Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [175]
Swollen by the summer monsoon, the River Kwae Noi flowed south beneath the two east-west bridges, then turned in a sweeping bend east, tracing the southern edge of the Tamarkan prison camp, where a pier lay thick with barges full of supplies and equipment. North of them was a network of tracks and switches, beyond which three flak batteries were positioned. The prison camp was precariously situated, well within an antiaircraft shell’s burst radius of the bridge. When the bombers came over, the shrapnel from the flak landed in the camp. “When we protested the camp being located in the very center of military objectives the Japanese blandly replied that they knew it, but had not they placed the three ack-ack batteries about the camp to protect us?” Lt. Clyde Fillmore of the Lost Battalion would write. If there was any ambiguity about the threat posed by the flak batteries, it applied doubly to the bombs themselves. “You cussed the planes and everyone in them; you hated to see them come and then somehow you hated to see them leave, but you could not hold down a surge of pride that these planes were American planes and that we were carrying the war to the Nips,” Fillmore wrote. “You want to cheer them for tearing up the bridge, and you want to cuss them for trying to kill you,” said Roy Offerle. Their exuberance chafed their captors. At Tamarkan the order came down, “Prisoners will not laugh at Japanese guards during air raids.”
The big B-24s generally targeted the main bridge spans, while the smaller B-25 Mitchells, as well as Royal Air Force Beaufighters and Mosquitos, swift and light, targeted the bridge’s approaches. Later, higher up, visible by their contrails, came B-29 Superfortresses. The prisoners had never seen their like before, four-engine bombers with long tubular fuselages. From their altitude and size, they knew it was a new kind of aircraft. There were rumors that these futuristic bombers were hitting Singapore and Bangkok, and that even Tokyo itself was under assault. When fighter planes began showing up escorting the bombers, they knew friendly forces had to be close. “That little P-51 came down with the B-24s there one day—goodness!—we didn’t know what it was, but we knew whose it was,” Luther Prunty said.
And sometimes they left behind a taste of things to come. At Kanburi, right next to Tamarkan, Slug Wright was watching some bombers at work when he spotted a different sort of object falling with the payload. It hit the ground about fifty yards away from him. It was a one-gallon can with the top shorn off. He went over and picked it up, reached his finger in, and tasted the residual liquid inside—peach syrup, cold and sweet. “My friends, American airmen, flying right over, by golly, threw the damn peach can out of the damn plane after they had eaten all the damn peaches. That’s how close I was to America—tasting that peach syrup.”
Red Huffman, working to repair the damaged bridges at Tamarkan, remembered the bombers leaving a different kind of calling card. One day he was huddled in an air-raid trench when he heard the roar of engines, looked up—he could never keep himself from looking up—and saw the metal skin of an aircraft so close overhead that he could make out its rivets. When the plane had gone, he got to his feet, looked around, saw something bright and small in the dirt, and said, “I don’t believe it.” It was a Juicy Fruit gum wrapper. “I picked it up and it smelled just like chewing gum. I hadn’t smelled anything like that in three years.”
After the bombers departed, there was always work