Twenty-five
B-29
ON ONE OF THE LAST DAYS OF OCTOBER 1944, LOUIE pushed a wheelbarrow over the Omori bridge, through the village at the bridge’s end, and into Tokyo. With him were another POW and a guard; they’d been ordered to pick up meat for the POW rations. Louie had been in Japan for thirteen months, but this was the first time that he had passed, unblindfolded, into the society that held him captive.
Tokyo was bled dry. There were no young men anywhere. The war had caused massive shortages in food and goods, and the markets and restaurants were shuttered. The civilians were slipshod and unbathed. Everyone knew that the Americans were coming, and the city seemed to be holding its breath. Teams of children and teenagers were shoveling out slit trenches and tearing down buildings to make firebreaks.
Louie, the other POW, and the guard arrived at a slaughterhouse, where their wheelbarrow was filled with horse meat. As they pushed it back toward Omori, Louie looked up at a building and saw graffiti scrawled over one wall. It said, B Niju Ku. The first character was simple enough, the English letter B. Louie knew that niju meant twenty and ku meant nine, though he didn’t know that ku carried another meaning: pain, calamity, affliction. Louie walked the wheelbarrow into Omori, wondering what “B twenty-nine” referred to, and why someone would write it on a wall.
——
At ten minutes to six on the morning of November 1, 1944, a wondrous American plane lifted off a runway on Saipan. Its size boggled the imagination: 99 feet long, 141 feet from wingtip to wingtip, almost 30 feet high at the tail, and weighing 120,000 pounds or more loaded, it dwarfed the famously huge B-24. Powered by four 2,200-horsepower engines—each engine almost twice as powerful as each of those of the B-24—it could rocket across the sky at up to 358 miles per hour and carry giant bomb loads. A B-24 didn’t have a prayer of making it from Saipan to Japan’s home islands and back. This plane could do it. It was the B-29 Superfortress, and it would bring down Japan.
The bomber, soon to be named Tokyo Rose as a mocking homage to the women who broadcast Japanese propaganda, was piloted by Captain Ralph Steakley. That morning, he flew his plane north. The plane split the air nearly six miles up. Above was a sky of intense blue; below, sliding over the horizon, came Japan.
B-29s had been used a handful of times over Japan, in raids launched from China, beginning four and a half months earlier. Largely because of the difficulty of supplying the Chinese bases and flying the vast distances between those bases and Japan, the missions had been ineffective. But to the Japanese, the swift leviathans were terrifying, inspiring the graffiti that Louie had seen. Three weeks after the first China-based raid, Saipan had been captured, and American plans had shifted to launching B-29s from there. Steakley’s was the first run from Saipan to Tokyo, which hadn’t seen an American plane since the Doolittle raid in 1942. His plane carried not bombs but cameras: Steakley was mapping the path for the B-29s that would follow his. At noon, the plane reached the city.
Louie was standing in a group of POWs, doing calisthenics on the orders of the guards, when a siren began sounding. The guards, as usual during alerts, shooed the men into the barracks. The POWs were used to the sirens, which had always been false alarms, so the alert caused little concern.
In the barracks, the men peered out the windows. Something was different; the guards were gaping at the sky as if, wrote Bob Martindale, “they were looking for the Messiah.” Then there was a glint above, a finger pointing urgently, and a crush of POWs bolting for the door. Running into the compound with his face skyward, Louie saw a sliver of radiant white light high over Tokyo, contrails curling behind it like twisting spines. “Oh God, God, an American plane!” someone shouted. The guards looked stricken. Martindale heard them speaking to each other in high agitation. One phrase stood out: “B niju ku.”
Louie, like all the POWs, had no idea what kind of plane this was. Then a POW who’d just been captured said that it was a new American bomber called a B-29. A cheer rang out. Men began shouting, “B-29! B-29!” The bomber was the most beautiful thing that Louie had ever seen.
Across the bay, masses of civilians stood in the streets, looking at the sky. As the plane passed into the civilians’ view, Frank Tinker heard the people shouting, sounds that blended into a roar. Louie glanced toward the south end of camp. The Bird was standing just outside his office, motionless and expressionless, watching the plane.
“It was not their Messiah,” Martindale wrote, “but ours.”
——
The bomber was flying at perfect liberty. Steakley guided it in a series of straight runs over the city as his crewmen snapped photographs. Below, the guards began pursuing the elated POWs, trying to force them back into the barracks. The men shushed each other, fearing that they’d be beaten for celebrating. The clamor died down. Louie stood with the other men and watched the bomber, occasionally darting between barracks to avoid the guards.
Steakley flew over Tokyo for more than an hour. No Japanese planes or guns engaged him. Finally, as he turned back for Saipan, a Zero banked up for his tail, followed briefly, then turned away.
Newspapers were relatively easy to come by in Omori. Slave laborers snuck them in, and each day, at his work site, Milton McMullen gave a Korean truck driver a bag of stolen rice in exchange for a small English-language paper, which McMullen smuggled into camp in his boot. For the POWs, the papers were inexhaustibly amusing. Though the Japanese press covered the European theater accurately, it was notorious for distorting the news of the Pacific war, sometimes absurdly. Louie once read a story about a Japanese pilot who ran out of ammunition in a dogfight and downed his opponent with a rice ball.
On the day after the B-29 flyover, the coverage wore a similar stripe. “Paper says, ‘Lone enemy B-29 visits Tokyo area,’ ” wrote POW Ernest Norquist in his diary. “It said it came from the Mariana Island group, flew over the city and ‘was drive off’ [sic] without dropping a single bomb. I laughed as I read the words ‘driven off’ for neither the antiaircraft fire nor the Zeros had come within miles of that great big beautiful bird.” Louie saw another headline that said the bomber had FLED IN CONSTERNATION.
The plane had simply crossed over Tokyo, but everyone in Japan, captive and free, knew what it meant. Every morning, the Omori POWs were assembled and ordered to call out their number in Japanese. After November 1, 1944, the man assigned number twenty-nine would sing out “Niju ku!” at the top of his lungs. “Not even bayonet prods,” wrote Wade, “could wipe the smiles from the POW faces now.”
——
Louie wasn’t smiling for long. The B-29, and what it portended, fed the Bird’s vitriol. One day Louie was in his barracks, sitting with friends far in the rear, out of sight of the door, in case the Bird came in. As the men passed around a cigarette rolled in toilet paper, two guards banged in, screaming “Keirei!” Louie leapt up in tandem with the other men. In bounded the Bird.
For several seconds, the Bird looked around. He took a few steps into the room, and Louie came into his view. The corporal rushed down the barracks and halted before Louie. He wore the webbed belt that Louie had seen on him his first day in Omori. The buckle was several inches square, made of heavy brass. Standing before Louie, the Bird jerked the belt off his waist and grasped one end with both hands.
“You come to attention last!”
The Bird swung the belt backward, with the buckle on the loose end, and then whipped it around himself and forward, as if he were performing a hammer throw. The buckle rammed into Louie’s left temple and ear.
Louie felt as if he had been shot in the head. Though he had resolved never to let the Bird knock him down, the power of the blow, and the explosive pain that followed, overawed everything in him. His legs seemed to liquefy, and he went down. The room spun.
Louie lay on the floor, dazed, his head throbbing, blood running from his temple. When he gathered his wits, the Bird was crouching over him, making a sympathetic, almost maternal sound, a sort of Awwww. He pulled a fold of toilet paper from his pocket and pressed it gently into Louie’s hand. Louie held the paper to his temple.
“Oh, it stop, eh?” the Bird said, his voice soft.
Louie pulled himself upright. The Bird waited for him to steady himself. The soothing voice and the offer of the paper for his wound were revelations to Louie: There was compassion in this man. The sense of relief was just entering his mind when the buckle, whirling around from the Bird’s swinging arms, struck his head again, exactly where it had hit before. Louie felt pain bursting through his skull, his body going liquid again. He smacked into the floor.
——
For several weeks, Louie was deaf in his left ear. The Bird continued to beat him, every day. As his attacker struck him, Louie bore it with clenched fists and eyes blazing, but the assaults were wearing him down. The sergeant began lording over his dream life, coming at him and pounding him, his features alight in vicious rapture. Louie spent hour after hour in prayer, begging for God to save him. He lost himself in fantasies of running through an Olympic stadium, climbing onto a podium. And he thought of home, tormented by thoughts of what his disappearance must have done to his mother. He longed to write to her, but there was no point. Once, a Japanese officer had announced that men could write home, and everyone in camp penned letters to their parents, wives, children, and steady girls. When the Bird learned of it, he called in Commander Maher, handed him the letters, and forced him to burn them.
One day in mid-November, Louie was sitting in his barracks when the Bird walked in and approached him, accompanied by two Japanese strangers. Louie expected a beating, but instead, the strangers were friendly. They told Louie that they were producers from Radio Tokyo and that they had something they thought he’d like to see. They handed Louie a piece of paper. Louie looked at it: It was a transcript of an NBC radio broadcast announcing his death. The transcript was real. Louie’s death declaration, delivered in June, had reached the American media on November 12, that same week.
The Radio Tokyo men wanted Louie to come to their studio to announce that he was alive on the Postman Calls show. They wanted Louie to do this, they said, for his sake and that of his suffering family. He was free to write his own message. Louie didn’t trust them, and gave them no answer. They told him to take a day to think about it. Louie consulted Martindale, who told him that several POWs had made such broadcasts, and as long as Louie didn’t read propaganda, there was no harm in accepting.
So Louie said yes. The Radio Tokyo men brought him pen and paper, and he set to work. Knowing that his family might not believe that it was really he, he added details that he hoped would convince them. To ensure that his message got through, he decided to speak positively about his captors. He included the names of other POWs who feared that their families thought they were dead, and also mentioned Bill Harris, whom he’d last seen a month and a half earlier, at Ofuna. He opted not to mention Phil. He hadn’t seen the pilot for eight months, and didn’t know if he was still alive.
Louie was driven to the Radio Tokyo studio. The producers greeted him as if he were a beloved friend. They read his speech and gave it a hearty approval. It would be taped for broadcast two days later. The producers planned to use that evening’s broadcast to tease the audience, then wait before presenting his voice to the world, proof that they were telling the truth.
Louie was taken to the microphone and given his cue. He read his message, to the pleasure of the producers. As the officials prepared to drive him back to Omori, Louie went to a producer who had been especially kind. He said that there was a man in camp named Watanabe who was beating the POWs. The producer seemed concerned and told Louie that he’d see what he could do.
——
In San Francisco at half past two on the morning of November 18, 1944, a young woman named Lynn Moody was alone in the Office of War Information, working the graveyard shift. Across the hall in the Federal Communications Commission station, one of her colleagues was listening to Japanese radio and typing up broadcasts for review by propaganda analysts. Moody was bored, so she crossed the hall to say hello. The colleague asked if Moody could fill in while she took a break.
Moody slipped on the earphones and began typing. The show airing was Postman Calls. As she typed, Moody was startled to hear a name that she knew well: Louis Zamperini. Moody was a member of the USC class of 1940, and Louie was an old friend. The announcer was speaking about the October 18 message that had been broadcast, supposedly from Louie, but in fact written without Louie’s knowledge. Giddy with excitement, Moody typed, placing unclear words within parentheses:
Exactly one month ago we broadcast a message. This message over the same station, same program, “Postman Calls,” was from First Lieutenant Louis (Silvie) Zamperini, United States Army Air Corps. Recently a news report has been brought to our attention in which it is stated that First Lieutenant Louis Zamperini is listed as dead by the United States War Department. According to the report, Lieutenant Zamperini was reported missing in action in the South Pacific in May, 1943. The apparently uninformed source of this item is a broadcasting station in California quoting the War Department of the United States of America. We hope we can rectify this mistake on someone’s part by saying that Louis Zamperini is alive and well as a prisoner of war here in Tokyo.
This is one of the many examples of the men missing in action erroneously reported and later being established as a lie. The last war was full of such instances and much suffering and heartaches could have been avoided by the transmittal of reliable information to the parties concerned regarding the whereabouts of men (in such cases); It is one of the purposes of this program to alleviate this condition and furnish speedy, reliable and authentic message service to the relatives and friends of men interned in prisoner of war camps throughout Japan. We sincerely hope Louis’ mother is listening in tonight or will be informed of what we say.
Long will Louis Zamperini’s name live in our memories. Those of us from the regions of Southern California well recall the days that Louis was breaking all records in the mile run. His unbroken national interscholastic mile record stands as a challenge to the aspirants of the (Ginger Cup). We followed closely Zamperini’s efforts in 1936 Olympic games held in Berlin, Germany. His opponents and some of the foremost in the country speak highly of him. He has run against such names as (Bensig) and Cunningham. The same personality that so endeared him to us as he raced against time on the tracks of the world is not dead but very much alive and with us yet. We regret the unhappiness that must have accompanied the news of his reported death but hope that the efforts of his fellow prisoners of war on “Postman Calls” will (atone) in some small way for the error.
So chin up, Mrs. Louis Zamperini of (Torrance) California, Louis is here; the same old Louis, cheerful, sportsmanlike, the idol of all our Southern California fans and graduates. You might pass the glad tidings along, Mrs. Zamperini, for we know all the lovers of the (spiked shoe) sport will b [sic] glad to hear this. Louis is not on the track anymore an [sic] for that we are sorry. He will be missed there. Louis is neither missing nor dead as has been reported and for that we are more than glad. It makes us very happy indeed to have performed this service for our prisoners and relatives and it is out [sic] earnest wish that no other such instances of this information will be forthcoming. We hope this little group of prisoners connected with “Postman Calls” program can be of further service in the future. That’s what we’re here for, so keep on listening, Mrs. Zamperini, and don’t mention it; the pleasure is all ours.
Moody typed as fast as she could, making a string of typos in her exhilaration. About an hour later, the FCC woman came back. “I practically danced around the room telling her about it,” Moody later wrote.
Down the coast in Torrance, the Zamperinis were coping with the aftermath of the public announcement of Louie’s death. After a package came bearing Louie’s Purple Heart, a letter arrived concerning his life insurance payout, $10,000. Louise deposited the money in the bank but didn’t spend any of it. When Louie came home, she declared, it would be his. And after the news of Louie’s death broke, the film director Cecil B. DeMille showed up to do a radio interview with the family for the Sixth War Bond Drive. Sylvia and Louise were given scripts that called for them to speak of Louie as if he were dead. Out of politeness, the Zamperinis read the scripts as written.
Somewhere in all of this, a deliveryman came, bearing a bouquet of flowers for Sylvia. It was an anniversary gift from her husband, Harvey, now manning a tank gun in Holland. A few days later she got a telegram: Harvey had been wounded. The telegram said nothing of what his injuries were, or how serious. Sylvia waited, knotted with anxiety. Finally, a letter arrived, composed by Harvey and dictated to a nurse from his hospital bed. His tank had been hit and had burst into flames. He had escaped, but his hands and face were burned. Of all the terrible scenarios that had run through Sylvia’s mind, fire was the one thing that she’d never imagined. Harvey was, after all, a firefighter. Exhausted and barely able to eat, Sylvia crept through November, haunted by nightmares and growing ever more gaunt.
——
On November 20, Lynn Moody, still in high spirits over the broadcast about Louie two days before, was back working the midnight-to-eight shift. At two-thirty A.M., one of the FCC transcribers yelled to her to come quickly.
Moody ran in, put on the earphones, and listened. It was Postman Calls again. “Hello, America,” the announcer began, “this is the postman calling and bringing a special message as promised earlier in tonight’s program to Mrs. Louis Zamperini, 2028 Gramercy Street, Torrance, California. We hope Mrs. Zamperini is listening in tonight for we have a real treat for her. Her son has come down to the studio especially to send her this message of reassurance after the erroneous report of a few days ago by the United States War Department, that he was officially given up as dead and missing. We assure Mrs. Zamperini that such is not the case. The next voice heard will be that of First Lieutenant Louis Helzie [sic] Zamperini, United States Air Force, now interned in the Tokyo camp. Go right ahead, Lieutenant Zamperini.”
A young man’s voice came across the airwaves. Moody knew the instant she heard it: It was Louie.
——
Hello mother and father, relatives and friends. This is your Louie talking. Through the courtesy of the authorities here I am broadcasting this personal message to you.
This will be the first time in two and one half years that you will have heard my voice. I am sure it sounds the same to you as it did when I left home.
I am uninjured and in good health and can hardly wait until the day we are together again. Not having heard from you since my most abrupt departure, I have been somewhat worried about the condition of the family, as far as health is concerned. I hope this message finds all of you in the best of health and good spirits.
I am now interned in the Tokyo prisoners’ camp and am being treated as well as can be expected under war time conditions. The camp authorities are kind to me and I have no kick coming.
Please write as often as you can and in doing so, send me snapshots of everyone. In my lonesome hours nothing would be more appreciated than to look at pictures of the family.
Before I forget it, Dad, I would be very pleased if you would keep my guns in good condition so we might do some good hunting when I return home.
Mother Sylvia and Virginia, I hope you will keep up your wonderful talents in the kitchen. I often visualize those wonderful pies and cakes you make.
Is Pete still able to pay you his weekly visits from San Diego? I hope he is still near home.
Give my best to Gorton, Harvey, Eldon and Henry and wish them the best of care. I send my fondest love to Sylvia, Virginia and Pete and hope they are enjoying their work at the present. I miss them very much.
Since I have been in Japan I have run into several of my old acquaintances. You will probably remember a few of them.
The tall Marine, William Harris, from Kentucky is here and enjoying good health. Lorren Stoddard Stanley Maneivve and Peter Hryskanich are the same. You must remember William Hasty from Bishopville? We have been rooming together for the past two months. He is looking fine.
I know that you have taken care of my personal belongings and saving long ago. You have no doubt received the rest of my belongings from the Army.
Hello to Bob Lewellyn and all of my home town friends. Before closing I wish you a merry Xmas and a Happy New Year.
Your loving son, Louie
——
Later that day, the phone rang at the Zamperinis’ house. The caller was a woman from the nearby suburb of San Marino. She said that she’d been listening to her radio when the station had aired an intercepted broadcast of an American prisoner of war speaking on Japanese radio. The broadcast had been scratchy and indistinct, but she was sure that she had heard the name right. The POW she had heard, she said, was Louie.
The Zamperinis were shocked and wary. The woman was a stranger, and they were afraid that she was a prankster. Sylvia and Louise asked for her address and drove to her house. The woman told them everything she had heard. Sylvia and Louise thanked her and left. They believed the woman, but they didn’t know if they could believe the broadcast itself. It could easily have been faked. “I was thinking, ‘Could it be true? Could it be true?’ ” Sylvia recalled.
After Sylvia and Louise got home, a Western Union telegram arrived from the provost marshal general. It read, FOLLOWING ENEMY PROPAGANDA BROADCAST FROM JAPAN HAS BEEN INTERCEPTED. Below were Louie’s words, as typed by Moody. The telegram ended with a disclaimer: PENDING FURTHER CONFIRMATION THIS REPORT DOES NOT ESTABLISH HIS STATUS AS A PRISONER OF WAR.
Messages began pouring in, from friends and strangers all over the country, telling the Zamperinis of the broadcast, which had been intercepted and re-aired on several stations. And Louie’s uncle Gildo Dossi called from Wilmington, Iowa. He had clicked on his radio and heard a voice that he felt certain was that of his nephew.
The messages relaying the content of the broadcast were varied, but a common thread ran through several of them: a request that they take care of Louie’s guns. Louie had grown up hunting, shooting rabbits in the fields around Torrance and on the Cahuilla Indian Reservation, and he was especially careful with his guns. To the Zamperinis, this was the fingerprint, the detail that the Japanese could not have known. Louise and Sylvia dissolved in tears, then began shouting with joy.
Pete picked up the phone, dialed Payton Jordan’s number, and shouted three words into the receiver:
“Payt! He’s alive!”