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

by Laura Hillenbrand

  Compounding the hardship of Omori was the food situation. The rations were of better quality than those at Ofuna but were doled out in only slightly larger quantities. Because officers weren’t enslaved, they were allowed only half the ration given to slaves, on the justification that they needed fewer calories. Along with rice, the men received some vegetables, but protein was almost nonexistent. About once a week, someone would push a wheelbarrow into the camp, bearing “meat.” Because a wheelbarrow’s worth was spread over hundreds of men, a serving amounted to about a thimble-sized portion; it consisted of things like lungs and intestines, assorted dog parts, something the POWs called “elephant semen,” and, once, a mystery lump that, after considerable speculation, the men decided was a horse’s vagina.

  Just as at Ofuna, beriberi and other preventable diseases were epidemic at Omori. Because rations were halved for sick men who were unable to work, the ill couldn’t recover. Men harrowed by dysentery—“the benjo boogie”—swallowed lumps of coal or burnt sticks to slow the digestive waterfall. Many men weighed less than ninety pounds.

  The only saving grace of Omori, prior to November 1943, had been the attitude of the Japanese personnel, who weren’t nearly as vicious as those at Ofuna. The prisoners gave them nicknames, including Hogjaw, Baby Dumpling, Bucktooth, Genghis Khan, and Roving Reporter; one unfortunate officer, wrote POW Lewis Bush, wore puffy pants and “walked as though he was always bursting to go to the lavatory,” prompting the men to call him Lieutenant Shit-in-Breeches. There were a few rogues and one or two outright loons, but several camp employees were friendly. The rest were indifferent, enforcing the rules with blows but at least behaving predictably. Relatively speaking, Omori wasn’t known for violence. When Watanabe came, all that changed.

  ——

  He arrived bearing candy and cigarettes for the POWs. He smiled and made pleasant conversation, posed for photographs with British officers, and spoke admiringly of America and Britain. For several days, he raised not a ripple.

  On a Sunday morning, Watanabe approached some POWs crowded in a barracks doorway. A POW named Derek Clarke piped up, “Gangway!” to clear a path. That one word sent Watanabe into an explosion. He lunged at Clarke, beat him until he fell down, then kicked him. As Bush tried to explain that Clarke had meant no harm, Watanabe drew his sword and began screaming that he was going to behead Clarke. A Japanese officer stopped the attack, but that evening Watanabe turned on Bush, hurling him onto a scalding stove, then pummeling and kicking him. After Bush went to bed, Watanabe returned and forced him to his knees. For three hours, Watanabe besieged Bush, kicking him and hacking off his hair with his sword. He left for two hours, then returned again. Bush expected to be murdered. Instead, Watanabe took him to his office, hugged him, and gave him beer and handfuls of candy and cigarettes. Through tears, he apologized and promised never to mistreat another POW. His resolution didn’t last. Later that night, he picked up a kendo stick—a long, heavy training sword—and ran shrieking into a barracks, clubbing every man he saw.

  Watanabe had, in Bush’s words, “shown his hand.” From that day on, both his victims and his fellow Japanese would ponder his violent, erratic behavior and disagree on its cause. To Yuichi Hatto, the camp accountant, it was simply madness. Others saw something calculating. After Watanabe attacked Clarke, POW officers who had barely noticed him began looking at him with terror. The consequence of his outburst answered a ravening desire: Raw brutality gave him sway over men that his rank did not. “He suddenly saw after he hit a few men that he was feared and respected for that,” said Wade. “And so that became his style of behavior.”

  Watanabe derived another pleasure from violence. According to Hatto, Watanabe was a sexual sadist, freely admitting that beating prisoners brought him to climax. “He did enjoy hurting POWs,” wrote Hatto. “He was satisfying his sexual desire by hurting them.”

  A tyrant was born. Watanabe beat POWs every day, fracturing their windpipes, rupturing their eardrums, shattering their teeth, tearing one man’s ear half off, leaving men unconscious. He made one officer sit in a shack, wearing only a fundoshi undergarment, for four days in winter. He tied a sixty-five-year-old POW to a tree and left him there for days. He ordered one man to report to him to be punched in the face every night for three weeks. He practiced judo on an appendectomy patient. When gripped in the ecstasy of an assault, he wailed and howled, drooling and frothing, sometimes sobbing, tears running down his cheeks. Men came to know when an outburst was imminent: Watanabe’s right eyelid would sag a moment before he snapped.

  Very quickly, Watanabe gained a fearsome reputation throughout Japan. Officials at other camps began sending troublesome prisoners to Watanabe for “polishing,” and Omori was dubbed “punishment camp.” In the words of Commander Maher, who’d been transferred from Ofuna to become the ranking Omori POW, Watanabe was “the most vicious guard in any prison camp on the main island of Japan.”

  Two things separated Watanabe from other notorious war criminals. One was the emphasis that he placed on emotional torture. Even by the standards of his honor-conscious culture, he was unusually consumed by his perceived humiliation, and was intent upon inflicting the same pain on the men under his power. Where men like the Quack were simply goons, Watanabe combined beatings with acts meant to batter men’s psyches. He forced men to bow at pumpkins or trees for hours. He ordered a clergyman POW to stand all night saluting a flagpole, shouting the Japanese word for “salute,” keirei; the experience left the man weeping and out of his mind. He confiscated and destroyed POWs’ family photographs, and brought men to his office to show them letters from home, then burned the unopened letters in front of them. To ensure that men felt utterly helpless, he changed the manner in which he demanded to be addressed each day, beating anyone who guessed wrong. He ordered men to violate camp policies, then attacked them for breaking the rules. POW Jack Brady summed him up in one sentence. “He was absolutely the most sadistic man I ever met.”

  The other attribute that separated Watanabe from fellow guards was his inconsistency. Most of the time, he was the wrathful god of Omori. But after beatings, he sometimes returned to apologize, often in tears. These fits of contrition usually lasted only moments before the shrieking and punching began again. He would spin from serenity to raving madness in the blink of an eye, usually for no reason. One POW recalled seeing him gently praise a POW, fly into a rage and beat the POW unconscious, then amble to his office and eat his lunch with the placidity of a grazing cow.

  When Watanabe wasn’t thrashing POWs, he was forcing them to be his buddies. He’d wake a POW in the night and be “nice as pie,” asking the man to join him in his room, where he’d serve cookies and talk about literature. Sometimes he’d round up anyone in camp who could play an instrument or sing, bring them to his room, and host a concert. He expected the men to respond as if they adored him, and at times, he seemed to honestly believe that they did.

  Maybe he held these gatherings because they left the POWs feeling more stressed than if he were consistently hostile. Or maybe he was just lonely. Among the Japanese at Omori, Watanabe was despised for his haughtiness, his boasts about his wealth, and his curtness. He made a great show of his education, droning on about nihilism and giving pompous lectures on French literature at NCO meetings. None of his colleagues listened. It wasn’t the subject matter; it was simply that they loathed him.

  Perhaps this is why he turned to POWs for friendship. The tea parties, wrote Derek Clarke, were “tense, sitting-on-the-edge-of-a-volcano affairs.” Any misstep, any misunderstood word might set Watanabe off, leaving him smashing teapots, upending tables, and pounding his guests into oblivion. After the POWs left, Watanabe seemed to feel humiliated by having had to force friendship from lowly POWs. The next day he would often deliver a wild-eyed whipping to the previous night’s buddies.

  Like any bully, he had a taste for a particular type of victim. Enlisted men usually received only the occasional slapped face; officers were
in for unrelenting cruelty. Among those officers, a few were especially irresistible to him. Some had elevated status, such as physicians, chaplains, barracks commanders, and those who’d been highly successful in civilian life. Others he resented because they wouldn’t crawl before him. These he singled out and hunted with inexhaustible hatred.

  From the moment that Watanabe locked eyes with Louie Zamperini, an officer, a famous Olympian, and a man for whom defiance was second nature, no man obsessed him more.

  * In POW memoirs, Watanabe’s first name is almost always listed as Matsuhiro. Official documents confirm that the correct spelling was Mutsuhiro.

  Twenty-four

  Hunted

  AFTER A DAY SPENT SHIVERING IN OMORI’S QUARANTINE area, Louie was led into the main body of the camp, an enormous compound crowded with some nine hundred prisoners. He wandered down a long row of barracks until he found the one to which he was assigned. As he walked in, several POWs came forward to greet him. One of them slipped a cup of piping hot tea into his chilled hands. A Scottish prisoner approached, carrying a spoon and a bulging sock. He dipped the spoon into the sock and ladled out two heaping teaspoons of sugar into Louie’s cup. To any POW, sugar was a treasure of incalculable value, and Louie couldn’t understand how this man could have acquired an entire sock full of it.

  As he sipped his tea, Louie was introduced to two barracks commanders, British lieutenant Tom Wade and American lieutenant Bob Martindale, who began filling him in on Omori. They spoke about the corporal who had attacked him at the gate. His name was Watanabe, they said, but Louie should never refer to him by his real name. Such was Watanabe’s paranoia that he often hid outside the barracks, trying to catch men speaking of him so he could beat them for it. The men referred to him by a host of nicknames, including the Animal, the Big Flag, Little Napoleon, and, most often, the Bird, a name chosen because it carried no negative connotation that could get the POWs beaten.

  It was the Bird’s favorite pastime to send guards bursting into a barracks ahead of him, screaming Keirei! He would then race in to choose his victim. Sitting far from the door didn’t ensure safety; the Bird loved to leap through open windows. Men were told to always be ready, speak of him only in whispers, and agree in advance on a subject to switch to if the Bird ran into the room demanding to be told what they were talking about. Men were advised to say that they were speaking of sex, because the subject interested and distracted him.

  The Omori barracks were arranged in two lines separated by a central avenue. At the avenue’s end stood the Bird’s office, placed so that the corporal could see the entire avenue through his large front window. To get anywhere in camp, other than the benjos behind the barracks, POWs had to step into the Bird’s view. One of his demands was that men salute not only him but his window. He often left the office vacant and hid nearby, baseball bat in hand, ready to club men who failed to salute the window.

  Among the POWs, there was an elaborate sentry system to monitor the Bird’s movements. When he was in his office, men would say, “The Animal is in his cage.” When he was out, they’d say, “The Animal is on the prowl.”

  “Flag’s up!” meant that the Bird was coming. Men were so attuned to the Bird’s presence that they instantly recognized the clopping sound his clogs made in the sand. The sound usually triggered a stampede to the benjos, where the Bird seldom went.

  As he absorbed the advice on coping with the Bird, Louie learned something else that surely sank his heart. He had thought that since this was a POW camp, he would be able to write home to let his family know he was alive. Once, Omori POWs had been allowed to write letters, but no longer. The Bird didn’t allow it.

  When new POWs arrived at Omori, they were registered with the Red Cross, and word of their whereabouts was forwarded to their governments, then their families. But Omori officials didn’t register Louie. They had special plans for him, and were apparently hiding him. In the absence of Louie’s name on a Red Cross roster, the American government had no reason to believe that he was alive, and Louie’s family was told nothing.

  For Louie, the shared lessons about the Bird did no good. No sooner had Louie stepped outside than the Bird found him, accused him of an imaginary infraction, and attacked him in a wild fury. The next day came another beating, and the next, another. Though there were hundreds of POWs in camp, this deranged corporal was fixated on Louie, hunting the former Olympian, whom he would call “number one prisoner.” Louie tried to conceal himself in groups of men, but the Bird always found him. “After the first few days in camp,” Louie said, “I looked for him like I was looking for a lion loose in the jungle.”

  ——

  When Louie woke each morning, the first thing that he thought of was the Bird. He’d look for the corporal through morning tenko, roll call, farting at the emperor, and forcing down rations. After breakfast, the enlisted men were assembled into work parties and marched away. With the camp population drastically diminished by the exodus, Louie had no crowds to hide in. The Bird was on him immediately.

  The one good thing about being an officer in Omori was that one was exempt from slave labor, albeit at the painful cost of half of the standard ration. But soon after Louie’s arrival, the Bird called out the officers and announced that from now on, they’d labor at the work sites alongside the enlisted men. When a man protested that this violated international law, the Bird swung his kendo stick straight into the man’s head. The Bird approached the next man, who also said he wouldn’t work. Again the kendo stick banged down. Louie was the third man. Trying to avoid getting his head cracked open, he blurted out a compromise idea. They’d love to work within the camp, he said, making it a better place.

  The Bird paused. He seemed to feel that as long as he forced the officers to work, he was winning. He sent them into a shack and ordered them to stitch up leather ammunition pouches, backpacks, and equipment covers for the Japanese military. Louie and the other men were kept there for about eight hours a day, but they worked only when the Bird was around, and even then, they deliberately stitched the leather improperly.

  The Bird’s next move was to announce that from now on, the officers would empty the benjos. Eight benjos were no match for nine hundred dysenteric men, and keeping the pits from oozing over was a tall order. Louie and the other officers used “honey dippers”—giant ladles—to spoon waste from the pits into buckets, then carried the buckets to cesspits outside the camp. The work was nauseating and degrading, and when heavy rains came, the waste oozed out of the cesspits and back into camp. To deprive the Bird of the pleasure of seeing them miserable, the men made a point of being jolly. Martindale created the “Royal Order of the Benjo.”

  “The motto,” he wrote, “was unprintable.”

  ——

  As the officers finished each day of abuse, honey-dipping, and errant sewing, the enlisted slaves were driven back to camp. The first time Louie saw them return, he learned where that sock of sugar had come from.

  At the work sites, Omori’s POWs were waging a guerrilla war. At the railyards and docks, they switched mailing labels, rewrote delivery addresses, and changed the labeling on boxcars, sending tons of goods to the wrong destinations. They threw fistfuls of dirt into gas tanks and broke anything mechanical that passed through their hands. Forced to build engine blocks, American Milton McMullen crafted the exteriors well enough to pass inspection but fashioned the interiors so the engines would never run. POWs loading at docks “accidentally” dropped fragile items, including a large shipment of wine and furniture en route to a Nazi ambassador. (The broken furniture was sent on; the wine was decanted into POW canteens.) Coming upon the suitcases of the German envoy, POWs shredded the clothes, soaked them in mud and oil, and repacked them with friendly notes signed “Winston Churchill.” They drank huge quantities of tea and peed profusely on nearly every bag of rice they loaded. And in one celebrated incident, POWs loading heavy goods onto a barge hurled the material down with such force that they sank the
barge, blocking a canal. After a Herculean effort was put into clearing the sunken barge and bringing in a new one, the POWs sank it, too.

  Emboldened by the thought that he was probably going to die in Japan and, thus, had nothing to lose, McMullen joined several other POWs in committing an act that was potentially suicidal. While enslaved at a railyard, they noticed that a group of track workers had neglected to put their tools away. When their guard became absorbed in wooing a pretty girl, the POWs sprinted from their stations, snatched up the tools, dashed over to a section of track, wrenched the pins and bolts out, and rushed back to their work. The guard, still talking to the girl, noticed nothing. A switch engine chugged in, pulling several boxcars. The engine hit the sabotaged strip, the rails shot out from under it, and the entire train tipped over. No one was hurt, but the Japanese were frantic. They looked to the POWs, who kept working, their faces devoid of expression. The Japanese began screaming accusations at one another.

  As dangerous as these acts were, for the POWs, they were transformative. In risking their necks to sabotage their enemy, the men were no longer passive captives. They were soldiers again.

  What the POWs couldn’t sabotage, they stole. They broke into shipping boxes, tapped bottles, lifted storage room doors off their hinges, raided ships’ galleys, and crawled up factory chutes. Scottish POWs who worked in the Mitsubishi food warehouse ran the most sophisticated operation. When the Japanese took their shoe sizes for work boots, the men asked for boots several sizes too big. They knitted special socks, some four feet long, and hoarded hollow bamboo reeds. Once at the sites, they leaned casually against sugar sacks, stabbed the reeds in, then ran the reeds into the socks, allowing sugar to pour through the reeds until the socks were full. Others tied up their pant cuffs, stuck the reeds in their waistbands, and filled their pants with sugar. Each load was deposited in a secret compartment in the latrine, to be retrieved at day’s end.