Devil at My Heels: The Story of Louis Zamperini (19 page)

The attack was so savage, making me wonder what I would have done in his place—and why I had gotten away with my “crime” in the kitchen.

NOT LONG AFTER
Harris’s beating, a B-24 pilot shot down in the Pacific joined us at Ofuna. His name was Fred Garrett. I watched as the guards brought him in, sitting in a special wooden chair because he only had one leg. Word quickly spread that he had lost the other on Kwajalein, and that he’d been asking if anyone named Louie Zamperini was at the camp.

I went to see Garrett. He told me that after his plane crashed the Japanese had imprisoned him and his men on Kwajalein. His crew was executed, but Garrett was spared. He didn’t know why. In addition, he had an ankle injury, which didn’t receive proper treatment and got infected, so they decided to amputate. Garrett was bitter, especially about the operation. I couldn’t blame him. For a mere ankle injury they’d cut off his leg above the knee, without using anesthetic or antiseptic—he said—with an ordinary crosscut wood saw. I couldn’t imagine the pain Garrett had endured. And I didn’t want to.

But why did he want to see me?

“I saw your name carved into the wall in my cell,” he explained. “Right under the names of the marines. I knew who you were because you got a lot of publicity when you went missing in action.” That was great. He was the second American, after Boyington, to confirm that, and we became close friends.

ONE DAY THE
commandant decided to stage a track meet, featuring me. It was weird. My muscles had atrophied; I couldn’t run. I entered the high jump instead, and won it. I guess I was so skinny, I didn’t have much to lift. After that, I made a point of exercising to get in better shape.

Soon, with great fanfare, they brought in a local runner because what they really wanted was for me to run and lose. I told the grinning officers that the race would be unfair, that the track was hardly adequate for going distances. Most important, I had no desire to run. I shouldn’t have said that. They told me in no uncertain terms that if I didn’t run, not only I but the whole camp would suffer. My pride was not worth that, so I ran, and surprised myself at how light and comfortable I felt, considering my condition. I let the local runner set the pace and allowed him to stay ahead even as the finish line loomed. Then I stretched out and passed him; I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t resist.

Moments later I woke up on the ground. Someone had hit me on the head from behind with a cherrywood club.

They brought up another runner a few weeks later, and I beat him, too. After the race he took me aside and said, “Next week I bring my girlfriend. Let me win, so I can say I beat an Olympian, and I’ll give you a rice ball.”

No problem. I let him win. Instead of giving me a rice ball, he left with his girlfriend. But two days later he came back and gave me
two
rice balls. I guess I’d helped him win with his girlfriend, too.

THOUGH I HAD
thought often of my family and friends, the running and meeting Fred Garrett brought back stronger memories of life before the war and made me wonder again how everyone was back home. I’d been gone almost a year, and according to Garrett, everyone thought I was dead. (I would later discover that because Ofuna was a secret camp, the Japanese had never registered me as a prisoner of war with the Geneva POW Convention.) I felt sorrier for my loved ones than I did for myself.

After the war I would confirm what Garrett had told me, that my disappearance had quickly made the papers. No more than a month after the crash, even as I drifted on the raft, a UPI story began, “A little flag hangs today in the ‘memory corner’ of a Pacific air base barracks for Lieut. Lou Zamperini and his dream of future miles.” Another paper described me as having “turned in [his] Service
wings…Zamperini—as far as can be determined—has made the supreme sacrifice.”

In June 1943 my mother received a letter from friends that read in part:

Another letter, this from a stranger, read:

Most touching, at least to me, was learning later that my mother had kept a list in her daily reminder book of who had called after I disappeared. She filled three pages, in her beautiful handwriting, with at least one hundred names.

IN NOVEMBER
1943 the army listed me as tentatively killed in action, but you had to be missing for a year and a month before they’d make it official. In June 1944 my parents received the country’s condolences. It read:

IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF
First Lieutenant Louis S. Zamperini, A.S. No 0-663341,
WHO DIED IN THE SERVICE OF HIS COUNTRY AT
in the Central Pacific Area, May 28, 1944.
HE STANDS IN THE UNBROKEN LINE OF PATRIOTS WHO HAVE DARED TO DIE THAT FREEDOM MIGHT LIVE, AND GROW, AND INCREASE ITS BLESSINGS. FREEDOM LIVES, AND THROUGH IT, HE LIVES—IN A WAY THAT HUMBLES THE UNDERTAKINGS OF MOST MEN

Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States of America.

After an all-too-brief summer, the first fall chill filled the air. Before long it would be colder still, and I didn’t relish another winter trying not to freeze standing outside on the cinder-strewn campgrounds.

Each night, just outside the gate, I could hear the local people on their way to a nearby shrine. Every morning a heavy mist covered the paddies and hills, and through it I could hear the voices of children walking to school, singing. Now it seems idyllic; then it irritated the heck out of me. Lempriere translated for me. They sang a marching song, the lyrics a stark and bitter contrast to the innocence of school-books and fresh faces. It would make sense to someone who’d fought in a war, but to the children?

One day I knew the war would be over, but I wondered how long the remains of war would last in me and in them even after the bombs had stopped falling and the guns were silent. What I feared most was that my generation would teach the hatred and resentment I was learning at the hands of the Japanese to our own children and the cycle of disaffection and violence would never stop.

But when I turned my attention back to the camp, to its filth, squalor, and inhumanity, I knew in my heart that the war—this war—was right. If it took my hatred to support it, to win it, and most important, to get me through it alive, so be it.

O
n September 30, 1944, just over a year after my arrival at Ofuna, a dozen prisoners marched through the camp’s wooden gate, turned right—toward life—and headed down a narrow country road.

I was one.

At last, they’d transferred me to a recognized POW camp, inspected by the Red Cross, where they might more strongly acknowledge my value as a human being. I’d be free to write letters, and my loved ones at home would soon discover to their great surprise that I still lived. I wanted that more than anything. As badly as I’d been treated, I knew their sorrow must be worse. I missed them so.

After a few hours and a short train ride, I crossed a small bridge and walked through oversize wooden gates into Omori, the Tokyo headquarters for perhaps thirty other POW compounds, and home to more than six hundred prisoners. As Tom Henling Wade, an Omori prisoner I’d soon meet, would later write in his book,
Prisoner of the Japanese,
“Omori meant great forest, but there was no forest now.”

Two guards with rifles motioned for the new prisoners to form a line. Wearily, we snapped to attention as best we could, and I stood waiting in a cold, barren quadrangle on a man-made sand-and-gravel spit—not even as long or wide as a football field—dredged from and protruding into the bay halfway between Yokohama and Tokyo.

During my journey I’d been told how lucky I was to be assigned here. After the barbarism of Ofuna, I prayed that was true; I’d heard of other camps with horrid conditions equivalent to Ofuna, like 3-B, under the Yokohama baseball stadium, and the various
Kempeitai
(Japanese secret police) prisons.

The group stood shivering for ten minutes until a flat-faced, frog-headed sergeant with the cruelest eyes I’d ever seen strutted out, more prima donna than martinet, to meet us. About five-feet-seven and in his midtwenties, he wore the usual enlisted man’s outfit: the little cap you see in all the movies, khaki green uniform with baggy pants, coat with a belt, boots, sword. He paced slowly in front of the line, pausing to push his face within inches of each prisoner.

Stopping in front of a seaman from the submarine
Grenadier,
he stuck his finger in the man’s face and said, “You do not stand at attention. You move!” The sergeant’s face contorted and he shook with uncontrolled rage. He unstrapped his sword and was about to strike the seaman across the face but hesitated, replaced the strap, and instead hit him full in the mouth with his fist. The sailor staggered back but remained standing. The sergeant adjusted his sword and resumed pacing.

Soon it was my turn. When I looked into those black and indelibly sadistic eyes I had the eerie feeling that the sergeant knew me. That was impossible, of course, but I couldn’t take the intensity of his stare and looked over his shoulder. Whack! He knocked me down.

“Why you no look in my eyes?” he barked. He stared again, and this time I stubbornly met his gaze. Whack! “You no look at me!” Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I immediately hated the little bastard—and feared him.

This was my introduction to Sergeant Matsuhiro Watanabe, disciplinary NCO and, although he had superiors, functional head of Omori. The prisoners called him “the Bird.” The practice with guards and camp officials was always to label them with the worst and dirtiest names we could invent. Watanabe was the Bird not because of any physical or personal characteristic but just because he was so rotten that no one could think of a name derogatory enough to match his irrational behavior. Also, if we’d called him an insulting name and he
found out about it—Watanabe could speak broken English—he might punish the whole camp.

Deranged, brutal beyond belief, vicious like someone who tortured animals as a child before turning his evil talents on people, the Bird by his mere existence allowed me to focus all the hatred I’d accumulated and let fester since my capture.

Later, I would learn that even Omori’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Kato, was simply a puppet. He’d see the Bird mete out punishment and look away. The Bird’s beatings went beyond doing his duty; he seemed to get personal satisfaction from causing pain. We thought he had almost
too
much authority; perhaps he belonged to the
Kempeitai
, the secret police. Tom Wade thought he might be in the Black Dragon Society, a secret, patriotic group. No one knew.

Compared with the Bird, the Ofuna guards were country gentleman.

I SPENT MY
first three days in a quarantine shed. I’m being generous; it was more like a carport: a roof and posts without walls, surrounded by an inch of snow and camp debris. I still wore my original, ragged clothes and the Norwegian’s coat. I slept on the dirt with nothing to keep me warm but a thin paper blanket. At only ninety pounds, with little meat on my bones to protect me, I nearly froze and I knew I couldn’t spend another night that way. But maybe I wouldn’t have to. I had an idea. I scoured the area and found an abandoned apple crate, old mats, driftwood—plenty of kindling, if only someone had a match.

Thank goodness for my Boy Scout training.

I took apart the box and made a base, a stick, and tinder. I borrowed leather shoestrings from another guy in the shed. Everyone chuckled while I worked, but pretty soon smoke streamed upward and no one laughed. I used bits of an old tatami mat to feed the embers, then I began to blow, blow, blow. Before long I had a small flame. I put it under the apple-box kindling, and soon we had a fire to warm ourselves. We moved in close, only to have each man immediately pull out a long-stashed cigarette butt and light up. Priorities. Only in wartime.

When word got to the Bird that we had a fire without permission he wanted to know who’d built it. I took responsibility. “Where you get the matches?” he screamed. We weren’t supposed to have matches, and we didn’t. I explained what I’d done. I thought he’d admire my resourcefulness. Instead, he beat me. Later a guard told me that this was part of my introductory “training.”

OMORI WAS MOSTLY
sand. The camp, surrounded by a six-foot fence, took up most of the man-made island. On the other side of the fence I could see big holes in the “beach,” where the prisoners charged with cleaning the latrines dumped the human excrement. Thousand of flies hovered over this sickening, open sewer. The smell never went away.

Inside the fence, Omori consisted of eight barracks, five on one side of the main walkway and three on the other, plus some administrative buildings like the camp office and infirmary. The bathrooms and kitchen were at the far end.

The barracks were long and narrow, with double-deck sleeping areas on either side of the central aisle. All the old-timers had the bottom bunks; the lowest-ranking men slept on top—my spot. In the woodwork behind my bunk someone showed me a nailed panel. He pulled out the nail and opened a wood slat. “That’s where you can hide stuff from the Japs,” he explained.

Once squared away, I got a cup of tea made from the leaves already used by the camp officers. It tasted weak and watery. A Royal Scots soldier a few bunks away noticed and walked over carrying a sock and spoon. He introduced himself as Blackie, and he seemed quite cheerful for a POW. He put two teaspoons of sugar from the sock in my tea.

Oh, what a treat that was.

Blackie was one of the Royal Scots who lived in Number Two, my barrack. The Scots were former criminals doing time in England who, when the war broke out, were given the choice of staying in prison or serving the queen in battle. They chose the latter.

Most of the able prisoners, excluding officers and the sick, had to work all day outside the camp, at the local railway yards, factories,
and warehouses. Each location provided great opportunities to steal goods to sneak into the camp: rice, sugar, canned oysters, canned sardines, dried fish, whale meat, dried egg powder, coconut, chocolate, even grain alcohol. The contraband kept the men healthier not only physically but mentally, because the game of pilfering sharpened their minds and sustained their hopes.

The Scots worked at a Mitsubishi warehouse and specialized in smuggling sugar. According to Tom Wade, they averaged ten pounds of sugar a day, or three tons a year. That’s why we knew them as the “Sugar Barons.”

At first I couldn’t figure out how they did it; we were regularly frisked. But rather than hide contraband in their jackets, waistbands, or other obvious places, they’d tie off their pant cuffs and fill the legs. Even more creatively, they’d ordered bigger work boots. The Japanese would say, “American crazy. Big shoes. Japanese wear tight shoes.” The reason was so they could fill the shoes with goodies and walk into camp with stolen items under their feet and no one the wiser.

The Scots also requested wraparound leggings like the Japanese had worn in World War I. This appealed to the Nippon ego, and it allowed the Scots to smuggle tobacco into Omori to supplement our meager ration. Again, they were quite inventive; they had to dampen at least every other leaf and stack them. By the time they were through working, the leaves were all soft, so they could wrap them around their legs. Then they’d put on the leggings and pull their pants down to cover the evidence.

Back at the barracks, the Scots would dry the leaves in secret compartments above their bunks until they hardened like wood. As a finishing touch, they’d somehow obtained a piece of steel, bent it at an angle, and used it to shave the dried wads. The result was more tobacco for everyone, free.

Not everyone smuggled contraband successfully. Guards searched prisoners when exiting work and entering camp. Guilty parties received beatings and limped back to their bunks with bruises, missing teeth, black eyes, and broken bones—but rarely broken spirits.

TO FURTHER HELP
the war effort the Scots drank excessive amounts of tea on the job. Seems strange; even the guards didn’t understand. They’d question the Scots and hear, “Never drank tea in my life, but you Japanese have the secret. It’s the greatest.” In truth, this was an elegantly simple form of sabotage. Every ship they loaded had rice. The Scots would drink tea all day, then take turns peeing on the rice so by the time it reached its destination it had spoiled. The same with oysters; they’d puncture the cans and pee on them. If they found a crate addressed to the German chancellor, they’d take great delight in ruining it as well.

The Japanese also shipped bricks to build fortifications. When the Scots loaded the bricks, the last guy would catch two bricks and bang them together, creating four “bricks” instead of two, then stack them carefully to look whole. By the time anyone found out, it was too late.

MY FIRST DAY
out of quarantine I immediately reported to the American officer in charge, naval commander Arthur L. Maher, gunnery chief and most senior crew member to survive when the
Houston
sank in March 1942. Maher had been at Omori since December 1943.

We looked to our leaders and to those who had the gift of fluency in foreign languages as our spokesmen. Besides Maher, Tom Wade, an Englishman of mixed parentage, knew Japanese; Lempriere, who’d been with me at Ofuna, knew a bit of many languages and picked up Japanese quickly. Martindale, an air corps second lieutenant from Arizona, also had a fair knowledge of Japanese. This didn’t necessarily ensure better treatment, just better comprehension of what our captors wanted from us each day, and the ability to follow directions when told—often by the Bird, usually screaming—that we must obey “all Japanese orders.”

Unfortunately, Maher seemed unhealthy and low-key, not a take-charge type at all. Wade remembers him regretfully telling us he had no access to the camp command—meaning Watanabe, reportedly once a quieter, friendlier fellow—or any international agency—the Red Cross wasn’t “recognized” except for carefully selected propaganda purposes. The only advice Maher offered was that we “obey all
Japanese commands, no matter how insane,” and pray along with the rest of the prisoners that they would transfer the Bird before he went completely insane and caused a mass killing. Meanwhile, he insisted that no officer was allowed to join the daily work parties. The Royal Scots said we were fools not to because we could steal goods, but we had to listen to Maher.

Our refusal to work did not please the Bird. With our group’s arrival, a surplus of unemployed officers sat around the camp all day. Although we scavenged the beach for driftwood, swept the grounds, handled sewage, and worked in the kitchen, he did not think it was enough.

One evening, while we smoked cigarettes and socialized, the Bird burst into the barracks for a surprise inspection. A prisoner by the door screamed,
“Kiotsuke!”
(Attention.) “
Kashira naka!
” (Eyes center.) He wasn’t quick enough for the Bird, who lunged at him and kicked him. Everyone else stood at attention. Waiting. Hardly breathing.

The Bird walked down the center aisle and scanned the building. Finally, his eyes found mine. “Look at me!” he screamed. “You come to attention last.” I hadn’t, and the Bird knew it. He’d entered at the opposite end of the building, and I was beyond his line of sight. Even if I had, the Japanese never punished anyone for such an offense. Yet somehow the Bird always managed to pick on me, as if he held some special grudge. Whenever he came around I did what I would do with anybody who is my superior and has a lease on my life: I was extremely nice, the model prisoner. I also stayed as far to the rear of the pack as possible, yet every day he managed to punish me. Now he’d set me up again.

Usually, he used his fists or a stick. This time he removed his thick web belt, held it like a baseball bat, and cracked me full across the temple with a steel buckle that must have weighed a pound or more. I fell to the ground, bleeding, in horrible pain. He ordered me to stand. I couldn’t. The Bird took a few squares of toilet tissue from his pocket, bent down, and gave them to me. “Ahhh,” he muttered, like he was sorry. I must have been really out of it because for a second I thought, Maybe the guy isn’t all that bad.
I struggled slowly to my feet and dabbed at the blood until it stopped. When I moved my hand away from my head he hit me again, in the same place, and I woke up on the floor. This time he offered no tissue, and my only thought was, God, this guy is scary.