Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [114]
CHAPTER 33
The harbor was a ruin, littered with hulks of bombed-out British ships. All along the wharf lay huge piles of scrap iron—steel plates from dismantled oil tanks, automobile chassis squashed flat. “Once again,” Rohan Rivett observed, “as in Batavia, one felt as if a blight were hanging over the city.”
Both of the main groups had the same experience on arriving. Loaded on trucks near the dock, they were convoyed through Singapore’s central city and then out into the countryside. Soon a fortresslike stone structure was visible, situated on scenic heights overlooking the city from the northeast. Known as Changi, this district of the island was the onetime home of a Royal Army garrison. The turreted gray stone edifice, the Changi Jail, was its signature structure. It was the most forbidding prison Charley Pryor had ever seen. When the trucks stopped in front of it, he asked himself, “Oh my God, what in the world have I done to deserve this?” But a mistake had been made. Before Pryor knew it, the Japanese were loading their prisoners back onto the trucks and taking them to the garrison barracks. These long barracks and smaller administrative buildings in the landscaped district were pleasant, picturesque even, with trees arranged in a neat layout. The barracks were mostly stripped bare, but there were a few bed frames and even some mattresses. The exhausted prisoners flopped down and sacked out.
Singapore was known as Great Britain’s Gibraltar of the East before it collapsed and capitulated like the Batavia of the North. Now the Japanese, rudely ignoring propaganda about Singapore’s invincibility, had imprisoned the British in their own fortress.
A total of about fifty thousand Allied prisoners were in Singapore, including thirteen thousand Australians and a small minority of about eight hundred Americans. Among them was a young British private named James Clavell, whose eventual novel King Rat would be based on his experience as a Singapore POW. “Changi was a school for survivors,” he would write. “It gave me a strength most people don’t have…. Changi became my university instead of my prison.” Observing the landscaped idyll of their surroundings and the cock-of-the-walk sureness of the British officer corps nominally administering it, the Houston sailors could never quite fathom Changi. “It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Otto Schwarz. “These guys acted as if they were on regimental maneuvers.”
The British had had eight months since February 15, 1942, to acclimate themselves to captivity. Though their pride was wounded, they were on the surface still in charge, brightly so and with bucked-up spirits. Save for the daily tenkos and the occasional presence of Sikh soldiers who had turned coat and served the emperor, scarcely a Japanese soldier or guard was in sight. Howard Charles asked himself, “Why don’t they make a run for the wall? They could make it; just by sheer numbers they could overwhelm these guards and go somewhere…. I remember asking a few of them that, and they just looked at me with a cold stare, like, ‘You’ve got to be out of your head.’” Everyday life as prisoners at Singapore had the aura of an absurd dream: the posturing of the British, pretending at command; the Japanese, lurking unseen like puppeteers; the manicured enclave turning dingy under occupation; creeping hunger blanching any illusion of order and civilization; the future, clouded in doubt.
At Changi the Allied prisoners would learn to count their blessings. Contrary to myth, Changi was no death camp. There was time for leisure when the light work of clearing the district’s rubber plantation and stevedoring