Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [123]
Nagatomo’s basic ethos was already emblazoned far more succinctly in German over the gates to concentration camps throughout central and eastern Europe: “Arbeit macht frei,” work brings freedom. Over the backs of the white man the Burma-Siam Express shall ride.
“Thanbyuzayat turned out to be the beginning of a real nightmare,” Jim Gee said. It was the northwestern terminus of one of the most notorious engineering projects in history. The prisoners did not know what awaited them, but they were quick to grasp their isolation. “At that point we learned that life was going to be pretty rugged,” Gee said. “It didn’t take a very educated man to see that conditions in this part of the world were going to be very bad. We knew something about the climate. We knew it had a rainy season, and we knew it had a dry season. We knew that both were severe. And just the thought that we were going to be in the jungles, wearing as few clothes as we had, working under the conditions that we knew and could see the natives work, we knew that we were in for a spell of pretty rough living.”
Howard Charles, who had to this point never really feared the Japanese, heard Nagatomo’s words and felt a chill in his bones. “I knew this guy meant business…. I just had this sinking feeling that this was going to be a bad show, and if we lived through it, we were going to be very lucky.”
Part Four
IN THE JUNGLE OF THE KWAI
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin’, an’ it’s there that I would be—
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
—Rudyard Kipling
“Mandalay” (1892)
CHAPTER 36
It was all about China. A world war engulfed the Pacific because Japan had struggled to subjugate its mainland neighbor. Franklin Roosevelt’s economic sanctions and oil embargo were punishment for Japan’s assault on China, Asia’s keystone in the economic world order. Japan’s earliest offensives in the southwestern Pacific grew from its need for oil to pursue its war on the continent. Now Japan aimed to strangle China by cutting its essential lines of supply from India and Burma, kept open by threadbare British and American armies.
Japan’s ability to fight in Burma was complicated by the predations of an increasingly assertive American submarine force. In the war’s early going the best supply route to Burma was by sea, from the home islands south through the South China Sea, around Singapore, through the Strait of Malacca, and up to Rangoon. Even without a submarine threat the two-thousand-mile journey would have strained the capacity of Japan’s thump-shafted merchant fleet. As the U.S. boats extended their reach, the sea lanes became a prohibitively dangerous gauntlet for the Japanese to run. By May 1942, they had lost sixty-seven ships to Rear Adm. Ralph Christie’s Fremantle-based raiders. In short order Japan’s struggle for Burma required a flow of arms and supplies far larger than its merchant marine could sustain.
The solution to the quandary had been drawn up years earlier: a new railway link between Bangkok and Rangoon. In Burma, well-developed lines already ran from Moulmein south to Ye. In Thailand, tracks extended from Bangkok west to Ban Pong, then turned south to the Malayan border. A great gap, held firm by the mountain ridges and impassable jungle that straddled the border between Burma and Thailand, stood between the two systems. The Japanese calculated that if a link could be forged through the 258-mile-wide gap separating them, a war might be won.
A 1939 report commissioned by the Japanese Army had concluded