Is there an etymologist in the house? The above picture appears to have been photoshopped, but only to highlight the message on the roof of one of the cellblocks in the Rangoon Central Jail complex.
The complex housed more than 1,000 British, American and Indian prisoners of the Japanese. I interviewed one of those former prisoners, Karnig Thomasian of River Edge, N.J., in the late 1990s. Karnig was a waist gunner on a B-29 which was badly damaged over Thailand when a 1,000-pound bomb and a 500-pound bomb, with uneven trajectories, exploded beneath his plane. Over the next few months he was subjected to starvation and regular beatings by his Japanese captors. And then on May 1, 1945, as a battle was raging in the city, the prisoners awoke to discover that the Japanese guards had abandoned the complex overnight.
The liberated inmates remained inside the compound and, fearful of being bombed by their own countrymen, painted messages on two of the cellblock roofs. One of them said "Japs Gone," while the other said "British Here."
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| "British Here" is barely visible in the lower center cellblock. The words "Japs Gone" would be two cellblocks to the left, just out of the picture. |
A Royal Air Force Mosquito nevertheless bombed the outer perimiter of the complex, according to a written account by Donald Lomas, one of the British prisoners. The British then climbed to the roof of another cellblock and painted "Extract Digit," a story told by Karnig and confirmed in Lomas' written account.
The idea being that the pilot who bombed the complex might have thought the words "British here" was a ruse by the Japanese to prevent them from being bombed, much like American GIs would use questions like "What is the capital of North Dakota?" to challenge unknown soldiers, knowing that no German in an American uniform was likely to know the capital of North Dakota. Come to think of it, I don't know what the capital of North Dakota is. Ach du liebe! Ich bin ein Berliner! (On the recent anniversary of that famous statement by President John F. Kennedy, numerous wags pointed out that a "Berliner" was the German word for a jelly donut, and that President Kennedy, at the Berlin wall, was announcing, in effect, "I am a jelly donut." But I digress.)
The phrase worked, and an RAF bomber passing overhead tipped its wings to a round of cheers and flew to a nearby airfield. The good news is that the bomber landed on the only runway that wasn't mined by the Japanese. The bad news is that its wheels got caught in a bomb crater and the plane was severely damaged. So the pilot and crew walked to the prison compound and discovered it to have been freed. Supplies were then dropped in by parachute.
Following is an excerpt from my interview with Karnig Thomasian in which he discusses the compound's liberation:
Karnig
Thomasian:
We were losing people from lack of food, lack of nourishment. There was a shack, a brick building on the corner of our compound, and it was
the warehouse, small as it was, of food. Like eggs. It had a door in the brick
wall, and the guys had slowly taken the cement from the bricks to the point
where the whole housing of the lock assembly came out with the door and the
door just opened. But you can’t go in and just ransack the place. You’d do it
one time and that’s it. So whenever somebody was really ill to the point that
they need the nourishment of an egg, they’d go in and get one or two eggs,
period, and that’s it. And then only by the direction of the commandant of our
group, whoever was the highest officer there.
And this is,
we’ll get to this, we haven’t gotten to this stage yet where they were dropping
food containers. They bombed us by mistake. We said, "Japs gone." The
British fighter planes thought they were joking so they bombed us. They missed
and hit one of the outer walls. So the British prisoners
got up and wrote this, "Extract Digit."
Aaron
Elson:
And what does that mean?
Karnig
Thomasian:
In British terms? "Take the finger out of your ass." So right away they came back
and they waved their wings. Then they came back and they dropped food
containers. I mean, would you believe? It’s just wild. What brilliance to come
up with that. "No, they’re really gone!" No, "Extract
Digit."
Aaron
Elson:
How much did you weigh when you were liberated?
Karnig
Thomasian:
I forget, 115, 120, something like that. Not much.
Aaron
Elson:
And what did you weigh when you were captured?
Karnig
Thomasian:
I imagine then I was around 165.
Aaron
Elson:
Was there any contact with the Red Cross when you were a prisoner, or was that
only in Europe?
Karnig
Thomasian:
No contact whatsoever. We had no contact with anybody.
Aaron
Elson:
Had your parents been notified that you were a prisoner?
Karnig
Thomasian:
That’s another story. Mom wrote a diary, in one of these little school
composition books. I still have it. It’s one of those notebooks the kids used
to have that looks like a cow’s skin, only smaller. So she wrote, "Oh, I
don’t know where you are but I know you’re going to be all right, and we miss
you." She’d write to me every now and then. Not every day. On the day that
we were – I call it liberated because that’s when the Ghurkas came in, the Japs
had gone and the Ghurkas came in and this one newspaperman, an American
newspaperman, he was the first one in there. He was fabulous. On that day, she
said, "Karnig, I know you’re alive." It’s phenomenal. And the date’s
there and everything. I could not believe it when I read it, when I got back,
she showed it to me some time later.
Aaron
Elson:
What day was it you were liberated?
Karnig
Thomasian:
May something. Let’s see if I have it here. Six Ghurkas. May 3rd.
(Reading) "I woke up at the crack of dawn, helped prepare the breakfast
for our compound. We still had some condiments from the food containers that
were parachuted by the British. We all started to gather what little we had so
that when the time came to leave, we’d be ready. Later that morning an American
officer entered our prison with his aide." That was General Stroudemeyer.
I’ve got a picture with him.
Aaron
Elson:
How did you readjust after being a prisoner?
Karnig
Thomasian:
Well, I was in the hospital for a month in Calcutta, and they just fed us and
they took care of our sores. I mean, these sores, the jungle sores that I got
on my ankles, that’s why I didn’t go on the march. I had a choice, am I well
enough to go on the march? They said, "Those that are able to walk, we
take." Then you’d wear their fatigues, the Japanese fatigue uniforms.
Aaron
Elson:
What was the march?
Karnig
Thomasian:
The Japanese contingents were leaving and they used them as hostages, in their
minds. Later on what happened was they left them, they just ran for their
lives. The guys were lucky, but along the way they killed some people because
they slacked back and that’s what I was afraid of. I said, gee whiz, if I can’t
walk, what’s gonna happen? So I flipped a coin to myself and I said, I’ll stay
back and I’ll be able to help the guys that are really bad off here, and
hopefully they’re not gonna kill us all. Why would they? So that’s what we did.
Aaron
Elson:
Tell me more about the sores.
Karnig
Thomasian:
I got jungle sores. Because my GI shoes had heels, and there were corners, and
at night I’d itch, and pretty soon I opened the wound and sure enough, they
became deep sores. And the only way I could clean it – there was no medication
– was to boil water and tear a piece of my suntans, which I didn’t wear, I wore
a little loincloth, and just laboriously clean it out. Each time. Oh, Jesus.
Aaron
Elson:
That must have been painful.
Karnig
Thomasian:
Oh, yes. But you had to do it. And then you’d walk around with a flap on the
top because flies were all over the place, so you don’t want them to hone in on
it.
Aaron
Elson:
And what about bruises from the beatings?
Karnig
Thomasian:
Well, they heal.
Aaron
Elson:
Did you ever get any broken bones?
Karnig
Thomasian:
No, thank God.
Aaron
Elson:
And what about the guys who were in worse shape than you were?
Karnig
Thomasian:
Well, they had problems. There’s this Montgomery, who I told you about. I have
a whole story on him, it’s all in there, where they had to, his hand was
hanging by a thread, you see, and they had to cut it off. They severed that.
But then it started to get gangrene, so they had to cut it below the elbow.
Well, now this doctor, Dr. McKenzie was his name, a British doctor, he
performed the operation. First the Japanese tried, and they gave him a shot of
something which was the wrong thing and it drove him nuts, and they stopped.
And the Japanese were just brutal, they were ridiculing him, "Ah, you,
shut up!" Not shut up, whatever they said. So finally the British
commandant appealed to the commandant of the Japanese, Look, let this man do
the operation. He knows how to do it. Still, they had no anaesthetic, no
nothing. Boy, we heard his screams, I hear them today. I tell you, it is
absolutely profound. He passed out. How he went through it I’ll never know. A
nice young man. So Dr. McKenzie did the operation, and by God, it held. And
don’t ask me how he didn’t get infected. We don’t know. You know, we need the
stories, they’re so unexplainable. In that humid climate, there were no
bandages, there was cloth. Oh, jeez, I don’t even like to think about it. And
Parmalee was another one. He had that shattered [bicep], and they had to
squeeze the pus out all the time, my friend did that.
So then we
got out of Rangoon. We went to a hospital ship, and they deloused us and we
threw all our clothes out the hatch. In the shower room there was a hatch, we
threw the clothes out into the Indian Ocean. But I kept my leather jacket. And
I kept the big gun, the rifle that I had been able to bring on board.
Aaron
Elson:
How did you get a rifle?
Karnig
Thomasian:
When the Japs had left, finally, we took over the place. My New Zealand friend and I were sitting on the steps of the compound, and I
was smoking tea leaves; I never smoked in my life, but I started there. So
we’re looking out over the city and we see Boom! Boom! Boom! They’re blasting
things. And it’s late at night, and we’re saying, "Hey, I haven’t seen a
guard come around, have you?"
"No."
We walked
around, and we went into this hut again, took the brick out, walked to the
front and looked, and we could see from there that the main gates were open.
When I say gates, they were these big teakwood doors, ten feet high. They were
open, and I didn’t see any movement. We stayed there about ten minutes. So he
said, "Something’s going on, let’s go back."
We talked to
the wing commander, and he said, "All right. Don’t tell anybody because
it’ll be a riot here." So we hopped over the wall – it’s only about eight
feet, you hike a guy up and he gets up and over. We hopped over and went down
there. Now we’re taking a risk. Now we’re in dead man’s land, about seven of
us. And some of the guys went to the gate and they saw a note. I have a copy of
the note. "We meet you on future battlefields, and now you are free to
go." Bullshit.
Now we’re
afraid to go further, maybe it’s boobytrapped. So, back in the fields there are
cows. The British guys went and got a couple of cows and they made them walk
around. The cows meander, they don’t go straight, so oh boy, they’re screening
it real good. I expected one of them to blow up, but no. They went out the
front door and we ran for the front door and closed it. This was late at night.
And we put the planks down and blocked it, because we had all the piles of rice
and stuff and cows, and Rangoon was starving.
Then we went
and ransacked the Japanese area. And then we gathered the guns and ammunition,
and we found a few hand grenades, and I found a carved ivory cigarette holder
that I kept. So now we had to negotiate with the townspeople, and finally we
found one guy who was going to help us round up the people who owned boats and
gather all the boats so that when the army landed on the other side, they’d
have the little boats and could bring them over to this side. So myself and
Dow, that fellow Dow, and Cliff Emony and this Burmese fellow, we went over to
the other side of the river and went to the huts; they offered us food but we
wouldn’t dare take any, or water – you’d get sick, you’d die. We’re not used to
their food. It’s not clean, anyway. It’s just terrible. They’re used to it.
Their bodies assimilate it. And so we got all our negotiations done, and we had
our rifles as if, what was gonna happen I don’t know, and then we came back.
That’s when this newspaper man came and the Ghurkas landed the next day.
Aaron
Elson:
Those Ghurkas must have been awesome.
Karnig
Thomasian:
Oh, they are. They’re little fellows, but I’m glad they’re on our side. Boy,
I’ll tell you what they did. We were ready to go, and this fellow looked so
beautiful, he was 6-foot-4, broad, rosy – apples for cheeks – and when we
looked and saw our pale faces, we realized really how sick we were because
before that we didn’t have anything to relate to. The Japanese have a different
coloring altogether, so we thought everything was all right.
We helped
all the guys; there were some we had to carry out of their hospital-like
situation, and we brought them in to the tender that was there. Oh, I was
telling you about this Ghurka. We gathered around him like Gulliver, you know,
with the little people, it was a scene. Oh, if they do a film I could just
direct this scene, it was so precious. I remember every moment of it.
Then the
next morning we gather our things, we’re going to have a last breakfast, and
then pretty soon it’s time to go to the tender that takes us out to the
hospital ship, because the hospital ship can’t get in there. We’re ready to
leave, and then we see these Ghurkas, they’re waving, waving, and then they’ve
got one Japanese on a rope with his head bandaged, and there’s three or four of
the Ghurkas holding a box between them, and the other Ghurkas are following up.
And they’re all running like crazy trying to meet us.
They brought
us a gift. What was this gift? This was this Japanese soldier which they threw
in the brig – they have a brig there – he was a young fellow – and they opened
the box.
It was full
of ears. I was mortified. If you can believe it, I felt sorry for this guy,
because he had never done anything to me. Oh, my God, how could they do this?
It’s terrible. This is a present? I don’t know what they did with it. I
couldn’t look at it anymore. Then they got us out to the ship. They deloused
us.
Aaron
Elson:
You hadn’t mentioned the lice before.
Karnig
Thomasian:
Oh, lice, yeah, in the seams of our loincloths and everything, because we
didn’t wear clothes, you didn’t have to wear clothes, but they get into the
seams, so you’d have to get them out. The best way is to put the clothing out
in the sun, and you see them starting to crawl out, and then you squash them.
That’s the way it is.
Aaron
Elson:
And they had no delousing facility in the camp?
Karnig
Thomasian:
No, they didn’t have anything. All that stuff, they didn’t have delousing, they
didn’t have Mercurochrome. They didn’t have nothing.
Aaron
Elson:
Were there rats or mice?
Karnig
Thomasian:
There were big cockroaches. Big ones. You went "POW!" But I wouldn’t
do it in my bare feet – I was always barefooted, so I said, "Does someone
have a shoe?" Oh, God. Oh, jeez, I tell you, I sometimes wonder how I…
So we get
there, and then we’re in the ship. And now it’s time to get off the ship. And
they tell us, "No arms. Leave your firearms or anything else that you’ve
gotten, swords and everything. …"
So I
dismantled the gun and put it in my blanket. We each got a blanket issued to us.
So now it was a shorter thing. I managed to smuggle it off the ship that way.
Then we got
to the hospital, and they started feeding us. The first thing they did was
clean our wounds. They put that sulfa powder in, and I tell you, in no time –
almost in minutes, but it wasn’t, it was a couple of days, but the sores filled
up and started to heal, it was a miracle. That’s a miracle drug as far as I was
concerned. It healed it so fast. And that’s all we needed. From that to
suffering like that.
Oh, there was
a general who visited us in the camp along with the American newsman. I never
got his name. And he said, "We will wire news ahead that you people have
been freed."
Then when we
got to the hospital, we met General Stroudemeyer, and I’ve got a picture with
him. With my beard. I’m the only one that had a beard, I shaved everybody else.
The wing commander wanted me to shave. He said, "Why don’t you
shave?"
I said,
"No."
He said,
"Do you want to be the only one with a beard?"
Oh, in the
hospital, so they had bowls of pills. You just grabbed pills and ate them by the
handful. It’s unreal. And ice cream.
Aaron
Elson:
What were the pills?
Karnig
Thomasian:
All kinds of vitamin things, who knows? I have no idea. All colors. Rainbow.
But there was a bowl, on every table. I don’t know, it sounds ridiculous, you’d
take one of this, and one of that. I guess we were lacking in so many things
they said it can’t hurt.
Then I went
over to the Chinese compound, and I met this fellow. I can’t remember his name
now, but he was the one that doled out the rice when we were in solitary. He
had a black skullcap, a white, flowing shirt, short black pants, and sandals.
That’s how he came around. And he’d always look to see if he could give us a
little more, if the Jap wasn’t over his shoulder; we couldn’t converse. But I
always remembered him. So I went over to where the Chinese were and I found
him, and I said, "Does anybody speak English?" One of the fellows
could speak a little English. I said, "Tell him that I want to thank him
for his kindness."
He told him,
and then I said, "He made life more bearable for us, and he was such a
nice man."
Then the guy
who was interpreting said, "Could he give you his father’s address, and
you write to him, tell him that you saw his son and he’s all right?"
I said,
"Oh, sure."
He gave me
the address. And then the Chinese fellow got a coin, and he broke the coin. And
he said, "When we meet again, we will match the coins."
So I wrote
to his parents. His father had a pharmacy in some town in China.
Along comes
a letter back, all in Chinese. I was going to art school then; this is when I
was back in the States. There was a letter to me, and a letter to his son. So I
showed it to my friend – I had a friend in school, the Art Students League in
New York, a Chinese guy – and I said, "Do you know how to read
Chinese?"
"Oh,
yeah."
"I
wonder if you could please translate these letters, so I could understand what
it is and send it to his son?"
He said,
"Sure." So he gave me the translation in the next couple of days. He
said, "I didn’t translate his son’s letter because that’s private."
I said,
"That’s okay."
The father
said he hadn’t seen his son all those years. That was the first time he’d heard
anything about him. And it was so nice of me to write, and his mother is happy
to hear that he’s okay.
And he said,
"Do you think you could send him a letter?" I don’t remember what he
wanted to say. He wanted to get in touch with him, basically, that’s what it
was. So I said, All right. Let me find out.
I called up the
142nd General Hospital, they’re not anymore in there but they have
an office in America. To make a long story short, I found out that these
Chinese were released from the hospital, and they walked back to China.
Aaron
Elson:
He walked from Rangoon to China?
Karnig
Thomasian:
Yeah, that means over the Hump, well, they’d probably go to the Burma Road;
that’s not a very good place, there are a lot of pirates there. It’s not safe
just because the Japs are gone. They’ve got a lot of other things, problems. God
knows if he ever got back.
I wrote back and said he is walking back. I mean, you’re talking about thousands of
miles. That’s how they must have gotten there in the first place. Can you
imagine?
Anyway, that
was a sad thing for me, I couldn’t come to peace with it somehow.
The full interview with Karnig is at my web site tankbooks.com, and Karnig has also written a book about his experiences, "Then There Were Six," which is available at amazon.com.
A little more, however, on the etymology of "Extract Digit." According to Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Catch Phrases, Prince Philip used a variation of it in a 1961 speech on British industry, he said "It is about time we pulled our fingers out!" Fast Forward to earlier this year, and Tiger Woods, according to the blog golfbytourmiss.com, sent an "extract digit" text to Rory McIlroy:
Tiger Woods Sends ‘Extract The Digit’
Return Text Message To Rory McIlroy.
New World No. 1 Tiger Woods sent
struggling Rory McIlroy a timely text message ahead of next month’s Masters –
‘Get your finger out of your ass and win this week’s Shell Houston Open’.
McIlroy is returning to the PGA Tour
for a first time in a fortnight and in his final tournament ahead of the April
11th starting first Major Championship of the season at Augusta
National.
The 23-year old Northern Irishman
tees up in America’s fourth largest city having broken 70 just one in nine
stroke play rounds including a pair of 75s to start his new season in Abu
Dhabi.
And on Monday, McIlroy’s 208-day
reign as World No. 1 ended when Woods captured a record-equalling eighth PGA
Tour event in capturing the Arnold Palmer Invitational in Orlando.
As McIlroy took to the Redstone
course in suburban Humble, Woods helped lead his Albany team to success in the
Tavistock Cup in Orlando.
However before teeing-up in the
Singles shootout he received a congratulatory text message from McIlroy.
“I thought I would just let it all
sort of die down a bit after his win yesterday so I texted him this morning.
“I hadn’t spoken to Tiger for a
couple of weeks but I sent him a text this morning congratulating him on his
win and saying: ‘Well done’.
“Tiger got back to me and told me to
get my finger out of my ass and win this week.”
And when www.golfbytourmiss. com mentioned the text
to McIlroy later while he was playing a practice round, McIlroy admitted that
was a toned down version of what Woods texted him.
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P.S. OMG, if there's one state those World War II Germans would know the capital of, it's North Dakota (Bismarck)!
