Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [149]
The hammer and tap crews tried, as much as their atrophying frames would allow, to avoid hitting a toe or breaking a buddy’s finger with their heavy hammers. “The head of the man holding the drill is only a few inches from where the hammer strikes,” wrote Ray Parkin. “If you wander, or relax those tired muscles, there can be a split skull.” The Japanese engineers, who forced out to work scores of men with useless limbs and horrible sores, took considerably less care with their explosives. Their excited cries of “Speedo, ah-hoiy-hoiy speedo, speedo!” often came too late for prisoners to avoid the blasts. “The stones and fragments came ripping through the treetops, cutting branches and lopping bamboos like scythes,” Ray Parkin wrote. For too many men, nearly including Parkin, the bombardment of shattered limestone had lethal consequences. Any break in the skin could easily metastasize into a flesh-rotting tropical ulcer.
Every morning, before dawn, the prisoner-patients of the morning shift made their way down to the mist-shrouded cutting site at Hintok Mountain Camp. “Occasionally we caught glimpses of far-away sunlit peaks of other mountains, rising out of the cloud that concealed the thousands of miles of jungle between us and freedom,” Ronald Searle wrote. The night shift worked by artificial light. Sleeping till noon, they awoke, prepared their bamboo torches and went out to work all night once again. The blasts and percussion of hammer on stone made for a constant din. “The daily blasting along this section is terrific,” Ray Parkin wrote, “like a war approaching.”
CHAPTER 45
The war was approaching. All of the prisoners knew it at some level of fact or faith, at least in its broad outlines. Rumors of its progress were whispered up and down both branches of the line, originating reliably with the stalwarts who managed to operate shortwave sets, even in the deprivation of the jungle. With the Lost Battalion’s radio whiz, Technical Sgt. Jess Stanbrough, long since shipped away to Japan, it fell to Capt. Windy Rogers of the Lost Battalion and Gus Forsman of the Houston to run the radios while keeping the lowest of profiles, even among their closest peers. “The radios were dismantled and smuggled into camps all the time, all the way along the line,” Forsman said. The prisoners fashioned components in camp, making vacuum tubes from test tubes. The origins and deployments of the equipment were closely held secrets. Still, Forsman said, “I don’t believe we were ever without a radio at one time or another in the camp.” The identity of the radio keepers was kept strictly secret too, not because friends couldn’t be trusted but because fevers couldn’t be. One never knew what a man might blurt out when racked with malarial tremors.
The war news didn’t turn broadly favorable until about January 1943, and then it spread through the camps only in the most general terms: the Allies had landed in North Africa, various Pacific island campaigns were under way. The men tried to keep a utilitarian perspective on news: “You hear it but you’re still here, so you forget about it,” said Roy Offerle of the Lost Battalion. “I lived day by day. I didn’t worry about yesterday or tomorrow. Really, to me that was the best way to keep your sanity and your wits about you—just what’s going to happen today and nothing else.”
Survival required close attention to the here and now, not to pipe dreams about great victories on distant battlefields. Near Konyu, some Australians dammed a stream and made a reservoir. Two hundred yards downstream they built a thirty-by-forty-foot system of perforated bamboo pipes held aloft on a trestle. In this way prisoners there could actually shower. Since the water was infested with cholera bacteria, they learned to shower with their mouths closed. But the path to life on the Death Railway was cleared by small victories such as this. If you kept your water boiled and your mess