Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [201]
To 2nd Lt. Miles Barrett, the highest-ranking USS Houston man in Singapore, the dramatically changing fortunes had been hard on the nerves. The possibility of liberation gave the prisoners a degree of hope that made fear possible again. “In many ways these weeks have seemed the most difficult of the whole war,” Barrett confided to his diary. All along they had been scrapping for their survival. Then a ball of plutonium was crushed over Nagasaki, and six days later word arrived that Japan had accepted the Allied terms of unconditional surrender. The war over, the prisoners endured a few last tenkos, trying to hold down their excitement. Finally, on August 19, the prisoners’ representative at Changi, an Australian colonel from F Force named Dillon, decided to press his luck, insisting on the immediate delivery of Red Cross supplies and the immediate release of prisoners known to be suffering in solitary confinement at the Outram Road Jail.
For Gus Forsman, the mind-wrecking routine there had never changed. Entombed in his routine of silence, he was not allowed to lie down during the day. He could only put down his board and sleep when the guard came by in the evening and issued a one-word command to turn in: “Yasume.” Only once had the rigid routine ever deviated, about three months into his confinement, when he was allowed to take a walk outside the prison. It was a strange thing. The guards took six prisoners outside to water a garden. It had been their first contact with fresh air until that time. Forsman didn’t understand the point of it. He knew only that everything the guards did was toward the purpose of what some psychiatrists would later call menticide: the killing of the mind.
But now faraway events had remade Forsman’s world. There was light—the door to his cell opened and it flooded in, blinding him. He was ushered out and as his eyes adjusted he saw Capt. Ike Parker and Maj. Windy Rogers, considerably bonier and dirtier than he had known them before. They cringed at each other’s stench.
Escorted by guards, they were taken to a well and instructed to draw from it. Forsman, who would have paid a thousand dollars for a Dixie cup full of water just moments before, drew three or four whole buckets, drank deeply—he would have jumped in had he found the strength—and began the long process of getting himself clean. He was guided to a stack of clothing and got dressed.
As the guards marched them toward the prison gate, Rogers was seized by a flash of horrible recognition. “They’re going to shoot us in the back,” he said. “They’re going to say we were escaping. By God, let’s give them a run for their money!” The frail men started running. They tottered down the hill, trying to zigzag in order to elude the expected hail of bullets. It never came. Perhaps the guards couldn’t draw a bead on the skeletons through the convulsions of their laughter. The three Americans stopped at the bottom of the hill and stood there, marveling at their survival, wondering what was next.
A Chinaman rode by on a bicycle. Windy Rogers said something to him, and he stopped to talk to the Americans. “The war is over.” “That’s impossible,” said the prisoners. “No. They boom-boom one time. Japan finished.” He urged them to head for Changi. Joined momentarily by some other survivors of solitary confinement—bomber crewmen, worn out from the special brand of torture the Japanese reserved for “air pirates”—they set out on foot. After a march that seemed like ten miles to Forsman, they reached the compound