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

Louie tore open the envelopes, and out came photographs of his family. It was the first that Louie had seen or heard of them in nearly two and a half years. He clutched his letters and hung on.
    The POWs were in a state of confusion; the guards would tell them nothing. A day passed with no news. When night fell, the men looked over the countryside and saw something they’d never seen before. The village was illuminated in the darkness; the blackout shades all over Naoetsu had been taken down. As a test, some of the POWs removed the shades on the barracks windows. The guards ordered them to put the shades back up. If the war had ended, the guards were going to considerable lengths to hide this fact from the POWs. The kill-all date was five days away.
    The next day, Louie was sicker still. He examined his feeble body and scrawled sad words in his diary: “Look like skeleton. feel weak.”
    The Bird reappeared, apparently back from preparing whatever lay in store for the POWs in the mountains. He looked different, a shade of a mustache darkening his lip. Louie saw him step into his office and close the door.
    ——

    On August 17, atRokuroshi POW camp on the frigid summit of a Japanese mountain, a telephone rang.
    Phil, Fred Garrett, and more than 350 other Rokuroshi POWs were shivering through summer inside the barracks, trying to survive on a nearly all-liquid diet. In this extremely remote, deathly quiet camp, the lone telephone hardly ever rang, and the POWs noticed it. A few minutes later, the Japanese commander hurried out of camp and down the mountain.
    For some time, the Rokuroshi prisoners had been racked with tension. All summer, the sky had been scratched with vapor trails. One night in July, the men had looked from the barracks to see the whole southern horizon lit up in red, generating light so bright that the men could read by it. On August 8, the guards had begun nailing the barracks doors shut. Then, on August 15, the guards had suddenly become much more brutal, and the POWs’ workload, breaking rocks on a hillside, had been intensified.
    After the commander left, something troubling happened. The guards began bringing the POWs out of the barracks and dividing them into small groups. Once they had the men assembled, they herded them out of camp and deep into the mountain forest, heading nowhere. After pushing the men onward through the trees for some time, the guards led the men back to camp and into the barracks. Later, the walks were repeated. No explanation was given. The guards seemed to be inuring the men to this strange routine in preparation for something terrible.
    ——

    On August 20, a white sky stretched out over Naoetsu, heavy and threatening. There was a shout in the compound: All POWs were to assemble outside. Some seven hundred men tramped out of the barracks and formed lines before the building. The little camp commander, gloves on his hands and a sword on his hip, stepped atop the air-raid spotter’s platform, and Kono climbed up beside him. The commander spoke, and Kono translated.
    “The war has come to a point of cessation.”
    There was no reaction from the POWs. Some believed it, but kept silent for fear of reprisal. Others, suspecting a trick, did not. The commander went on, becoming strangely solicitous. Speaking as if the POWs were old friends, he voiced his hope that the prisoners would help Japan fight the “Red Menace”—the Soviet Union, which had just seized Japan’s Kuril Islands.
    With the commander’s speech finished and the POWs waiting in suspicious silence, Kono invited the POWs to bathe in the Hokura River. This, too, was odd; the men had only rarely been allowed to go in the river. The POWs broke from their lines and began hiking down to the water, dropping clothes as they walked. Louie dragged along after them, peeled off his clothes, and waded in.
    All over the river, the men scattered, scrubbing their skin, unsure what was happening. Then they heard it.
    It was the growl of an aircraft engine, huge, low, and close. The swimmers looked up, and at first saw nothing but the overcast sky. Then, there it was, bursting from the clouds: a torpedo bomber.
    As the men watched, the bomber dove, leveled off, and skimmed over the water, its engine screaming. The POWs looked up at it. The bomber was headed straight toward them.
    In the instant before the plane shot overhead, the men in the water could just make out the cockpit and, inside, the pilot, standing.