Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (53 page)

At the end of his first day in the new apartment, Louie slid into bed, closed his eyes, and fel into a dream. As always, the Bird was there, but he was no longer hesitant. The sergeant towered over Louie, the belt flicking from his hand, lashing Louie’s face. Every night, he returned, and Louie was helpless once again, unable to flee him or drive him away.

Louie threw himself into training. His long hikes became runs. His strength was coming back, and his dodgy leg gave him no pain. He took it slowly, thinking always of London in ’48. He was aiming for the 1,500 meters, and assured himself that if he couldn’t make it, he’d return to the 5,000, or even the steeplechase. But without extending himself, he began clocking miles in 4:18, just two seconds slower than the winning time of the Zamperini Invitational that he’d seen in March. He was coming al the way back.

But running wasn’t the same. Once he had felt liberated by it; now it felt forced. Running was joyless, but Louie had no other answer to his internal turmoil. He doubled his workouts, and his body answered.

One day, with Cynthia standing by, holding a stopwatch, Louie set off to see how fast he could turn two miles. Early on, he felt a pulse of pain dart across his left ankle, just where it had been injured at Naoetsu. He knew better than to keep pushing, but pushing was al he knew now. As he completed the first mile, barbs of pain were crackling through his ankle. On he went, running for London.

Late in his last lap, there was an abrupt slicing sensation in his ankle. He half-hopped to the line and col apsed. His time was the fastest two-mile run on the Pacific coast in 1946, but it didn’t matter. He was unable to walk for a week, and would limp for weeks more. A doctor confirmed that he had disastrously exacerbated his war injury. It was al over.

——

Louie was wrecked. The quest that had saved him as a kid was lost to him. The last barricade within him fel . By day, he couldn’t stop thinking about the Bird. By night, the sergeant lashed him, hungry and feral. As the belt whipped him, Louie would fight his way to his attacker’s throat and close his hands around it. No matter how hard he squeezed, those eyes stil danced at him. Louie regularly woke screaming and soaked in sweat. He was afraid to sleep.

He started smoking again. There seemed no reason not to drink, so each evening, he swigged wine as he cooked, leaving Cynthia sitting through dinner with a tipsy husband. Invitations to clubs kept coming, and now it seemed harmless to accept the free drinks that were always offered. At first he drank just beer; then he dipped into hard liquor. If he got drunk enough, he could drown the war for a time. He soon began drinking so much that he passed out, but he welcomed it; passing out saved him from having to go to bed and wait for his monster. Unable to talk him into giving it up, Cynthia stopped going out with him. He left her alone each night while he went out to lose the war.

Rage, wild, random, and impossible to quel , began to consume him. Once he harassed a man for walking too slowly on a crosswalk in front of his car, and the man spat at him. Louie gunned the car to the curb, jumped out, and, as Cynthia screamed for him to stop, punched the man until he fel to the ground. On another day, when a man at a bar accidental y let a door swing into him, Louie chested up to him and provoked an embarrassing little scuffle that ended with Louie grinding the man’s face in the dirt.

His mind began to derail. While sitting at a bar, he heard a sudden, loud sound, perhaps a car backfiring. Before he knew it, he was on the floor, cringing, as the bar fel silent and the patrons stared. On another night, he was drinking, his mind drifting, when someone nearby yel ed something while joking with friends. In Louie’s mind, it was “Keirei!” He found himself jumping up, back straight, head up, heart pounding, awaiting the flying belt buckle. In a moment the il usion cleared and he saw that, again, everyone in the bar was looking at him. He felt foolish and humiliated.

One day Louie was overcome by a strange, inexplicable feeling, and suddenly the war was al around and in him, not a memory but the actual experience—the glaring and grating and stench and howl and terror of it. In a moment he was jerked back out again, confused and frightened. It was his first flashback. After that, if he caught a glimpse of blood or saw a tussle in a bar, everything would reassemble itself as prison camp, and the mood, the light, the sounds, his own body, would al be as they were, inescapable. In random moments, he felt lice and fleas wriggling over his skin when there was nothing there. It only made him drink harder.

Cynthia urged Louie to get help, so he went, reluctantly, to see a counselor at a veterans’ hospital. He spoke of the war and the nightmares, and came home feeling as turbulent as when he’d left. After two or three sessions, he quit.

One day he opened a newspaper and saw a story that riveted his attention. A former Pacific POW had walked into a store and seen one of his wartime captors. The POW had cal ed the police, who’d arrested the al eged war criminal. As Louie read the story, al of the fury within him converged. He saw himself finding the Bird, overpowering him, his fists bloodying the face, and then his hands locking about the Bird’s neck. In his fantasy, he kil ed the Bird slowly, savoring the suffering he caused, making his tormentor feel al of the pain and terror and helplessness that he’d felt. His veins beat with an electric urgency.

Louie had no idea what had become of the Bird, but he felt sure that if he could get back to Japan, he could hunt him down. This would be his emphatic reply to the Bird’s unremitting effort to extinguish his humanity: I am still a man. He could conceive of no other way to save himself.

Louie had found a quest to replace his lost Olympics. He was going to kil the Bird.

* Returning home to the postwar housing shortage, Weinstein took out a $600,000 loan, built an apartment complex in Atlanta, and offered the 140

family units to veterans at rents averaging less than $50 per month. “Priorities: 1) Ex-POWs; 2) Purple Heart Vets; 3) Overseas Vets; 4) Vets; 5) Civilians,” read his ad. “… We prefer Ex-GI’s, and Marines and enlisted personnel of the Navy. Ex-Air Corps men may apply if they quit tel ing us how they won the war.” His rule banning KKK members drew threatening phone cal s. “I gave them my office and my home address,” Weinstein said, “and told them I stil had the .45 I used to shoot carabau [water buffalo] with.”

* As Hal oran parachuted over Tokyo, the Zero that had shot him down sped toward him, and Hal oran was certain that he was going to be strafed, as so many fal ing airmen were. But instead of firing, the pilot saluted him. After the war, Hal oran and that pilot, Isamu Kashiide, became dear friends.

Thirty-six

The Body on the Mountain

IT WAS THE FIRST WINTER AFTER THE WAR. AN AGED POLICE officer trudged through a vilage high in the mountains of Japan’s Nagano Prefecture, knocking on doors, asking questions, and moving on. The Ministry of Home Affairs, frustrated at the failure to track down Mutsuhiro Watanabe, was renewing its effort, sending out photographs of and reports on the fugitive to every police chief in Japan. Chiefs were under orders to report twice a month on their progress.

Police officers conducted searches and interrogations nearly every day. In one prefecture alone, 9,100 officers were involved in the search for him. The officer in Nagano was part of this effort.

It was around noon when he reached the largest house in the vil age, home to a farmer and his family. Someone answered the door, and the family, thinking that he was a census taker, invited him in. Inside, the policeman found an old, portly farmer, the farmer’s wife, and their live-in laborer. As the laborer prepared a plate of pickles and a cup of tea, a traditional offering to visitors, the officer pul ed out a photograph of Watanabe, dressed in his sergeant’s uniform. Did they recognize the man? None of them did.

The officer left, moving on to a neighbor. He had no idea that the fugitive he was seeking had just been standing right in front of him, holding a plate of pickles.

——

The Bird had come to Nagano Prefecture the previous September, after having fled his brother’s home, then Kofu. Reaching the hot springs resort community of Manza Spa, he’d checked into an inn. He chose an alias, Saburo Ohta, a common name unlikely to attract notice or dwel in anyone’s memory. He had a mustache, which he’d begun growing in the last days of the war. He told people that he was a refugee from Tokyo whose relatives were al dead, a story that, in postwar Japan, was as common as white rice. He vowed to live by two imperatives: silence and patience.

Manza was a good choice, trafficked by crowds in which Watanabe could lose himself. But he soon began to think that he’d be better hidden in the prefecture’s remote mountain regions. He met the old farmer and offered himself as a laborer in exchange for room and board. The farmer took him to his home in the rural vil age, and Watanabe settled in as a farmhand.

Each night, lying on a straw mat on the farmer’s floor, Watanabe couldn’t sleep. Al over Japan, war-crimes suspects had been captured, and were now imprisoned, awaiting trials. He’d known some of these men. They’d be tried, sentenced, some executed. He was free. On the pages on which he poured out his emotions about his plight, Watanabe wrote of feeling guilty when he thought of those soldiers. He also mul ed over his behavior toward the POWs, describing himself as “powerful” and “strict when requesting [POWs] to obey the rules.” “Am I guilty?” he wrote. He didn’t answer his question, but he also expressed no remorse. Even as he wrote of his gratitude for the humanity of the farmer who had taken him in, he couldn’t see the paral el with himself and the helpless men who had fal en into his hands.

The radio in the farmer’s house was often on, and each day, Watanabe listened to reports on fugitive war-crimes suspects. He scanned the faces of his hosts as the stories aired, worried that they’d suspect him. The newspapers, too, were ful of articles on these fugitives, described as “enemies of human beings.” The pronouncements wounded Watanabe’s feelings. It seemed to him outrageous that the Al ies, who “would not forgive,” would oversee trials of Japanese. God alone, he felt, was qualified to judge him. “I wanted to cry out,” he wrote, “ ‘That’s not fair!’ ”

The tension of living incognito wore on him. He was especial y wary of the farmer’s wife, whose gaze seemed to convey suspicion. Sleep came so reluctantly that he had to work himself to exhaustion to bring it on. He brooded on the question of whether or not he should surrender.

One night, as the evening’s fire died in the hearth, Watanabe came to the farmer and told him who he was. The farmer listened, his eyes fixed on the fire, his tongue clicking against his false teeth.

“People say to control your mouth, or it brings evil,” the farmer said. “You should be careful of your speech.”

He said nothing else and turned away.

——

As the Bird hid, other men who had abused POWs were arrested, taken to Sugamo Prison, in Tokyo, and tried for war crimes. Roughly 5,400 Japanese were tried by the United States and other nations; some 4,400 were convicted, including 984 given death sentences and 475 given life in prison.* More than 30 Ofuna personnel were convicted and sentenced to a total of roughly 350 years in prison. The thieving cook, Tatsumi “Curley” Hata, was sentenced to twenty years. Masajiro “Shithead” Hirayabashi, who’d beaten countless prisoners and kil ed Gaga the duck, was given four years. Commander Kakuzo Iida, “the Mummy,” was sentenced to death for contributing to the deaths of five captives. Also convicted was Sueharu Kitamura—“the Quack”—who had mutilated his patients, bludgeoned Harris, and contributed to the deaths of four captives, including one who was carried from Ofuna at the war’s end, hours from death, crying out “Quack” over and over again. Kitamura was sentenced to hang.

Kaname Sakaba, the Omori commander, was given a life sentence. Of the men from Naoetsu, six civilian guards were tried, convicted, and hanged.

Seven Japanese soldiers were also convicted: two were hanged, four given life imprisonment with hard labor, and one given twenty years.

The police found Jimmie Sasaki working as a liaison between the Japanese navy and the occupying forces. Ever a fabulist, he told investigators that Ofuna interrogators were “always kind to prisoners,” that he’d never seen a prisoner abused, and that prisoners rarely complained. In questioning, the truth about his position at Ofuna final y emerged. He had not been the chief interrogator, bearing a rank equal to admiral, that he had claimed to be; he’d been only a low-ranking interpreter. This man of ever-shifting al egiances tried to shift them again, speaking of his debt to America and asking if someone could get him a job with the U.S. Army. Instead of a job, he received an indictment, charged with ordering the abuse of several captives, including one who’d been starved and tortured to death. Though the trial testimony seemed to raise enormous doubt as to his guilt, Sasaki was convicted and ultimately sentenced to six years of hard labor.

And so the strange and twisting war journey of Louie’s onetime friend ended in Sugamo Prison, where he was a model prisoner, tending a vegetable garden and a grove of trees. Who Jimmie Sasaki real y was—whether artful spy and wil ing instrument in Japan’s machine of violence or something more innocent—remains a mystery.

——

Of the postwar stories of the men who ran the camps in which Louie had lived, the saddest was that of Yukichi Kano, the Omori private who’d risked everything to protect the POWs and had probably saved several prisoners’ lives. Just after the war’s end was announced, Kano came upon a group of drunken guards stumbling toward the barracks, swords drawn, determined to hack some captured B-29 men to death. Kano and another man planted themselves in the guards’ path and, after a brief scuffle, stopped them. Kano was a hero, but when the Americans came to liberate the camp, two of them tried to rip the insignia off his uniform. Bob Martindale stepped in and gave the Americans a furious dressing-down. Fearing that Kano might be mistakenly accused of war crimes, Martindale and several other POW officers wrote a letter of commendation for him before they went home.