Ship of Ghosts (36 page)

T
he harbor was a ruin, littered with hulks of bombed-out British ships. All along the wharf lay huge piles of scrap iron—steel plates from dismantled oil tanks, automobile chassis squashed flat. “Once again,” Rohan Rivett observed, “as in Batavia, one felt as if a blight were hanging over the city.”

Both of the main groups had the same experience on arriving. Loaded on trucks near the dock, they were convoyed through Singapore’s central city and then out into the countryside. Soon a fortresslike stone structure was visible, situated on scenic heights overlooking the city from the northeast. Known as Changi, this district of the island was the onetime home of a Royal Army garrison. The turreted gray stone edifice, the Changi Jail, was its signature structure. It was the most forbidding prison Charley Pryor had ever seen. When the trucks stopped in front of it, he asked himself, “Oh my God, what in the world have I done to deserve this?” But a mistake had been made. Before Pryor knew it, the Japanese were loading their prisoners back onto the trucks and taking them to the garrison barracks. These long barracks and smaller administrative buildings in the landscaped district were pleasant, picturesque even, with trees arranged in a neat layout. The barracks were mostly stripped bare,
but there were a few bed frames and even some mattresses. The exhausted prisoners flopped down and sacked out.

Singapore was known as Great Britain’s Gibraltar of the East before it collapsed and capitulated like the Batavia of the North. Now the Japanese, rudely ignoring propaganda about Singapore’s invincibility, had imprisoned the British in their own fortress.

A total of about fifty thousand Allied prisoners were in Singapore, including thirteen thousand Australians and a small minority of about eight hundred Americans. Among them was a young British private named James Clavell, whose eventual novel
King Rat
would be based on his experience as a Singapore POW. “Changi was a school for survivors,” he would write. “It gave me a strength most people don’t have…. Changi became my university instead of my prison.” Observing the landscaped idyll of their surroundings and the cock-of-the-walk sureness of the British officer corps nominally administering it, the
Houston
sailors could never quite fathom Changi. “It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Otto Schwarz. “These guys acted as if they were on regimental maneuvers.”

The British had had eight months since February 15, 1942, to acclimate themselves to captivity. Though their pride was wounded, they were on the surface still in charge, brightly so and with bucked-up spirits. Save for the daily
tenkos
and the occasional presence of Sikh soldiers who had turned coat and served the emperor, scarcely a Japanese soldier or guard was in sight. Howard Charles asked himself, “Why don’t they make a run for the wall? They could make it; just by sheer numbers they could overwhelm these guards and go somewhere…. I remember asking a few of them that, and they just looked at me with a cold stare, like, ‘You’ve got to be out of your head.’” Everyday life as prisoners at Singapore had the aura of an absurd dream: the posturing of the British, pretending at command; the Japanese, lurking unseen like puppeteers; the manicured enclave turning dingy under occupation; creeping hunger blanching any illusion of order and civilization; the future, clouded in doubt.

At Changi the Allied prisoners would learn to count their blessings. Contrary to myth, Changi was no death camp. There was time for leisure when the light work of clearing the district’s rubber plantation and stevedoring at the docks was finished. There were some robust baseball games. Though John Wisecup, buckled by a knife-in-the-belly
bout of dysentery, was unavailable to pitch, the Americans stood their ground against a formidable Australian team that boasted several cricketers whose talents readily crossed over to the chalk diamond. Charley Pryor put on a show, hitting seven home runs in the four games they played, making an indelible impression on the slap-hitting Aussies and winning them over thoroughly—“Lay on one, Yank!” Lieutenant Hamlin gave several lectures to the Brits on the late, great USS
Houston
and her wartime exploits. At a musical revue at the Changi parade ground, Marine Pvt. Freddie Quick, a practiced baritone, caused jaws to drop when he stood before thousands and delivered an a cappella solo of an Irving Berlin peace song that Kate Smith had turned into a sensation in November 1938. Though “God Bless America” had graced both the Democratic and Republican national conventions in 1940, it was still fresh to the ears of this audience. Quick nailed it. As Howard Charles recalled, “Everybody just sat there spellbound because he was a great singer, and he belted this thing out like you had never heard it sung before. The Japs standing along the wall had rather frightened expressions, because they were afraid that this was going to rally the men to some kind of action.” Quick left the parade ground silent.

Mostly, though, the prisoners of different nationalities entertained themselves by comparing their grievances. They debated who had the more powerful claim to having been sold out. There was resentment to go around. The Americans noticed that the British fed their dogs better than their enlisted men. Australians were allied with the Americans in their dislike of the imperious British brass. According to Otto Schwarz, some Scottish Gordon Highlanders told the Americans that if any trouble started, “they’ll be right at our sides.” In the absence of the Japanese, the British were seen by default as the hand of the enemy.

Stealing from the British became a way of life. “They had their own stuff cached away…and we made it our business to find out where they were hiding it,” said Howard Charles. The absence of good rations forced them to get creative with their menus. Stray cats—or “alley rabbits”—filled the bill. Some Australians took to ribbing the Yanks by slyly squeaking “meow, meow” whenever they walked by. Outside the perimeter of the Changi Barracks, beyond the coils of concertina wire, were some sprawling groves of coconut trees. Marine Cpl. Hugh Faulk was particularly adept at shimmying
up the trees and knocking the fruits from their high perches, careful not to unleash a deluge lest it alert the guards. Once a British military policeman stopped some tree-climbing American thieves and informed them, “Those are the King’s coconuts.” The officiousness of his tone approached self-satire, though it had to be taken seriously: the penalty for stealing the King’s coconuts was a jail sentence.

As John Bartz tells the story, one time some Americans raided a British general’s chicken pen. The culprit, caught, was put in irons. Lieutenant Hamlin went to the jail and confronted the colonel in charge. “You have got to take that man out,” Hamlin said. “We do not put our people in irons.
At no time
do we put our people in irons.” Hamlin got his man back.

Lieutenant Hamlin was never shy about standing up to the British. One day he failed to salute a British colonel, who took umbrage at the disrespect shown by a Yank who was dressed in the ragged fashion of Serang and Bicycle Camp. The Brit declared, “Well, my man! Don’t you know you should salute?” Hamlin just stared at him. “Don’t you know who I am?” the colonel thundered. He announced his senior rank and station, whereupon Hamlin said, “Pleased to meet you. I’m Harold S. Hamlin, Acting Admiral for the American Pacific Fleet, Changi Area.”

Strictly speaking, Hamlin was within his rights to claim temporary flag rank. He was the senior U.S. naval officer at the new Changi Station and thus its acting commander. On an empty chessboard, a pawn can be king, just as a king’s royal coconuts, commandeered by an imperial emperor, can become fodder for slaves.

T
he Japanese aroused suspicions when they sent around a questionnaire asking the prisoners about their technical backgrounds. Leery of disclosing anything their enemy might find useful, some of the Americans professed to be students or farmers or certified “peach-fuzz inspectors.” Those who did disclose actual technical or mechanical aptitude were called to the Changi commandant’s office and told how fortunate they were. They were going to be taken to Japan.

Most of the men in the
Houston
’s engineering department, as well as technically minded Lost Battalioners such as Jess Stanbrough, joined this “technical party” on the same miserable ship that had brought them to Singapore. On October 27 the
Dai Nichi Maru
got under way north. Stopping over in Formosa, the ship arrived at Moji in northern Kyushu on November 25. A few days later, on November 28, another group left Singapore for Japan. This party included Frank Fujita, the Japanese American whose mother had written with such pride of his service in the 131st.

Fujita had plenty to lose in his dealings with the Japanese. His father’s countrymen, his captors, had no idea of his true heritage. Fujita didn’t quite know why. He assumed they took him for a Filipino or a Mexican. Though his name was as Japanese as could be,
no one paid him much attention. But his buddies did. “Hell, they are going to kill you,” they would tell him. “Change your name. For God’s sake, don’t tell them you’re half Japanese.” Fujita was scared. He had no doubt they were right. Yet he could not quite pull the trigger on adopting a racial disguise. “If I change my name to Joe Martinez or something, well, when they kill me anyhow they might have me listed as Joe Martinez, and then my folks will never know what happened to me. So I figured hell, I was born with this name, and I might as well die with it.”

On November 28 he found himself jammed with 2,200 other men aboard the
Kamakura Maru,
a 17,500-ton Japanese passenger ship. Each man had a single canteen to last him the ten-day voyage. The ship left Singapore and stopped at Formosa, where some POWs debarked. Continuing north, the ship reached Japan on December 7, 1942, and docked at Nagasaki, the home Fujita’s father had left in 1914. The northern winds were cold on his face.

The POW camp known as Fukuoka #2 was situated about a mile from the port city’s great Mitsubishi shipyard. The inland dry dock there was massive enough to hold four ten-thousand-ton ships simultaneously. The Japanese workforce was far less impressive. Whereas American shipbuilders at Newport News, Mare Island, Puget Sound, Seattle-Tacoma, Quincy Fore River, and elsewhere relied on professionals, the Japanese at Nagasaki employed children, the mentally ill, and starving and sick prisoners for its labor. Spread among the various yard crews, the Americans worked alongside Japanese civilian riveters, welders, and stage builders. Fujita’s job was to build scaffoldings on the angle-iron frameworks that cradled the infant hulls of new ships. The yard’s noise level was monstrous. The clangor of its overdriven riveters made speech communication impossible. Yard foremen used colored chalk to mark hull plates for different types of processes, such as bracketing, riveting, or cutting with a blowtorch. Fujita’s work took him all over the yard. He soon understood that if he was discreet enough, he could get away with murder as a saboteur. He carried a piece of chalk tied to a long stick. Whenever he felt he could get away with it, he would furtively change the foreman’s markings on randomly chosen plates and beams. “We carried on our own little war there,” he said.

They were in this war whether they wanted it or not. An average of six prisoners a day died on the job in the Nagasaki shipyard, a dangerous gauntlet of high-voltage wires, high-pressure hoses, and
toxic industrial substances. Heavy steel objects were hoisted with fraying cables, equipment was poorly maintained, and workers labored prone on high platforms, vulnerable to lethal human mischief. One day Fujita got hit in the head with a large rivet. It smarted badly and could have killed him. He looked upward in the direction of where it had fallen and saw a Japanese worker two stages above him, smiling nastily, fiercely pleased with his aim. Fujita took a long look at him, marking his features.

A few days later his opportunity for payback came when his task put him about six levels above where the rivet dropper happened to be working. Calmly Fujita found a big shipfitter’s bolt, slipped a couple of heavy industrial washers over it, and twisted on two or three large nuts. It was about fifteen pounds of metal. Hefting his handmade iron bomb, Fujita aimed by eye, made a minute adjustment for the brisk wind, and let go. The blow to the top of the Japanese worker’s head was direct and, according to Fujita, instantly fatal. “He never even kicked,” recalled the artilleryman, who within sixty seconds had shuffled and quickstepped around the platforms and scaffolding to the other side of the yard. He was on his own, feeling his way in a brutal new world.

Japan had scores of POW camps, most located in major urban centers near shipyards, or in the mountains adjacent to mines. The senior
Houston
officers under Cdr. Arthur L. Maher, who had arrived at Shimonoseki on May 4 and moved to the camp at Ohuna, had long since acclimated themselves to the frigid climate. The hard work in the mines, the rough treatment by the guards, and the sparse rations “took us all down,” Maher wrote. When dysentery and beriberi struck in the summer, the guards eased up on exercise, though no more food came. Meanwhile, every day brought more Japanese officers from Tokyo to pick out prisoners to interrogate. The
Houston
’s senior surviving officer faced questioning from as many as a dozen Japanese at a time.

“They were anxious to find out almost anything they could regarding our Navy,” Maher wrote, “the operations of the ships, the officers in command, the number of men on board, the modern installations, radar and so forth.” Because the barracks at the small Ohuna camp were within earshot of the guardhouse, prisoners spoke loudly so as to let the others overhear the questions and plan their answers. It was wise to keep one’s evasions consistent. Inadequate
answers brought a summons to the courtyard, where the offender was hauled before the POW company and beaten with clubs at the direction of a Japanese warrant officer.