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

private.
    Louie was alone in the studio. In front of him were several copies of the message that they wanted him to deliver. He slid his hand through a tear in his pocket, snagged a copy, and pulled it into his coat. The producers returned.
    “Okay,” one of them said. “I think you go to punishment camp.”
    Omori was called a punishment camp, but the producers were clearly referring to some other place. For Louie, any camp had to be better than Omori, because the Bird wouldn’t be there. The producers gave him one last chance to change his mind. He did not.
    Louie was dumped back at Omori. The Bird was waiting for him, glowing with renewed hatred. His beatings resumed, with intensified vigor. Maybe Louie was being punished for refusing to make the broadcast, or maybe the producer to whom Louie had appealed for help had told the Bird of Louie’s accusations. Louie stood his ground, took his beatings with rebellion boiling in him, and waited to be shipped to “punishment camp.” And like all the other POWs, he watched the sky, praying that the promise of that first B-29 would be fulfilled.
    ——

    In the early afternoon on Friday, November 24, the Tokyo sirens began to howl. From the sky came an immense shivering sound. The POWs looked up. There, so high that they appeared to be gleaming slits in thesky, were acres and acres of B-29s, one hundred and eleven of them, flying toward an aircraft factory on the rim of the city. Caught in what would later be called the jet stream, the planes were streaking along at speeds approaching 445 miles per hour, almost 100 miles per hour faster than they were built to fly. The Americans had arrived.
    “It was a cold, clear, sunny day,” wrote POW Johan Arthur Johansen, who was at a slave site at the time. “The planes were shining like silver in the sunshine against the blue sky overhead … It was a beautiful sight which lift[ed] our spirit right up to the sky.” Men began yelling, “Drop the bombs!” and “Happy landings!” and “Welcome back!” The guards stared up, so awed by the planes that they didn’t seem to hear the men shouting.

    A B-29 over Japan.
Associated Press

    At Omori, the camp accountant, Yuichi Hatto, was standing with a group of POWs. As they watched, a lone Japanese fighter raced toward the planes, then abruptly, startlingly, flew straight into a bomber, the smaller plane shattering and raining down on Tokyo Bay. The bomber began falling, white smoke twirling from it. A single parachute puffed from its side, and one of the POWs cried, “One safe! Safe!” The Englishword caught in Hatto’s ear; he had heard it used only in baseball games. The bomber hit the water, killing all aboard. The lone survivor, under his parachute, wafted over Tokyo as gently as a dandelion seed. As the man sank into the city, Hatto had a sick feeling, thinking of what would happen to that airman when he reached the ground. The other bombers flew on. A few minutes later, there was distant booming.
    ——

    As the fall stretched on, B-29s crossed over Omori nearly every day, sometimes a lone plane, sometimes vast continents of aircraft. On sunny days, the men stood out and watched them; on cloudy days, they only heard them, a growl above the gray. In Tokyo, thesirens sang so incessantly that the POWs began sleeping through them.
    Eighty-one bombers went over on November 27. On the drizzly night of November 29–30, the prisoners were awakened by two incendiary raids on Tokyo’s industrial areas. Explosions were heard far away, and the POWs could see licks of fire on the mainland, the last gasps of the 2,773 structures that burned that night. Civilians began streaming over the bridge and camping outside Omori’s walls in hopes of escaping the bombs.
    One day that fall, Louie stood outside, watching Japanese fighters turning lupine circles around a crowd of B-29s. The battle was so high that only the giant, shining bombers were consistently visible; the fighters, tiny in contrast, flickered in and out of view as the sunlight caught them. Every little while, there was a sharp, brief burst of light alongside the bombers. To Louie, it looked like firecrackers. It was the fighters, gunned by the B-29s, blowing up. The bombers flew on, imperious. The Bird watched the scene with a stricken face. “
Hikoki dame,
” he said. “
Hikoki dame.
” Japan’s planes, he was lamenting, were no good.
    Every B-29 that beat a path over Tokyo wound the Bird tighter. He