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By Root 1685 0

the sun is shining.” Where they went first was back into the steel confines of another hell ship. When Colonel Tharp’s group boarded the decrepit Dai Moji Maru about fifty Americans stayed behind at Changi. John Wisecup, Paul Papish, and Robbie Robinson were among those kept behind for reasons of ill health and placed under the nominal command of the lone American officer left with them, Marine 2nd Lt. Edward Miles Barrett. On January 11, the rest of them headed for sea. A second ship, the Nichimei Maru, embarked fifteen hundred Dutchmen and five hundred Japanese engineers whose services were needed somewhere in the north. The two freighters were escorted by a small corvette that looked like a large pleasure craft with a three-inch gun mounted astern. The little convoy settled on a northwesterly course through the Straits of Malacca.

At daybreak on January 15, 1943, the ships neared the Gulf of Martaban near Rangoon. Up on the main deck, Sgt. Luther Prunty was bulling around with two other Lost Battalion sergeants, trying to figure out where they were headed. Rumors had it they were just a day or so from making port. Having judged that they were well clear of Malayan waters, Prunty said, “Well, we ought to be out of the danger zone.” Sgt. Julius B. Heinen Jr. figured the exact opposite. The closer they got to India, he said, the closer they would be to Japanese airfields. Then Heinen said, “Just incidentally, if you’ll look up in the sky right over there right now, you’re going to see three planes, and I’m going to bet you that they’re ours. Prunty, those damn planes are going to make a run on these ships!”

As the aircraft approached, Charley Pryor was in the Dai Moji Maru’s after cargo hold, directly below the open topside hatch, watching some guys play a card game they called “Stateside Poker.” It was a variation common among prisoners. Bidding was vigorous but debts were deferred—kept careful track of, but not paid—until they returned to the States after the war. Under the circumstances it might as well have been called “Bright Side Poker.” A series of deep, muffled explosions shook the ship, putting an end to the card game. “We heard this tremendous whomp whomp whomp and couldn’t imagine what the Sam Hill it was,” Pryor said, “but I just looked up through there, and I see this great silver airplane with four motors.”

There were three of them. As the big B-24 Liberator bombers vectored in at about twelve thousand feet to make their bomb runs, hysteria gripped the Dai Moji Maru. Japanese soldiers up on deck fired their rifles at the planes and struggled to unlimber the two French-built, wooden-wheeled seventy-five-millimeter field guns tied down on wooden platforms fore and aft. Sergeant Heinen ordered all prisoners on deck to return to the hold. He told them to take off their shoes, tie them together and hang on. “Just don’t panic. Don’t get in an uproar,” he said. He yelled down to Ens. Charles D. Smith and swapped places with him. Tracking these bombers from a ship called for a naval officer’s talents. Heinen took charge of the men in the hold and Smith climbed topside.

The aircraft that found them early that morning were part of a flight of six B-24D Liberators operating from an Indian airdrome called Pandaveswar, well hidden in the countryside about a hundred miles northwest of Calcutta. Fanning out over the Gulf of Martaban hunting Japanese shipping, three of those planes found the POW convoy about fifty miles off the Burma coast, near Tavoy.

The Dai Moji Maru was an underpowered old bucket, saddled with a full load of coal and capable of only about six knots. With their limited elevation, her two field guns, one mounted fore and the other aft, were poorly suited to antiaircraft defense. But as the B-24s lumbered in, the Japanese gun crews untied their deck cables, tracked the planes, and opened fire. The old marus made difficult targets. Their captains began circling on contact with the bombers.

A Liberator nicknamed “Captain and the Kids,” piloted by Capt. William A. Delahay, droned overhead and dropped four