Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [184]
One morning the doctor didn’t show up. In his place came a native with a mouth full of silver-capped teeth. He said he wanted to buy something. An instinct told Forsman to play dumb. It was no secret that the Kempeitai was after the biggest operators on the growing black market. Robbie Robinson and Dan Buzzo had built relationships with the captains of the small river boats, trading goodies from their ditty bags for anything the hospital might need. One day Robinson and Buzzo had come to the river ready to trade and noticed that the captains were hesitating to approach them. Sensing a dark presence, the two men dumped their entire load into the river. Buzzo had a valuable ring, which he refused to deep-six. He wrapped it in a leaf and put it in his rectum. They narrowly avoided a Kempeitai trap. When the Japanese secret police made their move and rounded them up for search, there was nothing on which to hang them. Mindful of this, Forsman cautiously told the man he had nothing to sell, and left the scene. When the Houston sailor returned to the river the next day, two Japanese soldiers were waiting for him. They put him in handcuffs and marched him back to what they called Kempeitai headquarters. There he had his second encounter with the man with the silver teeth.
In the interrogation, they had no patience for his evasions. They screamed and ranted, made him kneel by a big teakwood table, chained him to one of its thick carved legs, and broke stout bamboo canes over his back. They lashed him with electrical wires. One of them said something ominous about taking him down to the river, but they returned him to his cell instead.
The next day the Japanese took Forsman, along with his superiors, Windy Rogers and Ike Parker, to Bangkok to commence court-martial proceedings. The use of actual legal process seemed extravagant given the summary nature of justice on the railway. Some say the Japanese were fast discovering the merits of legalities, knowing that the day was coming when they would be called to account. It still wasn’t much of a trial. No evidence was presented, no questions asked. The handcuffed defendants filed into a large house, faced a panel of Japanese officers, and were given their sentence: six years in solitary confinement. Major Rogers, thinking it all a joke, said, “Six years hell. We’ll be lucky if we serve six months,” whereupon a guard hammered him to the floor. The war effort did seem to be falling in around the Japanese. But who was this Yankee to tell them what they could do with their slaves?
Locked in a civilian jail in Bangkok, Forsman recognized one of his cellmates: the Portuguese doctor he had first met at the goat farm. The Japanese beat him so regularly and severely that the sailor doubted he ever survived. Before Forsman knew it, he was being loaded into a cattle car for a train ride to Singapore. To avoid Allied bombers, the train traveled at night. When they had to leave the train in the freight yard by day, the engineers camouflaged it with palm fronds. From within the leafy concealment Forsman could look out and see enough of the wreckage to know the bombers had been doing their job.
When the train reached Singapore, Gus Forsman began an ordeal above and beyond what most of the railway prisoners had to endure. Brought to the Outram Road Jail, several