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

hounded the POWs with endless inspections, prohibited smoking, singing, and card playing, and outlawed religious services. He slapped one officer across the face repeatedly for five minutes, made him stand at attention, coatless, for four hours in the cold, then ordered him to clean the
benjos
for two hours a day for two weeks. He beat a kitchen worker with a spoon the size of an oar. He pawed through the men’s belongings, confiscating personal papers and photographs of loved ones, deeming much of it “suspicious” and destroying it. He was seized with paranoia. “You win war, and you make all Japanese like black slaves!” he shouted at a POW. He hauled Martindale to his office, accused him of plotting to burn down a barracks, and beat him so energetically, with fists and a kendo stick, that he overturned all of the furniture.

    B-29 Superfortresses.
Associated Press

    In December, the Bird left camp for several days, and Omori was briefly peaceful. But on the night before the Bird was slated to return, the POWs were jarred from their sleep to hear him charging through camp in a driving rainstorm, yelling that it was a fire drill. When the designated firefighters assembled under the freezing downpour, the Bird punched several of them in the face, ran through barracks shouting and punching other men, then ordered every man in camp to line up outside. When Louie and the others did as told, the Bird drew his sword, swung it around, and screamed orders and invectives. For two hours, the Bird forced the men to pump water on imaginary fires, beat out phantom blazes with brooms, and run in and out of buildings “rescuing” food and documents.
    As December progressed, the Bird’s mania deepened. He rounded up the officers and hounded them across the bridge and into Tokyo, on the pretense of retrieving firewood from bombed-out houses. Troughs of water for firefighting had been set along the streets, and as the men marched, the Bird leapt upon one, drew his sword, and screamed“
Keirei!
” The men saluted him, and the Bird, lost in a fantasy, stood on his roost in an absurdly exaggerated troop-reviewing pose that reminded Tom Wade of Mussolini. Civilians gathered and began cheering. After the POWs had passed, the Bird jumped down, ran ahead, and hopped onto another trough, shouting, striking his pose, and demanding salutes. Over and over he repeated the farce, driving the men on for miles.
    When the bombs were falling, the Bird would snap, running through camp with his sword in the air, wailing at the men, foam flying from his mouth, lips peeled back in a wicked rictus, eyelid drooping, face purple. During at least two bombings, he prevented the POWs from seeking cover in the trenches. In one incident, he ran the POWs outside, stood them at attention, and ordered the guards to aim their rifles at them. With bombs booming, the Bird raced up and down the line of terrified POWs, swinging his sword over their heads.
    Every escalation in the bombing brought a parallel escalation in the Bird’s attacks on Louie. He sped around camp in search of the American, fuming and furious. Louie hid, but the Bird always found him. Three or four times a week, the Bird launched himself at Louie in what Frank Tinker would call his “death lunge,” coming at him with fists flying, going for his face and head. Louie would emerge dazed and bleeding. He was more and more convinced that Watanabe wouldn’t stop until he was dead.
    Louie began to come apart. At night, the Bird stalked his dreams, screeching, seething, his belt buckle flying at Louie’s skull. In the dreams, the smothered rage in Louie would overwhelm him, and he’d find himself on top of his monster, his hands on the corporal’s neck, strangling the life from him.
    ——

    As Louie suffered through December, some three hundred miles away, his former pilot was wasting away in a filthy, unheated barracks in theZentsuji POW camp. Phil had been transferred to Zentsuji the previous August, joining one-legged Fred Garrett, who’d been transferred from Ofuna.
    Though Ofuna interrogators had spoken of Zentsuji as a “plush” reward, the camp was no such place. The prisoners’ diet was so poor that the men wandered the compound, ravenous, pulling up weeds and eating them. Their only drinking water came from a reservoir fed by runoff from rice paddies fertilized with human excrement, and to avoiddying of thirst, the POWs had to drink it, leaving 90 percent of them afflicted