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

cure”—tipping him backward, holding his mouth shut, and pouring water up his nose until he passed out. Both Maher and Fitzgerald spoke Japanese, and they served as the camp’s only resident interpreters. All captives, regardless of nationality, deferred to them.

    Louie’s barracks at Ofuna. His cell window was the third from the right.
Frank Tinker

    During forced exercise one day, Louie fell into step with WilliamHarris, a twenty-five-year-old marine officer, the son of marine general Field Harris. Tall and dignified, with a face cut in hard lines, Harris had been captured in the surrender of Corregidor in May 1942. With another American, * he had escaped and embarked on an eight-and-a-half-hour swim across Manila Bay, kicking through a downpour in darkness as fish bit him. Dragging himself ashore on the Japanese-occupied Bataan Peninsula, he had begun a run for China, hiking through jungles and over mountains, navigating the coast in boats donated by sympathetic Filipinos, hitching rides on burros, and surviving in part by eating ants. He had joined a Filipino guerrilla band, but when he had heard of the American landing at Guadalcanal, the marine in him had called. Making a dash by boat toward Australia in hopes of rejoining his unit, he had gotten as far as the Indonesian island of Morotai before his journey ended. Civilians had turned him in to the Japanese, who had discovered that he was a general’s son and sent him to Ofuna. Even here, he was itching to escape.

    William Harris.
Courtesy of Katherine H. Meares

    Each day, Louie and Harris hung together, laboring through forced exercise, bearing blows from the guards, and whispering. The curious thing about Harris was that while he was certainly a tall man—six foot two or three, according to his daughter—virtually everyone, including Louie, would remember him as a giant, by one account six foot eight, by another six-ten. Figuratively, though, Harris was indeed a giant. He was probably a genius. Impeccably educated, conversant in several languages, including Japanese, he had a perfectphotographic memory. With a single glance, he could memorize a huge volume of information and retain it for years. In Ofuna, this attribute would be a blessing and a terrible curse.
    Jimmie Sasaki made frequent visits to Ofuna, and he liked to call Louie to his office. Among ragged captives and guards in drab uniforms, Sasaki was a spectacle, dressing like a movie star and wearing his hair slicked back and parted down the middle, like Howard Hughes. The captives dubbed him “Handsome Harry.” Louie expected interrogation, but it never came. Sasaki only wanted to reminisce about USC and boast of Japan’s coming victory. He knew that Louie had lied in his interrogation on Kwajalein, but he didn’t pursue the truth. Louie couldn’t understand it. Every other captive was grilled, at least at first, but no effort was made to interrogate him. He suspected that Sasaki was using his influence to protect him.
    Ofuna had one other notable resident.Gaga was a duck who bobbed around in a fire trough, paddling with a broken leg that a captive had fitted with a little splint. The duck trailed the captives around like a puppy, limping in and out of the kitchen, where the workers apparently fed him. Every morning at
tenko
, Gaga peg-legged to the parade ground and stood with the men, and one captive would later swear that when the men bowed toward the emperor, Gaga bowed in imitation. In so dark a place, this cheerful bird became especially beloved. For the captives, wrote Ofuna survivor “Pappy” Boyington, Gaga became a creature on which “to rest their tortured brains a moment while they [were] praying and worrying if anyone [would] ever free them.”
    Louie rarely crossed paths with Phil, who was housed far down the hall. The pilot seemed to be handling Ofuna well enough, but he remained shrunken and frail, a hollow distance in his eyes. During forced exercise, he wasn’t strong enough to run, so he and a few others were separated and harangued through calisthenics.
    Once, when Louie and Phil shuffled up next to each other on the parade ground, Phil finally spoke of the crash. Filled with anguish, he said that he felt responsible for the deaths of all of those men. Louie reassured him that the crash hadn’t been his fault, but Phil was unswayed.
    “I’ll never fly again,” he said.
    ——

    In time, Louie discovered that both the forced silence of Ofuna and the bowing