Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [166]
One struggles to grasp how some of the POWs did it, survived the round-the-clock physical and psychic assault from man and from nature. Part of the reason lies in the way they framed the experience. Those who used language carefully distinguished between suffering and enduring. “Suffer is a dangerous word here just now—it can induce self-pity,” wrote Ray Parkin. “Endure is a better word, it is not so negative. Enduring can give an aim, a sense of mastery over circumstance. I have seen so much self-conscious suffering and men dying from self-pity.”
In the midst of his ordeal in Japan, Frank Fujita kept an unshakeably positive outlook. “I find beauty in everything, even in death, you know. I always find something that’s worthwhile. And even when we were starved to death—most of us down to eighty or ninety pounds or walking skeletons—then instead of me sitting around thinking how horrible a shape we were in and ‘Oh, woe is me,’ I thought this was an absolutely marvelous opportunity to study anatomy.”
“There is a lot to grumble about; a lot to be disappointed about; a lot to lose our tempers over; but there is also much to marvel at,” wrote Ray Parkin. “For instance, the loyalty of a man’s body—to watch a sore heal itself—to feel that pain is not so much a tragedy but a process. There is a fascination in trying to help it consciously, to try to break down any internal resistance to recovery by trying to quell devastating emotions like bad temper, hatred, fear, lust, envy.” There was enough of an enemy in nature. There was no need to allow a psychological fifth column to form up from within.
The Japanese had their own way of motivating. When the officers weren’t raiding the sick parade and the guards weren’t bashing with rifle butts, they encouraged the prisoners to sing to keep up their spirits. “It has become quite an institution,” Ray Parkin wrote of the bandstand brigade that worked at Kinsayok in September. The battalion bugler blew military marches on his cornet, at least until the workers were out of earshot of camp. The favorite of the Japanese was “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” except that the Aussies didn’t use the traditional lyrics. They substituted their own, better suited for the circumstances: “They’ll be droppin’ thousand-pounders when they come.…”
CHAPTER 51
Colonel Nagatomo had doubtless been well briefed on the progress of the two threads of the railway, rising out of the jungle in two simultaneously constructed halves that would join near the Burma-Thailand border. On September 21, 1943, forward elements of Branch Three began arriving at 85 Kilo Camp, meeting up for the first time with their countrymen in Branch Five. A few days later, with the railway’s completion evidently within view, Nagatomo told Brigadier Varley that within a month, half of the prisoners in Branch Three would be shipped to Kanchanaburi, Thailand, including all of the sick. Was the end of the project upon them? Though few had a broad enough perspective to know, it seemed that it was. And when it came to pass, the final linking of the two railway branches about thirty-four kilometers southeast of Three Pagodas Pass was a surreal anticlimax to the Americans’ frightful twelve months in the jungle.
On October 17, the two ends of the line met on the Thai side of Three Pagodas Pass. History records no moment akin to the Russians and the Americans joining hands at the Elbe River. There was no joy in the railway’s completion, no feeling of shared achievement. As the collision of the north and south trade winds expended the last of their drenching energies, as the belt of equatorial monsoon rains collapsed into the mountains and receded south toward the Tropic of Capricorn, the Burma-Thailand railway’s final stake was driven near the waterfalls