Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [214]
After the war, Thailand bought the concrete bridge at Tamarkan from the Allies for $2.5 million. It has been big business for the tourist bureau ever since the movie came out, with tours and T-shirts and bumper stickers and vendors’ booths standing in commercial tribute to one of the Pacific War’s darkest episodes. The “River Kwai” today buzzes with motorboats and the kinetic pursuits of water sports enthusiasts under the steel bridge, which still stands against the glittering backdrop of a tourist bazaar that efficiently monetarizes the area’s sad past. At the annual fall festival, organizers pipe in sound effects to simulate bombing and antiaircraft fire. The kickoff of the 1990 event was marred by the discovery of a mass grave of romusha at Kanchanaburi. But the show went on. It always does. The bumper stickers and T-shirts sell briskly.
The privately funded Thailand-Burma Railway Centre does the more solemn work of remembrance. Founder and curator Rod Beattie has built a library, memorial, and gallery devoted to educating the public about the railway. Though it opened only in January 2003, it is the product of Beattie’s decade-long quest to walk the right-of-way, map it, capture its history, and teach it to others. A Buddhist shrine erected by the ex-Kempeitai interpreter Takashi Nagase in 1986 can be found near the bridge site as well. In 1976, Nagase organized a reunion of Japanese and American veterans of the railway.
Twelve hundred miles to the south, the wreck of the Houston slumbers off Panjang Island, its crew still standing watch in Sunda Strait, as her survivors like to say. The wreck, untouched by the cataclysmic tsunami of 2004, is disturbed only by the currents, which keep a churning cloud of sediment roiling around her, warding off all but the most determined intruders. In August 1973, Indonesian salvage divers recovered the ship’s bell and presented it to the American embassy in Jakarta. Today it stands in downtown Houston, in Sam Houston Park at Bagby and Lamar, atop a pink marble obelisk memorializing the reciprocal sacrifices of the cruiser and its city.
Edith Rooks and Fred Hodge got the answers they were seeking and resolved themselves, as all bereaved relatives do, to living with a hole in their hearts. But as the honors came and the encomia were delivered, the hole filled with pride. In Walla Walla, a sweeping park was named in Captain Rooks’s honor. On June 29, 1983, at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, in Norfolk, the Albert H. Rooks Center for Tactical Development was dedicated as the new headquarters for Commander, Surface Warfare Development Group.
Even as they are embraced by the Navy community—every officer and crewman on the submarine USS Houston (SSN-713) knows this story—they stand apart from it, for no ship’s company ever endured an ordeal quite like the Houston men did. They stand apart from the POW community too because their brotherhood was forged at sea, aboard Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fishing yacht and the flagship of the Asiatic Fleet, where they fought the first major surface actions of the Second World War. Their closest brothers in the naval fraternity live halfway around the world. The Australians got on with their lives too—Lt. Frank Gillan as a marine engineer, H. K. Gosden as a rubber worker. The Americans have forged enduring friendships with them. Arthur Bancroft, head of the HMAS Perth Association, calls Otto Schwarz every Fourth of July to wish America a happy birthday.
They are running short on birthdays, and the world looks so different with each passing year. It is history’s nature to be forgotten. As politics trumps geography and tradition, names change, conspiring against memory and lived experience. Burma is now Myanmar. Siam is Thailand. The Dutch East Indies are Indonesia, Batavia is Jakarta, Bangkok is Krung Thep. So many small places of outsized importance can no longer be found on the face of a map. History flees us.