Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [148]
They rode with the sliding doors of their boxcars wide open. What little water they had was supplemented with water stolen from the boiler. Disembarking at Ban Pong, they went on foot into the mountains. Kicked and beaten by guards the entire way, they marched to Kanchanaburi, over the great bridge at Tamarkan. As the macadam road turned into a muddy trail, the stragglers fell out of line and were left behind to die in the jungle. Soon, assaulted by the first torrents from the mountains, they realized they were marching straight into a trial not only by fire but by water. It took more than two weeks to walk the ninety-six miles from Ban Pong to Hintok. Ronald Searle, a British sapper headed for Konyu, recalled:
The road had petered out as the undergrowth changed to forest and then into a vast cathedral of vegetation with a ceiling of unbelievable height that veiled the occasional light filtering through. The forced marches continued through the nights and memories of them have become a compression of smells and feelings; plodding along a glutinous track thick with pitfalls, faces and bodies swollen and stinging from insect bites and cuts from overhanging branches that whipped back at us. Now it felt and smelt as I had imagined the jungle would: encroaching, oppressive and rotting. We were very aware of it confining us, although we barely caught a clear sight of it at first. The frequent rainstorms became more violent and the approximate track turned into a quagmire of calf-deep black slime…. I can still recall the bizarre sucking noise made by hundreds of feet being put down and pulled out of the mud.
The news of the reinforcements struck the bedraggled slaves of H Force as a promising development. “This period of movement must mean something big. Perhaps it is the big push to get the railway through—but we can’t see how they will be able to work when the Wet Season really sets in,” Ray Parkin wrote in his journal at Hintok.
The Japanese insistence on speed required a greater number of slaves than the engineering needs of the project should have dictated. The timber trestlework for the viaducts was straight out of The American Civil Engineers’ Handbook, long edited by Mansfield Merriman, a Lehigh University engineering professor who evidently had acquired a following in industrial Japan. Designed for heavier American freight trains, the Merriman trestles were overengineered for their purpose. The prisoners paid a heavy price for this indulgence in terms of exhaustion, disease, and injury. Had the Japanese done the prudent thing and tunneled through the rock at Hintok rather than cut straight down through its deep mass along its entire length, they would have spared their slaves hundreds of tons of rock to move. But unlike tunnels, which were made from two points, cuttings could be made simultaneously at every point along a given distance—like the railway itself. Cutting was far, far faster. And deadlier.
Over a three-and-a-half-kilometer stretch of railway they made six major cuttings from the heart of the rocky earth. One of these, between the last Konyu camp and Hintok, became known as Hellfire Pass. It took little imagination to coin that nickname, for Hellfire Pass was a chilling simulation of the underworld. Working deep in a rock gorge that they blasted deeper every night, the prisoners looked up at their guards standing atop its ridges, backlit by gasoline-dipped bamboo torches stuck into the earth all around the top. A couple of bamboo-burning bonfires put great volumes of smoke into the sky while the torches lit the rocky cutting like a harvest moon on a foggy night. Fearing untimely explosions and disease, the guards came no closer to the cutting area than necessary. When they were visible, it was at a distance, walking the edges of the stony ravine wearing hooded raincoats that silhouetted them like