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By Root 1692 0

roster of lost names, from “Agin, G. L.” to “Zabler, W. E.”—filled Pattern’s outgoing Morse bandwidth for nearly a week. It was not until August 5 that Major Bartlett’s radioman hand-keyed the last of the dots and dashes representing the 301 names on the list. Two days later he started sending a shorter list: the names of sixty-three of the seventy-seven Houston men who had met their end as prisoners of war. From that point on, Bartlett’s mission was to ensure that as few names as possible were added to the roster of fatalities. The resourceful commander of Pattern camp began to figure out what he could do for the rest of the prisoners at the Tayang airfield.

CHAPTER 59

All our men are bang-happy and would give their eyeteeth to begin an extensive sabotage campaign against the Japs.” So said Capt. Bud Grassi, head of the OSS base near Kanchanaburi, to Nicol Smith. He was chafing under the firm policy that blocked him from conducting overt actions of his own and forced him to rely instead on native proxies. “It’s damned hard to take when Thais come to us with explosives that they have slipped out of Jap supply dumps. I can’t help thinking how easy it would be to leave a few time pencils in these dumps, and no one would ever know what caused the explosions. We can also cut the Burma-Bangkok Railroad at innumerable places.

“Another thing the fellows are anxious to get at is rescuing the two thousand American, British, Australian and Dutch prisoners in the POW camp near Kanburi before the Japs kill them all off.”

The people who ran OSS Detachment 404 channeled the joy they felt on locating survivors of the Houston into planning their exfiltration and eventual homecoming as soon as possible. There were several possible avenues—by PBY Catalina flying boat from the southern coast of Thailand near Prachuab; by boat from the coast up to Bangkok, then up to the OSS main airfield at Pukeo; or via a single-engine Lysander flown directly from Tayang to Rangoon, then to Kandy or Calcutta. Bartlett’s men reconnoitered Tayang in case the last option was chosen. Evaluating the airfield’s security level and obstacles to approach, the major recommended a dawn or dusk landing.

“The only difficulty anticipated in the arrangement to date has been the openly expressed preference of the two rescued seamen to ‘stay here and have a crack at those GD Japs,’” Bartlett wrote. “It is probable that circumstances will compel this wish to be denied them.”

If the British were to be believed, the Royal Army was planning an invasion of Thailand in November. Accordingly, Washington had urged the OSS leadership, “Keep cautioning [your agents] against overt action before Mountbatten strikes.”

Inexorably the course was set for the war in the Pacific to end. By the middle of 1945, Okinawa had been taken, the last of the Japanese navy’s strength extinguished. American aircraft ruled the skies. Grand plans were afoot to combine all of America’s combat forces—almost everything already in the Pacific and whatever else could be brought over from liberated Europe—and throw it all against the Japanese home islands in a final strategic offensive, known as Operation Downfall. Free Thailand would contribute what it could. At Sattahip Bay, southeast of Bangkok, its small coastal fleet stood at the Allies’ disposal. There were ten torpedo boats, four large gunboats, four submarines, and fifteen seaplanes. Several of those craft could operate as far south as Singapore, or even east to the Philippines. Though the supply of oil limited their radius, more was available on a black market fed by Japanese soldiers more than willing to steal it from their depots.

But a more imposing exhibition of naval power had already struck Japan’s home islands. On the morning of July 14, as Lanson Harris and Red Huffman were slipping through the jungle toward their rendezvous with the OSS, the fast battleships South Dakota, Indiana, and Massachusetts, with the new heavy cruisers Chicago and Quincy, took station off Kamaishi, site of a great iron and steel works that adjoined the prison