Ship of Ghosts (37 page)

O
n January 7, 1943, the
Houston
’s remaining officers at Singapore were loaded into trucks and driven to a train station, where they said farewell to the Allies’ bastion of disgrace. This group included Colonel Tharp, Lieutenant Hamlin, and Ensigns John Nelson and Charles Smith, as well as 1st Sgt. Harley Dupler, Lanson Harris, Red Huffman, and Charley Pryor. Marching out of camp, they were led by a unit of Gordon Highlanders who groaned a haunting melody on their bagpipes as their lone drummer beat the cadence. “It was an honor, we understand, to be piped out, an old Scottish custom the Japs didn’t like,” pharmacist’s mate Raymond Day wrote. “For the sound of the pipes, they say, were devils and was against civilization for such savage music. So we had the Pipers play all the more.” Along the way, natives lined the city’s thoroughfares shouting encouragement and tossing them food and cigarettes. The officers boarded filthy boxcars, found patches of personal space, and began a squealing crawl north.

Two days later, they arrived at the Malayan coastal city of Georgetown, also known as Penang, and two days after that were herded to the docks to board another merchant vessel. The Japanese, inveterate busybodies when it came to moving prisoners around, were economical with information. Their native language seemed to be hyperbole, allegory, and propaganda. “You’re going to a health camp,” the guards told them. “You’re going to go to a nice place where the food is plentiful and the sun is shining.” Where they went first was back into the steel confines of another hell ship. When Colonel Tharp’s group boarded the decrepit
Dai Moji Maru
about fifty Americans stayed behind at Changi. John Wisecup, Paul Papish, and Robbie Robinson were among those kept behind for reasons of ill health and placed under the nominal command of the lone American officer left with them, Marine 2nd Lt. Edward Miles Barrett. On January 11, the rest of them headed for sea. A second ship, the
Nichimei Maru,
embarked fifteen hundred Dutchmen and five hundred Japanese engineers whose services were needed somewhere in the north. The two freighters were escorted by a small
corvette that looked like a large pleasure craft with a three-inch gun mounted astern. The little convoy settled on a northwesterly course through the Straits of Malacca.

At daybreak on January 15, 1943, the ships neared the Gulf of Martaban near Rangoon. Up on the main deck, Sgt. Luther Prunty was bulling around with two other Lost Battalion sergeants, trying to figure out where they were headed. Rumors had it they were just a day or so from making port. Having judged that they were well clear of Malayan waters, Prunty said, “Well, we ought to be out of the danger zone.” Sgt. Julius B. Heinen Jr. figured the exact opposite. The closer they got to India, he said, the closer they would be to Japanese airfields. Then Heinen said, “Just incidentally, if you’ll look up in the sky right over there right now, you’re going to see three planes, and I’m going to bet you that they’re ours. Prunty, those damn planes are going to make a run on these ships!”

As the aircraft approached, Charley Pryor was in the
Dai Moji Maru
’s after cargo hold, directly below the open topside hatch, watching some guys play a card game they called “Stateside Poker.” It was a variation common among prisoners. Bidding was vigorous but debts were deferred—kept careful track of, but not paid—until they returned to the States after the war. Under the circumstances it might as well have been called “Bright Side Poker.” A series of deep, muffled explosions shook the ship, putting an end to the card game. “We heard this tremendous
whomp whomp whomp
and couldn’t imagine what the Sam Hill it was,” Pryor said, “but I just looked up through there, and I see this great silver airplane with four motors.”

There were three of them. As the big B-24 Liberator bombers vectored in at about twelve thousand feet to make their bomb runs, hysteria gripped the
Dai Moji Maru
. Japanese soldiers up on deck fired their rifles at the planes and struggled to unlimber the two French-built, wooden-wheeled seventy-five-millimeter field guns tied down on wooden platforms fore and aft. Sergeant Heinen ordered all prisoners on deck to return to the hold. He told them to take off their shoes, tie them together and hang on. “Just don’t panic. Don’t get in an uproar,” he said. He yelled down to Ens. Charles D. Smith and swapped places with him. Tracking these bombers from a ship called for a naval officer’s talents. Heinen took charge of the men in the hold and Smith climbed topside.

The aircraft that found them early that morning were part of a flight of six B-24D Liberators operating from an Indian airdrome
called Pandaveswar, well hidden in the countryside about a hundred miles northwest of Calcutta. Fanning out over the Gulf of Martaban hunting Japanese shipping, three of those planes found the POW convoy about fifty miles off the Burma coast, near Tavoy.

The
Dai Moji Maru
was an underpowered old bucket, saddled with a full load of coal and capable of only about six knots. With their limited elevation, her two field guns, one mounted fore and the other aft, were poorly suited to antiaircraft defense. But as the B-24s lumbered in, the Japanese gun crews untied their deck cables, tracked the planes, and opened fire. The old
marus
made difficult targets. Their captains began circling on contact with the bombers.

A Liberator nicknamed “Captain and the Kids,” piloted by Capt. William A. Delahay, droned overhead and dropped four bombs on the first run, missing the
Dai Moji Maru
by about a quarter mile astern. Another B-24 targeted the lead prison ship, the
Nichimei Maru
. Its bombardier’s aim was true. A stick of bombs walked right across the ship’s fantail, killing most of the men in the after hold. She heaved up out of the sea and settled back again, broken at the keel. As fate would have it, the
Nichimei Maru
’s after hold was full of Japanese engineers. The men in the forward hold—Dutch POWs—suffered far fewer casualties.

Belowdecks on the
Dai Moji Maru,
Julius Heinen found Capt. Hugh Lumpkin, a medical officer, and two other Lost Battalion officers absorbed in a game of bridge. “What’s the bid?” he asked. One of the officers said he’d bid four spades. Heinen took his own cards, looked at everyone’s hands, and said, “If you play that hand correctly, you could make five spades, but I don’t think you’ve got time to finish it. They’re making a run over us with three bombers, and they’ve already sunk the ship ahead of us.”

Cards flew. As the bombers headed for them, Ensign Smith stood at the edge of the hatch above, calling down ranges and angles of elevation: “Thirty degrees, forty, forty-five…” Zero degrees was a line to the horizon, ninety was straight overhead. The soldiers from the Lost Battalion were hazy on what all the Navy’s aerial geometry meant, but understood well enough when Ensign Smith announced, “I can see them!
Jesus,
these are close!” The planes homed in on them again, approaching the drop point of fifty-five degrees. As the American bombers bore in high on the starboard hand of the undamaged
Dai Moji Maru,
gunners on the ship’s forward mount tracked one of the twin-tailed bombers and carelessly closed their
firing key just as the plane flew behind the ship’s superstructure. The projectile slammed into the bridge, blowing its starboard portion clean away and raining shrapnel over the bridge and the forward deck. Still tracking the plane, the crew fired again. This projectile struck a guide wire directly in front of them and exploded, killing them all. Five bombs came whistling down and landed right across the
Dai Moji Maru
’s beam, straddling the ship, three to starboard and two to port.

Observing his target from twelve thousand feet through his Norden bombsight, the bombardier of the plane, 2nd Lt. Thomas B. Sledge, could see flames raging amidships on the vessel. Then he watched as his bombs splashed close aboard, the nearest barely twenty feet alongside. The blasts ruptured hull plates, lifted the ship’s bow clear of the water, and turned her about fifteen degrees off her previous heading. As Sledge completed his run, he saw that the ship was stopped and the fire was out. He cursed, thinking that his hits had caused the fires and the towering spouts of his near-misses had quenched them. But the fires were from an altogether different cause: the incompetent zeal of the Japanese field gun crews on the
Dai Moji Maru
.

Charley Pryor figured it was the dense mass of coal filling the ship’s hull that had kept it from collapsing below the waterline. “Up above the water line,” Pryor said, “and above the coal bunkers, it just caved the whole side of the ship in. If we’d been an oil burner, it’d have torn all the seams loose and we’d have been sunk right there.” The Japanese gun crew on the fantail seemed just as intent on scuttling the ship with their flak barrage. On one of their first volleys at the Liberators, they failed to lock the breech of their field gun properly and produced a back blast that set the gun’s wooden platform and after magazine afire. At least thirty Japanese were killed. Flames engulfed the stern of the ship, threatening the aft hold, full of Australians. As those sailors fought the fire, the medical people on board, including Dr. Lumpkin, Staff Sgt. Jack Rogers of the 131st’s medical detachment, the
Houston
ship’s doctor Cdr. William Epstein, and pharmacist’s mate second class Raymond Day, tended to more than a hundred wounded and dead on deck.

The B-24s turned and came around yet again. Spotting them at a distance, the Americans cursed, and asked the Japanese skipper to grant the
Houston
’s chief signalman, Kenneth S. Blair, permission to alert the planes that they were a POW ship. An Australian major, as
it happened, just went and did it, blinking a message to the pilots with a flashlight. One of the planes returned the signal and, to everyone’s relief, departed to the west.

The
Dai Moji Maru
stopped to rescue survivors from the
Nichimei Maru,
lingering until after dark to get the work done. There were 960 in all, the majority of them Dutch. Ensign Smith, who had seen the whole show while spotting the aircraft topside, wrote, “I will give credit to the Japanese merchant captain of the
Moji Maru,
who conducted himself in a thoroughly seamanlike manner and after the planes left he refused to leave the vicinity until all survivors from the other ship were picked up.” It wouldn’t occur to Charley Pryor till much later that what may have compelled the Japanese captain to save them was not mercy but necessity: The prisoners jamming his miserable holds were needed alive for a reason.

One
Houston
sailor who had traveled this path with the Fitzsimmons Group, Donald Brain, heard en route to the docks that they were headed for Burma. Uncommon among the
Houston
’s working-class enlisted men, Brain knew the remote country well from his father’s prewar work in foreign oil fields. His dad’s job had taken him all over the world: Kirkuk, northern Pakistan, Shanghai, Rangoon. From the age of twelve to seventeen Brain had lived in the last of these cities, Burma’s great southern port. He learned the local commoners’ language, knew the gentleness of the Buddhist mind, the communal style of child rearing, the quiet spirit of industriousness. And he knew the fractious country well enough to weigh its possibilities and risks as a home in captivity. He thought of the mines in the north, the oil fields in the Irrawaddy River Valley, and the rubber plantations in the south. If Burma was indeed the destination, all of these would be likely places to put prisoners to work.

In Singapore, there had been talk of a railway in jungles far to the north. They had seen the groups of British and Australian prisoners shipping out, to where nobody knew. Brain doubted the experience would live up to the guards’ sunny billing. But what was this talk about a railroad? Don Brain wondered. The hearsay was never very specific. He knew enough about Burma to ask this: If that was indeed their destination, where in its godforsaken jungles was there a railroad to work on?

T
he men on the
Dai Moji Maru
—dozens of them, mostly Dutch, were horribly wounded in the attack by the U.S. bombers—spotted land again on January 16. The coastline was broken by a wide sweeping delta where a powerful river dissipated into the sea. Mangrove forests and rice paddies surrounded them as the ship navigated the winding river channels and estuaries. Forty miles into the delta system, they came upon a city. Speculation flew about its identity. It was well familiar to at least one sailor. “Hell, I know where we are now,” said Donald Brain. “This is Rangoon, Burma.” He caught some flak for being a know-it-all, but he was right.

The Japanese Fifteenth Army invaded that country on January 16, 1942, rolling over two weak divisions of Burmese and Indian irregulars in less than two weeks and putting the imperial sword against Rangoon, the threshold to Great Britain’s south Asian empire. When Japanese troops landed on March 7, taking the port city as the Dutch were surrendering on Java, the rout acquired epic proportions. Nearly a million Burmese became refugees, fleeing for their lives as the Japanese advanced northward. The British Army commander who yielded the city, Lt. Gen. Sir Harold Alexander, had already built a reputation as a steward of hopeless causes. Less than
two years earlier, he had directed the British evacuation of Dunkirk. U.S. Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell’s forces escaped into India in a withdrawal that would make “Vinegar Joe” too a hero for his exploits in retreat. By the end of April 1942, the Japanese had pushed north and seized Lashio, the western terminus of the Burma Road. When that supply link was severed, China was once again left to its own starved devices. The enemy’s success provoked fear in Allied military councils that the Japanese might link up with the Germans in the Middle East, bringing the immediate collapse not just of China but of India too.

Almost immediately on arrival in Rangoon, the prisoners were transferred to smaller vessels and sent to sea again. Departing, they headed east, traveling all that afternoon and through the following day. At dusk they approached the shore again. From within the Salween River delta, a smaller town could be seen near the coast: Moulmein.