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

Both men survived, and as terrible as their experience had been, they were lucky. All over their captured territories, the Japanese were using at least ten thousand POWs and civilians, including infants, as test subjects for experiments in biological and chemical warfare. Thousands died.

——

Back in his cell, Louie felt a sharp headache coming on, and was soon dizzy and baking with fever. His bones ached. Phil was going through the same ordeal. The guards summoned a doctor. Louie picked out a familiar word: dengue. The prisoners had dengue fever, a potentially fatal mosquito-borne illness that was ravaging the tropics. The doctor offered no treatment.

Louie drifted into a febrile fog. Time slid by, and he felt little connection to his body. As he lay there, feet tramped outside, livid faces appeared again at the door, and Louie felt himself struck with rocks, stabbed with sticks, and slapped with wads of spit. A new crop of submariners had come.

Louie floated through it, too sick to resist. The faces streamed past, and the stones and sticks cracked off his burning bones. Time passed with merciful speed, and the abuse was soon over.

——

Louie was brought to interrogation again. The officers pushed a map of Hawaii in front of him and told him to mark where the air bases were.

Louie resisted for some time, but the interrogators leaned hard on him. At last, he broke. He dropped his head and, with an expression of ashamed resignation, told them everything—the exact location of the bases, the numbers of planes.

The Japanese broke into jubilant smiles. They opened up a bottle of cola and gave it to Louie, along with a biscuit and a pastry. As they celebrated, they had no idea that the “bases” that Louie had identified were the fake airfields he had seen when tooling around Hawaii with Phil. If the Japanese bombed there, the only planes they would hit would be made of plywood.

Louie and Phil’s usefulness had been exhausted. At headquarters, the officers discussed what to do with the captives. The decision was probably easy; the same Japanese officers had been responsible for killing the marines whose names were written on Louie’s cell wall. Louie and Phil would be executed.

On August 24, men gathered before Louie’s cell, and once more he was dragged out. Is this it? he thought. He was tugged to the interrogation building. Expecting to learn that he was condemned to execution, he was told something else: A Japanese navy ship was coming to Kwajalein, and he was going to be put on it and taken to a POW camp in Yokohama, Japan. At the last minute, the officers had decided not to kill him. It would be a long time before Louie learned why.

Louie felt deep relief, believing that at a POW camp, he would be treated under the humane rules of international law, put in contact with the Red Cross, and allowed to contact his family. Phil, too, was told that he was going to Yokohama. He was amazed and hopeful.

On August 26, 1943, forty-two days after arriving at Execution Island, Louie and Phil were led from their cells, stripped naked, splashed with buckets of water, allowed to dress again, and taken toward the ship that would carry them to Japan.

As he walked from his cell for the last time, Louie looked back, searching for Kawamura. He couldn’t find him.

Nineteen

Two Hundred Silent Men

LOUIE AND PHIL WERE SITTING IN A HOLDING ROOM ON the navy ship when the door slapped open and a crowd of agitated, sloppy-drunk Japanese sailors pushed in. One of them asked if Japan would win the war.

“No,” said Phil.

A fist caught Phil in the face, then swung back and struck him again. Louie was asked who would win the war.

“America.”

The sailors fell onto the captives, fists flying. Something connected with Louie’s nose, and he felt a crunch. An officer ran in, peeled the crewmen off, and ordered them out. Louie’s nose was bleeding. When he touched it, he felt a gash and a bone elbowing out sideways.

In choppy English, the officer told them that the crewmen had been rifling through the captives’ wallets, which had been confiscated when they came on board. In Louie’s wallet, they had found a folded, stained bit of newspaper. It was the cartoon that Louie had cut from the Honolulu Advertiser many months before, depicting his service in the raid on Wake. The officer said that about half of the ship’s crew had been on Wake that night, and their ship, apparently anchored offshore, had been sunk.

The crewmen had regrets about attacking the captives. Later, the door opened again, and two of them lurched in, muttered apologies, draped their arms around Louie, and gave him sake.

This clipping was in Louie’s wallet throughout his raft journey, and was stained purple by the wallet dye. Its discovery by the Japanese resulted in Louie and Phil being beaten. Courtesy of Louis Zamperini

Louie and Phil were separated again, and Louie was locked in an officer’s cabin. Every few days, he had strange visits from a grinning sailor who would lean into the room, say, “Thump on the head for a biscuit?,” rap his knuckles on Louie’s head, hand him a biscuit, and amble away.

Between the sailor’s visits, Louie had nothing to do but sit, pinching his fingers around his nose to set the bones. Bored, he rummaged through the cabin and found a bottle of sake. He began taking furtive sips of the rice wine, little enough that its absence might not be missed. When, during a submarine alert, he panicked and drank so much that no one could fail to notice it, he decided that he might as well finish it off. In the last days of the journey, the skinny American and the fat Japanese bottle had a grand time together.

——

After a three-week journey, including a stopover at Truk Atoll, the ship docked at Yokohama, on the eastern coast of Japan’s central island, Honshu. Louie was blindfolded and led out. Solid ground came underfoot. Through a gap in his blindfold, Louie’s first glimpse of Japan was the word CHEVROLET, stamped on a hubcap. He was