bridge and into Tokyo, on the pretense of retrieving firewood from bombed-out houses. Troughs of water for firefighting had been set along the streets, and as the men marched, the Bird leapt upon one, drew his sword, and screamed “
When the bombs were falling, the Bird would snap, running through camp with his sword in the air, wailing at the men, foam flying from his mouth, lips peeled back in a wicked rictus, eyelid drooping, face purple. During at least two bombings, he prevented the POWs from seeking cover in the trenches. In one incident, he ran the POWs outside, stood them at attention, and ordered the guards to aim their rifles at them. With bombs booming, the Bird raced up and down the line of terrified POWs, swinging his sword over their heads.
Every escalation in the bombing brought a parallel escalation in the Bird’s attacks on Louie. He sped around camp in search of the American, fuming and furious. Louie hid, but the Bird always found him. Three or four times a week, the Bird launched himself at Louie in what Frank Tinker would call his “death lunge,” coming at him with fists flying, going for his face and head. Louie would emerge dazed and bleeding. He was more and more convinced that Watanabe wouldn’t stop until he was dead.
Louie began to come apart. At night, the Bird stalked his dreams, screeching, seething, his belt buckle flying at Louie’s skull. In the dreams, the smothered rage in Louie would overwhelm him, and he’d find himself on top of his monster, his hands on the corporal’s neck, strangling the life from him.
——
As Louie suffered through December, some three hundred miles away, his former pilot was wasting away in a filthy, unheated barracks in the Zentsuji POW camp. Phil had been transferred to Zentsuji the previous August, joining one-legged Fred Garrett, who’d been transferred from Ofuna.
Though Ofuna interrogators had spoken of Zentsuji as a “plush” reward, the camp was no such place. The prisoners’ diet was so poor that the men wandered the compound, ravenous, pulling up weeds and eating them. Their only drinking water came from a reservoir fed by runoff from rice paddies fertilized with human excrement, and to avoid dying of thirst, the POWs had to drink it, leaving 90 percent of them afflicted with dysentery. In one barracks room, men lost an average of fifty-four pounds over eighteen months. An officer estimated that twenty men fainted each day. Almost everyone had beriberi, and some men went blind from malnutrition. On the last day of November, they buried an American who had starved to death.
There was one blessing at Zentsuji. Phil was permitted to send brief messages home on postcards. He wrote one after another. They were mailed, but got snarled in the postal system. The fall waned and another Christmas approached, and Phil’s family received none of them.
A year and a half had passed since Phil had disappeared. His family remained in limbo, having heard nothing about him since his plane had gone down. In November, they had learned about Louie’s broadcast. The news had been tantalizing, but frustrating. Louie had mentioned other servicemen who were with him, but the names had been obscured by static, and the transcript hadn’t conveyed them with certainty. Had Louie mentioned Allen?
On a Friday night in December 1944, the telephone rang in Kelsey Phillips’s home. On the line was a major from the adjutant general’s office at the War Department. Probably through the Red Cross, the department had received news from Zentsuji. Allen was alive.
Kelsey was jubilant. She asked the major to cable her husband and her son’s fiancee, and in Washington, Cecy got the news she had awaited for so long. The fortune-teller had said that Allen would be found before Christmas. It was December 8. Overcome with elation, Cecy called her brother to shout the news, quit her job, dashed through her apartment throwing clothes and pictures of Allen into a suitcase, and hopped a plane back to Indiana to wait for her fiance to come home.
Four days before Christmas, a card from Allen, written in October, finally reached home. “Dear Folk: Hope you all are well and am looking forward to being home with you. I hope we can go rabbit hunting before the season closes Dad. Give my love to Cecy Martha and Dick. Happy birthday dad.” Kelsey pored over the precious slip of paper, comforted by the familiar lines of her son’s handwriting. Chaplain Phillips, now stationed in France, got the news on Christmas Eve. “Words really cannot describe the way I feel,” he wrote to his daughter. “I am in an altogether new world now. I can think of nothing more wonderful. It is a real touch of all that heaven means.”
In a letter officially confirming that Allen was a POW, the Phillipses were asked not to speak publicly about the fact that Allen had been discovered alive. Kelsey would henceforth heed this request, but the letter had reached her too late; by the morning after the War Department’s call, the news was already all over town, and stories about Allen’s survival were in the local papers. The Zamperinis, who had received a similar letter stating that the War Department now believed that Louie’s broadcast had been real, were also asked not to speak of it publicly. The War Department probably didn’t want it known that they had erroneously declared two airmen dead, especially as the Japanese were exploiting this fact.
Kelsey was allowed to send one cable to her son, and she filled the other days writing letters to him. On December 14, she wrote to Louise Zamperini. As relieved as Kelsey was for Allen, there was heaviness in her heart. Of all of the men on
“It is difficult to rejoice outwardly (though I do in my heart) when I think of the other mothers whom I have learned to love, and realize how keenly they feel the loss that is theirs,” Kelsey wrote to Louise. “How my heart goes out to them and I shall write them every one.”
——
As Christmas neared, Louie faltered. Starvation was consuming him. The occasional gifts from the thieves helped, but not enough. What was most maddening was that ample food was so near. Twice that fall, Red Cross relief packages had been delivered for the POWs, but instead of distributing them, camp officials had hauled them into storage and begun taking what they wanted from them.* They made no effort to hide the stealing. “We could see them throwing away unmistakable wrappers, carrying bowls of bulk cocoa and sugar between huts and even trying to wash clothes with cakes of American cheese,” wrote Tom Wade. The Bird was the worst offender, smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes and openly keeping Red Cross food in his room. From one delivery of 240 Red Cross boxes, the Bird stole forty-eight, more than five hundred pounds of goods.
Toward the end of December, the Bird ordered all of the men to the compound, where they found a truck brimming with apples and oranges. In all of his time as a POW, Louie had seen only one piece of fruit, the tangerine that Sasaki had given him. The men were told that they could take two pieces each. As the famished men swarmed onto the pile, Japanese photographers circled, snapping photos. Then, just as the men were ready to devour the
