Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [193]
With escapees to look after, the difficult supply situation Bartlett faced couldn’t have come at a worse time. Since arriving in-country Bartlett hadn’t received a single package of food. The airlift embargo angered him, especially because he had seen with his own eyes the drops B-24s were making to a Thai army camp nearby. Not that Huffman and Harris much noticed the shortage of rations. They were glad to be put to work in the mess, taking turns directing the preparation of whatever the Thais brought in from the jungle. It was the best duty they had had in more than three years.
Bartlett interrogated them, but gingerly. “He would get us apart,” Red Huffman said. “You’d never know when he was going to ask a question. All of a sudden he’d turn around and ask you something. We gave him more information than he had ever had. We told him everything we knew. He was making sure he was getting the truth. Then he would have his radioman radio it to India.” Soon after their arrival, Huffman and Harris were joined at Pattern camp by two English prisoners and an Australian. A much larger catch was in the offing. Bartlett informed Kandy that Tayang held 1,500 prisoners, had no planes, stored 25,000 gallons of gas, housed three radio stations but no radio direction-finding equipment, and had heavy machine guns but no larger antiaircraft emplacements. The information coming from the two Americans was voluminous. “What particular information do you want me to find out?” Bartlett asked headquarters. “Would take a day to send all they have told us.”
Kandy responded the next day that it wanted the names of the Houston’s survivors, information about their condition, the location of prison camps, the total numbers of prisoners, how the Japanese guarded them, evidence of their cruelty, information about their attitudes toward war, specific conversations between POWs and guards, how the fall of Okinawa was influencing Japanese treatment of POWs, and how enemy morale might be lowered through propaganda.
One time Bartlett turned to Huffman and asked, “Would you sneak back into camp and warn them and tell them I’m coming?” It was a preposterous suggestion. Huffman refused the request in no uncertain terms. “Neither one of us would go, because we’d been prisoners for three and a half years almost,” he said. Nevertheless, Harris and Huffman and their three Allied friends seriously weighed the option of reengaging with their enemy. In a July 28 radio transmission, Bartlett reported to Ceylon: “Have told them they would be [exfiltrated] soonest. Their own words quote Let us stay here and have a crack at those GD Japs unquote. This feeling exists with all five and they all are studying our weapons.”
They did some celebrating too. After the sailors’ safe arrival at Pattern, there was a jungle feast in their honor. The main dish was monkey. Though the Americans declined the proffered plates, they had their fill of Hershey bars. Huffman broke out his two canteens and the ex-prisoners got “all hooched up” on the stout rice wine. Huffman offered Bartlett a shot of it, but it seems the OSS man preferred scotch.
The most coveted treasure that the sailors turned over to Bartlett was the roster of Houston personnel, living and dead, kept by John Reas and John Harrell. With the disclosure of this priceless record, scores of families would finally know their loved ones’ fates. On July 29 the information that Fred Hodge and so many others had tried for years to ferret out began flowing as beeps from a portable transmitter hidden deep in the Thai jungle. The bursts of secret knowledge—a