Ship of Ghosts (53 page)

The Liberators of the Tenth Air Force’s Seventh Bomb Group flew their first reconnaissance missions over the railway in January 19, 1943, when Col. Conrad F. Necrason, the same pilot who had led the attack on the
Nichimei Maru
and the
Dai Moji Maru,
photographed the entire length of the line, unaware that the slaves hacking the right-of-way through the jungle were Allied prisoners. Because the bomber command gave priority to targets far closer to India, the B-24s did not make their first concentrated effort to destroy the bridges, rail junctions, and marshaling yards along the Kwae Noi until the latter part of 1944.

The September 6–7, 1944, strikes on Nong Pladuk turned out to be tragic miscues. As at Thanbyuzayat the previous June, the Japanese placed their prison barracks in harm’s way. The campaign of aerial bombardment to follow would all but destroy Nong Pladuk’s vital rail facilities. But they also commenced a terrible phase in the war in which American forces—bombers and submarines—inflicted grievous numbers of deaths on their own countrymen and allies. The B-24Js that pasted Nong Pladuk killed more than a hundred prisoners. At sea the toll was even higher. The railway survivors had heard enough war news to dread the thought of sailing between Luzon and Formosa in the South China Sea, well known as a torpedo gallery for the increasingly bold U.S. submarine wolf packs. Called “Convoy College” by the Americans for its status as a rendezvous area for Japanese merchant shipping, it was a harrowing journey. Like their counterparts in the Tenth Air Force, the submariners had no way to know that some of the ships they hunted were full of friendly POWs.

On June 24, 1944, the Japanese transport
Tamahoko Maru
had been torpedoed by the USS
Tang
(SS-306). Among the dead were
560 Allied prisoners of war, including two survivors of the USS
Houston
and fifteen members of the Lost Battalion. The survivors were bound for prison in Japan. Imprisoned at Camp Omori, also known as Tokyo Main Camp or Tokyo Base Camp No. 1, the
Houston
’s Cdr. Al Maher was joined by fellow prisoners such as Maj. Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, the legendary Marine fighter ace, and later, by Cdr. Richard H. O’Kane, the celebrated captain of the
Tang,
who had no way to know that it had been his own torpedoes that had killed some of Maher’s men on June 24.

Every aspect of Japanese national life was suffering under the tightening chokehold that O’Kane’s brothers in the Silent Service were applying to Japan’s oceanic lifelines. On September 6, the same day as the tragic bomber raid on Nong Pladuk, a convoy of unmarked passenger-cargo vessels laden with Allied prisoners departed Singapore and was soon beset by American submarines. In the predawn hours of September 12, the USS
Pampanito
(SS-383), under Lt. Cdr. Paul E. Summers, the
Growler
(SS-215), and the
Sealion II
(SS-315), stalking Japanese merchant traffic in Convoy College, located and attacked the Japan-bound convoy of seven transports and two oilers, escorted by six destroyers.

Caught on the surface at one point, the
Growler
made a bold head-on surface attack on a Japanese destroyer charging her. Struck by two of the
Growler
’s torpedoes, the
Shikinami
—which had helped sink the
Houston
in the Battle of Sunda Strait—burned so furiously that her fires blistered paint on the submarine’s conning tower as she passed by, sinking just two hundred yards away. The
Pampanito
torpedoed and sank the 524-foot transport
Kachidoki Maru
. Cdr. Eli Reich’s
Sealion II
put two torpedoes into the
Rakuyo Maru
. It took about twelve hours for the old ship to sink, for its full payload of rubber absorbed much of the force of the blasts and provided some buoyancy. As Reich took his boat deep to avoid the depth charging that followed, the convoy fled, zigzagging on a new course for Hong Kong.

The tragedy of the POWs on the doomed hell ships
Rakuyo Maru
and
Kachidoki Maru
must rank among the saddest of the Pacific war. Unknown to the subs that hunted them, they embarked thirteen hundred and nine hundred Allied prisoners, respectively. As the
Rakuyo Maru
took on water, her decks became a battlefield of sorts. Panicked prisoners rushed the ladders. The Japanese crewmen, holding
them at bay with makeshift weapons, took all ten of the ship’s lifeboats and made good their escape. The unlucky crew remaining on the sinking ship were left to contend with their prisoners. As a tanker in the convoy erupted nearby, brightening the predawn darkness, the prisoners seized the opportunity to settle old business. They set upon the Japanese crewmen and beat many of them to death by hand in one of the uncommon instances in the Pacific war when Allied prisoners rose up en masse against their captors. The ship disappeared beneath the waves around 5:30
p.m
. that afternoon.

In the water as on board the ship, the Australian and British survivors were left to their own devices once again when Japanese ships—two frigates and a merchantman—apparently responding to an SOS, reached the sinking site and organized the rescue of their countrymen in the lifeboats, leaving the Allied survivors behind. The
Growler
and
Pampanito
chased down the remaining ships that night. The
Growler
torpedoed and sank a Japanese frigate, the
Hirado,
incidentally killing a number of prisoners in the water with the explosions. The stunned survivors piled into some abandoned lifeboats and began paddling west toward the China coast, some 220 miles distant, splitting into two groups on the way. Three days into their race for shore, the men in the smaller of the two groups—four boats commanded by an HMAS
Perth
survivor named Vic Duncan—could see the other group of six boats hauling along nicely about six miles away. Then a sailor called out to Duncan, “Smoke on the horizon.”

It was a trio of Japanese corvettes. The men in Duncan’s group watched as the other group was surrounded by the corvettes. Then, in helpless horror, they listened as the mad-woodpecker sound of distant machine-gun fire reached them over the water. The men in Duncan’s group were approached next and asked if they were Americans; responding negatively, they were not shot but were taken prisoner and held in various camps in Japan.

What precipitated the slaughter of the other lifeboat group is beyond knowing. What is certain is that after leading A Force through the worst of the Burma railway construction, after parleying nose to nose with Colonel Nagatomo through every abomination his men were forced to endure, after keeping a secret diary that would document the story of his men’s experience in intimate detail, the commander of the doomed lifeboat flotilla, Brig. Arthur Varley, had well
earned a fate other than this. After the three Imperial corvettes finished with them and moved on, none of the men on those six boats, including Varley, were ever seen again.

F
or the American wolf packs operating in Convoy College, September 12 appeared to be a banner day. Three days later, however, the mood changed. When the
Pampanito
surfaced on the afternoon of September 15, the crew was stunned to find themselves in the midst of a large debris field dotted with men clinging to wreckage. Some were ill and many were wounded; all were fouled by bunker oil and ravaged by more than three days adrift without rations or water. They were friendlies, survivors of the
Rakuyo Maru
. As the submarine’s crew set about pulling the men from the water, Commander Summers radioed for help, summoning the
Sealion II
as well as the nearby subs USS
Queenfish
and USS
Barb
.

The extent of the disaster became quickly manifest as Summers’s crew hauled aboard survivor after survivor, seventy-three in all. According to the
Pampanito
’s patrol report:

The seas were whipping up, and by the time a typhoon passed through the area, making further rescue operations pointless, the four submarines had saved just 159 of the
Rakuyo Maru
’s 1,318 prisoner-passengers.

According to Clifford Kinvig, these Australians and Britons, taken to Saipan and then dispatched for rendezvous with their home
governments, “provided the first ‘open source’ information on conditions in the railway camps.” Their astonishing reports had almost immediate international repercussions. In October 1944, the pilots of the Seventh Bomb Group began receiving briefings about the disposition of Allied prisoner of war camps along the railway. On November 17, British and Australian representatives released coordinated statements describing the atrocities of the Burma-Thailand Railway. But they were powerless to stop what was happening to their men in Japanese custody. There was nothing to be done for them but finish the war as swiftly and decisively as possible.

T
he barbed-wire perimeter of the Tamarkan prison camp was just a stone’s throw from the point where one end of the great bridge touched land. A large concentration-camp–like complex that covered six or seven city blocks, Tamarkan was home to several thousand Allied prisoners. Pinky King was cleaning up the evening meal for some Japanese at their cookhouse outside the camp near the river when, from the north, he heard the drone of engines in the sky. There were aircraft, nineteen or twenty of them, big ones, coming right down the river at an altitude so high he had trouble identifying them. “Look at the mighty Japanese air force,” he said. Among the prisoners, a debate ensued as to their origin. No one had seen such a demonstration of Japanese airpower before. Doubts arose when a Japanese antiaircraft battery near the bridge opened fire on the formation. As the bombs rained down, the prisoners went wild. So did the guards. Koreans ran. Prisoners ran. “They just went wild running,” recalled King.

At the end of November, B-24s from the Seventh Group, flying from India, launched a serious effort against Tamarkan’s great railway bridge. From high altitude, they failed to bring down the steel spans. Their inefficacy was no surprise to anyone aware of their scant record against central Burma’s bridges in 1943. The big bombers’
high-volume mode of iron slinging proved to be ill suited to knocking bridge spans from their concrete piers. It took not only tremendous accuracy but also fuses timed with hairsbreadth precision—and not a little luck. Bomber commanders experimented with different angles of attack, aiming points, and aircraft formations. Against one especially heavily targeted bridge south of Mandalay, Tenth Air Force B-24s and B-25s flew 337 sorties during the year, dropping 1,219 bombs but scoring just eighteen hits. That 1.5 percent rate actually overstated the accuracy of the big B-24s: In their eighty-one sorties they accounted for just one of those hits. The skip-bombing tactics used successfully by medium bomber pilots against Japanese shipping were less useful against much narrower targets such as bridge abutments. Low-level attacks were problematic too because the bombs, with no time to orient to a vertical trajectory before they hit, seldom detonated. All manner of mechanical modifications—heavy spikes in the bombs’ noses, air brakes on the fins, and even parachutes—made little difference.

Swollen by the summer monsoon, the River Kwae Noi flowed south beneath the two east-west bridges, then turned in a sweeping bend east, tracing the southern edge of the Tamarkan prison camp, where a pier lay thick with barges full of supplies and equipment. North of them was a network of tracks and switches, beyond which three flak batteries were positioned. The prison camp was precariously situated, well within an antiaircraft shell’s burst radius of the bridge. When the bombers came over, the shrapnel from the flak landed in the camp. “When we protested the camp being located in the very center of military objectives the Japanese blandly replied that they knew it, but had not they placed the three ack-ack batteries about the camp to
protect
us?” Lt. Clyde Fillmore of the Lost Battalion would write. If there was any ambiguity about the threat posed by the flak batteries, it applied doubly to the bombs themselves. “You cussed the planes and everyone in them; you hated to see them come and then somehow you hated to see them leave, but you could not hold down a surge of pride that these planes were American planes and that we were carrying the war to the Nips,” Fillmore wrote. “You want to cheer them for tearing up the bridge, and you want to cuss them for trying to kill you,” said Roy Offerle. Their exuberance chafed their captors. At Tamarkan the order came down, “Prisoners will not laugh at Japanese guards during air raids.”