Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (42 page)

Al told, fifteen hundred American planes and several hundred Japanese planes flew over the POWs that day. That night, the city was bathed in red fires. The fol owing day, back the planes came. By the end of February 17, more than five hundred Japanese planes, both on the ground and in the air, had been lost, and Japan’s aircraft works had been badly hit. The Americans had lost eighty planes.

Seven days later, the hammer fel . At seven in the morning, during a heavy snowstorm, sixteen hundred carrier-based planes flew past Omori and bombed Tokyo. Then came B-29s, 229 of them, carrying incendiary bombs. Encountering almost no resistance, they sped for the industrial district and let their bombs fal . The POWs could see fire dancing over the skyline.

——

On the last day of February, Louie and the other officers were cal ed into the compound. Fifteen names were cal ed, among them Zamperini, Wade, Tinker, Mead, and Fitzgerald. They were told that they were being transferred to a camp cal ed 4B, also known as Naoetsu. Louie greeted the news with bright spirits. Wherever he was going, he would be joined by almost al of his friends.

On the evening of March 1, the chosen men gathered their belongings and donned overcoats that had been distributed the day before. Louie said good-bye to Harris. He would never see him again.

The Naoetsu-bound men climbed aboard a truck, which bore them into Tokyo. Watching the air battle over the city had been exhilarating, but when the men saw the consequences, they were shocked. Whole neighborhoods had been reduced to charred ruins, row after row of homes now nothing but black bones. In the rubble, Louie noticed something shining. Standing in the remains of many houses were large industrial machines. What Louie was seeing was a smal fragment of a giant cottage industry, war production farmed out to innumerable private homes, schools, and smal “shadow factories.”

Louie and the other transferring POWs were driven to the railway station and put on a train. They rode al night, moving west, into a snowy landscape.

As they rode on, the snow became deeper and deeper.

At about nine A.M. on March 2, the train drew up to Naoetsu, a seaside vil age on the west coast of Japan. Led to the front of the station, the POWs stared in amazement; the snow rose up some fourteen feet overhead. Climbing up a stairway cut into the drifts, they found themselves in a blindingly white world, standing atop a snow mountain that buried the entire vil age. “It was as if a giant frosted cake were sitting in the town,” Wade wrote. The snow was so deep that residents had dug vertical tunnels to get in and out of their homes. The contrast to fire-blackened Tokyo was jarring.

Pul ing their baggage along on sleighs, the POWs began the mile-and-a-quarter walk to camp. It was windy and bitterly cold. Fitzgerald, who had a badly infected foot, had the most difficulty. His crutches poked deep in the snow and wouldn’t hold his weight.

The prisoners crossed a bridge and saw the Sea of Japan. Just short of it, cornered against the Ara and Hokura rivers, was the Naoetsu POW camp, almost entirely obscured by snow. Louie and the others trudged into the compound and stopped before a shack, where they were told to stand at attention. They waited for some time, the wind frisking their clothes.

At last, a door thumped open. A man rushed out and snapped to a halt, screaming “ Keirei!”

It was the Bird.

Louie’s legs folded, the snow reared up at him, and down he went.

Twenty-eight

Enslaved

LOUIE WOULD REMEMBER THE MOMENT WHEN HE SAW THE Bird as the darkest of his life. For the Bird, it was something else. He beamed like a child on his birthday. He seemed certain that the POWs were overjoyed to see him.

Fitzgerald forked forward on his crutches and assumed the duties of senior POW. The Bird announced that just as at Omori, he was in command, and that the men must obey. He said that he would make this camp just as Omori had been under his tenure.

Ringing with shock, Louie picked himself up and hiked through the snow to the barracks, a two-story building on the edge of a smal cliff that dropped straight down to the frozen Hokura River. The three hundred residents, mostly Australians, were shrunken down to virtual stick figures. Most were wearing the tropical-weight khakis in which they’d been captured, and which, thanks to years of uninterrupted wear, were so ragged that one civilian likened them to seaweed. The wind, scudding off the sea, whistled through cracks in the wal s, and there were so many holes in the roof that it snowed indoors. The whole building was visibly infested with fleas and lice, and rats trotted through the rooms. The beds were planks nailed into the wal s; the mattresses were loose rice straw. Everywhere, there were large gaps in the floor; the POWs had pul ed up the floorboards and burned them in an effort to survive temperatures that regularly plunged far below zero.

Stacked against one wal were dozens of smal boxes, some of which had broken open and spil ed gray ash onto the floor. These were the cremated remains of sixty Australian POWs—one in every five prisoners—who had died in this camp in 1943 and 1944, succumbing to pneumonia, beriberi, malnutrition, colitis, or a combination of these. Relentless physical abuse had precipitated most of the deaths. In a POW camp network that would resonate across history as a supreme example of cruelty, Naoetsu had won a special place as one of the blackest holes in the Japanese Empire. Of the many hel s that Louie had known in this war, this place would be the worst.

Louie lay on his plank and tried to ready himself for what Naoetsu would bring. As he fel asleep that night, halfway around the globe the world’s best runners were gathering for a track meet at Madison Square Garden. The promoters had renamed the marquee event in tribute to Louie, who was stil believed dead by virtual y everyone outside of his family. When the Zamperinis heard of it, they were upset: The race was to be cal ed the Louis S.

Zamperini Memorial Mile. Out of respect for the family, the name was changed to the Louis S. Zamperini Invitational, but that did little to lift the spirits of those involved. Marty Glickman, who’d been on the 1936 Olympic team with Louie, watched the race with tears streaming down his face.

POWs at Naoetsu. Australian War Memorial, negative number 6033201

The race was won by Jim Rafferty, America’s best miler. His time was 4:16.4, four seconds slower than the time Louie had clocked on the sand of Oahu just before climbing aboard Green Hornet.

——

The first weeks Louie spent in Naoetsu were almost lethal y cold. Each night of shivering in his bed of straw ended abruptly before dawn, when he was shouted awake and forced outside for tenko in deep snow, howling wind, and darkness. By day, he huddled with Tinker, Wade, and his other friends in patches of sunlight, trying in vain to keep warm. He was soon nursing a cough, fever, and flulike symptoms, and the Naoetsu slop did nothing to help his body recover. The rations, which were halved for officers, rarely varied from mil et or barley and boiled seaweed, plus a few slices of vegetable. The drinking water, which the POWs had to haul in on sleds, was yel ow and reeked. Seeing the guards smoking American cigarettes, the POWs knew that the Red Cross was sending relief packages, but the prisoners got nothing.

Watanabe was the same fiend that he’d been at Omori, prompting the Aussies to nickname him “Whatabastard.” He held a far lower rank than Naoetsu’s commander, an elfin man sporting an abbreviated mustache as an apparent homage to Hitler, but the commander deferred to the Bird, just as the officers at Omori had done. And here, the Bird had recruited a henchman, an eggplant-shaped man named Hiroaki Kono, who trailed Watanabe around camp, assaulting men with the intensity, wrote Wade, of “a roaring Hitlerian animal.”

Louie’s transfer to Naoetsu, into the grip of the Bird, had been no coincidence. Watanabe had handpicked him and the others to come to this camp, which was short on officers. According to Wade, each chosen man had a skil or history that would make him useful. Al Mead, who had helped save Louie from starvation at Ofuna, had headed Omori’s cookhouse; Fitzgerald had been a ranking officer; Wade had been a barracks commander; and so on. The only man with no such history was Louie. Wade believed that the Bird had chosen Louie simply because he wanted to torment him.

Wade was right. From almost the moment that Louie walked into camp, the Bird was on him, slapping him, punching him, and berating him. Other POWs were shocked at how the sergeant pursued Louie, attacking him, remembered one POW, “just for dril .” Louie took his beatings with as much defiance as ever, provoking the Bird to ever more violent attacks. Once again in his tormenter’s clutches, Louie descended back into a state of profound stress.

And yet, by virtue of his rank, Louie was fortunate. Naoetsu was a factory vil age that generated products critical to the war effort, and al of its young workers had gone to war. The POWs were here to take their place. Each day, the enlisted POWs waded through the snow to labor in a steel mil , a chemical factory, the port’s coal and salt barges, or a site at which they broke rocks for mineral extraction. The work was extraordinarily arduous and often dangerous, and shifts went on day and night, some for eighteen hours. In the hikes back from this slave labor, men were so rubber-legged that they tumbled into snow crevasses and had to be dragged out.

Each morning and night, Louie saw the enlisted men rambling in from their slave shifts, some completely obscured by coal soot, some so exhausted that they had to be carried into the barracks. The Japanese literal y worked men to death at Naoetsu. Louie had much to bear, but at least he didn’t have this.

——

Winter faded. The river ice gave way to flowing water, and houses emerged where only snow had been. When the drifts in the compound melted, a pig miraculously appeared. Al winter, he’d been living below the POWs in a snow cavern, sustained by bits of food dropped to him by an Australian. Louie looked at him in wonder. The animal’s skin had gone translucent.

With the ground thawed, the Bird announced that he was sending the officers to work as farm laborers. Though this violated the Geneva Convention’s prohibition on forcing officers to labor, Fitzgerald now knew what life in camp with the Bird was like. Work on the farm would keep the officers out of the Bird’s path for hours every day, and couldn’t be anything like the backbreaking labor done by the enlisted men. Fitzgerald raised no protest.

Each morning, Louie and the rest of the farming party assembled before the barracks, attended by a civilian guard named Ogawa. They loaded a cart with benjo waste—to be used as fertilizer, as was customary in Japan—then yoked themselves to the cart like oxen and pul ed it to and from the farm. As they picked their way along the road, sometimos darting off to try to steal a vegetable from a field while Ogawa’s back was turned, Japanese farmers came out to stare at them, probably the first Westerners they’d ever seen. Louie looked back at the wan, stooped old men and women. The hardships of this war were evident on their blank, weary faces and from their bodies, winnowed for want of food. A few children scampered about, raising their arms in imitation of surrender and mocking the prisoners. There were no young adults.

The walk, six miles each way, was a tiring slog, but the work, planting and tending potatoes, was relatively easy. Ogawa was a placid man, and though he carried a club, he never used it. The plot had a clean wel , a relief after the stinking camp water, and Ogawa let the men drink al they wished. And because they were now working outside the camp, the officers were granted ful rations. Though those rations were dwindling as Japan’s fortunes fel , a ful bowl of seaweed was better than half a bowl of seaweed.

April 13 was a bright day, the land bathed in sunshine, the sky wide and clear. Louie and the other officers were scattered over the potato plot, working, when the field suddenly went stil and the men turned their faces to the sky. At the same moment, al over Naoetsu, labor at the outdoor work sites halted as the POWs and guards gazed up. High overhead, something was winking in the sunlight, slender ribbons of white unfurling behind it. It was a B-29.

It was the first Superfortress to cross over Naoetsu. The Omori officers had seen hundreds of B-29s over Tokyo, but for the Australians, who’d been hidden in this vil age since 1942, this was their first glimpse of the bomber.

Fol owed by innumerable eyes, some hopeful and some horrified, the B-29 made a slow arc from one horizon to the other, fol owing the coastline. No guns shot at it; no fighters chased it. It dropped no bombs, passing peaceful y overhead, but its appearance was a tel ing sign of how far over Japan the Americans were now venturing, and how little resistance the Japanese could offer. As al of Naoetsu watched, the plane slid out of view, and its contrails dissolved behind it.

The POWs were elated; the Japanese were unnerved. At the work sites, the prisoners hid their excitement behind neutral faces to avoid provoking the guards, who were unusual y tense and hostile. On the walk back to camp that evening, the prisoners absorbed a few swipes with a club, but their mood remained merry. When they reached the gates, the Bird was waiting for them.