Ship of Ghosts (56 page)

The OSS officers had trained at President Roosevelt’s retreat near Hagerstown, Maryland, practicing their spycraft by penetrating and observing U.S. war production centers. Slipping into factories, they mapped them as an enemy agent would. It was hard to find native Thais with such covert skills in their occupied homeland, in part because of the competition for recruits posed by British and Dutch intelligence services. The OSS focused its recruitment effort domestically, hand-selecting the best of the Thai students pursuing postgraduate studies in the United States. In January 1943 the first class of Thai agents was placed under the command of the Thai military attaché in Washington, Col. Khap Khunchon (also referred to as Kharb Kunjara). He took their oath of allegiance at the Thai Legation, holding a ceremonial Confederate sword bought at a costume shop, and heard each man pledge to overthrow the Japanese tyranny that gripped his homeland. Sent to a secret training center near Orange, Virginia, within twenty miles of the battlefields of
Spotsylvania, The Wilderness, and Chancellorsville, they prepared for a very different rebellion, training to become officers in the Free Thai Army.

The presence of so many Asian nationals in the middle of Dixie’s northern frontier would have attracted unwanted notice in the absence of a good cover story. But since Orange boasted a hosiery mill of some consequence, they passed as a traveling group of Asian manufacturing representatives. The cover held up through their training, in which they learned communications, demolitions, weapons, and a type of “stream-lined ju-jitsu” used by the Shanghai police. Seeing their progress, Capt. Nicol Smith, the OSS officer in charge of their training and eventual infiltration into Asia, was impressed. “They can throw their weight in wildcats,” he said.

By June 1944 they were in the field, flying from India to Kunming, then riding ponies down to China’s southern frontier. They infiltrated on foot through French Indochina and into northern Thailand, whereupon their radio signals went dark. In deep suspense, Captain Smith listened ten times a day to the radio, hoping to hear a signal from the field.

The infiltration was dangerous business. On July 1, Smith heard from an agent code-named “Charlie” that two of the Virginia-trained agents had been compromised, caught, and killed. It was a disaster on its own terms, but no doubt the Japanese were also now alert to the insertion of agents into their midst. Finally, on October 5, after nearly four months of waiting, Smith received news of an agent’s safe landing. From deep within occupied Thailand came word that an agent code-named “Pow” had set up shop in Bangkok.

The best minds in the OSS could never have imagined the intelligence bonanza Pow would produce. He had been told that an indigenous Thai underground existed and that its leader was a “big shot.” But he had no idea who actually ran it. Arrested and taken to the police headquarters in the capital, Pow reported to Smith that the number-two man in the anti-Japanese underground was actually the head of the Thai national police. Pow’s message, Smith discovered to his delight, had been sent from within Bangkok’s police headquarters. The OSS was even more stunned to realize that the number-one man in the underground was none other than the leader of the government: the regent of Siam, Pridi Phanomyong, also known by his title, Luang Pradit Manutham. As Nicol Smith would write, “A lamp had been lighted in the capital of Siam.”

Given the OSS code name “Ruth,” Pridi was a forty-four-year-old Paris-trained attorney who had risen to fame in the summer of 1932, leading a bloodless coup that unseated the ruling monarchy. He was, in Smith’s words, “a revolutionary whom success had not turned into a conservative.” He stood for universal education and work, for the common man over the monarchic elite. He was the ideal candidate to lead a democratic rebellion. And given that his deputy was the chief of the Thai national police—Gen. Adun Adundetcharat, given the OSS code name “Betty”—the climate could not have been more favorable to start the clandestine movement that General Donovan’s group had long envisioned.

“A double life is not an easy one,” Ruth would tell Captain Smith. “By day I sit in my palace and pretend to busy myself with the affairs of His Majesty. In reality the entire time is taken up with problems of the underground—how we are going to get more guerrillas; how we are going to feed the ones we have; how we can, without causing suspicion, replace governors from provinces where we are putting in American camps.” It was the unique and defining characteristic of the Thai insurgency that it was led by sitting heads of state working as double agents against their own quisling administration.

With help from Ruth and Betty, Col. John Coughlin, the chief of Office of Strategic Services Detachment 404, which ran operations in Burma and Southeast Asia, oversaw the creation of a guerrilla network across Thailand. Near the OSS headquarters at Kandy, Ceylon, by the seaside town of Trincomalee, Capt. Nicol Smith set up a training base where volunteers brought in by his Free Thai Army advance men rehearsed small-boat tactics, weapons training, unarmed combat, junglecraft, wireless communications, mapmaking, demolitions, and intelligence gathering. By the close of January 1945, the first two American field agents had followed Pow into Bangkok. During the next few months more U.S. agents, assisted by the Free Thai Army liaisons trained in the States, parachuted into other locations with the goal of creating a rebel force ten thousand strong. A world away, deep in the jungle of a country officially committed to the wrong side of the Pacific war, Allied prisoners of war prayed for a deus ex machina to rescue them, and a rebellion awaited its spark. With the OSS network spreading through Thailand’s tropical wilderness, both were coming to fruition.

O
utside the Kanburi camp, Gus Forsman was working as a goatherd along with a one-armed Australian who helped him with the herding and milking and the hauling of the milk to the Japanese cookhouse. They took full advantage of the opportunities that came their way, bartering with natives and watering the milk after they had taken some for the hospital. Forsman learned to procure medicines from the Japanese—sulfa, iodine—putatively for the benefit of his goats, and give it to the hospital. A thought began tickling the back of his brain: Could he escape? He had no connections—all around him lay a yawning cultural divide. But with the bombings well under way, Forsman had read fear in the eyes of his Korean guards. Engaging them in conversation, he got the sense they no longer believed it was their war, that they wanted it to end. The feeling was revolutionary. It opened a world of possibility.

One day while he was out working with the goats, Forsman met a man who claimed to be a Portuguese doctor. He said he had links to the resistance in French Indochina. The doctor asked Forsman for information on the camp, the number of prisoners, the preparedness of the guards. Against his better judgment Forsman cooperated, and in turn received as his reward copies of the Bangkok newspaper, which he passed up the chain of command to the Lost Battalion officer in
charge of the Americans at the camp, Capt. William “Ike” Parker whom the Navy guys called “skipper.” The Bangkok paper was an improvement on the English-language news the Japanese fed them every now and then, which was laced with uproariously funny propaganda. “We learned, from these sources, that the Japanese invented the Ford car, gave the world the telephone and begot the first electric light,” wrote Clyde Fillmore. Gus Forsman continued meeting weekly with the Portuguese, returning with the news and whatever medicine had been for sale too: sulfathiazole, Atabrine, quinine tablets.

One morning the doctor didn’t show up. In his place came a native with a mouth full of silver-capped teeth. He said he wanted to buy something. An instinct told Forsman to play dumb. It was no secret that the Kempeitai was after the biggest operators on the growing black market. Robbie Robinson and Dan Buzzo had built relationships with the captains of the small river boats, trading goodies from their ditty bags for anything the hospital might need. One day Robinson and Buzzo had come to the river ready to trade and noticed that the captains were hesitating to approach them. Sensing a dark presence, the two men dumped their entire load into the river. Buzzo had a valuable ring, which he refused to deep-six. He wrapped it in a leaf and put it in his rectum. They narrowly avoided a Kempeitai trap. When the Japanese secret police made their move and rounded them up for search, there was nothing on which to hang them. Mindful of this, Forsman cautiously told the man he had nothing to sell, and left the scene. When the
Houston
sailor returned to the river the next day, two Japanese soldiers were waiting for him. They put him in handcuffs and marched him back to what they called Kempeitai headquarters. There he had his second encounter with the man with the silver teeth.

In the interrogation, they had no patience for his evasions. They screamed and ranted, made him kneel by a big teakwood table, chained him to one of its thick carved legs, and broke stout bamboo canes over his back. They lashed him with electrical wires. One of them said something ominous about taking him down to the river, but they returned him to his cell instead.

The next day the Japanese took Forsman, along with his superiors, Windy Rogers and Ike Parker, to Bangkok to commence court-martial proceedings. The use of actual legal process seemed extravagant given the summary nature of justice on the railway. Some say
the Japanese were fast discovering the merits of legalities, knowing that the day was coming when they would be called to account. It still wasn’t much of a trial. No evidence was presented, no questions asked. The handcuffed defendants filed into a large house, faced a panel of Japanese officers, and were given their sentence: six years in solitary confinement. Major Rogers, thinking it all a joke, said, “Six years hell. We’ll be lucky if we serve six months,” whereupon a guard hammered him to the floor. The war effort did seem to be falling in around the Japanese. But who was this Yankee to tell them what they could do with their slaves?

Locked in a civilian jail in Bangkok, Forsman recognized one of his cellmates: the Portuguese doctor he had first met at the goat farm. The Japanese beat him so regularly and severely that the sailor doubted he ever survived. Before Forsman knew it, he was being loaded into a cattle car for a train ride to Singapore. To avoid Allied bombers, the train traveled at night. When they had to leave the train in the freight yard by day, the engineers camouflaged it with palm fronds. From within the leafy concealment Forsman could look out and see enough of the wreckage to know the bombers had been doing their job.

When the train reached Singapore, Gus Forsman began an ordeal above and beyond what most of the railway prisoners had to endure. Brought to the Outram Road Jail, several miles from Changi, their residence on the first pass through the city three years earlier, he was taken to a cellblock, where he was shown a thick oak door and introduced to the new life of misery that lay behind it.

The name Outram Road is synonymous with inhumanity to those aging few who know what the name represents. It is a footnote to the larger railway ordeal, but one that seems important to relate as an object illustration of the arbitrary nature of Japanese wartime cruelty. They shipped Gus Forsman nine hundred miles for an infraction that held no meaning, posed no threat. It was an experience he never should have survived. Outram Road was reserved for the recipients of the worst punishments the Japanese garrison at Singapore meted out. Formerly the main civil prison in Singapore until the new jail at Changi was opened in the 1930s, two of its main blocks were run as a military prison reserved for those who had committed “anti-Japanese offenses.” A survivor described it as “a vast tomb” whose dominant feature was a suffocating, strictly enforced culture of silence. “There could be a sick, deadly hush throughout the entire
prison, so quiet that you could hear the metallic twisting of a key in a lock echoing up the levels to the long roof,” a Scottish prisoner named Eric Lomax would write. “A warder’s boots would make a booming sound on the stone floor, and I would be afraid that the sound of a whisper would carry all the way along to him.

“This was a place in which the living were turned into ghosts, starved, diseased creatures wasted down to their skeletal outlines.”

There Gus Forsman would languish, stripped naked, washed down, and sent to live for six years in a four-foot-wide, ten-foot-deep concrete cell with only a bucket for a latrine. At the top of the fifteen-foot ceiling was a small metal grate to the outside. For a bed he was given two planks of wood laid side by side, with a wooden block for a pillow. Twice a day he received a demitasse cup of rice and a cup of tea. This ordeal was very different from the screaming fervor of the Speedo campaign on the railway—Outram Road was a regime of torture by silence. He had only himself to talk to. He asked himself questions and answered them; counted the bricks and counted the cracks in the bricks. For amusement he caught flies and pulled off their wings so they would stick around and keep him company. His only human contact was when a guard replaced his fouled “honey pot.”

He paced and he cursed, unleashing on the cold walls the full vocabulary he had acquired manning a gun on Captain Rooks’s late Asiatic Fleet flagship. He had plenty of time to ponder the existential mysteries surrounding him. For instance, there were 437 bricks in one wall of his cell, but just 435 in the other. He’d count them again—a
tenko
for the pavers—and get 433. He sang. He tried to remember books he had read, the sequence of their scenes. He took apart carburetors in his head. He reconstructed the agenda of the confirmation and catechism classes he had taken at the Lutheran church at his hometown in Iowa. For no obvious reason except to keep his nerve circuits alive, he would go to the corner and stand on his head until his head hurt so much he couldn’t take it.

The tea and rice diet evolved into a tyranny of repetition. The good days were days when a couple of kernels of corn came mixed in with his rice. He set them aside and cherished them like the rarest of truffles, sucking their juice and chewing them to nothing before swallowing. Through it all, Forsman could not push from his mind the absurdity of his situation. Having survived forced labor building a goddamn railroad through impassable hills and disease-ridden jungle,
this son of a railroad worker was to starve to death like a stock cartoon prisoner languishing in a forgotten dungeon cell. He understood the stupidity of the risk he’d taken in trading with the locals. More compelling to him than anything his subterfuge with the outsiders might ever have gained—and the drugs he had obtained were not trivial benefits—had been his need for contact with the free world. He longed to breathe that air again, to seize hold of the hand of that aircrewman, safe on high, destroying his and his shipmates’ hard-built handiwork with payloads of empty peach tins and steerable bombs and fragrant chewing gum wrappers. But until victory came crashing down around him, he would take a breather from the real world of men and play with flies. He found that if he picked the wings just right, he could get two or three hours entertainment from a single one.