Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [126]
The kilo camps, built in advance by parties of romusha, were of primitive design, consisting of several long, open-sided bamboo huts roofed with interwoven palm leaves—nepa, sugo, or coconut; atap, they called it. There was no metal in their construction, no nails or other hardware. The bamboo joints were fastened with strips of bark. A door at one end opened into a dirt center aisle on either side of which was a six-foot-deep sleeping platform made from bamboo branches. There were about a hundred men per barracks.
Each man got a one-by-two-meter-long bamboo platform for personal space. They slept shoulder to shoulder, ate there, stashed their stolen possessions there. Rough-hewn though this life was, it was, at first, far more tolerable than the hell ships. A contingent of twelve to fifteen guards and Japanese Army engineers lived in their own hut across camp. The guards who oversaw the individual camps made it abundantly clear, as Colonel Nagatomo himself did, that death was the penalty for escape. The camps had no discernible perimeter. No walls were needed. The surrounding jungle was its own prison. The tall trees, dense bamboo undergrowth, and predatory animals were as confining as a concertina-topped fence with guard towers.
With the survey done and elevations calculated, the Japanese engineers stretched lines from tree to tree, marking sections of earth to be cut and others to be filled, and the prisoners got to work decapitating hills and filling ravines to lay the embankment of the railway. In the early going, cutting and filling were the principal tasks. The Japanese gave them all the work they could handle and more. The engineers set a daily quota of dirt for each prisoner to dig. At the beginning of the project it was one cubic meter per day. This turned out to be far more work than it might first have seemed. The men had not only to dig the dirt at the cutting site but also load it and carry it to a corresponding area needing a fill.
During the dry season, in the coastal foothills, the work was as easy as it would get. They shoveled and dumped, shoveled and dumped, loading sacks that were suspended from long poles and hauled to whatever depression or ravine needed filling. The poles, known as yo-ho poles for the rhythmic chants the native workers sang while working with them, were long bamboo rods from which hung a rice cloth sack large enough to hold several bucketfuls of earth. Each end of the springy pole, whose bounce seemed to make it easier to bear the loads, was carried by a prisoner. They would march several hundred yards with a fully laden yo-ho pole straining from their shoulders, spill and fill, and march back to do it again.
“You might spend a whole month making one fill in one place,” said Houston sailor Howard Brooks. “There were relatively short distances. But there might be stones close by where you start breaking up stones and putting fill in, putting stones on top for the ties you’re going to lay on it. You might do that and then you might do it in reverse another place. Then you might leave and go on down to the next camp and start the same thing over again.”
The cuts could be 150 yards long and sixty to eighty feet deep. “There was a lot of rock—a tremendous amount of rock—that you had to go through, and this was all done by hand,” Gus Forsman said. The scope of the work didn’t bow them. There was almost always immediately to hand a smaller objective, a quota enforced with the rod, to concentrate their minds.
Their tools were primitive when they had tools at all. There were no bulldozers or bucket loaders, no graders. The prisoners were all