Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [129]
The jungle’s contagions afflicted the Americans in Branch Three especially hard, because they had none of their own medics with them. When Drs. Epstein and Burroughs from the Houston and Captain Lumpkin from the Lost Battalion arrived in January and went upcountry with Branch Five, they had little contact with the other group. Treatments were seldom ever more elaborate than a damp cloth over the head. “A little quinine would have saved a lot of lives,” said Otto Schwarz. “We were very rarely given it, just once in a blue moon.” At Thanbyuzayat, Nagatomo’s headquarters camp, was a reasonably well-equipped field hospital, but it was a prohibitive distance from the work sites where the weakest prisoners fell, far up the line.
The pace of work on the line was driven by many things that the Japanese could control—rifle butts on bones, the withholding of rations and medicines—and slowed by the never-predictable patterns of sickness. Looming behind all those variables was the knowledge that in a few short months, by April or May, the monsoon season was going to multiply the difficulty of every task. There was pressure to get the embankment laid quickly so that grass and other vegetation could grow through it before the seasonal torrents picked it apart.
The disease-ripe jungle would have posed a challenge to Western medicine even under ideal sanitary conditions. Without instruments and manufactured pharmaceuticals close at hand, the best Allied doctors were helpless. In the jungle, these shortages could turn even the smallest of wounds into death sentences.
Two Lost Battalion officers, Capt. Arch Fitzsimmons and Lt. Jimmy Lattimore, having heard that a group of Dutch physicians was based farther down the line, went to the Japanese and begged them to order one of them to join Branch Three. Just one would make the difference between life and death. They offered their watches as a bribe. As it would turn out, a gifted Dutch doctor had heard of their plight and was asking for them in turn. In April, a doctor whom some of the Americans in Branch Three had met in Singapore showed up at 40 Kilo Camp to join them as their on-site medical caretaker. His name was Henri Hekking.
Howard Charles remembered seeing Hekking back at Changi, gathered with Allied officers in one of the stucco barracks, rehashing the fall of the Dutch East Indies. Born in Surabaya to Dutch parents, Hekking felt indeed that they were his islands. It was his grandmother, a committed herbalist and healer, who set him on the path of studying native medicine. When he was sixteen, his father’s work took him back to the Netherlands. Though he didn’t want to leave, Hekking went there to study medicine on a Dutch army stipend, then paid for his training with a ten-year term of service that took him back to the East Indies as a medical officer in the colonial army. There Hekking continued pursuing his grandmother’s art, first at Batavia, then at a hospital in the Celebes, and finally, before his capture, at the hospital on Timor. When the Japanese seized Timor and took him prisoner, it marked the end of his fulfillment of his promise to his oma that he would return and use his skills to help the natives of his homeland.
On his arrival at 40 Kilo Camp, Hekking introduced himself to the camp commander, Major Yamada. After exchanging niceties, the Dutchman told Yamada, “I wish to speak to you about food. The men will need meat.”
“No meat,” Yamada replied. “Later, Nippon kill water buffalo. Boom-boom. Understand-kah?”
Hekking was not bowed. “The men must have meat and citrus—fruit, any kind of fruit.”
“No fruit,” the major said.
The flat denials moved Hekking to appeal to the Japanese officer’s self-interest. He knew Yamada had a tight deadline to complete his segment of the railway. He took a new tack. “As a doctor, I must warn you that if you do not provide protein and citrus, these men will soon become sick, and if they become sick, how do you