Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [141]
The rains were a feature of the season, a steady state, like the sun’s angle of elevation during summer, like summer heat itself. It rained all the time. The men ate, worked, rested, slept, and woke under continuous rain. They had to rise in the middle of the night to wring out their blankets. Back home, violent weather had its way with you briefly. Maybe a tornado tore up your neighborhood or took away your house. It always moved on. But the monsoon oozed overhead and settled in like tar over a pit. Thunder was rare. The most frightening sudden cracks and booms came not from lightning bolts but from great trees hitting the ground. The ground, loose and light in the dry season, could no longer hold the greatest members of its arbor. “It’s awesome to hear a huge tree three or four feet in diameter fall that way in the jungle,” said Ilo Hard. “It shakes the ground.”
Here the rains caused mudslides that buried the railway. There they washed out wooden bridges, imperiling the prisoners’ already scant supply of food. Bridges were replaced on the fly by flimsy rope-railed catwalks that the men used to haul their supplies across. “I remember on one occasion that a bridge had washed out,” Gus Forsman said, “and we strung two lines that crossed this ravine…. The train could come up to this one side of the ravine, and then we would go over there and get the supplies and go across this little catwalk deal across the ravine. Of course, the water is rushing ninety miles an hour down below you, and you’d lose your balance. Of course, if you were carrying a rice bag, it’d go over into the water—just saving yourself—and then when you got to the end, well, you’d get a bashing for letting it go. It was a really treacherous feat.”
Up at 105 Kilo Camp, the Japanese operated three vehicles captured from the English. The six-wheel-drive Studebaker, the four-wheel-drive Chevy truck, and the six-wheel-drive Reo truck had front-mounted winches, so they could hoist themselves out of most any jam. But they had limited mobility. Even with the winches, Don Brain and a number of other drivers were able to move just ten to twelve miles a day through the mud. With limited hauling capacity, corroding spark plugs, and fuel shortages, they had short range and moved only essential supplies. “Finally they gave up on this truck thing because it was just a farce,” Brain said. “They would have been better off with a bull cart.”
To get food, the prisoners had to march five or six miles on foot to the nearest spot a truck or train could reach. Their proficiency with yo-ho poles came in handy then. They’d sling a bag of rice or a box of meat and, in Jim Gee’s words, “chug-a-lug down the road.” But eventually the sodden ground was too impassable for efficient use of yo-ho pole teams, their soaked payloads too heavy. Up near the border at Three Pagodas Pass, at a far-from-alpine elevation of 925 feet, the grade was too steep at 2.9 degrees for even a single locomotive to reach the summit. The grade didn’t do any favors either for the barefooted workers hauling the supplies.
The rains depleted the kumis as men were taken back down the line to effect repairs. As they grew sick, the work parties grew smaller still, until the sick themselves were again called upon to fill the gaps. Otto Schwarz said, “You would work whatever they decided you would work—eight hours, ten hours, twelve hours or fourteen hours—then you’d drag your butt back into camp and lay down on those hard bamboo slats with the knots in them and the rain would be coming down and the thatched roof would be leaking like a sieve. Oh, God.”
They slept soaked. They kept their feet dangling off the end of the bed, unable—or, more crucially to survival, unwilling—to pull their muddy paws under the blanket. “There seemed to be no bottom to the mud in this place,” said Charley