Ship of Ghosts (61 page)

T
he serenity that fell over the prison camps from Thailand to Indochina belied the racking implosions that at last stilled Japan’s war machine. In Tokyo, some pilots were planning an unauthorized kamikaze reception for the U.S. ships gathering in the harbor. Tipped to the plot, the Imperial Army impounded their ammunition and fuel. At Atsugi Airfield, where General MacArthur was to arrive to direct the occupation, soldiers loyal to the throne subdued a navy captain who was furiously inciting a revolt, and removed the propellers from all the planes.

American aircraft littered the countryside with pamphlets printed in nine languages, instructing former prisoners:
Remain where you are, disarm the Japanese, show restraint, do not punish them.
The pamphlets also warned the Japanese that they were responsible for the prisoners. The prisoners seemed less interested in confiscating their captors’ weapons than in drinking their sake.

On the morning of August 29, Lt. Col. Amos D. Moscrip from OSS headquarters flew to Tayang and joined Major Bartlett on the ground. Thirty-five American prisoners were already there, and fifty-eight more arrived by truck that afternoon. Moscrip wrote:

The first C-47 from Rangoon landed at Phet Buri bright and early the next morning.

The reality of freedom dawned slowly over them. Modern diagnosticians have ready labels for the psychological syndromes that beset them. But those labels didn’t exist in 1945. “While the pictures may show the men to look fairly healthy, they weren’t,” Moscrip wrote. “It will take many of them months of good care and doctor’s treatment to be able to regain their mental balance. It must also be remembered, and I think the narrative should bring out the fact,
that these men were
the
survivors, that they were the fittest, and that many of the dead were left along the Burma-Siam Railway which they were compelled to construct. There wasn’t a single POW among all of those who were evacuated from Petburi [sic] who were not at one time or another beaten by the Japanese.” Operation Mainland’s haul from Thailand and French Indochina was 530 Americans among a total of 2,013 Allied prisoners.

Over Tokyo, Navy planes were dropping food over the prison camps, the pilots revealing their exuberance through their ailerons and rudders as they showed off their combat-honed talents in low-altitude aerobatics. At Ohasi, Red Reynolds, the chronicler of the late president’s 1938 tour on the
Houston,
was among the throng of prisoners marveling at an impromptu air show put on by a dozen or so U.S. dive-bombers. “They circled out and dived and wig-wagged,” he wrote in his diary. “My God, grown men looking up, waving and shouting with tears running down their cheeks. I too was a big baby, but I’m proud and not ashamed. I’ve waited three-and-a-half years for this.” As Reynolds recorded in his diary, one of the pilots zoomed in low and dropped a pack of Lucky Strikes, a book of matches, and a note reading,
Cheer up, boys, only a few more days—Ens. W. F. Harrah, 2221 East Newton St., Seattle, Washington
. “Boy he rates a bottle of Scotch from each man here,” Reynolds wrote.

In Washington on August 28, OSS field agent Nicol Smith appeared at a press conference, declaring: “Anyone having relatives on the crew of the
Houston
can be very optimistic.” That same day, American prisoners throughout southeast Asia began greeting their liberators, for out in Tokyo Bay a sight like no other greeted the residents of the capital city’s prison camps. Gliding into view came the sleek gray hulls of U.S. warships, camouflage paint schemes bright and angular. As lead elements of the U.S. Third Fleet approached, led by the battleship USS
Missouri,
other ships came for the prisoners. Commodore Rodger W. Simpson’s Task Group 30.6 happened to be led by the light cruiser USS
San Juan,
commissioned the day the
Houston
was lost and commanded in its early days by Capt. James Maher, the older brother of the
Houston
’s Arthur Maher.

Several LCVPs from the
San Juan
’s evacuation group, embarking medical parties, motored to the docks and tied up near Omori Camp No. 8. “The appearance of the landing craft in the channel near the prisoner of war camp caused an indescribable scene of jubilation and
emotion on the part of hundreds of prisoners of war who streamed out of the camp and climbed up over the piling,” Simpson wrote. “Some began to swim out to meet the landing craft.”

Simpson was powerfully affected by conditions in the hospitals that his medics located. While he noted in his report the “almost universally helpful and outwardly polite” attitude of the Japanese, his outrage was nearly universal at the time: “With the end of the war, history started immediately to repeat, but we shall not be deceived again by the superficial friendship of this cruel race.”

Thus began an eighteen-day evacuation process that would mark an official end to the ordeal. That day an Associated Press reporter was moved to poetry in his wire dispatch: “The hand that fills in the blank pages in the book of war began to write again today. It began on a page bearing the title ‘USS
Houston
.’ And as it started its journey across the paper, hope, like a swiftly-flaring spark, burned brightly again in hundreds of hearts in homes scattered across America.”

Omori Camp No. 8, where Commander Maher was senior officer, was the first camp liberated. Its occupants were safely transferred to the hospital ship
Benevolence
in Tokyo Bay by the night of August 30. Before Maher received treatment, he requested to visit and personally thank the skipper of his brother’s old cruiser, Capt. George H. Bahm. Shortly thereafter, the
Houston
’s senior surviving officer found himself with an invitation from Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz himself to board the
Missouri
on September 2 and watch the Japanese sign papers of surrender. When Maher was taken to the ship and went aboard, he was greeted by a Naval Academy classmate. Rather than salute him, shake his hand, or embrace, by reflex of habit Maher bowed from the waist.

W
ord of the surrender took a while to trickle down to the men still imprisoned in Singapore at Changi. Sixty-nine Americans were held there. For varying reasons, mostly related to their health, most of them had stayed behind when the rest of the Americans were shipped to Burma or Hintok. When the railroad was done, the paltry few survivors of F and H Forces returned to Singapore. At Changi they enjoyed a comparatively lavish lifestyle, though the work of dismantling industrial machinery as quickly as possible and shipping it back to Japan had its expected share of anxiety, pain, and crisis.

To 2nd Lt. Miles Barrett, the highest-ranking USS
Houston
man in Singapore, the dramatically changing fortunes had been hard on the nerves. The possibility of liberation gave the prisoners a degree of hope that made fear possible again. “In many ways these weeks have seemed the most difficult of the whole war,” Barrett confided to his diary. All along they had been scrapping for their survival. Then a ball of plutonium was crushed over Nagasaki, and six days later word arrived that Japan had accepted the Allied terms of unconditional surrender. The war over, the prisoners endured a few last
tenko
s, trying to hold down their excitement. Finally, on August 19, the prisoners’ representative at Changi, an Australian colonel from F Force named Dillon, decided to press his luck, insisting on the immediate delivery of Red Cross supplies and the immediate release of prisoners known to be suffering in solitary confinement at the Outram Road Jail.

For Gus Forsman, the mind-wrecking routine there had never changed. Entombed in his routine of silence, he was not allowed to lie down during the day. He could only put down his board and sleep when the guard came by in the evening and issued a one-word command to turn in:
“Yasume.”
Only once had the rigid routine ever deviated, about three months into his confinement, when he was allowed to take a walk outside the prison. It was a strange thing. The guards took six prisoners outside to water a garden. It had been their first contact with fresh air until that time. Forsman didn’t understand the point of it. He knew only that everything the guards did was toward the purpose of what some psychiatrists would later call
menticide:
the killing of the mind.

But now faraway events had remade Forsman’s world. There was light—the door to his cell opened and it flooded in, blinding him. He was ushered out and as his eyes adjusted he saw Capt. Ike Parker and Maj. Windy Rogers, considerably bonier and dirtier than he had known them before. They cringed at each other’s stench.

Escorted by guards, they were taken to a well and instructed to draw from it. Forsman, who would have paid a thousand dollars for a Dixie cup full of water just moments before, drew three or four whole buckets, drank deeply—he would have jumped in had he found the strength—and began the long process of getting himself clean. He was guided to a stack of clothing and got dressed.

As the guards marched them toward the prison gate, Rogers was seized by a flash of horrible recognition. “They’re going to shoot us
in the back,” he said. “They’re going to say we were escaping. By God, let’s give them a run for their money!” The frail men started running. They tottered down the hill, trying to zigzag in order to elude the expected hail of bullets. It never came. Perhaps the guards couldn’t draw a bead on the skeletons through the convulsions of their laughter. The three Americans stopped at the bottom of the hill and stood there, marveling at their survival, wondering what was next.

A Chinaman rode by on a bicycle. Windy Rogers said something to him, and he stopped to talk to the Americans. “The war is over.” “That’s impossible,” said the prisoners. “No. They boom-boom one time. Japan finished.” He urged them to head for Changi. Joined momentarily by some other survivors of solitary confinement—bomber crewmen, worn out from the special brand of torture the Japanese reserved for “air pirates”—they set out on foot. After a march that seemed like ten miles to Forsman, they reached the compound that three years earlier had been the portal to their ordeal as guests of the Imperial Army. The guard at the gate didn’t say a word. Forsman noticed in passing that he was armed with a wooden rifle.

Up the road ahead, he saw a crowd of men coming toward them. Since July 4 rumors had been circulating among the prisoners kept at Changi Jail that ten prisoners had been executed at Outram Road, possibly including some Americans. The rumors were never sorted out, but that evening Miles Barrett, Crayton Gordon, John Wisecup, and others saw how much worse life in captivity could have been. Fourteen lost souls representing a hidden piece of the war’s horrible, slow-to-emerge truth came limping in their direction. There was a mass embrace as they got introduced all over again.

Gus Forsman would not be convinced of his liberation until those aptly named four-engine Liberator bombers were visible overhead, this time dropping more than just Juicy Fruit wrappers. Crates of C-rations, cigarettes, and candy, the bounty of a victorious nation, spilled out and spouted parachutes. The volume was impressive, but what moved Forsman most was seeing on the ground, amid the windfall, a scattering of individual items, off-brand and different from the bulk. Apparently some of the individual aircrewmen had made their own personal contributions to the cause.

On September 7 an American flag flew over Changi Prison. “The last time that I had seen that flag was when that ship went down,”
said Paul Papish, “the Stars and Stripes fluttering there at the mainmast.” Prisoners broke out their own hidden stashes of goodies, reserve stocks of condensed milk and tins of sardines and rusty cans of peaches and meat and vegetables, some of it hoarded since the innocent, early days at Batavia. They rooted through their bags, traded this and that, exchanged home addresses, set their mattresses afire, and raised hell, mostly because they could. Great and optimistic promises flowed from their joy. The Americans would visit Australia, see their Aussie friends, go into business together, start a chain of motels or something. At the end of the line, the men of the
Houston
and the men of the
Perth,
soldiers of the Lost Battalion and sailors alike, were bound as one crew.