Devil at My Heels: The Story of Louis Zamperini (23 page)

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:

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.