On Oahu, Joe Deasy was summoned to Hickam Field. When he arrived, he was handed translations of some of the Japanese documents that had been taken from Kwajalein. He began to read. Two American airmen, the documents said, had been fished from a life raft and brought to Kwajalein. Their names weren’t given, but they were described as a pilot and a bombardier. They’d been in a plane crash—the date was apparently provided—and three men had survived, but one had died on the raft. The other two had drifted for forty-seven days. Included among the papers were interrogation reports and drawings of B-24s made by the captives. The report stated that the men had been beaten, then sent to Japan by boat.
The moment that Deasy read the report, he knew who the men were. Deasy had been long at war, and the experience had ground away his emotions, but this revelation broke through: Phillips and Zamperini had survived their crash. Deasy’s elation was tailed by a sinking sense of guilt: In their painstaking search of the ocean, they had missed seeing the lost men, but the enemy had not.
“I was happy to have found them,” Deasy recalled, “but the next thing is, where the hell are they?” If the report of their transport to Japan was correct, it still didn’t mean they had gotten there alive, or that they had survived whatever lay in store for them there.
The military now knew with a fair amount of certainty that everyone who had gone up on Green Hornet, with the exception of Zamperini and Phillips, was dead. Apparently because of the sketchiness of the reports and the fact that Louie’s and Phil’s fates were still unknown, the families of the dead and the two still missing weren’t notified.
Like the Zamperinis, the Phillips family had been largely in the dark since Allen had disappeared. Allen’s father was at Camp Pickett in Virginia; his mother, Kelsey, rattled around in her empty house in Princeton, Indiana. After the telegram informing them that Allen was missing, they received a letter from an adjutant from the 42nd squadron, giving details on how Allen had disappeared. The adjutant wrote with a tone of finality, speaking of “your hour of grief,” noting that Allen “will always be revered by the members of this organization” and offering to “extend myself to you to ease your sorrow.” The next month, a package came to Allen’s father at Camp Pickett. In it were two bronze oak-leaf clusters, awarded to Allen for his valor in the missions of Makin, Tarawa, and Nauru. “Pending final determination of your son’s status,” the cover letter read, “the Oak Leaf Clusters are being sent to you for safe-keeping.” Though the Phillipses didn’t know it, the medals arrived the same week Allen was captured.
Chaplain Phillips wanted to send the oak-leaf clusters to his wife but feared losing them in the mail, so he kept them with him in Virginia. He took a picture of them, along with Allen’s service ribbons, wings, insignia, and Air Medal, attached the picture to a maroon piece of felt he’d cut from a lady’s hat, and glued the felt to a walnut plaque. When he got back to Indiana, he planned to attach the actual medals and ribbons to the felt and stand the plaque on the bookcase, under Allen’s picture. “It certainly is swell,” he wrote to his daughter.
In the absence of information, all the Phillipses could do was ponder what little they knew. They, like the Zamperinis, refused to conclude that their boy was dead. “I think I have thought of every conceivable angle to what Allen did and I have not dismissed any of them from my mind yet,” Chaplain Phillips wrote to his daughter in August. “So many things could be true about it all that they build up for me a feeling of confidence that will not be shaken. Some day we are all going to have that reunion we are hoping and waiting for.”
For Cecy Perry, the news that her fiancé was missing was followed by a letter from her old friend Smitty, one of the pilots who had searched for Green Hornet. In his letter, Smitty told Cecy everything that was known about Allen’s disappearance and how dedicated the searchers were to finding him. He didn’t tell her that he had seen what had probably been the provisions box for the lost plane, floating by itself on the ocean. He wrote about having sat with Allen on the night before he disappeared, and how Allen had been thinking of her and hoping to get leave to see her.
Phil’s fiancée, Cecy Perry. Courtesy of Karen Loomis
After Smitty’s letter, no news came. Cecy, desperate for information, felt isolated in Indiana. One of her friends was living in a suburb of Washington, D.C., and Cecy thought that in the capital, she could find out more about Allen. She gave up teaching, traveled east, and moved into her friend’s apartment, which she decorated with pictures of Allen. She got a job with TWA, thinking that through the airline, she might learn something. She spent much of her time asking questions, but learned nothing.
Cecy was a sensible, educated woman, but in her anguish, she did something completely out of character. She went to a fortune-teller and asked about Allen.
The fortune-teller told her that Allen wasn’t dead. He was injured but alive. He would be found, she said, before Christmas. Cecy latched onto those words and believed them.
——
By the spring of 1944, the mothers of the Green Hornet crewmen, as well as other family members, had begun to correspond. In dozens of letters that crisscrossed America, they shared their emotions and bolstered each other’s hopes about “our boys.” Kelsey would later say that she came to love all of them through those letters.
“This year sure has been an awful long year just waiting of some word from them,” wrote Delia Robinson, the sister of Green Hornet gunner Otto Anderson, that June. “We just have to keep on hoping.” The waiting had taken its toll on crewman Leslie Dean’s mother, Mable—her failing health had sent her to Wichita for weeks of treatment—but she, like the others, had not given up. “We thought surely we would have heard something when the year was up,” she wrote to Louise. “So it seems they are not sure the crew were killed, or they would have notified us long before this. So I feel that we can still have hope of them being alive somewhere.”
Mable Dean wrote those words on June 27, 1944. On that very day, exactly thirteen months after Green Hornet had gone down, messages were typed up at the War Department and sent to the families of the plane’s crewmen. When Louise Zamperini’s message reached her door, she opened it and burst into tears. The military had officially declared Louie, and all the other crewmen, dead.
Kelsey Phillips was not persuaded. She either learned or guessed that the La Porte Herald-Argus, the newspaper of their former hometown, would publish the news. She contacted the paper and asked them not to print the death notice; her son, she told them, was not gone. The editors honored her request. Russell Allen Phillips had officially been declared dead, but no obituary appeared.
The feeling in the Zamperini home was the same as in the Phillipses’. When the initial shock from the death notice faded, all of the Zamperinis realized that it changed nothing. The notice had been generated as a bureaucratic matter of course, a designation made for all missing servicemen after thirteen months had passed. Louie’s official death date was listed as May 28, 1944, a year and a day after his plane had vanished. The notice was just a piece of paper. “None of us believed it. None of us,” Sylvia would say. “Never once. Not underneath, even.”
Inside themselves, the Zamperinis still felt that persistent little echo of Louie, the sense that he was still in the world somewhere. Until it was gone, they would go on believing that he was alive.
During family dinners, Pete and his father began drawing up plans to hunt for Louie. When the war was over, they’d rent a boat and sail from island to island until they found him. They’d go on for as long as it took.
Twenty-two
Plots Afoot
THE PLOT BEGAN WITH A QUESTION. IT WAS THE SUMMER of 1944, and Louie and Frank Tinker were walking together in the Ofuna compound. Louie could hear small planes coming and going from an airstrip somewhere in the distance, and the sound started him thinking. If we could get out of here, he asked Tinker, could you fly a Japanese plane?
“If it has wings,” Tinker replied.
&nb
sp; From that brief exchange, an idea took root. Louie, Tinker, and Harris were going to escape.
——
They’d been driven to this point by a long, desperate spring and summer. Every day, the men were slapped, kicked, beaten, humiliated, and driven through forced exercises. There were sudden explosions of violence that left captives spilled over the ground, hoping they wouldn’t be killed. And that spring, the central authorities had cut rations to all prisoners dramatically. With only about half of the official ration ending up in the captives’ bowls, the men were wasting away. When the Japanese weighed the captives, Bill Harris, over six feet tall, tipped the scale at 120 pounds. He had developed beriberi.
Louie was driven to ever more reckless efforts to find food. He stole an onion and secretly cooked it under a water heater, but divided between several men, it didn’t amount to much. He stole a package of miso paste and, when the guards weren’t looking, shoveled it into his mouth and swallowed it in one gulp, not knowing that miso paste is extremely concentrated, meant to be diluted in water. He was soon doubled over behind the barracks, heaving his guts out. He was so mad for food that he snuck from his cell late at night, broke into the kitchen, and crammed his mouth full of chestnuts that were to be served to the guards. When he looked up, Shithead was there, watching him. Louie backed away, then sprinted back to his cell. Shithead didn’t beat him for it, but the guard’s appearance was enough to scare Louie out of another go at the kitchen. The best he could do was volunteer to starch the guards’ shirts. The starch was made from rice water pressed through cloth; after Louie pressed the rice, he spent the rest of his time picking flecks of it off the cloth and eating them.
Finally, opportunity knocked. Camp officials asked for a volunteer to work as barber for the guards, offering payment of one rice ball per job. The idea of working around the guards was intimidating, but Louie had to eat. When he came forward, he was given not just electric clippers but a straight razor. He’d never used one before, and he knew what the guards would do to him if they were nicked. He took the razor to his cell and practiced on himself until he could shave without drawing blood. When he walked out to do his first job, the guard balled up his fist at him, then made a demand that, to an American, seemed bizarre. He wanted his forehead shaved, a standard barbering practice in Japan. All of the guards expected Louie to do this. Louie managed not to cut anyone, and the rice balls kept him alive.
A notoriously cruel guard called the Weasel began coming to Louie for shaves, but every time, he left without paying. Louie knew what he would risk in evening the score, but he couldn’t resist. While shaving the Weasel’s forehead, he let the blade stray a little low. By the time he was done, all that was left of the Weasel’s bushy eyebrows was a coquettish line. The Weasel stood, left without paying, and entered the guardhouse. A moment later, Louie heard a shout.
“Marlene Dietrich!”
Louie backed away, waiting for the Weasel to burst out. Several other guards went into the guardhouse, and Louie could hear laughing. The Weasel never punished Louie, but the next time he needed a shave, he went elsewhere.
——
For the captives, every day was lived with the knowledge that it could be their last. The nearer the Allies came to Japan, the larger loomed the threat of the kill-all order. The captives had only a vague idea of how the war was going, but the Japanese were clearly worried. In an interrogation session in late spring, an official told Fitzgerald that if Japan lost, the captives would be executed. “Hope for Japan’s victory,” he said. The quest for news of the war took on special urgency.
One morning, Louie was on the parade ground, under orders to sweep the compound. He saw the Mummy—the camp commander—sitting under a cherry tree, holding a newspaper. He was nodding off. Louie loitered near him, watching. The Mummy’s head tipped, his fingers parted, and the paper fluttered to the ground. Louie swept his way over, reached out with the broom, and, as quietly as he could, forked the newspaper to himself. The text was in Japanese, but there was a war map on one page. Louie ran to the barracks, found Harris, and held the paper up before him. Harris stared at it, memorizing the map. Louie then ran the paper to the garbage so they’d have no evidence of the theft. Harris drew a perfect rendering of the map, showed it to the other captives, then destroyed it. The map confirmed that the Allies were closing in on Japan.
In July, the scuttlebutt in camp was that the Americans were attacking the critical island of Saipan, in the Mariana Islands, south of mainland Japan. A spindly new captive was hauled in, and everyone eyed him as a source of information, but the guards kept him isolated and forbade the veterans from speaking to him. When the new man was led to the bathhouse, Louie saw his chance. He snuck behind the building and looked in an open window. The captive was standing naked, holding a pan of water and washing as the guard stood by. Then the guard stepped away to light a cigarette.
“If we’ve taken Saipan, drop the pan,” Louie whispered.
The pan clattered to the floor. The captive picked it up, dropped it again, then did it a third time. The guard rushed back in, and the captive pretended that the pan had accidentally slipped.
Louie hurried to his friends and announced that Saipan had fallen. At the time of their capture, the American bomber with the longest range was the B-24. Because the Liberator didn’t have the range to make the three-thousand-mile round-trip between Saipan and Japan’s home islands, the captives must have believed that winning Saipan was only a preliminary step to establishing an island base within bomber range of mainland Japan. They didn’t know that the AAF had introduced a new bomber, one with tremendous range. From Saipan, the Japanese mainland was already within reach.
The guards and officials were increasingly agitated. Sasaki had long crowed about the inevitability of Japan’s victory, but now he buddied up to the captives, telling Louie of his hatred of former prime minister and war architect Hideki Tojo. He began to sound like he was rooting for the Allies.
As they considered the news on Saipan, Louie and the others had no idea what horrors were attending the Allied advance. That same month, American forces turned on Saipan’s neighboring isle, Tinian, where the Japanese held five thousand Koreans, conscripted as laborers. Apparently afraid that the Koreans would join the enemy if the Americans invaded, the Japanese employed the kill-all policy. They murdered all five thousand Koreans.
At night, as they lay in their cells, the captives began hearing an unsettling sound, far in the distance. It was the scream of air-raid sirens. They listened for bombers, but none came.
——
As summer stretched on, conditions in Ofuna declined. The air was clouded with flies, lice hopped over scalps, and wiggling lines of fleas ran the length of the seams in Louie’s shirt. Louie spent his days and nights scratching and slapping, and his skin, like that of everyone else, was speckled with angry bite marks. The Japanese offered a rice ball to the man who killed the most flies, inspiring a cutthroat swatting competition and hoarding of flattened corpses. Then, in July, the men were marched outside and into a canal to bail water into rice paddies. When they emerged at the day’s end, they were covered in leeches. Louie had six on his chest alone. The men became frantic, begging the guards for their cigarettes. As they squirmed around, jabbing at the leeches with cigarettes, one of the guards looked down at them.
“You should be happy in your work,” he said.
On August 5, a truck bearing the month’s rations arrived. As Fitzgerald watched, camp officials stripped it nearly clean. Curley announced that the rations were again being cut, blaming it on rats. Fitzgerald noted in his diary that after officials were done “brown bagging” their way through the seventy pounds of sugar allotted to the captives, one teacup of sugar remained. On August 22, a truck backed up to the kitchen door, and the captive kitchen workers were told to leave. Fitzgerald went to the benjo, from which he could see the kitchen. He saw sacks of food being piled into the truck, which then left camp. “Someone must be ope
ning up a store and really getting set up in business,” he wrote.
The beatings went on. The Quack was especially feral. One day, Louie saw some Japanese dumping fish into the trough in which the captives washed their hands and feet. Told to wash the fish, Louie walked up and peered into the trough. The fish were putrid and undulating with maggots. As he recoiled, the Quack saw him, pounded over, and punched him a dozen times. That night, the same fish was ladled into Louie’s bowl. Louie wouldn’t touch it. A guard jabbed him behind the ear with a bayonet and forced him to eat it.
And then there was Gaga. Something about this affectionate little duck, perhaps the fact that he was beloved to the captives, provoked the guards. They tortured him mercilessly, kicking him and hurling him around. Then one day, in full view of the captives, Shithead opened his pants and violated the bird. Gaga died. Of all the things he witnessed in war, Louie would say, this was the worst.
Louie’s mind fled Ofuna and carried him home. He hadn’t seen his family in two years. He thought of the little white house, Virginia and Sylvia, his father and dear, devoted Pete. Most poignant were his memories of his mother. Fred Garrett had told Louie that he’d been given up for dead. Louie couldn’t bear the thought of what this news must have done to his mother.
It was the accumulation of so much suffering, the tug of memory, and the conviction that the Japanese wouldn’t let them leave Ofuna alive that led Louie to listen to the nearby planes and wonder if they could be a way out. Examining the fence, he, Tinker, and Harris concluded that it might be possible to get around the guards and over the barbed wire. The thought hooked all three of them. They decided to make a run for it, commandeer a plane, and get out of Japan.
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption Page 24