Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [137]
I grabbed the edge of my seat. “Okay. What’s up?”
“We found the Bird,” Draggan said. “And he’s alive.”
When I could finally speak, all I said was, “What!?”
“Yeah, we found him. He’s retired and wealthy from selling life insurance. We’re going to try and get an interview.”
“Really?”
“Would you like to see him?”
“Absolutely.”
AFTER WE HUNG up I flashed back to the final week at Camp 4-B. The Bird had left two days before we knew the war was over, and no one had seen him since. Even his mother, when questioned, said the family hadn’t heard from him. Eventually she built a shrine to her son and we assumed Watanabe was simply dead.
Draggan had somehow tracked him down, called the Bird’s home, spoken to his wife, and asked for an interview. She said he was sick. A couple of days later he tried again, and this time she said, “He’s on a trip.” Draggan and his crew, including veteran CBS reporter Bob Simon, who fronted the story, decided to hide and watch the house. They discovered that Watanabe took long walks, so they set up a camera across the street and hid another in someone’s hat, just in case. When the Bird came out, they approached him and, speaking through a translator, asked if he was Watanabe.
“Yes, I’m Matsuhiro Watanabe,” he said. After the usual formalities he agreed to speak.
“When you were in charge of Omori do you remember Tom Henling Wade?” Simon asked.
“No, I don’t remember. So many prisoners.”
I don’t know why he didn’t. Wade spoke Japanese and was always interpreting for us. “No, I don’t remember Wado,” he said.
“Do you remember Louis Zamperini?”
“Ah, Zamperini-ka. Orympi-ka. I remember him well. Good prisoner.”
“Would you like to see him?”
To my surprise the Bird said yes.
They also solved the mystery of Watanabe’s whereabouts after the war. He said he’d hidden in a mountain cabin way back in the hills of Nagano, which was wilderness before it became a big ski area. He stayed for seven or eight years, until the general amnesty. I don’t understand how he could have survived that long without a job or at least supplies. The story just increased my suspicion that his parents had known where he was. Where had he gotten the mountain cabin? They had money; they probably owned it. Besides, what kind of man would let his parents think he was dead for seven years?
In the middle of the interview/confrontation, Watanabe’s son and grandson came out of the house and discovered what was going on. They listened in and heard Bob Simon say, “Well, if [Zamperini] was such a good prisoner, why did you beat the hell out of him?”
Watanabe spoke very little English, but he understood. “He said that?”
“Zamperini and the other prisoners remember you in particular as being the most brutal of all the guards,” Simon asked. “How do you explain that?” “Beating and kicking in Caucasian society are considered cruel, cruel behavior,” the Bird explained. “However, there were some occasions in the prison camp in which beating and kicking were unavoidable. I wasn’t given military orders, but because of my own personal feelings…I treated the prisoners strictly as enemies of Japan. Zamperini was well known to me. If he says he was beaten by Watanabe, then such a thing probably occurred at the camp, if you consider my personal feelings at the time.”
“When you were at Omori, according to Tom Henling Wade,” Simon continued, and he brought up the belt buckle, the brutality, the testimony of Wade and Frank Tinker.
The Bird denied none of it.
Watanabe’s family, however, was astonished. They didn’t know the Bird had been a prison guard during the war and were horrified by what they heard and by the old man fighting to find the words. The son and grandson were probably pretty nice people. You can imagine their shock.
“No more!” they shouted. Watanabe’s son said, “You can’t see my father anymore. Leave and do not come back.”
I can’t blame them for that. Any son, no matter whether his father is right or wrong, is going to back his father. The Bird probably wishes he’d never been interviewed, too, because it