Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [198]
On the brink of liberation, prisoners in Saigon noticed that the guards no longer cared whether they worked or not. The guards asked them what this new secret weapon was that took the flesh off people, burned them to cinders, and razed whole cities. Visibly frightened, one of them asked Lost Battalion member Garth Slate, “Will they drop one on Saigon?” Then came the long-awaited news, spreading throughout the POW diaspora. It struck so many prisoners as a hollow anticlimax. The war was over.
Thailand had a great deal to lose from any last burst of Japanese rage. Ruth, as the country’s regent and resistance leader, did not approve of anything that might put the tenuous truce at risk. He feared that the sudden appearance of C-47 transport planes at Tayang would be an aggravating incident that could be a prologue to tragedy. He declined to approve an exfiltration effort until conditions settled. Finally, approval was granted and OSS headquarters radioed Major Bartlett on August 16: “Present plan tentatively approved on highest level includes complete exfiltration all POWs in Petburi [sic] area by American C-47 aircraft. Our info indicates 1500 POWs there including 500 too weak to walk. Task is tremendous. …. POW exfiltration biggest OSS job to do and has very highest priority. Let’s do it up right. We furnish everything you help organize POWs and assist medics. Advise as soon as field ready to take sixteen sorties per day, sixteen to a plane.”
The OSS parachuted in four more men to support Major Bartlett in the effort to retrieve the men at Tayang: Capt. Roger C. L’Hereault, Lt. W. B. Macomber, bm2/c Louis Pulgencio, and phm2/c Van W. Pressley jumped from an aircraft making a food drop on the night of August 17–18. “Cover is to be maintained until code word Goldfish RPT Goldfish is given,” Kandy radioed him. “At this time you will procede [SIC] to POW area but not before code word is wired.” Bartlett and L’Hereault received a transmission from a colleague: “See you at the Mayflower.”
Although Allied recovery teams for the Repatriation of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees (or RAPWI) were busily working under the auspices of the Southeast Asia Command, the OSS struck a secret agreement with their British clandestine counterpart, Force 136, to put Major Bartlett in charge of the Phet Buri area under the code name Operation Mainland. All Americans in Thailand west of the Bangkok River would be sent to Phet Buri for evacuation. Everyone else would go to Bangkok.
When the age of atomic weapons entered its third day, Jim Gee was thirty miles from Nagasaki, in a coal-mining camp in the mountains. He didn’t notice the blast that leveled the city—by the latter half of 1945 explosions were so common around the besieged shipbuilding center that it was hard for him to tell one from another. But one day something very out of the ordinary happened. He and his fellow prisoners were called to the parade ground where just a few days before they had been exhibited to and scolded by the populace. A formal ceremony was under way. The Japanese apologized for the hardships inflicted on the prisoners and said they and the Americans were now friends. The Japanese turned over their weapons, and the camp commander ordered his people to surrender to the nearest dumbfounded American. “As soon as we found out in this camp that the war was over,” the Houston’s Ens. Charles D. Smith wrote, “we kicked the Japanese out of their jobs, took their guns away from them and isolated them over in one side of the camp out of harm’s way, so that we could go and come from the camp into the town at will.”
The role reversal induced vertigo. A prisoner who had kept an American flag hidden in his effects fastened it to a flagpole and hoisted it over the camp. They set out into the countryside to forage. For every piece of food they received from locals, an