by James Scott
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Fitzgerald wasn’t the only familiar face the Tang crew found in Ofuna. Marine Major Gregory Boyington—known to most as Pappy—worked in the prison’s galley. The hard-charging fighter ace and leader of the famed Black Sheep Squadron had become a celebrity as he closed in on the then-top record of twenty-six shoot-downs, a record jointly held by Guadalcanal hero Major Joe Foss and former World War I fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker, both recipients of the Medal of Honor. A thirty-one-year-old divorced father of three young children, Boyington boasted an outsized personality and bravado the American public loved, even as he battled severe alcoholism that forced him at times to fly combat missions hung over. A former star college wrestler at the University of Washington, Boyington once circled above an enemy airfield, daring the Japanese to send someone up to fight him. “Major Boyington,” the Japanese radioed as he flew over Kahili. “What is your position?”
“Right over your damn airport, you yellow bellies,” the major barked, “Come up and fight!”
The major claimed four Zeros over Rabaul two days before Christmas 1943, upping his total victory credits to twenty-four planes. He blasted his twenty-fifth days later, bringing him one plane shy of the record. On the morning of January 3, Boyington lifted off for another attack on Rabaul. As seventy Japanese fighters rose up, Boyington dove toward them, blasting the first plane he spotted. He watched seconds later as the enemy pilot bailed out, his plane on fire. His twenty-sixth victim. Enemy planes swirled around Boyington, as many as twenty by his estimate. The Corsair flown by his wingman Captain George Ashmun started to smoke and glide down as the Japanese zeroed in on him. Boyington moved in to protect his wingman, but he was too late. Ashmun’s plane erupted in flames and plunged into the water. The Japanese turned on Boyington. “I could feel the impact of the enemy fire against my armor plate, behind my back, like hail on a tin roof,” he would later write. “I could see the enemy shots progressing along my wing tips, making patterns.”
Far outnumbered and with his wingman dead, Boyington dove at full speed to try to evade when a 20-mm cannon shell tore into his Corsair’s belly. Shrapnel from the explosion riddled his left leg, ripping a large gash in his thigh. Other smaller pieces lacerated his forearm and lodged in his jaw, ear, and scalp. With his plane crippled and surrounded by enemy fighters, Boyington felt he had no choice but to ditch. He hoped that a coast watcher on New Ireland’s nearby Cape St. George might rescue him. His plane skimmed just a few hundred feet above the water when Boyington released his safety belt, grabbed the ripcord, and kicked the stick all the way forward. His head jerked as his chute caught the air. He crashed seconds later into the Pacific. Afraid to inflate his life raft and give the Japanese a target, the battered pilot treaded water, stripping off his shoes and fatigues to make it easier before he gave up and decided he had no choice but to inflate his raft. He climbed inside naked, now at the mercy of the waves.
Rescued by an enemy submarine, Boyington landed in Rabaul then Truk before the Japanese eventually transferred him to Ofuna in late March, seven months before the arrival of the Tang crew. Boyington had spent his first six months as a prisoner battling his infected wounds, stretched out in the corner of his cell atop his own soiled bandages. The shrapnel in the major’s thigh pained him so much that bombardier Zamperini massaged his leg each morning and he limped with the aid of a makeshift crutch. Kitamura finally decided to remove Boyington’s shrapnel, recruiting captives to hold Boyington down—Ofuna’s version of anesthetic. “The pharmacist’s mate cut a criss-cross incision over the wound, but failed to extract the shrapnel,” Grant Butcher later testified. “The pharmacist’s mate cut another deep criss-cross incision over the shrapnel and squeezed to get the metal. The Major passed out because of the excruciating pain, but before this man proceeded with the operation he had the Major revived by having water thrown on him. He then proceeded with his torture.”
Boyington fit the profile of the high-value prisoner the Japanese interred at Ofuna. So did Fitzgerald and now O’Kane. The camp’s roster included not only American aviators and submariners, but Australians, British, and other Allied nationalities. Interrogation of the Tang crew began immediately in a small room with just two chairs and a table. Unlike the poorly educated guards, Ofuna’s visiting interrogators from the Gunreibu—the intelligence division of the Japanese navy—spoke fluent English. Most had attended American schools, like James Sasaki, a graduate of the University of Southern California and a former classmate and friend of bombardier Zamperini’s. Ofuna’s chief interrogator Yuzuru Sanematsu boasted to prisoners that he had studied at Princeton—he spent a term there while assigned to the Japanese embassy—and had toured the United States in a Buick before the war broke out. One even claimed to have taught American history at the University of Rhode Island. Prisoners dubbed the interrogators the “Quiz Kids.”
Interrogators dressed in Western clothes and some carried matchbooks from Hot Springs, the mountain resort area in Virginia where America interned many Japanese diplomats before repatriation. The Japanese pressed the Tang crew on operational matters. What areas did submarines patrol? How many did America have? What number had been lost or damaged? Interrogators also focused on mechanical and technical questions about radio gear, radar, and a submarine’s engineering department. Other times inquisitors probed prisoners for mundane details about recreational programs, facilities, and what previous jobs the men had worked. The sailors remembered O’Kane’s admonition not to lie about facts that could be found in references like Jane’s Fighting Ships, valuable advice Decker recalled when an interrogator quizzed the machinist’s mate for two hours about Tang’s Fairbanks Morse engines—only to produce the manual afterward. “If I had told him a falsehood,” Decker said, “he would have caught me.”
The prisoners realized that knowing when to tell the truth made the Japanese more inclined to believe the men’s fabrications. Fitzgerald went round after round with interrogators over what submarine bases America had in Australia. “We became terrific liars,” the Grenadier skipper recalled, “and usually got away with it.” The men also learned to bend the truth, obfuscate, and play dumb. “I kept telling the interrogators that I was just a ‘prospective’ engineering officer, I really didn’t know much about the submarine,” Savadkin recalled. “It didn’t seem to matter what you told the questioner, just so they could keep filling out papers to send back to Tokyo. I made some of the wildest statements about the speed and power of our ship. My machinist made wild statements in the other direction.” When the interrogators pressed Savadkin’s subordinate over inconsistencies, the machinist’s mate covered for him. “Well you know, Mr. Savadkin,” he answered. “Just a greenhorn, doesn’t know a thing.”
The days at Ofuna marched past as O’Kane and his men learned the prison’s rhythm, outlined in detail in Fitzgerald’s diary. Guards required the men to rise early, fold their blankets, and wash at an outdoor spigot. Prisoners then scrubbed the passageways, using a mop that consisted of a thick rope about three feet long with no handle that the men pushed up and down the corridor in what one prisoner described as a “bear walk.” Captives could earn a cigarette for helping a local farmer dubbed the “honey dipper” scoop feces from the camp’s primitive outhouses that the farmer used as fertilizer. Interrogation and idle time ate up the rest of the day. “Conversation was prohibited and books were negligible. As a result we were forced to stand around like a bunch of animals—and in our captors’ minds we were probably no more than that,” Fitzgerald wrote. “Everyone was always glad when night time came along for in that way we could forget the days past and obtain ever needed rest.”
O’Kane and his men remained in isolation, cut off from the camp’s other prisoners as the Japanese interrogated them daily, though some of Ofuna’s crafty captives managed to communicate via notes scribbled on scrap paper and left in the bathrooms. Guards set out to teach the new arrivals Japanese, starting with numbers one through ten, an essential skill t
he men would need for the prison’s morning head count. Other lessons involved basic expressions, like konichiwa and konbanwa, respectively “good morning” and “good evening.” “We had to greet them every morning with the proper salutation and had to bow to them and treat them with great respect,” recalled Savadkin. “This saved us considerable unhappiness.” Even with interrogations, chores, and language training, the men grew restless. “Most of the day there was nothing to do, so in our little compound we just walked back and forth, back and forth,” Savadkin remembered. “Walking was a good way to keep warm.”
Guards over time moved the Tang crew from the No. 1 barracks—designated for the camp’s newcomers—to the camp’s No. 2 and later No. 3 barracks as more new prisoners arrived. With each move came fewer interrogations and greater liberties. O’Kane and his men again enjoyed conversation and mingled with the camp’s veteran prisoners, including Boyington, who used his job in the kitchen to dole out larger portions of rations to the hungry submariners. The greatest privilege of the new quarters, Savadkin discovered, was access to the prison’s few worn and tattered books, a reported holdover from some merchantmen captured at the start of the war and whose shipboard libraries the Japanese had pilfered. “The rest of our time we spent just talking about food which was foremost in our minds and wondering how long it would be before the war was over,” Savadkin recalled. “We got tired of telling one another our experiences in the war and gradually, by common consent, that was never even discussed.”
Prisoners received a welcome gift on November 23—one week before Thanksgiving—when guards distributed Red Cross food packages. The starving Fitzgerald itemized the contents of the packages in his diary: two twelve-ounce cans of Spam, one twelve-ounce can of corned beef, one eight-ounce can of salmon, one six-ounce can of Rose Mill Paté, one six-ounce can of jam, two four-ounce bars of ration “D” chocolate, five to seven packages of either Camel or Chesterfield cigarettes, two packs of Wrigley’s Doublemint gum, powdered milk, and coffee, a half pound of cheese, raisins, prunes, and two bars of soap. “The usual concoctions of desserts, etc., plus ways of mixing up the food is going on, ‘how do you make so and such?’ Well how much of the chocolate, sugar, jam etc. to do it,” the skipper wrote, “and of course the exchange market among us, some liking one thing more than another and an exchange being made so that both parties are most satisfied—or so they think.”
December 4 brought the camp’s first freeze followed several days later by as many as four small earthquakes, strong enough to splash the water out of the pool used to collect water to fight fires. The first snow—just a half inch—fell December 13. The men celebrated Christmas two weeks later with a service that morning based on the Gospel of Luke and Psalm 23, a fitting message for Ofuna: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” The prisoners sang “Silent Night,” “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem” before concluding with a series of silent prayers for an end to the war, the safety of friends still fighting, comfort for the families back home, and for the strength to overcome the bitterness and hatred. “If it be thy will that we return safely to our beloved homeland,” the men prayed, “grant that we return not broken, spiritless, but infinitely better sons, husbands, friends and citizens tempered by the ordeals we have passed through.”
Snow blanketed Ofuna again after the first of the year. The Tang men convinced guards to allow a few of them to crowd into a single cell to share body heat. Pete Narowanski dwelled on the turkeys cooks had thawed for the trip home—before the torpedo ripped open the Tang—while Jesse DaSilva recalled the three apple pies he had spied on the counter as he trudged past the flooded galley. The men’s hunger now manifested in physical ailments. “Still in our tattered whites and with rags for shoes, although we were each allowed a blanket, we walked incessantly in the snow to keep warm and as an antidote for the creeping paralysis of beriberi,” wrote O’Kane, who dropped fifty-four pounds and suffered painful scurvy ulcers. “Our conversations ranged from boyhood to shipboard just to keep our thoughts from our stomachs, and now having shared tasks we had never dreamed of, the barriers our different ranks had imposed were steadily dropping away. I doubt that any skipper has ever learned more about his ship from the viewpoint of the troops than did I.”
Caverly even confessed to bootlegging.
The men watched with elation in February as American planes pummeled Japan. O’Kane interpreted carrier operations so far north as a sign MacArthur had secured the Philippines. Guards beat any prisoner who dared a peek skyward at the torpedo bombers buzzing overhead, a beating O’Kane felt worth the risk. The increased air strikes translated into new prisoners, including twenty-three-year-old bomber pilot Lieutenant Richard Hunt, Jr. A former winner of the high school Missouri State Golf Championship, Hunt had enlisted in the Navy in February 1942 during his senior year at the University of Kansas City. During his first tour overseas in the fall of 1943, the torpedo bomber pilot was wounded near the Gilberts. Hunt returned home to recuperate before he deployed again in fall 1944. Along with another bomber pilot, Hunt was credited with sinking a Japanese battleship off the Philippines. On a mission over Hong Kong on January 16, 1945, Hunt collided with another plane and was forced to bail out. The burned and injured aviator arrived thirteen days later at the gates of Ofuna in a wheelbarrow.
Guards dumped Hunt into a cell adjacent to Bill Leibold’s. Tang’s boatswain’s mate worked as Kitamura’s assistant in the dispensary, a job he landed after he successfully constructed a model airplane that the medic had requested. Leibold knew firsthand what kind of treatment the flier could expect at the hands of the Butcher. Rather than remove shrapnel from a B-24 gunner’s groin, Kitamura once punched the prisoner’s wound to drain pus. Another time the medic only gave a few bandages to a flying boat pilot who had been shot down and burned—his wounds later became so infected that maggots ate his flesh. When one airman arrived with a clean bullet hole in his right thigh, Kitamura delighted in reopening the wound, day after day for some five months. “He would run a swab completely through the hole, a dry cotton swab. This would break through the part of the wound that was healed,” Grant Butcher would later testify. “Many of the men who got this treatment passed out, but I was so unfortunate as to remain conscious throughout the ordeal.”
In between cleaning the medic’s quarters and shining his shoes, Leibold studied Kitamura. The Butcher hoarded rolls of fresh dressings, vitamins, and B1 vials in a four-foot-long trunk, supplies he refused to administer to sick prisoners, but traded with local villagers, one time returning to camp with carpenter tools he had coveted. Kitamura over the course of a month treated a young village girl, carefully washing her eyes out. Other times he treated the cook’s wife for beriberi and even performed house calls for her twice a week, taking precious camp supplies with him. His care for the local villagers was so common that many showed up and walked unescorted through the camp straight to the treatment room. Prisoners in contrast received almost no care. Kitamura’s treatment for diarrhea was to withhold food. He forced prisoners to wear recycled bandages that helped spread infection, bandages Kitamura made Leibold wash of blood and pus. As one prisoner noted: “A man being treated for a sore throat had the same rag used on his throat as a man who was treated for hemorrhoids.” The only time Leibold ever saw Kitamura use a fresh gauze bandage was to shine his samurai sword.
The pale and exhausted Hunt had arrived at Ofuna in rough shape. Third-degree burns ran from his feet to his knees on both legs and the skin had begun to rot. Additional burns peppered his chest, back, and shoulders. Pus oozed from facial burns and dried tracks marked his skin, like tears. Hunt suffered from a compound and comminuted fracture between the elbow and shoulder of his left arm. A wire splint offered the only support for the unset and shattered arm, which drained dark pus from a hole in his punctured skin. His bandaged right arm hung limp and useless. The day after his arrival at Ofuna, guards ordered the burned and bro
ken aviator—covered in bloodied bandages from the hips down and with a blanket thrown over his head as a makeshift blindfold—to trudge at least fifty yards from his cold cell to Kitamura’s office. “He staggered most of the way,” Leibold would later testify. “His wounds were poorly bandaged and blood was running out of the bandages on his legs.”
Leibold witnessed the Butcher examine Hunt only a handful of times, eventually allowing the Tang boatswain’s mate and a fellow prisoner Charles Rogers of the British Royal Navy to carry the pilot to Kitamura’s office on a stretcher. On that first visit Kitamura ordered Leibold and Rogers to position the stretcher alongside a bench. The Butcher then rolled Hunt off the stretcher so that the carrier aviator landed on his broken arm. Kitamura then ordered the prisoners to wait outside for forty-five minutes, leaving the medic alone with Hunt. The prisoners knew the Butcher seemed to reserve his harshest treatment for aviators, payback no doubt for the increased bombings of Japan. Hunt experienced Kitamura’s torment on his first visit. When Leibold returned to retrieve him some forty-five minutes later, Hunt confided that the Butcher had “worked him over,” even jerking his broken arm. Kitamura hurt him again on his next visit. Hunt begged Leibold not to take him back.
Hunt spent his days alone in his cell, unable even to feed himself. Leibold watched from his nearby cell as guards and fellow prisoners delivered his food, then returned later to retrieve the uneaten rice and soup. One of those food carriers was Hayes Trukke, Tang’s blond-haired torpedoman. Hunt’s condition pained the submariner, who noted that every time Hunt moved he left a trail of blood. “A guard stood by me as I placed his soup and rice by his bed and Hunt asked me would I help him eat it. I started to tell him I couldn’t and the guard gave me the usual growl and slapped me, pushing me from his cell,” Trukke would later testify. “At the end of a week Hunt hadn’t eaten anything and his cell smelled terrible, also it was evident he was losing his mind. He told me there was a man hiding behind his door and other things on that order. A couple of days later one of the newer guards let me stay in Hunt’s cell and feed him but he ate only a small portion of rice and soup and then vomited it a little later.”