Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (40 page)

“Okay,” one of them said. “I think you go to punishment camp.”

Omori was cal ed a punishment camp, but the producers were clearly referring to some other place. For Louie, any camp had to be better than Omori, because the Bird wouldn’t be there. The producers gave him one last chance to change his mind. He did not.

Louie was dumped back at Omori. The Bird was waiting for him, glowing with renewed hatred. His beatings resumed, with intensified vigor. Maybe Louie was being punished for refusing to make the broadcast, or maybe the producer to whom Louie had appealed for help had told the Bird of Louie’s accusations. Louie stood his ground, took his beatings with rebel ion boiling in him, and waited to be shipped to “punishment camp.” And like al the other POWs, he watched the sky, praying that the promise of that first B-29 would be fulfil ed.

——

In the early afternoon on Friday, November 24, the Tokyo sirens began to howl. From the sky came an immense shivering sound. The POWs looked up.

There, so high that they appeared to be gleaming slits in the sky, were acres and acres of B-29s, one hundred and eleven of them, flying toward an aircraft factory on the rim of the city. Caught in what would later be cal ed the jet stream, the planes were streaking along at speeds approaching 445

miles per hour, almost 100 miles per hour faster than they were built to fly. The Americans had arrived.

“It was a cold, clear, sunny day,” wrote POW Johan Arthur Johansen, who was at a slave site at the time. “The planes were shining like silver in the sunshine against the blue sky overhead … It was a beautiful sight which lift[ed] our spirit right up to the sky.” Men began yel ing, “Drop the bombs!” and

“Happy landings!” and “Welcome back!” The guards stared up, so awed by the planes that they didn’t seem to hear the men shouting.

A B-29 over Japan. Associated Press

At Omori, the camp accountant, Yuichi Hatto, was standing with a group of POWs. As they watched, a lone Japanese fighter raced toward the planes, then abruptly, startlingly, flew straight into a bomber, the smal er plane shattering and raining down on Tokyo Bay. The bomber began fal ing, white smoke twirling from it. A single parachute puffed from its side, and one of the POWs cried, “One safe! Safe!” The English word caught in Hatto’s ear; he had heard it used only in basebal games. The bomber hit the water, kil ing al aboard. The lone survivor, under his parachute, wafted over Tokyo as gently as a dandelion seed. As the man sank into the city, Hatto had a sick feeling, thinking of what would happen to that airman when he reached the ground. The other bombers flew on. A few minutes later, there was distant booming.

——

As the fal stretched on, B-29s crossed over Omori nearly every day, sometimes a lone plane, sometimes vast continents of aircraft. On sunny days, the men stood out and watched them; on cloudy days, they only heard them, a growl above the gray. In Tokyo, the sirens sang so incessantly that the POWs began sleeping through them.

Eighty-one bombers went over on November 27. On the drizzly night of November 29–30, the prisoners were awakened by two incendiary raids on Tokyo’s industrial areas. Explosions were heard far away, and the POWs could see licks of fire on the mainland, the last gasps of the 2,773 structures that burned that night. Civilians began streaming over the bridge and camping outside Omori’s wal s in hopes of escaping the bombs.

One day that fal , Louie stood outside, watching Japanese fighters turning lupine circles around a crowd of B-29s. The battle was so high that only the giant, shining bombers were consistently visible; the fighters, tiny in contrast, flickered in and out of view as the sunlight caught them. Every little while, there was a sharp, brief burst of light alongside the bombers. To Louie, it looked like firecrackers. It was the fighters, gunned by the B-29s, blowing up.

The bombers flew on, imperious. The Bird watched the scene with a stricken face. “Hikoki dame,” he said. “Hikoki dame.” Japan’s planes, he was lamenting, were no good.

Every B-29 that beat a path over Tokyo wound the Bird tighter. He hounded the POWs with endless inspections, prohibited smoking, singing, and card playing, and outlawed religious services. He slapped one officer across the face repeatedly for five minutes, made him stand at attention, coatless, for four hours in the cold, then ordered him to clean the benjos for two hours a day for two weeks. He beat a kitchen worker with a spoon the size of an oar.

He pawed through the men’s belongings, confiscating personal papers and photographs of loved ones, deeming much of it “suspicious” and destroying it.

He was seized with paranoia. “You win war, and you make al Japanese like black slaves!” he shouted at a POW. He hauled Martindale to his office, accused him of plotting to burn down a barracks, and beat him so energetical y, with fists and a kendo stick, that he overturned al of the furniture.

B-29 Superfortresses. Associated Press

In December, the Bird left camp for several days, and Omori was briefly peaceful. But on the night before the Bird was slated to return, the POWs were jarred from their sleep to hear him charging through camp in a driving rainstorm, yel ing that it was a fire dril . When the designated firefighters assembled under the freezing downpour, the Bird punched several of them in the face, ran through barracks shouting and punching other men, then ordered every man in camp to line up outside. When Louie and the others did as told, the Bird drew his sword, swung it around, and screamed orders and invectives.

For two hours, the Bird forced the men to pump water on imaginary fires, beat out phantom blazes with brooms, and run in and out of buildings “rescuing”

food and documents.

As December progressed, the Bird’s mania deepened. He rounded up the officers and hounded them across the bridge and into Tokyo, on the pretense of retrieving firewood from bombed-out houses. Troughs of water for firefighting had been set along the streets, and as the men marched, the Bird leapt upon one, drew his sword, and screamed “Keirei!” The men saluted him, and the Bird, lost in a fantasy, stood on his roost in an absurdly exaggerated troop-reviewing pose that reminded Tom Wade of Mussolini. Civilians gathered and began cheering. After the POWs had passed, the Bird jumped down, ran ahead, and hopped onto another trough, shouting, striking his pose, and demanding salutes. Over and over he repeated the farce, driving the men on for miles.

When the bombs were fal ing, the Bird would snap, running through camp with his sword in the air, wailing at the men, foam flying from his mouth, lips peeled back in a wicked rictus, eyelid drooping, face purple. During at least two bombings, he prevented the POWs from seeking cover in the trenches. In one incident, he ran the POWs outside, stood them at attention, and ordered the guards to aim their rifles at them. With bombs booming, the Bird raced up and down the line of terrified POWs, swinging his sword over their heads.

Every escalation in the bombing brought a paral el escalation in the Bird’s attacks on Louie. He sped around camp in search of the American, fuming and furious. Louie hid, but the Bird always found him. Three or four times a week, the Bird launched himself at Louie in what Frank Tinker would cal his

“death lunge,” coming at him with fists flying, going for his face and head. Louie would emerge dazed and bleeding. He was more and more convinced that Watanabe wouldn’t stop until he was dead.

Louie began to come apart. At night, the Bird stalked his dreams, screeching, seething, his belt buckle flying at Louie’s skul . In the dreams, the smothered rage in Louie would overwhelm him, and he’d find himself on top of his monster, his hands on the corporal’s neck, strangling the life from him.

——

As Louie suffered through December, some three hundred miles away, his former pilot was wasting away in a filthy, unheated barracks in the Zentsuji POW camp. Phil had been transferred to Zentsuji the previous August, joining one-legged Fred Garrett, who’d been transferred from Ofuna.

Though Ofuna interrogators had spoken of Zentsuji as a “plush” reward, the camp was no such place. The prisoners’ diet was so poor that the men wandered the compound, ravenous, pul ing up weeds and eating them. Their only drinking water came from a reservoir fed by runoff from rice paddies fertilized with human excrement, and to avoid dying of thirst, the POWs had to drink it, leaving 90 percent of them afflicted with dysentery. In one barracks room, men lost an average of fifty-four pounds over eighteen months. An officer estimated that twenty men fainted each day. Almost everyone had beriberi, and some men went blind from malnutrition. On the last day of November, they buried an American who had starved to death.

There was one blessing at Zentsuji. Phil was permitted to send brief messages home on postcards. He wrote one after another. They were mailed, but got snarled in the postal system. The fal waned and another Christmas approached, and Phil’s family received none of them.

A year and a half had passed since Phil had disappeared. His family remained in limbo, having heard nothing about him since his plane had gone down. In November, they had learned about Louie’s broadcast. The news had been tantalizing, but frustrating. Louie had mentioned other servicemen who were with him, but the names had been obscured by static, and the transcript hadn’t conveyed them with certainty. Had Louie mentioned Al en?

On a Friday night in December 1944, the telephone rang in Kelsey Phil ips’s home. On the line was a major from the adjutant general’s office at the War Department. Probably through the Red Cross, the department had received news from Zentsuji. Al en was alive.

Kelsey was jubilant. She asked the major to cable her husband and her son’s fiancée, and in Washington, Cecy got the news she had awaited for so long. The fortune-tel er had said that Al en would be found before Christmas. It was December 8. Overcome with elation, Cecy cal ed her brother to shout the news, quit her job, dashed through her apartment throwing clothes and pictures of Al en into a suitcase, and hopped a plane back to Indiana to wait for her fiancé to come home.

Four days before Christmas, a card from Al en, written in October, final y reached home. “Dear Folk: Hope you al are wel and am looking forward to being home with you. I hope we can go rabbit hunting before the season closes Dad. Give my love to Cecy Martha and Dick. Happy birthday dad.” Kelsey pored over the precious slip of paper, comforted by the familiar lines of her son’s handwriting. Chaplain Phil ips, now stationed in France, got the news on Christmas Eve. “Words real y cannot describe the way I feel,” he wrote to his daughter. “I am in an altogether new world now. I can think of nothing more wonderful. It is a real touch of al that heaven means.”

In a letter official y confirming that Al en was a POW, the Phil ipses were asked not to speak publicly about the fact that Al en had been discovered alive.

Kelsey would henceforth heed this request, but the letter had reached her too late; by the morning after the War Department’s cal , the news was already al over town, and stories about Al en’s survival were in the local papers. The Zamperinis, who had received a similar letter stating that the War Department now believed that Louie’s broadcast had been real, were also asked not to speak of it publicly. The War Department probably didn’t want it known that they had erroneously declared two airmen dead, especial y as the Japanese were exploiting this fact.

Kelsey was al owed to send one cable to her son, and she fil ed the other days writing letters to him. On December 14, she wrote to Louise Zamperini.

As relieved as Kelsey was for Al en, there was heaviness in her heart. Of al of the men on Green Hornet, only Louie and Al en had been found. Hugh Cuppernel ’s mother was so demoralized that she could no longer bear to write to the other mothers. Sadie Glassman, mother of the bel y gunner, Frank Glassman, had written to Louise, asking if she had heard anything about Frank. “Even though we have heard nothing,” she wrote, “the fact that you might know something makes us feel as though there might be a little hope.”