possible finally to destroy the great bridge over the River Kwae Noi. The newfangled bomb known as the VB-1 AZON was delivered to the Seventh Bomb Group’s 493rd Squadron in late 1944. It was a thousand-pounder equipped with a gyro, solenoids, and moveable fins to hold it steady in free fall, and a radio receiver and servomotor to steer it left or right. The acronym “AZON” stood for “azimuth only,” indicating the limited (though revolutionary) extent of steering control the bombardier had over the weapon in flight. There was no way to adjust its range in free fall, no way to flatten or steepen its trajectory. But it could be guided left and right by visual means, as a powerful flare burned in its tail fin. Against a long, narrow target such as a bridge, control over one dimension of the trajectory was usually enough to greatly improve the chance of a hit.

On February 5, 1945, a raid by B-24s missed the bridges but took out some of the gun positions and tracks near their approaches. Four days later Seventh Group bombers hit two sections of the wooden bridge. On February 13, another raid finally succeeded in bringing down several spans of the main concrete and steel structure over the River Kwae Noi, known as “Bridge 277” to the men who bombed it.

The end of the bridge heralded the end of the war, and the status
and security of all Allied prisoners of war entered a tenuous and uncertain new phase.

At Kanburi, the new camp commandant, Captain Noguchi, and his sergeant-major, Sergeant Shimoso, were insistent disciplinarians. But the bombing seemed to unnerve even them. “You could see they were worried. They showed it,” said John Wisecup, who was there briefly before returning from Thailand to Singapore with the rest of H Force. “We started worrying too as to what they’re going to do with us. But you threw it off in the back of your mind. You’re so goddamned tired and hungry and disgusted that, I don’t know, it didn’t worry you that much. You knew that it was in the cards for them to do you in.”

Talk among prisoners was alarmingly persistent that a landing by Allied troops would force the Japanese to kill all the prisoners in their care. According to Pinky King, the guards often threatened that if they were going to die, they would take their prisoners with them. At Kanburi, Eddie Fung noticed the machine gun emplacements around the camp, ostensibly installed for antiaircraft defense. “They had been very casual about guarding us. We began hearing rumors that there might be a wholesale slaughter.” At Tamarkan, too, prisoners noticed one day that the Japanese seemed to have turned their antiaircraft guns in toward the camp.

According to documentation produced after the war, the commanding general of the Sixteenth Imperial Japanese Army instructed his troops that prisoners of war were fair game for killing. Troops were advised to kill “cautiously and circumspectly, with no policemen or civilians to witness the scene, and care must be taken to do it in a remote place and leave no evidence.” Orders traced to a Kempeitai unit and dated April 3–21, 1944, stated, “When prisoners are taken, those who are not worth utilizing shall be disposed of immediately…. Surrenderors found to be malicious after the interrogations performed on them…will be immediately killed in secret and will be disposed of so as not to excite public feeling.” A secret Imperial Japanese Navy document dated March 20, 1943, read, “Do not stop with the sinking of enemy ships and cargoes; at the same time that you carry out the complete destruction of the crews of the enemy’s ships, if possible, seize part of the crew and endeavor to secure information.”

Unbeknownst to the POWs, on August 1, 1944, a declaration
had been issued by the Japanese War Ministry granting local camp commanders discretion to execute all Allied prisoners of war. Throughout their tenure on the Death Railway, the men had acclimated themselves to the risk of death as an element of daily living. Any number of offenses could get a man executed in the struggle to stay alive. Now the act of survival itself could be an offense that carried a death sentence.

The written document referencing a liquidation of the POW population was not a direct order but a clarification of some earlier policy guideline issued at the request of a prison camp commander in Formosa. According to author Linda Goetz Holmes, the war minister who wrote it did not actually have the authority to issue orders. Nonetheless, the chilling implications of the memo evoked the worst horrors of the worldwide Axis rampage. It stated, “Although the basic aim is to act under superior orders, individual disposition may be made in the following circumstances.” It allowed a commander to make a “final disposition”—that is, “to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces”—if there was an uprising, or if he feared prisoners might escape and become a hostile fighting force. This falls short of proving an actual order to kill Allied prisoners, but in the context of what the POWs were hearing from their own camp guards, it supports the idea that the possibility of a mass slaughter was more than idle chatter.

T
he spirit of the
Houston
—the faith of the city’s people, the fruit of their finances, and the volunteer gusto of their adult sons—was making rapid progress toward saving the vessel’s lost crewmen. The U.S. Fifth Fleet, including the new
Houston
and the
New Orleans,
embarking Lt. (jg) Hal Rooks, liberated the Mariana Islands in mid-June, taking down most of Japan’s carrier airpower in the so-called Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. Three months later the two cruisers supported the landings in the Palaus as the Marines seized Peleliu. In October they joined Adm. William F. Halsey Jr. in the Third Fleet’s audacious carrier raids on Formosa. In the counterattacks by Japanese land-based planes that followed, the new
Houston
joined both her lost namesake and the
New Orleans
in their terrible acquaintance with Japanese torpedoes.

Like the heavy cruiser USS
Canberra
(CA-70) the day before, the
Houston
was struck by an aerial torpedo and left dead in the water, in grave danger of sinking. Taken in tow by other warships, a risky proposition so close to enemy air bases, the two cruisers were towed to rear areas at a gingerly four-knot pace, on the verge of sinking the whole way. With their ships playing the unwelcome role of magnets to further attacks, Third Fleet wags called the damaged cruisers “BaitDiv,” a play on the Navy shorthand “BatDiv” for a battleship
division. The joking ended on October 16, when Japanese planes hit the
Houston
again. With the ship staggered by a second aerial torpedo, only her crew’s determined damage-control work kept her from joining old CA-30 below the waves. Nearly two weeks later, against all odds, she reached the fleet base at Ulithi.

Though the fate of prisoners would remain an open question until surrender was secured, the war between navies was essentially over. In 1943 and 1944, American industry built 25 cruisers to Japan’s 5, 202 destroyers to Japan’s 36, and 22 fleet carriers to Japan’s 7. In merchant ship construction, the disparity was even more pronounced, with U.S. factories turning out nearly ten times Japan’s tonnage in that same two-year period. By the end of 1944 American factories had produced a total of 300,000 planes during the war. Japan had managed about one-sixth of that.

It was the gross mismatch in aircraft production that enabled John Wisecup, convalescing at Changi after his ordeal in Thailand, to pull a morsel of hope from the air and keep up his struggle of will against his captors. He was working outside splitting logs when someone told him to hit the ground. “And you know,
whoosh!
We look up and, Christ, here they come—about four of them. They’re not more than a hundred feet high, and they buzzed us…. I said, ‘Boy, it ain’t going to be long.’”

That feeling was becoming evident all through Japan’s faltering Pacific imperium. The first B-29 flew a reconnaissance mission over Tokyo on November 1, 1944, heralding far worse to come. Weekly, then daily, then three and four times daily, bombers of the American Twentieth Air Force ranged freely through Japanese skies, each loaded with more than seven tons of explosives, high explosive and incendiary alike. From November to the war’s end, they would drop 157,000 tons of bombs on the home islands. By optimistic estimates, the Twentieth would by the end of 1945 have built the capacity to deliver over half of that ten-month expenditure of bombs within a single month.

Duly nervous, the guards taunted prisoners with boasts of Japan’s supposed triumphs. But the falsities were easy to tease out, and thus too the desperation that underlay them. “Bombed San Francisco,” a guard would assert. Knowing the provenance of his captives, he would continue, “Bombed Amarillo,” or, “Bombed Decatur.” In the end language barriers and a poor sense of North American geography betrayed the lie. The absurdities mounted. When one of the
Americans finally responded, “Oh, bullshit!” a guard said, “Bombed Bullshit!”

A
fter a year in the Burma jungle, Otto Schwarz, Howard Charles, Robbie Robinson, and more than a hundred other Americans were shipped to Saigon, which they all expected to be a way station for an eventual shipment to Japan. There they enjoyed the relatively light, opportunity-laden work of unloading barges on the city’s vast waterfront, among many other assignments at airfields, railways, and radio stations. North of Saigon, in a resort area once popular with wealthy Frenchmen, the Japanese were digging a tunnel network similar to the defensive system they had built in Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. But with American B-24s on the prowl, the trains that hauled the prisoners to work sites had to move in fitful sprints, racing from tunnel to tunnel trying to avoid air attack. “There wasn’t an engine on that railroad that wasn’t filled with bullet holes,” Schwarz said.