Devil at My Heels: The Story of Louis Zamperini (22 page)

After the war Harris returned to Camp Lejeune and planned to get married and leave the service. Then he wrote me and said he’d decided to re-up. The marines sent him to Korea. During a battle he was surrounded, captured, and later executed. It was war, we knew it could happen, but no one deserves that. The poor guy.

AS 1944 TURNED
into 1945, the Germans were close to defeat in Europe and the Japanese knew their end was near. The more desperate they became the more they relied on propaganda to motivate their troops and citizens, and to paint a better picture of themselves for the world.

At one point a film crew came to the camp and asked the huskiest guys to step forward. About fifty did. Not me, of course; skin and bones was not what they were after. They told the group to go to the beach and whoever did would get all the food they could eat. But first they had to put on American marine uniforms and take rifles with no bullets.

On the beach the film crew explained that they wanted to make a little movie. After the group went through some sort of exercise, everyone stood around wondering what would happen next. The Japanese pointed out tables set with fruit and rice balls and other foods, about a hundred yards away. They said, “Okay, we’re through shooting here. Like we promised you, you can have all you can eat. See those tables? There’s your food. The first one there gets more food.”

You’d have thought a starter’s pistol went off. The men were so hungry they literally raced to the food tables—and what footage that made! “American marines” running desperately, carrying rifles, losing ground, throwing down their rifles, running. Later, the Japanese spliced in ten little Japanese soldiers with rifles and bayonets so it looked like they were chasing the marines along the beach, forcing a coward’s retreat. And not a sign of the food anywhere in the movie, of course.

IN FEBRUARY
1945 sirens wailed again and the camp came alive. I ran out of my barracks and looked up to see the beginning of a raid, probably from a carrier ship. There were planes all over the sky: navy Hell Cats and Zeroes. Three F-4U fighters streaked over the camp and dived in on the Japanese navy airstrip about two miles south. Above, I could see Zeroes exploding, popping like little firecrackers.

Suddenly, a navy Hellcat flashed by, chasing a Zero. He was so close I could have hit him with a brick. The Zero finally veered over Tokyo, where he knew he had protection, and the navy pilot turned right and went out over the ocean. That was my first real taste of the victory to come. The Bird and the camp guards had all run outside to watch, and I could hear them saying,
“Nippon skokey!”
In other words, the Japanese air force is no good.
“Dah may!”

Then I saw a B-29 in flames. The crew bailed out, but two Zeroes strafed the survivors all the way down to the water. That was a sickening sight, and I thought I could hear a cold moan of frustration and vengeance rise up from the prisoners.

I turned to Bill Harris. “It’s going to be a pleasure to watch them squirm when the pressure really mounts,” I said. “I think it won’t be long before our planes come over by the hundreds and turn Tokyo to rubble.”

Not a week later we heard sirens again, saw vapor trails, and smoke rising from the city as our bombs found their targets.

Had we cheered as we watched, the sullen guards would surely have shot us on the spot, but we satisfied ourselves with whispers and nudges and bets on when we’d finally head home. We knew from stolen scraps of newspaper that MacArthur had returned to the Philippines, headed for Manila. The German lines in Western Europe had all but crumbled in the face of irresistible Allied forces.

DESPITE OUR VICTORIES,
the reality of my transfer was only a matter of time. But even as I wondered when I’d be forced to leave Omori, the entire camp got a big surprise:
the Bird had been transferred
. Perhaps his new assignment was another move by the Japanese command to appease prisoners who might shortly be free, by ridding them of the scourge of Matsuhiro Watanabe. I’m certain I wasn’t the only one who’d complained.

Overjoyed
does not begin to describe my state of mind, but my celebration was cut short on March, 1, 1945, when my own transfer came in. My destination: Camp 4-B in Naoetsu, 250 miles northwest of
Tokyo, on the other side of the country. A few other prisoners, like Tom Wade, moved with me. The rest came to say good-bye.

NINETEEN SQUARE MILES
of Tokyo had burned in the recent fire-bombing raid, and our train to Naoetsu went right through the devastation. I’d seen the area before the destruction, home to huge power lines, electrical transformers, and generators, factories, private houses. Now all I could see was charcoal for miles as thousands of buildings were reduced to ash. Only one silhouette stuck up repeatedly through the waste: lathes, the machines used to make airplane and ship parts. What a sight, these charred metal monsters framed against an overcast Tokyo sky.

Then we slid into a tunnel and a cold, depressing blackness.

Twelve hours later the train arrived in Naoetsu, a city about forty miles outside of Nagano, where the 1998 Winter Olympics were held. Snow blanketed the ground in huge ten-to twelve-foot drifts, reaching to the rooftops. How the hell would we walk through this stuff? People actually tunneled
down
to get into their homes. The guards herded us through gloomy streets. In the distance I could see the dirty smokestacks of a factory perched on a hillside overlooking the Sea of Japan and the prison camp.

We shuffled into Camp 4-B’s main courtyard, and the gate closed behind the last man. A guard shouted for everyone to stand at attention and wait for inspection. And wait we did, in the bone-numbing, frigid wasteland: five minutes, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty. I could hardly move my half-frozen hands and feet. If this was “punishment camp,” then the penance had already begun—and I expected it would soon get worse.

Finally, the door of a rusty, corrugated tin shack by the main gate opened. The camp commandant stepped out onto the icy parade ground, moved briskly into the light, and surveyed his new arrivals.

I felt my knees buckle and my heart collapse.

The Bird.

I steadied myself on the man next to me in line, but inside I gave up
all hope. I thought, Oh, what they’ve done to me! This is futile. There’s no escape. It was the lowest ebb. The cruelest joke. The kiss of death. I realized I’d never get away from the Bird.

Watanabe marched down the line and found me. His black eyes bored into mine. It was impossible to look at him, and impossible to look away. His face twisted into a sick, sardonic smile. He didn’t seem surprised at all to see me.

In his book, Tom Wade put perfectly exactly how I also felt at that moment: “If someone had given me a pistol then, I would have just blown my brains out.”

E
ven 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.