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

2008, when he was about to turn ninety-two, he was moving a slab of concrete on a dolly down a flight of stairs when the dolly wheels broke, sending Louie and the concrete crashing down the steps. He wound up in the hospital with a minor hip fracture and a shattered thumb. As his daughter came down the hospital corridor toward his room, she heard shouts of “Hey Louie!” from the crowd of friends that her father had made among the hospital staff. “I neverknew anyone,” Pete once said, “who didn’t love Louie.” As soon as he was out of the hospital, Louie went on a three-mile hike.
    ——

    With the war over, Phil became Allen again. After a brief stint running a plastics business in Albuquerque, he and Cecy moved to his boyhood hometown, La Porte, Indiana, where they eventually took jobs at a junior high, Allen teaching science, Cecy teaching English. They were soon parents to a girl and a boy.
    Allen hardly ever mentioned the war. His friends kept their questions to themselves, fearful of treading upon a painful place. Other than the scars on his forehead from the
Green Hornet
crash, only his habits spoke of what he’d been through. After having lived for weeks on raw albatross and tern, he never again ate poultry. He had a curious affinity for eating food directly out of cans, cold. And the onetime king hot dog of his squadron wouldn’t go near an airplane. As the jet age overtook America, he stayed in his car. Only many years later, when his daughter lost her husband in an auto accident, did he brave the air to go to her.
    He never returned to Japan, and he seemed, outwardly, free of resentment. The closest thing to it was the flicker of irritation that people thought they saw in him when he was, almost invariably, treated as a trivial footnote in what was celebrated as Louie’s story. If he was rubbed wrong by it, he bore it graciously. In 1954, when the TV program
This Is Your Life
feted Louie and presented him with a gold watch, a movie camera, a Mercury station wagon, and a thousand dollars, Allen traveled to California to join Louie’s family and friends on stage, wearing a neat bow tie and looking at the floor as he spoke. When the group posed together, Allen slipped to the back.

    Allen Phillips with his children, Chris and Karen, bedtime, 1952.
Courtesy of Karen Loomis

    As Allen grew old, he settled into retired life with Cecy. He walked quite a few back nines, changed his rooting interests from the Sox to the Cubs, and spent whole days just sitting in silence. “Dad must have swung a thousand miles on that front porch swing,” said his daughter, Karen Loomis. “What he was thinking, I don’t know.”
    In the 1990s, diabetes and heart disease converged on him. In 1998, a few months before he died, he was moved to a nursing home. When the staff learned his war story, they scheduled an event to honor him. It was probably the first time that what he’d done during the war was publicly recognized not simply in reference to Louie, but for its own sake. For the only time in his life, Allen became an open book. As people gathered to listen to his story, spellbound, Karen saw a lovely light come to her father’s face. There was, she said, “a little grin underneath.”
    ——

    The men who had befriended Louie in captivity found their way back into civilian life. Some flourished; some struggled for the rest of their lives. There was one terrible loss.
    Bill Harris ended the war in grand style, plucked from Omori to stand on the
Missouri
as Japan surrendered. His singular intellectual acuity, lost in the beatings from the Quack, returned to him. He went home, fell irretrievably in love with a navy captain’s daughter, married her, and became a doting father to two little girls. After leaning toward retirement, he opted to stay with the marines, rising to lieutenant colonel. He and Louie sent letters back and forth, laying plans to see each other one day soon.
    In September 1950, Harris was driving down a highway when the police pulled him over. He was being called to command a battalion in Korea and had to leave the next day. Before he left, he told his wife that if his luck went bad, he wouldn’t allow himself to be captured again.
    Before dawn on December 7, 1950, Harris stood on a frozen Korean mountain with his weary battalion, which had seen such horrendous fighting that it had lost three-quarters of its men. That morning,it was serving as the rear guard for a convoy. As the convoy