Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [176]
One time after the all-clear sounded Huffman and some others who had emerged to undertake repairs heard muffled shouts from below the earth. They found a man buried in the rubble about ten feet under. He had kept himself alive by using a handy piece of hollow bamboo as a snorkel. “He was breathing under the ground through the bamboo coming to the surface, and hollering through it, too. That’s how we knew he was there,” Huffman said. The Japanese gunners defending the bridges had their innovations too, mounting antiaircraft guns on mobile flatcars and planting mines on bridge abutments or railway embankments and detonating them by remote control as bombers flew by. These tactics were throwbacks to the days of Richthofen’s barnstormers, but within a very short time technology would show the way to an even more destructive future.
It was a largely uncelebrated technical achievement—the Allied nations’ first smart bomb—that made it possible finally to destroy the great bridge over the River Kwae Noi. The newfangled bomb known as the VB-1 AZON was delivered to the Seventh Bomb Group’s 493rd Squadron in late 1944. It was a thousand-pounder equipped with a gyro, solenoids, and moveable fins to hold it steady in free fall, and a radio receiver and servomotor to steer it left or right. The acronym “AZON” stood for “azimuth only,” indicating the limited (though revolutionary) extent of steering control the bombardier had over the weapon in flight. There was no way to adjust its range in free fall, no way to flatten or steepen its trajectory. But it could be guided left and right by visual means, as a powerful flare burned in its tail fin. Against a long, narrow target such as a bridge, control over one dimension of the trajectory was usually enough to greatly improve the chance of a hit.
On February 5, 1945, a raid by B-24s missed the bridges but took out some of the gun positions and tracks near their approaches. Four days later Seventh Group bombers hit two sections of the wooden bridge. On February 13, another raid finally succeeded in bringing down several spans of the main concrete and steel structure over the River Kwae Noi, known as “Bridge 277” to the men who bombed it.
The end of the bridge heralded the end of the war, and the status and security of all Allied prisoners of war entered a tenuous and uncertain new phase.
At Kanburi, the new camp commandant, Captain Noguchi, and his sergeant-major, Sergeant Shimoso, were insistent disciplinarians. But the bombing seemed to unnerve even them. “You could see they were worried. They showed it,” said John Wisecup, who was there briefly before returning from Thailand to Singapore with the rest of H Force. “We started worrying too as to what they’re going to do with us. But you threw it off in the back of your mind. You’re so goddamned tired and hungry and disgusted that, I don’t know, it didn’t worry you that much. You knew that it was in the cards for them to do you in.”
Talk among prisoners was alarmingly persistent that a landing by Allied troops would force the Japanese to kill all the prisoners in their care. According to Pinky King, the guards often threatened that if they were going to die, they would take their prisoners with them. At Kanburi, Eddie Fung noticed the machine gun emplacements around the camp, ostensibly installed for antiaircraft defense. “They had been very casual about guarding us. We began hearing rumors that there might be a wholesale slaughter.” At Tamarkan, too, prisoners noticed one day that the Japanese seemed to have turned their antiaircraft guns in toward the camp.
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