Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [186]
In February 1945, a photo of five Marines and a Navy corpsman planting a flagpole on a western Pacific mountaintop graced the front pages of hundreds of newspapers worldwide. After a month more of bitter fighting, Iwo Jima finally fell. In April, as troops were going ashore on Okinawa, the bombing of the Burma-Thai Railway reached its peak and Allied aircraft began to tip the balance in their race to destroy the bridges faster than the Japanese could force their slaves to repair them. With their weak air defenses and lack of appreciable aerial striking power, the Japanese garrison in Southeast Asia resembled nothing so much as the Allies in Java in February 1942.
On April 13, news began circulating that would touch the heart of every Houston sailor wherever he was and whenever he received the news. That day the joint Army-Navy casualty list was led with a prominent name: “Roosevelt, Franklin D., Commander in Chief,” who had died the previous day. In May, a world away, Germany surrendered. As fate would have it, a member of the Rooks family was involved with the negotiations with the Nazis at the highest levels. On the morning of May 12, 1945, Maj. Gen. Lowell W. Rooks, fresh from his assignment as commander of the Ninetieth Infantry Division in the Ardennes, was sent to Flensburg in his new capacity as head of General Eisenhower’s SHAEF* Control Party, the job of which was “to impose [Eisenhower’s] will on the German High Command.” On a passenger ship in Flensburg’s harbor General Rooks interviewed Admiral Doenitz and his Oberkommando der Wehrmacht braintrust. According to a U.S. Army colonel who witnessed the events, “If ever a man with a field marshal’s baton looked unhappy, Doenitz did (after he came out). Rooks must have taken almost no time to deliver his message. The Germans were marched off and put into cars to take them home to pack.”
Freedom was in the air. In June, the prison camp at Kanburi closed. Officers were segregated from the enlisted men and sent to Nakhon Pathom, forty-five miles west of Bangkok. The Japanese seemed to be concerned that prisoners in camps along the railway, lying in the likely path of invading forces, might form a fifth column against them. If the prisoners were held in a conspicuous place, it might make it difficult to hold them hostage, use them for blackmail, or carry out the “disposition” that the army command was preparing for.
The Japanese struggled to raise their battlements against the bombers. In the spring, a large number of Houston and Lost Battalion men were transferred from Kanburi and Tamarkan to the town of Phet Buri in Thailand’s south. Their job there was to construct an airstrip, as if the starving empire could do anything against the silvery fleets of bombers now crossing the skies at will. Phet Buri’s Cashew Mountain Camp was a huge concentration camp on southern Thailand’s agricultural coastal plain. About a dozen large atap-roofed barracks each accommodated about two hundred men. Red Huffman was part of the large group of prisoners there whose job was to break rocks and move earth to make a serviceable landing strip. Since boarding a cattle car at 114 Kilo Camp and leaving the cholera-infected jungle behind, Huffman had mastered the art of the cushy work detail. At Tamarkan, one of the Houston’s Chinese mess cooks, Marco Su, had gotten him a job in the guards’ cookhouse, where he showed up to find Pinky King and a number of other familiar faces already at work. When the bombing attacks forced Tamarkan to close, Huffman had been sent next to Chungkai,