Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [73]
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.
9
THE BIRD
On 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