Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [164]
This comes to us all in turn. Men watch each other in silent understanding. What they see is ludicrous, but they don’t laugh.
Sacrifices were made on the railway that were every bit as dramatic as Chaplain Rentz giving up his life jacket in the Java Sea. According to Robbie Robinson, it could be “as small a thing as hiding, from yourself, let’s say, a can of condensed milk—even have the guts to hide it from yourself for that period of time until you reach it in the jungle when your buddy lay there, and you know that he was probably gone. Then you would break it out, and it would go to him—after all of the temptations that you, in possession, had. I call that a pretty good sacrifice.” They spent their scant reserves of energy hauling their buddies from one camp to the next on stretchers fashioned from yo-ho poles.
The men of the Lost Battalion were helped in captivity, as many of the Houston and Perth survivors were helped, by their parochial closeness. “It’s people you’ve known, gone to school with, you know their families. As long as you’ve been together, you know their families intimately—everything about them. Well, they just look at you different,” the Lost Battalion’s Sgt. Luther Prunty said. They could see through the distractions—the bloody leakings of amoebic dysentery or the ripeness of beriberi or a seeping tropical ulcer—and see the person they knew, a buddy in need of a meal.
Courageous and selfless though so many of them were, few ever dared try to escape. The thought was often on Charley Pryor’s mind. He realized how easy it would be. At 80 Kilo Camp he was largely free of supervision. For a while the guards came to verify the deaths claimed by Dr. Epstein, but once they got wind of the conditions there, they stopped coming altogether. Pryor realized it would be easy enough to fake his own death—to prevail upon Epstein to sign his death papers, then dig a hole, decorate it with a phony grave marker, and become a ghost. He could float away into the jungle. It was tempting, but the obstacles beyond the camp perimeter were still formidable. Pryor never rolled the dice.
Another trio of Americans had to learn the hard way. Gus Forsman, Roy Stensland, and Jimmy Lattimore made a bid to escape after tenko one night. Stensland had long ago learned to cultivate risk and exploit it through audacious, sudden action. He’d pounded a Japanese private on Batavia, had even drunk with his captors. How hard could it be to walk to freedom? The damnedest things were possible if only you tried. They thought they might make the coast and signal a submarine for assistance.
One night around ten p.m. they left the camp boundaries and set out into the nighttime jungle. They crossed hills and steep ridges, traversed cliff facings, and hacked through heavy scrub. They quickly ran out of water, but knew they couldn’t risk contact with Burmese hillmen, who stood to profit richly from their capture. Two hours into their flight they looked back toward camp and saw the watch fires burning. How far had they come? How far was there yet to go? From what they could tell, there lay ahead of them unimaginably dense and imponderably long stretches of jungle. Trying to penetrate it by night was more than they were up to. They weighed their chances and finally elected to cut their losses and return to camp before anyone knew they were missing.
CHAPTER 50
On August 1, at 100 Kilo Camp, the men in Branch Five suffered their most devastating blow to date. Hugh Lumpkin, the Lost Battalion’s twenty-nine-year-old medical officer, “had the weight of the whole camp on his shoulders, because he was about the only officer capable of controlling the Japs and the Koreans,” one of his battalionmates would write. Overworked and underfed, he got careless. He obtained