Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [178]
Though the fate of prisoners would remain an open question until surrender was secured, the war between navies was essentially over. In 1943 and 1944, American industry built 25 cruisers to Japan’s 5, 202 destroyers to Japan’s 36, and 22 fleet carriers to Japan’s 7. In merchant ship construction, the disparity was even more pronounced, with U.S. factories turning out nearly ten times Japan’s tonnage in that same two-year period. By the end of 1944 American factories had produced a total of 300,000 planes during the war. Japan had managed about one-sixth of that.
It was the gross mismatch in aircraft production that enabled John Wisecup, convalescing at Changi after his ordeal in Thailand, to pull a morsel of hope from the air and keep up his struggle of will against his captors. He was working outside splitting logs when someone told him to hit the ground. “And you know, whoosh! We look up and, Christ, here they come—about four of them. They’re not more than a hundred feet high, and they buzzed us…. I said, ‘Boy, it ain’t going to be long.’”
That feeling was becoming evident all through Japan’s faltering Pacific imperium. The first B-29 flew a reconnaissance mission over Tokyo on November 1, 1944, heralding far worse to come. Weekly, then daily, then three and four times daily, bombers of the American Twentieth Air Force ranged freely through Japanese skies, each loaded with more than seven tons of explosives, high explosive and incendiary alike. From November to the war’s end, they would drop 157,000 tons of bombs on the home islands. By optimistic estimates, the Twentieth would by the end of 1945 have built the capacity to deliver over half of that ten-month expenditure of bombs within a single month.
Duly nervous, the guards taunted prisoners with boasts of Japan’s supposed triumphs. But the falsities were easy to tease out, and thus too the desperation that underlay them. “Bombed San Francisco,” a guard would assert. Knowing the provenance of his captives, he would continue, “Bombed Amarillo,” or, “Bombed Decatur.” In the end language barriers and a poor sense of North American geography betrayed the lie. The absurdities mounted. When one of the Americans finally responded, “Oh, bullshit!” a guard said, “Bombed Bullshit!”
After a year in the Burma jungle, Otto Schwarz, Howard Charles, Robbie Robinson, and more than a hundred other Americans were shipped to Saigon, which they all expected to be a way station for an eventual shipment to Japan. There they enjoyed the relatively light, opportunity-laden work of unloading barges on the city’s vast waterfront, among many other assignments at airfields, railways, and radio stations. North of Saigon, in a resort area once popular with wealthy Frenchmen, the Japanese were digging a tunnel network similar to the defensive system they had built in Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. But with American B-24s on the prowl, the trains that hauled the prisoners to work sites had to move in fitful sprints, racing from tunnel to tunnel trying to avoid air attack. “There wasn’t an engine on that railroad that wasn’t filled with bullet holes,” Schwarz said.
One day down at the docks, the guard in charge of a dock party unloading a barge called a break and marched down into the barge and stood among the prisoners. He sat down on a crate and told everyone to relax. He spoke excellent English, and he had a message for his charges. “You know, you Americans think you’re smarter than the Japanese, but we watch a lot of your gangster movies, and we know just how you people operate. Now I’m going to show you what you look like to us.” He went into a little act, a comic improv portrait of an American prisoner casing the waterfront, peering hither and yon as if keeping a lookout for the guards. Then he went to a crate and opened it, removing a can of condensed milk. He looked around, removed his hat, and covered the can with it, then set it down and raced to the other end of the barge as if