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

looking “dirty, ragged and haggard,” and a lone man trying to pull them back. He aborted the drop and circled again. By the time he returned, Louie had cleared the paddy. The second drop rolled out.
    Kinney turned the plane again, descended very low over camp, and dipped his wings. Louie stood under him in a crowd of POWs, waving his shirt. Kinney was so low that he and Louie saw each other’s smiling faces. “We could almost hear their cheers as we passed over the last time,” Kinney wrote. “They looked so happy. It touched my heart. I felt perhaps we were the hand of Providence reaching out to those men. I was very thankful I had gone.”

    B-29 pilot Byron Kinney shot this photograph on his final pass over Naoetsu on September 2, 1945. The Naoetsu POW camp is straight ahead, on the far side of the bridge. The large barracks from which Louie and other officers planned to throw the Bird to his death is faintly visible, at the confluence of the two rivers.
Byron Kinney

    As
Ghost Ship
sailed off, one of Kinney’s crewmen piped the radio over the interphone. On came General Douglas MacArthur’s voice, broadcasting from the deck of the USS
Missouri
in Tokyo Bay. Standing with MacArthur was Bill Harris. He’d been rescued from Omori and brought to the ship to occupy a place of honor. Alongside the Americans stood Japanese officials, there to sign surrender documents.
    In its rampage over the east, Japan had brought atrocity and death on a scale that staggers the imagination. In the midst of it were the prisoners of war. Japan held some 132,000 POWs from America, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Holland, and Australia. Of those, nearly36,000 died, more than one in every four. * Americans fared particularly badly; of the 34,648 Americans held by Japan, 12,935—more than 37 percent—died. * By comparison, only 1 percent of Americans held by the Nazis and Italians died. Japan murdered thousands of POWs ondeath marches, and worked thousands of others to death in slavery, including some 16,000 POWs who died alongside as many as 100,000 Asian laborers forced to build theBurma-Siam Railway. Thousands of other POWs were beaten, burned, stabbed, or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed duringmedical experiments, or eaten alive in ritual acts ofcannibalism. And as a result of being fed grossly inadequate and befouled food and water, thousands more died of starvation and easily preventable diseases. Of the 2,500 POWs at Borneo’sSandakan camp, only 6, all escapees, made it to September 1945 alive. Left out of the numbing statistics are untold numbers of men who were captured and killed on the spot or dragged to places like Kwajalein, to be murdered without the world ever learning their fate.
    In accordance with the kill-all order, the Japanese massacred all 5,000 Korean captives on Tinian, all of the POWs onBallale,Wake, andTarawa, and all but 11 POWs atPalawan. They were evidently about to murder all the other POWs and civilian internees in their custody when the atomic bomb brought their empire crashing down.
    On the morning of September 2, 1945, Japan signed its formal surrender. The Second World War was over.
    ——

    For Louie, these were days of bliss. Though he was still sick, wasted, and weak, he glowed with euphoria such as he had never experienced. His rage against his captors was gone. Like all the men around him, he felt flush with love for everyone and everything.
    Only the thought of the Bird gave him pause. A few days earlier, Louie would have bound and killed him without remorse. Now the vengeful urge no longer had sure footing. The Bird was gone, his ability to reach Louie—physically, at least—extinguished. At that moment, all Louie felt was rapture.
    Forgiveness coursed through all of the men at Naoetsu. POWsdoled out supplies to civilians and stood in circles of children, handing out chocolate. Louie and other POWs brought food and clothing to the guards and asked them to take it home to their families. Even Kono was spared. Ordered to stay in camp, he holed up in his office for eleven days, so afraid of retribution that he never once came out. When a POW opened the door, Kono gasped and ran to a corner. A few days before, he might have met with reprisal, but today, there was no such spirit. The POWs left him alone. *
    There was only one act of vengeance in the camp. When a particularly hated guard appeared in the galley, a POW grabbed him by the collar and the seat of the pants and threw him