Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [160]
It was in July when Allied airpower began making its presence felt farther up the line. On July 11, Varley saw reconnaissance aircraft of “a type not seen before.” They were “twin-engined and dual body and appeared to be fast.” Every day just before noon a plane believed to have been a P-38 Lightning would range down the length of the railway at high altitude taking pictures. Jim Gee said, “He was as regular as clockwork, and he flew down and we’d get outside and we would wave to him and holler at him, and he, of course, was 32,000 feet high…That old boy will never know how much courage he gave us.”
The trick to preserving hope was to parcel it out in packages no larger than necessary to sustain yourself for three months at a time. The ninety-day interval was long enough to contain visions of significant progress in the war, yet short enough for the imagination to cycle around and revise or extend. The stoutest prisoners were optimists. When the rains abated, they imagined great Allied armies uncoiling and coming for them, suddenly free to move over dry ground. When the monsoon came back, they saw salvation in the rain-swollen rivers, newly navigable to boats carrying their liberators. “I guess they’re going to wait for the rains so they can get their boats up in these rivers,” Jim Gee told himself, knowing full well that the high hopes were but a gambit aimed at bucking up his buddies. He knew that his survival would be up to him and no one else.
CHAPTER 49
In Japan, near Nagasaki, at Fukuoka #2 Camp, the Japanese guards realized as early as February 1943 that one of their American captives was a son of Nippon. Somehow the issue didn’t come to a head until the guard who ran the tenkos at Frank Fujita’s barracks got the inkling to show off his language proficiency by reading the barracks roster.
Fujita presumed that he had gotten by up to that point because his olive skin, high cheekbones, and angular facial structure looked like the product of Filipino or Mexican heritage. But as his crewmates had warned, eventually there was no disguising the pedigree of his surname. Encountering it on the muster roll, the guard puzzled over it, then looked up, demanding: “Fu-ji-ta. Where is this Fu-ji-ta?” He approached the American artilleryman and began pawing him, running his hands over his face, inspecting the texture of his skin and hair. “Oh, this is fantastic,” the guard exclaimed. He disappeared and returned with the sergeant of the guard, abuzz about his discovery.
The next day they let Fujita off work and the camp commander brought an interpreter with him to help question the unusual captive. Why had he joined the U.S. Army? Had the Americans conscripted him against his will? They showed more pity than outrage. “A Japanese who can’t speak Japanese—how terrible,” they seemed to think. In an apparent effort toward rehabilitation, the commandant made Fujita his private servant. As he went about preparing the commandant’s meals, an English-speaking corporal was assigned to teach him Japanese.
Fujita used his position to scrape up leftovers for the sickest men in the POW barracks. Meanwhile, the Japanese continued to coax him to switch sides. In exchange for his loyalties they offered him the rank of captain and as many geishas as he could handle. “They got mad as hell when I laughed at them and told them they were doomed.” Fujita asked them why anyone would want to join a military that was busy losing a world war. That kind of talk got him well acquainted with their rifle butts.
Fujita saw trouble in learning the language of his father’s homeland. “I figured my best bet is to keep my head where it belongs—on my shoulders—and not