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

standing before a car.

He heard someone stomping off the ship, shouting. The men around Louie froze; the man approaching, he assumed, must be an officer. Louie felt the officer grabbing him and shoving him into the car’s jump seat. As he struggled to get his legs in, the officer cracked him in the face with a flashlight. Louie felt his nose bones splay again. He thought of the sake and wondered if this man was its owner. He folded himself into the seat, alongside Phil.

The Chevy motored up through hilly country. After the better part of an hour, it stopped. Hands pulled Louie onto his feet and led him into an enclosed, humid space. The blindfold was untied. He was in a bathhouse, apparently in the promised POW camp. Phil was no longer with him. There was a tub before him, filled with water that carried the tart smell of disinfectant. Told to undress and get in, he stepped into the water, luxuriating in the warmth, scrubbing himself clean for the first time since he’d left Oahu.

When his bath was over, he was told to dress again. A man came with clippers and shaved his head and beard. Louie was escorted out, led down a hallway, and stopped at a door. The guard told him to go in and wait for orders.

Louie walked into the room. The lights were out, and he could only just make out the silhouette of a man in civilian clothing, facing away from him. Someone flipped on a light, the man turned, and Louie saw his face.

It was his college friend Jimmie Sasaki.

——

“We meet again,” Sasaki said. Louie gaped at him in astonishment. He knew nothing of Sasaki’s alleged spying, and was stunned to see his friend in the service of his enemy. Sasaki looked at him warmly. He’d been prepared to see Louie, but he was disturbed by how thin he was. He made a playful crack about how ugly Louie looked bald.

What followed was a strange and stilted conversation. Sasaki asked a few questions about Louie’s odyssey, then began reminiscing about USC, meals at the student union, ten-cent movies on campus. Louie, uneasy, waited for questions on military matters, but they never came. The closest Sasaki got was to express confidence that Japan would win the war. He told Louie that he was a civilian employee of the Japanese navy, which had made him head interrogator of all POWs in Japan. He said he bore a rank equal to that of admiral.

Louie was taken outside. He was in a large compound with several one-story buildings surrounded by a high fence topped with barbed wire. There was something spooky about this place. Louie, like every man brought there, noticed it immediately. Gathered in drifts against the buildings were some two hundred whisper-thin captive Allied servicemen. Every one of them had his eyes fixed on the ground. They were as silent as snow.

Louie was led to a bench, some distance from the other captives. He saw Phil far away, sitting alone. A couple of captives sat on other benches across the compound, hiding their hands from the guards’ view and gesturing to each other in Morse code—fists for dots and flat hands for dashes. Louie watched them until a captive approached. The man seemed to have permission to speak. He began to tell Louie about where he was.

This wasn’t a POW camp. It was a secret interrogation center called Ofuna, where “high-value” captured men were housed in solitary confinement, starved, tormented, and tortured to divulge military secrets. Because Ofuna was kept secret from the outside world, the Japanese operated with an absolutely free hand. The men in Ofuna, said the Japanese, weren’t POWs; they were “unarmed combatants” at war against Japan and, as such, didn’t have the rights that international law accorded POWs. In fact, they had no rights at all. If captives “confessed their crimes against Japan,” they’d be treated “as well as regulations permit.” Over the course of the war, some one thousand Allied captives would be hauled into Ofuna, and many would be held there for years.

The man told Louie the rules. He was forbidden to speak to anyone but the guards, to put his hands in his pockets, or to make eye contact with other captives. His eyes were to be directed downward at all times. He had to learn to count in Japanese, because every morning there was tenko, a roll call and inspection in which men had to count off. To use the benjo—latrine—he had to ask in broken Japanese: “Benjo kudasai,” said while bowing. He wouldn’t be given a cup, so if he was thirsty he’d have to beg the guard to escort him to the washstand. There were rules about every detail of life, from the folding of blankets to the buttoning of clothes, each reinforcing isolation and total obedience. The slightest violation would bring a beating.

The Japanese were abundantly clear about one thing. In this secret place, they could, and did, do anything they wanted to their captives, and no one would ever know. They stressed that they did not guarantee that captives would survive Ofuna. “They can kill you here,” Louie was told. “No one knows you’re alive.”

After nightfall, Louie was taken into a barracks and led to a tiny cell. On the floor was a thin tatami (straw mat), which would be his bed, with three paper sheets. There was a small window, but it had no glass, so wind eddied through the room. The walls were flimsy, the floorboards gapped, the ceiling was tarpaper. It was mid-September, and with winter approaching, Louie would be living in a building that was, in one captive’s words, barely a windbreak.

Louie curled up under the paper sheets. There were dozens of men in cells near him, but no one made a sound. Phil was in a cell far down the hall, and for the first time in months, Louie wasn’t near him. In this warren of captive men, he was alone.

——

Each day began at six: a bell clanging, a shouting guard, captives running outside to tenko. Louie would fall into a line of haggard men. Guards stalked them, clubs or baseball bats in their hands and rifles with fixed bayonets over their shoulders, making menacing postures and yelling unintelligibly. The captives were hounded through a frenzied routine: counting off, bowing toward Emperor Hirohito, rushing to the washstand and benjo, then rushing back to the assembly area five minutes later. Then it was back to the barracks, where guards rifled through the men’s things in search of contraband, misfolded blankets, misaligned buttons—anything to justify a beating.

Breakfast came from captives who handed out bowls of watery, fetid slop, which each man ate alone in his cell. Then men were paired off, given clots of wet rope, and forced to bend double, put the rope on the floor, and wash the 150-foot-long barracks aisle floor at a run, or sometimes waddling duck-style, while the guards trotted behind them, swatting them. Then it was back outside, where the guards made the men run circles or perform calisthenics, often until they collapsed. When the exercise was over, the men had to sit outside, regardless of the weather. The only breaks in the silence were the screams coming from the interrogation room.

Punctuating the passage of each day were beatings. Men were beaten for folding their arms, for sitting naked to help heal sores, for cleaning their teeth, for talking in their sleep. Most often, they were beaten for not understanding orders, which were almost always issued in Japanese. Dozens of men were lined up and clubbed in the knees for one man’s alleged infraction. A favorite punishment was to force men to stand, sometimes for hours, in the “Ofuna crouch,” a painful and strenuous position in which men stood with knees bent halfway and arms