Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [174]
The extent of the disaster became quickly manifest as Summers’s crew hauled aboard survivor after survivor, seventy-three in all. According to the Pampanito’s patrol report:
As men were received on board, we stripped them and removed most of the heavy coating of oil and muck. We cleared the after torpedo room and passed them below as quickly as possible. Gave all men a piece of cloth moistened with water to suck on. All of them were exhausted after four days on the raft and three years imprisonment. Many had lashed themselves to their makeshift rafts, which were slick with grease; and had nothing but lifebelts with them. All showed signs of pellagra, beri-beri, immersion, salt water sores, ringworm, malaria etc. All were very thin and showed the results of undernourishment. Some were in very bad shape…. A pitiful sight none of us will ever forget. All hands turned to with a will and the men were cared for as rapidly as possible.
The seas were whipping up, and by the time a typhoon passed through the area, making further rescue operations pointless, the four submarines had saved just 159 of the Rakuyo Maru’s 1,318 prisoner-passengers.
According to Clifford Kinvig, these Australians and Britons, taken to Saipan and then dispatched for rendezvous with their home governments, “provided the first ‘open source’ information on conditions in the railway camps.” Their astonishing reports had almost immediate international repercussions. In October 1944, the pilots of the Seventh Bomb Group began receiving briefings about the disposition of Allied prisoner of war camps along the railway. On November 17, British and Australian representatives released coordinated statements describing the atrocities of the Burma-Thailand Railway. But they were powerless to stop what was happening to their men in Japanese custody. There was nothing to be done for them but finish the war as swiftly and decisively as possible.
CHAPTER 54
The barbed-wire perimeter of the Tamarkan prison camp was just a stone’s throw from the point where one end of the great bridge touched land. A large concentration-camp–like complex that covered six or seven city blocks, Tamarkan was home to several thousand Allied prisoners. Pinky King was cleaning up the evening meal for some Japanese at their cookhouse outside the camp near the river when, from the north, he heard the drone of engines in the sky. There were aircraft, nineteen or twenty of them, big ones, coming right down the river at an altitude so high he had trouble identifying them. “Look at the mighty Japanese air force,” he said. Among the prisoners, a debate ensued as to their origin. No one had seen such a demonstration of Japanese airpower before. Doubts arose when a Japanese antiaircraft battery near the bridge opened fire on the formation. As the bombs rained down, the prisoners went wild. So did the guards. Koreans ran. Prisoners ran. “They just went wild running,” recalled King.
At the end of November, B-24s from the Seventh Group, flying from India, launched a serious effort against Tamarkan’s great railway bridge. From high altitude, they failed to bring down the steel spans. Their inefficacy was no surprise to anyone aware of their scant record against central Burma’s bridges in 1943. The big bombers’ high-volume mode of iron slinging proved to be ill suited to knocking bridge spans from their concrete piers. It took not only tremendous accuracy but also fuses timed with hairsbreadth precision—and not a little luck. Bomber commanders experimented with different angles of attack, aiming points, and aircraft formations. Against one especially heavily targeted bridge south of Mandalay, Tenth Air Force B-24s and B-25s flew 337 sorties during the year, dropping 1,219 bombs but scoring just eighteen hits. That 1.5 percent rate actually overstated the accuracy of the big B-24s: In their