Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [199]
“Hollywood couldn’t have written a better ending,” Jim Gee said.
The serenity that fell over the prison camps from Thailand to Indochina belied the racking implosions that at last stilled Japan’s war machine. In Tokyo, some pilots were planning an unauthorized kamikaze reception for the U.S. ships gathering in the harbor. Tipped to the plot, the Imperial Army impounded their ammunition and fuel. At Atsugi Airfield, where General MacArthur was to arrive to direct the occupation, soldiers loyal to the throne subdued a navy captain who was furiously inciting a revolt, and removed the propellers from all the planes.
American aircraft littered the countryside with pamphlets printed in nine languages, instructing former prisoners: Remain where you are, disarm the Japanese, show restraint, do not punish them. The pamphlets also warned the Japanese that they were responsible for the prisoners. The prisoners seemed less interested in confiscating their captors’ weapons than in drinking their sake.
On the morning of August 29, Lt. Col. Amos D. Moscrip from OSS headquarters flew to Tayang and joined Major Bartlett on the ground. Thirty-five American prisoners were already there, and fifty-eight more arrived by truck that afternoon. Moscrip wrote:
I gave them a short talk regarding why we were there and where they were to go, how and when, and then we fell to in a huge party where generous supplies of cigarettes, gum, candy, razors, tooth brushes and paste, combs, mirrors, matches, Yank magazines, fruit juice, toddy, etc. were issued to all American POW’s. The party lasted until 0200 the next morning, 30 August, during which time my team was very busy answering a multitude of questions for those news-starved Americans. Their physical condition seemed to be fair, from a layman’s point of view, but they bore scars and marks of much suffering…. The American POW’s presented me with an American flag that two of them had made in the POW Camp over a period of 8 months from scraps of material such as they could filch. This flag was about 4 × 6 feet and had been kept secret from the Japanese at all times. I promised them that the flag would fly until every American had left Tayang. I had a flagpole erected the first thing the next morning and the flag was raised in the presence of 5 Japanese officers and about 8 Japanese enlisted men. Through an interpreter, the ranking Japanese officer stated that he was very sorry but he did not wish the American flag flown at this time over the Japanese airfield. I explained that I wasn’t interested in his wishes and after several exchanges of American and Japanese phrases via the interpreter, the Stars and Stripes whipped gaily in the breeze.
The first C-47 from Rangoon landed at Phet Buri bright and early the next morning.
The reality of freedom dawned slowly over them. Modern diagnosticians have ready labels for the psychological syndromes that beset them. But those labels didn’t exist in 1945. “While the pictures may show the men to look fairly healthy, they weren’t,” Moscrip wrote. “It will take many of them months of good care and doctor’s treatment to be able to regain their mental balance. It must also be remembered, and I think the narrative should bring out the fact, that these men were the survivors, that they were the fittest, and that many of the dead were left along the Burma-Siam Railway which they were compelled to construct. There wasn’t a single POW among all of those who were evacuated from Petburi [sic] who were not at one time or another