Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

engines—each engine almost twice as powerful as each of those of the B-24—it could rocket across the sky at up to 358 miles per hour and carry giant bomb loads. A B-24 didn’t have a prayer of making it from Saipan to Japan’s home islands and back. This plane could do it. It was theB-29 Superfortress, and it would bring down Japan.
    The bomber, soon to be named
Tokyo Rose
as a mocking homage to the women who broadcast Japanese propaganda, was piloted by Captain Ralph Steakley. That morning, he flew his plane north. The plane split the air nearly six miles up. Above was a sky of intense blue; below, sliding over the horizon, came Japan.
    B-29s had been used a handful of times over Japan, in raids launched from China, beginning four and a half months earlier. Largely because of the difficulty of supplying the Chinese bases and flying the vast distances between those bases and Japan, the missions had been ineffective. But to the Japanese, the swift leviathans were terrifying, inspiring the graffiti that Louie had seen. Three weeks after the first China-based raid, Saipan had been captured, and American plans had shifted to launching B-29s from there. Steakley’s was the first run from Saipan to Tokyo, which hadn’t seen an American plane since the Doolittle raid in 1942. His plane carried not bombs but cameras: Steakley was mapping the path for the B-29s that would follow his. At noon, the plane reached the city.
    Louie was standing in a group of POWs, doing calisthenics on the orders of the guards, when a siren began sounding. The guards, as usual during alerts, shooed the men into the barracks. The POWs were used to the sirens, which had always been false alarms, so the alert caused little concern.
    In the barracks, the men peered out the windows. Something was different; the guards were gaping at the sky as if, wrote Bob Martindale, “they were looking for the Messiah.” Then there was a glint above, a finger pointing urgently, and a crush of POWs bolting for thedoor. Running into the compound with his face skyward, Louie saw a sliver of radiant white light high over Tokyo, contrails curling behind it like twisting spines. “Oh God, God, an American plane!” someone shouted. The guards looked stricken. Martindale heard them speaking to each other in high agitation. One phrase stood out: “
B niju ku
.”
    Louie, like all the POWs, had no idea what kind of plane this was. Then a POW who’d just been captured said that it was a new American bomber called a B-29. A cheer rang out. Men began shouting, “B-29! B-29!” The bomber was the most beautiful thing that Louie had ever seen.
    Across the bay, masses of civilians stood in the streets, looking at the sky. As the plane passed into the civilians’ view, Frank Tinker heard the people shouting, sounds that blended into a roar. Louie glanced toward the south end of camp. The Bird was standing just outside his office, motionless and expressionless, watching the plane.
    “It was not their Messiah,” Martindale wrote, “but ours.”
    ——

    The bomber was flying at perfect liberty. Steakley guided it in a series of straight runs over the city as his crewmen snapped photographs. Below, the guards began pursuing the elated POWs, trying to force them back into the barracks. The men shushed each other, fearing that they’d be beaten for celebrating. The clamor died down. Louie stood with the other men and watched the bomber, occasionally darting between barracks to avoid the guards.
    Steakley flew over Tokyo for more than an hour. No Japanese planes or guns engaged him. Finally, as he turned back for Saipan, a Zero banked up for his tail, followed briefly, then turned away.
    Newspapers were relatively easy to come by in Omori. Slave laborers snuck them in, and each day, at his work site, Milton McMullen gave a Korean truck driver a bag of stolen rice in exchange for a small English-language paper, which McMullen smuggled into camp in his boot. For the POWs, the papers were inexhaustibly amusing. Though the Japanese press covered the European theater accurately, it was notorious for distorting the news of the Pacific war, sometimes absurdly. Louie once read a story about a Japanese pilot who ran out of ammunition in a dogfight and downed his opponent with a rice ball.
    On the day after the B-29 flyover, the coverage wore a similar stripe. “Paper says, ‘Lone enemy B-29 visits Tokyo area,’ ” wrote POW Ernest Norquist in his diary. “It said it came