Ship of Ghosts (59 page)

Bartlett had plenty else to do. All through June, his native right-hand man, Pow Khamourai, had been watching the Phet Buri camp and its nearby Tayang airfield and radioing reports of its assets and personnel directly to Ceylon. Much of the reporting by other Thai agents was deemed “lamentable.” Although the OSS had to risk operational security by transmitting instructions to Pow—explanations of what radar was and what the installations looked like—his detailed reporting was considered excellent. In early July, he discovered and reported the presence of Americans among the prisoners at Tayang. Rumors of American prisoners nearby had been circulating for a while. Some of Betty’s men found an Australian
POW who mentioned having been with survivors of the USS
Houston
out in the jungle somewhere. He described how bombers attacked the big bridge, and how the Japanese drove the prisoners under it for cover.

In Bangkok, Pow visited Nicol Smith and told him about his discovery outside Phet Buri: “Things are getting hot down there. Lots of Japs.” Though Operation Pattern hadn’t yet been compromised, there had been scares. Once, Pow was confronted with a pair of Japanese soldiers near the camp, “heading straight for it like a couple of homing pigeons,” he said. “If we hadn’t ambushed them, nothing could have stopped them from blowing the show.” Smith asked him what he had done with the bodies. “Buried them in the woods,” Pow replied. “The only trouble is that several others have dropped out of sight lately in the same way, and we’re afraid the Jap commander suspects why.”

When Bartlett learned of the U.S. prisoners so close to his camp, he ordered two of his men to try to contact them, to encourage their escape and arrange a rendezvous. When Huffman and Harris made their break, it was a Free Thai Army patrol from Pattern camp that led them through the jungle to the OSS major. “Upon their arrival,” Bartlett wrote, “a runner came and informed me that they had two Americans. I sent an armed guard of four men to pick them up and bring them to camp.” At midday on July 27, the Morse transmitter at Bartlett’s field station sent the following high-pitched stutter into the ether: “
I have two prisoners of war with me. Names are James W. Huffman Navy and Lanson H. Harris. Both are in good condition…. Please notify their folks…. Please send PX and smokes soonest
.”

With escapees to look after, the difficult supply situation Bartlett faced couldn’t have come at a worse time. Since arriving in-country Bartlett hadn’t received a single package of food. The airlift embargo angered him, especially because he had seen with his own eyes the drops B-24s were making to a Thai army camp nearby. Not that Huffman and Harris much noticed the shortage of rations. They were glad to be put to work in the mess, taking turns directing the preparation of whatever the Thais brought in from the jungle. It was the best duty they had had in more than three years.

Bartlett interrogated them, but gingerly. “He would get us apart,” Red Huffman said. “You’d never know when he was going to ask a
question. All of a sudden he’d turn around and ask you something. We gave him more information than he had ever had. We told him everything we knew. He was making sure he was getting the truth. Then he would have his radioman radio it to India.” Soon after their arrival, Huffman and Harris were joined at Pattern camp by two English prisoners and an Australian. A much larger catch was in the offing. Bartlett informed Kandy that Tayang held 1,500 prisoners, had no planes, stored 25,000 gallons of gas, housed three radio stations but no radio direction-finding equipment, and had heavy machine guns but no larger antiaircraft emplacements. The information coming from the two Americans was voluminous. “
What particular information do you want me to find out
?” Bartlett asked headquarters. “
Would take a day to send all they have told us
.”

Kandy responded the next day that it wanted the names of the
Houston
’s survivors, information about their condition, the location of prison camps, the total numbers of prisoners, how the Japanese guarded them, evidence of their cruelty, information about their attitudes toward war, specific conversations between POWs and guards, how the fall of Okinawa was influencing Japanese treatment of POWs, and how enemy morale might be lowered through propaganda.

One time Bartlett turned to Huffman and asked, “Would you sneak back into camp and warn them and tell them I’m coming?” It was a preposterous suggestion. Huffman refused the request in no uncertain terms. “Neither one of us would go, because we’d been prisoners for three and a half years almost,” he said. Nevertheless, Harris and Huffman and their three Allied friends seriously weighed the option of reengaging with their enemy. In a July 28 radio transmission, Bartlett reported to Ceylon: “
Have told them they would be [exfiltrated] soonest. Their own words quote Let us stay here and have a crack at those GD Japs unquote. This feeling exists with all five and they all are studying our weapons
.”

They did some celebrating too. After the sailors’ safe arrival at Pattern, there was a jungle feast in their honor. The main dish was monkey. Though the Americans declined the proffered plates, they had their fill of Hershey bars. Huffman broke out his two canteens and the ex-prisoners got “all hooched up” on the stout rice wine.
Huffman offered Bartlett a shot of it, but it seems the OSS man preferred scotch.

The most coveted treasure that the sailors turned over to Bartlett was the roster of
Houston
personnel, living and dead, kept by John Reas and John Harrell. With the disclosure of this priceless record, scores of families would finally know their loved ones’ fates. On July 29 the information that Fred Hodge and so many others had tried for years to ferret out began flowing as beeps from a portable transmitter hidden deep in the Thai jungle. The bursts of secret knowledge—a roster of lost names, from “
Agin, G. L
.” to “
Zabler, W. E
.”—filled Pattern’s outgoing Morse bandwidth for nearly a week. It was not until August 5 that Major Bartlett’s radioman hand-keyed the last of the dots and dashes representing the 301 names on the list. Two days later he started sending a shorter list: the names of sixty-three of the seventy-seven
Houston
men who had met their end as prisoners of war. From that point on, Bartlett’s mission was to ensure that as few names as possible were added to the roster of fatalities. The resourceful commander of Pattern camp began to figure out what he could do for the rest of the prisoners at the Tayang airfield.

A
ll our men are bang-happy and would give their eyeteeth to begin an extensive sabotage campaign against the Japs.” So said Capt. Bud Grassi, head of the OSS base near Kanchanaburi, to Nicol Smith. He was chafing under the firm policy that blocked him from conducting overt actions of his own and forced him to rely instead on native proxies. “It’s damned hard to take when Thais come to us with explosives that they have slipped out of Jap supply dumps. I can’t help thinking how easy it would be to leave a few time pencils in these dumps, and no one would ever know what caused the explosions. We can also cut the Burma-Bangkok Railroad at innumerable places.

“Another thing the fellows are anxious to get at is rescuing the two thousand American, British, Australian and Dutch prisoners in the POW camp near Kanburi before the Japs kill them all off.”

The people who ran OSS Detachment 404 channeled the joy they felt on locating survivors of the Houston into planning their exfiltration and eventual homecoming as soon as possible. There were several possible avenues—by PBY Catalina flying boat from the southern coast of Thailand near Prachuab; by boat from the coast up to Bangkok, then up to the OSS main airfield at Pukeo; or via a
single-engine Lysander flown directly from Tayang to Rangoon, then to Kandy or Calcutta. Bartlett’s men reconnoitered Tayang in case the last option was chosen. Evaluating the airfield’s security level and obstacles to approach, the major recommended a dawn or dusk landing.

“The only difficulty anticipated in the arrangement to date has been the openly expressed preference of the two rescued seamen to ‘stay here and have a crack at those GD Japs,’” Bartlett wrote. “It is probable that circumstances will compel this wish to be denied them.”

If the British were to be believed, the Royal Army was planning an invasion of Thailand in November. Accordingly, Washington had urged the OSS leadership, “Keep cautioning [your agents] against overt action before Mountbatten strikes.”

Inexorably the course was set for the war in the Pacific to end. By the middle of 1945, Okinawa had been taken, the last of the Japanese navy’s strength extinguished. American aircraft ruled the skies. Grand plans were afoot to combine all of America’s combat forces—almost everything already in the Pacific and whatever else could be brought over from liberated Europe—and throw it all against the Japanese home islands in a final strategic offensive, known as Operation Downfall. Free Thailand would contribute what it could. At Sattahip Bay, southeast of Bangkok, its small coastal fleet stood at the Allies’ disposal. There were ten torpedo boats, four large gunboats, four submarines, and fifteen seaplanes. Several of those craft could operate as far south as Singapore, or even east to the Philippines. Though the supply of oil limited their radius, more was available on a black market fed by Japanese soldiers more than willing to steal it from their depots.

But a more imposing exhibition of naval power had already struck Japan’s home islands. On the morning of July 14, as Lanson Harris and Red Huffman were slipping through the jungle toward their rendezvous with the OSS, the fast battleships
South Dakota, Indiana,
and
Massachusetts,
with the new heavy cruisers
Chicago
and
Quincy,
took station off Kamaishi, site of a great iron and steel works that adjoined the prison camp at Ohasi, where many
Houston
men were imprisoned, and trained their turrets inland. At 11:00 the
South Dakota
signaled to her sisters, “N
ever forget
P
earl
H
arbor
.”

At 12:10
p.m
. the main batteries of Rear Adm. John F. Shafroth’s task unit thundered out, hammering the coke ovens, hearths, and
foundries near the prison camps for two hours. It was the first time that American naval gunfire hit the home islands. Over the next few days the bombardment would be joined by five more U.S. fast battleships, plus a British dreadnought, HMS
King George V
. Planes from the Third Fleet swarmed northern Honshu and Hokkaido, striking rail yards, harbors, and ground installations.

Jess Stanbrough was working at the power plant in Ohasi when the American sixteen-inch projectiles began raining down on the nearby camp. After the Tokyo fire raids, he had smelled the incinerated pine. When the bombardment of the Kamaishi ironworks started, he heard the low rumble down the coast. The guards explained that the imperial fleet was conducting gunnery practice. Having acquired a Japanese vocabulary of about five hundred words, Stanbrough and the others weren’t fooled by the bid to save face. They had overheard mine workers conversing over morning tea: “Where were our planes?” “Well, we didn’t see any. All we saw was the Americans.” The Japanese always seemed to be talking about the bombers. Like the Allied attacks by air and from under the sea, the bombardment of Kamaishi claimed Allied lives. According to Stanbrough, “There was a lot of people that had been captured down on Wake Island and so forth in that camp that lost their lives. We had some eighteen or nineteen burn victims out of that. They brought them up to our place to try to do something…. Our medical boys—Navy guys—were over there pulling flesh off of them.”

A season of fevered diplomacy was under way as the Allies stepped up pressure on the Japanese to surrender. On July 26, at Potsdam, Germany, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin put forward a final demand for Japan to end the war via unconditional surrender.

The Japanese would invest some hope in the odd absence of reference to the Soviet Union in the Potsdam Declaration. Soon enough, however, what the Soviets were or were not doing would be of secondary significance. On August 6, a B-29 Superfortress with the name
Enola Gay
stenciled on her fuselage took flight from Tinian and released its epochal payload over the city of Hiroshima. Three days later another atomic device fell on Nagasaki. That same day Admiral Shafroth’s battleships closed with the Japanese mainland and let Kamaishi have it again.

A
t Tayang, near Phet Buri, Lloyd Willey saw a peculiar cloud move across the sky one day. It was like nothing he had ever seen before, streaked with multiple hues—purple, red, and yellow—and moving, it seemed, with unnatural swiftness. One of the Australian prisoners with him, who had taught at Melbourne University, told him that only a godawful explosion could have produced something so exotic.

A marked change had come over the guards. The Japanese ceased their daily routine of raising their flag and gathering in ceremony to bow to the emperor. One day they just stopped doing it. Willey had premonitions of what lay ahead as he joined a work party digging a six-feet-deep moat east of the airfield. “The Japs were very touchy about that moat. They wanted every side to be perfect…. All the dirt that was piled up, they put machine guns on each corner and they told our officers that the moat was to keep the Thais out. They said it was to defend the camp, but we knew the Japs were masters of deceit.”