The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [84]
The second time the hatches opened the bucket of rice came down nearer to where I was. Someone threw a lump of rice and I managed to catch it. I wolfed it down. Rice becomes water and that is what I needed to abate my thirst. At no time during this terrible journey did the Japanese give us water; we relied on the occasional rice ball for it. The terrible stomach cramps induced by the lack of food and water defied belief. The pain doubled me over. This was a slow and painful death.
Six days out of Singapore I wondered how much more I could take. Then in the distance came a muffled explosion. Right on cue we had sailed into the trap set by the American submariners, who were determined to sink as many of the vessels they believed to be carrying oil and rubber as they could. At two in the morning the USS Growler had fired at the convoy sending our escorts fanning out. Then in one of the most daring manoeuvres in American naval history the Growler took on the Japanese destroyer Shikinami bow to bow. At a range of a thousand yards, Commander Oakley slammed three torpedoes into the Shikinami. She was only two hundred yards from the Growler when she sank. Oakley hit another two vessels before withdrawing to rearm.
Next the Pampanito and the Sealion II moved in for the kill. On board the Pampanito Lieutenant Commander Paul Summers had just taken up a perfect position to attack the scattered convoy when several large explosions unexpectedly rocked his vessel. To the west of Summers the Sealion II had fired two salvoes of three torpedoes each at the frantically zig-zagging convoy – and met with spectacular success. Three torpedoes smashed into a large oil tanker that exploded into flames, lighting up the sea like a giant flare. Out of control the burning tanker collided with the Kachidoki Maru. We had an amazingly close escape as it screeched along the side of our hull. When the Kachidoki Maru suddenly listed dramatically, pandemonium broke out afresh as men screamed in terror and begged to be let up on deck. It was terrifying; we expected to be torpedoed at any moment and drowned like rats in those stinking holds. We all fixed our eyes on the narrow stairwell to the decks, wondering how the hell we would ever get out.
But the burning tanker had illuminated a second target, the Rakuyo Maru. The poor prisoners in the holds knew what was coming and braced themselves for the inevitable. At 5.25 a.m. Lieutenant Commander Eli Reich steadied the Sealion II, a modern Balao-class submarine that had been commissioned just six months earlier, and fixed the Rakuyo Maru in the sights of his periscope. The thirty-one-year-old skipper took careful aim at the 9500-tonne vessel silhouetted against the night sky by the burning tanker. He was not going to miss. Earlier in the attack he had fired in support of the Growler and missed and been forced to flee Japanese escorts. And he had a personal score to settle: the first USS Sealion had been sunk in a Japanese bombing raid on the Philippines at the outbreak of war and Reich had lost four of his crew. There would be no mistake. As he gave the order to fire three steam torpedoes at ten-second intervals, the young New Yorker had no idea of the carnage he was about to cause. All three tin fish hit the Rakuyo Maru. The first struck the engine room, another hit amidships and the third torpedo hit the 477-foot ship in the bow area. Amazingly none of the 1317 prisoners were killed by the explosion. The ship started to list and the Japanese guards and sailors immediately deserted the sinking ship in ten of twelve available lifeboats, leaving the prisoners to fashion makeshift rafts and take to the water with what little food and water they could find on board.
Tragically 1159 men, survivors of the Death Railway and