Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer

The USS Houston was part of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet at the start of World War 2. This meant it was quickly brought into the joint American/British/Dutch/Australian fighting group, ABDA, as they tried to slow Japan’s progress towards Australia. Considering the communication difficulties, the conflicting interests of the various nations involved, the lack of air support, and the fact ABDA’s naval forces were facing a naval force that was more modern, better supported, and vastly more numerous, they were essentially doomed from the start. Houston was one of the last few ships left to try and make it back to Australia when it and the Aussie cruiser Perth surprised a considerable Japanese invasion fleet in the Sunda Strait one night. It would have been a great opportunity if it hadn’t come as a complete surprise to the two Allied ships as well. Also if they hadn’t been two already battered ships, running low on fuel and ammunition, fighting I’m not even sure how many enemy vessels. At least 2 cruisers and I’m not sure how many destroyers. On the plus side, they could fire in almost any direction and hit something, but that was because they were being fired at from all directions. The two ships were both sunk, though not before taking some of the Imperial Navy’s transports (and the Imperial Army’s troops) with them.

That’s the first third of the book. The remainder is what happened to the survivors afterward. Put simply, they suffered, and they struggled to endure. Many of the officers and men with experience in technical fields were sent to Japan, for interrogation or to be put to use in shipbuilding yards or mines. The majority, though, eventually wound up in Burma, helping to construct the railroad meant to deliver supplies to Japanese troops from the ports in Bangkok. In other words, the work that was immortalized in the book, The Bridge on the River Kwai, though Hornfischer immediately points out how little resemblance that story bore to the reality of things. The Japanese weren’t incompetent clods, unable to devise how to construct a bridge, and life was a lot harder for the prisoners forced to do the work. From the stories Hornfischer collected, it amazes me anyone survived what they went through there, considering the malnutrition, general lack of medical supplies, the beatings, the sheer level of physical labor they were made to complete, almost entirely with hand tools. The parts about the ingenuity and compassion of prisoners of all countries in getting around these problems are impressive. The remedies they found to deal with ulcers on their skin, or the effort they invested in keeping a friend going when he seemed on death’s door. But there’s always the depressing background radiation that its horrible events that make these efforts necessary in the first place. They really shouldn’t be in a situation where they keep whatever special rations – by which I mean something like a can of condensed milk - they can cobble together hidden somewhere and denied to themselves, on the chance they may need to use it to keep that buddy going down the line.

Hornfischer fills the book out nicely by not only focusing on the crew of the Houston, but also on how their loved ones back home were dealing with not knowing what happened to them for a couple of years. They knew the Houston was sunk, but who survived, where they were, how they were doing, largely there was no information, either because the Navy didn’t know, or because it wouldn’t say. Those parts of the book, along with the end chapters, where Hornfischer details the lives of the survivors after the war, really help to illuminate the overall toll the experience took on everyone involved. There’s also a bit in there about the guerrilla forces in Thailand, mostly as they overlap with OSS efforts to free the prisoners. The parts Hornfischer touches on are intriguing, but that thread seems to peter out along the way. Something for me to look into another time. It’s certainly not a happy book, but it was definitely an absorbing book. I’d stop for awhile, only to decide I had to pick the book up again and keep going.

‘In his continuing parleys with Japanese officers, Brigadier Varley noticed more than once that they were referring to a document written in Japanese. From what Varley could tell, it was a fresh copy of the pertinent articles of the Geneva Convention. If Colonel Nagatomo came around to embracing international law, it is doubtful that his superior, General Sasa, ever did. In any case, by July 1943 it was far too late for a sudden embrace of prisoners’ rights to make any difference. The Wet had hold of them and disease was raging throughout the camps.’