Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [146]
Implements safely in hand, they saw two guards on the camp perimeter some distance away from them. As the guards paused to converse, King and Charles made their move, crawling under the barbed wire, running, staying low until the tree cover blocked the line of sight back to camp. Then, stepping softly, the two Marines went down to the roadbed and followed the line a quarter mile back to the depot, where they came upon a flatcar parked on a rail siding. Rails came into camps piled on flatcars, which rode the tracks as far as the prisoners had laid them. The heavy rails and cross ties were stacked alongside the rail bed.
Fully loaded with rails to be put down in the morning, this flatcar was attached to a caboose. “The idea,” said Charles, “was that we’d crawl under there and cut the band on the front end of that flatcar so that when the train moved, those rails in the front would come down and hit the ground, and that would unload all of those rails up there a quarter-of-a-mile from where we had to work on them.”
Though simple, the plan was dangerous, and Charles knew it. He asked King, “Why me? Why did you pick me for this?” King didn’t have a special reason for selecting him for the job. Apparently he hadn’t thought much about it. Good Marine that he was, he grabbed the handiest volunteer. “He was a quiet guy,” Charles remembered, “but if something was to be done, and he got the idea to do it—you loved to be with him, because he never showed any signs of being afraid.” King’s tool-snatching co-conspirator didn’t have quite the same amount of ice in his veins. Returning to camp, Charles executed what for him was the scariest part of the mission, returning the wirecutters to the tool shed. He slipped back into the shed without the guards noticing, returning the tools like a thoughtful neighbor. Then they slinked back into their hut. Jim Gee noticed them crawling back into their sleeping platforms and breathed, “Where the hell have you been?”
“Out,” King said.
Charles added, “Of our minds.”
“We agreed not to place the burden of secrecy on anyone,” Charles wrote. “So we never revealed what we had done, particularly after what we learned the following day.”
The next morning, the Japanese started a locomotive, backed it into the flatcar to hitch it up, and began hauling the load of rails out toward the prisoners’ work site. The train had gotten up some speed when the metal bands the two Marines had cut gave out, letting loose the ends of the rails at the front of the car. They cascaded off the train in a rushing cacophony of metal and hit the ground. Digging into the earth, the rails were driven backward as the train rolled forward, the still fastened rear-end bands effectively aiming the rails straight back into the caboose. With a whine of steel on steel, and the crack of wooden caboose walls yielding, the rails penetrated the front of the car like lances, driving in amid the engineers and guards inside. According to Charles, five Japanese were killed by the thrusting of the rails. “I don’t know how many it hurt or mangled,” he said. “There were two or three guys who saw the results of it; I never saw it, but the word got back that we had really done some damage.” The next day Pfc. Bert “Bird Dog” Page happened to see them cleaning up the mess, hauling off several covered stretchers. There were no interrogations, no reprisals. It was all an unfortunate accident.
As in previous camps, sabotage pitted ultimate questions of right and wrong against the more ambiguous morality of risking collective punishment for solo acts. Their own self-interest required cooperation with the enemy, but as Sergeant Dupler had understood, cooperation could be viewed as a kind of hostility to one’s distant brothers in arms. The chain of causation was more than a little attenuated, but there could be no question that there was an Allied soldier fighting near Mandalay whose life would become much harder if the railway were successfully built.