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By Root 1629 0

by midday. Little did they appreciate at first that their efficiency would work against them. “The prisoners worked in a rather foolish fashion against the advice of the officers,” Ens. Charles D. Smith wrote, “racing through their work to try to finish early so they could return to camp and have more time off for themselves.” That might have been a good strategy so long as your overseers were U.S. Navy boatswains. On the Burma-Thailand Railway, the Japanese were not in the business of granting privileges or giving breaks. They just raised the quotas to match the prisoners’ evident capacity: one and a half, two, three cubic meters a day. Because the Japanese relied on POW officers as go-betweens, they were exempt from the work details. When the enlisted men went out to the line, the officers stayed in their huts. Part of it was to be expected. They had earned the privilege not to work.

As the rail embankment stretched into the hills, the prisoners grew distant from the semblance of civilization that could be found at the Thanbyuzayat base camp. Brigadier Varley’s diary refers to tennis and soccer tournaments being played there as late as March 1943. Colonel Nagatomo presented the prizes. Concerts were permitted after working hours and on rest days. Perhaps remembering Freddie Quick’s star turn in Changi, and his defiance at 40 Kilo Camp, the Japanese required that the playlist be approved in advance, and they forbade nationalistic tunes.

Uncertain omens played at the prisoners’ hopes and fears. On February 12, prisoners at Thanbyuzayat could hear a series of distant detonations. As the guard was increased and POWs confined to huts, rumors passed that Moulmein had been bombed, though drivers traveling up from the port town disputed it. There was speculation that Allied bombers might have attacked ships off the coast. Meanwhile, as the base hospital was filling with growing numbers of no-duty sick, the epidemiological picture took a dramatic turn for the worse. Word arrived that far up the line, as far out as 80 Kilo and 85 Kilo Camps, cholera had broken out. The news chilled the spine of every thinking man. In the absence of the right treatments, the disease could kill a healthy man nearly overnight. Near the end of February, the Houston’s Dr. Epstein was sent up from base camp to continue to look after Branch Five, and soon thereafter Brigadier Varley asked that Epstein and six Australian and Dutch doctors head even farther up-country to take over the new field hospital at 30 Kilo Camp. The monsoon season was coming, and when its rains began washing down it would become impossible to move the sick all the way back to the base hospital.

As if the medical news were not bad enough, the first week of March saw, for the first time, Allied aircraft over Thanbyuzayat. On March 1, three twin-engine bombers appeared, circling the camp and the railway yards at five thousand feet. The planes dropped flares north and south of the camp, then unloaded their bombs on unknown targets to the north. The Korean guards panicked at the sight of the planes. Fixing bayonets, they confined prisoners to their huts once again and scrambled down into the slit trenches around the camp, a privilege denied to the prisoners who had dug them. The appearance of the bombers seemed to have an effect on the camp’s Japanese leadership as well. The next time a fresh group of prisoners of war arrived at the base camp, Colonel Nagatomo was there to greet them. This time, however, he read only portions of his grand stump speech. It seemed to Brigadier Varley that some of the pomp had gone out of his circumstance.

CHAPTER 40

Sinuous and halting, the emergent railway crept up the mountain, moving in contractions and dilations like a vast segmented worm. Alive with the movements of thousands of feet and hands, it grew from the earth, writhing across Burma’s gentle lowland foothills and plains and entering a land of steep, jungled rises and rocky barriers around rivers.

By the end of March 1943, the mobile track-laying parties had spiked down meter-gauge