Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [168]
In the very near future your comrades will be leaving this district; consequently it may be impossible to offer prayers or place a wreath in your cemetery for some time to come. But undoubtedly some of your comrades will come here again after the war to pay homage to your memory. Please accept my deepest sympathy and sincere regards, and may you sleep peacefully and eternally. Yoshitada Nagatomo, Lieut. Col., Chief of Branch Three of Thai War Prisoners’ Camp. November 20, 1943
The next day Colonel Nagatomo had some thoughts for the living too:
We have exploited untrodden jungles. Under the burning heat of the tropical sun and the daily torrential downpour of rain we have achieved this epochal and brilliant feat in this period of time, with the inflexible and indefatigable energies of those who have wielded the pick and shovel. This achievement reflects great credit on us, and must be attributed to the fact that each of you has been zealous in doing your own respective work, grasping my mind and aims, observing my instructions of various times and many rules since the establishment of Branch Three. I extend to you my thanks for your labor with the deepest regards…. Happily let us celebrate this memorable day by having a very pleasant and cheerful time to everyone’s heart’s content. Let this occasion be chiefly one of looking to the future and reflecting on the memories of the past year.
For most any Death Railway prisoner it would have been easy to reflect on the memories of the past year and strip down one’s thinking to its vindictive, spiteful core. Of the people prone to seeing the world through such a lens, who could have been more likely than the Lost Battalion medical orderly who had seen it all, Slug Wright? As he was being shuttled by railcar to Thailand from the cholera wasteland around 114 Kilo Camp, he saw a Japanese train that had come up from Burma. When his train stopped and he was ordered to get off, Wright could hear the miserable moaning of the occupants of one of the boxcars. It was full of wounded Japanese soldiers, amputees among them. A Japanese nurse saw that Wright had a bunch of bananas and a big bamboo stalk containing about a gallon and a half of water. She approached him and asked in flawless English: “Do you have anything to eat or any water? These men haven’t had anything to eat and nothing to drink?” The woman’s nerve was extraordinary, for Wright wasn’t inclined to be helpful. “I almost said, ‘Big deal! Neither have we!’ But I didn’t. I hadn’t talked to a woman, especially a woman that could speak English…. She was a nice-looking lady and everything like that…. So I handed her the bamboo, and I gave her my damn bananas.” The woman, who seemed to be a trained opera singer, rewarded him with a rendition of “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.” After everything Wright had been through, the beauty of the solo was staggering. “I stood there and bawled like a baby,” he said. “I didn’t dare tell my fellow POW’s what had happened, because they would be ashamed of me. But there is one time in my life that I am not ashamed of what I did. That was the enemy, but I just couldn’t do to them what they had done to me.”
CHAPTER 52
In the end, the railway of death was its builders’ route to salvation. The ghost sailors of the Houston and the Perth and the vanquished defenders of Java and Malaya rode its meter-gauge track out of the mountains toward new camps in Thailand’s central lowlands—places like Kanchanaburi and Tamarkan, Tamuan, Chungkai and Nakhon Pathom, home to a massive hospital with eight thousand beds. The