Ship of Ghosts (65 page)

T
he war over World War II continues, with some states such as California permitting lawsuits against Japanese defendants, and with some courts in Japan ruling in favor of plaintiffs with restitution claims. It was a Mitsui executive who predicted that if the
zaibatsu
—Japan’s great banking and industrial combines—were destroyed by war crimes tribunals or private litigation, Japan would be fertile ground for communism. Yet it was Mitsui Mining that in 2002 was ordered by the Fukuoka District Court to pay 165 million yen ($1.45 million) in restitution to fifteen Chinese nationals who worked as slaves in the prefecture’s mines during the war. Unavoidably the wheels of time move faster than the wheels of jurisprudence. By the time the appeals are exhausted, few of the survivors will be left to savor any victory. They are living to see, however, Japan finally apologize for its well-documented atrocities. In May 2005, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, in Amsterdam to meet with his Dutch opposite number, Jan Peter Balkenende, said, “Humbly accepting the fact that Japan inflicted grave damage and
pain on people of many countries including the Netherlands during World War II, we would like to deeply reflect on this and offer heartfelt apology.”

More than a few
Houston
men resolved to get justice on their own terms. When Charley Pryor was in South Korea during the Korean War, he kept an eye out for targets of opportunity unrelated to the current needs of the U.S. Marine Corps. He meant to get even with his onetime Korean guards. “If I had ever seen three or four of these guys, I’ll tell you they would have suffered unusual consequences…. I would have made a horrible example out of four or five of them that I can name right now.” But some mellowed in the knowledge that bitterness and vigilante fantasies took a price. “When you harbor something like that over a period of years, it hurts you as much or more than the people you have these feelings against,” said Roy Offerle, who buried his brother in the jungle. “There’s no use in it. Really. There was a war. They did things wrong. Maybe other people had done things wrong. But I have no animosity, really.”

Once upon a time, Gus Forsman dreamed of revenge. Returning home to Iowa, he was eager to have another assignment, but the Navy couldn’t find his records. He restlessly tolerated the bureaucratic stasis for a while before demanding and getting a discharge, whereupon he enlisted in the Army. “I wanted to volunteer to go to Japan for one thing. I planned on beating some heads over there,” he said. The Navy knew his history in Asia and wouldn’t have let that happen. When the Army discovered his status as an ex-prisoner of war, it decided to keep him from getting into a situation that both he and Uncle Sam might regret. “They figured I’d go over there on a revenge deal,” he said. He wound up quietly retiring in 1964 before getting a recall four years later to go to Vietnam with the 269th Aviation Battalion, an assault helicopter outfit. Though he had a well-rooted case of post-traumatic stress disorder when he arrived in theater, it never kept him from doing his job. He earned a promotion to first sergeant.

Sixty years after the war, revenge was the farthest thing from Forsman’s gracious mind. At the USS
Houston
reunion in 2005, the final year of his life, he rolled through the halls of Houston’s Doubletree Allen Center just radiating warmth and cheer, happy to talk about what he had seen, endured, and done, and not in the least held back by the wheelchair he used or the oxygen cannula he wore.
The hospitality room buzzed with shared memories, small talk between big hearts. A television set ran the latest documentary of interest, people poring over a large conference table full of rare historical documents, photographs, books and manuscripts. At the previous year’s gathering, the centerpiece on that table was a large transparent case holding a six-foot scale model of the
Houston
. The father and son who built it had no personal connection to the ship. They hauled it down from Ohio to show off their labor of love. Like all visitors who show up with a sincere interest, they are welcomed as family. Like the state of Texas itself, the
Houston
veterans and the “Next Generation” of their kin adopt new friends without formality.

The last veterans of the American Civil War were passing away as the veterans of World War II sank their roots into postwar life back home, beginning a new cycle of trauma and recovery. As this book nears publication, America is not far from looking at World War II just as it does at its Civil War—that is, without living participants to learn from. Too soon, the only available sources to study will be the written and recorded ones. No voices will be left, except those that are preserved on audio recordings by relatives with enough foresight and nostalgia—a rare combination of virtues—to do this service to history.

Historian Ronald Marcello’s three-decade quest to record and preserve the stories of the Death Railway while the memories that housed them were still fresh has produced a sprawling collection of interview transcripts that resides at the University of North Texas in Denton, the home turf of the old 131st Field Artillery. To immerse oneself in these stories of witness, most of whose tellers are long dead, is to touch the sentiment that moved Stephen Crane to write his 1896 short story “The Veteran,” about the gallant death of a Civil War veteran who, long after his war, ran into a burning building to save a pet:

After the war, Thailand bought the concrete bridge at Tamarkan from the Allies for $2.5 million. It has been big business for the
tourist bureau ever since the movie came out, with tours and T-shirts and bumper stickers and vendors’ booths standing in commercial tribute to one of the Pacific War’s darkest episodes. The “River Kwai” today buzzes with motorboats and the kinetic pursuits of water sports enthusiasts under the steel bridge, which still stands against the glittering backdrop of a tourist bazaar that efficiently monetarizes the area’s sad past. At the annual fall festival, organizers pipe in sound effects to simulate bombing and antiaircraft fire. The kickoff of the 1990 event was marred by the discovery of a mass grave of
romusha
at Kanchanaburi. But the show went on. It always does. The bumper stickers and T-shirts sell briskly.

The privately funded Thailand-Burma Railway Centre does the more solemn work of remembrance. Founder and curator Rod Beattie has built a library, memorial, and gallery devoted to educating the public about the railway. Though it opened only in January 2003, it is the product of Beattie’s decade-long quest to walk the right-of-way, map it, capture its history, and teach it to others. A Buddhist shrine erected by the ex-Kempeitai interpreter Takashi Nagase in 1986 can be found near the bridge site as well. In 1976, Nagase organized a reunion of Japanese and American veterans of the railway.

Twelve hundred miles to the south, the wreck of the
Houston
slumbers off Panjang Island, its crew still standing watch in Sunda Strait, as her survivors like to say. The wreck, untouched by the cataclysmic tsunami of 2004, is disturbed only by the currents, which keep a churning cloud of sediment roiling around her, warding off all but the most determined intruders. In August 1973, Indonesian salvage divers recovered the ship’s bell and presented it to the American embassy in Jakarta. Today it stands in downtown Houston, in Sam Houston Park at Bagby and Lamar, atop a pink marble obelisk memorializing the reciprocal sacrifices of the cruiser and its city.

Edith Rooks and Fred Hodge got the answers they were seeking and resolved themselves, as all bereaved relatives do, to living with a hole in their hearts. But as the honors came and the encomia were delivered, the hole filled with pride. In Walla Walla, a sweeping park was named in Captain Rooks’s honor. On June 29, 1983, at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, in Norfolk, the Albert H. Rooks Center for Tactical Development was dedicated as the new headquarters for Commander, Surface Warfare Development Group.

Even as they are embraced by the Navy community—every officer and crewman on the submarine USS
Houston
(SSN-713) knows this story—they stand apart from it, for no ship’s company ever endured an ordeal quite like the
Houston
men did. They stand apart from the POW community too because their brotherhood was forged at sea, aboard Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fishing yacht and the flagship of the Asiatic Fleet, where they fought the first major surface actions of the Second World War. Their closest brothers in the naval fraternity live halfway around the world. The Australians got on with their lives too—Lt. Frank Gillan as a marine engineer, H. K. Gosden as a rubber worker. The Americans have forged enduring friendships with them. Arthur Bancroft, head of the HMAS
Perth
Association, calls Otto Schwarz every Fourth of July to wish America a happy birthday.

They are running short on birthdays, and the world looks so different with each passing year. It is history’s nature to be forgotten. As politics trumps geography and tradition, names change, conspiring against memory and lived experience. Burma is now Myanmar. Siam is Thailand. The Dutch East Indies are Indonesia, Batavia is Jakarta, Bangkok is Krung Thep. So many small places of outsized importance can no longer be found on the face of a map. History flees us. But entertainment is an edifice that never rusts.

If we are to believe David Lean’s vision of Pierre Boulle’s novel
The Bridge on the River Kwai,
the prisoners took fierce pride in building the best railway they could and developed a sporting competition with the Japanese who were working alongside them. There were no tropical ulcers or kneeling prisoners taking headshots and toppling into graves they had dug for themselves. There were no cholera camps, no afflicted wretches lurching through the monsoon to drain themselves into disease-ridden pits. If you believe what you read in James Clavell’s
King Rat,
the British-run facility at Changi was the most notorious prison in Japanese-held Asia, not Outram Road or Kempeitai headquarters at Kanburi or 100 Kilo Camp or Hintok.

Time and again, the demands of entertainment have taken an essential aspect of historical reality and driven it so far as to outrun the truth. In
King Rat,
an American prisoner acquired vast personal power by breaking rules, accumulating contraband, and engaging in petty subversions that built a legend. Truth is different, more practical, and less or more interesting, depending on how much someone like John Wisecup or Pack Rat McCone intrigues you. Rules were
there and opportunity was there. Survival was the product of one’s ability to balance the two. “The fact is, the ones that obeyed the rules are the ones that are still there,” said Seldon Reese of the
Houston
. “Now a few of us guys that did the stealing and swapping and trading, we got back home. Some of us got shot, but some of us got back home.”

Frank Fujita had seen, somehow, a glimpse of everyone’s future. On August 11, 1945, under skies droning with Wright radial engines, B-29s seeding the air with black specks whistling earthward, he pulled out his diary, put pen to paper, exuberant, and waxed Solomonic:

He was right. Among the survivors—the resurrected ghosts of Captain Rooks’s ship’s company, the wayward Texans of the Lost Battalion—there was enough variety in the endgame of destiny to fulfill the breadth of the bomb-raid prophecy. Though every day thereafter they would fight their way through a monsoon-laced jungle of memories, and though they and their loved ones would wrestle
with the legacy of an ordeal that claimed some four hundred lives per mile of track set down, most of them kept the memories where they belonged, boxed up, stored for exploration only when the time was right, held down and ignored at all other times. Most of them, in spite of it all, managed to do all right.