Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [187]
When he arrived at Phet Buri, he had to find a different skill set to exploit. Opportunity knocked when a Japanese soldier approached Huffman and asked him if he knew how to drive a bulldozer. The fact that he had never touched a bulldozer before didn’t keep him from answering, “Hell, yes.” The Japanese had brilliant engineers but a severe shortage of men with daily experience in practical mechanics. They had a Caterpillar tracklayer but no idea how to start it. It took Huffman only a few minutes to see that the vehicle used a separate gas engine to start the main engine. Thus did a farm boy become an airfield grader. Setting to work patching over holes in the earth caused by the removal of trees, Huffman, joined by his shipmate Lanson Harris, who as a pilot and aviation machinist’s mate was also technically adept, helped them build one fine airfield, which was referred to as Tayang.
When they weren’t working the tarmac, the two Americans were detailed to a truck depot near the camp’s perimeter. Because the guards seemed to consider the two men reliable, they were allowed to work with minimal supervision. About a half mile outside the main camp, the Japanese had gathered a dozen old vehicles in poor repair. Huffman and Harris cannibalized six of them so the other six could run. Flat tires were patched with tree gum. Though there was a guardhouse about four hundred yards from the truck depot, whenever Harris was feeling brave and the guards were occupied with their lunch, he would sneak out and explore the perimeter. “Anything to get the hell out of camp and scrounge around for something to eat,” he said. He found a grove of banana palms near the fence and took to raiding it as often as possible.
His second or third week at Tayang, Harris was in the banana grove when he noticed a trio of strangers on the other side of the fence. He wasn’t sure what to make of them. They were wearing sarongs and looked like Thai locals, but he knew that didn’t prove anything. The Japanese were known to recruit natives as collaborators, tempting their prisoners to break military law. Harris thought, Oh God, I’m going to be caught by these damn Kempeis. His alarm intensified when one of them approached him and pulled out a weapon that looked a lot like a Japanese service pistol. The man handed the weapon to him to examine. It turned out to be a German Luger. Harris was befuddled. “These guys were trying to communicate with me, but couldn’t speak the language,” he said. “I assumed he wasn’t a Kempei policeman, but I didn’t know who the hell he was.” Harris returned to camp full of questions and uncertain of the wisdom of treating the strangers as friendlies.
Harvesting bananas a few days later, Harris again encountered the trio, but this time they were accompanied by a fourth man. The man conveyed the idea to Harris that he wanted him to go with him. When or where or how was beyond Harris’s grasp. Then the man unfolded a piece of paper from his coat and showed the American a drawing of a box hanging from a parachute. “This didn’t mean a damn thing to me,” Harris said, “but he kept pointing to this picture of the parachute and pointing out in the jungle, like he wanted me to go somewhere where there was a parachute. Well, I had enough smarts to know there were no parachutes out in the damn jungle anyplace.
“When you’re associated with people under these conditions, never, never do you trust anybody. If you’re gonna do something you never say anything about it, because there are guys who would turn you in for damn near nothing, and all kinds of problems can result from this.” Still, he felt he could trust Red Huffman. “I knew Red very well. So I told him what had happened. He couldn’t figure it out and I couldn’t figure it out.
“I said, ‘Red, tell you what you do. Tomorrow morning when we go on that working party, you come with me and we’ll see if we can find those guys out in that banana grove.’” That’s what they did. And once again, the strangers were waiting for them. The mysterious