Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [165]
As another railway survivor tells it, Lumpkin couldn’t shake his fear of cholera. He was terrified by the news that an outbreak had ravaged one of the British camps not too far away, killing good men by the hundreds. Fear of it overwhelmed him. “Once the dysentery took a hold of him, he was so run-down from worrying about this cholera case and trying to keep everybody alive…he went real fast,” said Roy Offerle. He refused hospitalization, asking, “What about my men?” When he did finally stay in bed it was only because he had no strength to rise. At that point he just allowed himself to die. “It was almost like a death blow to all of us,” said Dan Buzzo. “It really tore us up. He was a great man.” Ben Dunn of the Lost Battalion said it was not just fear of cholera but the disease itself that had killed Lumpkin. According to Gus Forsman, “He didn’t have it left in him because he had expended so much energy and everything toward the health of the POW’s.” After Doc Lumpkin was dead and gone even the Koreans saluted his grave.
Dr. Lumpkin’s fears were rooted in dark reality. As the Speedo campaign continued through August 1943, driving the prisoners to their limits and the railway toward completion—by the middle of the month the embankment would reach the 112 Kilo marker, with the rails laid to 83 Kilo Camp—prisoners were shuttled back and forth between the hospital camps at 80, 55, and 30 Kilo Camps, within closer reach of foods and medicines, and the work site at 108 Kilo, ever closer to the dreaded “cholera camps” on the Thailand branch of the railway.
In the jungle, a strain of bacteria known as Vibrio cholerae runs rampant where hygiene is lacking, coursing through river deltas and waterways contaminated by human waste, attaching itself to small animals living in the water. When the cholera reaches a human body, it finds a home in the small intestine, stimulating it to secrete fluid until severe dehydration sets in. In its worst form it causes profuse watery diarrhea, vomiting, and leg cramps. It seizes hold of a man in an instant and wrings him dry. Victims lose body fluids so fast that they lapse into shock. Without treatment, death can occur within hours.
Rumors of cholera’s presence was perhaps the only talisman the prisoners had against the guards. The Japanese and Koreans were terrified of it and did what they could to make the scant supply of inoculations available where conditions were threatening. The disease was rare in the Burma camps. There were several cholera deaths at 60 Kilo Camp in the end of May, and Burmese romusha suffered an outbreak at 75 Kilo at around the same time. But its most horrifying predations were in Thailand—at Hintok, Konyu, and later at a place called Songkurai.
A handful of Americans saw firsthand what the jungle had wrought upon the British prisoners in the camps around Three Pagodas Pass. Dr. Hekking asked Slug Wright to lend a hand at a cholera camp near 114 Kilo Camp, hit heavily by a fresh scourge. According to George Detre, 2,500 prisoners were said to have died there. When he saw it for the first time, “it was like a ghost town,” Detre recalled. “They walked everybody out of there that could walk, and the rest of them set the camp on fire. The guys that were laying there sick, they burned…. There was clothing waving in the wind, and we saw these partially burned barracks and canteens hanging there…. It was eerie. Believe me the Japanese cut a wide swath around the place.” Only a handful