Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (31 page)

Wil iam Harris. Courtesy of Katherine H. Meares

Each day, Louie and Harris hung together, laboring through forced exercise, bearing blows from the guards, and whispering. The curious thing about Harris was that while he was certainly a tal man—six foot two or three, according to his daughter—virtual y everyone, including Louie, would remember him as a giant, by one account six foot eight, by another six-ten. Figuratively, though, Harris was indeed a giant. He was probably a genius. Impeccably educated, conversant in several languages, including Japanese, he had a perfect photographic memory. With a single glance, he could memorize a huge volume of information and retain it for years. In Ofuna, this attribute would be a blessing and a terrible curse.

Jimmie Sasaki made frequent visits to Ofuna, and he liked to cal Louie to his office. Among ragged captives and guards in drab uniforms, Sasaki was a spectacle, dressing like a movie star and wearing his hair slicked back and parted down the middle, like Howard Hughes. The captives dubbed him

“Handsome Harry.” Louie expected interrogation, but it never came. Sasaki only wanted to reminisce about USC and boast of Japan’s coming victory. He knew that Louie had lied in his interrogation on Kwajalein, but he didn’t pursue the truth. Louie couldn’t understand it. Every other captive was gril ed, at least at first, but no effort was made to interrogate him. He suspected that Sasaki was using his influence to protect him.

Ofuna had one other notable resident. Gaga was a duck who bobbed around in a fire trough, paddling with a broken leg that a captive had fitted with a little splint. The duck trailed the captives around like a puppy, limping in and out of the kitchen, where the workers apparently fed him. Every morning at tenko, Gaga peg-legged to the parade ground and stood with the men, and one captive would later swear that when the men bowed toward the emperor, tenko, Gaga peg-legged to the parade ground and stood with the men, and one captive would later swear that when the men bowed toward the emperor, Gaga bowed in imitation. In so dark a place, this cheerful bird became especial y beloved. For the captives, wrote Ofuna survivor “Pappy” Boyington, Gaga became a creature on which “to rest their tortured brains a moment while they [were] praying and worrying if anyone [would] ever free them.”

Louie rarely crossed paths with Phil, who was housed far down the hal . The pilot seemed to be handling Ofuna wel enough, but he remained shrunken and frail, a hol ow distance in his eyes. During forced exercise, he wasn’t strong enough to run, so he and a few others were separated and harangued through calisthenics.

Once, when Louie and Phil shuffled up next to each other on the parade ground, Phil final y spoke of the crash. Fil ed with anguish, he said that he felt responsible for the deaths of al of those men. Louie reassured him that the crash hadn’t been his fault, but Phil was unswayed.

“I’l never fly again,” he said.

——

In time, Louie discovered that both the forced silence of Ofuna and the bowing submission of its captives were il usions. Beneath the hush was a humming underground of defiance.

It began with sidelong whispers. The guards couldn’t be everywhere, and as soon as an area was left unattended, the captives became absorbed in stealthy muttering. Men scribbled notes on slips of toilet paper and hid them for each other in the benjo. Once, when given permission to speak aloud so he could translate orders, Commander Maher advised another captive on stealing techniques, right in front of the oblivious guards. The boldest captives would walk up to the guards, look straight at them, and speak in English, using a querying tone. The confused guards thought they were being asked questions, when in fact the men were speaking to each other.

When words couldn’t be used, Morse code could. At night, in the smal intervals when the guards left the building, the whole barracks would start tapping. Outside, men would whisper in code, using “tit” for “dot” and “da” for “dash,” words that could be spoken without moving the lips. Louie used his hands for code, obscuring them from the guards. Most of the discussions were trivial—Louie would be remembered for descriptions of his mother’s cooking—but the content didn’t matter. The triumph was in the subversion.

Louie soon learned a critical rule of conversation: Never use a guard’s real name. Guards who discovered that they were being discussed often delivered savage beatings, so the men invented nicknames for them. The sluggish, quiet camp commander was cal ed the Mummy. Guard nicknames included Turdbird, Flange Face, the Weasel, Liver Lip, Fatty, and Termite. A particularly repugnant guard was known as Shithead.

The defiance took on a life of its own. Men would smile and address the guards in friendly tones, cooing out insults filthy enough to curl a man’s hair.

One captive convinced a particularly dim-witted guard that a sundial would work at night if he used a match. A fragrant favorite involved saving up intestinal gas, explosively voluminous thanks to chronic dysentery, prior to tenko. When the men were ordered to bow toward the emperor, the captives would pitch forward in concert and let thunderclaps fly for Hirohito.

Louie had another, private act of rebel ion. A fel ow captive, a bookbinder in civilian life, gave him a tiny book that he’d made in camp with rice paste flattened into pages and sewn together. Louie either found or stole a pencil and began keeping a diary. In it, he recorded what had happened since his crash, then continued with life in the camp. On the book’s central pages, in bold print, he wrote hometown contact information for other captives, making it seem to be an innocuous address book. He wrote his diary entries in faint script upside down in the back of the book, where they might be overlooked.

He pried up a board on his cel floor and hid the diary underneath. With daily room inspections, discovery was likely, and would probably bring a clubbing.

But this smal declaration of self mattered a great deal to Louie. He knew that he might wel die here. He wanted to leave a testament to what he had endured, and who he had been.

After food, what every man wanted most was war news. The Japanese sealed their camps from outside information and went to some lengths to convince their captives of Al ied annihilation, first by trumpeting Japanese victories, and later, when victories stopped coming, by inventing stories of Al ied losses and ridiculously implausible Japanese feats. Once, they announced that their military had shot Abraham Lincoln and torpedoed Washington, D.C.

“They couldn’t understand why we laughed,” said a prisoner. Ofuna officials had no idea that the captives had found ways to fol ow the war in spite of them.

New captives were fonts of information, and no sooner had they arrived than their minds were picked clean, the news tapping its way down the cel blocks in minutes. Newspapers rarely appeared, but when one did, stealing it became a campwide obsession. Rations were sometimes delivered to camp wrapped in newspapers, and the two kitchen laborers, Al Mead and Ernest Duva, would quietly pocket them. The boldest men even managed to pinch papers from the interrogation room as they were being questioned. Once stolen, the papers made elaborate secret journeys, passed hand to hand until they reached the translators, Harris, Fitzgerald, and Maher. As translations were done, lookouts stood by, pretending to tie their shoes or adjust their belts. When guards neared, warnings were issued, and the papers vanished, soon to be put to their final use. In a camp with a lot of dysentery and little toilet paper, newspapers were priceless.

In a secret place inside his cel , Harris stored the tools of his clandestine translating trade. Sometime during his stay at Ofuna, he had scavenged or stolen bits of wire and string, strips of cardboard, scraps of paper, and a pencil. The cardboard had been cut from a Canadian Red Cross POW relief package; because the Red Cross didn’t know of Ofuna’s existence, the package had probably been brought from another camp by the Japanese, who routinely purloined the contents of such parcels for their own consumption. Cutting or tearing the paper into smal pages, Harris had used the wire and string to bind them into two books, sewing on the cardboard as covers.

In one book, Harris had recorded the addresses of his fel ow captives, including Louie. In the other, he had begun creating an elaborate Japanese-English dictionary. Inside, he had written sentences in Japanese and English—“I feel like eating melon,” “Don’t you intend to buy a piano”—fol owed by notes on proper phrasing, verbs, and tenses. Other pages were devoted to a comprehensive list of translations of military terms, words like “torpedo plane,” “tank,” “bomber,” “antiaircraft gun,” and “captive.” In creating the dictionary, Harris may have had more in mind than translating stolen documents; if he ever escaped from Ofuna, the Japanese translations of words like “compass,” “seacoast,” and “ashore” might be critical to know. Along with the books, Harris kept a col ection of hand-drawn war maps; he’d seen the original maps in stolen newspapers, memorized them, and recreated them. He stored al of these items, along with a newspaper clipping, in a smal bag that he kept careful y hidden from the guards.

Thanks to the work of thieves and translators, most captives were wel enough informed on the war’s progress that they had wagers riding on when it would end. Knowing that the Al ies were winning was immensely inspiring, enabling men to go on a little longer. Though the captives’ resistance was dangerous, through such acts, dignity was preserved, and through dignity, life itself. Everyone knew what the consequences would be if anyone were caught stealing newspapers or hiding items as incriminating as Harris’s maps and dictionary. At the time, it seemed worth the risk.

——

In the fal , the snow came, gliding through the gaps in the barracks wal s. During the morning mopping, the water in the aisle froze. Nearly every captive fel il . Louie, stil wearing only the clothes he’d crashed in, developed an ominous cough. Shut outside al day, he and the others stood in large huddles, mixing slowly to give each man time in the middle, where it was warmest.

The rations dwindled. The central authorities were al otting scant food to Ofuna, but this wasn’t the half of it. Unloading the ration trucks, captives saw beans, vegetables, and other nutritious fare, yet at mealtime, these items were almost never in their bowls. Camp officials, including the commander, were stealing them. The most flagrant thief was the cook, a ringlet-haired civilian known as Curley. Curley would stand in ful view of the captives as he were stealing them. The most flagrant thief was the cook, a ringlet-haired civilian known as Curley. Curley would stand in ful view of the captives as he hoisted their food over the fence to civilians, or packed it onto his bicycle and pedaled off to sel it on the black market, where it would bring astronomical prices. Sometimes he’d cal Louie over, give him a package of the captives’ food, and order him to walk it over to the fence, where a woman would take it in exchange for barter payment. According to one captive, it was widely known that Curley had bought and furnished a house with his profits.

The stealing left Ofuna in a state of famine. “To give you an idea of how hungry we were,” wrote Commander Fitzgerald, “it can best be explained by the fact that it took an awful lot of wil power to take the last part of starch from my rice bowl in order to stick a snapshot of my wife to a piece of plywood.”

Commander Maher pleaded for more food. Officials punished his impertinence by slashing the prisoners’ rations and intensifying their exercise.

In search of something to occupy their hungry mouths, the captives were seized by a mania for smoking. Smal al otments of foul tobacco were handed out, and Louie, like almost al captives, resumed the habit. Men became fiercely addicted. The few who didn’t smoke stil received the tobacco ration; they were richer than kings. One of Louie’s friends, an aging Norwegian sailor named Anton Minsaas, became so hooked that he began trading his food for smokes. Louie urged him to eat, but Minsaas couldn’t be persuaded. He grew ever thinner.

Every man in camp was thin, many emaciated, but Louie and Phil were thinner than anyone else. The rations weren’t nearly enough, and Louie was plagued by dysentery. He couldn’t get warm, and he was racked by a cough. He teetered through the exercise sessions, trying to keep his legs from buckling. At night, he folded his paper blankets to create loft, but it barely helped; the unheated, drafty rooms were only a few degrees warmer than the frigid outside air. When camp officials staged a basebal game, Louie was sent to bat. He hit the bal , took one step, and col apsed. Sprawled on the ground, he heard laughing.

One day that fal , a Japanese newspaper editor came to camp. He had learned that a Louis Zamperini was being held there. In Japan, track was wildly popular, and international running stars were wel known. The editor carried a file ful of information on Louie, and showed it to the guards.

The guards were fascinated to learn that the sick, emaciated man in the first barracks had once been an Olympic runner. They quickly found a Japanese runner and brought him in for a match race against the American. Hauled out and forced to run, Louie was trounced, and the guards made tittering mockery of him. Louie was angry and shaken, and his growing weakness scared him. POWs were dying by the thousands in camps al over Japan and its captured territories, and winter was coming.

Louie went to Sasaki to ask for help. Since Sasaki was, by his own account, a bigwig, it seemed that it would be easy for him to intervene. But after talking about what “we” would do, Sasaki never fol owed through. The most he did for Louie was to give him an egg and a tangerine, which Louie shared with other captives. Louie began to believe that Sasaki wasn’t his al y, and wasn’t protecting him from interrogation. It now seemed that the Japanese simply weren’t interested in what he knew. They had brought him to Ofuna to soften him up for something else, but he had no idea what it was.

Where Sasaki failed Louie, the kitchen workers, Mead and Duva, came through, at considerable risk to themselves. Each day as they walked the barracks hal to deliver rations, they bal ed up an extra portion of rice and sometimes a bit of fish, waited for a moment when the guards glanced away, and tossed it to Louie. Mead whispered his only request: Give half to Phil. Louie would hide half the rice, inch up to Phil on the parade ground, and slip it into his hand.