Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (29 page)

Louie felt deep relief, believing that at a POW camp, he would be treated under the humane rules of international law, put in contact with the Red Cross, and al owed to contact his family. Phil, too, was told that he was going to Yokohama. He was amazed and hopeful.

On August 26, 1943, forty-two days after arriving at Execution Island, Louie and Phil were led from their cel s, stripped naked, splashed with buckets of water, al owed to dress again, and taken toward the ship that would carry them to Japan.

As he walked from his cel for the last time, Louie looked back, searching for Kawamura. He couldn’t find him.

Nineteen

Two Hundred Silent Men

LOUIE AND PHIL WERE SITTING IN A HOLDING ROOM ON the navy ship when the door slapped open and a crowd of agitated, sloppy-drunk Japanese sailors pushed in. One of them asked if Japan would win the war.

“No,” said Phil.

A fist caught Phil in the face, then swung back and struck him again. Louie was asked who would win the war.

“America.”

The sailors fel onto the captives, fists flying. Something connected with Louie’s nose, and he felt a crunch. An officer ran in, peeled the crewmen off, and ordered them out. Louie’s nose was bleeding. When he touched it, he felt a gash and a bone elbowing out sideways.

In choppy English, the officer told them that the crewmen had been rifling through the captives’ wal ets, which had been confiscated when they came on board. In Louie’s wal et, they had found a folded, stained bit of newspaper. It was the cartoon that Louie had cut from the Honolulu Advertiser many months before, depicting his service in the raid on Wake. The officer said that about half of the ship’s crew had been on Wake that night, and their ship, apparently anchored offshore, had been sunk.

The crewmen had regrets about attacking the captives. Later, the door opened again, and two of them lurched in, muttered apologies, draped their arms around Louie, and gave him sake.

This clipping was in Louie’s wal et throughout his raft journey, and was stained purple by the wal et dye. Its discovery by the Japanese resulted in Louie and Phil being beaten. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

Louie and Phil were separated again, and Louie was locked in an officer’s cabin. Every few days, he had strange visits from a grinning sailor who would lean into the room, say, “Thump on the head for a biscuit?,” rap his knuckles on Louie’s head, hand him a biscuit, and amble away.

Between the sailor’s visits, Louie had nothing to do but sit, pinching his fingers around his nose to set the bones. Bored, he rummaged through the cabin and found a bottle of sake. He began taking furtive sips of the rice wine, little enough that its absence might not be missed. When, during a submarine alert, he panicked and drank so much that no one could fail to notice it, he decided that he might as wel finish it off. In the last days of the journey, the skinny American and the fat Japanese bottle had a grand time together.

——

After a three-week journey, including a stopover at Truk Atol , the ship docked at Yokohama, on the eastern coast of Japan’s central island, Honshu. Louie was blindfolded and led out. Solid ground came underfoot. Through a gap in his blindfold, Louie’s first glimpse of Japan was the word CHEVROLET, stamped on a hubcap. He was standing before a car.

He heard someone stomping off the ship, shouting. The men around Louie froze; the man approaching, he assumed, must be an officer. Louie felt the officer grabbing him and shoving him into the car’s jump seat. As he struggled to get his legs in, the officer cracked him in the face with a flashlight. Louie felt his nose bones splay again. He thought of the sake and wondered if this man was its owner. He folded himself into the seat, alongside Phil.

The Chevy motored up through hil y country. After the better part of an hour, it stopped. Hands pul ed Louie onto his feet and led him into an enclosed, humid space. The blindfold was untied. He was in a bathhouse, apparently in the promised POW camp. Phil was no longer with him. There was a tub before him, fil ed with water that carried the tart smel of disinfectant. Told to undress and get in, he stepped into the water, luxuriating in the warmth, scrubbing himself clean for the first time since he’d left Oahu.

When his bath was over, he was told to dress again. A man came with clippers and shaved his head and beard. Louie was escorted out, led down a hal way, and stopped at a door. The guard told him to go in and wait for orders.

Louie walked into the room. The lights were out, and he could only just make out the silhouette of a man in civilian clothing, facing away from him.

Someone flipped on a light, the man turned, and Louie saw his face.

It was his col ege friend Jimmie Sasaki.

——

“We meet again,” Sasaki said. Louie gaped at him in astonishment. He knew nothing of Sasaki’s al eged spying, and was stunned to see his friend in the service of his enemy. Sasaki looked at him warmly. He’d been prepared to see Louie, but he was disturbed by how thin he was. He made a playful crack about how ugly Louie looked bald.

What fol owed was a strange and stilted conversation. Sasaki asked a few questions about Louie’s odyssey, then began reminiscing about USC, meals at the student union, ten-cent movies on campus. Louie, uneasy, waited for questions on military matters, but they never came. The closest Sasaki got was to express confidence that Japan would win the war. He told Louie that he was a civilian employee of the Japanese navy, which had made him head interrogator of al POWs in Japan. He said he bore a rank equal to that of admiral.

Louie was taken outside. He was in a large compound with several one-story buildings surrounded by a high fence topped with barbed wire. There was something spooky about this place. Louie, like every man brought there, noticed it immediately. Gathered in drifts against the buildings were some two hundred whisper-thin captive Al ied servicemen. Every one of them had his eyes fixed on the ground. They were as silent as snow.

Louie was led to a bench, some distance from the other captives. He saw Phil far away, sitting alone. A couple of captives sat on other benches across the compound, hiding their hands from the guards’ view and gesturing to each other in Morse code—fists for dots and flat hands for dashes. Louie watched them until a captive approached. The man seemed to have permission to speak. He began to tel Louie about where he was.

This wasn’t a POW camp. It was a secret interrogation center cal ed Ofuna, where “high-value” captured men were housed in solitary confinement, starved, tormented, and tortured to divulge military secrets. Because Ofuna was kept secret from the outside world, the Japanese operated with an absolutely free hand. The men in Ofuna, said the Japanese, weren’t POWs; they were “unarmed combatants” at war against Japan and, as such, didn’t have the rights that international law accorded POWs. In fact, they had no rights at al . If captives “confessed their crimes against Japan,” they’d be treated

“as wel as regulations permit.” Over the course of the war, some one thousand Al ied captives would be hauled into Ofuna, and many would be held there for years.

The man told Louie the rules. He was forbidden to speak to anyone but the guards, to put his hands in his pockets, or to make eye contact with other captives. His eyes were to be directed downward at al times. He had to learn to count in Japanese, because every morning there was tenko, a rol cal and inspection in which men had to count off. To use the benjo—latrine—he had to ask in broken Japanese: “Benjo kudasai,” said while bowing. He wouldn’t be given a cup, so if he was thirsty he’d have to beg the guard to escort him to the washstand. There were rules about every detail of life, from the folding of blankets to the buttoning of clothes, each reinforcing isolation and total obedience. The slightest violation would bring a beating.

The Japanese were abundantly clear about one thing. In this secret place, they could, and did, do anything they wanted to their captives, and no one would ever know. They stressed that they did not guarantee that captives would survive Ofuna. “They can kil you here,” Louie was told. “No one knows you’re alive.”

After nightfal , Louie was taken into a barracks and led to a tiny cel . On the floor was a thin tatami (straw mat), which would be his bed, with three paper sheets. There was a smal window, but it had no glass, so wind eddied through the room. The wal s were flimsy, the floorboards gapped, the ceiling was tarpaper. It was mid-September, and with winter approaching, Louie would be living in a building that was, in one captive’s words, barely a windbreak.

Louie curled up under the paper sheets. There were dozens of men in cel s near him, but no one made a sound. Phil was in a cel far down the hal , and for the first time in months, Louie wasn’t near him. In this warren of captive men, he was alone.

——

Each day began at six: a bel clanging, a shouting guard, captives running outside to tenko. Louie would fal into a line of haggard men. Guards stalked them, clubs or basebal bats in their hands and rifles with fixed bayonets over their shoulders, making menacing postures and yel ing unintel igibly. The captives were hounded through a frenzied routine: counting off, bowing toward Emperor Hirohito, rushing to the washstand and benjo, then rushing back to the assembly area five minutes later. Then it was back to the barracks, where guards rifled through the men’s things in search of contraband, misfolded blankets, misaligned buttons—anything to justify a beating.

Breakfast came from captives who handed out bowls of watery, fetid slop, which each man ate alone in his cel . Then men were paired off, given clots of wet rope, and forced to bend double, put the rope on the floor, and wash the 150-foot-long barracks aisle floor at a run, or sometimes waddling duck-style, while the guards trotted behind them, swatting them. Then it was back outside, where the guards made the men run circles or perform calisthenics, often until they col apsed. When the exercise was over, the men had to sit outside, regardless of the weather. The only breaks in the silence were the screams coming from the interrogation room.

Punctuating the passage of each day were beatings. Men were beaten for folding their arms, for sitting naked to help heal sores, for cleaning their teeth, for talking in their sleep. Most often, they were beaten for not understanding orders, which were almost always issued in Japanese. Dozens of men were lined up and clubbed in the knees for one man’s al eged infraction. A favorite punishment was to force men to stand, sometimes for hours, in the

“Ofuna crouch,” a painful and strenuous position in which men stood with knees bent halfway and arms overhead. Those who fel over or dropped their arms were clubbed and kicked. Captives who tried to assist victims were attacked themselves, usual y far more violently, so victims were on their own.

Any attempt to protect oneself—ducking, shielding the face—provoked greater violence. “My job,” remembered captive Glenn McConnel , “was to keep my nose on my face and keep from being disassembled.” The beatings, he wrote, “were of such intensity that many of us wondered if we’d ever live to see the end of the war.”

At night, in the cel again, Louie awaited dinner, eaten alone in the dark. Then he just sat there. He wasn’t permitted to speak, whistle, sing, tap, read, or look out his window. There was another inspection outside, another haranguing, and then the uneasy pause of night, the pacing of the guards, before the dawn again brought shouting and running and the thud of clubs.

——

At Ofuna, as at the scores of POW camps scattered throughout Japan and its conquests, the men used for guard duty were the dregs of the Japanese military. Many had washed out of regular soldierly life, too incompetent to perform basic duties. Quite a few were deranged. According to captives, there were two characteristics common to nearly al Ofuna guards. One was marked stupidity. The other was murderous sadism.

In the Japanese military of that era, corporal punishment was routine practice. “Iron must be beaten while it’s hot; soldiers must be beaten while they’re fresh” was a saying among servicemen. “No strong soldiers,” went another, “are made without beatings.” For al Japanese soldiers, especial y low-ranking ones, beating was inescapable, often a daily event. It is thus unsurprising that camp guards, occupying the lowest station in a military that applauded brutality, would vent their frustrations on the helpless men under their authority. Japanese historians cal this phenomenon “transfer of oppression.”

This tendency was powerful y reinforced by two opinions common in Japanese society in that era. One held that Japanese were racial y and moral y superior to non-Japanese, a “pure” people divinely destined to rule. Just as Al ied soldiers, like the cultures they came from, often held virulently racist views of the Japanese, Japanese soldiers and civilians, intensely propagandized by their government, usual y carried their own caustic prejudices about their enemies, seeing them as brutish, subhuman beasts or fearsome “Anglo-Saxon devils.” This racism, and the hatred and fear it fomented, surely served as an accelerant for abuse of Al ied prisoners.