Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [130]
Yamada darkened. He asked: “You warn me, Captain?”
“Yes, I—” Hekking offered, before he found himself reeling backward from the blow he never saw coming. As Hekking found his balance and clutched his face, Yamada shouted, “You do not warn me, Doctor! I warn you! You will speak no more of food!” Yamada ordered a roll call, mustering the prisoners before him. Then he began a speech that was an angrier, more threatening version of the address his superior, Colonel Nagatomo, had given the prisoners at Thanbyuzayat. As Charles recalled it:
Prisoners were worthless driftwood washed ashore on the tide, he said. In Japan, one who surrendered to the enemy was worse than worthless, he was dead, for all practical purposes. He could never go home again, members of his family were disgraced, his offspring would suffer for many generations. But we were lucky: the railroad gave us the opportunity to redeem ourselves.
Yamada was just getting to the part about how his segment of the railway line would be built better and more quickly than any other when a voice began to sing. It was Freddie Quick, doing a reprise of his turn at Changi singing “God Bless America.” His voice, Charles wrote, was “a beautiful baritone, challenging [Yamada], mocking everything he stood for.”
The Japanese major’s face went crimson as he scanned the ranks for the offender, found him, and shouted for him to stop singing. Two guards seized Quick and pulled him in front of Yamada. The guards tied his hands behind his back, then, wielding bamboo poles three inches in diameter, began pounding him over the head. On demand, the bleeding Marine repeated his name, rank, and serial number, each time weaker than the last. He was made to kneel, with another pole behind his knees. The guards kept working on him, lifting and pummeling, the thick bamboo shaft whistling down and cracking him atop the head, his legs numb and starved for blood. “Stop!” Henri Hekking shouted. “You will kill that man.” The physician felt a crushing weight in his midsection—a rifle butt. The bamboo continued to fall on Quick. The guards relented only when finally he pitched forward, unconscious.
Jim Gee, Howard Charles, and some others hauled the unconscious Marine to a hut and laid him on the bamboo platform. “Is he gonna live?” someone asked. Examining the gash in his head, Hekking said, “Oh, yes. I would sew this up if I had some way to disinfect it.” He said he needed a suture, some thread, and some cloth. Jim Gee volunteered to get some water boiled and, for a cloth, offered the shirt off his back.
The Lost Battalion’s Lieutenant Lattimore, installed by Major Yamada as the food and supply officer at 40 Kilo Camp, confronted the Japanese officer one day about the inadequacy of their daily ration. The Japanese had informed Lattimore that working prisoners were to get a ration of five hundred to eight hundred grams of rice each day. In actuality, they were getting half that. The rice was “rotten and unusable, all of a grade the natives usually fed to cattle,” Howard Charles wrote. Hekking realized that the prisoners were contributing to the problem by washing their rice. He insisted they stop. The “gray rice” they were served—dirty floor sweepings with a certain proportion of bugs and other foreign garnishments—was in fact an important source of vitamins and protein. They were supposed to receive 125 grams of meat. There was none to be had—and whenever there was a windfall, say if a water buffalo was killed, the guards always took the steak. Prisoners were supposed to get 250 grams of vegetables, but this came in the form of melon, full of water and with little caloric content to fuel a working man’s metabolism. As the Lost Battalion’s talented medical officer, Capt. Hugh Lumpkin, would tell an interpreter with Branch Five, based farther down the line, “Melons were only hog feed in the States.”
Jimmy Lattimore was small of build and modest of mien, but he never had any trouble standing up for his men, no matter how many times his spectacles were sent flying. According