Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [142]
The Japanese engineers knew all too well what the rains would do to their plans. In response they launched what became known as the “Speedo” campaign, so called because of the merciless cries of the guards, who set round-the-clock working hours, abandoned quotas, and stepped up their campaign of brutality to get the job done. Laboring from before sunrise to well after dark, the reeling prisoners redoubled their efforts. By one estimate, two men were expected to dig enough earth during the Speedo campaign to fill a whole dump truck every workday. There was a draconian unwillingness to allow a prisoner to claim no-duty status for reasons of health. “That word ‘Speedo,’” said Howard Brooks. “You went to bed at night with it ringing in your ears.” At the end of May, the Japanese ordered Branch Five to move out, and on the twenty-sixth they pulled up stakes at 80 Kilo and began climbing again.
The push farther up into the jungle to 100 Kilo Camp reflected Captain Mizutani’s fantastic indifference to the human life in his care. Mizutani told Colonel Tharp that the sick were of no use “to us or to themselves.” Accordingly, they were abandoned and left on their own at 80 Kilo Camp while the able workers marched up the line. Anyone unable to march on his own power would be left behind. Though it was a place to await death, the Japanese would call 80 Kilo Camp a “hospital.” With reduced rations and no medicine, it was less a hospital than a hospice where men too sick to work were sent to watch each other die.
The decision to establish the hospital was an act of utilitarian cruelty: With the sick segregated, it was easier to allocate food only to the fit. Though the camp was better drained than 105 Kilo, stood on higher ground, and lay adjacent to a stream that provided sanitation, its lack of food and medicine turned deadly. During its first few weeks in operation, there were no luxuries such as actual medical staff, medicines, or kitchen personnel. “The least sick of the stretcher cases had to get up and do these jobs. As a result there were many more deaths than were necessary,” wrote Ensign Smith.
With supply roads impassable, a worker’s full rice ration was cut to a hundred grams a day: half a canteen cup of rice twice daily. The no-duty sick, who needed it all the more, got half of what the workers got. Captain Mizutani seemed to consider his rations policy as an incentive to improved health. But the only way the sick survived at all was by the entrepreneurial grace of the healthy. Men stole for them, brought burnt scrapings from the kitchen and contraband sweet potatoes into the hospital. Anything extra that turned up found its way back to the hospital. The men who catered to that grim ward had strong stomachs in addition to stout hearts.
Having fought off his fever and afflicted now with a trophy-caliber tropical ulcer, which he kept dousing with steaming water and wrapping with old rags, Charley Pryor saw the pathetic state of care at 80 Kilo Camp and decided to do something about it. He started voluntary duty as its custodian and its cemetery keeper. For several weeks he worked alone, the only fit man in a camp of the dying, until Commander Epstein arrived to handle patient care, to the extent the dying could be called patients absent any care to give them. Ben Dunn of the Lost Battalion was the only patient in his truckload of souls who walked into the camp under his own power. Pryor helped him hobble onto his bamboo platform. “I looked in that hut, and I couldn’t believe that those guys were still living. It was a horrible mess. I don’t know how they managed, but Charley did a remarkable job,” Dunn said. “When a man’s lying there with beriberi or any of those other things, and he’s so sick that he’s about to die, a fly will land on his eyeball and he won’t even blink,” Dunn said. “You know he’s not going to live very long. I couldn’t believe that could happen, but I saw it.” For his steadfast work in the morguelike squalor of 80 Kilo Camp, Charley Pryor earned the nickname