I hope that all good people have within them the strength that Louie Zamperini displayed - and that we can all find the sources of support that made his triumph possible.
I was pleased that his greatest triumph was running a boys camp. I believe that boys camps are wonderful.
I have reduced this powerful book - which I highly recommend to everyone - to 23 pages containing 111 quotes.
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
1. BSA Fire by
Friction “ . . . Louie . . . setting a legitimate Boy Scout state record in
friction-fire ignition . . .” p. 7
2. Ethnic Tension
“And then there was his ethnicity. In
Torrance in the early 1920s, Italians were held in such disdain that when the
Zamperinis arrived, the neighbors petitioned the city council to keep them out. Louie, who know only a smattering of English
until he was in grade school, couldn’t hide his pedigree.” p. 8
3. Pseudoscience of Eugenics “In the 1930s,
America was infatuated with the pseudoscience of eugenics and its promise to
strengthening the human race by culling the “unfit” for the genetic pool. Along with the “feebleminded, insane, and
criminal, those so classified included women who had sex out of wedlock
(considered a mental illness), orphans, the disabled, the poor, the homeless,
epileptics, masturbators, the blind and the deaf, alcoholics, and girls whose
genitals exceeded certain measurements. Some eugenicists advocated euthanasia,
and in mental hospitals, this was quietly carried out on scores of people
though “lethal neglect” or outright murder.
At one Illinois mental hospital, new patients were dosed with milk form
cows infected with tuberculosis, in the belief that only the undesirable would perish.
As many as four in ten of these patients died.
A more popular tool of eugenics was forced sterilization, employed on a
raft of lost souls who, through misbehavior or misfortune, fell into the hands
of state governments. By 1930, when
Louie was entering his teens, California was enraptured with eugenics, and
would ultimately sterilize some twenty thousand people.” p. 11
4. On Running “He
came home with a mania for running. All
of he effort that he’d once put into thieving he threw into track. On Pete’s instruction, he ran his entire
paper rout . . . He gave up drinking and smoking . . . he ran to the public
pool . . .dove to the bottom grabbed the drain plug, and just floated there,
hanging on a little longer each time.” p. 16
5. His Hero “Louie also found a role
model. In the 1930s, track was hugely
popular, and its elite performers were household names. Among them was a Kansas University miler
named Glenn Cunningham. As a small
child, Cunningham had been in a schoolhouse explosion . . . and left Glen with
severe burns on his legs and torso. It
was a month and a half before he could sit up, and more time still before he
could stand. Unable to straighten his
legs, he learned to push himself about by leaning on a chair, his legs floundering
. . . By 1932, the modest, mild-tempered Cunningham, whose legs and back were
covered in a twisting mesh of scars, was becoming a national sensation, soon to
be acclaimed as the greatest miler in American history. Louie had his hero.” p. 16
6. Global Warming in
1936 “That week, which included the hottest three-day period in the
nation’s history, the heat would kill three thousand Americans. In Manhattan, where it would reach 106
degrees, forty people would die.” p 23
7. A Proud
Scoutmaster “Anthony headed off to the Kiwanis club, where he and Louie’s
Boy Scout master would drink toasts to Louie until four in the morning.” p. 27
8. Shaking Hands with
Hitler “Louis was led into the fuhrer’s section. Hitler bent from his box, smiled, and offered
his hand. Louie, standing below, had to
reach far up. Their fingers barely
touched. Hitler said something in
German. An interpreter translated “Ah, you’re the boy with the fast finish.” p.
35
9. Louie’s Character
Reveled in a Race “In June 1938, Louie arrived at the NCAA Championship in
Minneapolis, gunning for four minutes.
Spilling over with eagerness, he babbled to other athletes about his new
training regimen, his race strategy, and how fast he might go. Word spread that Louie was primed for a
superlative performance. On the night
before the race, a coach from Notre Dame knocked on Louie’s hotel room door, a
grave expression on his face. He told
Louie that some of his rival coaches were ordering their runners to sharpen
their spikes and slash him. Louie
dismissed the warning, certain that no one would do such a thing
deliberately.
He was wrong. Halfway through the race, just as Louie was
about to move for the lead, several runners shouldered around him, boxing him
in. Louie tried repeatedly to break loose but he couldn’t get around the other
men. Suddenly, the man beside him swerved in and stomped on his foot, impaling
Louie’s toe with his spike. A moment
later, the man ahead began kicking backward, cutting both of Louie’s
shins. A third man elbowed Louie’s chest
so hard that he cracked Louie’s rib. The
crowd gasped.
Bleeding
and in pain, Louie was trapped. For a
lap and a half, he ran in the cluster of men, unable to get free, restraining
his stride to avoid running into the man ahead.
At last, as he neared the final turn, he saw a tiny gap open before
him. He burst through, blew past the
race leader, and, with his shoe torn open, shins streaming blood, and chest
aching, won easily.
He slowed
to a halt, bitter and frustrated. When
his coach asked him how fast he thought he had gone, Louie replied that he
couldn’t have beaten 4:20.
The race
time was posted on the board. From the
stands came a sudden Woooo! Louie had
run the mile in 4:08.3. It was the
fastest NCAA mile in history and the fifth-fastest outdoor mile ever run. Louie had missed the world record by 1.9
seconds. His time would stand as the
NCAA record for fifteen years.” p. 41
10. Japanese Racism “Central
to the Japanese identity was the belief that it was Japan’s divinely mandated
right to rule its fellow Asians, whom it saw as inherently inferior. “There are superior and inferior races in the
world,” said the Japanese politician Nakajima Chikuhei in 1940, “and it is the
sacred duty of the leading race to lead and enlighten the inferior ones.” The Japanese, he continued, are “the sole
superior race of the world.” Moved by
necessity and destiny, Japan’s leaders planned to “plant the blood of the
Yamato [Japanese] race” on their neighboring nations’ soil. They were going to subjugate all of the Far
East.” p. 43
11. Training
Accidents “In the Army Air Forces, or AAF,* there were 52,651 stateside
aircraft accidents over the course of the war, killing 14,903 personnel. Though
some of these personnel were probably on coastal patrol and other duties, it
can be presumed that the vast majority were trainees, killed without ever
seeing a combat theater. In the three
months in which Phil’s men trained as a crew, 3,041 AAF planes—more than 33 per
day—met with accidents stateside, killing nine men per day. In subsequent months, death tallies exceeding
500 were common. In August 1943, 590
airmen would die stateside, 19 per day.”
p. 61
12. Quality Crew
“Training was a crucible, and it transformed Phil’s crew. They would not all live through what lay
ahead, but the survivors would speak of their good fortune in serving among
such skilled men. They worked together
with seamless efficiency, and judging by their training scores, in the grim
business of bombs and bullets, there was not better crew in the squadron.” p.
62
13. Size of the
Japanese Empire “ . . . Japan’s new empire stretched five thousand miles,
from the snowbound Aleutians to Java, hundreds of miles south of the
equator. West to east, the empire
sprawled over more then six thousand miles form the border of India to the
Gilbert and Marshall islands in the central Pacific. In the pacific, virtually everything above
Australia and west of the International Date Line had been taken by Japan.” p.
65
14. Losses to Combat
and Accidents “In World War II, 35,933 AAF planes were lost in combat and
accidents. The surprise of the attrition
rate is that only a fraction of he ill-fated planes were lost in combat. In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas theater in
which Phil’s crew served. For every plane lost in combat, some six planes were
lost in accidents. Over time, combat
took a greater toll, but combat losses never overtook noncombat losses.
As planes
went, so went men. In the air corps,
35,946 personnel died in nonbattle situations, the vast majority of them in
accidental crashes. * Even in combat,
airmen appear to have been more likely to die from accidents than combat
itself. A report issued by the AAF surgeon
general suggests that in the Fifteenth Air Force, between November 1, 1943, and
May 25, 1945, 70 percent of men listed as killed in action died in operational
aircraft accidents, not as a result of enemy action.” p. 80
15. Risk of Death
“The risks of combat created grim statistics. In World War II, 52,173 AAF men
were killed in combat. According to
Stay, who would become a squadron commander, airmen trying to fulfill the forty
combat missions that made up a Pacific bomber crewman’s tour of duty had a 50
percent chance of being killed.” p. 84
16. B-24 a Dangerous Plane “Less than a quarter of ditched B-17s
broke up, but a survey of B-24 ditchings found that nearly two-thirds broke up
and a quarter of the crewmen died.” p. 85
17. Fear of Sharks “The
fear of sharks was so powerful that most men, faced with the choice of riding a
crippled plane to a ditching or bailing out, chose to take their chances in a
ditching, even in the B-24. At least
that would leave them near the rafts.”
p. 86
18. Percent of Men
Lost “According to reports made by the Far East Air Force air surgeon, fewer
than 30 percent of men whose planes went missing between July 1944 and February
1945 were rescued. Even when the plane’s
location was know, only 46 percent of men were saved. In some months, the picture was far
worse. In January 1945, only 21 of 167
downed XXI Bomber Command airmen were rescued—just 13 percent.
As bleak as
these odds were late in the war, men who went down before min-1944 faced far
worse.” p. 87
19. Danger of the
Search “The improbability of rescue, coupled with the soaring rate of
accidental crashes, created a terrible equation. Search planes appear to have been more likely
to go down themselves than find the men they were looking for. In one time frame, in the Eastern Air
Command, half of the Catalina flying boats attempting rescues crashed while
trying to land on the ocean. It seems
likely that for every man rescued, several would-be rescuers died, especially
in the first years of the war.” p. 87
20. The Rape of Nanking “Of all of the horrors
facing downed men, the one outcome that they feared most was capture by the
Japanese. The roots of the men’s fear
lay in an event that occurred in 1937, in the early months of Japan’s invasion
of China. The Japanese military
surrounded the city of Nanking, stranding more than half a million civilians
and 90,000 Chinese soldiers. The
soldiers surrendered and, assured of their safety, submitted to being
bound. Japanese officers then issued a
written order: ALL PRISONERS OF WAR ARE TO BE EXECUTED.
What
followed was a six-week frenzy of killing that defies articulation. Masses of POWs were beheaded, machine-gunned,
bayoneted, and burned alive. The
Japanese turned on civilians, engaging in killing contests, raping tens of
thousands of people, mutilating and crucifying them and provoking dogs to maul
them. Japanese soldiers took pictures of
themselves posing alongside hacked-up bodies, severed heads, and women strapped
down for rape. The Japanese press ran tallies
of the killing contests as if they were baseball scores, praising the heroism
of the contestants. Historians estimate
that the Japanese military murdered between 200,000 and 430,000 Chinese,
including the 90,000 POWs, in what became know as the Rape of Nanking.” p.
88
21. BSA 1st
Aid Training “There were two gashes on the left side of Phil’s forehead, by
the hairline. Blood was spurting form
the wounds and, mixed with seawater, sloshing in the bottom of the raft. Remembering what he had learned in Boy Scouts
and his Honolulu first aid course, Louie ran his fingers down Phil’s throat
until he felt a pulse, the carotid artery.
He showed Mac the spot and told him to press down. He pulled off his muslin top shirt and T-shirt
and pulled Phil’s shirts off as well . . . and tied them tightly round Phil’s
head, then slid Phil into the second raft.” p. 126
22. Why Not to Drink
Sea Water “Most worrisome was the water situation. A few half-pints wouldn’t last them
long. The men were surrounded by water,
but they couldn’t drink it. The salt
content in seawater is so high that it is considered a poison. When a person drinks seawater, the kidneys
must generate urine to flush the salt away, but to do so, they need more water
than is contained in the seawater itself, so the body pulls water from its cells. Bereft of water, the cells begin to
fail. Paradoxically, a drink of seawater
causes potentially fatal dehydration.” p.128
23. Hope Springs
Eternal “What is remarkable is that the two men who shared Mac’s plight
didn’t share his hopelessness. Though
Phil was constantly wondering how long this would go on, it had not yet
occurred to him that he might die. The
same was true for Louie. Though they
both knew that they were in an extremely serious situation, both had the
ability to warn fear away from their thoughts, focusing instead on how to
survive and reassuring themselves that things would work out . . . For Phil,
there was another source of strength, one of which even Louie was unaware. According to his family, in his quiet,
private way, Phil was a deeply religious man, carrying a faith instilled in him
by his parents.” p. 147
24. Learning to
Overcome “From earliest childhood,
Louie had regarded every limitation placed on him as a challenge to his wits,
his resourcefulness, and his determination to rebel. The result had been a mutinous youth. As
maddening as his exploits had been for his parents and his town, Louie’s
success in carrying them off had given him the conviction that he could think
his way around any boundary. Now, as he was cast into extremity, despair and
death became the focus of his defiance.
The same attributes that had made him the boy terror of Torrance were
keeping him alive in the greatest struggle of his life.” p. 148
25. Cannibalism
“In 1820, after the whaling ship Essex
was sunk by an enraged whale, the lifeboat-bound survivors, on the brink of
death, resorted to cannibalism. Some
sixty years later, after nineteen days adrift, starving survivors of the sunken
yacht Mignonette killed and ate a teenaged crewman. Stories of cannibalism among castaways were
so common that British sailors considered the practice of choosing and
sacrificing a victim to be an established “custom of the sea.” To well-fed men on land, the idea of
cannibalism has always inspired revulsion.
To many sailors who have stood on the threshold of death, lost in the
agony and mind-altering effects of starvation, it has seemed a reasonable, even
inescapable solution.” pp. 148-149
26. The Miracle of
Prayer “On the sixth day without water, the men recognized that they
weren’t going to last much longer. Mac
was failing especially quickly.
They bowed
their head together as Louie prayed. If
God would quench their thirst he vowed, he’d dedicate his life to him.
The next
day, by divine intervention or the fickle humors of the tropics, the sky broke
open and rain poured down. Twice more
the water ran out, twice more they prayed, and twice more the rain came. The
showers gave them just enough water to last a short while longer. If only a plane would come.” p. 152
27. Bullets “And
then, all at once, the ocean erupted.
There was a deafening noise, and the rafts began hopping and shuddering
under the castaways. The gunners were
firing at them.
Louie,
Phil, and Mac clawed for the raft walls and threw themselves overboard. They swam under the rafts and huddled there,
watching bullets tear through the rafts and cut bright slits in the water
around them. Then the firing
stopped.
The men surfaced. The bomber had overshot them and was now to
the east, moving away. Two sharks were
nosing around. The men had to get out of
the water immediately . . . In the distance, the bomber swung around and began
flying at the rafts again . . . All three men saw it at once. Behind the wing, painted over the waist, was
a red circle. The bomber was Japanese .
. .
The bullets
showered the ocean in a glittering downpour.
Looking up, Louie saw them popping through the canvas, shooting beams of
intensely bright tropical sunlight through the raft’s shadow. But after a few feet, the bullets spent their
fore and fluttered down fizzing. Louie
straightened his arms over his head and pushed against the bottom of one of the
rafts, trying to get far enough down to be outside the bullets’ lethal
range. Above him, he could see the depressions
formed by Mac and Phil’s bodies.
Neither man was moving.” pp. 154-155
28. Sharks “As he
lay underwater, his legs tugged in front of him by the current, Louie looked
down at his feet . . . Then, in the murky blur beyond it, he saw the huge,
gaping mouth of a shark emerge out of the darkness and rush straight at his
legs.
Louie
recoiled, pulling his legs toward his body.
The current was too strong for him to get his legs beneath him, but he
was able to swing them to the side, away from the shark’s mouth. The shark kept coming, directly at Louie’s
head. Louie remembered the advice of the
old man in Honolulu: Make a threatening expression, then stiff-arm the shark’s
snout. As the shark lunged for his head,
Louie bared his teeth, widened his eyes, and rammed his palm into the tip of
the shark’s nose. The shark flinched,
circled away, then swam back for a second pass.
Louie waited until the shark was inches from him, then struck it in the
nose again. Again, the shark peeled
away.
Above, the
bullets had stopped coming. As quickly
as he could, Louie pulled himself along the cord until he reached the raft. He grabbed its wall and lifted himself clear
of the shark . . .
As the men
sat together, exhausted and in shock, a shark lunged up over a wall of the
raft, mouth open, trying to drag a man into the ocean. Someone grabbed an oar and hit the shark, and
it slid off. Then another shark jumped
on and, after it, another. The men gripped
the oars and wheeled about, frantically swinging at the sharks.” pp. 155-157
29. Patching the Leaks “As they turned and swung and the sharks
flopped up, air was forced out of the bullet holes, and the raft sank
deeper. Soon, part of the raft was
completely submerged.
If the men
didn’t get air into the raft immediately, the sharks would take them. One pump had been lost in the staffing; only
the one from Mac and Louie’s raft remained.
The men hooked it up to one of the two values and took turns pumping as
hard as they could. Air flowed into the chamber and seeped out
though the bullet holes, but the men found that if they pumped very quickly,
just enough air passed through the raft to lift it up in the water and keep it
mostly inflated. The sharks kept coming,
and the men kept beating them away.
As Phil and
Mac pumped and struck at the sharks, Louie groped for the provisions pocket and
grabbed at the patch kit . . . When Louie pulled it out, only the paper
emerged; the sand that had been stuck to it had washed off. For the umpteenth time Louie cursed whoever
had stocked the raft. He had to devise
something that could etch up the patch area so the glue would stick . . . Using
the pliers he cut three teeth into the edge of the [bronze signal] mirror. Phil and Mac kept fighting the sharks off.
Louie began
patching, starting with the holes on the top of the raft . . . After cutting
the X, he peeled back the canvas to reveal the rubber layer, using the mirror
to scratch up the rubber, squeezed glue onto it, and stuck the patch on. Then he waited for the sun to dry the
glue. Sometimes, a whitecap would drench
the patch before it dried, and he’d have to begin again . . . When that half of
the bottom was patched, they re-inflated it, crawled onto the repaired side,
deflated the other side, and repeated the process. Again, whitecaps repeatedly washed over the
raft and spoiled the patches, and everything had to be redone . . .
Finally,
they could find no more holes to patch . . . With the raft now reasonably
inflated, the sharks stopped attacking.” pp. 157-158
30. The Passing of
Sargent McNamara “Sergeant Francis McNamara had begun his last journey with
a panicked act, consuming the raft’s precious food stores . . . But in the last
days of his life, in the struggle against the deflating raft and the jumping
sharks, he had given all he had left . . . Had Mac not survived the crash,
Louie and Phil might well have been dead by the thirty-third day. In his dying days, Mac had redeemed himself .
. . When he was done, Louie lifted the shrouded body in his arms . . . Louie
bent over the side of the raft and gently slid Mac into the water. Mac sank away. The sharks let him be. p. 165
31. 34 Day Record “The
next night, Louie and he completed their thirty-fourth day on the raft. Though they didn’t know it, they had passed
what was almost certainly the record for survival adrift in an inflated
raft. If anyone had survived longer,
they hadn’t lived to tell about it.” p. 165
32. Beauty as Proof
of God’s Existence “One morning, they woke to a strange stillness. The rise and fall of the raft had ceased, and
it was virtually motionless. There was no wind.
The ocean stretched out in all directions in glossy smoothness,
regarding the sky and reflecting its image in crystalline perfection . . .
It was an
experience of transcendence. Phil
watched the sky, whispering that it looked like a pearl. The water looked so solid that it seemed they
could walk across it . . .
For a while
they spoke, sharing their wonder. Then they fell into reverent silence. Their suffering was suspended. They weren’t hungry or thirsty. They were unaware of the approach of death.
As he
watched this beautiful, still world, Louie played with a thought that had come
to him before. He had thought it as he
had watched hunting seabirds, marveling at their ability to adjust their dives
to compensate for the refraction of light in water. He had thought it a he had considered the
pleasing geometry of the sharks, their gradation of color, their slide through
the sea . . . Such beauty, he thought was too perfect to have come about by
mere chance. That day in the center of the Pacific was, to him, a gift crafted
deliberately, compassionately, for him and Phil.
Joyful and
grateful in the midst of slow dying, the two men bathed in that day until
sunset brought it and their time in the doldrums, to and end.” p. 166
34. Violation of the
Code of Honor “As Japanese servicemen crowded around, the raft was spread
out and the bullet holes counted. There
were forty-eight. The curious servicemen
pressed toward the Americans, but the officers kept them back. An officer asked
Louie where the bullet holes had come from.
Louie replied that a Japanese plane had strafed them. The officer said that this was impossible, a
violation of their military code of honor.” P. 173
35. At First –
Compassion “Two beds were made up, and Louie and Phil were invited to get as
much rest as they wished. Slipping
between cool, clean sheets, their stomachs full, their sores soothed, they were
deeply grateful to have been received with such compassion. Phil had a relieved thought: they were among friends.
Louie and
Phil stayed in the infirmary for two days, attended by Japanese who cared for
them with genuine concern for their comfort and health. On the third day, the deputy commanding
officer came to them. He brought beef,
chocolate, and coconuts—a gift from his commander—as well as news. A freighter
was coming to transport them to another atoll.
The name he gave sent a tremor through Louie: Kwajalein. It was the place know as Execution Island.
“After you
leave here,” Louie would long remember the officer saying, “we cannot guarantee
your life.”” p. 173
36. Imprisoned
“Slowly, his thoughts quieted and his eyes settled. He was in a wooden cell, about the length of
a man and not much wide than his shoulders.
Over his head was a thatched roof, about seven feet up. The only window was a hole, about a foot
square, in the door. The floor was
strewn with gravel, dirt, and wiggling maggots, and the room hummed with flies
and mosquitoes, already beginning to swarm onto him. There was a hole in the floor with a latrine
bucket below it. The air hung hot and
still, oppressive with the stench of human waste. Louie looked up. In the dim light, he saw words carved into the
wall: NINE MARINES MAROONED ON MAKIN ISLAND, AJGUST 18, 1942 . . .
Louie
looked down at his body. Legs that had
sprung through a 4:12 mile over bright sand on the last morning on Kualoa were
now useless. The vibrant, generous body
that he had trained with such vigilance had shrunken until only the bones
remained, draped in yellow skin, crawling with parasites.
All
I see, he thought, is a dead body
breathing.
Louie dissolved into hard, racking
weeping. He muffled his sobs so the
guard wouldn’t hear him.” pp. 174-175
37. He Missed
the Raft “Curled up on the gravelly floor, both men felt as if their bones
were wearing through their skins. Louie
begged for a blanket to sit on, but was ignored. He passed the time trying to strengthen his
legs, pulling himself upright and standing for a minute or two while holding
the wall, then sinking down. He missed
the raft.” p. 180
38. “Friends” “Louie often stared at the
names of the marines, wondering who they were, if they’d had wives and
children, how the end had come for them.
He began to think of them as his friends. One day he pulled off his belt and bent the buckle
upward. In tall block letters, he carved
his name into the wall beside theirs.” p. 181
39. So Much Misunderstanding “The pretext
for many of the outburst was miscommunication.
The captives and their guards came from cultures with virtually no overlap
in language or custom. Louie and Phil
found it almost impossible to understand what was being asked of them. Sign language was of little help, because
even the culture’s gestures were different.
The guards, like nearly all citizens of their historically isolated
nation, had probably never seen a foreigner before, and probably had no
experience in communication with a non-Japanese. When misunderstood they often became so
exasperated that they screamed at and beat the captives” p. 182
40. To Deprive Them of Dignity “The crash
of Green hornet had left Louie and
Phil in the most desperate physical extremity, without food, water, or
shelter. But on Kwajalein, the guards
sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else
had been lost: dignity. This
self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies
at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be
cleaved form and cast below, mankind. Men
subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and
loneliness and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by
themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced
to live. One American airman, shot down
and relentlessly debased by his Japanese captors described the state of mind
that his captivity created: “I was literally becoming a lesser human being.” pp.
182-183
41. Japanese Honor and Degradation “Few
societies treasured dignity, and feared humiliation, as did the Japanese, for
whom a loss of honor could merit suicide.
This is likely one of the reasons why Japanese soldiers in World War II
debased their prisoners with such zeal, seeking to take from them that which
was most painful and destructive to lose.
On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil learned a dark truth known to the doomed in
Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other
generations of betrayed people. Dignity
is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the
face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body log past
the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely
as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could
be as lethal as a bullet.” p. 183
42. Sex and Slavery “The ranking officer
stared coolly at his captive. How do
American soldiers satisfy their sexual appetites? he asked. Louie replied that they don’t—they rely on
willpower. The officer was amused. The Japanese military, he said, provides
women for its soldiers, as allusion to the thousands of Chinese, Korean,
Indonesian, and Filipino women whom the Japanese military had kidnapped and
forced into sexual slavery.” pp. 184-185
43. Necessary Lies “They [the
interrogators] moved on to the Norden bombsight. How do you work it? You just twist two knobs, Louie said. The officers were annoyed. Louie was sent back to his cell.
Suspecting that he’d be brought
back, Louie brainstormed, trying to anticipate Fuestions. He thought about
which things he could divulge and which things he couldn’t. for the latter, he came up with lies and
practiced until he could utter them smoothly.
Because he’d been partially truthful in the first session, he was now in
a better position to lie.” p. 184
44. Me Christian “The guard slipped two
pieces of hard candy into Louie’s hand, then moved down the hall and gave two
pieces to Phil. A friendship was born.
The prisoners understood almost
nothing of what Kawamura said, but his good will needed no translation.
Kawamura could do nothing to improve the physical conditions in which the
captives lived, but his kindness was lifesaving.
When Kawamura was off guard duty, a new
guard came. He launched himself at Louie,
ramming a stick through the door window and into Louie’s face . . . Upon
hearing the guard’s name Kawamura hardened, lifting his arm and flexing his
biceps at Louie. When his shift was up,
he sped away with an expression of furious determination.
For two days, Louie saw nothing of
Kawamura or the vicious guard. Then
Kawamura returned, opened Louie’s cell door a crack, and proudly pointed out
the guard who had beaten Louie. His forehead and mouth were heavily
bandaged. He never guarded the cell
again.” p. 185
45. Experiments “. . . they were subjected
to a third experiment, and a few days later came a fourth. In the last infusing a full pint of the fluid
was pumped into their veins.
Both men survived, and as terrible
as their experience had been they were lucky.
All over their captured territories, the Japanese were using at least
ten thousand POWs and civilians, including infants, as test subjects for
experiments in biological and chemical warfare.
Thousands died.” p. 187
46. “Unarmed Combatants” “The men in Ofuna,
said the Japanese, weren’t POWs; they were “unarmed combatants” at war against
Japan and, as such, didn’t have the rights that international law accorded
POWs. In fact, they had no rights at all
. . . they stressed that they did not guarantee that captives could survive
Ofuna. “They can kill you here,” Louie was told, “No one knows your alive.””
pp. 192-193
47. Beatings “Punctuating the passage of
each day were beatings. Men were beaten for folding their arms, for sitting
naked to help heal sores, for cleaning their teeth, for talking in their
sleep. Most often, they were beaten for
not understanding orders, which were almost always issued in Japanese. Dozens of men were lined up and clubbed in
the knees for one man’s alleged infraction.
A favorite punishment was to force men to stand, sometimes for hours, in
the “Ofuna crouch,” a painful and strenuous position in which men stood with
knees bent halfway and arms overhead.
Those who fell over of dropped their arms were clubbed and kicked. Captives who tried to assist victims were attacked
themselves, usually far more violently, so victims were on their own. Any attempt to protect oneself—ducking,
shielding the face—provoked greater violence.
“My job,” remembered captive Glenn McConnell, “was to keep my nose on my
face and keep from being disassembled.”
The beatings, he wrote, “were of such intensity that many of us wondered
if we’d ever live to see the end of the war.” pp. 193-194
48. On the Guards “At Ofuna, as at the
scores of POW camps scattered throughout Japan and its conquests, the men used
for guard duty were the dregs of the Japanese military. Many had washed out of regular soldierly
life, too incompetent to perform basic duties.
Quite a few were deranged.
According to captives, there were two characteristics common to nearly
all Ofuna guards. One was marked
stupidity. The other was murderous
sadism.” p. 194
49. Corporal Punishment “In the Japanese
military of that era, corporal punishment was routine practice. “Iron must be beaten while it’s hot; soldiers
must be beaten while they’re fresh” was a saying among servicemen. “No strong soldiers,” went another, “are made
without beatings.” p.194
50. Japanese Racism “One [opinion common in
Japan] held that Japanese were racially and morally superior to non-Japanese, a
“pure” people divinely destined to rule.
Just as Allied soldiers, like the cultures they came from, often held
virulently racist views of the Japanese, Japanese soldiers and civilians,
intensely propagandized by their government, usually carried their own caustic
prejudices about their enemies, seeing them as brutish, subhuman beasts or
fearsome “Anglo-Saxon devils.” This
racism, and the hatred and fear it fomented, surely served as an accelerant for
abuse of Allied prisoners.” pp. 194-195
51. The Japanese Would Not Be Captured “In
Japan’s militaristic society, all citizens, from earliest childhood, were
relentlessly indoctrinated with the lesson that to be captured in war was
intolerable shameful. The 1941 Japanese
Military Field Code made clear what was expected of those facing capture: “Have
regard for you 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, virtually every Japanese soldier fought to the
death. For every Allied soldier killed, four
were captured; for every 120 Japanese soldiers killed, 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 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 machineguns and set their living
quarters afire in a mass suicide attempt that became know as ”the night of a
thousand suicides.” The contempt and
revulsion that most Japanese felt for those who surrendered or were captured
extended to Allied servicemen. This
thinking created an atmosphere in which to abuse, enslave and even murder a
captive or POW was considered acceptable, even desirable.” p. 195
52. As in Slavery “Writing
of his childhood in slavery, Frederick Douglass told of being acquired by a man
whose wife was a tender hearted woman who had never owned a slave. “Her face was made of heavenly smiles and her
voice of tranquil music,” Douglas 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 Ofuna guards more than a century later, had succumbed to what Douglass
called “the fatal poison of irresponsible power.” p. 196
53. Kill-all Policy “That
August [1942], the Japanese war Ministry would issue a clarification of this
order, sending it to all POW camp commanders: “At such time as the situation
becomes urgent and it be extremely important, the POWs will be concentrated and
confined in their present location and under heavy guard the preparation for
the final disposition will be made . . . Weather they are destroyed
individually 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 allow the escape of a
single one, to annihilate them all and not to leave any traces””. pp. 198-199
54. Torture “The
Japanese had attempted, in vain, 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.” p. 210
55. Morse Code “
. . . words couldn’t be used, Morse code could . . . men would whisper in code,
using “tit” for “dot” and “da” for “dash,” words that could be spoken without
moving the lips.” pp. 103-104
56. Home Made Book
“Louie had another, private act of rebellion. A fellow 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 . . . He knew that he might well die
here. He wanted to leave a testament to
what he had endured and who he had been.”
b. 204
57. Mock Race “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 all over Japan and its captured territories,
and winter was coming.”
58. Fortune-teller
“Cecy [Phil’s fiancée] was a sensible, educated woman, but in her anguish, she
did something completely out of character.
She went to a fortune-teller and asked about Allen [Phil].
The fortune-teller
told her that Allen wasn’t dead. He was
injured but alive. He would be found,
she said, before Christmas.” p. 218
59. Killing Koreans
“[On the] isle, Tinian, where the Japanese held five thousand Koreans,
conscripted as laborers. Apparently afraid
that the Koreans would join the enemy if the Americans invaded, the Japanese
employed the kill-all policy. They
murdered all five thousand Koreans.” p. 223
60. Chinese Killed
for Protecting Doolittle’s Men “After bombing Japan, some of the Doolittle
crews had run out of gas and crashed or bailed out over China. Civilians had hidden the airmen from the
Japanese, who’d ransacked the country in search of them. Harris, Tinker, and Louie had heard rumors
that the Japanese had retaliated against Chinese civilians for sheltering the
Doolittle men, but didn’t know the true extent of it. The Japanese had murdered an estimated
quarter of a million civilians.” p. 225
61. “Good Japanese”
“After the war, some POWs would tell of heroic Japanese civilians who snuck
them food and medicine, incurring ferocious beatings from guards when they were
caught. But this behavior was not the
rule.” p. 226
62. Anti Escape
Decree “Ofuna officials . . . issued a new decree: Anyone caught escaping
would be executed, and for every escapee, several captive officers would be
shot.” p. 226
63. BSA Once More
“Louie saw a wooden apple box lying nearby.
Remembering his Boy Scout friction-fire training, he grabbed the box and
broke it up. He asked one of the other
men to unthread the lace for his boot. He fashioned a spindle out of a bamboo stick,
fit it into a hole in a slat from the apple box, wound the bootlace around the
spindle, and began alternately pulling the ends, turning the spindle. After a good bit of work, smoke rose from the
spindle. Louie picked up bits of a
discarded tatami mat, laid them on
the smoking area, and blew on them. The
mat remnants whooshed into flames. The
men gathered close to the fire, and cigarettes emerged from pockets. Everyone got warmer.” p.233
64. Geneva Convention
Ignored “The 1929 Geneva Convention, which Japan had signed but never
ratified, permitted detaining powers to use POWs for labor, with
restrictions. The laborers had to be
physically fit, and the labor couldn’t be dangerous, unhealthy, or of
unreasonable difficulty. The work had to be unconnected to the operations of
war, and POWs were to be given pay commensurate with their labor. Finally, to ensure the POW officers had
control over their men, they could not be forced to work.
Virtually
nothing about Japans use of POWs was in keeping with the Geneva
Convention. To be an enlisted prisoner
of war under the Japanese was to be a slave . . . The only aspect of the Geneva
Convention that the Japanese sometimes respected was the prohibition on forcing
officers to work.” p. 234
65. Food “Along
with rice, the men received some vegetables, but protein was almost
nonexistent. About once a week, someone
would push a wheelbarrow into the camp, bearing “meat.” Because a wheelbarrow’s worth was spread over
hundreds of men, a serving amounted to about a thimble-sized portion; it
consisted of things like lungs and intestines, assorted dog parts, something
the POWs called “elephant semen,” and, once, a mystery lump that, after
considerable speculation, the men decided was a horse’s vagina.” p. 235
66. Sexual Pleasure
of Violence “Watanabe derived another pleasure from violence. According to [Yuichi] Hatto [the camp
accountant], Watanabe was a sexual sadist, freely admitting that beating prisoners
brought him to climax. “He did enjoy
hurting POWs,” wrote Hatto. “He was
satisfying his sexual desire by hurting them.” p.23
67. KYBO Duty “The
Bird’s next move was to announce that from now on, the officers would empty the
benjos. Eight benjos
were no match for nine hundred dysenteric men, and keeping the pits from oozing
over was a tall order. Louie and the
other officers used “honey dippers”— giant ladles—to spoon waste from the pits
into buckets, then carried the buckets to cesspits outside the camp. The work was nauseating and degrading, and
when heavy rains came, the waste oozed out of the cesspits and back into
camp. To deprive the Bird of the
pleasure of seeing them miserable the men made a point of being jolly. Martindale created the “Royal Order of the
Benjo.” “The motto,” he wrote, “was
unprintable.” pp. 242-243
68. More Good
Japanese “Some Japanese, including Hatto, tried to help POWs behind
Watanabe’s back. No one did more than
Private Yukichi Kano, the camp interpreter . . . “there was a far braver man
than I,” wrote POW Pappy Boyington, winner of the Medal of Honor. Kano’s “heart was being torn out most of the
time, a combination of pity for the ignorance and brutality of some of his own
countrymen and a complete understanding of the suffering of the prisoners.” pp.
246-247
69. Louie Would Not
Give In “Other prisoners warned Louie that he had to show deference or the
Bird would never stop. Louie couldn’t do
it. When he raised his eyes, all that
shone in them was hate. To Watanabe,
whose life was consumed with forcing men into submission Louie’s defiance was
an intolerable, personal offense.” p.
246
70. Fortune Teller 2
“Cecy got the news she had awaited for so long.
The fortune-teller had said that Allen [Phil] would be found before Christmas. It was December 8.”
71. Theft of Red
Cross Packages “What was most maddening was that ample food was so
near. Twice that fall, Red Cross relief
packages had been delivered for the POWs, but instead of distributing them,
camp officials had hauled them into storage and begun taking what they wanted
form them.*
*After the war, the head of the Tokyo area camps would admit
that he had ordered the distribution of Red Cross parcels to Japanese
personnel.” p. 267
72. Propaganda “
. . . [from] a truck brimming with apples and oranges . . . The men were told
that they could take two pieces each. As
the famished men swarmed onto the pile, Japanese photographers circled,
snapping photos. Then just as the men were ready to devour the fruit, the order
came to put it back. The entire thing
had been staged for propaganda.” p. 268
73. Louie Gives His
Red Cross Box to Harris “The Omori POW doctor examined Harris gravely. He told Louie that the thought the marine was
dying.
That same
day, Oguri opened the storehouse and had the Red Cross boxes handed out. Giving his box to Harris was, Louie would
say, the hardest and easiest thing he eve did.
Harris rallied.” p. 272
74. Mass Murder on
Palawan “On December 15 on Palawan, the guards suddenly began screaming
that there were enemy planes coming. The
POWs crawled into the shelters and sat there, hearing no planes. Then liquid
began to rain onto them. It was
gasoline. The guards tossed in torches,
then hand grenades. The shelters, and
the men inside, erupted in flames.
As the
guards cheered, the POWs fought to escape, some clawing their own fingertips
off. Nearly all of those who broke out
were bayoneted, machine-gunned, or beaten to death. Only eleven men escaped. They swam across a nearby bay and were
discovered by inmates at a penal colony.
The inmates delivered them to Filipino guerrillas, who brought them to
American forces.
That night,
the Japanese threw a party to celebrate the massacre.” p. 273
75. The Bombing of Tokyo
“. . . the hammer fell. At seven in the
morning, during a heavy snowstorm, sixteen hundred carrier-based planes flew
past Omori and bombed Tokyo. Then came
B-29s, 229 of them, carrying incendiary bombs.
Encountering almost no resistance, they sped for the industrial district
and let their bombs fall. The POWs could
see fire dancing over skyline.” p. 274
76. Reveled by the
Flames “The Naoetsu-bound men [Naoetsu – the slave labor camp] climbed
aboard a truck, which bore them into Tokyo.
Watching the air battle over the city had been exhilarating, but when
the men saw the consequences, they were shocked. Whole neighborhoods had been reduced to charred
ruins, row after row of homes now nothing but black bones. In the rubble, Louie noticed something
shining. Standing in the remains of many
houses were large industrial machines.
What Louie was seeing was a small fragment of a giant cottage industry, war
production farmed out to innumerable private homes, schools, and small “shadow
factories.”” p. 275
78. The Bird – Again
“Louie and the others trudged into the compound and stopped before a shack,
where they were told to stand at attention.
They waited for some time, the wind frisking their clothes.
At last, a
door thumped open. A man rushed out and snapped
to a halt, screaming “Keirei!”
It was the
Bird.
Louie’s
legs folded, the snow reared up at him and down he went.” p. 276
79. Black Hole at Naoetsu
“Stacked against one wall were dozens of small boxes, some of which had broken
open and spilled gray ash onto the floor. These were the cremated remains of
sixty Australian POWs—one in every five prisoners—who had died in this camp in
1943 and 1944, succumbing to pneumonia, beriberi, malnutrition colitis, or a
combination of these. Relentless physical
abuse had precipitated most of the deaths.
In a POW camp network that would resonate across history as a supreme
example of cruelty, Naoetsu had won a special place as one of the blackest
holes in the Japanese Empire. Of the
many hells that Louie had known in this war, this place would be the worst.” p.
278
80. Worked to Death
“The Japanese literally worked men to death at Naoetsu. . .
He [the
Bird] stormed and frothed, seeming completely deranged.
Finally, he
screamed his punishment: From now on, all officers would perform hard labor,
loading coal on barges. If they refused,
he would execute every one of them. One
look at the Bird told Fitzgerald that this was an order he could not fight.
Early the
next morning, as the officers were marched off to labor, the Bird stood by,
watching them go. He was smiling.
It was a
short walk into slavery.” p. 282
81. Shoveling Coal
“The POWs were taken back to shore and dropped there, so caked in coal that
they were virtually indistinguishable.
Every
morning, the men were sent back to take up their shovels again. Every night, they dragged back into camp, a
long line of blackened ghosts trudging into the barracks and falling onto their
bunks. Weary to their bones, spitting
black saliva.” p. 283
82. The Beating “The
Bird called for the work party to line up before him and ordered the thieves to
stand before the group. He then walked
down the line, pulling out Wade, Tinker, Louie, and two other officers and
making them stand with the thieves. He
announced that these officers were responsible for the behavior of the thieves.
His punishment: Each enlisted man would punch each officer and thief in the
face, as hard as possible.
The chosen
men looked at the line of enlisted men in terror: there were some one hundred
of them. Any man who refused to carry
out the order, the Bird said, would meet the same fate as the officers and
thieves. He told the guards to club any
men who didn’t strike the chosen men with maximum force,
The enlisted
men had no choice. At first, they tried
to hit softly, but the Bird studied each blow.
When a man didn’t punch hard enough, the Bird would begin shrieking and
clubbing him, joined by the guards. Then
the errant man would be forced to hit the victim repeatedly until the Bird was
satisfied. Louie began whispering to each
man to get it over with, and hit hard.
Some of the British men whispered "Sorry sir,” before punching
Wade.
For the
first few punches, Louie stayed on his feet.
But his legs soon began to waver, and he collapsed. He pulled himself upright, but fell again
with the next punch, and then the next.
Eventually, he blacked out. When
he came to, the Bird force the men to resume punching him, Screaming, “Next! Next! Next!” In Louie’s whiling mind, the voice began to
sound like the tramping of feet.
The sun
sank. The beating went on for some two hours, the Bird watching with fierce and
erotic pleasure. When every enlisted
man had done his punching, the Bird ordered the guards to club each one twice
in the head with a kendo stick.
The victims
had to be carried to the barracks. Louie’s face was so swollen that for several
days he could barely open his mouth. By
Wade’s estimate, each man had been punched in the face some 220 times.” pp. 289-290
But Japan
was a long way from giving in. If a
massively destructive air war would not win surrender, invasion seemed the only
possibility. POWs all over the country were
noticing worrisome signs. They saw women
holding sharpened sticks, practicing lunges at stacks of rice straw, and small
children being lined up in front of schools, handed wooden mock guns and
drilled. Japan, whose people deemed
surrender shameful, appeared to be preparing to fight to the last man, woman,
or child.” pp. 291-292
84. The Beam
“Lying on the ground before them was a thick, heavy wooden beam, some six feet
long. Pick it up, the Bird said. With some effort, Louie hoisted it up, and
the Bird ordered him to lift it high and hold it directly over his head. Louie heaved the beam up. The Bird called a guard over. If the prisoner Lowes his arms, the Bird told
him, hit him with your gun. The Bird
walked to a nearby shack climbed on the roof, and settled in to watch.
Louie stood
in the sun, holding up the beam. The
Bird stretched over the roof like a contented cat, calling to the Japanese who
walked by, pointing to Louie and laughing.
Louie locked his eyes on the Bird’s face, radiating hatred.
Several
minutes passed. Louie stood, eyes on the
Bird. The beam felt heavier and heavier,
the pain more intense. The Bird watched
Louie, amused by his suffering, mocking him.
Wade and Tinker went on with their work, stealing anxious glances at the
scene across the compound. Wade had
looked at the camp clock when Louie had first lifted the beam. He became more and more conscious of how much
time was passing.
Five more
minutes passed, then ten. Louie’s arms
began to waver and go numb. His body
shook. The beam tipped. The guard jabbed
Louie with his gun, and Louie straightened up.
Less and less blood was reaching his head, and he began to feel
confused, his thoughts gauzy, the camp swimming around him. He felt his consciousness slipping, his mind
losing adhesion, until all he knew was a single thought: He cannot break me. Across
the compound the Bird stopped laughing.
Time ticked
on, and still Louie remained in the same position, conscious and yet not, the
beam over his head, his eyes on the Bird’s face, enduring long past when his
strength should have given out
“Something went on inside of me,” he said later. “I don’t know what it
was.”
There was a
flurry of motion ahead of him, the Bird leaping down from the roof and charging
toward him, enraged. Watanabe’s fist
rammed into Louie’s stomach, and Louie folded over in agony. The beam dropped, striking Louie’s head. He
flopped to the ground.
When he
woke, he didn’t know where he was or what had happened. He saw Wade and some
other POWs, along with a few guards, crouched around him. The Bird was gone. Louie had no memory of the last several
minutes, and had no idea how long he’d stood there. But Wade had looked at the clock when Louie
had fallen.
Louie had
held the beam aloft for thirty-seven minutes.” pp. 295-296
86. Hiroshima “At
a quarter to three on the morning of August 6, 1945, a B-29 skipped off Runway
Able on Tinian Island . . . Crossing the Inland Sea, Tibbets saw a city ahead .
. .
“It’s
Hiroshima.” . . .
At 8:15.17,
the bomb slipped from the plane. Tibbets
turned the plane as hard as he could and put it into a dive to gain speed . . .
One of the
crewmen counted seconds in his head.
When he hit forty-three, nothing happened. He didn’t know that he had been counting too
quickly. For an instant, he thought the
mission had failed.
Exactly as
the thought crossed his mind, the sky over the city ripped open in a firestorm
of color and sound and felling wind. A
white light, ten times the intensity of the sun, enveloped the plane as the
flash and sound and jolt of it skidded out in all directions . . . the copilot
scribbled two words in his diary: MY GOD! . . .
At POW Camp
10-D, on the far side of the mountains by Hiroshima, prisoner Ferron Cummins
felt a concussion roll down from the hills, and the air warmed strangely. He looked up.
A fantastically huge, roiling cloud, glowing bluish gray, swaggered over
the city. It was more than three miles
tall. Below it, Hiroshima was boiling.”
pp. 299-300
87. Summery of Atrocity
“In its rampage over the east, Japan had brought atrocity and death on a
scale that staggers the imagination. In
the midst of it were the prisoners of war.
Japan held some 132,000 POWs from America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand,
Holland, and Australia. Of those nearly
36,000 died, more than one in every four. * (*Japan also held more than 215,000
POWs from other countries and untold thousands of forced laborers. Their death rates are unknown.) Americans fared particularly badly; of the 34,648
Americans held by Japan, 12,935—more than 37 percent—died. By comparison, only 1 percent of Americans
held by the Nazis and Italians died.
Japan murdered thousands of POWs on death marches, and worked thousands
of others to death in slavery, including some 16,000 POWs who died alongside as
many as 100,000 Asian laborers forced to build the Burma-Siam Railway. Thousands of other POWs were beaten, burned,
stabbed, or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments,
or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism. And as a result of being feed
grossly inadequate and befouled food and water thousands more died of
starvation and easily preventable diseases.
Of the 2,500 POWs at Borneo’s Sandakan camp, only 6, all escapees, made
it to September 1945 alive. Left out of
the numbering statistics are untold numbers of men who were captured and killed
on the spot or dragged to places like Kwajalein, to be murdered without the
world ever learning their fate.
In
accordance with the kill-all order, the Japanese massacred all 5,000 Korean
captives on Tinian, all of the POWs on Ballale, Wake, and Tarawa, and all but
11 POWs at Palawan. They were evidently
about to murder all 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.” p. 315
88. Forgiveness
“For Louie, these were days of bliss.
Though he was still sick, wasted, and weak, he glowed with euphoria such
as he had never experienced . . . forgiveness coursed through all 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” pp.
315-316
89. Food Bombs
“All 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.” p. 316
90. Commander John
Fitzgerald Gets a Train “. . . 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.” pp. 317-318
91. A View of
Destruction “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 all of those
B-29s had done. Once-grand cities were
now flat, black stains, their only recognizable feature a gridwork [sp.] 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 though 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.” pp. 319-320
92. The Value of
Hiroshima “A few of the trains slipped past Hiroshima. Virtually 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 still, 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 really wasn’t. But I believe the end probably justified the
means.” p. 320
93. Never Do It Again
“If I [Louie] knew I had to go through those experiences again,” he final said,
“I’d kill myself.” p. 320
94. Secret Flag Flown
“That afternoon [Sept. 2, 1945], an American navy man dug through his
belongings and pulled out his most secret and precious possession. It was an American flag with a remarkable
provenance. In 1941, just before Singapore
had fallen to the Japanese, an American missionary woman had given it to a
British POW. The POW had been loaded
aboard a ship, which had sunk. Two days
later, another British POW had rescued the flag from where it lay underwater
and slipped it to the American navy man, who had carried it through the entire
war, somehow hiding it from the Japanese, until this day. The POWs pulled down the Japanese flag and
ran the Stars and Stripes up the pole over Rokuroshi. The men stood before it, hands up in salutes,
tears running down their faces.” p. 325
95. The List of War
Criminals “On September 11, General MacArthur, now the
supreme commander of Allied powers in occupied Japan,
ordered the arrest of forty war-crimes suspects. While thousands of men would be sought later
this preliminary list was composed of those accused of the worst crimes,
including list-topper Hideki Tojo, mastermind of Pearl Harbor and the man on
whose orders POWs had been enslaved and starved, and Masahuru Homma, who was
responsible for the Bataan Death March.
On the list with them was Mutsuhiro Watanabe. pp. 334-335
96. The Execution of
Tojo “Tojo was found in his home that day, sitting in chair, blood gushing
from a self-inflected bullet wound in his chest. Whispering “Banzai!” and saying he’d rather die than face trial, Tojo was
given a pint of American blood plasma, then taken to a hospital. When he recovered, he was housed at Omori,
sleeping in Bob Martindale’s bunk. He
complained about lice and bedbugs. He
was tried, sentenced to death, and in1948, hanged.” p. 335
97. How They Suffered
“ . . . Physically, almost every one of them was ravaged. The average army or army air forces Pacific
POW had lost sixty-one pounds in captivity, a remarkable statistic given that
roughly three-quarters of the men had weighed just 159 pounds or less upon
enlistment. Tuberculosis, malaria,
dysentery, malnutrition, anemia, eye ailments, and festering wounds were
widespread. At one chain of hospitals,
doctors found a history of wet beriberi in 77 percent of POWs and dry beriberi
in half. Among Canadian POWs, 84 percent
had neurologic damage. Respiratory diseases,
from infections and exposure to unbreathable air in factories and mines, were
rampant. Men had been crippled and
disfigured by unset broken bones, and their teeth had been ruined by beatings
and years of chewing grit in their food.
Others had gone blind from malnutrition.
Scores of men were so ill that they had to be carried from camps, and it
was common for men to remain hospitalized for many months after repatriation.
Some couldn’t be saved.
The
physical injuries were lasting, debilitating, and sometimes deadly. A 1954 study found that in the first two
postwar years, former Pacific POWs died at almost four times the expected rate
for men of their age, and continued to die at unusually high rates for many
years. The health repercussions often lasted
for decades; a follow-up study found that twenty-two years after the war,
former Pacific POWs had hospitalization rates between two and eight times
higher than former European POWs for a host of diseases.
As bad as
were the physical consequences of captivity, the emotional injuries were much more
insidious, widespread, and enduring. In
the first six postwar years, one of the most common diagnoses given to
hospitalized former Pacific POWs was psychoneurosis. Nearly forty years after the war, more than
85 percent of former Pacific POWs in one study suffered from post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD), characterized in part by flashbacks, anxiety, and
nightmares. And in a 1987 study, eight
in ten former Pacific POWs had “Psychiatric impairment,” six in ten had anxiety
disorders, more than one in four had PTSD, and nearly one in five was
depressed. For some, there was only one
way out: a 1970 study report that former Pacific POWs committed suicide 30
percent more often then controls.” pp. 346-347
98. An Atrocity
“Raymond “Hap” Holloran was a navigator who parachuted into Tokyo after his
B-29 was shot down. Once on the ground,
Halloran was beaten by a mob of civilians, then captured by Japanese
authorities, who tortured him, locked him in a pig cage, and held him in a
burning horse stall during the fire bombings.
They stripped him naked and put him on display at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo, tied
upright in an empty tiger cage so civilians could gawk at his filthy,
sore-encrusted body. He was starved so
severely that he lost one hundred pounds.” pp. 247-348
99. Executions
“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* (* Some death sentences were later commuted: 920 men were
eventually executed.)”
100. “Never Came
Home” “No one could reach Louie, because he had never really come home. In
prison camp, he’d been beaten into dehumanized obedience to a world order in
which the Bird was absolute sovereign, and it was under this world order that
he still lived. The Bird had taken his
dignity and left him feeling humiliated, ashamed, and powerless, and Louie
believed that only the Bird could restore him, by suffering and dying in the
grip of his hands. A once singularly
hopeful man now believed that his only hope lay in murder.” pp. 365-366
101. Billy Graham and
the Footprints of God “Under the tent that night, Graham spoke of how the
word was in an age of war, an age defined by persecution and suffering. Why, Graham asked, is God silent while good
men suffer? He began his answer by
asking his audience to consider the evening sky. “If you look into the heavens tonight, on
this beautiful California night, I see the stars and can see the footprints of
God,” he said. “ . . . I think to myself, my heavenly father, hung them there
with a flaming fingertip and holds them there with the power of his omnipotent
hand, and he runs the whole universe, and he’s not too busy running the whole
universe to count the hairs on my head and see a sparrow when it falls, because
God is interested in me . . . God spoke in creation” p 374
102. Graham on Faith
“What God asks of men, said Graham, is faith.
His invisibility is the truest test of that faith. To know who sees him, God makes himself
unseen.” p .375
103. The Miracle of
the Promise “As he reached the aisle, he stopped. Cynthia, the rows of bowed heads, the sawdust
underfoot, the tent around him, all disappeared. A memory long beaten back, the memory from
which he had run the evening before, was upon him.
Louie was
on the raft. There was gentle Phil
crumpled up before him, Mac’s breathing skeleton, endless ocean stretching away
in every direction, the sun lying over them, the cunning bodies of the sharks, waiting,
circling. He was a body on a raft, dying
of thirst. He felt words whisper from
his swollen lips. It was a promise
thrown at heaven, a promise he had not kept, a promise he had allowed himself
to forget until just this instant” If you
will save me, I will serve you forever.
And then, standing under a circus tent on a clear night in downtown Los
Angeles, Louie felt rain falling.” p. 375
104. Cleaning Up His
Life “When they entered the apartment, Louie went straight to his cache of
liquor. It was the time of night when
the need usually took hold of him, but for the first time in years, Louie had
no desire to drink. He carried the
bottles to the kitchen sink, opened them, and poured their contents into the
drain. Then he hurried through the
apartment, gathering packs of cigarettes, a secret stash of girlie magazines,
everything that was part of his ruined years.
He heaved it all down the trash chute.” p. 376
105. Saved by Love
“When he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that
he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save
him.” P. 376
106. On Compassion “In Sugamo Prison, as he was told of
Watanabe’s fate, all Louie saw was a lost person, a life now beyond
redemption. He felt something that he
had never felt for his captor before.
With a shiver of amazement, he realized that it was compassion.” p. 379
107. Boys Camp
“So opened the great project of Louie’s life, the nonprofit Victory Boys Camp .
. .Victory became a tonic for lost boys.
Louie took on anyone including one boy so ungovernable that Louie had to
be deputized by as sheriff to gain custody of him. He took the boys fishing, swimming, horseback
riding, camping, and in winter, skiing.
He led them on mountain hikes, letting them talk out their troubles, and
rappelled down cliffs beside them. He
showed them vocational films, living for the days when a boy would see a career
depicted and whisper, “That’s what I want to do!” Each evening, Louie sat with the boys before
a campfire, telling them about his youth, the war, and the road that had led
him to peace. We went easy on
Christianity, but laid it before them as an option. Some we convinced, some
not, but either way, boys who arrived at Victory as ruffians often left it
renewed and reformed.” pp. 381-382
108. “Fame” “The
house on Gramercy became a historic landmark, Louie was chosen to carry the Olympic
torch before five different Games. So
many groups would clamor to give him awards that he’d find it difficult to fit
everyone in” p. 383
109. “Christmas
Amnesty” “ . . . 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 alliance 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 all convicted war criminals. With the pursuit of justice for POSWs 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.” pp. 390-391
109. The End “Mutsuhiro
Watanabe’s flight was over. In his
absence, many of his fellow 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, all of
them, including those serving life sentences, would soon be paroled. It appears that even Suehar Kitamra, “the
Quack,” was set free, in spite of his death sentence. By 1958, every criminal who had not been
executed would be free, and on December 30 of that year, all would be granted
amnesty. Sugamo would be torn down, an
the epic ordeals of POWs in Japan would fade form the world’s memory.” p. 392
110. Japanese POWs in
America “ . . . Shoichi Ishizuka, a veteran who’d been held as a POW by the
Americans and treated so kindly that he referred to the experience as “lucky
prison life.” p. 394
111. Still Running
“At last [January 22, 1998], it was time. Louie extended his hand, and in it
was placed the Olympic torch. His legs
could no longer reach and push as they once had, but they were sill sure
beneath him. He raised the torch, bowed,
and began running.” p. 397