Mihailovich rented a room at the hotel and set up a camera crew inside. Doubting that Watanabe would agree to a sit-down interview, he rigged his cameraman with a tiny camera inside a baseball cap. At the appointed hour, in walked the Bird.
They sat down in the lobby, and Watanabe ordered a beer. Mihailovich explained that they were profiling Louis Zamperini. Watanabe knew the name immediately. “Six hundred prisoner,” he said. “Zamperini number one.”
Bob Simon, CBS’s on-air correspondent for the story, thought that this would probably be his only chance to question Watanabe, so there in the lobby, he began grilling him about his treatment of Louie. Watanabe was startled. He said something about Zamperini being a good man, and how he—Watanabe—hated war. He said that his central concern had been protecting the POWs, because if they had escaped, civilians would have killed them. Asked why he’d been on the list of most wanted war criminals, he puffed with apparent pride. “I’m number seven,” he said. “Tojo number one.” Exile, he said, had been very painful for him.
They asked Watanabe if he’d come upstairs for an on-camera interview. Watanabe asked if the interview would air in Japan, and Mihailovich said no. To Mihailovich’s surprise, Watanabe agreed.
Upstairs, with cameras rolling, they handed Watanabe a photograph of a youthful Louie, standing on a track, smiling. Simon dug in.
“Zamperini and the other prisoners remember you, in particular, being the most brutal of all the guards. How do you explain that?”
Watanabe’s right eyelid began drooping. Mihailovich felt uneasy.
“I wasn’t given military orders,” Watanabe said, contradicting the assertion he’d made in the 1995 interview. “Because of my personal feelings, I treated the prisoners strictly as enemies of Japan. Zamperini was well known to me. If he says he was beaten by Watanabe, then such a thing probably occurred at the camp, if you consider my personal feelings at the time.”
He tossed his head high, jutted out his chin, and directed a hard gaze at Simon. He said that the POWs had complained of “trifle things” and had used epithets to refer to the Japanese. These things, he said, had made him angry. With hundreds of prisoners, he said, he’d been under great pressure.
“Beating and kicking in Caucasian society are considered cruel. Cruel behavior,” he said, speaking very slowly. “However, there were some occasions in the prison camp in which beating and kicking were unavoidable.”
When the interview was over, Watanabe looked shaken and angry. Told that Zamperini was coming to Japan and wanted to meet him to offer his forgiveness, Watanabe replied that he would see him and apologize, on the understanding that it was only a personal apology, not one offered on behalf of the Japanese military.
As they packed up, Mihailovich had a last request. Would he agree to be filmed walking down the street? This, it seemed, was what Watanabe had come for. He donned his cap, stepped to the sidewalk, turned, and walked toward the camera. He moved just as he had in parades before his captives, head high, chest thrust out, eyes imperious.
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One day nine months later, as he prepared to return to Japan to carry the Olympic torch, Louie sat at his desk for hours, thinking. Then he clicked on his computer and began to write.
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To Matsuhiro [sic] Watanabe,
As a result of my prisoner of war experience under your unwarranted and unreasonable punishment, my post-war life became a nightmare. It was not so much due to the pain and suffering as it was the tension of stress and humiliation that caused me to hate with a vengeance.
Under your discipline, my rights, not only as a prisoner of war but also as a human being, were stripped from me. It was a struggle to maintain enough dignity and hope to live until the war’s end.
The post-war nightmares caused my life to crumble, but thanks to a confrontation with God through the evangelist Billy Graham, I committed my life to Christ. Love replaced the hate I had for you. Christ said, “Forgive your enemies and pray for them.”
As you probably know, I returned to Japan in 1952 [sic] and was graciously allowed to address all the Japanese war criminals at Sugamo Prison … I asked then about you, and was told that you probably had committed Hara Kiri, which I was sad to hear. At that moment, like the others, I also forgave you and now would hope that you would also become a Christian.
Louis Zamperini
He folded the letter and carried it with him to Japan.
The meeting was not to be. CBS contacted Watanabe and told him that Zamperini wanted to come see him. Watanabe practically spat his reply: The answer was no.
When Louie arrived in Joetsu, he still had his letter. Someone took it from him, promising to get it to Watanabe. If Watanabe received it, he never replied.
Watanabe died in April 2003.
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On the morning of January 22, 1998, snow sifted gently over the village once known as Naoetsu. Louis Zamperini, four days short of his eighty-first birthday, stood in a swirl of white beside a road flanked in bright drifts. His body was worn and weathered, his skin scratched with lines mapping the miles of his life. His old riot of black hair was now a translucent scrim of white, but his blue eyes still threw sparks. On the ring finger of his right hand, a scar was still visible, the last mark that Green Hornet had left in the world.
At last, it was time. Louie extended his hand, and in it was placed the Olympic torch. His legs could no longer reach and push as they once had, but they were still sure beneath him. He raised the torch, bowed, and began running.
All he could see, in every direction, were smiling Japanese faces. There were children peeking out of hooded coats, men who had once worked beside the POW slaves in the steel mill, civilians snapping photographs, clapping, waving, cheering Louie on, and 120 Japanese soldiers, formed into two columns, parting to let him pass. Louie ran through the place where cages had once held him, where a black-eyed man had crawled inside him. But the cages were long gone, and so was the Bird. There was no trace of them here among the voices, the falling snow, and the old and joyful man, running.
* America’s War Crimes Acts of 1948 and 1952 awarded each former POW $1 for each day of imprisonment if he could prove that he wasn’t given the amount and quality of food mandated by the Geneva Convention, and $1.50 per day if he could prove that he’d been subjected to inhumane treatment and/or hard labor. This made for a maximum benefit of $2.50 per day. Under the Treaty of Peace, $12.6 million in Japanese assets were distributed to POWs, but because America’s POWs had already received meager War Crimes Acts payments, first claim on the assets was given to other nations.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“I’ll be an easier subject than Seabiscuit,” Louie once told me, “because I can talk.”
When I finished writing my first book, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, I felt certain that I would never again find a subject that fascinated me as did the Depression-era racehorse and the team of men who campaigned him. When I had my first conversation with the infectiously effervescent and apparently immortal Louie Zamperini, I changed my mind.
That conversation began my seven-year journey through Louie’s unlikely life. I found his story in the memories of Olympians, former POWs and airmen, Japanese veterans, and the family and friends who once formed the home front; in diaries, letters, essays, and telegrams, many written by men and women who died long ago; in military documents and hazy photographs; in unpublished memoirs buried in desk drawers; in deep stacks of affidavits and war-crimes trial records; in forgotten papers in archives as far-flung as Oslo and Canberra. By the end of my journey, Louie’s life was as familiar to me as my own. “When I want to know what happened to me in Japan,” Louie once told his friends, “I call Laura.”
In opening his world to me, Louie could not have been more gracious. He sat through some seventy-five interviews, answering thousands of questions with neither impatience nor complaint. He was refreshingly honest, quick to confess his failures and correct a few embellished stories that journalists have written about him. And his memory was astounding; nearly every time I cross-checked his accounts of events against newspaper stories, official records, and other sources, his recollections proved accurate to the smallest detail, even when the events took place some eighty-five years ago.
A superlative pack rat, Louie has saved seemingly every artifact of his life, from the DO NOT DISTURB sign that he swiped from Jesse Owens in Berlin to the paper number that he wore as he shattered the interscholastic mile record in 1934. One of his scrapbooks, which covers only 1917 to 1938, weighs sixty-three pounds. This he volunteered to send me, surrendering it to my late friend Debie Ginsburg, who somehow manhandled it down to a mailing service. Along with it, he sent several other scrapbooks (fortunately smaller), hundreds of photographs and letters, his diaries, and items as precious as the stained newspaper clipping that was in his wallet on the raft. All of these things were treasure troves to me, telling his story with immediacy and revealing detail. I am immensely grateful to Louie for trusting me with items so dear to him, and for welcoming me into his history.
Pete Zamperini, Sylvia Zamperini Flammer, and Payton Jordan didn’t live to see this book’s completion, but they played an enormous role in its creation, sharing a lifetime of memories and memorabilia. There were many joys for me in writing this book; my long talks with Pete, Sylvia, and Payton ranked high among them. I also thank Harvey Flammer, Cynthia Zamperini Garris, Ric Applewhite, and the late Marge Jordan for telling me their stories about Louie and Cynthia.
Karen Loomis, the daughter of Russell Allen Phillips and his wife, Cecy, walked me through her family’s history and sent her father’s wartime love letters to her mother, scrapbooks, photographs, clippings, and her grandmother’s memoir. Thanks to Karen, I was able to peer into the life of the quiet, modest pilot known as Phil and uncover the brave and enduring man underneath. Someday I’ll make it down to Georgia for long-promised muffins with Karen. My thanks also go to Bill Harris’s daughter Katey Meares, who sent family photographs and told me of the father she lost far too soon, remembering him standing on his head in his kitchen to summon giggles from his girls. I also thank Monroe and Phoebe Bormann, Terry Hoffman, and Bill Perry for telling me about Phil and Cecy.
For the men who endured prison camp, speaking of the war is often a searing experience, and I am deeply grateful to the many former POWs who shared their memories, sometimes in tears. I shall never forget the generosity of Bob Martindale, Tom Wade, and Frank Tinker, who spent many hours bringing POW camp and the Bird to life for me. Milton McMullen described Omori, the POW insurgency, and the day he knocked over a train. Johan Arthur Johansen told of Omori and shared his extensive writings on POW camp. The late Ken Marvin spoke of the last pancakes he ate on Wake before the Japanese came, Naoetsu under the Bird, and teaching a guard hilariously offensive English. Glenn McConnell spoke of Ofuna, Gaga the duck, and the beating of Bill Harris. The late John Cook told me of slavery at Naoetsu and shared his unpublished memoir. I also send thanks to former POWs Fiske Hanley, Bob Hollingsworth, Raleigh “Dusty” Rhodes, Joe Brown, V. H. Spencer, Robert Cassidy, Leonard Birchall, Joe Alexander, Minos Miller, Burn O’Neill, Charles Audet, Robert Heer, and Paul Cascio, and POW family members J. Watt Hinson, Linda West, Kathleen Birchall, Ruth Decker, Joyce Forth, Marian Tougas, Jan Richardson, Jennifer Purcell, Karen Heer, and Angie Giardina.
Stanley Pillsbury spent many afternoons on the phone with me, reliving his days aboard his beloved Super Man, the Christmas raid over Wake, and the moment when he shot down a Zero over Nauru. Frank Rosynek, a born raconteur, sent his unpublished memoir, “Not Everybody Wore Wings,” and wrote to me about the bombing of Funafuti and Louie’s miraculous return from the dead on Okinawa. Lester Herman Scearce and the late pilots John Joseph Deasy and Jesse Stay told of Wake, Nauru, Funafuti, and the search for the lost crew of Green Hornet. Martin Cohn told of squadron life on Hawaii; John Krey told of Louie’s disappearance and reappearance. Byron Kinney described the day he flew his B-29 over Louie at Naoetsu and listened to the Japanese surrender as he flew back to Guam. John Weller described the fearfully complex job of a B-24 navigator.
I am deeply indebted to several Japanese people who spoke candidly of a dark hour in their nation’s history. Yuichi Hatto, the Omori camp accountant and a friend to POWs, was an indispensable source on the Bird, Omori, and life as a Japanese soldier, answering my questions in writing, in his second language, when we were unable to speak on the telephone. Yoshi Kondo told me about the founding of the Joetsu Peace Park, and Shibui Genzi wrote to me about Japanese life in Naoetsu. Toru Fukubayashi and Taeko Sasamoto, historians with the POW Research Network Japan, answered my questions and pointed me toward sources.
The delightful Virginia “Toots” Bowersox Weitzel, Louie’s childhood friend, made me cassette tapes of the most popular songs at Torrance High in the 1930s, narrating them with stories from her days as a school cheerleader. Toots, who passed away just before this book went to press, told of tackling Louie on his sixteenth birthday, cheering him on as he ran the Torrance track with Pete, and playing football with him in front of Kellow’s Hamburg Stand in Long Beach. She was the only ninetysomething person I knew who was obsessed with American Idol. Olympians Velma Dunn Ploessel and Iris Cummings Critchell vividly described their experiences aboard the USS Manhattan and at the Berlin Games. Draggan Mihailovich told me of his remarkable encounter with the Bird. Georgie Bright Kunkel wrote to me about her brother, the great Norman Bright.
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