Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (48 page)

In accordance with the kil -al order, the Japanese massacred al 5,000 Korean captives on Tinian, al of the POWs on Bal ale, Wake, and Tarawa, and al but 11 POWs at Palawan. They were evidently about to murder al the other POWs and civilian internees in their custody when the atomic bomb brought their empire crashing down.

On the morning of September 2, 1945, Japan signed its formal surrender. The Second World War was over.

——

For Louie, these were days of bliss. Though he was stil sick, wasted, and weak, he glowed with euphoria such as he had never experienced. His rage against his captors was gone. Like al the men around him, he felt flush with love for everyone and everything.

Only the thought of the Bird gave him pause. A few days earlier, Louie would have bound and kil ed him without remorse. Now the vengeful urge no longer had sure footing. The Bird was gone, his ability to reach Louie—physical y, at least—extinguished. At that moment, al Louie felt was rapture.

Forgiveness coursed through al of the men at Naoetsu. POWs doled out supplies to civilians and stood in circles of children, handing out chocolate.

Louie and other POWs brought food and clothing to the guards and asked them to take it home to their families. Even Kono was spared. Ordered to stay in camp, he holed up in his office for eleven days, so afraid of retribution that he never once came out. When a POW opened the door, Kono gasped and ran to a corner. A few days before, he might have met with reprisal, but today, there was no such spirit. The POWs left him alone.*

There was only one act of vengeance in the camp. When a particularly hated guard appeared in the gal ey, a POW grabbed him by the col ar and the seat of the pants and threw him out the door with such force that he sailed over the riverside drop-off and into the Hokura River. The POWs never saw him again.

The pal ets didn’t stop fal ing. After a few days of B-29 visits, food, medicine, and clothing were piling up everywhere. The officers distributed the food as soon as it landed, and every man was entombed in goodies. Eventual y someone climbed on the roofs and wrote: NO MORE—THANKS. ANY-NEWS?

Gorging brought consequences. Digestive systems that had spent years scraping by on two or three cups of seaweed per day were overwhelmed.

Naoetsu became a festival of rapid-fire diarrhea. The benjo lines wound everywhere, and men unable to wait began dropping their pants and fertilizing Japan wherever the spirit moved them. Then they went right back to happy feasting.

Al over Japan, B-29s continued pouring food down on POWs. More than one thousand planes saturated the landscape with nearly forty-five hundred tons of Spam and fruit cocktail, soup, chocolate, medicine, clothing, and countless other treasures. At Omori, Bob Martindale had taken over the hateful little office where the Bird had sat before his picture window, hunting men. He was there when an enormous box sailed out of the sun, hit the ground just outside the window, and exploded, obliterating the Bird’s office in a cataclysm of American cocoa powder. Martindale stumbled out, caked head to toe in cocoa, but otherwise uninjured.

——

Everyone in camp was eager to get home, but radio messages sent out by the occupying forces stated that POWs should remain in camps for the time being. Fitzgerald was told that an evacuation team would come to Naoetsu on September 4 to oversee the POWs’ transport to Yokohama, and then home. So the POWs settled in to wait, eating, smoking, resting, eating, celebrating, swimming, and eating more. Louie ate voraciously, got stronger, and expanded exponential y, his face and body bloating from water retention.

Louie did his best to clean himself up, starting with his muslin shirt, which he’d worn every day since the morning he had climbed into Green Hornet. A beloved brother to him, it was torn, faded, and stained with coal dust, and Louie’s handwritten name was now nearly invisible on its breast pocket. Louie boiled it in a pot to kil the lice and fleas, then scrubbed it to get the coal out.

POWs fanned out over the countryside. Men carried air-dropped items into town, where they met cautiously friendly civilians and traded their goods for shaves, haircuts, and souvenirs. They knocked on doors, offering to trade air-dropped food and tobacco for fresher fare. Inside the houses, they saw large industrial machines, just as Louie had seen in the ruins of Tokyo. Tinker found a Victrola in camp, then went to town and bought a gift for Louie, a recording of Gustave Charpentier’s Impressions d’Italie. The POWs broke into the storehouse and found some fifteen hundred Red Cross boxes.

Several men discovered a brothel and came back to camp with sinners’ grins. Ken Marvin and a friend borrowed kids’ bikes and pedaled the roads, discovering what a beautiful place they’d been in al this time. Coming upon a public bath ful of civilians, Marvin jumped right in with them, scrubbing himself clean for the first time since his last shower on Wake Atol in December 1941. “My God!” he remembered. “Just like a smorgasbord!”

September 4 arrived. The evacuation team never showed up. More than two weeks had passed since the TBF had flown over the river and blinked out the message that the war was over, and Commander Fitzgerald, like al of the men in camp, was sick of waiting. He asked Marvin and another man to don MP badges and walk with him to the train station. When they got there, Fitzgerald asked a Japanese station official to arrange for a ten-carriage train to be there the next day. The official refused, and was plenty obnoxious about it.

Commander John Fitzgerald had been in Japanese custody since April 1943. For two and a half years, he’d been forced to grovel before sadists and imbeciles as he tried to protect his men. He’d been starved, beaten, and enslaved, given the water cure, had his fingernails torn out. He was done negotiating. He hauled back and punched the station official, to the delight of Ken Marvin. The next morning, the train was there, right on time.

Early on the morning of September 5, Louie packed up his diary, the record from Tinker, and his letters from home, and stepped down the barracks ladder for the last time. In the compound, the POWs were congregating in joyful anticipation. Everyone carried what few possessions they had, and the British Commonwealth soldiers held the white boxes bearing the remains of the sixty Aussies who had died in camp. Determined to leave this indecent place with dignity, the men assembled behind flags of their nations. Then, together, they passed through the camp gate and marched up the road, toward wives and sweethearts and children and Mom and Dad and home.

As he walked over the bridge, Louie glanced back. Some of the guards and camp officials stood in the compound, watching them go. A few of the sickest POWs remained behind, awaiting transport the next day. Fitzgerald stayed with them, unwil ing to leave until the last of his men was liberated.*

Louie raised his arm and waved the war good-bye. He crossed over the bridge, and the camp passed out of view.

As the train pushed off for Yokohama, the POWs’ last sight of Naoetsu was a broken line of Japanese, the few civilian guards and camp staffers who had been kind to them, standing along the side of the track. Their hands were raised in salute.

* Japan also held more than 215,000 POWs from other countries and untold thousands of forced laborers. Their death rates are unknown.

* There has been some confusion concerning American POW statistics. The figures above, compiled by Charles Stenger, PhD, in a comprehensive study of POW statistics for the Veterans Administration, appear to be definitive.

* Kono put on civilian clothes, fled camp, wrote his mother to say he was kil ing himself, then took a false name and moved to Niigata. A year later, he was recognized on a wanted poster and arrested. Convicted of abusing POWs, he was sentenced to life at hard labor.

* When Fitzgerald got home, he would be honored with the Navy Cross and the Silver Star for his heroism in combat and in the POW camp.

Thirty-three

Mother’s Day

THE NAOETSU POWS HAD CONTROL OF THE TRAIN. AT EVERY town on the line, the train squealed to a stop and the men piled off, then piled back on, laden with liberated sake and whatever else they could steal. The journey went on, sake coursed through skinny bodies, and the men grew rowdier. A lieutenant stood up and, with solemn officiousness, warned the men to behave themselves. He didn’t want anyone fal ing off the train, he said.

At about three in the afternoon, the train stopped and began backing up. Just as the lieutenant had feared, a man had gone overboard. As the train rol ed backward, the errant POW came into view. It was the lieutenant himself, at least three sheets to the wind. He was lucky. Al afternoon, drunken POWs staggered off the train, but the train didn’t stop for them. They had to find their own way.

From the top of Japan to the bottom, trains packed with POWs snaked toward Yokohama. Men pressed their faces to the windows to catch their first glimpse of what al of those B-29s had done. Once-grand cities were now flat, black stains, their only recognizable feature a gridwork of burned roads, passing nothing, leading nowhere.

At the first sight of the destruction of their enemy, the POWs cheered. But after the first city there was another, then another, city after city razed, the survivors drifting about like specters, picking through the rubble. The cheering died away. On Louie’s train, the silence came as they passed through Tokyo. A week after Louie had left Omori, sixteen square miles of Tokyo, and tens of thousands of souls, had been immolated by B-29s.

A few of the trains slipped past Hiroshima. Virtual y every POW believed that the destruction of this city had saved them from execution. John Falconer, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, looked out as Hiroshima neared. “First there were trees,” he told historian Donald Knox. “Then the leaves were missing. As you got closer, branches were missing. Closer stil , the trunks were gone and then, as you got in the middle, there was nothing. Nothing! It was beautiful. I realized this was what had ended the war. It meant we didn’t have to go hungry any longer, or go without medical treatment. I was so insensitive to anyone else’s human needs and suffering. I know it’s not right to say it was beautiful, because it real y wasn’t. But I believed the end probably justified the means.”

——

At seven that evening, the Naoetsu train entered bombed-out Yokohama and stopped at the station.

“Welcome back, boys.”

“Before me in immaculate khaki uniform and cap stood an American girl with a magazine-cover smile, faultless makeup and peroxide blonde hair,”

wrote Tom Wade. “After three and a half years in prison camp, I had been liberated by the great American blonde!”

The POWs were soon blissful y enveloped in Red Cross nurses, some of whom cried at the sight of them. Perhaps the women weren’t al beautiful, but to Ken Marvin, they looked like goddesses.

Someone spotted a mess hal , and a charge ensued. In the midst of it stood a journalist, Robert Trumbul . He cal ed out, asking if anyone had a story to tel . As he hurried past, Frank Tinker told him to talk to Louie Zamperini, gesturing toward his friend.

“Zamperini’s dead,” said Trumbul , who thought that the man in question didn’t even look like the famous runner. He asked Louie if he could prove his identity. Louie pul ed out his wal et. The Japanese had cleaned out the main folds, but in a hidden pocket he’d tucked eight dol ars, the cartoon that had gotten him and Phil beaten up, and a USC footbal admission pass inscribed with his name.

Trumbul was astonished. He took Louie aside and began asking questions, and Louie recounted his entire saga. He omitted one detail: For the sake of Mac and his family, he said nothing of how the chocolate had been lost. Phil would do the same, saying that the chocolate had gone overboard. When Louie finished, Trumbul asked him to summarize what he had endured. Louie stood silently.

“If I knew I had to go through those experiences again,” he final y said, “I’d kil myself.”

The next morning, Louie was taken to an airfield to be flown to Okinawa, where many POWs were being col ected before being sent home. Seeing a table stacked with K rations, he began cramming the boxes under his shirt, brushing off an attendant who tried to assure him that he didn’t have to hoard them, as no one was going to starve him anymore. Looking extremely pregnant, Louie boarded his plane.

Somewhere in the bustle, he’d been separated from his friends. There had been no good-byes. By seven that morning, he was airborne—leaving Japan, he hoped, forever.

At Okinawa, a staff sergeant named Frank Rosynek stood by the airfield, watching transport planes come in. He was with Louie’s old outfit, the 11th Bomb Group, which was now stationed on Okinawa, and he had come to the airfield to welcome the POWs. “They were a pathetic looking bunch: mostly skin and bones, clad in rags with makeshift footwear, and nervous,” he wrote. He walked among them, listening to their stories, marveling at how they savored the mess hal grub, watching them tear up over photographs of wives and steady girls who, they hoped, hadn’t given them up for dead.*

Rosynek’s CO asked him to come to the debriefing of a POW from the 11th. When Rosynek arrived, he saw three officers sitting before a drawn, unshaven POW in sun-bleached clothes. The officers were staring at the POW as if in shock. The colonel told Rosynek that the man was Louis Zamperini, and that he had disappeared some two and a half years earlier. Everyone in the bomb group had thought he was dead. Rosynek was incredulous. It had been his job to write next-of-kin letters for lost men, and he had probably written to Zamperini’s mother, but he no longer remembered. There had been so many such letters. Not one of those men had turned up alive, until now.

It was probably sometime later that day when the dead man walked into the 11th Bomb Group’s quarters. Jack Krey, who had packed up Louie’s belongings on Oahu, captured the reaction to news of Louie’s reappearance: “Wel , I’l be damned.”

It wasn’t the reunion that Louie had anticipated. Most of these men were strangers to him. Many of his friends, he learned, were dead. Two hundred and twenty-five men from the 11th had gone missing and were presumed dead, including twenty-six from Louie’s 42nd squadron. Many more had been kil ed in action. Of the sixteen rowdy young officers who had shared the pornographic palace on Oahu, only four—Louie, Phil, Jesse Stay, and Joe Deasy