Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [138]
Charley Pryor, who had had no trouble with his health when Branch Five started work at 18 Kilo Camp, caught a blowtorch of a fever after the move to 85 Kilo Camp. It laid him flat for more than two weeks. When his fever first spiked, Captain Lumpkin took him off the duty list. The fever wouldn’t break. A week went by, and another week. His temperature hit 107.5 degrees. The Dutch doctors at 85 Kilo, who hadn’t a drop of medicine to give him, puzzled over the fever’s persistence and diagnosed him with cerebral malaria complicated by jungle fever.
Burning up from within, Pryor begged for a wet blanket to be laid over him. With one draped across his body and another one over his head, he was still pushing the mercury to 105 degrees. He was so overheated that his vision blurred. He couldn’t see the jungle canopy a hundred feet above him. He couldn’t keep any water or food down. Once a robust 188 pounds, Pryor had by now withered down to no more than 75—“nothing but the skin stretched over the bones,” he said. After the eighteenth day, the fever broke. The day after the fever left him the Japanese decided to truck him back to Thanbyuzayat. It was April 16 when he was put on a truck with four or five other litter patients and driven down the pothole-laced service road. The jackhammering of the truck bed against his spine had him cursing the driver in four languages. It was a good sign.
Pryor got back to Major Fisher’s base hospital in time to witness the festivities attending the celebration of Emperor Hirohito’s forty-second birthday. The Japanese marked April 29 by producing a propaganda film showing prisoners on the railway cheerfully working in the care of their most merciful captors. They circulated written instructions concerning the production, which was preceded by several days of setup and rehearsals. No-duty prisoners were turned out of the hospital to form an audience for a concert. They carefully rehearsed enjoying it. When Colonel Nagatomo realized the players weren’t fully and properly dressed, he ordered clothing for them. Missing buttons were sewn on in a hurry. A curt order was passed to the prisoners—“You will be happy”—and then the curtain rose and the show began. Guards wheeled in tables laden with fruit and meat. All of a sudden the base hospital had new sinks, racks of real surgical equipment. “It looked like an Army field hospital in there,” Jim Gee said.
Outside, a concert platform was quickly built. Trucks drove to the hospital gate unloading patients, who were then placed on operating tables surrounded by doting Japanese medical personnel. Stocks of food and medicines until now unavailable were piled everywhere, clearly labeled for the cameras. An International Red Cross team was filmed inspecting the camp. The Japanese had long been playing that organization for fools, commandeering rations mandated by the Geneva Prisoner of War Convention, seizing shipments of medicines, and dumping loads of morale-saving mail from home into open pits. The ubiquitous Dr. Higuchi, costumed in a white gown, was trotted out to examine sick prisoners for the cameras.
There were photo opportunities aplenty, with happy, smiling prisoners all around. As Otto Schwarz recalled, they were at one point instructed to sing for the cameras. Some Australians, insurgents to the end, struck up the popular tune “Bless ’Em All,” but replaced the verb with a four-letter obscenity. The Japanese captured it on film and tape, pleased at their prisoners’ happiness.
Production of the phony showcase lasted long enough for many of the prisoners to eat like kings for just one meal. Then the Red Cross departed and the fantastic dream evaporated. When the show was over, the food and the phony field hospital disappeared. The Japanese even took back their buttons.
It would be a puzzle of life on the railway, emerging in the midst of its horror and occupying survivors’ thoughts ever after, why some men lived and others died. Conditions on the line were in a spiraling descent owing to the cumulative result of more than