10
Even taking into account the barbarity of my captors, I couldn’t imagine they were so devious that they’d planned all along to get even with me by transferring the Bird from Omori—to raise my spirits—and then to crush them again by moving me to his new command.
I was only one man, yet it seemed so.
They knew I hated the Bird’s guts. I’d ruined their propaganda plans, and when they’d threatened me with punishment camp, I’d acted almost pleased. I would have worked in a coal or salt mine to be away from Watanabe. How many nights had I already dreamed about strangling him? So what better comeuppance than to make my greatest fear come true? It was a hateful, brilliant plan.
And what about the Bird himself? Was it all his idea, or had he been banished to Naoetsu because of my failure to play along with Radio Tokyo, and then cleverly used as a pawn in my continued torture? He may have run Camp 4-B, but I’m sure there were other places he’d rather be.
Whatever the sorry truth, I’ll always believe our intertwined fate was more than mere coincidence.
NAOETSU ROSE ON the west bank of the Aba River, about two kilometers from the Sea of Japan. Camp 4-B was maybe fifty meters square, at the confluence of two rivers, with fences but no barbed wire and a complement of five or six guards to oversee anywhere from fifty to three hundred men.
In each prison camp my first thought always turned to escape. As at Ofuna and Omori, I repressed these fantasies. The threat leveled at Ofuna to shoot innocent prisoners if others tried to run had since become a national edict. I couldn’t see sacrificing someone else’s life for my own freedom. Instead, I hung in as best I could, hoping the war would end soon and we’d all be free.
The raid over Tokyo was more than inspiring, and it gave our souls the power to endure through any hardships to come.
In the Tokyo area alone, 250,000 civilians were armed, knowing the Allies might invade any day. Word had spread that if our forces landed on Japanese soil, all prisoners of war would be executed. Why, when we were already locked up? Because the authorities considered us their number one threat; we could organize overnight and attack from within. In fact, we’d already discussed that possibility in camp, but we believed that if our troops invaded, our only recourse was to scatter. Every man for himself. Like on Okinawa and other Pacific islands, we knew that the Japanese would fight to the last person. How could we, starving men with no weapons, fight back? All we could do was leave at night and run for the hills.
IF THE JAPANESE didn’t kill us first, the dwindling food supply might. Or a miserable winter. Or both. The winter before my arrival, eighty-one Australian soldiers (out of three hundred prisoners) died from pneumonia, starvation, forced labor, and brutality. While I was there, one third of my camp buddies didn’t make it.
Forced labor was our only occupation; officers, too. Every day, gangs marched to the nearby steel mill, train yard, and port. Although we all had shoes, most of us walked the two miles to work barefoot in the March snow and ice, our feet wrapped in rags, because the Bird had a rule: whoever had dirty shoes got beaten and had to lick them clean.
Watanabe required all men with temperatures of 103 or less to work; those with 104 and above could stay behind. You worked or you died, and sometimes you’d die anyway. I never knew when a soldier would go; even men who didn’t seem ill at all would come back from work detail, fall asleep, and never wake up. I’d kick a guy’s foot, saying, “Come on, let’s go eat,” and he wouldn’t move. Then we’d have to haul the poor guy to the village crematorium on a toboggan, and his remains would end up in a little wooden box stacked on piles of other little wooden boxes, in a small storage room on the first floor of the main prison building, waiting for the rats to gnaw through the thin wood and scatter the ashes on the cold cement floor.
IN APRIL 1945 the Bird demanded that all the POW officers line up on the parade ground. He stood with his hands behind his back, gazing up at the sky, indifferent to our restlessness. Finally, he sauntered up to our senior officer, Commander Fitzgerald, of the submarine Grenadier, and said, “Roosevelt-san, he is dead. Dead!”
We managed to show the proper grief and surprise at the Bird’s announcement and did not bother to tell him that we’d learned the news six hours earlier from the workmen at the steel mill. Let him enjoy his moment.
AS THE WEATHER warmed the Bird dispatched an older civilian guard to accompany some officers to a garden about six miles from the camp, where we planted potato vines in the sandy soil, knowing we’d never get to taste the harvest. Every day we took turns pulling a heavy, dung-laden cart to and from the site, and on the way home we’d scoop up forgotten or discarded daikons from the roadside.
One night the Bird searched everyone at the gate and found the food scraps. He exploded. The next day he sent us with a detachment of enlisted men to unload coal from ships anchored at the end of Naoetsu’s breakwater. The job was not only dirty but dangerous. Naoetsu didn’t have a proper harbor; when swells came in, the ships rose and fell on the break. We’d approach on heavy barges and have to jump onto rope netting to climb aboard the ship. One guy missed and was crushed like a grape between the surging barge and cold steel hull.
It took two or three days to unload a ship. A huge net lowered us into the hold, where we breathed black dust and filled the net with raw coke. A kempii, or member of the military police, always stood watch and drove us like slaves. “Work faster! Work faster!” I’ve always been a fast worker, and the other prisoners didn’t like it. They’d say, “Zamperini, slow down. Slow down!” Gradually I did.
Next we’d take the barges upriver and unload the coal into wicker baskets, then carry those on our backs up a hill to waiting train cars. The baskets often weighed a hundred pounds, and we’d have to walk over a short wooden plank, barely big enough for one person, to dump them onto the half car. One day a guard coming off the car shoved me aside and I dropped about five feet to the ground with all that weight on my back, and tore the ligaments in my knee and ankle. After that I couldn’t work. Unfortunately, the rule in a Japanese prison camp is, if you work, you get a full dinner. If you don’t, you get half. That made even the most reluctant workers do the job.
Nutrition, of course, was a joke and starvation common. The Japanese had ninety-one camps on the home islands alone, not to mention in Malaysia, Singapore, and all over the Far East. Food for the civilian population was scarce, which meant it was almost nonexistent for prisoners. Prisoners died of hunger; the Japanese didn’t care.
Even farm animals ate better than we did. Every day, three times a day, we were served an awful red grain—Korean millet, I think—along with dried ferns and seaweed. The grain tasted bitter and foul. Often it contained pebbles and bits of wire that chipped my teeth and left my mouth bleeding and raw. The seaweed was pulled straight from the ocean and boiled, turning the water into a goop the consistency of snot. Our meals were perfectly suited to typical prison camp gallows humor. Guys would say, “Well, call me when the chow’s ready. I wonder what’s on Tojo’s menu tonight.”
This time I didn’t hesitate to steal food from the Japanese at every opportunity. Using an old trick learned from the Royal Scots at Omori, I sharpened one end of a short bamboo stick to form a natural funnel that, once stuck into any rough mesh bag of grain, siphoned out the contents.
Every night we had to change into pajamas provided by the camp. The pants had a waist string to hold them up, and strings to pull the cuffs closed to keep in the heat. A fly in front let you take a leak. They kept all the grain at Naoetsu in a small room near the heads; I could see the straw bags through knotholes in the walls. I’d say I had to pee, take my bamboo funnel, which was about two feet long, and standing outside the grain room, put one end in my fly. Then I’d lean against an open knothole and work the sharp end into a rice sack. Soon I could feel rice running down my leg. I’d let it fill calf-high, then shift to the other side.
We lived in a locked building, three stories high, with only one door, bracketed by two guards. I’d come back from the head, find Commander Fitzgerald on the second floor, stand on a blanket, and untie my ankle strings. Fitzgerald stashed the contraband in socks and fake wall panels. The Bird had allowed us a little stove with which to make tea; we used it to cook rice whenever the guards stood outside, and stashed it whenever they came in for regular walk-throughs.
Because my injury kept me from working, I was on half rations and stuck in camp. One afternoon I peeked through a mesh door into a room and saw a Singer sewing machine just like the one my mother had. As a kid I’d patched my pants, and I got an idea about how to get back on full rations. “I’ll make your clothes like Hollywood,” I told a senior guard. “Like Clark Gable.”
I spent half a day cleaning the machine, oiling it, adjusting it. Then I altered the guard’s coat. When the others saw it they flipped. Even the Bird. He wanted me to style his clothes, too. I said, “Okay, if I get back on full ration.” He agreed, and I tailored everyone’s clothes until I ran out of work, and the Bird cut my rations again.
Next, I went to Corporal Kono, the Bird’s assistant. A rotten stinker, Kono idolized Watanabe and always tried to imitate him by using the kendo stick to beat us at every opportunity and bolster his own doubtful courage. “I want to get back on full rations,” I said. “You got work for me?”
Kono spoke to the Bird, and they made me handmaiden to a skinny, sickly little goat. The Bird himself offered me the job, hoping to humiliate me.
“Care for goat,” the Bird said. “Care good.”
Whatever. I just wanted food.
Unfortunately, that night someone let the goat into the grain shack and closed the door. The next morning I heard, “Zamperini!”
The Bird shoved me into the kitchen and pointed at the young goat, which lay on the brick hearth, heaving for breath, its body bloated from gobbling barley all night.
“I told you take care of goat!” the Bird screamed. “If goat die, you die!”
I NURSED THE goat while word of the Bird’s ultimatum spread through camp. When the goat died a week later, I prayed the Bird had been joking; I’d never seen him kill anyone, but I still I couldn’t be sure that the threat had been idle. Several senior officers who had seen the Bird come close to killing advised me to attempt an escape before the Bird found out.
I didn’t take their advice. Instead, I went straight to the Bird and told him the truth. He rushed at me, enraged, and I thought I’d made the wrong decision. Watanabe could easily have killed me. He beat me, then dragged me outside and ordered me to stand at one end of the compound while holding a four-by-four-by-six-foot hardwood timber at arm’s length over my head—and keep it there. Then he said, “Wait,” and sat on a low roof nearby, chatting with the other guards, watching.
The first three minutes I could hardly take the pain. Every muscle burned and begged to collapse. Then all one hundred pounds of me went numb. I froze in that position and time stood still until, seething with anger and frustration, the Bird hopped off the roof and punched me in the stomach with all his might. The beam dropped on my head and knocked me flat on my face, and out.
When I awoke, Tom Wade told me he’d timed my punishment. I’d held the wood aloft for thirty-seven minutes.
ABOUT A WEEK later I asked the Bird for another job. “Okay,” he said. “You are in charge and take care of pigs.” I swear, the pigs were so skinny you could see through them. He said, “We’re getting food for the pigs. You clean out the pen.”
I said, “You got any tools?”
“No tools. You clean out by hand.”
Oh, God, what a mess.
They fed the pigs rice polishings, which are high in vitamin B. I knew this and ate along with the pigs. It helped protect me against beriberi, which had infected the camp.
ANOTHER TIME THE Bird suddenly filled a tub with water and told me to prepare to die, he would drown me in it. I don’t know what kind of response he expected, but when he didn’t get fear or begging he abruptly changed his mind. “I drown you tomorrow,” he said, before stomping off.
THE LATRINES AT Camp 4-B had cement floors and a trough into which we peed. The toilets had wooden seats like an outhouse, and the refuse went into big steel tubs underneath. When the tubs were full, prisoners on benjos duty scooped out the excrement with big wooden dippers and put it in barrels, on a cart, to be used in our garden six miles away.
When a heavy rain fell for days we couldn’t empty the steel tubs and the muck overflowed into the urinal trench and then all over the cement floor. This was disgusting stuff on its own; the nonstop diarrhea from one ever-present disease or another made it worse.
The Bird, being the Bird, called a surprise inspection. Men in the head with the runs rushed back to the barracks as fast as possible, put their boots in the rack by the door—we weren’t allowed to wear shoes inside—and stood at attention by their beds. The Bird came in with two guards and, knowing that men had just come back from the latrine, checked their boots. Three had crap on the soles. The Bird bawled out the offenders and said, “You lick bottom of boots or die.” He meant it. Sometimes he made us do push-ups over the latrine troughs until we collapsed facedown on the ground. I watched this from the upper deck where I was in my bed with a 104-degree fever.
Had it been me, I’d have chosen to die. I’ve always been germphobic. I couldn’t have done what he asked, but those men did. I don’t know how.
AT NIGHT HUGE rats would run over those of us sleeping up high. If you made any attempt to knock them away, they were certain to attack with a vengeance—and no one wanted to be bitten by these filthy, aggressive creatures.
On the other hand, we had to do something. One night I prepared myself with a wooden paddle fashioned from a piece of driftwood. I lay it across my chest and was about to doze off one night when I felt a large rat stand on my blanket, between my knees. I slowly clutched the paddle and gave it all I had. I didn’t dare miss.
I heard a sickening thud from the impact and then the loud rattling of metal as the rat landed on our hanging kitchen utensils. The entire barracks burst out with laughter.
Then someone turned on the barrack’s lights and said, “Is he dead?”
An Australian soldier said, “Nah, nah, the blighter is limping back to his hole.” Everyone cracked up again.
Laughter was just the medicine we needed.
The next day I was in the paddle business.
WHEN TWO ENLISTED men stole a piece of dried fish from the coal ship, someone snitched. (Desperate for food or better treatment, some men informed. We sympathized; we all suffered. But we couldn’t condone ratting.) Back at camp, the Bird indulged in his favorite form of punishment: having the enlisted men beat the officers.
Occasionally he was more creative. When the Bird and Kono got a book on American boxing they lined up everyone in the yard and assigned us numbers. They’d call your number and you’d step forward. They’d consult their book, then they’d hit you. The Japanese usually hit with the inside of a closed hand; they didn’t know about knuckle punching. Still, Watanabe expected us to go down. If not, his obnoxious little assistant made sure we fell with his kendo stick. Nobody could take more than two blows, and then you went out like a light.
And yet, through it all, we hated the punishments less than being treated like nonentities, as if we were less than human. I could take the pain and the blood. That didn’t bother me. But to have fewer rights and less respect than an animal? That really stripped me of my dignity.
SUMMER FINALLY ARRIVED, bringing with it oppressive heat and legions of vermin. They dripped from the rafters and ceiling and crept through the floorboards of the old bunkhouse at night, leaving our bodies covered with welts. The sand fleas were so thick that the earth itself seemed to be crawling, undulating like waves. I tried to sleep outside but gave up, exhausted and, frankly, indifferent. Bugs were the least of our torments.
Only our hope for a speedy end to the war kept us going. We knew Germany had surrendered, and I’d heard that B-29s had finally firebombed Tokyo almost beyond recognition. To continue fighting was clearly pointless, yet the Japanese wouldn’t give in. Their willingness to prolong the war seemed senseless, but they insisted Japan would win because whatever God they believed in was on their side.
This faith was deeply rooted in their history. In the year 1273, Kublai Khan had landed on the shores of Japan with a large fleet of ships and a horde of Mongol warriors. The situation was hopeless as the invaders overpowered the populace. As a last resort, the Japanese prayed to their god and suddenly a typhoon blew in and destroyed the entire Mongol fleet.
In 1281 Kublai Khan tried again, with double the number of ships. Another typhoon destroyed the fleet a second time. Again, the Japanese believed that God had intervened. They named the great typhoon “the divine wind,” or kamikaze.
To cap it all, the Bird had started to act erratic. He’d disappear for days at a time, leaving Kono in charge. Then he’d return, find some minor offense involving the arrangement of clothing or eating utensils, and drag the victim around the yard by his feet, while other guards rifled through our belongings. He was completely unpredictable. I knew we couldn’t take much more of him.
By August, freedom was clearly so near that we could taste it. I’d hear planes overhead coming and going. One night a group of us were in the latrine, trying to pick insects off our bodies, when we heard pounding in the distance. Just before dawn, a lone B-29 circled the nearby steel mill and dropped what was probably a leftover, discretionary bomb just off target. The tremendous explosion nearly emptied the village. Later, the Bird confirmed the bombing of Niigata, just to the north, when he called the American officers into the yard for punishment because American planes had done the damage.
The bombers made us brave, and some men hatched a plot to kill the Bird and Kono as soon as the war was over. Rather than wait for the slow machinery of military justice, I joined the conspirators. Somehow we managed to bring a big rock, weighing maybe one hundred pounds, up to the second floor and stow it by a window overlooking the river just beyond the fence that pushed up against our barrack. I stole some rope from the grain shack. The plan was to grab the Bird, tie him to the rock, and throw him and it out the window into the muddy water.
AS THE ALLIED invasion loomed, we heard scuttlebutt—as expected—that all prisoners of war would be moved to the interior mountains where we could be easily killed when the first foreign forces landed. Then, one morning, Ogawa-san, the kindly old civilian guard who had supervised our trips to the garden, struck me brutally. He’d never before expressed anger or even impatience with any of us. I couldn’t understand his behavior; I thought maybe the emperor had called for a last-ditch stand against the prisoners, but that didn’t make much sense.
That afternoon Kono ordered all prisoners to line up in the yard. I shuffled into place, weary, expecting the worst.
“The war is over,” he said simply. “No work today. War is over.”
No one moved. No one cheered. I’d heard these rumors before and been disappointed too many times to take the news seriously. But Kono repeated himself, and told us to paint POW in large letters on the roof of the headquarters and barracks, and to clean ourselves by swimming in the river.
Finally, I began to believe.
THAT DAY WAS peaceful unlike any other. A plane lazily circled the barracks and rocked its wings to acknowledge the letters we’d painted for our flyboys to see. While some of us swam, a navy torpedo bomber flew over, the red lights on both sides of the plane blinking Morse code. A couple of radiomen in the water translated: “The war is over.” Before leaving, the pilot dropped a red ribbon; tied to one end was a candy bar with a bite taken out of it and a pack of cigarettes with two missing. The candy and cigarettes had to be divided among three hundred men. We did it by cutting the candy into little slivers; for the smokes, we formed circles, lit the cigarettes, took one puff, and passed them around.
A few hours later the plane returned and dropped what looked like a body; it was actually a pair of navy pants stuffed with goodies. Not all the contents were delightful. We found cartons of cigarettes and candy but also a magazine with a front-page picture of the atomic bomb exploding. The ranking officer grabbed it, and we all looked over his shoulder, thinking, What the heck? Atomic bomb? Never heard of it. The picture had been taken in New Mexico. For a moment we froze, shocked at the power of our side’s weapon. (Later we’d learn that both Germany and Japan had atomic programs and we were just lucky to get ours out of the gate first.)
The magazine shed light on a story we’d all heard maybe two weeks earlier when the guard whose coat I’d first tailored took me aside and said, “A terrible thing happened in a city called Hiroshima.” I’d never heard of Hiroshima. He said, “Epidemic of cholera broke out, so Hiroshima is off limits. No one can come in or come out. No one can call on the phone.”
I thought, Gee, that’s terrible. Here’s a whole city quarantined with an epidemic. The war’s not bad enough, and these people are dying from cholera?
Now we all knew what had really happened.
I think the camp was silent for half an hour, contemplating the unavoidable horror, and what the world might be like if we used these bombs again.
We also found a message inside that supplies would soon be dropped by parachute.
The first delivery was a big bag of shoes. I got a pair and some socks. Unfortunately, the package crashed through the barracks roof, killing one man and injuring two others. That stuff came down hard, and I realized the drop had to be made outside the compound. I organized a crew and, using lime, wrote DROP HERE with a big arrow pointing at a rice paddy.
On September 2, 1945, the day Japan officially surrendered, most of our supplies were delivered. I was duty officer. A B-29 brought the goods. First it made a pass at about one thousand feet, searching for a drop target. Though we had POW on the roof and DROP HERE near the paddy, the letters probably looked quite small from the air. On the next pass, the plane was at maybe eight hundred feet. Their forward bomb bay opened and disgorged a parcel, which landed in the paddy. Even though I’d discussed safety, the men rushed out of the buildings. I frantically waved them back. I tried to keep everyone inside because even with parachutes, the platforms made a dent a foot deep. The bomber circled again, came in for another drop, and, once I’d cleared the area, released its load. One eager Japanese farmer darted out anyway and got flattened.
The B-29 made a final pass at about five hundred feet, rocking its wings. I stood in the open, waving my shirt, and when I looked up I saw the pilot’s face as he banked. He saw me, too. I remember thinking how I’d love to meet that guy and his crew. Maybe he said the same to himself, wondering about me, where I came from, how I got there.
Lots of crazy stories come out of a war, and this is one. A couple of years later a friend of the pilot, Byron W. Kinney, heard me interviewed on Ted Malone’s radio show on ABC. She recognized my tale because Kinney had told her his story of dropping supplies in northern Japan, at a camp near Naoetsu. He’d remembered the soldier below, waving his shirt, and the look that passed between them. She called Kinney, who wrote to Malone and got my address. When I got his letter we exchanged information that proved that I was the guy on the ground.
Here’s part of my letter to him:
Your letter is very interesting especially since every word of it is true…
We had a total of seven hundred men in the camp at the time, including two-hundred-seventy-five Australians. Most of the Wake Is. boys were sent in the last five months. Your description of the camp was right including the drawing and the bridge. I heard your plane when you passed over the first time. You were quite high. During your first drop I was organizing a group to pick up the stuff when a bunch of enlisted men broke loose and ran for the food. I had to get them back for fear of a second drop. You gave us a real thrill when you buzzed the camp. It was more appreciated than the food, especially for the Air Corps men. We were a filthy looking lot, but the happiest men in the world…. For the first time we felt like real Americans again. It made us feel that our sufferings were all worth it…
A few Navy TBF’s came in off battleships or carriers a few days before you fellows did. They could only drop enough stuff for a taste…. Your ship was the first to drop enough food to feed the entire camp and give the fellows more smokes than they could handle…
I’m very glad you contacted me for since the day you dropped the food I have always wanted to know who took such wonderful care of us.
When Kinney came to Los Angeles in 1948, on vacation, he dropped by to see me. Unfortunately, I was out of town. Thirty-seven years later, on November 1, 1985, we finally met.
THE MORE FOOD our troops delivered, the faster we gained weight. Some men overdid it. Instead of mixing concentrated pea soup with water, they ate it straight, without even heating. Diarrhea was their reward. I knew from training—and experience—that you can’t change your diet overnight, but any food helped and by the time I left Camp 4-B, I weighed about 110 pounds.
Freedom felt unusual, but strangest of all was the role reversal with our former captors. The guards were now our prisoners, not that we treated them as such. The minute we had food, they bowed and scraped subserviently and confessed to us all their problems. We fed them liberally, gave them rations for their families, cartons of good American cigarettes, candy bars. The anger and desire for revenge I’d had on the final day had already almost faded. It’s funny how one minute I wanted to kill someone, and then, when I saw how pathetic they really were—like dogs with their tails between their legs—I wanted to help them.
The only guard missing from this pretty new picture was the Bird.
Watanabe had left the camp two days before hostilities ceased, on one of his usual trips. He had not returned. When we checked his quarters, all his belongings were gone. I asked the guards, but they didn’t have any information on his earlier destinations or current whereabouts. Had he learned of our plot, or was he simply afraid of our pent-up anger? Had he gone to Tokyo, or Korea, or been captured in town? One fact was certain: with the war over, no one expected him to come back voluntarily. It seemed that instead of our disposing of Watanabe as planned, all that went out the barracks window was our scheme itself.
Kono remained, and we’d had plans for him as well, but when he came to the officers quarters weeping and begging for mercy, we could only regard him with contempt, not malice.
ON SEPTEMBER 5, 1945, a special train pulled into the Naoetsu station and we bundled our rags and possessions and marched through the wooden gates of Camp 4-B for the last time. Looking back as I climbed the road leading to the village and the station, I could see Ogawa-san, the old farmer; Homma-san, the cook, who, like Hata at Ofuna, had sold much of our ration through the back fence; and Corporal Kono, now an insignificance, staring dully at our departure.
When they waved, I waved back—to Ogawa-san—and then I walked around a bend and the camp disappeared from view. My thoughts were no longer of all the suffering, only of having made it, and of my new life ahead. At last, I had a chance to make the promises, plans, and dreams to which I’d so furiously clung for so long come true.