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

holes in a farmer’s field, and everyone knew it. For the POWs, kept in ignorance of the Pacific war’s progression, this raid, and the growing number of B-29 sightings over the village, raised a dazzling possibility. If the Americans were turning their efforts toward a lone steel mill in a place as obscure as Naoetsu, had the B-29s already destroyed the big strategic cities?
    The answer came ten days later. Four hundred new POWs tramped through the gates and halted in the compound. The Bird leapt onto a perch over them and delivered his standard harangue:
    “You must be sober! You must be sincere! You must work for earnest! You must obey! I have spoken.”
    “Who the hell is Ernest?” muttered a POW.
    When the Bird was finished, the four hundred new men wedged into the barracks with the three hundred old ones, and the
benjos
ranneth over. The new men said they’d come from slave camps in the huge cities of Kobe, a matrix of war production, and Osaka, Japan’s biggest port. Weeks before, B-29s had swept over those cities in gleaming, three-hundred-plane swarms, showering them in fire. Large swaths of Kobe and Osaka had been burned to the ground. Of no use to Japan in razed cities, the POWs had been shipped to Naoetsu to be reenslaved for the empire. The new men had one other piece of news: Germany had fallen. The whole weight of the Allies was now thrown against Japan.
    ——

    That month, the Bird’s presence at Naoetsu became sporadic. On top of his duty at Naoetsu, he’d been named disciplinary officer for Mitsushima, a camp in the mountains. He arrived there with his trademark flourish, bursting through a door and shouting, “
Nanda!
” at a group of startled POW officers, demanding to know what they were doing. Immediately, he set to beating the officers day and night. The POWs there called him “the Knob.”
    The Bird was so vicious at Mitsushima that the POW officers soon concluded that they had to kill him to save themselves. Conspirators formed “murder squads” set on drowning the Bird or hurling him from a cliff. Whenever the Bird was in camp, they stalked him, but he seemed to be on to them, moving about with armed guards. Meanwhile, two POW physicians, Richard Whitfield and Alfred Weinstein, hatched a plan to poison the Bird with massive doses of atropine and morphine.Again the Bird eluded them: The day after the doctors formed their plan, the Bird had the pharmacy medications locked up.
    Whitfield devised a new plan. Preparing a bottle of saline solution and glucose to serve as a culture medium, he mixed in stool samples from two patients infected with amoebic and bacillary dysentery, tossed in three flies, then stored the bottle next to his skin for several days to incubate the pathogens. He and Weinstein delivered it to the POW cook, who poured it onto the Bird’s rice for the better part of a week. To their amazement, the Bird didn’t get sick, so the doctors mixed up a new dose, using the stools of six ill POWs. This time, they hit the jackpot.
    In two days, the Bird was violently ill, completely incapacitated with rocketing diarrhea and a 105-degree fever. Weinstein found him in his room, crying and “whimpering like a child.” The Bird ordered Weinstein to cure him. Weinstein gave him what he said were sulfa pills. Suspicious, the Bird made Weinstein take some of the pills himself. Weinstein took them, knowing that all that was in them was aspirin and baking soda. The Bird lost fifteen pounds in one week. Weinstein urged him to eat his rice.
    With the Bird out of the way, the men and even the guards were, wrote Weinstein, “almost hysterically childish” in their delight. But the Bird seemed unmurderable. After ten days, his fever broke. He returned to Naoetsu to take out his rage on the officers and Louie.
    ——

    By June, Louie’s leg was healed enough to bear his weight, and he was sent back to shovel coal and salt. He was growing ever sicker, and his dysentery never eased. When he appealed for rest while burning up with fever, the Bird refused him. His temperature was only 103, he said; you go to work. Louie went.
    One day that month, Louie, Tinker, and Wade were shoveling on a barge when the foreman discovered that fish had been stolen from the galley. The foreman announced that if the thieves didn’t turn themselves in, he’d report the theft to the Bird. During a lunch break, the innocent men persuaded the culprits to confess. When the men walked into camp that