Ship of Ghosts (48 page)

In the beginning, they valued life above all else. They dragged their sick and dying on the boxcars and on up from Kanchanaburi into the jungles around Hintok to work with them until they died. “Had we known…that they’d wind up in a damn slop-hole grave, [we would have] let them die on the trail,” Quaty Gordon said. “It would have been far better not to have carried the man, to let him stop on the side of the road, and let a Jap either put a bayonet through him or a bullet through his head, and that would have been
the end of it. You carried him and let him go through all the agonies of hell in that jungle. But that was
clinging to life;
that’s what it amounted to.”

At Hintok they died without drama or ceremony. “We’d find them laying out there outside the tents,” Wisecup said. “At first we made individual graves, and then there were so many of them that we just couldn’t keep up with it.” One rainy morning he and another man were hauling a corpse on a stretcher through the rain. Wearing khaki pants torn across the rear, the Marine was sloughing through six inches of mud, bare feet bleeding with every step over the sharp bamboo shoots growing beneath the mire. As he walked, the swaying of the stretcher caused the dead man’s feet to keep bumping into his exposed buttocks. Lice were all over Wisecup. He bit off curse after curse. The jungle was working on him. “I never will forget this. I never will forget this to the end of my days,” he said. “I stopped and turned around, grabbed hold of the stretcher, and threw the whole bunch into the jungle.”

The other man with him on that grave detail was a very religious young Dubliner. To him, it was bad enough that there was never time for last rites. It was bad enough that sometimes people delayed reporting a prisoner’s death just so they could get his ration. Sometimes they simply failed to notice a death until the stench reached an appreciable level. But the Irishman considered Wisecup’s act a sacrilege. He protested to the Marine, told him he was going to retrieve the body. Wisecup snapped at him to leave the body alone.

“John, we can’t do that, lad. No good will come of it. You can’t blaspheme the dead.”

Wisecup roared that the dead man was free at last. “Goddamnit, he’s out of the son of a bitch!” he shouted. “Leave that bastard laying over there.”

The Irishman said nothing. After a few minutes, Wisecup cooled down and went and retrieved the corpse. “I can remember that just so plain—them cold feet hitting me in the ass. I was thinking, ‘Look at him! He’s out of it! He ain’t got to put up with this shit no more!’”

B
y the middle of 1943, the industrial base of the United States was at full wartime tilt. As silt, corrosion, and sea creatures were having their way with the old
Houston,
roiled by bottom currents off St. Nicholas Point, new ships were rolling off the line. The new light cruiser
Houston
was nearing completion, sliding off the ways at Newport News on June 19. The coming of that ship and so many others like her had been foretold to the Japanese slave drivers. It was the Australian doctor Weary Dunlop who did it in the spring of 1943, in the midst of the cutting project in the stony ridgelands of Hintok and Konyu.

Like every other doctor on the railway, Dunlop had been waging a war to keep the Japanese from forcing his sickest men out to work. After days of argument, which usually resulted in a sound beating for the doctor, a Japanese officer evidently tried to improve relations with Dunlop by inviting him to the screening of a propaganda film. The Australian agreed and that night was trucked up to the camp at Kinsayok and seated front and center beneath the projection screen with hundreds of Japanese on mats behind him. A sequence of propaganda pieces flickered on the screen, including a news review that depicted, as Dunlop wrote, “Nippon tearing Asia up into strips by the employment of every conceivable arm of the service.”
The film highlighted the unpreparedness of the U.S. Navy and featured plenty of footage of Pearl Harbor burning.

The reaction from the Japanese audience was the predictable lusty chorus of
“Banzai!”
At one point they were doubtless startled to see Dunlop himself jumping to his feet, right there under their movie screen, and shouting
“Banzai!”
along with them.

“You think good? Nippon bomb-bomb, sink American and British ships?” someone asked him.

“Yes!” Dunlop roared. “Old ships no good—
taksan
[many] new ships now built—better!” he said. He could have known little about the naval forces marshaling to retake the Pacific’s far-flung realms, but his exuberant defiance would prove to be prophecy itself.

Ships were one thing; people were another. This was the first American war in three generations large enough to subsume entire families in the regular course of events. Thirty-seven sets of brothers, seventy-seven men, had served in the battleship USS
Arizona
. Fifty-two of them died. Off Guadalcanal the Navy lost the USS
Juneau
and five members of the Sullivan family, whose outsized legend would match that of the eventual flag raisers on Iwo Jima. Cdr. Al Maher’s brother James was for a time the captain of the light cruiser USS
San Juan,
launched the same day the
Houston
was sunk. The
Houston
’s Howard Brooks had three other brothers in the Pacific when he was working in the Burma jungle. His older brother was a Navy medic on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Another brother was killed in Luzon. The third Brooks boy was on the destroyer escort USS
Bright,
struck by a kamikaze off Iwo Jima. Captain Rooks’s own younger brother was Maj. Gen. Lowell W. Rooks, of Tucson, Arizona, who served on the staff of Gen. Mark Clark and headed the planning group that had drawn up the North African offensive in 1942. An article in
The Oregonian
newspaper carried the headline, “Where Is the Crew of the Ghost Cruiser ‘Houston’?” It reported on Fred Hodge’s ongoing quest to determine the fate of his brother, and the rest of the crew of the
Houston
.

In the midst of another severe bout of malaria, Jim Gee languished in 114 Kilo Camp. Splayed out on what he was convinced would be his deathbed, “out of his mind” with the tremors, he saw his sister, Johnnie Gee, appear, looking down on him from a tree outside the sick hut. In his hallucination she had joined the service and had come looking for him. Her mouth was moving and they talked for a time. He had yet to learn of women in the military—in
mid-1940, when Gee, then nineteen, had left the States, he hadn’t heard of the women’s auxiliaries—but the oddity of it would not occur to him until later. When he shook off the fever and came back to his senses, Jim Gee was the most disappointed Marine on the Burma-Thailand Railway. But the vision renewed his hope, for the clarity and immediacy of the image of his sister searching for him told him that people were out there coming for him. “This dream gave to me the strength, again, to know that, gosh, they’re really looking for us,” Gee would say. “They’re getting pretty close, and they can’t be far away because this was too realistic.”

One possibility might have struck him as a fantasy as outlandish as Johnnie floating in the trees: Less than two years after their ship’s loss, a new USS
Houston
was with the American fleet leading the way across the Pacific to reckon with their captors. If the new
Houston
was not strictly speaking a sister to Captain Rooks’s old heavy cruiser, there was certainly something of a blood relation there. Surging westward in the same task force as the new light cruiser
Houston
was the heavy cruiser USS
New Orleans
. Like the old
Houston,
she had felt the sting of Japanese torpedoes. In the Battle of Tassafaronga near Guadalcanal on the night of November 30, 1942, the
New Orleans
had taken a Long Lance torpedo that blew away her bow, forecastle, and a turret—everything forward of its number-two turret. The ship’s exposed cross-section of compartments was sealed over, and she was taken to Sydney for temporary repairs. Then CA-32 returned to Puget Sound Navy Yard in April to receive a new bow—and a new young officer. Ens. Harold R. Rooks, fresh from Harvard’s ROTC program, joined the ship on June 14, 1943. A year earlier, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had summoned Ensign Rooks to Washington and presented him with his father’s Medal of Honor. Now Rooks joined the
New Orleans
gunnery department.

Her son’s assignment doubtless filled Edith Rooks with a mix of pride and fear. When Secretary Knox wrote her in November 1943 to invite her to come to the Seattle-Tacoma shipyard to smash a champagne bottle across the stem of a new destroyer named in her husband’s honor, the last ship in the famous
Fletcher
class, the opportunity to reflect on the full weight of the Rooks family naval tradition must have come bearing down on her. It compelled her, on the second anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, to sit down and write Secretary Knox a letter:

Though her last sentence only implied what many other mothers would have beseechingly implored, it failed to mask the idea that even an iron soul such as Edith Rooks was willing to risk only so much personal grief.

But to a young Marine 7,500 miles away, suffering the rigors of malaria at a place called 114 Kilo Camp, her son had an important charge to keep. The forces the prisoners envisioned coming for them had long since gathered and set sail. Among the swarm was the USS
San Jacinto,
the light carrier built with the $49 million surplus from the Harris County War Bond Drive, a ship that counted among its hard-hitting air group a future president, George H. W. Bush. As Lieutenant Bush and the other aviators of VT-51 were flying strike missions against the radio installations at Chichi Jima in the first week of September 1944, the USS
New Orleans
moved in close to bombard that island with her guns. It was the son of the old
Houston
’s late captain, deep in the plotting room, who was laying the main batteries on target.

W
hen the war reached the American POWs, they rather wished they could have stayed hidden and been spared its fury. There were no liberating armies, no waking fulfillment of the dreams falsely spun when the troopers of the Lost Battalion first arrived at Bicycle Camp. Rather, it took the form of large bombers flown by pilots who had no earthly idea that their bombs would terminate their parabolic plunges among American captives.

Flying from bases in India in indirect support of General Stilwell’s Burma Raiders, the bombers of the Tenth Air Force ranged up and down Burma’s western coast, hitting dockyards, shipping, bridges, and railway centers. They spread a steady rain of iron on Japanese targets in Burma from before Christmas 1942 clear through 1943. Their success against shipping was partly why a railway had to be constructed in the first place. Nowhere were Japanese supply lines safe, not by land, air, or sea. But the wings of freedom were, for the prisoners, wings of death.

On June 12, 1943, the jungle’s peace yielded to a symphony of radial aircraft engines. Six planes—B-24 Liberators—approached from the southeast, circled the camp, and made their bomb runs in two waves of three. The Japanese raised no air alarm. Once more,
they confined the prisoners to their huts and refused them access to the slit trenches. Though the bombers’ targets appeared to be the railway lines and workshops east of the camp, two bombs fell within the camp perimeter. There were deep percussive thuds, the closest of them sending shrapnel through the
atap
roofs. One of these bombs struck a well inside the camp that from the air might have looked like a gun emplacement. Twelve prisoners were killed and fifteen wounded. Losses among the Burmese camped outside the fence were doubtless heavier.

The next day Brigadier Varley was called to the Japanese headquarters and met some Japanese officers he had never seen before. One of them spoke perfect English and identified himself as a representative of the propaganda department at Rangoon. He asked Varley what he thought about the bombing and the deaths of the prisoners. Varley replied that the camp’s illegal proximity to the rail yards, a military target, was bound to bring tragedy. He said that Japanese antiaircraft fire from within the camp not only brought return fire from the bombers’ window and turret gunners but was sure to void any protection the Red Cross might have guaranteed the hospital and the prison camp.

On June 15, bugles sounded as the Liberators again appeared. Though there were just three planes on this raid, the results were far worse. Thanbyuzayat’s fourteen huts, which must have looked like a military barracks from the air, were in the crosshairs now. Though the new hospital was not hit, bombs fell inside the camp, collapsing several slit trenches and setting several roofs afire. Nineteen Australian and Dutch prisoners were killed, with about thirty wounded. Varley himself was injured in this attack, receiving shrapnel in his legs and back, bruises from head to toe, two black eyes, and punctured eardrums.

Adorning the top of the camp’s center hut was a red cross improvised from red blankets but with no white background to make it recognizable. It had faded under the elements and had been blown partly out of position by the wind. When the Japanese finally let Varley’s men construct a more visible cross out of red sand, the B-24 bombardiers still did not get the message. They put a bomb right in the center of it. According to Slug Wright, the aviators came over low enough to see them, but thought the prisoners, with their deeply tanned skin, loincloths, and panicked tendency to flee for
cover in the perimeter jungle, were natives working with the enemy. The Japanese refused Brigadier Varley’s request to broadcast the hospital’s location from Rangoon.