Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [125]
Such a trial had never confronted American fighting men before. Pressured to perform five years of work in twelve short months, they would be given over to the jungle and left to wrestle it toward civilization. They would contend with all its elements—its hardwoods, rocks, and vines, its predators both mammalian and bacterial, under the lash of their enemy and assault from the elements. The work would harden some and consume others. They would forget all but the most basic memories of home, picking their way through a life in captivity that would become the grist for sleepless nights ever afterward.
CHAPTER 37
How does one build a railway through an impassable jungle? How does one do it without industrial equipment, without hydraulics, steam, or mechanized tools? The task begins with an imperative: that it will be done. It will be done whether people go hungry, suffer disease, or are beaten to death with sticks. The imperative, enforced with martial ruthlessness, drives everything, but it comes with a cost. The Imperial Japanese Army was good at enforcing imperatives, if generally unmoved by the costs.
A railway begins with a survey, a right-of-way, and a cleared path. The path is staked out by engineers and cleared through forests and hills. In mountainous terrain such as the jungles of Burma, the challenge then is to tame that path, to make dangerous, jungle-draped elevations flat and level and passable by train. Long climbing stretches of earth must be leveled, ravines built up, hills knocked down, valleys filled. The railway must be squeezed through gaps between cliffs and rivers, carved as a channel through hard rock, bridged over a river system’s innumerable feeders and estuaries.
Then the path is shoveled up into a raised earth embankment, a base for a layer of broken stones, known as ballast, that allows the embankment to bear a crosshatched layer of wooden ties, or sleepers, and steel rails, and ultimately the weight of the freight trains themselves.
Like a collective embodiment of fabled John Henry in the mine, the prisoners would do with thousands of hands what should have been done by machine. In Burma, those hands were Australian, Dutch, and American. In Thailand, on the southeastern end, they were predominantly British. The British had gotten started in June 1942, just as the Japanese carrier fleet was trounced in the Battle of Midway. By the turn of 1943, as the fight for Guadalcanal was shifting in the Americans’ favor and General MacArthur was beginning the assault on New Guinea, work on the railway was in full swing. News of these victories would take months to reach the prisoners and kindle hope in their souls.
After the men in Fitzsimmons Group were marshaled at the leper’s prison at Moulmein, they were loaded into trucks and driven twenty-six kilometers into the countryside to the site of their first work camp. Since the work camps in Burma were named for their distance in kilometers from the Thanbyuzayat headquarters, this camp was known as 26 Kilo Camp. The Burma half of the railway was loosely structured around these kilo camps, each with its own Japanese commander, sited on the rail right-of-way from Thanbyuzayat (0 Kilo Camp), all the way up to Three Pagodas Pass on the Thai border, or 114 Kilo Camp. It was at 26 Kilo Camp that the story of the Americans on the River Kwai Railway began.
The 191 men of Captain Fitzsimmons’s group were loosely attached to a larger force of three thousand Australian prisoners under the leadership of Brig. Arthur L. Varley of the Australian Army. This group, who gathered at Thanbyuzayat in October, was the nucleus of the construction unit working on the Burma side of the line. The Allies would refer to it as “A Force.” In the Japanese scheme of organization, it was known as the “Number 3 Thai POW Branch” or “Branch Three.”* Its commander was Col. Yoshitida Nagatomo.
The Americans who arrived later, in January on the Dai Moji Maru, were greeted by Colonel Nagatomo and put under separate