Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (38 page)

Stephan stapled a transcript of the radio message to the card. He addressed it using the contact information typed in the message, misunderstood as Louise Vancerini, 2028 Brammersee Street, Terence, California. He dropped the card in the mail.

Thanks to the mistaken address and the severe delays of the wartime mail, the card would wander the world for months. In January 1945, it would turn up in Trona, a crossroads in the California desert. It would be the end of January, nearly three and a half months after the broadcast, when someone in Trona would pick up the letter, scribble try Torrance on the outside, and mail it on.

Twenty-five

B-29

ON ONE OF THE LAST DAYS OF OCTOBER 1944, LOUIE pushed a wheelbarrow over the Omori bridge, through the vilage at the bridge’s end, and into Tokyo.

With him were another POW and a guard; they’d been ordered to pick up meat for the POW rations. Louie had been in Japan for thirteen months, but this was the first time that he had passed, unblindfolded, into the society that held him captive.

Tokyo was bled dry. There were no young men anywhere. The war had caused massive shortages in food and goods, and the markets and restaurants were shuttered. The civilians were slipshod and unbathed. Everyone knew that the Americans were coming, and the city seemed to be holding its breath.

Teams of children and teenagers were shoveling out slit trenches and tearing down buildings to make firebreaks.

Louie, the other POW, and the guard arrived at a slaughterhouse, where their wheelbarrow was fil ed with horse meat. As they pushed it back toward Omori, Louie looked up at a building and saw graffiti scrawled over one wal . It said, B Niju Ku. The first character was simple enough, the English letter B. Louie knew that niju meant twenty and ku meant nine, though he didn’t know that ku carried another meaning: pain, calamity, affliction. Louie walked the wheelbarrow into Omori, wondering what “B twenty-nine” referred to, and why someone would write it on a wal .

——

At ten minutes to six on the morning of November 1, 1944, a wondrous American plane lifted off a runway on Saipan. Its size boggled the imagination: 99

feet long, 141 feet from wingtip to wingtip, almost 30 feet high at the tail, and weighing 120,000 pounds or more loaded, it dwarfed the famously huge B-24. Powered by four 2,200-horsepower engines—each engine almost twice as powerful as each of those of the B-24—it could rocket across the sky at up to 358 miles per hour and carry giant bomb loads. A B-24 didn’t have a prayer of making it from Saipan to Japan’s home islands and back. This plane could do it. It was the B-29 Superfortress, and it would bring down Japan.

The bomber, soon to be named Tokyo Rose as a mocking homage to the women who broadcast Japanese propaganda, was piloted by Captain Ralph Steakley. That morning, he flew his plane north. The plane split the air nearly six miles up. Above was a sky of intense blue; below, sliding over the horizon, came Japan.

B-29s had been used a handful of times over Japan, in raids launched from China, beginning four and a half months earlier. Largely because of the difficulty of supplying the Chinese bases and flying the vast distances between those bases and Japan, the missions had been ineffective. But to the Japanese, the swift leviathans were terrifying, inspiring the graffiti that Louie had seen. Three weeks after the first China-based raid, Saipan had been captured, and American plans had shifted to launching B-29s from there. Steakley’s was the first run from Saipan to Tokyo, which hadn’t seen an American plane since the Doolittle raid in 1942. His plane carried not bombs but cameras: Steakley was mapping the path for the B-29s that would fol ow his. At noon, the plane reached the city.

Louie was standing in a group of POWs, doing calisthenics on the orders of the guards, when a siren began sounding. The guards, as usual during alerts, shooed the men into the barracks. The POWs were used to the sirens, which had always been false alarms, so the alert caused little concern.

In the barracks, the men peered out the windows. Something was different; the guards were gaping at the sky as if, wrote Bob Martindale, “they were looking for the Messiah.” Then there was a glint above, a finger pointing urgently, and a crush of POWs bolting for the door. Running into the compound with his face skyward, Louie saw a sliver of radiant white light high over Tokyo, contrails curling behind it like twisting spines. “Oh God, God, an American plane!” someone shouted. The guards looked stricken. Martindale heard them speaking to each other in high agitation. One phrase stood out: “B niju ku.”

Louie, like al the POWs, had no idea what kind of plane this was. Then a POW who’d just been captured said that it was a new American bomber cal ed a B-29. A cheer rang out. Men began shouting, “B-29! B-29!” The bomber was the most beautiful thing that Louie had ever seen.

Across the bay, masses of civilians stood in the streets, looking at the sky. As the plane passed into the civilians’ view, Frank Tinker heard the people shouting, sounds that blended into a roar. Louie glanced toward the south end of camp. The Bird was standing just outside his office, motionless and expressionless, watching the plane.

“It was not their Messiah,” Martindale wrote, “but ours.”

——

The bomber was flying at perfect liberty. Steakley guided it in a series of straight runs over the city as his crewmen snapped photographs. Below, the guards began pursuing the elated POWs, trying to force them back into the barracks. The men shushed each other, fearing that they’d be beaten for celebrating. The clamor died down. Louie stood with the other men and watched the bomber, occasional y darting between barracks to avoid the guards.

Steakley flew over Tokyo for more than an hour. No Japanese planes or guns engaged him. Final y, as he turned back for Saipan, a Zero banked up for his tail, fol owed briefly, then turned away.

Newspapers were relatively easy to come by in Omori. Slave laborers snuck them in, and each day, at his work site, Milton McMul en gave a Korean truck driver a bag of stolen rice in exchange for a smal English-language paper, which McMul en smuggled into camp in his boot. For the POWs, the papers were inexhaustibly amusing. Though the Japanese press covered the European theater accurately, it was notorious for distorting the news of the Pacific war, sometimes absurdly. Louie once read a story about a Japanese pilot who ran out of ammunition in a dogfight and downed his opponent with a rice bal .

On the day after the B-29 flyover, the coverage wore a similar stripe. “Paper says, ‘Lone enemy B-29 visits Tokyo area,’ ” wrote POW Ernest Norquist in his diary. “It said it came from the Mariana Island group, flew over the city and ‘was drive off’ [sic] without dropping a single bomb. I laughed as I read the words ‘driven off’ for neither the antiaircraft fire nor the Zeros had come within miles of that great big beautiful bird.” Louie saw another headline that said the bomber had FLED IN CONSTERNATION.

The plane had simply crossed over Tokyo, but everyone in Japan, captive and free, knew what it meant. Every morning, the Omori POWs were assembled and ordered to cal out their number in Japanese. After November 1, 1944, the man assigned number twenty-nine would sing out “Niju ku!” at the top of his lungs. “Not even bayonet prods,” wrote Wade, “could wipe the smiles from the POW faces now.”

——

Louie wasn’t smiling for long. The B-29, and what it portended, fed the Bird’s vitriol. One day Louie was in his barracks, sitting with friends far in the rear, out of sight of the door, in case the Bird came in. As the men passed around a cigarette rol ed in toilet paper, two guards banged in, screaming “Keirei!”

Louie leapt up in tandem with the other men. In bounded the Bird.

For several seconds, the Bird looked around. He took a few steps into the room, and Louie came into his view. The corporal rushed down the barracks and halted before Louie. He wore the webbed belt that Louie had seen on him his first day in Omori. The buckle was several inches square, made of heavy brass. Standing before Louie, the Bird jerked the belt off his waist and grasped one end with both hands.

“You come to attention last!”

The Bird swung the belt backward, with the buckle on the loose end, and then whipped it around himself and forward, as if he were performing a hammer throw. The buckle rammed into Louie’s left temple and ear.

Louie felt as if he had been shot in the head. Though he had resolved never to let the Bird knock him down, the power of the blow, and the explosive pain that fol owed, overawed everything in him. His legs seemed to liquefy, and he went down. The room spun.

Louie lay on the floor, dazed, his head throbbing, blood running from his temple. When he gathered his wits, the Bird was crouching over him, making a sympathetic, almost maternal sound, a sort of Awwww. He pul ed a fold of toilet paper from his pocket and pressed it gently into Louie’s hand. Louie held the paper to his temple.

“Oh, it stop, eh?” the Bird said, his voice soft.

Louie pul ed himself upright. The Bird waited for him to steady himself. The soothing voice and the offer of the paper for his wound were revelations to Louie: There was compassion in this man. The sense of relief was just entering his mind when the buckle, whirling around from the Bird’s swinging arms, struck his head again, exactly where it had hit before. Louie felt pain bursting through his skul , his body going liquid again. He smacked into the floor.

——

For several weeks, Louie was deaf in his left ear. The Bird continued to beat him, every day. As his attacker struck him, Louie bore it with clenched fists and eyes blazing, but the assaults were wearing him down. The sergeant began lording over his dream life, coming at him and pounding him, his features alight in vicious rapture. Louie spent hour after hour in prayer, begging for God to save him. He lost himself in fantasies of running through an Olympic stadium, climbing onto a podium. And he thought of home, tormented by thoughts of what his disappearance must have done to his mother. He longed to write to her, but there was no point. Once, a Japanese officer had announced that men could write home, and everyone in camp penned letters to their parents, wives, children, and steady girls. When the Bird learned of it, he cal ed in Commander Maher, handed him the letters, and forced him to burn them.

One day in mid-November, Louie was sitting in his barracks when the Bird walked in and approached him, accompanied by two Japanese strangers.

Louie expected a beating, but instead, the strangers were friendly. They told Louie that they were producers from Radio Tokyo and that they had something they thought he’d like to see. They handed Louie a piece of paper. Louie looked at it: It was a transcript of an NBC radio broadcast announcing his death. The transcript was real. Louie’s death declaration, delivered in June, had reached the American media on November 12, that same week.

The Radio Tokyo men wanted Louie to come to their studio to announce that he was alive on the Postman Calls show. They wanted Louie to do this, they said, for his sake and that of his suffering family. He was free to write his own message. Louie didn’t trust them, and gave them no answer. They told him to take a day to think about it. Louie consulted Martindale, who told him that several POWs had made such broadcasts, and as long as Louie didn’t read propaganda, there was no harm in accepting.

So Louie said yes. The Radio Tokyo men brought him pen and paper, and he set to work. Knowing that his family might not believe that it was real y he, he added details that he hoped would convince them. To ensure that his message got through, he decided to speak positively about his captors. He included the names of other POWs who feared that their families thought they were dead, and also mentioned Bil Harris, whom he’d last seen a month and a half earlier, at Ofuna. He opted not to mention Phil. He hadn’t seen the pilot for eight months, and didn’t know if he was stil alive.

Louie was driven to the Radio Tokyo studio. The producers greeted him as if he were a beloved friend. They read his speech and gave it a hearty approval. It would be taped for broadcast two days later. The producers planned to use that evening’s broadcast to tease the audience, then wait before presenting his voice to the world, proof that they were tel ing the truth.

Louie was taken to the microphone and given his cue. He read his message, to the pleasure of the producers. As the officials prepared to drive him back to Omori, Louie went to a producer who had been especial y kind. He said that there was a man in camp named Watanabe who was beating the POWs. The producer seemed concerned and told Louie that he’d see what he could do.

——

In San Francisco at half past two on the morning of November 18, 1944, a young woman named Lynn Moody was alone in the Office of War Information, working the graveyard shift. Across the hal in the Federal Communications Commission station, one of her col eagues was listening to Japanese radio and typing up broadcasts for review by propaganda analysts. Moody was bored, so she crossed the hal to say hel o. The col eague asked if Moody could fil in while she took a break.

Moody slipped on the earphones and began typing. The show airing was Postman Calls. As she typed, Moody was startled to hear a name that she knew wel : Louis Zamperini. Moody was a member of the USC class of 1940, and Louie was an old friend. The announcer was speaking about the October 18 message that had been broadcast, supposedly from Louie, but in fact written without Louie’s knowledge. Giddy with excitement, Moody typed, placing unclear words within parentheses:

Exactly one month ago we broadcast a message. This message over the same station, same program, “Postman Cal s,” was from First Lieutenant Louis (Silvie) Zamperini, United States Army Air Corps. Recently a news report has been brought to our attention in which it is stated that First Lieutenant Louis Zamperini is listed as dead by the United States War Department. According to the report, Lieutenant Zamperini was reported missing in action in the South Pacific in May, 1943. The apparently uninformed source of this item is a broadcasting station in California quoting the War Department of the United States of America. We hope we can rectify this mistake on someone’s part by saying that Louis Zamperini is alive and wel as a prisoner of war here in Tokyo.