been a word or a look that hinted at all she didn’t know, or maybe impulsive decisions made in the fog of lovesickness were becoming real. Whatever it was, Louie thought he was losing her. He lost his temper and abruptly said that maybe they should call off the engagement. Cynthia panicked, and they argued, overwrought. When they calmed down, they made a decision.
On Saturday, May 25, the same day that the papers quoted Louie as saying he’d marry Cynthia at the summer’s end, Louie and Cynthia drove to the Church of Our Savior, where the Zamperinis were waiting. He wore his dress uniform; she wore a simple off-white suit. One of Louie’s college buddies walked Cynthia down the aisle, and Louie and Cynthia said their vows. There had been no time to bake a wedding cake, so Pete’s birthday cake, made by Sylvia the day before, did double duty.
Suspecting that Louie’s friends would pull wedding night pranks, the newlyweds stole off to an obscure hotel, and Cynthia called home. Her announcement prompted an explosion. Cynthia hung on the phone all evening, crying, while her mother, who’d gone to great effort to plan a fall wedding, bawled her out. Louie sat by, listening as his bride was excoriated for marrying him, trying in vain to get her to hang up. Eventually he picked up a bottle of champagne, popped it open, drank it dry, and went to sleep by himself.
*
Tojo was found in his home that day, sitting in a chair, blood gushing from a self-inflicted bullet wound in his chest. Whispering “
” and saying he’d rather die than face trial, Tojo was given a pint of American blood plasma, then taken to a hospital. When he recovered, he was housed at Omori, sleeping in Bob Martindale’s bunk. He complained about lice and bedbugs. He was tried, sentenced to death, and, in 1948, hanged. He and 1,068 other convicted war criminals were later honored in Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, memorializing Japanese who died in the service of the emperor.
Coming Undone
FROM ACROSS THE ROOM, THEY LOOKED LIKE THREE ordinary men. It was an evening in the latter half of 1946, and Louie sat at a table in the Florentine Gardens, a dinner club in Hollywood, with Cynthia nestled near him. Phil and Cecy had come from Indiana for a visit, and Fred Garrett had motored across town to join them for dinner. Phil and Louie were grinning at each other. The last time they’d been together was March of ’44, when Phil was being shipped out of Ofuna and neither man knew if he’d live to see the other again.
The men smiled and talked. Fred, who was soon to become an air traffic controller, had a new prosthetic leg. In a festive mood, he bumped out to the dance floor to show the room that he could still cut a rug. Phil and Cecy were about to move to New Mexico, where Phil would open a plastics business. Louie and Cynthia were glowing from their honeymoon, spent sharing a sleeping bag in Louie’s beloved mountains, where Cynthia, for all her finishing schools, had proven game for getting dirty. Louie was running again, full of big plans, as garrulous and breezy as he’d been before the war. As the men leaned together for photographs, all that they had been through seemed forgotten.
Sometime amid the laughing and conversation, a waiter set a plate in front of Fred. On it, beside the entree, was a serving of white rice. That was all it took. Fred was suddenly raving, furious, hysterical, berating the waiter and shouting with such force that his face turned purple. Louie tried to calm him, but Fred was beyond consolation. He had come completely undone.
The waiter hurried the rice away and Fred pulled himself together, but the spell was broken. For these men, nothing was ever going to be the same.
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At the end of World War II, thousands of former prisoners of the Japanese, known as Pacific POWs, began their postwar lives. Physically, almost every one of them was ravaged. The average army or army air forces Pacific POW had lost sixty-one pounds in captivity, a remarkable statistic given that roughly three-quarters of the men had weighed just 159 pounds or less upon enlistment. Tuberculosis, malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, anemia, eye ailments, and festering wounds were widespread. At one chain of hospitals, doctors found a history of wet beriberi in 77 percent of POWs and dry beriberi in half. Among Canadian POWs, 84 percent had neurologic damage. Respiratory diseases, from infections and exposure to unbreathable air in factories and mines, were rampant. Men had been crippled and disfigured by unset broken bones, and their teeth had been ruined by beatings and years of chewing grit in their food. Others had gone blind from malnutrition. Scores of men were so ill that they had to be carried from camps, and it was common for men to remain hospitalized for many months after repatriation. Some couldn’t be saved.
The physical injuries were lasting, debilitating, and sometimes deadly. A 1954 study found that in the first two postwar years, former Pacific POWs died at almost four times the expected rate for men of their age, and continued to die at unusually high rates for many years. The health repercussions often lasted for decades; a follow-up study found that twenty-two years after the war, former Pacific POWs had hospitalization rates between two and eight times higher than former European POWs for a host of diseases.
As bad as were the physical consequences of captivity, the emotional injuries were much more insidious, widespread, and enduring. In the first six postwar years, one of the most common diagnoses given to hospitalized former Pacific POWs was psychoneurosis. Nearly forty years after the war, more than 85 percent of former Pacific POWs in one study suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), characterized in part by flashbacks, anxiety, and nightmares. And in a 1987 study, eight in ten former Pacific POWs had “psychiatric impairment,” six in ten had anxiety disorders, more than one in four had PTSD, and nearly one in five was depressed. For some, there was only one way out: a 1970 study reported that former Pacific POWs committed suicide 30 percent more often than controls.
All of this illness, physical and emotional, took a shocking toll. Veterans were awarded compensation based on their level of disability, ranging from 10 percent to 100 percent. As of January 1953, one-third of former Pacific POWs were categorized as 50 to 100 percent disabled, nearly eight years after the war’s end.
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These statistics translated into tormented, and sometimes ruined, lives. Flashbacks, in which men reexperienced their traumas and were unable to distinguish the illusion from reality, were common. Intense nightmares were almost ubiquitous. Men walked in their sleep, acting out prison camp ordeals, and woke screaming, sobbing, or lashing out. Some slept on their floors because they couldn’t sleep on mattresses, ducked in terror when airliners flew over, or hoarded food. One man had a recurrent hallucination of seeing his dead POW friends walking past. Another was unable to remember the war. Milton McMullen couldn’t stop using Japanese terms, a habit that had been pounded into him. Dr. Alfred Weinstein, who had infected the Bird with dysentery at Mitsushima, was dogged by urges to scavenge in garbage cans.* Huge numbers of men escaped by drinking. In one study of former Pacific POWs, more than a quarter had been diagnosed with alcoholism.
Raymond “Hap” Halloran was a navigator who parachuted into Tokyo after his B-29 was shot down. Once on
