Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (43 page)

Roosevelt, he said, was dead.

The men deflated. The Bird sent them into the barracks.

A few days later, Ogawa made a little joke to the Bird, teasing him about how his POW officers were lazy. Ogawa meant no harm, but the remark sent the Bird into a fury. He shouted for the farm workers to line up before him, then began berating them for their indolence. He stormed and frothed, seeming completely deranged.

Final y, he screamed his punishment: From now on, al officers would perform hard labor, loading coal on barges. If they refused, he would execute every one of them. One look at the Bird told Fitzgerald that this was an order he could not fight.

Early the next morning, as the officers were marched off to labor, the Bird stood by, watching them go. He was smiling.

——

It was a short walk into slavery. The officers were taken to the riverbank and crowded onto a barge, which was heaped with coal destined for the steel mil .

Six men were given shovels; Louie and the rest were given large baskets and told to strap them to their backs. Then, on the guards’ orders, the shovelers began heaving coal into each man’s basket. As a cubic foot of loose coal can weigh as much as sixty pounds, the bearers were soon staggering. Once the baskets were ful , the bearers were ordered to lug the loads off the barge and up the shore to a railroad car, where they wobbled up a narrow, steep ramp, dumped the coal into the car, and returned to have their baskets refil ed.

Al day the men shoveled and hauled. The guards kept the basket men moving at a rapid clip. By the time the guards final y let them stop, the men were utterly exhausted; by Wade’s estimate, over the course of the day, each basket bearer had carried wel over four tons of coal.

So began a daily routine. Each time the men finished clearing one barge, they were pushed aboard another, and the hauling went on, punishing their bodies and numbing their minds. Somewhere along the way, as he and the others bent under their burdens and plodded along, Tom Wade began reciting poetry and speeches. Louie and the other slaves shoveled and walked in time with Shakespeare’s soliloquies, with Churchil ’s vow to fight in the fields and in the streets and in the hil s, with Lincoln’s last ful measure of devotion.

The barges were eventual y empty, but the officers’ life in slavery had only just begun. In a mass of POWs, Louie was herded onto another of the barges, which was pul ed by a tugboat into the Sea of Japan. About three-quarters of a mile out, the barge drew alongside an anchored coal ship and stopped, the sea heaving under it, water spraying over the deck. Standing before the prisoners, a guard gestured to a net slung over the side of the ship. Jump from the barge onto the net, he said, then climb up onto the ship’s deck.

The POWs were appal ed. On the tossing sea, the two vessels were pitching up and down, crashing together and rol ing apart, and the net was a rapidly moving target. If the men mistimed their jumps, they’d be caught between the crafts as they col ided or thrown into the water as they gapped apart.

The men balked, but the guards forced them forward, and the POWs began jumping. Louie, as scared as everyone else, sprang across and climbed clear.

He was hustled into the ship’s hold. Before him stood a giant dome of coal and, beside it, a large hanging net. As he was given a shovel, the guards suddenly teemed around him, screaming at him to get to work. Louie jammed his shovel into the coal and began piling it into the net.

Hour after hour, Louie stooped over his shovel in a churning cloud of black dust. The guards turned circles around him and the others, shouting and cracking them with clubs and kendo sticks. They pushed the POWs at such a frenzied pace that the laborers never had a moment to straighten their backs. Clubbed and badgered, Louie shoveled so frantical y that the men alongside him whispered to him to slow down. At last, in the evening, the work was halted. The POWs were taken back to shore and dropped there, so caked in coal that they were virtual y indistinguishable.

Every morning, the men were sent back to take up their shovels again. Every night, they dragged back into camp, a long line of blackened ghosts trudging into the barracks and fal ing onto their bunks, weary to their bones, spitting black saliva. There was just one bathtub in camp, and its water was almost never changed. The one other place to bathe was a vat at the steel mil , but the guards marched the POWs there for baths only once every ten days. Unwil ing to brave the camp tub, the coal-labor men lived in a patina of soot, waiting to go to the mil . Eventual y, Wade felt so befouled that he had someone shave the coal-clotted hair from his head. “It was an act of expiation,” he wrote.

Day after day, Louie shoveled. Occasional y, he was switched from coal to industrial salt; the work was just as taxing, and the salt liquefied in his sweat and ran down his back, burning fissures in his skin. Fitzgerald labored alongside his men and tangled with the foremen to protect them. Once, during a nonstop fourteen-hour shift, he ordered the POWs to stop and told the foreman that he wouldn’t let his men work until they were fed. After much argument, the overseers brought the men a single, huge bal of rice, then sent them back to work.

Tragedy was inevitable, and Louie was there when it happened. He was standing on the barge, awaiting his turn to jump to the ship, when the man ahead of him mistimed his leap, thudding into the side of the ship just as it col ided with the barge. Crushed between the vessels, the man crumpled onto the barge. The guards hardly paused, pushing Louie to make his jump. While the rest of the POWs tramped past him, the injured man was left where he lay. Louie never learned if he survived.

——

The slave labor at Naoetsu was the kind of work that swal owed men’s souls, but the prisoners found ways to score little victories, so essential to their physical and emotional survival. Most of the work sites offered nothing to sabotage, but stealing was epidemic. On the barges, men would wait until the operator stepped away, then sprint into the gal ey and stuff al the food they could find into their clothes. The lunch boxes of the civilian guards kept vanishing; an overseer’s pack of cigarettes, set down while he turned away, would be gone when he turned back. The POWs would pinch anything they could, often items they had no need for, risking a beating or worse for something as useless as a pencil box. The box itself was nothing; the theft of it was everything.

Because the POW diet was severely deficient in sodium, leaving many men crippled by muscle cramps and other ailments, the men developed a system for stealing and processing salt. As they worked, the men on the salt barges would secrete handfuls of salt in their pockets. In its raw form, the salt was inedible, so the barge men would carry it up to camp and slip it to the POWs assigned to the steel mil . These men would hide the salt in their clothing and carry it to the mil , wait until the guard wasn’t looking, then drop lumps of it into canteens fil ed with water. At day’s end, they’d hang the canteens on the sides of a coal-fire vat. By morning, the water would be boiled away, leaving only edible salt residue, a treasure beyond price.

While in the benjo one day, Louie looked through a knothole and noticed that a grain sack was resting against it, in a storage room on the other side of the wal . Remembering the thieving techniques of the Scots at Omori, he left the benjo, searched the camp, and found a pile of discarded bamboo reeds, which were hol ow. He took one and, when the guards weren’t watching, sharpened the end. That night, he put on his camp-issued pajamas, which were fitted with strings around the ankles. He pocketed his bamboo reed, pul ed his ankle strings as tight as he could, and headed to the benjo. Once inside, he jammed one end of the reed through the knothole hard enough to pierce the grain sack, then put the other end into his pajama fly. The grain—rice

—poured through the reed and into his pants. When he had about five pounds in each leg, Louie pul ed the reed out.

Louie walked out of the benjo, moving as natural y as a man could with ten pounds of rice in his pajamas. He strol ed past the barracks guards and climbed the ladder to the second floor, where Commander Fitzgerald awaited him, a blanket spread before him. Louie stepped onto the blanket, untied his pant legs, and let the rice spil out, then hurried back to his bunk. Fitzgerald quickly folded up the blanket, then hid the rice in socks and secret compartments he had made under the wal panels. After memorizing the guards’ routines, Louie and Fitzgerald would wait for a time when the guards left the building, then dig out the rice, rush it to the building stove, boil it in water, and scoop it into their mouths as rapidly as they could, sharing it with a few others. They never got more than about a tablespoon of rice per man, but the accomplishment of outwitting their slaveholders was nourishment enough.

In Naoetsu’s little POW insurgency, perhaps the most insidious feat was pul ed off by Louie’s friend Ken Marvin, a marine who’d been captured at Wake Atol . At his work site, Marvin was supervised by a one-eyed civilian guard cal ed Bad Eye. When Bad Eye asked Marvin to teach him English, Marvin saw his chance. With secret delight, he began teaching Bad Eye catastrophical y bad English. From that day forward, when asked, “How are you?

,” Bad Eye would smilingly reply, “What the fuck do you care?”

——

Disaster struck Louie one day that spring, on the riverbank. He’d been transferred back to hauling and was hunched under a basket, lugging a heavy load of salt from a barge to a railroad car. He carried his basket up the riverbank, then began the perilous walk up the railcar ramp. As he made his way up, a guard stepped onto the top of the ramp and started down. As they passed, the guard threw out his elbow, and Louie, top-heavy under the basket, fel over the side. He managed to get his legs under him before he hit the ground, some four feet down. One leg hit before the other. Louie felt a tearing sensation, then scorching pain in his ankle and knee.

Louie couldn’t bear any weight on the leg. Two POWs supported him while he hopped back to camp. He was removed from barge duty, but this was hardly comforting. Not only would he now be the only officer trapped in camp with the Bird al day, but his rations would be cut in half.

Louie lay in the barracks, ravenous. His dysentery was increasingly severe, and his fevers were growing worse, sometimes spiking to 104 degrees. To get his rations restored, he had to find work that he could do on one leg. Spotting an abandoned sewing machine in a shed, he volunteered to tailor the guards’ clothes in exchange for ful rations. This kept him going for a while, but there was soon no one left to tailor for, and his rations were halved again.

Such was his desperation that he went to the Bird and begged for work.

The Bird savored his plea. From now on, he said, Louie would be responsible for the pig in the compound. The job would earn him ful rations, but there was a catch: Louie was forbidden to use tools to clean the pig’s sty. He’d have to use his hands.

Al his life, Louie had been fastidious about cleanliness, so much so that in col ege he had kept Listerine in his car’s glove compartment so he could rinse his mouth after kissing girls. Now he was condemned to crawl through the filth of a pig’s sty, picking up feces with his bare hands and cramming handfuls of the animal’s feed into his mouth to save himself from starving to death. Of al of the violent and vile abuses that the Bird had inflicted upon Louie, none had horrified and demoralized him as did this. If anything is going to shatter me , Louie thought, this is it. Sickened and starving, his wil a fraying wire, Louie had only the faint hope of the war’s end, and rescue, to keep him going.

Twenty-nine

Two Hundred and Twenty Punches

AT ELEVEN-THIRTY ON THE MORNING OF MAY 5, 1945, THE sound of four massive engines broke the silence over Naoetsu. A B-29 was turning circles over the vil age. Sirens sounded, but in the steel mil , the foreman ignored them, and the POWs continued working the furnaces. Then there was a sudden, enormous crash, and it began snowing very hard inside the mil .

It wasn’t snow, but a tremendous quantity of dust fal ing from the rafters. Something had shaken the mil violently. The foreman announced that the sound had only been a transformer blowing up, and kept the men working.

A moment later, a worker ran in and said something urgently to the foreman. The Japanese dropped everything and sprinted out, abandoning the POWs as they ran for the air-raid shelters on the beach. Gathering that only a B-29 could make the foreman run like that, the panicked POWs crowded together in a smal room, praying that they wouldn’t get hit.

They didn’t. The B-29’s bombs missed the plant, blowing gaping holes in a field nearby. It took an hour for everyone, captive and free, to calm down.

The guards did their best to impress the POWs with the incompetence of American airmen, taking them on a crater tour to show how badly the bomber had missed, but they were spooked. There was much more to this raid than a couple of holes in a farmer’s field, and everyone knew it. For the POWs, kept in ignorance of the Pacific war’s progression, this raid, and the growing number of B-29 sightings over the vil age, raised a dazzling possibility. If the Americans were turning their efforts toward a lone steel mil in a place as obscure as Naoetsu, had the B-29s already destroyed the big strategic cities?

The answer came ten days later. Four hundred new POWs tramped through the gates and halted in the compound. The Bird leapt onto a perch over them and delivered his standard harangue:

“You must be sober! You must be sincere! You must work for earnest! You must obey! I have spoken.”

“Who the hel is Ernest?” muttered a POW.

When the Bird was finished, the four hundred new men wedged into the barracks with the three hundred old ones, and the benjos ranneth over. The new men said they’d come from slave camps in the huge cities of Kobe, a matrix of war production, and Osaka, Japan’s biggest port. Weeks before, B-29s had swept over those cities in gleaming, three-hundred-plane swarms, showering them in fire. Large swaths of Kobe and Osaka had been burned to the ground. Of no use to Japan in razed cities, the POWs had been shipped to Naoetsu to be reenslaved for the empire. The new men had one other piece of news: Germany had fal en. The whole weight of the Al ies was now thrown against Japan.