Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [183]
Given the OSS code name “Ruth,” Pridi was a forty-four-year-old Paris-trained attorney who had risen to fame in the summer of 1932, leading a bloodless coup that unseated the ruling monarchy. He was, in Smith’s words, “a revolutionary whom success had not turned into a conservative.” He stood for universal education and work, for the common man over the monarchic elite. He was the ideal candidate to lead a democratic rebellion. And given that his deputy was the chief of the Thai national police—Gen. Adun Adundetcharat, given the OSS code name “Betty”—the climate could not have been more favorable to start the clandestine movement that General Donovan’s group had long envisioned.
“A double life is not an easy one,” Ruth would tell Captain Smith. “By day I sit in my palace and pretend to busy myself with the affairs of His Majesty. In reality the entire time is taken up with problems of the underground—how we are going to get more guerrillas; how we are going to feed the ones we have; how we can, without causing suspicion, replace governors from provinces where we are putting in American camps.” It was the unique and defining characteristic of the Thai insurgency that it was led by sitting heads of state working as double agents against their own quisling administration.
With help from Ruth and Betty, Col. John Coughlin, the chief of Office of Strategic Services Detachment 404, which ran operations in Burma and Southeast Asia, oversaw the creation of a guerrilla network across Thailand. Near the OSS headquarters at Kandy, Ceylon, by the seaside town of Trincomalee, Capt. Nicol Smith set up a training base where volunteers brought in by his Free Thai Army advance men rehearsed small-boat tactics, weapons training, unarmed combat, junglecraft, wireless communications, mapmaking, demolitions, and intelligence gathering. By the close of January 1945, the first two American field agents had followed Pow into Bangkok. During the next few months more U.S. agents, assisted by the Free Thai Army liaisons trained in the States, parachuted into other locations with the goal of creating a rebel force ten thousand strong. A world away, deep in the jungle of a country officially committed to the wrong side of the Pacific war, Allied prisoners of war prayed for a deus ex machina to rescue them, and a rebellion awaited its spark. With the OSS network spreading through Thailand’s tropical wilderness, both were coming to fruition.
CHAPTER 57
Outside the Kanburi camp, Gus Forsman was working as a goatherd along with a one-armed Australian who helped him with the herding and milking and the hauling of the milk to the Japanese cookhouse. They took full advantage of the opportunities that came their way, bartering with natives and watering the milk after they had taken some for the hospital. Forsman learned to procure medicines from the Japanese—sulfa, iodine—putatively for the benefit of his goats, and give it to the hospital. A thought began tickling the back of his brain: Could he escape? He had no connections—all around him lay a yawning cultural divide. But with the bombings well under way, Forsman had read fear in the eyes of his Korean guards. Engaging them in conversation, he got the sense they no longer believed it was their war, that they wanted it to end. The feeling was revolutionary. It opened a world of possibility.
One day while he was out working with the goats, Forsman met a man who claimed to be a Portuguese doctor. He said he had links to the resistance in French Indochina. The doctor asked Forsman for information on the camp, the number of prisoners, the preparedness of the guards. Against his better judgment