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

men’s lives in great danger. “We were dying,” wrote captive Jean Balch, “on about 500 calories a day.” Scurvy was common. Foodborne parasites and pathogens made diarrhea almost ubiquitous. Most feared was beriberi, a potentially deadly disease caused by a lack of thiamine. There were two forms of beriberi, and they could occur concurrently. “Wet” beriberi affected the heart and the circulatory system, causing marked edema—swelling—of the extremities; if untreated, it was often fatal. “Dry” beriberi affected the nervous system, causing numbness, confusion, unsteady gait, and paralysis. When wet beriberi victims pressed on their swollen limbs, deep indentations would remain long after the pressure was removed, giving the men the unnerving impression that their bones were softening. In some cases, wet beriberi caused extreme swelling of the scrotum. Some men’s testicles swelled to the size of bread loaves.

——

In Ofuna’s theater of cruelty, survival was an open question, and deaths were common. For Louie, Phil, and the other captives, the only hope lay in the Allies rescuing them, but this prospect also carried tremendous danger.

In the fall of 1942, when the Americans attacked Japanese ships off Tarawa, in the Gilbert Islands, the Japanese beheaded twenty-two POWs held on the island. A similar horror played out on Japanese-held Ballale, in the Shortland Islands, where British POWs were being used as slaves to build an airfield. According to a Japanese officer, in the spring of 1943, when it appeared that the Americans were soon to land on Ballale, Japanese authorities issued a directive that in the event of an invasion, the POWs were to be killed. No landing occurred, but in response to an Allied bombing, the Japanese executed all of the POWs anyway, some seventy to one hundred men.

A few weeks after Louie arrived at Ofuna, an American carrier force began bombing and shelling Wake Atoll, where the Americans captured during the Japanese invasion were still being held as slaves. Mistakenly believing that an invasion was imminent, the Japanese commander had the prisoners blindfolded, bound, shot, and dumped in a hole. One man escaped. When he was caught three weeks later, the commander himself beheaded him. The only trace of the men was found years afterward. In the atoll lagoon, on a hunk of coral, one of the POWs had scraped a message:

98

US

P.W.

5-10-43

These murders were the first applications of what would come to be known as the “kill-all” rule. Japanese policy held that camp commanders could not, under any circumstances, allow Allied forces to recapture POWs. If Allied advances made this a possibility, POWs were to be executed. “If there is any fear that the POWs would be retaken due to the tide of battle turning against us,” read a May 1944 order issued to every POW branch camp commander, “decisive measures must be taken without returning a single POW.”

That August, the Japanese War Ministry would issue a clarification of this order, sending it to all POW camp commanders:

At such time as the situation becomes urgent and it be extremely important, the POWs will be concentrated and confined in their present location and under heavy guard the preparation for the final disposition will be made … Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation, or what, dispose of them as the situation dictates … In any case it is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.

As the Allies fought their way toward Japan, the captives in Ofuna and POWs everywhere else faced the very real threat that Allied successes would bring the kill-all policy to bear on them. While none of the captives knew of the incidents in which this order had already been followed, the guards at Ofuna enjoyed warning them about the policy. Like every other captive, Louie knew that most of the guards would be eager to carry it out.

*

Probably Lieutenant Hiroetsu Narushima.

Twenty

Farting for Hirohito

AT FIRST, THERE WAS ONLY SILENCE AND ISOLATION. AT night, all Louie could see were walls, stripes of ground through the gaps in the floorboards, and his own limbs, as slender as reeds. The guards would stomp down the aisles, occasionally dragging a man out to be beaten. There were men in cells around Louie, but no one spoke. Come daylight, Louie was suddenly among them, hustled outside and herded in crazy circles; with his eyes trained obediently on the ground and his mouth obediently closed, Louie was no less alone. The only break in the gloom came in the form of a smiling guard who liked to saunter down the barracks aisle, pause before each cell, raise one leg, and vent a surly fart at the captive within. He never quite succeeded in farting his way down the entire cell block.

In stolen glances, nods, and hushed words, Louie sorted out the constellations of Ofuna. His barracks was inhabited by new captives, mostly Americans, survivors of downed aircraft and sunken seacraft. Down the hall lived two emaciated American navy officers, the ranking Allied servicemen. First in rank was Commander Arthur Maher, who had survived the sinking of his ship, the Houston, in Indonesia’s Sunda Strait. He had swum to Java and fled into the mountains, only to be hunted down. Second in rank was thirty-five-year-old Commander John Fitzgerald, who had fallen into Japanese hands after he’d scuttled his burning submarine, the Grenadier, which had been bombed. The Japanese had attempted, in vain, to torture information out of Fitzgerald, clubbing him, jamming penknives under his fingernails, tearing his fingernails off, and applying the “water 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 William Harris, 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