Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [71]
I kept sweeping, looking for an opening. I worried less about the commandant catching me than about being spotted by the cook, Hata, or the Quack. Though not in any way responsible for camp discipline, both frequently administered punishments.
The commandant began to doze, and let his paper slip beneath his tea table. I edged closer, reached out, and snagged the paper with my broom, crumpling it as if it were trash. I swept it around the corner and to the latrine. There I undid the wad. I couldn’t read the Japanese scrawl, but it didn’t matter. I saw a map with arrows showing major troop movements.
I gave it to Bill Harris to decipher.
Harris read the text and said, “How do you spell the name of the island you were on when you came in from the Marshalls?”
“K-W-A-J-A-L-E-I-N,” I said. “Why? Have we taken it?
“Long ago, I think,” he said, “because we’re apparently launching attacks from there on all the other islands, leading right to Japan.”
Kwajalein taken! Where Phil and I had suffered, our forces now played gin rummy. We never had a doubt about winning the war. It just took time for our country, an industrial giant, to get rolling. But with the war split between two enemies and continents, we could understand the slower pace.
Harris returned the newspaper, and I took it outside to the trash pile. Meanwhile, he made a rough sketch from memory depicting the Allied advances. Later he showed it to the ranking officers. The men in our little espionage group were overjoyed. We imagined imminent victory and speculated about when they might release us.
Our joy was brief.
Harris should have destroyed his map, but he hid it instead. The next day, when we were outside, the Japanese went through everyone’s stuff and found it.
The cry went out. “Line up! Inspection.”
The Quack called Harris out and started punching him, then grabbed a heavy cherrywood bludgeon and hit him repeatedly, knocking him out. We all wanted to jump in and stop the sadistic medic, but the guards had their rifles ready because they knew it was a serious situation. The Quack kept jumping on Harris even as he lay helpless on the ground. He totally lost control. It broke our hearts to watch and not be able to intervene.
Afterward, the Quack leaned against a bench, ecstatic, breathing hard, like a guy just finished having intercourse with a woman. We thought Harris was dead, and I hated the Japanese then even more than I had hated them on Kwajalein. I felt angry and helpless. Had it been possible I would gladly have torn the Quack to bits with my own hands and shot those who leered from the doorways and giggled behind the kitchen windows.
Meanwhile, the commandant had acted like he couldn’t care less. He’d let the beating continue uninterrupted. And Conga Joe walked up and down the line of men left standing at attention—two had fainted—belting anyone who blinked or looked suspicious.
No one could touch Harris. We had to let him lie there until, thankfully, he stirred. Then one of our ranking men got permission to take him back to his cubicle. I helped. We lay him facedown on his tatami mat and ripped away his clothing. When we saw the spare flesh of his back, now reduced to pulp, and his buttocks, all one purple-black bruise, it was hard not to cry. We were sure the Quack had crushed Bill’s vertebrae. Maybe still being alive wouldn’t be so great after all.
The next morning, rather than give his captors the satisfaction of having eliminated him, Harris, with the pride of an American marine, walked stiffly to roll call. Afterward he returned to bed, where he stayed for days. Even when he could move again, it was months before he could focus mentally.
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