Unbroken (The Young Adult Adaptation): An Olympian’s Journey from Airman to Castaway to Captive

Another captive approached Louie, and he seemed to have permission to speak. This isn’t a POW camp, he said. It was a secret interrogation camp called Ofuna, where “high-value” captives were held in solitary confinement, starved, and tortured so they’d give up military secrets.

Louie was forbidden to speak to anyone but the guards, to put his hands in his pockets, or to make eye contact with other captives. His gaze was to be directed down at all times. He had to learn Japanese numbers, because every morning there was a roll call in which men had to count off. There were rules about everything, from folding sheets to buttoning clothes, each reinforcing total obedience. The slightest violation would bring a beating.

In this secret place, the Japanese could, and did, do anything they wanted to captives. “They can kill you here,” Louie was told. “No one knows you’re alive.”

Louie was led to a cell. His bed was a straw mat with three paper sheets. The window had no glass, the walls were particleboard, the ceiling made of tar paper. With winter approaching, Louie would be living in a building that was barely a windbreak.

Louie curled up on his mat. There were dozens of men in cells near him, but there was no sound. In this warren of captives, Louie was alone.

Ofuna was a place dedicated to breaking men’s souls, and Louie soon learned what a hell it was.

This newspaper clipping, which Louie put in his wallet after the Wake raid, remained in his wallet throughout his raft journey, turning purple from the leached dye of the leather. When it was discovered by the Japanese, Louie and Phil were beaten.

COURTESY OF LOUIS ZAMPERINI

This newspaper clipping, which Louie put in his wallet after the Wake raid, remained in his wallet throughout his raft journey, turning purple from the leached dye of the leather. When it was discovered by the Japanese, Louie and Phil were beaten.

Each day began at six: a clanging bell, a shouting guard, captives running outside for inspection. Louie would fall into a line of haggard men. Guards stalked them, yelling unintelligibly. The men were made to count off, bow toward the palace of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, then run to the benjo—latrine. Breakfast was a bowl of watery, foul slop, which each man ate alone in his cell. Then they were given knots of wet rope and forced to bend double, put the rope on the floor, and wash the barracks aisle at a run, or sometimes waddling duck-style, while the guards swatted them.

Outside again, the guards forced the captives to run or perform calisthenics, often until they collapsed. When the exercise was over, the men had to stand outside, regardless of the weather. The only breaks in the silence were the screams in the interrogation room.

Beatings were almost constant. Men were beaten for virtually anything: folding their arms, cleaning their teeth, talking in their sleep, and most often, for not understanding orders issued in Japanese. Dozens of men were clubbed in the knees for one man’s alleged infraction. Any attempt they made to protect themselves—ducking, shielding their faces—provoked more violence. The beatings, wrote a captive, “were of such intensity that many of us wondered if we’d ever live to see the end of the war.”

The captives weren’t just beaten, they were starved. Meals usually consisted of a bowl of broth with a bit of vegetable and a bowl or half bowl of rancid rice, sometimes mixed with a little barley. The food was infested with rat droppings, maggots, and so much sand and gravel that Louie’s teeth were soon pitted, chipped, and cracked.

The extremely low caloric intake and foul food put men’s lives in jeopardy. Parasites and intestinal infections made diarrhea universal. Malnourishment-related diseases were epidemic. Most feared was beriberi, caused by vitamin B1 deficiency. One form of it caused grotesque swelling of the extremities; testicles could swell to the size of bread loaves. Untreated, beriberi was often fatal.

The ringmasters of the violence were the guards. At Ofuna, as at the scores of POW camps in Japan and its conquests, the guards were the dregs of the military. Some were too incompetent for any other duty. Others were deranged. Among nearly all Ofuna guards, there were two common characteristics. One was marked stupidity. The other was murderous cruelty.

The cruelty was a product of Japan’s military culture. All Japanese soldiers were regularly beaten by their superiors, in the belief it would strengthen them. Guards, occupying the lowest station in a military that applauded brutal domination of underlings, vented their frustrations on the helpless prisoners under their authority.

Louie’s barracks at Ofuna. His window was the third from right.

COURTESY OF FRANK TINKER

Louie’s barracks at Ofuna. His window was the third from right.

This tendency was powerfully reinforced by two opinions then common in Japan. Just as Allied soldiers, like the cultures they came from, often held venomously racist views of the Japanese, Japanese soldiers and civilians usually carried caustic prejudices about their enemies, seeing them as brutish beasts or fearsome devils. This racism, and the hatred and fear it generated, further inspired abuse of Allied prisoners.

From earliest childhood, Japanese citizens were taught that to surrender or be captured was intolerably shameful. The Japanese Military Field Code made clear what was expected of men facing capture: “Rather than live and bear the shame of imprisonment, the soldier must die and avoid leaving a dishonorable name.” In many hopeless battles, virtually every Japanese soldier fought to the death. At times, soldiers committed mass suicide to avoid surrender. The revulsion most Japanese felt for those who were captured extended to Allied servicemen. To abuse, enslave, and even murder a prisoner was acceptable, even desirable.

Though under great pressure to conform to a culture of brutality, a few guards refused to join the violence. Such humane behavior took nerve. Everywhere in Japan, demonstrating sympathy for captives or POWs was taboo. Guards caught trying to help prisoners, or even voicing compassion for them, were beaten. At Ofuna, one guard who was kind to captives endured nightly gang attacks from his fellow guards.

Deaths from beating and malnourishment were common in Ofuna. For captives, the only hope lay in rescue by the Allies, but this prospect carried tremendous danger.

In 1942, when America attacked Japanese ships near Tarawa Atoll, the Japanese beheaded twenty-two POWs held there. In 1943, when the Americans bombed Japanese-held Ballale, the Japanese executed some seventy to one hundred POWs they’d enslaved on the island. Then, shortly after Louie arrived at Ofuna, American ships attacked Wake, where the ninety-eight captured Americans were still being used as slaves. The Japanese promptly shot all the prisoners.

These mass murders were the first applications of Japan’s “kill-all” rule: if Allied advances made the rescue of POWs possible, POWs must be executed. A message sent to all POW camp commanders stated:

Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation, or what, dispose of them as the situation dictates.… It is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.

As the Allies fought their way toward Japan, the kill-all order loomed over the Ofuna captives. Like every other captive, Louie knew the guards were eagerly awaiting the chance to carry it out.