Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (50 page)

On October 16, Russel Al en Phil ips, wearing his dress uniform and captain’s bars, stepped off a train in Indiana. He’d been gone for four years. His mother, his sister, and a throng of friends were there. A telegram had come from his father, who was soon to return from Europe: THANK THE LORD GREAT DAY

HAS ARRIVED. WELCOME HOME MY SON. There, too, was the woman whose image had sustained him. Cecy was in his arms at last.

At Kelsey’s house in Princeton, they sat Al en down on the front steps, and he grinned while they snapped his picture. When they got the print back, someone wrote one word on it: Home!

Four weeks later, in a wedding ceremony officiated by Reverend Phil ips at Cecy’s parents’ house, the hero final y got the girl. Al en had no car, so he borrowed one from a friend. Then, as he had promised in a letter so long ago, he ran away with Cecy to a place where no one would find them.

Russel Al en Phil ips arrives at his mother’s house. On the back of this photo, someone wrote, “Home!” Courtesy of Karen Loomis

——

Pete was so anxious to see Louie that he could hardly bear it. The fighting had ended in mid-August, it was now October, and stil Louie was hospital-hopping far from home. Then Pete learned that Louie was final y stateside, transferred from Hawaii to San Francisco’s Letterman General Hospital. As soon as he got the news, Pete went AWOL. He bummed a ride to San Francisco on a navy plane, hitched his way to Letterman, and walked in. At the front desk, he cal ed Louie’s room. A minute later, Louie bounded into the lobby.

Each felt startled by the sight of the other. Pete had expected Louie to be emaciated and was surprised to find him looking almost portly. Louie was disturbed to see how the years of worry had depleted his brother. Pete was gaunt, and he’d gone largely bald. The brothers fel together, eyes shining.

Pete and Louie spent several days together in San Francisco while doctors final y cured Louie of his dysentery. After reading the Trumbul article, Pete had worried that Louie might be severely traumatized, but as the two laughed and kidded each other, his fears faded. Louie was as upbeat and garrulous as ever. Once, when a group of reporters shuffled in to interview Louie, they crowded around Pete, assuming that of the two men, this haggard one had to be the POW.

On a drizzling October day, the army sent a banged-up B-25 to San Francisco to bring Louie home. Pete, stil AWOL, went aboard with his brother. The plane lifted off and rose over the clouds into a shining blue morning. Scared to death of flying, Pete tried to distract himself from the plane’s rattles and groans by staring out over a carpet of bright clouds, the upside of the rainstorm. He felt as if he could step from the plane and walk on them.

Over Long Beach, they sank back into the rain and landed. There, bursting from army cars, were their mother and father, and Sylvia and Virginia. The moment the plane stopped, Louie jumped down, ran to his sobbing mother, and folded himself around her.

“Cara mamma mia,” he whispered. It was a long time before they let go.

Louie’s homecoming, Long Beach Airport. Foreground, left to right: Virginia, Sylvia, Louise, and Louie. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

* One POW’s worst nightmare came true. Upon liberation, he was told by a reporter that his wife, believing him dead, had just married his uncle.

When she learned that her first husband was alive, the woman immediately had her new marriage annul ed and got the Associated Press to deliver a message to her lost husband: “I love only you, Gene. Please forgive me.”

* Louie was luckier than he knew. Another transport crashed on takeoff, in part because several Dutch POWs had overloaded the plane by packing aboard a large cache of GI shoes that they intended to sel back home. Everyone on the plane died. Another POW transport was lost over the ocean.

Thirty-four

The Shimmering Girl

ON AN OCTOBER AFTERNOON, LOUIE STEPPED OUT OF AN army car and stood on the lawn at 2028 Gramercy Avenue, looking at his parents’ house for the first time in more than three years.

“This, this little home,” he said, “was worth al of it.”

As his parents and siblings filed into the house, Louie paused, overcome by a strange uneasiness. He had to push himself to walk up the steps.

The house was done up top to bottom for his homecoming. The surface of the dining room table was a traffic jam of heaping dishes. Three years’ worth of Christmas and birthday presents sat ready for opening. There was a cake with Welcome Home Louie inscribed in the icing. In the garage sat Louie’s beige Plymouth convertible, just as he had left it.

The family ringed around Louie, babbling, eager to look at him and touch him. Anthony and Louise smiled, but there was a cast to their eyes, a tension that had never been there before. What Louie didn’t see was the rash on his mother’s hands. As soon as Louise had learned that her son was coming home, the rash had vanished. Nothing, not even a scar, remained. She would never tel Louie about it.

After dessert, the family sat and talked. They spoke easily, as they always had. No one asked about prison camp. Louie volunteered a little about it, and to everyone’s relief, it seemed to carry little emotion for him. It seemed that he was going to be just fine.

Sylvia had a surprise for Louie. Lynn Moody, the woman who had transcribed Louie’s broadcast, had arranged for a recording of it to be sent to the Zamperinis. The family treasured the record, which had given them proof that he was alive. Knowing nothing of the circumstances in which the broadcast had been made, Sylvia was eager to share it with Louie. As he sat nearby, relaxed and cheerful, she dropped the record on the turntable. The broadcast began to play.

Louie was suddenly screaming. Sylvia turned and found him shaking violently, shouting, “Take it off! Take it off! I can’t stand it!” As Sylvia jumped up, Louie swore at the voice, yel ing something about propaganda prisoners. Sylvia snatched up the record, and Louie yel ed at her to break it. She smashed it and threw it away.

Louie fel silent, shivering. His family stared at him in horror.

Louie walked upstairs and lay down on his old bed. When he final y drifted off, the Bird fol owed him into his dreams.

——

The same man was on many other minds that fal . On ships docked at Yokohama, in tents in Manila, and in stateside hospitals, former POWs were tel ing their stories. Investigators, gathering affidavits on war criminals, sat by as men told of abuses and atrocities that pushed the bounds of believability. As the stories were corroborated again and again, it became clear that these events had been commonplace in camps throughout Japan’s empire. In interview after interview, former POWs mentioned the same name: Mutsuhiro Watanabe. When Wade wrote that name on his statement, his interviewer exclaimed,

“Not the same Watanabe! We’ve got enough to hang him six times already.”

“Sit back and take it easy,” Wade replied. “There’s lots more to come.”

On September 11, General MacArthur, now the supreme commander of Al ied powers in occupied Japan, ordered the arrest of forty war-crimes suspects. While thousands of men would be sought later, this preliminary list was composed of those accused of the worst crimes, including list-topper Hideki Tojo, mastermind of Pearl Harbor and the man on whose orders POWs had been enslaved and starved, and Masahuru Homma, who was responsible for the Bataan Death March.* On the list with them was Mutsuhiro Watanabe.

——

The Bird had left Naoetsu in a panic, and without a plan. According to Watanabe family accounts, he fled to the vil age of Kusakabe, where his mother and other relatives were living. About a week and a half after Mutsuhiro’s arrival, his aunt found him out drinking and told him that she’d just heard a radio broadcast naming him as a war-crimes suspect. Mutsuhiro decided to make a run for it. He apparently told his mother that he was leaving to visit a friend’s tomb, then took his little sister aside and told her that he had to escape, but asked her not to tel his mother. As Mutsuhiro was preparing to go, his little sister gave him a deck of playing cards, to be used for fortune-tel ing.

Wearing his uniform with the insignia torn off, Mutsuhiro packed a trunk with food and clothing and lugged it to a car. He drove to the rail station and walked onto the first train he saw, without checking its destination. He hoped it would take him to someplace distant and obscure, but the train reached its terminus only two towns down the line, at the metropolis of Kofu. He got off, wandered the station, then lay down and slept.

In the morning, he meandered around Kofu. Somewhere in the city, he passed a radio and heard his name listed among those wanted for war crimes.

To learn that he was being sought was no surprise, but he was shocked to hear his name listed alongside that of Tojo. If his case was considered comparable to that of Tojo, he thought, arrest would mean execution.

At al costs, he vowed, he wouldn’t let himself fal into the hands of the Americans. He resolved to disappear forever.

——

As Mutsuhiro fled, the hunt for him began. Though they were now operating under the orders of their former enemies, the Japanese police worked swiftly and energetical y to round up war-crimes suspects. The Watanabe case was no exception. After finding nothing at Mutsuhiro’s last known address, police appeared at his mother’s door in Kusakabe. Shizuka Watanabe told them that her son had been there, but had left. They had missed him by three days.

Shizuka suggested that he might seek refuge with his sister Michiko, who lived in Tokyo. She’d soon be visiting Michiko, she said, and if she found Mutsuhiro there, she’d urge him to turn himself in.

The police seized on the lead. Shizuka gave them an address for Michiko, and they converged on it. Not only was there no Michiko there, there was no house. Every home in the neighborhood had burned long ago, in the firebombing.

Shizuka was now the focus of suspicion. On her regular visits to Tokyo, she always stayed with Michiko, and given that she was scheduled to do so that very week, she surely knew that her daughter’s home had burned down. Shizuka’s misdirection of the detectives may have been an honest mistake

—Michiko had moved to a home down the same road, so the only change in the address was the door number—but the police began to suspect that she knew where her son was. On September 24, the police arrested her. If she knew anything, she let nothing slip. She was released.

The police were a long way from giving up. Two detectives began tailing Shizuka and often came into her home to question her. Her monetary transactions were tracked, and her landlord was regularly questioned. Mutsuhiro’s other relatives were investigated, questioned, and sometimes searched. Police intercepted al of the family’s incoming and outgoing mail. They even had a stranger deliver a fake letter, apparently making it appear to be from Mutsuhiro, in hopes of getting the family to betray his whereabouts.

Widening the hunt, the police investigated Mutsuhiro’s former army roommates. The home of his Omori commander was searched and put under surveil ance. Mutsuhiro’s photograph was distributed throughout police ranks in the Tokyo metropolitan area and four prefectures. Every police station in Nagano Prefecture, where a Watanabe family mine was located, conducted special searches. Detectives went through Mutsuhiro’s academic records and searched for his teachers and classmates, going back to his childhood. They even got hold of a love letter from a girl who had asked Mutsuhiro if he’d marry her.

They found only two leads. A former soldier told them that Mutsuhiro had spoken of his intention to flee to Fukuoka Prefecture to be a farmer. The soldier thought that Mutsuhiro would hide with a friend named Yo. Police found Yo, questioned and investigated him, and questioned people in his neighborhood. It was a dead lead. Meanwhile, a detective at Mitsushima found a man who’d seen Mutsuhiro in August. The man said that Mutsuhiro had left, claiming to be headed for Tokyo, at the war’s end. But Mutsuhiro had gone to Kusakabe; there was no evidence that he’d gone to Tokyo. He may have seeded his acquaintances with false information to misdirect his pursuers.