Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [86]
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