Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (47 page)

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The rock stil sat at the foot of the barracks window, Louie’s rope tied around it. But the conspirators were too late; the Bird was nowhere to be found.

Sometime that day, or perhaps the day before, he had taken off his uniform, picked up a sack of rice, slipped into the Naoetsu countryside, and vanished.

* Torpedo bombers.

* The TBF pilot, Ray Hawkins, was a legend. In World War I , he shot down fourteen Japanese planes, making him an ace nearly three times over, and was awarded three Navy Crosses. He went on to fly in the Korean War, then became a Blue Angels flight leader. He was the first man to eject from a jet at supersonic speed. He survived.

Thirty-two

Cascades of Pink Peaches

ON AUGUST 22, PHIL AND FRED GARRETT SAT IN THE Rokuroshi POW camp, wondering what was happening. Isolated on their chily mountain, the POWs had been told nothing of the momentous events of recent days. Al they knew was that the camp commander had been gone for five days, and in his absence, the guards had been leading the POWs on ominous walks through the forest.

That afternoon, the Japanese commander slogged back up the mountain, looking wilted. He walked into the barracks and approached the ranking American, Lieutenant Colonel Marion Unruh.

“The emperor has brought peace to the world,” he said.

The commander surrendered his sword to Unruh, who gathered his men and told them that the war was over. The POWs immediately gathered for a thanksgiving service. They were told that they must not seek revenge; they were officers and gentlemen, and they were to behave that way.

The POWs promptly threw a party to end al parties. They demolished the camp fence and built a gigantic pile of wood, described by one POW as fifty feet tal . They asked the Japanese interpreter if he could get them sake, and a barrel ful of it soon arrived. The men jacked the lid off the barrel, imbibing began, the pile of wood was set on fire, an Alabaman transformed a huge can into a drum, and inebriated men began dancing. A conga line of crazy drunk POWs wrapped around camp and through the barracks, and one partier did a striptease, flinging off his clothes to reveal an emphatical y unattractive body. The revelry, which went on al night, was so riotous that one man marveled at the fact that al the POWs were stil alive when the sun came up.

POWs celebrate the war’s end. Naval History and Heritage Command

The fol owing day, the hungover POWs walked down the mountain to the nearest vil ages. They found mostly ghost towns. The civilians had seen the bonfire, abandoned their homes, and fled. The POWs hiked back up and waited for help to come.

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At Naoetsu, most of the guards stayed in camp, their haughtiness replaced by gushing obsequiousness. There was almost no food and no tobacco.

Fitzgerald went to the Japanese commander three times a day to demand more food, and was rejected each time. POWs left camp in search of something to eat. Someone came back with a cow. Someone else herded in pigs. It wasn’t enough. Fitzgerald wrote a dispatch to the Swiss consul in Tokyo, tel ing of the terrible conditions in camp and asking for immediate help, but the Japanese commander refused to send it. Livid, Fitzgerald threatened to inform the American forces about the commander’s behavior, but the commander stil refused.

At about ten in the morning on August 26, six days after the war’s end was announced in Naoetsu, Fitzgerald was just stepping out of the commander’s office when a crowd of American fighter planes, sent from the carrier Lexington, shot overhead and began circling. The POWs charged outside, yel ing.

They hastily cleared an area, fetched some white lime, and painted two giant words on the ground: FOOD SMOKES. Messages dropped from the cockpits.

The planes had been hauling emergency supplies to POW camps but had exhausted their loads. The pilots promised that food would soon come.

Unable to feed the POWs, the pilots did the next best thing, putting on a thirty-minute air show while the prisoners shouted their approval. Fitzgerald stood among his men, moved by their joyful upturned faces. “Wonderful?” wrote J. O. Young in his diary. “To stand cheering, crying, waving your hat and acting like a damn fool in general. No one who has not spent al but 16 days of this war as a Nip prisoner can real y know what it means to see ‘Old Sammy’ buzzing around over the camp.”

The fighters had a persuasive effect on the Japanese commander. He cal ed for Fitzgerald, complained that Fitzgerald had not behaved “like a

gentleman,” and accused him of bluffing when he had threatened to tel the American forces about him.

“I meant every word I said,” Fitzgerald replied.

Ninety minutes later, Japanese trucks drove into camp, and out came rations, biscuits, and canned fruit.

That afternoon, more planes from the Lexington flew over, and sea bags began thumping down al over camp. The POWs ran for their lives. One man, leaping from a fence to avoid getting clobbered, broke his ankle. One bag missed the camp altogether, splashing down in the river. The POWs ventured out, tore into the bags, and split up the loot. Each man received half a tin of tangerines, one pack of hardtack, two cigarettes, and a bit of candy. Someone waded into the river to grab the errant bag, and in it found magazines and a newspaper. Concerned that the food dropped wasn’t nearly adequate, Fitzgerald told someone to write 700 PWS HERE on the ground.

As the men ate, they passed around the magazines and peeled through the soaked pages. The fighting, they learned, had ended on August 15; the smal voice that Wade had heard on the radio in the guardroom that day had been that of Emperor Hirohito, announcing the cessation of hostilities. This meant that for five days—seven in the case of Rokuroshi—the Japanese had deceived the POWs to hide the fact that the war was over. Given al the signs that a massacre had been imminent, it seems likely that the commanders had been awaiting instruction on whether or not to carry it out, and had wanted to keep the men docile in case the answer was affirmative.

Three days after the fighters flew over, the Americans sent in the big boys: six B-29s, the words Food for POWs scrawled down the wing of one of them. The bomb bay doors parted and pal ets poured out, swinging under red, white, and blue parachutes. The first load hit the compound. Others fel over the rice paddies, pursued by hundreds of gleeful living skeletons. One canister bore a message written in chalk: BOMBED HERE IN MAY 45—SORRY I MISSED. BILLY THE KID. RHODE ISLAND NEW YORK. Boxes fel al over the landscape. Some civilians pul ed them into their homes and hid them. Others, though in great hardship themselves, dragged them into camp.

The cargo banged down and boxes broke open. Cascades of pink peaches spil ed over the countryside. A vegetable crate exploded, and the sky rained peas. A box dragged down the power lines in Naoetsu. Another harpooned the guardhouse. Louie and Tinker just missed being totaled by a giant drum ful of shoes that they never saw coming. It shot through the benjo roof, landing on an unfortunate Australian, whose leg was broken, and a Yank from Idaho, whose skul was fractured, fortunately not fatal y. The Idahoan had been fasting al day in hopes that care packages would begin fal ing and he could gorge himself on American food instead of seaweed. To prevent further disaster, someone ran onto the road and wrote DROP HERE.

An orgy of eating and smoking commenced. Men crammed their stomachs ful , then had seconds and thirds. Louie opened a can of condensed split pea soup and shoveled it into his mouth, too hungry to add water. J. O. Young and two friends drank two gallons of cocoa. The food kept fal ing. So much of it showered down that Fitzgerald asked a man to go out on the road and make sure that whoever had written 700 PWS HERE hadn’t accidental y added a zero.

At nightfal , the eating stopped. Men upended by swol en stomachs drifted off to sleep with no air raids, no tenkos, no Bird. Louie lay among them, swaddled in an American parachute that he had dragged in from the rice paddy.

“ ’Tis about 6 p.m., and I’m lying here in blissful misery just as al POWs have sat around and dreamed about throughout this internment, in short so ful of chow that it’s hard to even breath [sic],” J. O. Young wrote in his diary. “As four years prisoners … there is no such thing as being satisfied after eating.

You either don’t have enough, or as we are al now so darn ful you’re in misery.”

“There’s just one thing left to say as we bunk down for the night,” he continued, “an [sic] that it’s wonderful to be Americans and free men, and it’s a might [sic] hard job even now to realize we’re free men.”

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On the morning of September 2, a B-29 known as Ghost Ship traced the long thread of beach marking the coast of western Japan. The plane had earned its moniker when an air traffic control er, unable to see five-foot, seven-inch pilot Byron Kinney in the cockpit, had exclaimed, “There’s nobody in that plane! It must be a ghost ship!” In a briefing on Guam the afternoon before, Kinney had been told that he’d be carrying supplies to a remote POW camp cal ed Naoetsu.

Louie was in the compound alone when Ghost Ship dipped under the clouds, skimmed the rice paddy, dropped its first load, and began a long circle for a second drop. Hearing the bomber, sleepy men shuffled out of the barracks and began running into the drop zone. Louie saw the plane coming back and began trying to alert the men. As he descended, Kinney saw POWs scattered over the paddy, looking “dirty, ragged and haggard,” and a lone man trying to pul them back. He aborted the drop and circled again. By the time he returned, Louie had cleared the paddy. The second drop rol ed out.

Kinney turned the plane again, descended very low over camp, and dipped his wings. Louie stood under him in a crowd of POWs, waving his shirt.

Kinney was so low that he and Louie saw each other’s smiling faces. “We could almost hear their cheers as we passed over the last time,” Kinney wrote.

“They looked so happy. It touched my heart. I felt perhaps we were the hand of Providence reaching out to those men. I was very thankful I had gone.”

B-29 pilot Byron Kinney shot this photograph on his final pass over Naoetsu on September 2, 1945. The Naoetsu POW camp is straight ahead, on the far side of the bridge. The large barracks from which Louie and other officers planned to throw the Bird to his death is faintly visible, at the confluence of the two rivers. Byron Kinney

As Ghost Ship sailed off, one of Kinney’s crewmen piped the radio over the interphone. On came General Douglas MacArthur’s voice, broadcasting from the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Standing with MacArthur was Bil Harris. He’d been rescued from Omori and brought to the ship to occupy a place of honor. Alongside the Americans stood Japanese officials, there to sign surrender documents.

In its rampage over the east, Japan had brought atrocity and death on a scale that staggers the imagination. In the midst of it were the prisoners of war.

Japan held some 132,000 POWs from America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Hol and, and Australia. Of those, nearly 36,000 died, more than one in every four.* Americans fared particularly badly; of the 34,648 Americans held by Japan, 12,935—more than 37 percent—died. * By comparison, only 1

percent of Americans held by the Nazis and Italians died. Japan murdered thousands of POWs on death marches, and worked thousands of others to death in slavery, including some 16,000 POWs who died alongside as many as 100,000 Asian laborers forced to build the Burma-Siam Railway.

Thousands of other POWs were beaten, burned, stabbed, or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, kil ed during medical experiments, or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism. And as a result of being fed grossly inadequate and befouled food and water, thousands more died of starvation and easily preventable diseases. Of the 2,500 POWs at Borneo’s Sandakan camp, only 6, al escapees, made it to September 1945 alive. Left out of the numbing statistics are untold numbers of men who were captured and kil ed on the spot or dragged to places like Kwajalein, to be murdered without the world ever learning their fate.