And yet, by virtue of his rank, Louie was fortunate. Naoetsu was a factory village that generated products critical to the war effort, and all of its young workers had gone to war. The POWs were here to take their place. Each day, the enlisted POWs waded through the snow to labor in a steel mill, a chemical factory, the port’s coal and salt barges, or a site at which they broke rocks for mineral extraction. The work was extraordinarily arduous and often dangerous, and shifts went on day and night, some for eighteen hours. In the hikes back from this slave labor, men were so rubber-legged that they tumbled into snow crevasses and had to be dragged out.
Each morning and night, Louie saw the enlisted men rambling in from their slave shifts, some completely obscured by coal soot, some so exhausted that they had to be carried into the barracks. The Japanese literally worked men to death at Naoetsu. Louie had much to bear, but at least he didn’t have this.
——
Winter faded. The river ice gave way to flowing water, and houses emerged where only snow had been. When the drifts in the compound melted, a pig miraculously appeared. All winter, he’d been living below the POWs in a snow cavern, sustained by bits of food dropped to him by an Australian. Louie looked at him in wonder. The animal’s skin had gone translucent.
With the ground thawed, the Bird announced that he was sending the officers to work as farm laborers. Though this violated the Geneva Convention’s prohibition on forcing officers to labor, Fitzgerald now knew what life in camp with the Bird was like. Work on the farm would keep the officers out of the Bird’s path for hours every day, and couldn’t be anything like the backbreaking labor done by the enlisted men. Fitzgerald raised no protest.
Each morning, Louie and the rest of the farming party assembled before the barracks, attended by a civilian guard named Ogawa. They loaded a cart with
The walk, six miles each way, was a tiring slog, but the work, planting and tending potatoes, was relatively easy. Ogawa was a placid man, and though he carried a club, he never used it. The plot had a clean well, a relief after the stinking camp water, and Ogawa let the men drink all they wished. And because they were now working outside the camp, the officers were granted full rations. Though those rations were dwindling as Japan’s fortunes fell, a full bowl of seaweed was better than half a bowl of seaweed.
April 13 was a bright day, the land bathed in sunshine, the sky wide and clear. Louie and the other officers were scattered over the potato plot, working, when the field suddenly went still and the men turned their faces to the sky. At the same moment, all over Naoetsu, labor at the outdoor work sites halted as the POWs and guards gazed up. High overhead, something was winking in the sunlight, slender ribbons of white unfurling behind it. It was a B-29.
It was the first Superfortress to cross over Naoetsu. The Omori officers had seen hundreds of B-29s over Tokyo, but for the Australians, who’d been hidden in this village since 1942, this was their first glimpse of the bomber.
Followed by innumerable eyes, some hopeful and some horrified, the B-29 made a slow arc from one horizon to the other, following the coastline. No guns shot at it; no fighters chased it. It dropped no bombs, passing peacefully overhead, but its appearance was a telling sign of how far over Japan the Americans were now venturing, and how little resistance the Japanese could offer. As all of Naoetsu watched, the plane slid out of view, and its contrails dissolved behind it.
The POWs were elated; the Japanese were unnerved. At the work sites, the prisoners hid their excitement behind neutral faces to avoid provoking the guards, who were unusually tense and hostile. On the walk back to camp that evening, the prisoners absorbed a few swipes with a club, but their mood remained merry. When they reached the gates, the Bird was waiting for them.
Roosevelt, he said, was dead.
The men deflated. The Bird sent them into the barracks.
A few days later, Ogawa made a little joke to the Bird, teasing him about how his POW officers were lazy. Ogawa meant no harm, but the remark sent the Bird into a fury. He shouted for the farm workers to line up before him, then began berating them for their indolence. He stormed and frothed, seeming completely deranged.
Finally, he screamed his punishment: From now on, all officers would perform hard labor, loading coal on barges. If they refused, he would execute every one of them. One look at the Bird told Fitzgerald that this was an order he could not fight.
Early the next morning, as the officers were marched off to labor, the Bird stood by, watching them go. He was smiling.
——
It was a short walk into slavery. The officers were taken to the riverbank and crowded onto a barge, which was heaped with coal destined for the steel mill. Six men were given shovels; Louie and the rest were given large baskets and told to strap them to their backs. Then, on the guards’ orders, the shovelers began heaving coal into each man’s basket. As a cubic foot of loose coal can weigh as much as sixty pounds, the bearers were soon staggering. Once the baskets were full, the bearers were ordered to lug the loads off the barge and up the shore to a railroad car, where they wobbled up a narrow, steep ramp, dumped the coal into the car, and returned to have their baskets refilled.
All day the men shoveled and hauled. The guards kept the basket men moving at a rapid clip. By the time the guards finally let them stop, the men were utterly exhausted; by Wade’s estimate, over the course of the day, each basket bearer had carried well over four tons of coal.
So began a daily routine. Each time the men finished clearing one barge, they were pushed aboard another, and the hauling went on, punishing their bodies and numbing their minds. Somewhere along the way, as he and the others bent under their burdens and plodded along, Tom Wade began reciting poetry and speeches. Louie and the other slaves shoveled and walked in time with Shakespeare’s soliloquies, with Churchill’s vow to fight in the fields and in the streets and in the hills, with Lincoln’s last full measure of devotion.
The barges were eventually empty, but the officers’ life in slavery had only just begun. In a mass of POWs, Louie was herded onto another of the barges, which was pulled by a tugboat into the Sea of Japan. About three- quarters of a mile out, the barge drew alongside an anchored coal ship and stopped, the sea heaving under it, water spraying over the deck. Standing before the prisoners, a guard gestured to a net slung over the side of the ship.
