Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (30 page)

In Japan’s militaristic society, al citizens, from earliest childhood, were relentlessly indoctrinated with the lesson that to be captured in war was intolerably shameful. The 1941 Japanese Military Field Code made clear what was expected of those facing capture: “Have regard for your family first.

Rather than live and bear the shame of imprisonment, the soldier must die and avoid leaving a dishonorable name.” As a result, in many hopeless battles, virtual y every Japanese soldier fought to the death. For every Al ied soldier kil ed, four were captured; for every 120 Japanese soldiers kil ed, one was virtual y every Japanese soldier fought to the death. For every Al ied soldier kil ed, four were captured; for every 120 Japanese soldiers kil ed, one was captured. In some losing battles, Japanese soldiers committed suicide en masse to avoid capture. The few who were captured sometimes gave false names, believing that their families would rather think that their son had died. The depth of the conviction was demonstrated at Australia’s Cowra camp in 1944, when hundreds of Japanese POWs flung themselves at camp machine guns and set their living quarters afire in a mass suicide attempt that became known as “the night of a thousand suicides.” The contempt and revulsion that most Japanese felt for those who surrendered or were captured extended to Al ied servicemen. This thinking created an atmosphere in which to abuse, enslave, and even murder a captive or POW was considered acceptable, even desirable.

Some guards, intoxicated by absolute power and indoctrinated in racism and disgust for POWs, fel easily into sadism. But those less inclined toward their culture’s prejudices may stil have been vulnerable to the cal to brutality. To be made responsible for imprisoning people is surely, to many guards, an unsettling experience, especial y when they are tasked with depriving their prisoners of the most basic necessities. Perhaps some guards forced their prisoners to live in maximal y dehumanizing conditions so that they could reassure themselves that they were merely giving loathsome beasts their due.

Paradoxical y, then, some of the worst abuses inflicted on captives and POWs may have arisen from the guards’ discomfort with being abusive.

Writing of his childhood in slavery, Frederick Douglass told of being acquired by a man whose wife was a tenderhearted woman who had never owned a slave. “Her face was made of heavenly smiles and her voice of tranquil music,” Douglass wrote. She lavished him with motherly love, even giving him reading lessons, unheard of in slaveholding society. But after being ordered by her husband to treat the boy like the slave he was, she transformed into a vicious “demon.” She, like the Ofuna guards more than a century later, had succumbed to what Douglass cal ed “the fatal poison of irresponsible power.”

Of al of the warped, pitiless men who persecuted captives at Ofuna, Sueharu Kitamura stood above al others. In civilian life, by different accounts, he was either a sake salesman or a movie scenario writer. In Ofuna, he was the medical officer. Fascinated by suffering, he forced sick and injured captives to come to him for “treatment,” then tortured and mutilated them while quizzing them on their pain, his mouth curved in a moist smile. Known as “the Butcher” and “the Quack,” Kitamura was Ofuna’s most eager instigator of beatings. He was a massive man, built like a bison, and he punched like a heavyweight. No official in Ofuna was more hated or feared.

Though under great pressure to conform to a culture of brutality, a few guards refused to participate in the violence. In one incident, a captive was clubbed so savagely that he was certain he was going to be kil ed. In the middle of the assault, the attacking guard was cal ed away, and a guard known as Hirose* was ordered to finish the beating. Out of sight of other guards, Hirose told the captive to cry out as if he were being struck, then pounded his club harmlessly against the floor. The two acted out their parts until it seemed enough “beating” had been done. The captive believed that Hirose may have saved his life.

What Hirose did took nerve. Everywhere in Japan, demonstrating sympathy for captives or POWs was taboo. When a child living near the Zentsuji POW camp expressed compassion for the prisoners, her comments became a national scandal. Camp personnel caught trying to improve conditions for POWs, or even voicing sympathy for them, were sometimes beaten by their superiors. “The general opinion towards POWs at that time was very bad,”

wrote Yukichi Kano, a private at another camp who was beloved by POWs he tried to assist. “There was always some risk of to be misunderstood by other Japanese by making humane interpretation of our duty. To resist against the wrong hostile feeling, prejudice, and lack of knowledge was not very easy for the lower rank soldier like me.”

At Ofuna, merciful guards paid the price. One officer, upon learning that another guard had shown leniency to captives, assaulted the guard with a sword. During his nightly walk from his kitchen job to his cel , one captive would regularly see a guard who refused to beat prisoners being singled out for gang attacks from his fel ow guards.

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At Ofuna, captives weren’t just beaten, they were starved. The thrice-daily meals usual y consisted of a bowl of broth with a bit of vegetable and a bowl or half bowl of rancid rice, sometimes mixed with barley. It contained virtual y no protein and was grossly lacking in nutritive value and calories. It was camp policy to give diminished and/or spoiled rations to captives suspected of withholding information, and at times the entire camp’s rations were cut to punish one captive’s reticence. The food was infested with rat droppings, maggots, and so much sand and grit that Louie’s teeth were soon pitted, chipped, and cracked. The men nicknamed the rations “al dumpo.”

The extremely low caloric intake and befouled food, coupled with the exertion of the forced exercise, put the men’s lives in great danger. “We were dying,” wrote captive Jean Balch, “on about 500 calories a day.” Scurvy was common. Foodborne parasites and pathogens made diarrhea almost ubiquitous. Most feared was beriberi, a potential y deadly disease caused by a lack of thiamine. There were two forms of beriberi, and they could occur concurrently. “Wet” beriberi affected the heart and the circulatory system, causing marked edema—swel ing—of the extremities; if untreated, it was often fatal. “Dry” beriberi affected the nervous system, causing numbness, confusion, unsteady gait, and paralysis. When wet beriberi victims pressed on their swol en limbs, deep indentations would remain long after the pressure was removed, giving the men the unnerving impression that their bones were softening. In some cases, wet beriberi caused extreme swel ing of the scrotum. Some men’s testicles swel ed to the size of bread loaves.

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In Ofuna’s theater of cruelty, survival was an open question, and deaths were common. For Louie, Phil, and the other captives, the only hope lay in the Al ies rescuing them, but this prospect also carried tremendous danger.

In the fal of 1942, when the Americans attacked Japanese ships off Tarawa, in the Gilbert Islands, the Japanese beheaded twenty-two POWs held on the island. A similar horror played out on Japanese-held Bal ale, in the Shortland Islands, where British POWs were being used as slaves to build an airfield. According to a Japanese officer, in the spring of 1943, when it appeared that the Americans were soon to land on Bal ale, Japanese authorities issued a directive that in the event of an invasion, the POWs were to be kil ed. No landing occurred, but in response to an Al ied bombing, the Japanese executed al of the POWs anyway, some seventy to one hundred men.

A few weeks after Louie arrived at Ofuna, an American carrier force began bombing and shel ing Wake Atol , where the Americans captured during the Japanese invasion were stil being held as slaves. Mistakenly believing that an invasion was imminent, the Japanese commander had the prisoners blindfolded, bound, shot, and dumped in a hole. One man escaped. When he was caught three weeks later, the commander himself beheaded him. The only trace of the men was found years afterward. In the atol lagoon, on a hunk of coral, one of the POWs had scraped a message: 98

US

P.W.

5-10-43

These murders were the first applications of what would come to be known as the “kil -al ” rule. Japanese policy held that camp commanders could not, under any circumstances, al ow Al ied forces to recapture POWs. If Al ied advances made this a possibility, POWs were to be executed. “If there is any fear that the POWs would be retaken due to the tide of battle turning against us,” read a May 1944 order issued to every POW branch camp commander,

“decisive measures must be taken without returning a single POW.”

That August, the Japanese War Ministry would issue a clarification of this order, sending it to al POW camp commanders: At such time as the situation becomes urgent and it be extremely important, the POWs wil be concentrated and confined in their present location and under heavy guard the preparation for the final disposition wil be made … Whether they are destroyed individual y or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation, or what, dispose of them as the situation dictates … In any case it is the aim not to al ow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them al , and not to leave any traces.

As the Al ies fought their way toward Japan, the captives in Ofuna and POWs everywhere else faced the very real threat that Al ied successes would bring the kil -al policy to bear on them. While none of the captives knew of the incidents in which this order had already been fol owed, the guards at Ofuna enjoyed warning them about the policy. Like every other captive, Louie knew that most of the guards would be eager to carry it out.

* Probably Lieutenant Hiroetsu Narushima.

Twenty

Farting for Hirohito

AT FIRST, THERE WAS ONLY SILENCE AND ISOLATION. AT night, al Louie could see were wals, stripes of ground through the gaps in the floorboards, and his own limbs, as slender as reeds. The guards would stomp down the aisles, occasional y dragging a man out to be beaten. There were men in cel s around Louie, but no one spoke. Come daylight, Louie was suddenly among them, hustled outside and herded in crazy circles; with his eyes trained obediently on the ground and his mouth obediently closed, Louie was no less alone. The only break in the gloom came in the form of a smiling guard who liked to saunter down the barracks aisle, pause before each cel , raise one leg, and vent a surly fart at the captive within. He never quite succeeded in farting his way down the entire cel block.

In stolen glances, nods, and hushed words, Louie sorted out the constel ations of Ofuna. His barracks was inhabited by new captives, mostly Americans, survivors of downed aircraft and sunken seacraft. Down the hal lived two emaciated American navy officers, the ranking Al ied servicemen.

First in rank was Commander Arthur Maher, who had survived the sinking of his ship, the Houston, in Indonesia’s Sunda Strait. He had swum to Java and fled into the mountains, only to be hunted down. Second in rank was thirty-five-year-old Commander John Fitzgerald, who had fal en into Japanese hands after he’d scuttled his burning submarine, the Grenadier, which had been bombed. The Japanese had attempted, in vain, to torture information out of Fitzgerald, clubbing him, jamming penknives under his fingernails, tearing his fingernails off, and applying the “water cure”—tipping him backward, holding his mouth shut, and pouring water up his nose until he passed out. Both Maher and Fitzgerald spoke Japanese, and they served as the camp’s only resident interpreters. Al captives, regardless of nationality, deferred to them.

Louie’s barracks at Ofuna. His cel window was the third from the right. Frank Tinker

During forced exercise one day, Louie fel into step with Wil iam Harris, a twenty-five-year-old marine officer, the son of marine general Field Harris. Tal and dignified, with a face cut in hard lines, Harris had been captured in the surrender of Corregidor in May 1942. With another American,* he had escaped and embarked on an eight-and-a-half-hour swim across Manila Bay, kicking through a downpour in darkness as fish bit him. Dragging himself ashore on the Japanese-occupied Bataan Peninsula, he had begun a run for China, hiking through jungles and over mountains, navigating the coast in boats donated by sympathetic Filipinos, hitching rides on burros, and surviving in part by eating ants. He had joined a Filipino guerril a band, but when he had heard of the American landing at Guadalcanal, the marine in him had cal ed. Making a dash by boat toward Australia in hopes of rejoining his unit, he had gotten as far as the Indonesian island of Morotai before his journey ended. Civilians had turned him in to the Japanese, who had discovered that he was a general’s son and sent him to Ofuna. Even here, he was itching to escape.