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

submission of its captives were illusions. Beneath the hush was a humming underground of defiance.
    It began with sidelong whispers. The guards couldn’t be everywhere, and as soon as an area was left unattended, the captives became absorbed in stealthy muttering. Men scribbled notes on slips of toilet paper and hid them for each other in the
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. Once, when given permission to speak aloud so he could translate orders, Commander Maher advised another captive on stealing techniques, right in front of the oblivious guards. The boldest captives would walk up to the guards, look straight at them, and speak in English, using a querying tone. The confused guards thought they were being asked questions, when in fact the men were speaking to each other.
    When words couldn’t be used,Morse code could. At night, in the small intervals when the guards left the building, the whole barracks would start tapping. Outside, men would whisper in code, using “tit”for “dot” and “da” for “dash,” words that could be spoken without moving the lips. Louie used his hands for code, obscuring them from the guards. Most of the discussions were trivial—Louie would be remembered for descriptions of his mother’s cooking—but the content didn’t matter. The triumph was in the subversion.
    Louie soon learned a critical rule of conversation: Never use a guard’s real name. Guards who discovered that they were being discussed often delivered savage beatings, so the men invented nicknames for them. The sluggish, quiet camp commander was called the Mummy.Guard nicknames included Turdbird, Flange Face, the Weasel, Liver Lip, Fatty, and Termite. A particularly repugnant guard was known as Shithead.
    The defiance took on a life of its own. Men would smile and address the guards in friendly tones, cooing out insults filthy enough to curl a man’s hair. One captive convinced a particularly dim-witted guard that a sundial would work at night if he used a match. A fragrant favorite involved saving up intestinal gas, explosively voluminous thanks to chronic dysentery, prior to
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. When the men were ordered to bow toward the emperor, the captives would pitch forward in concert and let thunderclaps fly for Hirohito.
    Louie had another, private act of rebellion. A fellow captive, a bookbinder in civilian life, gave him a tiny book that he’d made in camp with rice paste flattened into pages and sewn together. Louie either found or stole a pencil and began keeping a diary. In it, he recorded what had happened since his crash, then continued with life in the camp. On the book’s central pages, in bold print, he wrote hometown contact information for other captives, making it seem to be an innocuous address book. He wrote his diary entries in faint script upside down in the back of the book, where they might be overlooked. He pried up a board on his cell floor and hid the diary underneath. With daily room inspections, discovery was likely, and would probably bring a clubbing. But this small declaration of self mattered a great deal to Louie. He knew that he might well die here. He wanted to leave a testament to what he had endured, and who he had been.
    After food, what every man wanted most was war news. The Japanese sealed their camps from outside information and went to some lengths to convince their captives of Allied annihilation, first by trumpeting Japanese victories, and later, when victories stopped coming, by inventing stories of Allied losses and ridiculously implausible Japanesefeats. Once, they announced that their military had shot Abraham Lincoln and torpedoed Washington, D.C. “They couldn’t understand why we laughed,” said a prisoner. Ofuna officials had no idea that the captives had found ways to follow the war in spite of them.
    New captives were fonts of information, and no sooner had they arrived than their minds were picked clean, the news tapping its way down the cell blocks in minutes. Newspapers rarely appeared, but when one did, stealing it became a campwide obsession. Rations were sometimes delivered to camp wrapped in newspapers, and the two kitchen laborers, Al Mead and Ernest Duva, would quietly pocket them. The boldest men even managed to pinch papers from the interrogation room as they were being questioned. Once stolen, the papers made elaborate secret journeys, passed hand to hand until they reached the translators, Harris, Fitzgerald, and Maher. As translations were done, lookouts stood by,