Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (58 page)

As Al en grew old, he settled into retired life with Cecy. He walked quite a few back nines, changed his rooting interests from the Sox to the Cubs, and spent whole days just sitting in silence. “Dad must have swung a thousand miles on that front porch swing,” said his daughter, Karen Loomis. “What he was thinking, I don’t know.”

In the 1990s, diabetes and heart disease converged on him. In 1998, a few months before he died, he was moved to a nursing home. When the staff learned his war story, they scheduled an event to honor him. It was probably the first time that what he’d done during the war was publicly recognized not simply in reference to Louie, but for its own sake. For the only time in his life, Al en became an open book. As people gathered to listen to his story, spel bound, Karen saw a lovely light come to her father’s face. There was, she said, “a little grin underneath.”

——

The men who had befriended Louie in captivity found their way back into civilian life. Some flourished; some struggled for the rest of their lives. There was one terrible loss.

Bil Harris ended the war in grand style, plucked from Omori to stand on the Missouri as Japan surrendered. His singular intel ectual acuity, lost in the beatings from the Quack, returned to him. He went home, fel irretrievably in love with a navy captain’s daughter, married her, and became a doting father to two little girls. After leaning toward retirement, he opted to stay with the marines, rising to lieutenant colonel. He and Louie sent letters back and forth, laying plans to see each other one day soon.

In September 1950, Harris was driving down a highway when the police pul ed him over. He was being cal ed to command a battalion in Korea and had to leave the next day. Before he left, he told his wife that if his luck went bad, he wouldn’t al ow himself to be captured again.

Before dawn on December 7, 1950, Harris stood on a frozen Korean mountain with his weary battalion, which had seen such horrendous fighting that it had lost three-quarters of its men. That morning, it was serving as the rear guard for a convoy. As the convoy crossed an open area in the dark, a vast, entrenched Chinese force ambushed it from point-blank range. What Harris did next became Marine Corps legend. He gathered his men and, under murderous fire, led them straight at the Chinese. They took heavy casualties but held the Chinese off long enough for the convoy to escape.

Bil Harris with his daughter Katey in 1950. He disappeared a few months later. Courtesy of Katherine H. Meares When dawn came, no one could find Harris. The last time anyone had seen him, he’d been heading up a road, carrying two rifles. His men searched for hours but found no trace of him. They concluded that he’d again been captured.

For his actions that night, Harris won the Navy Cross, an award second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor. General Clifton Capes kept the medal in his desk in hopes that Harris would come home to receive it. He would not. Thirty-two-year-old Wil iam Harris was never seen again. When America’s Korean War POWs were released, none of them reported having seen him. He was simply gone.

Many years later, Harris’s family received a box of bones, apparently returned by North Korea. The remains inside were said to match those of Harris, but the reports were so incomplete that the family was never sure if it was real y Bil whom they buried in a church cemetery in Kentucky. What actual y happened on that morning in 1950 remains unknown.

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After the war, Pete married a Kansas City beauty named Doris, had three kids, and devoted his life to the work he’d been born to do. He coached footbal at Torrance High, winning the league championship, then moved on to Banning High, in Wilmington, to coach track and footbal . In thirty years of Banning track, he had only one losing season. Coach Zamperini was so beloved that upon his retirement in 1977, he was feted by eight hundred people on the Queen Mary.

“I’m retired; my wife is just tired,” Pete used to say, and he loved the motto so much that he had it printed on his business cards. But in truth, retirement never real y took. At ninety, Pete had the littlest kids in his neighborhood in training, fashioning dumbbel s out of old cans, just as his dad had done for Louie. He’d lead the kids onto his sidewalk and cheer them on through sprints, handing out a dime for each race run, a quarter for a personal best.

Pete was more troubled by Louie’s war experience than Louie was. In 1992, he served as escort for a group of students on an ocean fishing trip.

Though the vessel was a spanking new, ninety-foot ship, the prospect of being at sea terrified Pete. He showed up with a ridiculously comprehensive assortment of safety items, including a heavy-duty plastic bag to use as a flotation device, a floatable flashlight, a six-foot lanyard, a whistle, and a pocketknife, which he imagined flailing at any sharks who tried to eat him. He spent the trip staring ambivalently at the water.

At the end of his life, Pete remained as dedicated to Louie as he’d been in boyhood. He assembled a scrapbook thick with clippings and photographs of Louie’s life, and would happily give up his afternoons to talk about his brother, once spending nearly three hours on the phone with a reporter while sitting in a bath towel. At ninety, he stil remembered the final times of Louie’s races, to the fifth of a second, three-quarters of a century after Louie had run them. Like Payton Jordan, who went on to coach the 1968 U.S. Olympic track and field team, Pete never stopped believing that Louie could have run a four-minute mile long before Roger Bannister became the first man to do it, in 1954. Many decades after the war, Pete was stil haunted by what Louie had endured. When describing Louie’s wartime ordeal to an audience gathered to honor his brother, Pete faltered and broke down. It was some time before he could go on.

On a May day in 2008, a car pul ed to a stop before Pete’s house in San Clemente, and Louie stepped out. He had come to say good-bye to his brother; Pete had melanoma, and it had spread to his brain. Their younger sister Virginia had died a few weeks before; Sylvia and Payton Jordan would fol ow months later. Cynthia, as gorgeous and headstrong as ever, had succumbed to cancer in 2001, drifting off as Louie pressed his face to hers, whispering, “I love you.” Louie, declared dead more than sixty years earlier, would outlive them al .

Pete was on his bed, eyes closed. Louie sat beside him. Softly, he began to talk of his life with Pete, tracing the paths they had taken since pneumonia had brought them to California in 1919. The two ancient men lingered together as they had as boys, lying side by side on their bed, waiting for the Graf Zeppelin.

Louie spoke of what a feral boy he had once been, and al that Pete had done to rescue him. He told of the cascade of good things that had fol owed Pete’s acts of devotion, and the bountiful lives that he and Pete had found in guiding children. Al of those kids, Louie said, “are part of you, Pete.”

Pete’s eyes opened and, with sudden clarity, rested on the face of his little brother for the last time. He couldn’t speak, but he was beaming.

——

In the fal of 1996, in an office in the First Presbyterian Church of Hol ywood, a telephone rang. Louie, then a nudge short of eighty, picked up the receiver.

The voice on the telephone belonged to Draggan Mihailovich, a producer for CBS television. The 1998 Winter Olympics had been awarded to Nagano, and Louie had accepted an invitation to run the torch past Naoetsu. Mihailovich was filming a profile of Louie, to be aired during the Olympics, and had gone to Japan to prepare. While chatting with a man over a bowl of noodles, he had made a startling discovery.

Mihailovich asked Louie if he was sitting down. Louie said yes. Mihailovich told him to grab hold of his chair.

“The Bird is alive.”

Louie nearly hit the floor.

——

The dead man had walked out of the darkness late one night in 1952. He’d been gone for nearly seven years. Watanabe stepped off a train in Kobe, walked through the city, and stopped before a house with a garden bisected by a stone path. Before his disappearance, his mother had spent part of each year living in this house, but Watanabe had been gone for so long that he didn’t know if she came here anymore. He strode about, searching for a clue. Under the gate light, he saw her name.

In al the time in which he’d been thought dead, Watanabe had been hiding in the countryside. He’d spent the previous summer pedaling through vil ages on a bicycle fitted with a cooler, sel ing ice cream, envying the children who played around him. When summer had ended, he’d gone back to farm work, tending rice paddies. Then, one day in March 1952, as he read a newspaper, his eyes had paused over a story. The arrest order for suspected war criminals had been lifted. There on the page was his name.

The lifting of the apprehension order was the result of an unlikely turn in history. Immediately after the war, there was a worldwide outcry for punishment of the Japanese who had abused POWs, and the war-crimes trials began. But new political realities soon emerged. As American occupiers worked to help Japan transition to democracy and independence, the Cold War was beginning. With communism wicking across the Far East, America’s leaders began to see a future al iance with Japan as critical to national security. The sticking point was the war-crimes issue; the trials were intensely unpopular in Japan, spurring a movement seeking the release of al convicted war criminals. With the pursuit of justice for POWs suddenly in conflict with America’s security goals, something had to give.

On December 24, 1948, as the occupation began to wind down, General MacArthur declared a “Christmas amnesty” for the last seventeen men awaiting trial for Class A war crimes, the designation for those who had guided the war. The defendants were released, and some would go on to great success; onetime defendant Nobusuke Kishi, said to be responsible for forcibly conscribing hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Koreans as laborers, would become prime minister in 1957. Though American officials justified the release by saying that it was unlikely that the defendants would have been convicted, the explanation was questionable; more than two dozen Class A defendants had been tried, and al had been convicted. Even in Japan, it was commonly believed that many of the released men were guilty.

Ten months later, the trials of Class B and C defendants—those accused of ordering or carrying out abuse or atrocities—were ended. An army officer named Osamu Satano was the last man tried by the United States. His punishment fit the reconciliatory mood; convicted of beheading an airman, he was sentenced to just five years. In early 1950, MacArthur ruled that war criminals’ sentences would be reduced for good behavior, and those serving life sentences would be eligible for parole after fifteen years. Then, in 1951, the Al ies and Japan signed the Treaty of Peace, which would end the occupation. The treaty waived the right of former POWs and their families to seek reparations from Japan and Japanese companies that had profited from their enslavement.* Final y, in March 1952, just before the treaty took effect and the occupation ended, the order for apprehension of fugitive war criminals was lifted. Though Watanabe was on the fugitive list, hardly anyone believed that he was stil alive.

When he saw the story, Watanabe was wary. Afraid that the police had planted the story as a trap, he didn’t go home. He spent much of the spring working as a fishmonger, al the while wondering if he was free. Final y, he decided to sneak back to his mother.

Watanabe rang the bel , but no one answered. He rang again, longer, and heard footfal s on the garden stones. The gate swung open, and there was the face of his youngest brother, whom he hadn’t seen since the latter was a boy. His brother threw his arms around him, then pul ed him into the house, singing out, “Mu-cchan’s back!”

Mutsuhiro Watanabe’s flight was over. In his absence, many of his fel ow camp guards and officials had been convicted of war crimes. Some had been executed. The others wouldn’t be in prison for long. In keeping with the American effort to reconcile with Japan, al of them, including those serving life sentences, would soon be paroled. It appears that even Sueharu Kitamura, “the Quack,” was set free, in spite of his death sentence. By 1958, every war criminal who had not been executed would be free, and on December 30 of that year, al would be granted amnesty. Sugamo would be torn down, and the epic ordeals of POWs in Japan would fade from the world’s memory.

Watanabe would later admit that in the beginning of his life in exile, he had pondered the question of whether or not he had committed any crime. In the end, he laid the blame not on himself but on “sinful, absurd, insane war.” He saw himself as a victim. If he had tugs of conscience over what he’d done, he shrugged them away by assuring himself that the lifting of the fugitive-apprehension order was a personal exoneration.

“I was just in a great joy of complete release and liberation,” he wrote in 1956, “that I was not guilty.”

——

Watanabe married and had two children. He opened an insurance agency in Tokyo, and it reportedly became highly profitable. He lived in a luxury apartment worth a reported $1.5 mil ion and kept a vacation home on Australia’s Gold Coast.

Almost everyone who knew of his crimes believed he was dead. By his own account, Watanabe visited America several times, but he apparently didn’t encounter any former POWs. Then, in the early 1980s, an American military officer visiting Japan heard something about the Bird being alive. In 1991, Bob Martindale was told that a Japanese veteran had spotted a man he thought was Watanabe at a sports event. Among the other POWs, few, if any, heard of this. Louie remained in ignorance, convinced that the Bird had kil ed himself decades earlier.

In the summer of 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of his flight from Naoetsu, Watanabe was seventy-seven years old. His hair had grayed; his haughty bearing had bent. He seemed to be close to concluding his life without publicly confronting his past. But that year, he was at last ready to admit that he had abused men. Perhaps he truly felt guilty. Perhaps, as he approached his death, he had a troubling sense that he’d be remembered as a fiend and wished to dispel that notion. Or perhaps he was motivated by the same vanity that had consumed him in wartime, and hoped to use his vile history, and his victims, to draw attention to himself, maybe even win admiration for his contrition. That summer, when London Daily Mail reporter Peter Hadfield came cal ing, Watanabe let him in.