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

for them. They began to wonder if anyone knew they were there. It wasn’t until September 2 that B-29s finally flew over Rokuroshi, their pallets hitting the rice paddies with such force that the men had to dig them out. The POWs ate themselves silly. One man downed twenty pounds of food in a single day, but somehow didn’t get sick.
    That afternoon, an American navy man dug through his belongings and pulled out his most secret and precious possession. It was an American flag with a remarkable provenance. In 1941, just before Singapore had fallen to the Japanese, an American missionary woman had given it to a British POW. The POW had been loaded aboard a ship, which had sunk. Two days later, another British POW had rescued the flag from where it lay underwater and slipped it to the American navy man, who had carried it through the entire war, somehow hiding it from the Japanese, until this day. The POWs pulled down the Japanese flag andran the Stars and Stripes up the pole over Rokuroshi. The men stood before it, hands up in salutes, tears running down their faces.
    On September 9, Phil, Fred, and the other POWs were finally trucked off the mountain. Arriving in Yokohama, they were greeted with pancakes, a band playing “California, Here I Come,” and a general who broke down when he saw them. The men were escorted aboard a ship for hot showers and more food. On September 11, the ship set off for home.
    When news of the Trumbull story reached Indiana, Kelsey Phillips’s telephone began ringing, and friends and reporters flocked onto her front porch. Remembering the War Department’s request that she not speak publicly of her son’s survival, Kelsey kept a smiling silence, awaiting official notification that Allen had been released from the POW camp. It wasn’t until September 16 that the War Department telegram announcing Allen’s liberation reached her. It was followed by a phone call from her sister, who delivered a message from Allen that had passed from person to person from Rokuroshi to Yokohama to San Francisco to New Jersey to Indiana: He was free. Allen’s friends went downtown and bought newspapers, spread them out on someone’s living room floor, and spent the morning reading and crying.
    As she celebrated, Kelsey thought of what Allen had written in a letter to her. “I would give anything to be home with all of you,” the letter said, “but I’m looking forward to the day—whenever it comes.”
    “That day,” Kelsey rejoiced, “has come.”
    ——

    On Okinawa, Louie was having a grand time, eating, drinking, and making merry. When he was given orders to fly out, he begged a doctor to arrange for him to stay a little longer, on the grounds that he didn’t want his mother to see him so thin. The doctor not only agreed to have Louie “hospitalized,” he threw him a welcome-back-to-life bash, complete with a five-gallon barrel of “bourbon”—alcohol mixed with Coke syrup, distilled water, and whatever else was handy.
    More than a week passed, bombers left with loads of POWs, and still Louie stayed on Okinawa. The nurses threw him another party, the ersatz bourbon went down easy, and there was a moonlit jeep ride with a pretty girl. Along the way, Louie discovered that a delightful upside to being believed dead was that he could scare the hell out of people. Learning that a former track recruiter from USC was on the island, he asked a friend to tell the recruiter that he had a college runningprospect who could spin a mile in just over four minutes. The recruiter eagerly asked to meet the runner. When Louie appeared, the recruiter fell over backward in his chair.
    On September 17, atyphoon hit Okinawa. Louie was in a tent when nature called, sending him into the storm to fight his way to an outhouse. He was on the seat with his pants down when a wind gust shot the outhouse over an embankment, carrying Louie in it. Dumped in the mud under a downpour, Louie stood up, hitched up his pants, got broadsided by another gust, and fell over. He crawled through the mud, “lizarding his way,” as he put it, up the hill. He had to bang on the hospital door for a while before someone heard him.
    The next morning dawned to find planes flipped over, ships sunk, tents collapsed. Louie, covered in everything that a somersault inside an outhouse will slather on a man, was finally willing to leave Okinawa. He got an enlisted man to pour water over his head while he soaped off, then went to the