• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1614 0

to through the ordeal at Hintok. A Scotsman still had his bagpipes, a boxer his gloves. Out on burial detail, Wisecup traded odd items with Thai locals for duck eggs—watches, Ronson lighters, flints, Parker pens. Most of the survivors of the mountains were sick, awaiting transport to better hospitals. One day the Japanese raided the sick hut at Kanburi and organized a kumi of its fittest men to work the Tamarkan railroad bridge. John Wisecup joined the workers who put the finishing touches on the “Bridge on the River Kwai.” With the concrete piers finished, and with trains already using it, their work was limited to putting up braces, side stays, and sleepers. “They were in a hurry to finish it,” he said. “Boy, they were really rough on us.”

The bombers were rougher. As it happened, the Australians had been right: they were dropping thousand-pounders when they came. What none of the songsters had anticipated was that more than a few of those bombs would fall on them. Tragically, the bridge would prove most lethal not in its construction but because it attracted the full power of the United States Army Air Forces, and because the Japanese chose to locate one of the largest prisoner of war camps in central Thailand mere yards from this strategic target. When the men of the Houston were looking longingly to the skies for protection, Allied airpower had let them down. Now the airplanes fulfilled the sailors’ hopes all too thoroughly. They flowed over them like storm fronts.

Freedom was heralded by airpower, by multiengine planes the likes of which they had never seen before—B-24s, B-25s, B-29s, Mosquitos, Beaufighters, P-38s, and later shorter-ranged single-engine planes whose appearance suggested the proximity of friendly bases and renewed the POWs’ faltering hope. Tipped off by Allied intelligence agents that Bangkok’s dockyards had been expanded and that the Japanese were building a railway to link the port with Moulmein, Allied air forces escalated and extended their campaign to bomb Japanese railheads and bridges and rolling stock, destroying with impunity what prisoners had risked death to sabotage. The lifting of the monsoon opened the way for a new torrent of bombs. It was the nature of war, and the nature of the Japanese practice of exploiting their prisoners as military chattel, that victory, when it came, would not be antiseptic or painless. The success of the bombers would come at the prisoners’ expense. As the bombs fell on the bridges and their approaches, the Japanese organized kumis to repair them. More than occasionally, the bombs went astray and took a horrible toll from the prison camps. For survivors who had come this far on fatalism, there was little cause to care.

*According to a leading Australian authority on the railway, Lt. Col. Terence R. Beaton, in 1960 the River Mae Khlung was renamed the River Kwai Yai at least in part to mold life to art and accommodate the bridge’s association with the famous movie.

CHAPTER 53

The U.S. Tenth Air Force had grown from a skeleton organization in 1942 to a powerful aerial striking force operating out of bases in India. The primary mission of its B-24 Liberators, B-25 Mitchells, P-40 Warhawks, P-38 Lightnings, P-51 Mustangs, and A-36 Apaches was to keep open the supply routes to China, including a legendarily difficult airlift corridor over the Himalayas known to history as “the Hump.” Secondarily, it was charged with blocking Japan’s supplies flowing into and across Burma. As with ABDA at the outset of the war in the Dutch East Indies, it took months of political upheaval before the varied American and British air assets came under unified command. At the end of 1943, the Tenth Air Force and the RAF’s Bengal Air Command were joined as the Eastern Air Command under Maj. Gen. George E. Stratemeyer. Stratemeyer appreciated the challenge at hand. “A resourceful, able and wily enemy must be blasted from the jungles of Burma and driven from the skies in days to come,” he wrote to his men. “We must establish in Asia a record of Allied air victory of which we can