Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [136]
With pilings driven, trusses were next, installed from piling to piling, fastened with nails where possible but more often simply tied with vines, until the rail bed reached the opposite bank at the proper elevation. Bridges crossing the larger streams in hillier terrain sometimes required several decks of wooden pilings, one standing on top of the other. “It worked,” said Luther Prunty of the Lost Battalion. “It seemed impossible, but it worked…. It wasn’t so hard once you got the hang of it. It was just like marching…. There’s nothing that manpower can’t substitute for.”
CHAPTER 41
The first American had yet to fall when the men of Branch Three, laying rails, reached 23 Kilo Camp. Up to that point, that camp had been home only to Burmese romusha, and the condition of the camp showed it. It was evident why scores of thousands of the native slaves would die. It had to do not with their constitution or their knowledge of the region, but with their lack of discipline in maintaining proper hygiene. Wholly unprepared to survive in a disease-ridden aboriginal wasteland, though they were natives, the throng that died was unmeasurably large. Many responsible estimates approach a hundred thousand. It would become a human tragedy whose intensity and scale grew as the rail reached toward the mountains from each end. If anything put the lie to the rhetoric of a Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, it was in the atrocious mass crime that Japan perpetrated on its workforce of conscripts.
In the native-type huts, lice infestation was rampant and there was never enough boiled water to scald the floors clean. For the prisoners, there was never any choice about attending to the vital business of sanitation. Otto Schwarz said, “As we would go into a new working camp, the first thing anybody did was dig a couple of fire pits, put in the fifty-five-gallon drums, fill them with water, and get the water hot. Before you got your rice, you had to get in line and dip your mess kit or coconut shell in the hot water. Blowflies were all over everything. And that’s what carried dysentery.
“We kept our structure. We had our officers, our NCO’s—our chain of command was kept intact. We always dug big ditches and put bamboo across the tops, so we could perch and do our business…. But if you went into a native camp, they’d have families of natives there on the railroad to work, but no leaders, no bosses, and no sanitation whatever. Feces were all over the place. They crapped wherever they stood. When they died, they lay there and rotted away. Disease ran rampant in those camps.”
Faithful adherence to simple procedures—such as dipping mess kits in boiling water before eating—made all the difference. “If a passing fly chose to step into your rice ration as it was about to be eaten, there was no alternative but to throw the lot into the fire and go without,” wrote Ronald Searle, a Royal Army sapper captured at Singapore. “Although such a gesture was dramatic for a starving man, there could be no hesitation.” Survival meant continued deprivation. “There were times when most of us felt that perhaps those chums who had encountered The Curse of the Fly’s Footprint were the fortunate ones.”
Hygiene, health, and morale stood in symbiotic linkage. If the prisoners in a camp got careless with the first, the other two collapsed in turn. One sip from a tempting but bacteria-hosting wayside pool, a lack of religiosity in boiling one’s mess kit, failure to see that upstream from one’s bathing area was another pool used by the dysentery-prone—a single slip ensured that a bad life would grow far worse in a hurry. Dr. Fisher already had