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

Down the hall, Phil languished. Rats were everywhere, climbing up his waste bucket and wallowing in his urine pail, waking him at night by skittering over his face. Periodically, he was prodded outside, halted before a pan of water, and ordered to wash his face and hands. Phil dropped his face into the pan and slurped up the water.

Louie often stared at the names of the marines, wondering who they were, if they’d had wives and children, how the end had come for them. He began to think of them as his friends. One day he pulled off his belt and bent the buckle upward. In tall, block letters, he carved his name into the wall beside theirs.

Louie couldn’t speak to Phil, nor Phil to him, but occasionally one of them would cough or scuff the floor to let the other know that he was there. Once, the guards left the cells unattended, and for the first time, Phil and Louie were alone. Louie heard Phil’s voice.

“What’s going to happen?”

Louie had no answer. There was a beating of boots in the hall and the Americans fell silent.

——

The guards maintained a fixed state of fury at the captives, glaring at them wrathfully, making threatening gestures, shouting at them. Virtually every day, they flew into rages that usually ended in Phil and Louie being bombarded with stones and lit cigarettes, spat upon, and poked with sticks. Louie always knew that he was in for it when he heard a guard arriving in a stomping fit—a consequence, he hoped, of an American victory. The situation worsened when the guard had company; the guards used the captives to impress each other with their cruelty.

The pretext for many of the outbursts was miscommunication. The captives and their guards came from cultures with virtually no overlap in language or custom. Louie and Phil found it almost impossible to understand what was being asked of them. Sign language was of little help, because even the cultures’ gestures were different. The guards, like nearly all citizens of their historically isolated nation, had probably never seen a foreigner before, and probably had no experience in communicating with a non-Japanese. When misunderstood, they often became so exasperated that they screamed at and beat the captives.

For self-preservation, Louie and Phil studied everything they heard, developing small Japanese vocabularies. Kocchi koi meant “come here.” Ohio was a greeting, used by the occasional civil guard. Though Louie soon knew what it meant, his stock reply was “No, California.” Phil learned that mizu meant water, but the knowledge got him nowhere; his cries for mizu were ignored.

When the guards weren’t venting their fury at the captives, they entertained themselves by humiliating them. Every day, at gunpoint, Louie was forced to stand up and dance, staggering through the Charleston while his guards roared with laughter. The guards made Louie whistle and sing, pelted him with fistfuls of gravel, taunted him as he crawled around his cell to pick up bits of rice, and slid long sticks through the door window so they could stab and swat him, finding his helpless contortions hilarious. Down the hall, the guards did the same to Phil. Sometimes Louie could hear Phil’s voice, tiny and thin, groaning. Once, driven to his breaking point by a guard jabbing him, Louie yanked the stick from the guard’s hands. He knew he might get killed for it, but under this unceasing degradation, something was happening to him. His will to live, resilient through all of the trials on the raft, was beginning to fray.

The crash of Green Hornet had left Louie and Phil in the most desperate physical extremity, without food, water, or shelter. But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live. One American airman, shot down and relentlessly debased by his Japanese captors, described the state of mind that his captivity created: “I was literally becoming a lesser human being.”

Few societies treasured dignity, and feared humiliation, as did the Japanese, for whom a loss of honor could merit suicide. This is likely one of the reasons why Japanese soldiers in World War II debased their prisoners with such zeal, seeking to take from them that which was most painful and destructive to lose. On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.

——

Louie had been on Kwajalein for about a week when his cell door was thrown open and two guards pulled him out. He flushed with fear, thinking that he was being taken to the sword. As he was hustled toward what seemed to be an officers’ quarters, he passed two girls with Asian features, walking with heads down, eyes averted, as they retreated from the building. Louie was pulled into a room and stopped before a table covered with a white tablecloth, on which was arranged a selection of foods. Around it sat Japanese officers in dress uniforms, smoking cigarettes. Louie wasn’t here to be executed. He was here to be interrogated.

The officers took long draws on their cigarettes and sighed the smoke toward Louie. Periodically, one of them would open a bottle of cola, pour it into a cup, and drink it slowly, making a show of his enjoyment.

The ranking officer stared coolly at his captive. How do American soldiers satisfy their sexual appetites? he asked. Louie replied that they don’t—they rely on willpower. The officer was amused. The Japanese military, he said, provides women for its soldiers, an allusion to the thousands of Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, and Filipino women whom the Japanese military had kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery. Louie thought of the girls outside.

The interrogators asked about Louie’s plane. They knew, probably from Louie’s conversation with the officers on the first atoll, that it was a B-24. What model was it? On Oahu, Louie had heard that during a battle, a B-24D had crashed on a reef and had been retrieved by the Japanese. Green Hornet had been a D model. Knowing that the Japanese already knew about this model, he decided not to lie, and told them that he had been in a D. They handed him a pencil and paper and asked him to draw the plane. When he was done, his interrogators held up a photograph of a D model. They had been testing him.

What did he know about the E-model B-24? Nothing, he told them. It was a lie; Super Man, while always officially a D model, had undergone upgrades that had effectively made it an E. Where was the radar system? The location of the radar had no bearing on how it worked, so Louie told the truth. How do you operate it? Louie knew the answer, but he replied that as a bombardier, he wouldn’t know. The interrogators asked him to draw the radar system. Louie invented an imaginary system, making a drawing so