Unbroken
Directed by Angela Jolie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbroken_%28film%29
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Louie, Mac, and Phil caught a shark and only ate its liver...Not all sharks are edible. Most commonly consumed shark varieties are dogfishes, catsharks, sand sharks, makos, and smoothhounds. Mako fish is a delicacy for their meat is salmon-coloured having a very fine quality. Mako liver is used to prepare oil that is rich in vitamins.
Mutsuhiro Watanabe (Japanese: 渡邊睦裕, January 1, 1918 – April 1, 2003) was an Imperial Japanese Army sergeant in World War II who served at POW camps in Omori, Naoetsu (present day Jōetsu, Niigata), and Mitsushima (present day Hiraoka). After Japan's defeat, the US Occupation authorities classified Watanabe as a war criminal for his mistreatment of prisoners of war (POWs), but he managed to evade arrest and was never tried in court.[1]
Prison guard Former POWs have described the frequent beatings that Watanabe administered as causing the prisoners often serious and lasting injuries. Other examples of torture commited by Watanabe include having made one officer sit in a shack, wearing only a fundoshi undergarment, for ten days in the winter, and to have tied a sixty-five-year-old prisoner to a tree for days. Watanabe allegedly ordered one man to report to him to be punched in the face every night for three weeks, and practiced judo on an appendectomy patient. His prisoners nicknamed Watanabe "The Bird". One of Watanabe's prisoners was American track star Louis Zamperini, who recalled that after one beating he saw on Watanabe's face a "soft languor.... It was an expression of sexual rapture.".[2]
Beatings administered by Watanabe could go on for hours at a time, and would be resumed the next day. Watanabe is described as someone who received great joy from humiliating and emotionally torturing prisoners. Examples of such practice include showing prisoners letters sent to them by family members, and then burning these letters in front of the prisoners without giving them a chance to read them. Other crimes described by former prisoners include stealing supplies provided by the Red Cross for Watanabe's and other staff members private use as well as making POWs do excruciating hard slave labor while providing only 500 calories worth of food each day.
Later life In 1945, General Douglas MacArthur included Watanabe as number 23 on his list of the 40 most wanted war criminals in Japan. Watanabe went into hiding and was therefore never prosecuted even though the case against him consisted of some 250 sworn affidavits spanning more than 8 feet. While in hiding, Watanabe apparently worked on a farm and in a small grocery store. In 1956, the Japanese literary magazine Bungeishunjū published an interview with Watanabe titled アメリカに裁かれるのは厭だ! ("I do not want to be judged by America").[2] Watanabe later became a successful life insurance salesman and was reportedly wealthy, owning a $1.5 million apartment in Tokyo and a vacation condominium in Gold Coast, Australia.[2]
Prior to the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, the CBS News program 60 Minutes interviewed Watanabe at the Hotel Okura in Tokyo as part of a feature on Zamperini, who was returning to carry the Olympic Flame torch through Naoetsu en route to Nagano. In the interview, Watanabe acknowledged beating and kicking prisoners, but was unrepentant, saying: "I treated the prisoners strictly as enemies of Japan." Watanabe refused to meet Zamperini upon request.[3]
Legacy Watanabe's abusive behavior is described in Laura Hillenbrand's book about Zamperini titled Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (2010).[2] Watanabe also appears in Dr. Alfred A. Weinstein's memoir, Barbed Wire Surgeon, published in 1948. In 2014, Japanese musician Miyavi played Watanabe in Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, the film adaptation of Hillenbrand's book.[4]
Prison guard Former POWs have described the frequent beatings that Watanabe administered as causing the prisoners often serious and lasting injuries. Other examples of torture commited by Watanabe include having made one officer sit in a shack, wearing only a fundoshi undergarment, for ten days in the winter, and to have tied a sixty-five-year-old prisoner to a tree for days. Watanabe allegedly ordered one man to report to him to be punched in the face every night for three weeks, and practiced judo on an appendectomy patient. His prisoners nicknamed Watanabe "The Bird". One of Watanabe's prisoners was American track star Louis Zamperini, who recalled that after one beating he saw on Watanabe's face a "soft languor.... It was an expression of sexual rapture.".[2]
Beatings administered by Watanabe could go on for hours at a time, and would be resumed the next day. Watanabe is described as someone who received great joy from humiliating and emotionally torturing prisoners. Examples of such practice include showing prisoners letters sent to them by family members, and then burning these letters in front of the prisoners without giving them a chance to read them. Other crimes described by former prisoners include stealing supplies provided by the Red Cross for Watanabe's and other staff members private use as well as making POWs do excruciating hard slave labor while providing only 500 calories worth of food each day.
Later life In 1945, General Douglas MacArthur included Watanabe as number 23 on his list of the 40 most wanted war criminals in Japan. Watanabe went into hiding and was therefore never prosecuted even though the case against him consisted of some 250 sworn affidavits spanning more than 8 feet. While in hiding, Watanabe apparently worked on a farm and in a small grocery store. In 1956, the Japanese literary magazine Bungeishunjū published an interview with Watanabe titled アメリカに裁かれるのは厭だ! ("I do not want to be judged by America").[2] Watanabe later became a successful life insurance salesman and was reportedly wealthy, owning a $1.5 million apartment in Tokyo and a vacation condominium in Gold Coast, Australia.[2]
Prior to the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, the CBS News program 60 Minutes interviewed Watanabe at the Hotel Okura in Tokyo as part of a feature on Zamperini, who was returning to carry the Olympic Flame torch through Naoetsu en route to Nagano. In the interview, Watanabe acknowledged beating and kicking prisoners, but was unrepentant, saying: "I treated the prisoners strictly as enemies of Japan." Watanabe refused to meet Zamperini upon request.[3]
Legacy Watanabe's abusive behavior is described in Laura Hillenbrand's book about Zamperini titled Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (2010).[2] Watanabe also appears in Dr. Alfred A. Weinstein's memoir, Barbed Wire Surgeon, published in 1948. In 2014, Japanese musician Miyavi played Watanabe in Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, the film adaptation of Hillenbrand's book.[4]
From Wikipedia
Japanese attitudes to surrender During the 1920s and 1930s, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) adopted an ethos which required soldiers to fight to the death rather than surrender.[6] This policy reflected the practices of Japanese warfare in the pre-modern era.[7] During the Meiji period the Japanese government adopted western policies towards POWs, and few of the Japanese personnel who surrendered in the Russo-Japanese War were punished at the end of the war. Prisoners captured by Japanese forces during this and the First Sino-Japanese War and World War I were also treated in accordance with international standards.[8] Attitudes towards surrender hardened after World War I. While Japan signed the 1929 Geneva Convention covering treatment of POWs, it did not ratify the agreement, claiming that surrender was contrary to the beliefs of Japanese soldiers. This attitude was reinforced by the indoctrination of young people.[9]
A Japanese soldier in the sea off Cape Endaiadere, New Guinea on 18 December 1942 holding a hand grenade to his head moments before using it to commit suicide. The Australian soldier on the beach had called on him to surrender.[10][11] The Japanese military's attitude towards surrender was institutionalized in the 1941 "Code of Battlefield Conduct" (Senjinkun), which was issued to all Japanese soldiers. This document sought to establish standards of behavior for Japanese troops and improve discipline and morale within the Army, and included a prohibition against being taken prisoner.[12] The Japanese Government accompanied the Senjinkun's implementation with a propaganda campaign which celebrated people who had fought to the death rather than surrender during Japan's wars.[13] While the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) did not issue a document equivalent to the Senjinkun, naval personnel were expected to exhibit similar behavior and not surrender.[14] Most Japanese military personnel were told that they would be killed or tortured by the Allies if they were taken prisoner.[15] The Army's Field Service Regulations were also modified in 1940 to replace a provision which stated that seriously wounded personnel in field hospitals came under the protection of the 1929 Geneva Convention for the Sick and Wounded Armies in the Field with a requirement that the wounded not fall into enemy hands. During the war, this led to wounded personnel being either killed by medical officers or given grenades to commit suicide.[16]
Not all Japanese military personnel chose to follow the precepts set out on the Senjinkun. Those who chose to surrender did so for a range of reasons including not believing that suicide was appropriate or lacking the courage to commit the act, bitterness towards officers, and Allied propaganda promising good treatment.[19] During the later years of the war Japanese troops' morale deteriorated as a result of Allied victories, leading to an increase in the number who were prepared to surrender or desert.[20] During the Battle of Okinawa, 11,250 Japanese military personnel (including 3,581 unarmed labourers) surrendered between April and July 1945, representing 12 percent of the force deployed for the defense of the island. Many of these men were recently-conscripted members of Boeitai home guard units who had not received the same indoctrination as regular Army personnel, but substantial numbers of IJA soldiers also surrendered.[21]
Japanese soldiers' reluctance to surrender was also influenced by a perception that Allied forces would kill them if they did surrender, and historian Niall Ferguson has argued that this had a more important influence in discouraging surrenders than the fear of disciplinary action or dishonor.[4] In addition, the Japanese public was aware that US troops sometimes mutilated Japanese casualties and sent trophies made out of body-parts home from media reports of two high-profile incidents in 1944 in which a letter-opener carved from a bone of a Japanese soldier was presented to President Roosevelt and a photo of the skull of a Japanese soldier which had been sent home by a US soldier was published in the magazine Life. In these reports Americans were portrayed as "deranged, primitive, racist and inhuman".[22] Hoyt in "Japan’s war: the great Pacific conflict" argues that the Allied practice of taking bones from Japanese corpses home as souvenirs was exploited by Japanese propaganda very effectively, and "contributed to a preference to death over surrender and occupation, shown, for example, in the mass civilian suicides on Saipan and Okinawa after the Allied landings".[22]
The causes of the phenomenon that Japanese often continued to fight even in hopeless situations has been traced to a combination of Shinto, Messhi hoko (self-sacrifice for the sake of group), and Bushido. However, a factor equally strong or even stronger to those, was the fear of torture after capture. This fear grew out of years of battle experiences in China, where the Chinese guerrillas were considered expert torturers, and this fear was projected onto the American soldiers who also were expected to torture and kill surrendered Japanese.[23] During the Pacific War the majority of Japanese military personnel did not believe that the Allies treated prisoners correctly, and even a majority of those who surrendered expected to be killed.[24]
Allied attitudes A Japanese soldier surrendering to three US Marines in the Marshall Islands during January 1944. The Western Allies sought to treat captured Japanese in accordance with international agreements which governed the treatment of POWs.[18] Shortly after the outbreak of Pacific War in December 1941, the British and United States governments transmitted a message to the Japanese government through Swiss intermediaries asking if Japan would abide by the 1929 Geneva Convention. The Japanese Government responded stating that while it had not signed the convention, Japan would treat POWs in accordance with its terms; in effect though, Japan had willfully ignored the convention's requirements. While the Western Allies notified the Japanese government of the identities of Japanese POWs in accordance with the Geneva Convention's requirements, this information was not passed onto the families of the captured men as the Japanese government wished to maintain that none of its soldiers had been taken prisoner.[25]
Allied combatants were reluctant to take Japanese prisoners at the start of the Pacific War. During the first two years following the US entry into the war, US combatants were generally unwilling to accept the surrender of Japanese soldiers due to a combination of racist attitudes and anger at Japan's atrocities committed against US and Allied nationals and its widespread mistreatment or summary execution of Allied prisoners of war.[18][26] Australian soldiers were also reluctant to take Japanese prisoners for similar reasons.[27] Incidents in which Japanese soldiers booby-trapped their dead and wounded or pretended to surrender in order to lure Allied combatants into ambushes were well known within the Allied militaries and also hardened attitudes against seeking the surrender of Japanese on the battlefield.[28] As a result, Allied troops believed that their Japanese opponents would not surrender and that any attempts to surrender were deceptive;[29] for instance, the Australian jungle warfare school advised soldiers to shoot any Japanese troops who had their hands closed while surrendering.[27] Furthermore, in many instances, Japanese soldiers who had surrendered were killed on the front line or while being taken to POW compounds.[30] The nature of jungle warfare also contributed to prisoners not being taken, as many battles were fought at close ranges where participants "often had no choice but to shoot first and ask questions later".[31]
Two surrendered Japanese soldiers with a Japanese civilian and two US soldiers on Okinawa. The Japanese soldier on the left is reading a propaganda leaflet. Despite the attitudes of combat troops and nature of the fighting, Allied militaries made systematic efforts to take Japanese prisoners throughout the war. Each US Army division was assigned a team of Japanese Americans whose duties included attempting to persuade Japanese personnel to surrender.[32] Allied forces mounted an extensive psychological warfare campaign against their Japanese opponents to lower their morale and encourage surrender.[33] This included dropping copies of the Geneva Conventions and 'surrender passes' on Japanese positions.[34] This campaign was undermined by Allied troops' reluctance to take prisoners, however.[35] As a result, from May 1944, senior US Army commanders authorized and endorsed educational programs which aimed to change the attitudes of front line troops. These programs highlighted the intelligence which could be gained from Japanese POWs, the need to honor surrender leaflets, and the benefits which could be gained by encouraging Japanese forces to not fight to the last man. The programs were partially successful, and contributed to US troops taking more prisoners. In addition, soldiers who witnessed Japanese troops surrender were more willing to take prisoners themselves.[36]
Japanese POW bathing on board the USS New Jersey, December 1944. Survivors of ships sunk by Allied submarines frequently refused to surrender, and many of the prisoners who were captured by submariners were taken by force. US Navy submarines were occasionally ordered to obtain prisoners for intelligence purposes, and formed special teams of personnel for this purpose.[37] Overall, however, Allied submariners usually did not attempt to take prisoners, and the number of Japanese personnel they captured was relatively small. The submarines which took prisoners normally did so towards the end of their patrols so that they did not have to be guarded for a long time.[38]
Allied forces continued to kill many Japanese personnel who were attempting to surrender throughout the war.[39] It is likely that more Japanese soldiers would have surrendered if they had not believed that they would be killed by the Allies while trying to do so.[2] Fear of being killed after surrendering was one of the main factors which influenced Japanese troops to fight to the death, and a wartime US Office of Wartime Information report stated that it may have been more important than fear of disgrace and a desire to die for Japan.[40] Instances of Japanese personnel being killed while attempting to surrender are not well documented, though anecdotal accounts provide evidence that this occurred.[26]
Intelligence gathered from Japanese POWs A US surrender leaflet depicting Japanese POWs. The leaflet's wording was changed from 'I surrender' to 'I cease resistance' at the suggestion of POWs.[49] The Allies gained considerable quantities of intelligence from Japanese POWs. Because they had been indoctrinated to believe that by surrendering they had broken all ties with Japan, many captured personnel provided their interrogators with information on the Japanese military.[41] Australian and US troops and senior officers commonly believed that captured Japanese troops were very unlikely to divulge any information of military value, leading to them having little motivation to take prisoners.[50] This view proved incorrect, however, and many Japanese POWs provided valuable intelligence during interrogations. Few Japanese were aware of the Geneva Convention and the rights it gave prisoners to not respond to questioning. Moreover, the POWs felt that by surrendering they had lost all their rights. The prisoners appreciated the opportunity to converse with Japanese-speaking Americans and felt that the food, clothing and medical treatment they were provided with meant that they owed favours to their captors. The Allied interrogators found that exaggerating the amount they knew about the Japanese forces and asking the POWs to 'confirm' details was also a successful approach. As a result of these factors, Japanese POWs were often cooperative and truthful during interrogation sessions.[51]
Japanese POWs were interrogated multiple times during their captivity. Most Japanese soldiers were interrogated by intelligence officers of the battalion or regiment which had captured them for information which could be used by these units. Following this they were rapidly moved to rear areas where they were interrogated by successive echelons of the Allied military. They were also questioned once they reached a POW camp in Australia, New Zealand, India or the United States. These interrogations were painful and stressful for the POWs.[52] Force was not used by Allied interrogators, though on one occasion headquarters personnel of the US 40th Infantry Division debated, but ultimately decided against, administering sodium penthanol to a senior non-commissioned officer.[53]
Some Japanese POWs also played an important role in helping the Allied militaries develop propaganda and politically indoctrinate their fellow prisoners.[54] This included developing propaganda leaflets and loudspeaker broadcasts which were designed to encourage other Japanese personnel to surrender. The wording of this material sought to overcome the indoctrination which Japanese soldiers had received by stating that they should "cease resistance" rather than "surrender".[55] POWs also provided advice on the wording for propaganda leaflets which were dropped on Japanese cities by heavy bombers in the final months of the war.[56]
Allied prisoner of war camps Japanese POWs held in Allied prisoner of war camps were treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention.[57] By 1943 the Allied governments were aware that personnel who had been captured by the Japanese military were being held in harsh conditions. In an attempt to win better treatment for their POWs, the Allies made extensive efforts to notify the Japanese government of the good conditions in Allied POW camps.[58] This was not successful, however, as the Japanese government refused to recognise the existence of captured Japanese military personnel.[59] Nevertheless, Japanese POWs in Allied camps continued to be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions until the end of the war.[60]
Most Japanese captured by US forces after September 1942 were turned over to Australia or New Zealand for internment. The United States provided these countries with aid through the Lend Lease program to cover the costs of maintaining the prisoners, and retained responsibility for repatriating the men to Japan at the end of the war. Prisoners captured in the central Pacific or who were believed to have particular intelligence value were held in camps in the United States.[61]
Japanese POWs practice baseball near their quarters, several weeks before the Cowra breakout. This photograph was taken with the intention of using it in propaganda leaflets, to be dropped on Japanese-held areas in the Asia-Pacific region.[62] Prisoners who were thought to possess significant technical or strategic information were brought to specialist intelligence-gathering facilities at Fort Hunt, Virginia or Camp Tracy, California. After arriving in these camps, the prisoners were interrogated again, and their conversations were wiretapped and analysed. Some of the conditions at Camp Tracy violated Geneva Convention requirements, such as insufficient exercise time being provided. However, prisoners at this camp were given special benefits, such as high quality food and access to a shop, and the interrogation sessions were relatively relaxed. The continuous wiretapping at both locations may have also violated the spirit of the Geneva Convention.[63]
Japanese POWs generally adjusted to life in prison camps and few attempted to escape.[64] There were several incidents at POW camps, however. On 25 February 1943, POWs at the Featherston prisoner of war camp in New Zealand staged a strike after being ordered to work. The protest turned violent when the camp's deputy commander shot one of the protest's leaders. The POWs then attacked the other guards, who opened fire and killed 48 prisoners and wounded another 74. Conditions at the camp were subsequently improved, leading to good relations between the Japanese and their New Zealand guards for the remainder of the war.[65] More seriously, on 5 August 1944, Japanese POWs in a camp near Cowra, Australia attempted to escape. During the fighting between the POWs and their guards 257 Japanese and four Australians were killed.[66] Other confrontations between Japanese POWs and their guards occurred at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin during May 1944 as well as a camp in Bikaner, India during 1945; these did not result in any fatalities.[67] In addition, 24 Japanese POWs killed themselves at Camp Paita, New Caledonia in January 1944 after a planned uprising was foiled.[68] News of the incidents at Cowra and Featherston was suppressed in Japan,[69] but the Japanese Government lodged protests with the Australian and New Zealand governments as a propaganda tactic. This was the only time that the Japanese Government officially recognized that some members of the country's military had surrendered.[70]
The Allies distributed photographs of Japanese POWs in camps to induce other Japanese personnel to surrender. This tactic was initially rejected by General MacArthur when it was proposed to him in mid-1943 on the grounds that it violated the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and the fear of being identified after surrendering could harden Japanese resistance. MacArthur reversed his position in December of that year, however, but only allowed the publication of photos that did not identify individual POWs. He also directed that the photos "should be truthful and factual and not designed to exaggerate".[71]
Japanese attitudes to surrender During the 1920s and 1930s, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) adopted an ethos which required soldiers to fight to the death rather than surrender.[6] This policy reflected the practices of Japanese warfare in the pre-modern era.[7] During the Meiji period the Japanese government adopted western policies towards POWs, and few of the Japanese personnel who surrendered in the Russo-Japanese War were punished at the end of the war. Prisoners captured by Japanese forces during this and the First Sino-Japanese War and World War I were also treated in accordance with international standards.[8] Attitudes towards surrender hardened after World War I. While Japan signed the 1929 Geneva Convention covering treatment of POWs, it did not ratify the agreement, claiming that surrender was contrary to the beliefs of Japanese soldiers. This attitude was reinforced by the indoctrination of young people.[9]
A Japanese soldier in the sea off Cape Endaiadere, New Guinea on 18 December 1942 holding a hand grenade to his head moments before using it to commit suicide. The Australian soldier on the beach had called on him to surrender.[10][11] The Japanese military's attitude towards surrender was institutionalized in the 1941 "Code of Battlefield Conduct" (Senjinkun), which was issued to all Japanese soldiers. This document sought to establish standards of behavior for Japanese troops and improve discipline and morale within the Army, and included a prohibition against being taken prisoner.[12] The Japanese Government accompanied the Senjinkun's implementation with a propaganda campaign which celebrated people who had fought to the death rather than surrender during Japan's wars.[13] While the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) did not issue a document equivalent to the Senjinkun, naval personnel were expected to exhibit similar behavior and not surrender.[14] Most Japanese military personnel were told that they would be killed or tortured by the Allies if they were taken prisoner.[15] The Army's Field Service Regulations were also modified in 1940 to replace a provision which stated that seriously wounded personnel in field hospitals came under the protection of the 1929 Geneva Convention for the Sick and Wounded Armies in the Field with a requirement that the wounded not fall into enemy hands. During the war, this led to wounded personnel being either killed by medical officers or given grenades to commit suicide.[16]
Not all Japanese military personnel chose to follow the precepts set out on the Senjinkun. Those who chose to surrender did so for a range of reasons including not believing that suicide was appropriate or lacking the courage to commit the act, bitterness towards officers, and Allied propaganda promising good treatment.[19] During the later years of the war Japanese troops' morale deteriorated as a result of Allied victories, leading to an increase in the number who were prepared to surrender or desert.[20] During the Battle of Okinawa, 11,250 Japanese military personnel (including 3,581 unarmed labourers) surrendered between April and July 1945, representing 12 percent of the force deployed for the defense of the island. Many of these men were recently-conscripted members of Boeitai home guard units who had not received the same indoctrination as regular Army personnel, but substantial numbers of IJA soldiers also surrendered.[21]
Japanese soldiers' reluctance to surrender was also influenced by a perception that Allied forces would kill them if they did surrender, and historian Niall Ferguson has argued that this had a more important influence in discouraging surrenders than the fear of disciplinary action or dishonor.[4] In addition, the Japanese public was aware that US troops sometimes mutilated Japanese casualties and sent trophies made out of body-parts home from media reports of two high-profile incidents in 1944 in which a letter-opener carved from a bone of a Japanese soldier was presented to President Roosevelt and a photo of the skull of a Japanese soldier which had been sent home by a US soldier was published in the magazine Life. In these reports Americans were portrayed as "deranged, primitive, racist and inhuman".[22] Hoyt in "Japan’s war: the great Pacific conflict" argues that the Allied practice of taking bones from Japanese corpses home as souvenirs was exploited by Japanese propaganda very effectively, and "contributed to a preference to death over surrender and occupation, shown, for example, in the mass civilian suicides on Saipan and Okinawa after the Allied landings".[22]
The causes of the phenomenon that Japanese often continued to fight even in hopeless situations has been traced to a combination of Shinto, Messhi hoko (self-sacrifice for the sake of group), and Bushido. However, a factor equally strong or even stronger to those, was the fear of torture after capture. This fear grew out of years of battle experiences in China, where the Chinese guerrillas were considered expert torturers, and this fear was projected onto the American soldiers who also were expected to torture and kill surrendered Japanese.[23] During the Pacific War the majority of Japanese military personnel did not believe that the Allies treated prisoners correctly, and even a majority of those who surrendered expected to be killed.[24]
Allied attitudes A Japanese soldier surrendering to three US Marines in the Marshall Islands during January 1944. The Western Allies sought to treat captured Japanese in accordance with international agreements which governed the treatment of POWs.[18] Shortly after the outbreak of Pacific War in December 1941, the British and United States governments transmitted a message to the Japanese government through Swiss intermediaries asking if Japan would abide by the 1929 Geneva Convention. The Japanese Government responded stating that while it had not signed the convention, Japan would treat POWs in accordance with its terms; in effect though, Japan had willfully ignored the convention's requirements. While the Western Allies notified the Japanese government of the identities of Japanese POWs in accordance with the Geneva Convention's requirements, this information was not passed onto the families of the captured men as the Japanese government wished to maintain that none of its soldiers had been taken prisoner.[25]
Allied combatants were reluctant to take Japanese prisoners at the start of the Pacific War. During the first two years following the US entry into the war, US combatants were generally unwilling to accept the surrender of Japanese soldiers due to a combination of racist attitudes and anger at Japan's atrocities committed against US and Allied nationals and its widespread mistreatment or summary execution of Allied prisoners of war.[18][26] Australian soldiers were also reluctant to take Japanese prisoners for similar reasons.[27] Incidents in which Japanese soldiers booby-trapped their dead and wounded or pretended to surrender in order to lure Allied combatants into ambushes were well known within the Allied militaries and also hardened attitudes against seeking the surrender of Japanese on the battlefield.[28] As a result, Allied troops believed that their Japanese opponents would not surrender and that any attempts to surrender were deceptive;[29] for instance, the Australian jungle warfare school advised soldiers to shoot any Japanese troops who had their hands closed while surrendering.[27] Furthermore, in many instances, Japanese soldiers who had surrendered were killed on the front line or while being taken to POW compounds.[30] The nature of jungle warfare also contributed to prisoners not being taken, as many battles were fought at close ranges where participants "often had no choice but to shoot first and ask questions later".[31]
Two surrendered Japanese soldiers with a Japanese civilian and two US soldiers on Okinawa. The Japanese soldier on the left is reading a propaganda leaflet. Despite the attitudes of combat troops and nature of the fighting, Allied militaries made systematic efforts to take Japanese prisoners throughout the war. Each US Army division was assigned a team of Japanese Americans whose duties included attempting to persuade Japanese personnel to surrender.[32] Allied forces mounted an extensive psychological warfare campaign against their Japanese opponents to lower their morale and encourage surrender.[33] This included dropping copies of the Geneva Conventions and 'surrender passes' on Japanese positions.[34] This campaign was undermined by Allied troops' reluctance to take prisoners, however.[35] As a result, from May 1944, senior US Army commanders authorized and endorsed educational programs which aimed to change the attitudes of front line troops. These programs highlighted the intelligence which could be gained from Japanese POWs, the need to honor surrender leaflets, and the benefits which could be gained by encouraging Japanese forces to not fight to the last man. The programs were partially successful, and contributed to US troops taking more prisoners. In addition, soldiers who witnessed Japanese troops surrender were more willing to take prisoners themselves.[36]
Japanese POW bathing on board the USS New Jersey, December 1944. Survivors of ships sunk by Allied submarines frequently refused to surrender, and many of the prisoners who were captured by submariners were taken by force. US Navy submarines were occasionally ordered to obtain prisoners for intelligence purposes, and formed special teams of personnel for this purpose.[37] Overall, however, Allied submariners usually did not attempt to take prisoners, and the number of Japanese personnel they captured was relatively small. The submarines which took prisoners normally did so towards the end of their patrols so that they did not have to be guarded for a long time.[38]
Allied forces continued to kill many Japanese personnel who were attempting to surrender throughout the war.[39] It is likely that more Japanese soldiers would have surrendered if they had not believed that they would be killed by the Allies while trying to do so.[2] Fear of being killed after surrendering was one of the main factors which influenced Japanese troops to fight to the death, and a wartime US Office of Wartime Information report stated that it may have been more important than fear of disgrace and a desire to die for Japan.[40] Instances of Japanese personnel being killed while attempting to surrender are not well documented, though anecdotal accounts provide evidence that this occurred.[26]
Intelligence gathered from Japanese POWs A US surrender leaflet depicting Japanese POWs. The leaflet's wording was changed from 'I surrender' to 'I cease resistance' at the suggestion of POWs.[49] The Allies gained considerable quantities of intelligence from Japanese POWs. Because they had been indoctrinated to believe that by surrendering they had broken all ties with Japan, many captured personnel provided their interrogators with information on the Japanese military.[41] Australian and US troops and senior officers commonly believed that captured Japanese troops were very unlikely to divulge any information of military value, leading to them having little motivation to take prisoners.[50] This view proved incorrect, however, and many Japanese POWs provided valuable intelligence during interrogations. Few Japanese were aware of the Geneva Convention and the rights it gave prisoners to not respond to questioning. Moreover, the POWs felt that by surrendering they had lost all their rights. The prisoners appreciated the opportunity to converse with Japanese-speaking Americans and felt that the food, clothing and medical treatment they were provided with meant that they owed favours to their captors. The Allied interrogators found that exaggerating the amount they knew about the Japanese forces and asking the POWs to 'confirm' details was also a successful approach. As a result of these factors, Japanese POWs were often cooperative and truthful during interrogation sessions.[51]
Japanese POWs were interrogated multiple times during their captivity. Most Japanese soldiers were interrogated by intelligence officers of the battalion or regiment which had captured them for information which could be used by these units. Following this they were rapidly moved to rear areas where they were interrogated by successive echelons of the Allied military. They were also questioned once they reached a POW camp in Australia, New Zealand, India or the United States. These interrogations were painful and stressful for the POWs.[52] Force was not used by Allied interrogators, though on one occasion headquarters personnel of the US 40th Infantry Division debated, but ultimately decided against, administering sodium penthanol to a senior non-commissioned officer.[53]
Some Japanese POWs also played an important role in helping the Allied militaries develop propaganda and politically indoctrinate their fellow prisoners.[54] This included developing propaganda leaflets and loudspeaker broadcasts which were designed to encourage other Japanese personnel to surrender. The wording of this material sought to overcome the indoctrination which Japanese soldiers had received by stating that they should "cease resistance" rather than "surrender".[55] POWs also provided advice on the wording for propaganda leaflets which were dropped on Japanese cities by heavy bombers in the final months of the war.[56]
Allied prisoner of war camps Japanese POWs held in Allied prisoner of war camps were treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention.[57] By 1943 the Allied governments were aware that personnel who had been captured by the Japanese military were being held in harsh conditions. In an attempt to win better treatment for their POWs, the Allies made extensive efforts to notify the Japanese government of the good conditions in Allied POW camps.[58] This was not successful, however, as the Japanese government refused to recognise the existence of captured Japanese military personnel.[59] Nevertheless, Japanese POWs in Allied camps continued to be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions until the end of the war.[60]
Most Japanese captured by US forces after September 1942 were turned over to Australia or New Zealand for internment. The United States provided these countries with aid through the Lend Lease program to cover the costs of maintaining the prisoners, and retained responsibility for repatriating the men to Japan at the end of the war. Prisoners captured in the central Pacific or who were believed to have particular intelligence value were held in camps in the United States.[61]
Japanese POWs practice baseball near their quarters, several weeks before the Cowra breakout. This photograph was taken with the intention of using it in propaganda leaflets, to be dropped on Japanese-held areas in the Asia-Pacific region.[62] Prisoners who were thought to possess significant technical or strategic information were brought to specialist intelligence-gathering facilities at Fort Hunt, Virginia or Camp Tracy, California. After arriving in these camps, the prisoners were interrogated again, and their conversations were wiretapped and analysed. Some of the conditions at Camp Tracy violated Geneva Convention requirements, such as insufficient exercise time being provided. However, prisoners at this camp were given special benefits, such as high quality food and access to a shop, and the interrogation sessions were relatively relaxed. The continuous wiretapping at both locations may have also violated the spirit of the Geneva Convention.[63]
Japanese POWs generally adjusted to life in prison camps and few attempted to escape.[64] There were several incidents at POW camps, however. On 25 February 1943, POWs at the Featherston prisoner of war camp in New Zealand staged a strike after being ordered to work. The protest turned violent when the camp's deputy commander shot one of the protest's leaders. The POWs then attacked the other guards, who opened fire and killed 48 prisoners and wounded another 74. Conditions at the camp were subsequently improved, leading to good relations between the Japanese and their New Zealand guards for the remainder of the war.[65] More seriously, on 5 August 1944, Japanese POWs in a camp near Cowra, Australia attempted to escape. During the fighting between the POWs and their guards 257 Japanese and four Australians were killed.[66] Other confrontations between Japanese POWs and their guards occurred at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin during May 1944 as well as a camp in Bikaner, India during 1945; these did not result in any fatalities.[67] In addition, 24 Japanese POWs killed themselves at Camp Paita, New Caledonia in January 1944 after a planned uprising was foiled.[68] News of the incidents at Cowra and Featherston was suppressed in Japan,[69] but the Japanese Government lodged protests with the Australian and New Zealand governments as a propaganda tactic. This was the only time that the Japanese Government officially recognized that some members of the country's military had surrendered.[70]
The Allies distributed photographs of Japanese POWs in camps to induce other Japanese personnel to surrender. This tactic was initially rejected by General MacArthur when it was proposed to him in mid-1943 on the grounds that it violated the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and the fear of being identified after surrendering could harden Japanese resistance. MacArthur reversed his position in December of that year, however, but only allowed the publication of photos that did not identify individual POWs. He also directed that the photos "should be truthful and factual and not designed to exaggerate".[71]
Story of Makin Island--Now known as Butaritari in the Pacific Ocean
BeriBeri
B-1 Deficiency/ Thiamine
B-1 deficiency disease called beriberi affects the peripheral nervous system (polyneuritis) and/or the cardiovascular system. Thiamine deficiency has a potentially fatal outcome if it remains untreated.[1] In less severe cases, nonspecific signs include malaise, weight loss, irritability and confusion.
Thiamine is found in a wide variety of foods at low concentrations. Yeast, yeast extract, and pork are the most highly concentrated sources of thiamine.[citation needed] In general, cereal grains are the most important dietary sources of thiamine, by virtue of their ubiquity. Of these, whole grains contain more thiamine than refined grains, as thiamine is found mostly in the outer layers of the grain and in the germ (which are removed during the refining process). For example, 100 g of whole-wheat flour contains 0.55 mg of thiamine, while 100 g of white flour contains only 0.06 mg of thiamine. In the US, processed flour must be enriched with thiamine mononitrate (along with niacin, ferrous iron, riboflavin, and folic acid) to replace that lost in processing.
In Australia, thiamine, folic acid, and iodised salt are added for the same reason.[12]
Zamp/Unbroken
5 Key Lessons Every Entrepreneur Can Learn From 'Unbroken' Louis Zamperini Today's January 08, 2015
Louis ZamperiniImage credit: WikipediaUnbroken could be one of the most influential books you read and films you watch this year. What does a film about the olympian, World War II bombardier and prisoner of war have to do with being an entrepreneur? If you’ve been exposed to the life of Louis Zamperini then you already know: this guy had guts. He led an extraordinary life and refused to give up in any situation. Entrepreneurship is based on the same defining character traits that Zamperini exemplified throughout his life.
Here are five of the key lessons you can learn from Zamperini.
1. Thank your lucky stars it’s hard.Zamperini didn’t grow up with any special advantages or skills. In fact in many ways, he was at a disadvantage. His family came to California when Zamperini was a kid and he spoke no English, making him an easy target for bullying. He got in a lot of trouble in his youth. He worked hard to train and become a runner, a pursuit that eventually took him to the Olympics.
Related: A Navy SEAL's 5 Entrepreneurial Leadership Lessons From 2014
Whether it’s truth or fable, the oft-repeated line in the film is, “If you can take it, you can make it.” That ability to take the challenges and hardships life throws your way is what defines an entrepreneur. Don’t lament the hurdles that lie in front of you as an entrepreneur: embrace them. Run toward the conflict and rise to the tasks at hand.
Innovation comes through solving the world’s problems, not by having an easy answer to an easy existence. Be glad it’s hard: that’s why you’ll be so good.
2. Great risks mean greater rewards.It’s crucial as an entrepreneur to engage in small, calculated and continuous risks. Your ability to take and survive risks will help build up your confidence in yourself. Your risks will also develop the courage you’ll need to face fear in the future when it comes time to take the bigger risks.
Zamperini certainly understood that taking risks sometimes meant failing, but ultimately meant big rewards. He took the risks necessary in running to make it to the Olympics and during his days as a POW to survive the war. Taking risks is part of the entrepreneur’s path and the more you develop the ability to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, the greater your long-term rewards will be in your life.
3. Failure is a huge part of the journey.Never let your failures define you or you’ve lost the game. Zamperini was shaping up to be a total failure as a kid. He was getting in fights, drinking by age eight, robbing strangers and neighbors alike and in pretty much every other way misbehaving. By the time he was a teen his parents knew the local police very well. That’s not what you’d call a model start, but with the right support from others and initiative from himself, Zamperini turned things around. It would’ve been easy to give up and define Zamperini as a failure, a lost cause and a bad bet.
Where are you in your entrepreneurial journey? Don’t let others cast the die and define your success. Never let failure define you. You can always find the right support and you can always, always take the initiative to keep improving. An entrepreneur’s path is never straightforward, simple or easy. Embrace the failures you’ve faced and keep moving forward.
Related: 7 Entrepreneurial Lessons a 'Happy Days' Star Learned From an Unlikely Mentor
4. The right support makes all the difference.Speaking of support, it’s debatable whether Zamperini would’ve reached his Olympic success without the support of the right mentors. It wasn’t just his parents that didn’t give up on him during his misspent youth, but his brother, the school’s track coach and even the police became active mentors in coaching Zamperini into a different path that eventually led him to the Olympics.
Surrounding yourself with the right people who believe in you, support you and will rally for you when you’re off track will get you far as an entrepreneur. Likewise, remember that you can give that support and encouragement to other entrepreneurs and up-and-comers in your startup communities.
When Zamperini was stranded in a life raft with the two other survivors of the crashed flight, and later in the barracks of the POW camp, he would talk about his mother’s cooking and other fond memories to improve morale. He actively lent support to the men to keep spirits high.
We all need people to believe in us to help us achieve our best. So get yourself in the right supportive environment and lend a hand to those in need of your mentoring as well.
5. Never give up.Zamperini didn’t just embody the message of never giving up, he literally wrote the book on it. At 97 years old he published and co-authored the book, Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In: Lessons From An Extraordinary Life. If anyone is qualified to give you advice, wisdom and insights into the indomitable spirit you’ll need in entrepreneurship and in life, it’s Zamperini.
Louis ZamperiniImage credit: WikipediaUnbroken could be one of the most influential books you read and films you watch this year. What does a film about the olympian, World War II bombardier and prisoner of war have to do with being an entrepreneur? If you’ve been exposed to the life of Louis Zamperini then you already know: this guy had guts. He led an extraordinary life and refused to give up in any situation. Entrepreneurship is based on the same defining character traits that Zamperini exemplified throughout his life.
Here are five of the key lessons you can learn from Zamperini.
1. Thank your lucky stars it’s hard.Zamperini didn’t grow up with any special advantages or skills. In fact in many ways, he was at a disadvantage. His family came to California when Zamperini was a kid and he spoke no English, making him an easy target for bullying. He got in a lot of trouble in his youth. He worked hard to train and become a runner, a pursuit that eventually took him to the Olympics.
Related: A Navy SEAL's 5 Entrepreneurial Leadership Lessons From 2014
Whether it’s truth or fable, the oft-repeated line in the film is, “If you can take it, you can make it.” That ability to take the challenges and hardships life throws your way is what defines an entrepreneur. Don’t lament the hurdles that lie in front of you as an entrepreneur: embrace them. Run toward the conflict and rise to the tasks at hand.
Innovation comes through solving the world’s problems, not by having an easy answer to an easy existence. Be glad it’s hard: that’s why you’ll be so good.
2. Great risks mean greater rewards.It’s crucial as an entrepreneur to engage in small, calculated and continuous risks. Your ability to take and survive risks will help build up your confidence in yourself. Your risks will also develop the courage you’ll need to face fear in the future when it comes time to take the bigger risks.
Zamperini certainly understood that taking risks sometimes meant failing, but ultimately meant big rewards. He took the risks necessary in running to make it to the Olympics and during his days as a POW to survive the war. Taking risks is part of the entrepreneur’s path and the more you develop the ability to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, the greater your long-term rewards will be in your life.
3. Failure is a huge part of the journey.Never let your failures define you or you’ve lost the game. Zamperini was shaping up to be a total failure as a kid. He was getting in fights, drinking by age eight, robbing strangers and neighbors alike and in pretty much every other way misbehaving. By the time he was a teen his parents knew the local police very well. That’s not what you’d call a model start, but with the right support from others and initiative from himself, Zamperini turned things around. It would’ve been easy to give up and define Zamperini as a failure, a lost cause and a bad bet.
Where are you in your entrepreneurial journey? Don’t let others cast the die and define your success. Never let failure define you. You can always find the right support and you can always, always take the initiative to keep improving. An entrepreneur’s path is never straightforward, simple or easy. Embrace the failures you’ve faced and keep moving forward.
Related: 7 Entrepreneurial Lessons a 'Happy Days' Star Learned From an Unlikely Mentor
4. The right support makes all the difference.Speaking of support, it’s debatable whether Zamperini would’ve reached his Olympic success without the support of the right mentors. It wasn’t just his parents that didn’t give up on him during his misspent youth, but his brother, the school’s track coach and even the police became active mentors in coaching Zamperini into a different path that eventually led him to the Olympics.
Surrounding yourself with the right people who believe in you, support you and will rally for you when you’re off track will get you far as an entrepreneur. Likewise, remember that you can give that support and encouragement to other entrepreneurs and up-and-comers in your startup communities.
When Zamperini was stranded in a life raft with the two other survivors of the crashed flight, and later in the barracks of the POW camp, he would talk about his mother’s cooking and other fond memories to improve morale. He actively lent support to the men to keep spirits high.
We all need people to believe in us to help us achieve our best. So get yourself in the right supportive environment and lend a hand to those in need of your mentoring as well.
5. Never give up.Zamperini didn’t just embody the message of never giving up, he literally wrote the book on it. At 97 years old he published and co-authored the book, Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In: Lessons From An Extraordinary Life. If anyone is qualified to give you advice, wisdom and insights into the indomitable spirit you’ll need in entrepreneurship and in life, it’s Zamperini.
Louis "Louie" Silvie Zamperini
Character Analysis
Catch Him If You Can
Louie is the hero/protagonist of the story.
Louie Zamparini is the guy who almost breaks the four-minute mile, gets swept up by World War II, shot down in the Pacific, punches sharks in the face, survives numerous POW camps, lives, goes home, marries, and finds God. Through it all, he remains… say it with us… unbroken.
We spend a lot of time with Louie as a young boy, before the war starts. He's resourceful and fast-thinking, and he grew up in Torrance, California, just like Dirk Diggler. The childhood scenes—and the fact that most of Louie's childhood stories end with "and then I ran like mad" (1.1.17)—serve to show us how tenacious he is. The kid who never gives up grows into a man who can push through anything.
Even without the war stuff, Louie goes through quite the transformation in his boyhood. Like Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Louie goes from "his hometown's resident archvillain [to] superstar" (1.3.3), and like Robert Downey, Jr., he is sometimes called "Iron Man" (1.3.3). He's also called the "Torrance Tempest" and the "Torrance Tornado," and he's the "youngest distance runner to ever make the team" (1.3.33) in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, He even gets to meet Hitler, who calls him "the boy with the fast finish" (1.4.27).
(We realize getting a compliment from Hitler is like a memoirist getting a blurb from James Frey, but it's neat how Louie plays a Forrest Gump-like role in world history before the war.)
Fear of Flying
When Louie is young, "He wanted nothing to do with airplanes" (1.1.22)—which is a sure sign that he will have something to do with airplanes. Sure enough, despite being "jittery and dogged by airsickness" (1.5.23), Louie is made a bombardier. In other words, he's the guy who drops the bombs and gets to shout the classic phrase bombs away.
Louie is skilled at hitting his targets and playing pranks on his friends during down time, like when he clogs a crewmate's "piss pipe" (2.7.10) with a wad of chewing gum.
Remember the resourcefulness we talked about? Well, it doesn't just come in handy for pulling pranks. During one close landing in the Super Man, Louie manages to splice cables together, tie all the men down, tend to wounds, and ready a parachute, all as their plane is practically flying upside down. It's too bad that the Green Hornet isn't as resilient as Louie is.
Lost at Sea
Louie's perseverance and resourcefulness shine when the Green Hornet goes down. Adrift on a raft with Mac and Phil, the only other surviving crewmen, Louie manages to keep them all alive. He kills an albatross and makes it into bait; he fashions Wolverine-like claws out of fishhooks; and he doesn't resort to cannibalism, even if Mac does start looking like a McDonald's dinner.
Unfortunately though, he can't keep Mac alive, and Louie has a harrowing near-death experience of his own. By harrowing we mean kind of nice: "He saw human figures, silhouetted against the sky. He counted twenty-one of them" (3.16.45). They are singing, and Louie swears he's not hallucinating, even though Phil doesn't hear or see them. Louie will hear them again later in the first POW camp he is imprisoned in, and this vision plays a part in his acceptance of Christianity after returning from the war.
Radio Found the WWII Star
Other places perseverance and resourcefulness come in handy: high school, Survivor, Japanese POW camps. After forty-six days at sea, Louie and Phil are rescued. Well, we should really say captured, because the two men are shipped to a POW camp, the first of several they will be shuffled between over the next two years.
The conditions are pretty terrible (see our analysis of suffering in the "Themes" section for a taste), and to make matters worse, Louie is dogged by Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a sadistic corporal who makes the Marquis de Sade look like a fun-loving Ellen DeGeneres. The Bird does all he can to break Louie, but Louie remains—all together now--unbroken.
Louie's strong morals shine through, even at his lowest moments. When Louie is able to send his family a message on Radio Tokyo, it validates their hopes that he's still alive. But when the radio men try to strike a bargain with Louie by offering to feed him if he'll read messages they wrote, he refuses to be a propaganda tool.
Dead Man Limping
Louie survives two years of being in various POW camps, even though everyone else thinks he's dead. He's even told "Zamperini's dead" (4.33.11) at a clinic and has to prove his identity with the contents of his wallet. He quickly returns to what he knows best: being a WWII-era Ashton Kutcher and punking a track and field recruiter who thought he was dead.
Although Louie is thrilled to be alive and home, he has no direction in life. He injures his ankle and knee doing manual labor for the Bird, and thinks, "I'll never run again" (4.33.23), so after the war, Louie's lost and… well, we almost said broken, but from the title we know that he's not broken. But he's close. Cracked. Almost shattered. Think of some more synonyms for us, guys.
The term PTSD didn't exist in the 1940s, but that's what Louie is going through. He sees the Bird "lurking in his dreams" (5.34.16) and plots ways to exact his revenge against him. Ironically, this obsession merely keeps Louie feeling like a victim of torment: "The paradox of human vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer" (5.37.16). In other words, hatred hurts the person who holds it in their heart.
Eventually, Louie gets married, has a child, finds God through Billy Graham, and realizes "I am a good man" (5.38.25). He has been drinking heavily for years at this point, but he dumps it all out on the evening he prays in Billy Graham's tent. Later Louie returns to Japan and forgives the men who abused him, even the Bird, with "a radiant smile on his face" (5.39.18). Yup—this dude is definitely unbroken.
Louis "Louie" Silvie Zamperini Timeline & Summary
Russell Allen "Phil" Phillips
Character Analysis
Pilot to Bombardier… Pilot to Bombardier
Phil is like the Ginger Rogers to Louie's Fred Astaire. He has to go through everything Louie does (being shot at, lost at sea for forty-six days, imprisoned in Japanese POW camps) but backwards and in heels.Okay, no heels, but he is the pilot of both the Super Man and the Green Hornet, and he feels a lot of guilt for being at the wheel (or whatever a plane has) when the Green Hornet goes down into the Pacific.
Phil has a less than illustrious beginning to his military career. He was small, short-legged, and his ROTC captain called him "the most unfit, lousy-looking soldier" (2.6.16) he had ever seen. But he quickly proves everyone wrong when he lands the Super Man after it is riddled with 594 bullet holes, and even though the Green Hornet makes a devastating splash down, he survives, along with Louie and Mac.
On the raft, Phil is mostly incapacitated, having been injured in the crash. But he participates in Louie's quiz show antics to keep their minds active. Keeping mentally active probably keeps Phil alive. He experiences so much guilt, he almost feeds himself to sharks: "There were times when Phil seemed lost in trouble thoughts, and Louie guessed that he was reliving the crash, and perhaps holding himself responsible for the deaths of his men" (3.14.29). It's a heavy burden, to say the very least.
The Other Man
Phil's a deeply religious man, and he spends his time singing hymns over the ocean. Maybe Louie absorbs some of Phil's spirituality subconsciously. Phil also pines for his fiancée, Cecile "Cecy" Perry. For her part, Cecy has a fateful experience right out of movie: She goes to a fortune-teller when she learns of Phil's disappearance, where she's told that he will be found before Christmas—a prediction which turns out to be true. They're finally married when Phil returns home from the war.
When Louie and Phil finally wash ashore, they get captured by the Japanese and shuffled from POW camp to POW camp. We lose track of Phil when he isn't suffering the same indignities that Louie is at the hands of the Japanese.
Phil calls himself Allen once again after returning from the war, and seems content enough being "that guy who was with Louie during the war." There is an event in his honor shortly before he dies, finally granting him a deserved moment in the spotlight.
Russell Allen "Phil" Phillips Timeline & Summary
Character Analysis
Bird of Prey
Mutsuhiro Watanabe is a man of many names… and personalities. Known to his family as "Mu-cchan" (4.23.15), to everyone else as the Bird (and a lot of things we can't print here, we're sure), and even sometimes mistranslated as Matsuhiro, Watanabe is the worst of the worst when it comes to abusive prison guards. He makes the creepy guard from The Green Mile seem like a guy you'd love to bring home to dinner.
The Bird gets a few snippets of glowing praise from both Japanese guards and American POWs, like "He did enjoy hurting POWs. […] He was satisfying his sexual desire by hurting them" (4.23.29), and "He was absolutely the most sadistic man I ever met" (4.23.31). Okay, those are more like superlatives than praise, but this bird is more like a vicious hawk than a cute little blue jay, so it only makes sense. In fact, he earns his nickname—the Bird—because it carries "no negative connotation" (4.24.2). Everyone is that afraid of getting on his bad side.
Speaking of his bad side, the Bird is confusingly nice at times, which almost makes him worse. In the middle of beating Louie, he once stops and speaks to him kindly. Louie even thinks, "There was compassion in this man" (4.25.24)… before he gets cracked in the head with a belt buckle again. Forget the Bird's bad side—you don't want to get on any of his sides.
Louie is relieved when the Bird gets kicked out of the Omori prison camp, ordered to leave by Prince Yoshitomo Tokugawa. But Louie's relief is short-lived, and when he arrives at Naoetsu, he's greeted by the Bird. He just can't get away from this dude. (Talk about an albatross… be sure to check out the "Symbols" section for more on this)
Fed up with the abusive treatment, the POWs try to kill the Bird by spiking his food with contaminated stool. He's violently ill, but recovers within two weeks and "take[s] out his rage on the officers and Louie" (4.29.13). It's fun while it lasts (for everyone but the Bird). but his anger is worse than his diarrhea, and when he recovers he makes Louie clean a pig sty with his bare hands, hold a beam for over half an hour, get punched in the face over two hundred times, and threatens to drown him and kill him. He's um… back with a vengeance.
And in short, he's Louie's worst nightmare.
Bird on the Lam
Watanabe vanishes after the atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and hides around the Japanese countryside for seven years. He either manages to fake his death, or simply gets lucky that a man who looks just like him commits suicide by jumping off a mountain—he only emerges once the arrest order for war criminals is lifted. He manages to live a nice life after that, proving that real life, unlike fiction, is never fair.
When CBS news uncovers Watanabe's story, he agrees to be interviewed. He seems apologetic in one interview, saying that "war is a crime against humanity" (Epilogue.50), but he doesn't believe he is guilty of any wrongdoing, and in fact says that "beating and kicking were unavoidable" (Epilogue.70) in certain situations. Yikes.
To atone for whatever wrong he thinks he did, he offers to let any of the men he hurt come to Japan and hit him. Hmm, maybe his sexual tastes have changed in old age. No one takes him up on the offer, though, and when Louie tries to meet the Bird, the Bird refuses to meet him. He's flown the coop for good, and no one sees him again.
Mutsuhiro Watanabe a.k.a. the Bird Timeline & Summary
Character Analysis
All that Glitters
If Unbroken were a novel, Cynthia would be a character who came out of nowhere. She appears in the book's final part, and ends up being the love of Louie's life. He sees Cynthia at a bar shortly after returning home from the war. She has a "shimmer about her, an incandescence" (5.33.33), and when Louie sees her, he has the astounding thought that he has to marry her.
And he does.
It's not a happily ever after for either person, though. Cynthia is Louie's opposite, writing novels, painting, and yearning to see the world. Louie has already seen the world though, and while she's pretty well off, Louie is poor. Her parents don't want her to marry Louie, but the lovebirds do anyway on the sly.
Unfortunately, Cynthia doesn't understand Louie's drinking problem, which is getting worse every day do to the PTSD he suffers and his nightmares of the Bird. She's not quite sleeping with the enemy, like Julia Roberts, but "she was engaged to a stranger" (5.33.41). It's a major bummer.
Cynthia almost leaves Louie because he won't stop drinking, and she files for divorce after having a baby, little Cynthia, and coming home to find Louie shaking her. But it's thanks to Cynthia that Louie turns his life around. She convinces him to go see Billy Graham, the preacher, not once, but twice. If she hadn't done that, Louie might not have found the peace within himself, and the ability to forgive those who had wronged him during the war.
Francis "Mac" McNamara
Character Analysis
He's Come Undone
We lose a lot of crewman when the Green Hornet goes down, but watching Mac's slow decline into madness might be the most difficult death to watch.
Along with Louie and Phil, Mac survives the crash into the Pacific, but it's all downhill from there. First, he eats all the survival chocolate, eliminating days' worth of rations in a few seconds. Even though Louie understands that Mac did this in a moment of panic, he's still not happy about it.
In a life or death situation, it's important that everyone keep their cool, and Mac does not keep his cool. He starts screaming "We're going to die!" (3.12.17), and although Mac stands up (literally) at one point and whacks a shark with an oar—saving Louie—he soon returns to his near vegetative state. Eventually he dies, and Louie and Phil wrap him in part of the raft and drop him into the water. "Mac sank away. The sharks let him be" (3.16.31). And that's the end of Mac.
Crew of the Super Man
Character Analysis
Justice League
Other than their names and their positions, we don't get to learn too much about the personalities or private lives of the crewmen of the Super Man. Most likely, these omissions are to keep the story focused on Louie. Or maybe it's because it would just be too difficult to read about the fates of these men if we knew more about them.
Here's the roll call: Stanley Pillsbury, the top gunner; Clarence Douglas, waist gunner; Robert Mitchell, navigator; Frank Glassman, the radioman who looks like Harpo Marx; Ray Lambert, tail gunner; Harry Brooks, another waist gunner, and George Moznette, Jr., copilot, who is soon replaced by Charleton Hugh Cuppernell.
We get more characterization about the plane than we do the men. They name their plane Super Man, which is step-up from the common nickname "the Constipated Lumberer" (2.6.27) or worse, "The Flying Coffin" (2.6.32). These nicknames serve to make the survival of the plane, after getting shot at more than five hundred times, all the more miraculous. The fact that they don't all die is due to a near-magical combination of Phil's mad pilot skills and the hardy constitution of the plane.
The Zamperini Family
Character Analysis
Family Matters
Louie's family always supports him, from the time he's a trouble teenager, to when he's a track superstar, and, finally when he's a decorated war hero. His father, Anthony, was a coal miner, boxer, and construction worker, and his mom, Louise, is a housewife who had Louie when she was eighteen. They do not come from illustrious beginnings, and the Zamperinis lived in a one-room shack for a year—with no running water—that Louise defended with a rolling pin.
That's just one of the ways we're shown that Louise is crafty and scrappy, just like her son. She even gets into a fight with four kids who try to steal her pants and later bribes one of Louie's schoolmates to spy on him. In other words, this mom wouldn't seem out of place in your average network primetime sitcom.
Throughout Unbroken, we get glimpses of what the Zamperinis are up to while Louie is lost at sea and imprisoned. They too are unbroken, never losing faith that their son is still alive. Even though Louise develops a rash when she learns of Louie's disappearance, she never believes that her son is dead. Sylvia, Louie's sister, takes his disappearance hard too—she is often "wracked with anxiety" and "barely able to eat" (4.21.9), but she also believes in her brother's strength and ingenuity.
Louie loves his whole family, but he is perhaps closest to his brother, Pete. Pete is "everything [Louie] was not" (1.1.23) when the boys are younger, and it's Pete's strong influence that changes Louie's life. Pete convinces Louie to try his hand (well, his feet) at athletics, and he always believes in his brother, even trying to get him to break the four-minute mile.
If Louie didn't have such a strong family unit, we wouldn't have Unbroken. Laura Hillenbrand seems to have relied just as much on their memories and mementos (like Pete's giant Louie-related scrapbook) to weave together Louie's tale, so not only do they hold Louie up throughout his life, but they also help make this book possible.
Kunichi James "Jimmie" Sasaki
Character Analysis
International Man of Mystery
Jimmie Sasaki remains a mystery from the beginning of the book up until the end. When we meet him, he's a track fan attending college with Louie. He spends his time convincing people to send money to Japan to help the poor, but what he's really funding is Japan's war efforts against America with American money.
It turns out that he's a fake student, 21 Jump Street-style. He's almost forty and under FBI investigation. Ha.
When Jimmie resurfaces in Yokohama, he literally says to Louie, "We meet again" (4.19.16), officially making himself a character from a cheesy spy movie. Louie goes back and forth between believing that Sasaki is watching after him and believing that Sasaki doesn't give a flying maki roll about him. No one knows where this dude's loyalties lie, though at one point, "he began to sound like he was rooting for the Allies" (4.22.16). But really—no one's ever sure.
After the war, Jimmie is sentenced to six years in Sugamo Prison, where he tends his own vegetable garden. Whether he was an "artful spy" (5.35.15) or not remains unknown.
Other Men
Character Analysis
POWs
Louie meets a variety of men as he's carted from POW camp to the next. Some he inspires, and some inspire him to hold on and survive. One man who tells us a lot about the search for Louie is Joe Deasy. He piloted the Daisy Mae, a search plane, and even though he never found the crew of the Green Hornet, he was always on the look out for them.
In Ofuna, Louie meets William Harris, a marine with a photographic memory. Harris is beaten to a pulp by the Quack and never quite recovers his memory. Harris is eventually transferred to Omori, and although he's on death's doorstep when he arrives, he manages to recover. He stays in the Marines and disappears in the 1950s in Korea.
There's also one-legged Fred Garrett, who was once put in the cell where Louie carved his name. Later on they end up in the same hospital in Honolulu after the war ends, and they reunite at a restaurant two years after this. Fred has a prosthetic leg and freaks out over a plate of rice, a moment of post-traumatic stress from his years in the Japanese POW camps with only rice to eat.
Finally, there's Frank Tinker, a dive-bomber pilot and opera singer (4.20.36). Louie and Tinker plot to escape Ofuna, but their plan never comes to fruition.
Good Cop, Bad Cop
There are both good guards in the Japanese POW camps and bad ones. You can tell the bad ones by their nicknames—like the Quack, the Weasel, and, of course, Shithead. (That's Mr. Shithead to most of you.)
Also known as "The Butcher," the Quack is the most hated official in Ofuna. He tortures and mutilates captives (like William Harris, who we mentioned above) "while quizzing them on their pain" (4.19.35). When the men steal a map from the Quack, he beats Bill Harris until Bill is disfigured and cannot recognize his friends. After the war, the Quack is sentenced to hang.
Louie gives the Weasel a "coquettish" (4.22.7) eyebrow trim à la Marlene Dietrich, but somehow manages to escape retribution for the prank. And the guard known as Shithead violates Gaga the duck and kills him. These are not nice men, in case you couldn't guess.
Not all the Japanese Louie meets are bad, however. A guard known as Kawamura draws pictures of cars, planes, ice cream, and the like, writing the Japanese names for them to help the POWs learn to communicate. He even takes revenge on guards who hurt Louie. Hirose has captives fake screaming so it only seems like he beat them, and Kano once "snuck sick man from the sadistic Japanese doctor and into the hands of a POW who was a physician" (4.24.27). Yup—they're not all bad just because they're POW guards.
Even though Kano is relatively kind, he gets sentenced to jail for a time, being confused for Hiroaki Kono, a man described as a "roaring Hitlerian animal" (4.28.8). After Kano's release, he hesitates to contact his POW friends for fear of reminding them of terrible times.
These men prove that just because war causes people to do bad things, not all people succumb to the pressure to be evil. Perhaps it is only the ones who are already evil at heart.
Unbroken Questions
Young Louie Zamperini is the troublemaker of Torrance, California, stealing food, running like hell, and dreaming of hopping on a train and leaving town for good. His beloved older brother, Pete, manages to turn his life around, though, translating Louie's love of running from the law into a passion for track and field. Louie breaks high school records, goes to the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, and trains to beat the four-minute-mile.
His running career is put on hold when the Second World War breaks out. Louie enlists in the army air corps and becomes a bombardier. He and his crew, including pilot "Phil" Phillips, have a harrowing air battle in their plane, the Super Man. But Phil's pilot skills and Louie's ingenuity enables them to land the plane, even though it's riddled with over five hundred bullet holes.
With the Super Man succumbed to its kryptonite, the men are transferred to the Green Hornet—a less-reliable plane, the Hornet is shot down over the Pacific. Only three men survive: Louie, Phil, and Mac. Phil wrestles with his guilt about crashing, Mac kind of goes nuts, and Louie wrestles a shark from the ocean with his bare hands and eats its liver. (We are not making that up.) Unfortunately, Mac dies at sea.
Louie and Phil survive for forty-six days, but only to be captured by the Japanese and holed away in a terrible POW camp. The men are shuffled from camp to camp, each one almost worse than the last, until the war ends. Louie survives, despite being pursued by a sadistic guard nicknamed the Bird, punched over two hundred times, and forced to clean a pigsty with his bare hands.
Back home, Louie reunites with his family and marries his love-at-first-sight: Cynthia. They have a daughter and, well, a drinking problem. Louie is haunted by the horrors of war and turns to alcohol to forget. He is directionless, unable to run or find a new career; he dreams of going to Japan and killing the Bird. The newlyweds' life reaches a low point when Cynthia catches Louie shaking the baby. She files for divorce.
Cynthia changes her mind when Billy Graham (yes, the Billy Graham) comes to town. She manages to convince Louie to attend one of his tent preaching sessions. Louie remembers a bargain he made with God while on the raft, and the relative peace he felt that day at sea. Finding faith enables him to quit drinking and become a motivational speaker.
Years later, Louie forgives all the men who wronged him during the war. When it turns out that the Bird is still alive, Louie hopes to meet the man and forgive him in person—the Bird refuses, but Louie sends him a letter. In 1998, Louie carries the Olympic torch past Naoetsu, where he was once imprisoned, and he puts his dark past behind him.
How It All Goes Down
How It All Goes Down
The One-Boy Insurgency
How It All Goes Down
Run Like Mad
How It All Goes Down
The Torrance Tornado
How It All Goes Down
Plundering Germany
How It All Goes Down
Into War
How It All Goes Down
The Flying Coffin
How It All Goes Down
"This Is It, Boys"
How It All Goes Down
"Only the Laundry Knew How Scared I Was"
How It All Goes Down
Five Hundred and Ninety-Four Hole
How It All Goes Down
The Stinking Six
How It All Goes Down
"Nobody's Going to Live Through This"
How It All Goes Down
Downed
How It All Goes Down
Missing at Sea
How It All Goes Down
Thirst
How It All Goes Down
Sharks and Bullets
How It All Goes Down
Singing in the Clouds
How It All Goes Down
Typhoon
How It All Goes Down
A Dead Body Breathing
How It All Goes Down
Two Hundred Silent Men
How It All Goes Down
Farting for Hirohito
How It All Goes Down
Belief
How It All Goes Down
Plots Afoot
How It All Goes Down
Monster
How It All Goes Down
Hunted
How It All Goes Down
B-29
How It All Goes Down
Madness
How It All Goes Down
Falling Down
How It All Goes Down
Enslaved
How It All Goes Down
Two Hundred and Twenty Punches
How It All Goes Down
The Boiling City
How It All Goes Down
The Naked Stampede
How It All Goes Down
Cascades of Pink Peaches
How It All Goes Down
Mother's Day
How It All Goes Down
The Shimmering Girl
How It All Goes Down
Coming Undone
How It All Goes Down
The Body on the Mountain
How It All Goes Down
Twisted Ropes
How It All Goes Down
A Beckoning Whistle
How It All Goes Down
Daybreak
How It All Goes Down
Unbroken Theme of Perseverance
When Winston Churchill said "If you're going through hell, keep going," he might as well have been talking about Louie Zamperini, whose picture should come up every time someone Googles perseverance. If Laura Hillenbrand wrote "Louie went through hell," she would have been glossing over a lot, but she still would have been accurate.
In Unbroken, we see Louie survive crash landings, shark attacks, Japanese POW camps, and PTSD with a little luck and a heck of a lot of personal strength and tenacious determination.
Questions About Perseverance
You probably don't need Unbroken to tell you this, but crash landing in the Pacific is not fun. Fending off shark attacks? Nope, not fun either. And neither is being forced to clean up a pig sty with your bare hands in a Japanese POW camp, or chronic alcoholism. Louie Zamperini's life sees a whole lot of suffering over the course of a few very long years. However, the book is called Unbroken, not Broken--so though Louie suffers, he doesn't let it keep him down.
Questions About Suffering
One of the most misguided ad campaigns in recent history is the U.S. Army's creation of the slogan "Army of One." Because do you know what happens to an army of one? He dies.
The people who survive at war are the ones who work together, the teams that manage to communicate with each other almost telepathically and who are teammates on the battlefield and friends in the barracks. In Unbroken, Louie's friendships aren't just fun—they keep him alive.
Questions About Friendship
Take a look at the cover of Unbroken.
Oops. Wrong Unbroken. Take a look at this cover. "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption"—it's right there on the cover: World War II. So of course war is a theme.
Unbroken is less about the politics of war, however, and more about the horrors of war. Atrocities weren't just committed by the Japanese, and Louie often falls victim to mishaps caused by his very own country, the one he's sworn to protect. It feels like all is un-fair when it comes to war.
Questions About War
War is kind of a competition. Different teams fight each other for a variety of reasons, whether it's to claim resources, earn new territories, or resolve political differences. Louie is well equipped for war because of his innate competitive spirit (that's part of why the book is called Unbroken...a less equipped person's story would've required a different title). The same drive that pushes him across the finish line in his track days helps him stay in the race, so to speak, during the war. Like Buzz Lightyear, real competitors never give up, never surrender.
Questions About Competition
Even if it isn't Memorial Day (remembering men and women who died while serving) or Veterans Day (remembering all veterans), people almost always admire and respect war heroes. It's the least we can do for people who sacrifice so much for their country, and for causes they may or may not believe in.
In Unbroken, Louie spends a lot of his life searching for admiration, so all the accolades he receives after his miraculous survival must be rewarding indeed.
Questions About Admiration
Unbroken Theme of Language and Communication
War is pretty much a failure to communicate on a global scale. Men in power fail to make a peaceful compromise, and instead decide to sentence thousands of others to death to get they want. Miscommunication trickles down to the soldiers too. In Unbroken, English-speaking men are taken prisoner by Japanese-speaking soldiers, and their inability to talk to one another only builds tension that is already thick enough to cut with a butter knife.
It's difficult to have peace when the world doesn't speak a common language.
Questions About Language and Communication
On television, from The Brady Bunch to Modern Family we often see families that all live together (and don't even have a toilet) or live in the same town. But the powerful thing about families is how they stay strong even when separated—and in Unbroken, the Zamperinis show incredible strength. They're able to survive a couple of troublemaking teenage boys, distance, death, and even war. Just like Louie, his family remains unbroken.
Questions About Family
Character Analysis
Catch Him If You Can
Louie is the hero/protagonist of the story.
Louie Zamparini is the guy who almost breaks the four-minute mile, gets swept up by World War II, shot down in the Pacific, punches sharks in the face, survives numerous POW camps, lives, goes home, marries, and finds God. Through it all, he remains… say it with us… unbroken.
We spend a lot of time with Louie as a young boy, before the war starts. He's resourceful and fast-thinking, and he grew up in Torrance, California, just like Dirk Diggler. The childhood scenes—and the fact that most of Louie's childhood stories end with "and then I ran like mad" (1.1.17)—serve to show us how tenacious he is. The kid who never gives up grows into a man who can push through anything.
Even without the war stuff, Louie goes through quite the transformation in his boyhood. Like Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Louie goes from "his hometown's resident archvillain [to] superstar" (1.3.3), and like Robert Downey, Jr., he is sometimes called "Iron Man" (1.3.3). He's also called the "Torrance Tempest" and the "Torrance Tornado," and he's the "youngest distance runner to ever make the team" (1.3.33) in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, He even gets to meet Hitler, who calls him "the boy with the fast finish" (1.4.27).
(We realize getting a compliment from Hitler is like a memoirist getting a blurb from James Frey, but it's neat how Louie plays a Forrest Gump-like role in world history before the war.)
Fear of Flying
When Louie is young, "He wanted nothing to do with airplanes" (1.1.22)—which is a sure sign that he will have something to do with airplanes. Sure enough, despite being "jittery and dogged by airsickness" (1.5.23), Louie is made a bombardier. In other words, he's the guy who drops the bombs and gets to shout the classic phrase bombs away.
Louie is skilled at hitting his targets and playing pranks on his friends during down time, like when he clogs a crewmate's "piss pipe" (2.7.10) with a wad of chewing gum.
Remember the resourcefulness we talked about? Well, it doesn't just come in handy for pulling pranks. During one close landing in the Super Man, Louie manages to splice cables together, tie all the men down, tend to wounds, and ready a parachute, all as their plane is practically flying upside down. It's too bad that the Green Hornet isn't as resilient as Louie is.
Lost at Sea
Louie's perseverance and resourcefulness shine when the Green Hornet goes down. Adrift on a raft with Mac and Phil, the only other surviving crewmen, Louie manages to keep them all alive. He kills an albatross and makes it into bait; he fashions Wolverine-like claws out of fishhooks; and he doesn't resort to cannibalism, even if Mac does start looking like a McDonald's dinner.
Unfortunately though, he can't keep Mac alive, and Louie has a harrowing near-death experience of his own. By harrowing we mean kind of nice: "He saw human figures, silhouetted against the sky. He counted twenty-one of them" (3.16.45). They are singing, and Louie swears he's not hallucinating, even though Phil doesn't hear or see them. Louie will hear them again later in the first POW camp he is imprisoned in, and this vision plays a part in his acceptance of Christianity after returning from the war.
Radio Found the WWII Star
Other places perseverance and resourcefulness come in handy: high school, Survivor, Japanese POW camps. After forty-six days at sea, Louie and Phil are rescued. Well, we should really say captured, because the two men are shipped to a POW camp, the first of several they will be shuffled between over the next two years.
The conditions are pretty terrible (see our analysis of suffering in the "Themes" section for a taste), and to make matters worse, Louie is dogged by Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a sadistic corporal who makes the Marquis de Sade look like a fun-loving Ellen DeGeneres. The Bird does all he can to break Louie, but Louie remains—all together now--unbroken.
Louie's strong morals shine through, even at his lowest moments. When Louie is able to send his family a message on Radio Tokyo, it validates their hopes that he's still alive. But when the radio men try to strike a bargain with Louie by offering to feed him if he'll read messages they wrote, he refuses to be a propaganda tool.
Dead Man Limping
Louie survives two years of being in various POW camps, even though everyone else thinks he's dead. He's even told "Zamperini's dead" (4.33.11) at a clinic and has to prove his identity with the contents of his wallet. He quickly returns to what he knows best: being a WWII-era Ashton Kutcher and punking a track and field recruiter who thought he was dead.
Although Louie is thrilled to be alive and home, he has no direction in life. He injures his ankle and knee doing manual labor for the Bird, and thinks, "I'll never run again" (4.33.23), so after the war, Louie's lost and… well, we almost said broken, but from the title we know that he's not broken. But he's close. Cracked. Almost shattered. Think of some more synonyms for us, guys.
The term PTSD didn't exist in the 1940s, but that's what Louie is going through. He sees the Bird "lurking in his dreams" (5.34.16) and plots ways to exact his revenge against him. Ironically, this obsession merely keeps Louie feeling like a victim of torment: "The paradox of human vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer" (5.37.16). In other words, hatred hurts the person who holds it in their heart.
Eventually, Louie gets married, has a child, finds God through Billy Graham, and realizes "I am a good man" (5.38.25). He has been drinking heavily for years at this point, but he dumps it all out on the evening he prays in Billy Graham's tent. Later Louie returns to Japan and forgives the men who abused him, even the Bird, with "a radiant smile on his face" (5.39.18). Yup—this dude is definitely unbroken.
Louis "Louie" Silvie Zamperini Timeline & Summary
- As a young boy, Louie causes a lot of trouble around town until his brother convinces him to join the track team as a teenager.
- Louie ends up being a track superstar. He breaks records, and almost breaks the four-minute mile.
- In 1936, Louie attends the Olympic Games in Berlin.
- While training for the next Olympics, WWII breaks out, and Louie enlists in the army air corp.
- His first plane, the Super Man, is shot down, but Louie and his crew (except one) survive.
- They're transferred to a clunkier plane, the Green Hornet, which gets shot down over the Pacific.
- Only Louie, Phil, and Mac survive.
- Louie manages to keep the men alive by catching rain water and fish to feed them.
- Unfortunately Mac dies, but Louie and Phil live at sea for forty-six days.
- They find an island… that is occupied by Japanese. They're captured and put into a POW camp.
- Louie is shipped from camp to camp, many times being tortured by a sadistic Japanese guard nicknamed the Bird.
- When the war ends, Louie gets to return home.
- He meets and marries Cynthia, but grapples with alcoholism and PTSD.
- Eventually Louie finds faith at a Billy Graham gathering, and forgives everyone who hurt him during the war.
- Years later, he almost gets the opportunity to forgive the Bird (who'd faked his own death), but the Bird ends up declining to meet Louie.
- Louie carries the Olympic torch past Naoetsu, where he was once imprisoned, giving him great closure.
Russell Allen "Phil" Phillips
Character Analysis
Pilot to Bombardier… Pilot to Bombardier
Phil is like the Ginger Rogers to Louie's Fred Astaire. He has to go through everything Louie does (being shot at, lost at sea for forty-six days, imprisoned in Japanese POW camps) but backwards and in heels.Okay, no heels, but he is the pilot of both the Super Man and the Green Hornet, and he feels a lot of guilt for being at the wheel (or whatever a plane has) when the Green Hornet goes down into the Pacific.
Phil has a less than illustrious beginning to his military career. He was small, short-legged, and his ROTC captain called him "the most unfit, lousy-looking soldier" (2.6.16) he had ever seen. But he quickly proves everyone wrong when he lands the Super Man after it is riddled with 594 bullet holes, and even though the Green Hornet makes a devastating splash down, he survives, along with Louie and Mac.
On the raft, Phil is mostly incapacitated, having been injured in the crash. But he participates in Louie's quiz show antics to keep their minds active. Keeping mentally active probably keeps Phil alive. He experiences so much guilt, he almost feeds himself to sharks: "There were times when Phil seemed lost in trouble thoughts, and Louie guessed that he was reliving the crash, and perhaps holding himself responsible for the deaths of his men" (3.14.29). It's a heavy burden, to say the very least.
The Other Man
Phil's a deeply religious man, and he spends his time singing hymns over the ocean. Maybe Louie absorbs some of Phil's spirituality subconsciously. Phil also pines for his fiancée, Cecile "Cecy" Perry. For her part, Cecy has a fateful experience right out of movie: She goes to a fortune-teller when she learns of Phil's disappearance, where she's told that he will be found before Christmas—a prediction which turns out to be true. They're finally married when Phil returns home from the war.
When Louie and Phil finally wash ashore, they get captured by the Japanese and shuffled from POW camp to POW camp. We lose track of Phil when he isn't suffering the same indignities that Louie is at the hands of the Japanese.
Phil calls himself Allen once again after returning from the war, and seems content enough being "that guy who was with Louie during the war." There is an event in his honor shortly before he dies, finally granting him a deserved moment in the spotlight.
Russell Allen "Phil" Phillips Timeline & Summary
- Phil meets Louie and they become pilot and bombardier, respectively, of the Super Man, a B-24 bomber.
- Phil's crazy-good pilot skills enable him to land the Super Man after an air fight leaves the plane in critical condition.
- The crew is transferred to the Green Hornet, which is a disaster of a plane.
- Speaking of disaster, the Hornet is shot and crashes into the Pacific.
- Phil survives, along with Louie and Mac.
- Although Mac dies, Phil and Louie make it for forty-six days, at which point they are captured by the Japanese.
- After being transferred to a different POW camp, they are transferred again, and this time they are separated.
- They don't see other again until after the war.
- When Phil arrives home, he finally gets to marry Cecy, the love of his life, and they live happily ever after. (Seriously, they really do.)
Character Analysis
Bird of Prey
Mutsuhiro Watanabe is a man of many names… and personalities. Known to his family as "Mu-cchan" (4.23.15), to everyone else as the Bird (and a lot of things we can't print here, we're sure), and even sometimes mistranslated as Matsuhiro, Watanabe is the worst of the worst when it comes to abusive prison guards. He makes the creepy guard from The Green Mile seem like a guy you'd love to bring home to dinner.
The Bird gets a few snippets of glowing praise from both Japanese guards and American POWs, like "He did enjoy hurting POWs. […] He was satisfying his sexual desire by hurting them" (4.23.29), and "He was absolutely the most sadistic man I ever met" (4.23.31). Okay, those are more like superlatives than praise, but this bird is more like a vicious hawk than a cute little blue jay, so it only makes sense. In fact, he earns his nickname—the Bird—because it carries "no negative connotation" (4.24.2). Everyone is that afraid of getting on his bad side.
Speaking of his bad side, the Bird is confusingly nice at times, which almost makes him worse. In the middle of beating Louie, he once stops and speaks to him kindly. Louie even thinks, "There was compassion in this man" (4.25.24)… before he gets cracked in the head with a belt buckle again. Forget the Bird's bad side—you don't want to get on any of his sides.
Louie is relieved when the Bird gets kicked out of the Omori prison camp, ordered to leave by Prince Yoshitomo Tokugawa. But Louie's relief is short-lived, and when he arrives at Naoetsu, he's greeted by the Bird. He just can't get away from this dude. (Talk about an albatross… be sure to check out the "Symbols" section for more on this)
Fed up with the abusive treatment, the POWs try to kill the Bird by spiking his food with contaminated stool. He's violently ill, but recovers within two weeks and "take[s] out his rage on the officers and Louie" (4.29.13). It's fun while it lasts (for everyone but the Bird). but his anger is worse than his diarrhea, and when he recovers he makes Louie clean a pig sty with his bare hands, hold a beam for over half an hour, get punched in the face over two hundred times, and threatens to drown him and kill him. He's um… back with a vengeance.
And in short, he's Louie's worst nightmare.
Bird on the Lam
Watanabe vanishes after the atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and hides around the Japanese countryside for seven years. He either manages to fake his death, or simply gets lucky that a man who looks just like him commits suicide by jumping off a mountain—he only emerges once the arrest order for war criminals is lifted. He manages to live a nice life after that, proving that real life, unlike fiction, is never fair.
When CBS news uncovers Watanabe's story, he agrees to be interviewed. He seems apologetic in one interview, saying that "war is a crime against humanity" (Epilogue.50), but he doesn't believe he is guilty of any wrongdoing, and in fact says that "beating and kicking were unavoidable" (Epilogue.70) in certain situations. Yikes.
To atone for whatever wrong he thinks he did, he offers to let any of the men he hurt come to Japan and hit him. Hmm, maybe his sexual tastes have changed in old age. No one takes him up on the offer, though, and when Louie tries to meet the Bird, the Bird refuses to meet him. He's flown the coop for good, and no one sees him again.
Mutsuhiro Watanabe a.k.a. the Bird Timeline & Summary
- Watanabe obsesses over Louie the moment he sees him at the Omori POW camp.
- He beats Louie with a belt buckle and is generally abusive toward everyone, except when he has his weird mood swings and suddenly turns nice.
- When a POW manages to report the Bird's actions to a Japanese dignitary, he is ordered to leave Omori.
- However, he gets transferred to Naoetsu, and Louie soon follows.
- The Bird turns his torture up to eleven, beating Louie, ordering him to clean a pigsty with his hands, and forcing him to do unsafe manual labor jobs.
- The men try to kill the Bird by contaminating his food with bacteria, but he survives.
- When the war ends, the Bird goes into hiding.
- He even manages to fake his own death (although maybe not intentionally) and stays hidden until the arrest order for war criminals is lifted.
- A free man, he manages to make a nice life for himself.
- Years later, he's discovered by a reporter for 60 Minutes and he gives an interview.
- Louie tries to find the Bird so that he can talk to him in person and forgive him, but the Bird refuses.
- He dies in 2003.
Character Analysis
All that Glitters
If Unbroken were a novel, Cynthia would be a character who came out of nowhere. She appears in the book's final part, and ends up being the love of Louie's life. He sees Cynthia at a bar shortly after returning home from the war. She has a "shimmer about her, an incandescence" (5.33.33), and when Louie sees her, he has the astounding thought that he has to marry her.
And he does.
It's not a happily ever after for either person, though. Cynthia is Louie's opposite, writing novels, painting, and yearning to see the world. Louie has already seen the world though, and while she's pretty well off, Louie is poor. Her parents don't want her to marry Louie, but the lovebirds do anyway on the sly.
Unfortunately, Cynthia doesn't understand Louie's drinking problem, which is getting worse every day do to the PTSD he suffers and his nightmares of the Bird. She's not quite sleeping with the enemy, like Julia Roberts, but "she was engaged to a stranger" (5.33.41). It's a major bummer.
Cynthia almost leaves Louie because he won't stop drinking, and she files for divorce after having a baby, little Cynthia, and coming home to find Louie shaking her. But it's thanks to Cynthia that Louie turns his life around. She convinces him to go see Billy Graham, the preacher, not once, but twice. If she hadn't done that, Louie might not have found the peace within himself, and the ability to forgive those who had wronged him during the war.
Francis "Mac" McNamara
Character Analysis
He's Come Undone
We lose a lot of crewman when the Green Hornet goes down, but watching Mac's slow decline into madness might be the most difficult death to watch.
Along with Louie and Phil, Mac survives the crash into the Pacific, but it's all downhill from there. First, he eats all the survival chocolate, eliminating days' worth of rations in a few seconds. Even though Louie understands that Mac did this in a moment of panic, he's still not happy about it.
In a life or death situation, it's important that everyone keep their cool, and Mac does not keep his cool. He starts screaming "We're going to die!" (3.12.17), and although Mac stands up (literally) at one point and whacks a shark with an oar—saving Louie—he soon returns to his near vegetative state. Eventually he dies, and Louie and Phil wrap him in part of the raft and drop him into the water. "Mac sank away. The sharks let him be" (3.16.31). And that's the end of Mac.
Crew of the Super Man
Character Analysis
Justice League
Other than their names and their positions, we don't get to learn too much about the personalities or private lives of the crewmen of the Super Man. Most likely, these omissions are to keep the story focused on Louie. Or maybe it's because it would just be too difficult to read about the fates of these men if we knew more about them.
Here's the roll call: Stanley Pillsbury, the top gunner; Clarence Douglas, waist gunner; Robert Mitchell, navigator; Frank Glassman, the radioman who looks like Harpo Marx; Ray Lambert, tail gunner; Harry Brooks, another waist gunner, and George Moznette, Jr., copilot, who is soon replaced by Charleton Hugh Cuppernell.
We get more characterization about the plane than we do the men. They name their plane Super Man, which is step-up from the common nickname "the Constipated Lumberer" (2.6.27) or worse, "The Flying Coffin" (2.6.32). These nicknames serve to make the survival of the plane, after getting shot at more than five hundred times, all the more miraculous. The fact that they don't all die is due to a near-magical combination of Phil's mad pilot skills and the hardy constitution of the plane.
The Zamperini Family
Character Analysis
Family Matters
Louie's family always supports him, from the time he's a trouble teenager, to when he's a track superstar, and, finally when he's a decorated war hero. His father, Anthony, was a coal miner, boxer, and construction worker, and his mom, Louise, is a housewife who had Louie when she was eighteen. They do not come from illustrious beginnings, and the Zamperinis lived in a one-room shack for a year—with no running water—that Louise defended with a rolling pin.
That's just one of the ways we're shown that Louise is crafty and scrappy, just like her son. She even gets into a fight with four kids who try to steal her pants and later bribes one of Louie's schoolmates to spy on him. In other words, this mom wouldn't seem out of place in your average network primetime sitcom.
Throughout Unbroken, we get glimpses of what the Zamperinis are up to while Louie is lost at sea and imprisoned. They too are unbroken, never losing faith that their son is still alive. Even though Louise develops a rash when she learns of Louie's disappearance, she never believes that her son is dead. Sylvia, Louie's sister, takes his disappearance hard too—she is often "wracked with anxiety" and "barely able to eat" (4.21.9), but she also believes in her brother's strength and ingenuity.
Louie loves his whole family, but he is perhaps closest to his brother, Pete. Pete is "everything [Louie] was not" (1.1.23) when the boys are younger, and it's Pete's strong influence that changes Louie's life. Pete convinces Louie to try his hand (well, his feet) at athletics, and he always believes in his brother, even trying to get him to break the four-minute mile.
If Louie didn't have such a strong family unit, we wouldn't have Unbroken. Laura Hillenbrand seems to have relied just as much on their memories and mementos (like Pete's giant Louie-related scrapbook) to weave together Louie's tale, so not only do they hold Louie up throughout his life, but they also help make this book possible.
Kunichi James "Jimmie" Sasaki
Character Analysis
International Man of Mystery
Jimmie Sasaki remains a mystery from the beginning of the book up until the end. When we meet him, he's a track fan attending college with Louie. He spends his time convincing people to send money to Japan to help the poor, but what he's really funding is Japan's war efforts against America with American money.
It turns out that he's a fake student, 21 Jump Street-style. He's almost forty and under FBI investigation. Ha.
When Jimmie resurfaces in Yokohama, he literally says to Louie, "We meet again" (4.19.16), officially making himself a character from a cheesy spy movie. Louie goes back and forth between believing that Sasaki is watching after him and believing that Sasaki doesn't give a flying maki roll about him. No one knows where this dude's loyalties lie, though at one point, "he began to sound like he was rooting for the Allies" (4.22.16). But really—no one's ever sure.
After the war, Jimmie is sentenced to six years in Sugamo Prison, where he tends his own vegetable garden. Whether he was an "artful spy" (5.35.15) or not remains unknown.
Other Men
Character Analysis
POWs
Louie meets a variety of men as he's carted from POW camp to the next. Some he inspires, and some inspire him to hold on and survive. One man who tells us a lot about the search for Louie is Joe Deasy. He piloted the Daisy Mae, a search plane, and even though he never found the crew of the Green Hornet, he was always on the look out for them.
In Ofuna, Louie meets William Harris, a marine with a photographic memory. Harris is beaten to a pulp by the Quack and never quite recovers his memory. Harris is eventually transferred to Omori, and although he's on death's doorstep when he arrives, he manages to recover. He stays in the Marines and disappears in the 1950s in Korea.
There's also one-legged Fred Garrett, who was once put in the cell where Louie carved his name. Later on they end up in the same hospital in Honolulu after the war ends, and they reunite at a restaurant two years after this. Fred has a prosthetic leg and freaks out over a plate of rice, a moment of post-traumatic stress from his years in the Japanese POW camps with only rice to eat.
Finally, there's Frank Tinker, a dive-bomber pilot and opera singer (4.20.36). Louie and Tinker plot to escape Ofuna, but their plan never comes to fruition.
Good Cop, Bad Cop
There are both good guards in the Japanese POW camps and bad ones. You can tell the bad ones by their nicknames—like the Quack, the Weasel, and, of course, Shithead. (That's Mr. Shithead to most of you.)
Also known as "The Butcher," the Quack is the most hated official in Ofuna. He tortures and mutilates captives (like William Harris, who we mentioned above) "while quizzing them on their pain" (4.19.35). When the men steal a map from the Quack, he beats Bill Harris until Bill is disfigured and cannot recognize his friends. After the war, the Quack is sentenced to hang.
Louie gives the Weasel a "coquettish" (4.22.7) eyebrow trim à la Marlene Dietrich, but somehow manages to escape retribution for the prank. And the guard known as Shithead violates Gaga the duck and kills him. These are not nice men, in case you couldn't guess.
Not all the Japanese Louie meets are bad, however. A guard known as Kawamura draws pictures of cars, planes, ice cream, and the like, writing the Japanese names for them to help the POWs learn to communicate. He even takes revenge on guards who hurt Louie. Hirose has captives fake screaming so it only seems like he beat them, and Kano once "snuck sick man from the sadistic Japanese doctor and into the hands of a POW who was a physician" (4.24.27). Yup—they're not all bad just because they're POW guards.
Even though Kano is relatively kind, he gets sentenced to jail for a time, being confused for Hiroaki Kono, a man described as a "roaring Hitlerian animal" (4.28.8). After Kano's release, he hesitates to contact his POW friends for fear of reminding them of terrible times.
These men prove that just because war causes people to do bad things, not all people succumb to the pressure to be evil. Perhaps it is only the ones who are already evil at heart.
Unbroken Questions
- What does Unbroken teach about World War II that you didn't already know?
- Are there any parts of Louie's story that you find too incredible to believe?
- Is there any event, or any person, that you want to know more details about? (Where's our sequel about Phil?)
- Would you have believed Louie's story if it were fiction?
- What motivates Louie the most as a teenager? Is he driven by the same goals and desires while in the war?
- How does the war change Louie? In what way is he the same?
- Why is the book divided into five parts, plus an epilogue? How does each part encapsulate a new leg of Louie's journey?
- Have you read (or seen the movie adaptation of) Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand's first book? How does Louie's story mirror that of this champion racehorse? (Hey, we'd be honored to be compared to anyone that famous, even if he is a horse.)
Young Louie Zamperini is the troublemaker of Torrance, California, stealing food, running like hell, and dreaming of hopping on a train and leaving town for good. His beloved older brother, Pete, manages to turn his life around, though, translating Louie's love of running from the law into a passion for track and field. Louie breaks high school records, goes to the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, and trains to beat the four-minute-mile.
His running career is put on hold when the Second World War breaks out. Louie enlists in the army air corps and becomes a bombardier. He and his crew, including pilot "Phil" Phillips, have a harrowing air battle in their plane, the Super Man. But Phil's pilot skills and Louie's ingenuity enables them to land the plane, even though it's riddled with over five hundred bullet holes.
With the Super Man succumbed to its kryptonite, the men are transferred to the Green Hornet—a less-reliable plane, the Hornet is shot down over the Pacific. Only three men survive: Louie, Phil, and Mac. Phil wrestles with his guilt about crashing, Mac kind of goes nuts, and Louie wrestles a shark from the ocean with his bare hands and eats its liver. (We are not making that up.) Unfortunately, Mac dies at sea.
Louie and Phil survive for forty-six days, but only to be captured by the Japanese and holed away in a terrible POW camp. The men are shuffled from camp to camp, each one almost worse than the last, until the war ends. Louie survives, despite being pursued by a sadistic guard nicknamed the Bird, punched over two hundred times, and forced to clean a pigsty with his bare hands.
Back home, Louie reunites with his family and marries his love-at-first-sight: Cynthia. They have a daughter and, well, a drinking problem. Louie is haunted by the horrors of war and turns to alcohol to forget. He is directionless, unable to run or find a new career; he dreams of going to Japan and killing the Bird. The newlyweds' life reaches a low point when Cynthia catches Louie shaking the baby. She files for divorce.
Cynthia changes her mind when Billy Graham (yes, the Billy Graham) comes to town. She manages to convince Louie to attend one of his tent preaching sessions. Louie remembers a bargain he made with God while on the raft, and the relative peace he felt that day at sea. Finding faith enables him to quit drinking and become a motivational speaker.
Years later, Louie forgives all the men who wronged him during the war. When it turns out that the Bird is still alive, Louie hopes to meet the man and forgive him in person—the Bird refuses, but Louie sends him a letter. In 1998, Louie carries the Olympic torch past Naoetsu, where he was once imprisoned, and he puts his dark past behind him.
How It All Goes Down
- It's June 1943, and Louie Zamperini and two other crewmen are on a raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
- It must be Shark Week because they are surrounded by toothy beasts from the deep.
- A plane flies overhead, so Zamperini fires off a flare and shakes some orange dye (a packet of Tang?) into the ocean.
- Unfortunately, the plane is not there to rescue them—it's a Japanese plane, and it opens fire.
- They have to hide under the raft, deciding to take their chances with sharks instead of bullets.
How It All Goes Down
The One-Boy Insurgency
- On August 26, 1929, a twelve-year-old Louis Zamperini looksoutside to see a massive object blocking out the sky.
- No, it's not the Death Star—it's the Graf Zepplin, a German dirigible.
- Louie is impressed with it, as any young boy would be at the time (i.e. a time before iPads).
- This kid is quite the troublemaker in his spare time, and he steals food, able to run like a bat outta heck to get away from his pursuers.
- However, even though he was in awe of that dirigible, planes scare him—he sees one land and wants "nothing to do with airplanes" (1.1.21). (Shmoopers, this is what we call irony and foreshadowing.)
- Louie has a handsome older brother, Pete, whom he idolizes. Pete pulls the same stunts Louie does; Pete just doesn't get caught.
- Because Louie is always getting into so much trouble, his parents are frustrated and worried that his lack of ambition will affect him in high school.
- Louie worries about this too. He reads western novels and dreams of running away from home.
How It All Goes Down
Run Like Mad
- Louie learns that any key has a "one-in-fifty chance"(1.2.1) of fitting in any lock.
- He almost gets suspended from school when he helps a bunch of students sneak into the gym free of charge for a basketball game.
- Pete convinces Louie to join track. Louie hates running, but he's good at it, and he likes when people clap for him. (He lives for the applause, applause, applause.)
- At one point, however, Louie actually does try to run away from home, but he gets kicked off a train and has to walk home over the course of two days.
- After that epic fail, Louie devotes his time to running the mile and starts breaking records.
How It All Goes Down
The Torrance Tornado
- Charlie Sheen best sums up Louie's track career: winning.
- He runs a mile in 4:21.3, which breaks high school records, and starts training for the Olympics.
- Unfortunately, even with his obsessive training, Louie worries that he won't make it: "He was heartbroken" (1.3.7).
- However, after running in the Compton open—and almost winning—he gets invited to the Olympic trials.
- With a suitcase labeled "TORRANCE TORNADO" (1.3.12), Louie sets off to New York with fellow runner Norman Bright.
- They have to train despite the record-breaking heat in the Big Apple.
- In order to stay cool, Louie buys tickets to movies and sleeps through the shows. ("What I'd give for a twelve-hour Twilight marathon.")
- Louie manages a photo finish at the trial, and although the radio announces that Louie wins, they're mistaken.
- Still, he made the team. Hooray! He's "The youngest distance runner" (1.3.33) to ever do so.
How It All Goes Down
Plundering Germany
- Louie boards the luxury steamer Manhattan to Germany, which is the closest thing you could get to a Disney cruise in 1936.
- On the ship, Louie eats so much that he gains twelve pounds.
- At the Olympic Village, Louie rooms with famous athlete Jesse Owens and gets to mingle with other athletes and Hitler Youth.
- Yes, we said Hitler Youth.
- Hitler is really excited about Germans rocking the Olympics, and German nationalism is at all-time high.
- They're not the only competitive ones though, and Louie has to deal with people dashing in front of him and throwing elbows during his runs.
- Despite the fisticuffs (which cause him to come in seventh place), he breaks a final-lap record in the Olympic 5,000, running his last lap in 56 seconds, a feat which entitles Louie to a brief visit with Der Fuhrer.
- After the Olympics are over, the Olympic Village is transformed into military barracks (and its designer, Wolfgang Fürstner, hangs himself).
- Back home, Louie sets his sights on the 1940 Games in Tokyo.
How It All Goes Down
Into War
- At the University of Southern California, Louie makes some friends: Payton Jordanand Jimmie Sasaki.
- We're told that Jimmie is some sort of Japanese spy or something: His "attempts to pass as a student were apparently an elaborate ruse" (1.5.5). Like 21 Jump Street, we guess.
- Louie sets an NCAA record by running the mile in 4:08.3, and he even does it with bleeding shins and an impaled toe caused by a fellow runner kicking him with his cleats. These guys play nasty.
- Unfortunately, the Olympics get canceled because of a little thing called World War II.
- In 1941, Louie joins the Army Air Corps, but drops out because of airsickness.
- He ends up working as an extra in the film They Died with Their Boots On and is drafted.
- Unfortunately, Louie hadn't read his papers when he resigned from the air corps: he'd agreed to rejoin them. So now Louie's gonna be a bombardier.
- After Pearl Harbor is bombed, America is at war.
How It All Goes Down
The Flying Coffin
- Louie finds one perk to being a flyboy: "women found the flyboy uniform irresistible" (2.6.8).
- As a bombardier, it's Louie's job to spot targets, program the bombsight that takes over flying the plane toward the target, and yell "Bombs away" when the bombs are, in fact, away. Then the pilot takes over control of the plane again.
- Louie graduates from training in August 1942. He takes one last photograph with his family and gets on the train to leave, wondering if he'll ever see them again.
- At the air base in Ephrata, Washington, Louie meets his pilot, Russell Allen Phillips.
- Phillips is cool, calm, and collected (good qualities for a pilot) and engaged to a girl in Terre Haute, Indiana named Cecy.
- Other men of note on the bomber crew: Stanley Pillsbury (the gunner), Clarence Douglas (the engineer), Robert Mitchell (navigator), Frank Glassman (radioman), Ray Lambert (tail gunner), George Moznette, Jr. (copilot), and Harry Brooks (girl magnet).
- The men are set to fly a B-24 Liberator, a plan nicknamed "'the Flying Brick,' 'the Flying Boxcar,' and 'the Constipated Lumberer'" (2.6.27)—and, unlike a B-52, it doesn't know any of the words to "Love Shack."
- It seems like the men are more in danger of being killed by their flying deathtrap of a plane than by the Japanese.
- The men are taught how to survive a water landing.
- Louie and his crew must be super lucky, because "their plane never failed them" (2.6.41)—it's ugly and quirky, but "a noble thing" (2.6.41), just like Benicio del Toro.
- They name their plane Super Man, and draw a cartoon of Superman on the plane that is so bad, it makes the Brandon Routh Superman movie look good.
- Before their first flight, Louie starts keeping a war diary and he sends his mother a pair of airman's wings, which she pins to her dress every day.
- On November 2, 1942, Louie, Phil, and the crew of the Super Man are ready for war.
How It All Goes Down
"This Is It, Boys"
- The crew is stationed in Kahuku, Hawaii, and Louie and Phil spend their days drinking, wrestling, and decorating their barracks with nudepinups, calling it the "pornographic palace" (2.7.3).
- Moznette, the copilot, is transferred and replaced by Charleton Hugh Cuppernell, a "jovial ex-football player" (2.7.4).
- Everyone is pretty much a badass at training. Their accuracy rate is three times the squadron average.
- When they're not kicking butt, they're playing pranks on each other, like clogging up the "piss pipe" (2.7.10) with chewing gum or attacking one another with fire extinguishers.
- Three days before Christmas, they get their first dive bombing mission. They're headed for Midway, and from there ordered to bomb a Japanese base on Wake Atoll that night. It would take sixteen hours, "the longest combat flight the war had yet seen" (2.7.18).
- In honor of his friend Payton Jordan, who just wed, Louie writes "Maggie and Payton Jordan" on a bomb, because what is a better wedding gift than the explosive death of hundreds of people?
- They bomb Wake, not knowing that there are ninety-eight American POWs on the base.
- The mission is a success and, surprisingly, all the American captives survive.
- Louie and his crew feel pretty cocky, thinking that the war will be over soon.
How It All Goes Down
"Only the Laundry Knew How Scared I Was"
- On January 8, 1943, George Moznette, the Super Man's former copilot, dies in a plane crash.
- It's only been two months, and Louie already knows men who have died.
- Seventy percent of men killed between November 1, 1942 and May 25, 1945 die in "operational aircraft accidents" (2.8.9)—in other words, these planes crash more than an Xbox 360.
- If just flying the plane isn't dangerous enough, there are the Japanese fighter planes, "the swift, agile Zero" (2.8.19) to contend with.
- Evasive action is impossible when the bombsight is controlling the plane, making a bomber a very dangerous place to be.
- Also, bombers collide with each other a lot.
- When a plane goes down, the men have to hope that their air vests, called "Mae Wests" after the busty movie star, inflate.
- Then they have to hope they're found. Locating a plane in the 1940s is harder than locating a missing Malaysian Air jet today—only thirteen percent of men are rescued, and search planes go down more often than they find the men they're searching for.
- If they're captured, they have to worry about being taken to the atoll of Kwajalein, which Americans call "Execution Island."
- Although there are tons of statistics, the men aren't statistics to Louie (remember him? We've barely heard about him this chapter)—they're roommates and drinking buddies.
- Speaking of drinking, Louie drinks a lot, unwinds by listening to music, and just hopes he won't die.
How It All Goes Down
Five Hundred and Ninety-Four Hole
- Another past time amongst the airmen: throwing grenades into sharks' mouths and watching them blow up. (No wonder those sharks are circling Louie in the prologue. Want revenge much?)
- Japan seizes the island of Nauru in August 1942, and the Super Man is ordered to bomb the phosphate works on the island.
- They get into an intense air battle. Their left wing is hit, but Louie stays focused and hits his targets.
- When Phil takes control, they're surrounded by nine Zeros. (You do the math: 9 x 0 = DEATH.)
- Super Man escapes the fray, but it's wounded, "trying to fly up and over onto its back" (2.9.25) like a dying goldfish circling its bowl.
- Their plane is perforated by bullets as the gunners do their best to defend the craft.
- Men are hit by shrapnel and gunfire and lie bleeding all over the plane.
- Harry Brooks is covered with blood and the wall behind him is splattered with purple fluid.
- No, his peanut butter and jelly sandwich isn't mortally wounded—it's hydraulic fluid. The plane has no brakes.
- Louie and Cuppernell tend to everyone's wounds as fast as they can.
- As Louie is bandaging Stanley Pillsbury's foot, Pillsbury manages to blast a Zero out of the sky.
- Despite being in critical condition, the Super Man survives the battle. Not one Zero makes it back to Nauru.
- Now it's time for Phil to land the plane. Funafuti is five hours away, and Super Man has no brakes. Um… this situation never came up in any of our flight simulators.
- Louie ties a parachute cord to each man to serve like a seatbelt, keeping them from being ejected from the plane.
- Phil touches down at 110 miles per hour. The left tire is flat, and the plan spins around in a crazy circle… but it stops.
- There are 594 holes in the plane.
- Unfortunately, Harry was bleeding inside his skull and died.
How It All Goes Down
The Stinking Six
- Even though Phil managed to land it safely, Super Man will never fly again.
- To make matters worse, while Louie and the crew of Super Man are recovering from their injuries, bombs fall on Funafuti.
- Poor Stanley Pillsbury is forgotten in the infirmary and is too weak to stand on his own.
- Phil and Louie hide under a hut that is up on flood stilts.
- Two bombs strike the B-24s, which causes a chain reaction of machine gun fire and bomb explosions.
- Someone managed to drag Pillsbury to safety, but his injured foot isn't healing, and he needs a rudimentary skin graft.
- Somehow the Super Man also escaped unscathed (not a single bullet hole added to its 594) and Phil is hailed "as a miracle worker" (2.10.25) just like Anne Bancroft.
- Pillsbury and Lambert are retired from war, and Louie, Phil, Mitchell, and Cuppernell are sent back to Hawaii.
- At the base, Louie watches They Died with Their Boots On, the movie he was an extra in, and he holes up in his room listening to music. How emo. He must be listening to whatever the 1940s version of Bright Eyes is.
- Louie takes a short ride on the Green Hornet, a plane which he dubs "the craziest plane" and "hope[s] he'd never have to fly in it again" (2.10.32)… Which is pretty much a guarantee that he will.
How It All Goes Down
"Nobody's Going to Live Through This"
- As we predicted, Louie and his crew are put on the Green Hornet and sent on a search mission.
- Before he leaves, Louie leaves a note on his locker: "If we're not back in a week […] help yourself to the booze" (2.11.5), and he gives a letter for his best friend, Payton Jordan, to a crewman to mail.
- The Green Hornet sets out with the Daisy Mae, but is such a crappy plane it can't keep up.
- Just like the Seth Rogen movie of the same name, the Green Hornet bomber fails fast.
- The engines are burning fuel unequally and quickly fail.
- They try to save the plane by "feathering" the engines, but that tactic doesn't work—the men prepare to crash.
- When the plane hits the water, Louie is sucked under.
- He gets tangled in cords and debris and passes out momentarily.
- When he wakes up, he's floating inside the fuselage, in water filled with blood, gasoline, and oil.
- His USC ring catches on something and cuts his finger, but he realizes that he's stuck to the window, which orients him.
- He kicks away from the sinking plane and bursts out of the water, into the sunlight.
- "He had survived" (2.11.36).
How It All Goes Down
Downed
- Phil and Mac, the tail gunner, are the only other two crewmen who have survived the crash.
- They all managed to clamber aboard a raft and tie it to another.
- Phil is woozy from two cuts on his forehead, and Louie makes a compress out of a wet t-shirt.
- Once they're stabilized, they hear the sound of a man drowning, but they can't figure out who it is. He doesn't surface.
- The supplies are pitiful: too little water, a mirror, a flare gun, dye, fishhooks, fishing line, two air pumps, a patch kit, and a screwdriver, which on a rubber raft is like having mayonnaise at an ice cream stand.
- The raft doesn't even have a radio or navigation instruments. They might as well name this raft the S.S. SOL.
- Mac starts freaking out almost immediately, screaming, "We're going to die!" (3.12.16) and prompting Louie to backhand him.
- As if that wasn't bad enough, sharks begin circling the raft.
How It All Goes Down
Missing at Sea
- When Phil Deasy, pilot of the Daisy Mae, returns to Palmyra and discovers that the Green Hornet never came back, he says "Holy smoke!" (3.13.1) That's a direct quote, which means people outside of comic strips actually said that once upon a time.
- A search party is sent out to find them.
- The next day, Louie wakes up and discovers that Mac has eaten all the survival chocolate.
- Louie is disappointed, but understands that Mac acted in panic.
- A B-25 passes overhead. Louie shoots up a flare, but the bomber doesn't stop for them.
- Later, the Daisy Mae also flies overhead, but does not see them; everyone starts to lose hope.
- Meanwhile, the last letters of all the men are reaching their families and friends, who do not yet realize the men are missing.
- After a week, the search is abandoned, and the men's things in the barracks are catalogued. Louie's liquor is gone, of course.
- Louie is officially reported missing on May 27, 1943, but his family is "absolutely certain that [he is] still alive" (3.13.49).
- Over on Samoa, Pillsbury and Douglas are still in the hospital—Douglas with a wounded shoulder and Pillsbury with his bleeding leg (and sore stomach from being poked over and over again)
- When they find out that the crew of the Green Hornet is missing, they hang a flag in their memory.
How It All Goes Down
Thirst
- The men on the raft are covered in sunburns and salt sores, and their water cans are empty.
- Luckily, it starts to rain. Louie realizes that the air pumps are stored in canvas cases, and he uses the cases to catch water.
- Unfortunately, when a wave splashes inside, the water is ruined by salty ocean water—so Louie sucks the water from the cases and spits it into the canteens.
- When the rain stops, they realize the canvas cases make excellent hats too.
- While they may not be thirsty now, they're definitely hungry.
- An albatross lands on the raft, and Louie catches the bird and snaps its neck.
- The inside of the bird is too stinky to eat, but they use the meat as bait and catch a few small fish to eat raw.
- Phil worries that the dead albatross will bring them bad luck, like in the poem "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." But Louie thinks that after a plane crash, how could things get any worse? (A sure sign that things are about to get worse)
- The men spend their days lying on the raft and sniffing their earwax, because "the scent of the wax was curiously refreshing" (3.14.18). Okay…
- To try to stay sane, the men quiz each other constantly, tell each other stories of their pasts, and hum "White Christmas."
- After two weeks, the rafts are decomposing and the men look grotesque.
- Will they resort to cannibalism, like the 1820 whaling ship the Essex?
- No, they won't—instead they resort to prayer.
- Another albatross comes, giving them more meat for fishing.
- Louie also puts fish hooks on his fingertips and plays Wolverine, reaching his claws in the water to catch fish.
- They have to go six days without water. Louie prays to God to quench his thirst, and if he does, he'll dedicate his life to him.
- God loves a bargain like that, and on the seventh day, the sky opens up and rain falls down.
How It All Goes Down
Sharks and Bullets
- On the 27th day, Louie fires a flare at a plane overhead.
- Big mistake. It's a Japanese bomber, and it swoops down and opens fire.
- They're safer with the sharks, so the men hide under the raft.
- Louie punches a shark in the face to keep it away from him.
- Really.
- The men survive, unshot and unsharked, but unfortunately the rafts are in bad shape. One of the two rafts is slashed in two, and the other is rapidly deflating.
- Louie, Phil, and Mac work together to reinflate the raft—there's no way it could have been done with only one or two men.
- They also end up using the shredded raft as a canopy to shield them from the sun.
How It All Goes Down
Singing in the Clouds
- The sharks are getting daring. One of them leaps out of the water at Louie, so Mac steps in and whacks it with an oar.
- Louie decides to declare war against the sharks, as though he's in a production of West Side Story.
- In something straight out of the Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook, Louie reaches into the water and snatches a shark out with his bare hands.
- Then, proving that having a screwdriver on a rubber raft actually is useful, he stabs the shark in the eye with the screwdriver. (No amount of italics can do justice to this insanity.)
- Only the liver of a shark is edible, so they eat the shark's liver (hold the onions).
- The sharks are not happy about this, and at night on the thirtieth day at sea, a great white rams the bottom of the raft and tries to tip them over. Thankfully, it fails.
- Unfortunately though, Mac never regains his strength and dies. They drop his body into the sea, where "The sharks let him be" (3.16.31).
- As Louie and Phil continue to waste away, Louie's mind experiences a strange sense of near-death clarity, and he remembers things that he never knew had happened to him.
- He also sees human figures singing to him from the clouds.
- Phil says he saw nothing.
- On the forty-sixth day, they see an island. Land ho, yo.
How It All Goes Down
Typhoon
- As Phil and Louie are rowing to the island, a Japanese boat draws alongside the raft and brings them onboard.
- They're tied up, blindfolded, and pistol whipped. Yikes.
- Phil and Louie are transferred to another boat, where they're actually fed and treated nicely.
- Unfortunately though, the boat is en route to Kwajalein, a.k.a. Execution Island.
- There, Louie and Phil are placed in separate cells.
- In Louie's cell, the names of nine marines are carved into a wood board.
- Louie knows he's going to die here, and he starts to cry.
How It All Goes Down
A Dead Body Breathing
- Louie has to survive on hardtack (Bisquick's evil twin) and small cups of tea.
- Even though his track achievements make him kind of a celebrity (some of the natives know his name), Louie receives no special treatment.
- His cell is infested with mosquitoes, lice, and rats—oh my.
- The guards humiliate Phil and Louie, forcing them to whistle and sing while having rocks chucked at them. They're stripped of their dignity.
- One day Louie is pulled from his cell and he assumes he's going to be executed.
- Luckily though, he's only interrogated. Louie lies to them, but Phil tells them about how a B-24D works. However, Phil believes that the Japanese are desperate for information because they're losing the war.
- Later, a guard named Kawamura shows up a Louie's door. He's nice, and he teaches Louie some Japanese.
- When one of the cruel guards pokes Louie in the face with a stick, Kawamura beats the man up.
- Three weeks later, Louie and Phil are injected with a mysterious substance. The Japanese are testing chemicals to be used in biological warfare. Good thing they're not very good at it, so Phil and Louie both survive.
- Unfortunately, Louie comes down with dengue fever. Just like being sick doesn't get you out of dodge ball in middle school though, his illness doesn't exempt him from continued stonings.
- One day, Louie caves to interrogation and shows the Japanese where American bases are. However, the "bases" he shows them are fake airfields.
- On August 24, Louie and Phil are finally shipped off Execution Island to a POW camp in Yokohama.
How It All Goes Down
Two Hundred Silent Men
- After three weeks, the ship docks at Yokohama. From there, the men take a Chevy to the POW camp, where they are greeted by… wait for it…
- Jimmie Sasaki. (Remember him? Louie's fake college friend from Chapter 5.)
- Sasaki literally says, "We meet again" (4.19.16), as though this is a James Bond movie—one of the bad ones.
- Sasaki tells Louie that he's head interrogator of all POWs in Japan (is he telling the truth?).
- All the POWs are super skinny, like models at a Versace fashion show, and communicate in Morse code like they're Charlie's Angels.
- It turns out that this isn't a POW camp—the Japanese call it a "secret interrogation center" (4.19.20) as a loophole around the Geneva Convention. (A loophole that might end up around someone's neck…)
- Louie is forbidden to speak to anyone but the guards, and not allowed to make eye contact with the other captives. Basically, the same conditions as being on tour with Katy Perry.
- Phil and Louie are put in cells far away from one another.
- Each day, the men have to do intense exercises and eat a breakfast of fetid slop.
- The men are also beaten daily. One of the routine sayings is "Iron must be beaten while it's hot; soldiers must be beaten while they're fresh" (4.19.30).
- The most feared man in the camp is Sueharu Kitamura, also known as "the Quack" or "the Butcher" (4.19.35).
- However, there is also a nice guard named Hirose, who tells the men to scream and only pretends to beat them.
- When they're not eating slop, they're eating rancid rice and other food infested with rat droppings, maggots, and sand—the men call this food "all dumpo" (4.19.39) (though we'd call it Hot Pockets).
- Many of the men get a disease called beriberi, which sounds cute but leads to numbness, confusion, paralysis, death, and giant testicles.
- Under no circumstances is a POW to be saved or escaped, and Louie knows it's only a matter of time before they are all executed.
How It All Goes Down
Farting for Hirohito
- Louie meets a few other POWs, including one man who was tortured: clubbed, penknives under the fingernails, and water-boarding.
- Louie mostly hangs out with William Harris, another man who made a miraculous escape only to be captured in the end. He has a photographic memory like Cam Jansen.
- Another of Louie's friends is Gaga the duck, who follows the soldiers around and cheers them up.
- Jimmie Sasaki frequently visits Ofuna, and Louie suspects that Sasaki is using his influence to protect him.
- Captives do what they can to defy the guards: passing around war news, calling the guards things like "Turdbird, Flange Face, the Weasel, Liver Lip" (4.20.12), and farting when forced to bow to Emperor Hirohito.
- One day, a one-legged captive named Fred Garrett hunts down Louie. It turns out that Louie added his name to the list of names on the board, and Garrett asked around, hearing that Zamperini had survived. The name had given him hope that he, too, would live.
- Later, a Japanese civilian is brought in to race Louie.
- Louie, malnourished and practically on death's door, actually beats the man, and then gets beat himself… by a club to the head.
- The next time Louie is made to race, he's offered a rice ball if he throws it. He does, and collects his food as payment.
- In March, Phil is taken away to Ashio, a camp north of Tokyo.
- He says goodbye to Louie. In Ashio, he writes a letter home, but someone burns it instead of delivering it. Phil finds the charred remains and vows to deliver it someday in person.
How It All Goes Down
Belief
- Back in Torrance, California, Louie's sister Sylvia slips into depression.
- The family receives a telegram announcing Louie's disappearance, which makes matters worse.
- Phil even has a letter to Louie returned to him marked "Missing at Sea"and "CASUALTY STATUS VERIFIED" (4.21.8). Ugh.
- Louise, Louie's mom, develops a weird rash that won't go away.
- On October 6, Louie's army trunk arrives, but the family never opens it.
- In early 1944, America seizes Kwajalein, and someone finds the splinter of wood with Louie's name on it.
- Joe Deasy, the pilot of the Daisy Mae, realizes that Louie and Phil are still alive, although he has no clue where they might be.
- Cecy, Phil's fiancée, also holds onto hope that Phil is alive. Why? Because a fortune teller tells her so, and also says that Phil will be found by Christmas.
- The mothers of the men of the Green Hornet build a support group and start talking to each other.
- Louie is officially declared dead on May 28, 1944, but no one believes it.
How It All Goes Down
Plots Afoot
- In the summer of 1944, Louie, Tinker, and Harris decide they should try to escape.
- There are a few problems, though: Harris has beriberi and Louie is doing odd jobs around the camp (like starching shirts and shaving guards) to earn food.
- The men are being starved and beaten severely, and the guard they call Shithead "open[s] his pants and violate[s]" (4.22.23) Gaga the duck, then kills him.
- Louie and his bros decide they can get over the barbed wire fence, commandeer a plane, and get out of Japan.
- However, they can't disguise themselves as Japanese guards because they're much taller than all the guards.
- The day before they plan to try it anyway, they're told that if anyone escapes, the Japanese will kill people in the camp. So they suspend the plan.
- Instead, the sneak into the Quack's office to find information about how the war is going.
- They recover a map from his office, which Harris copies onto a strip of toilet paper.
- His work is discovered, and Harris is severely beat in front of everyone; when he recovers consciousness, he doesn't know who any of his friends are.
- In September, Louie is transferred to a different camp called Omori.
How It All Goes Down
Monster
- Louie, Tinker, and the other POWs from Ofuna are greeted at Omori by a corporal named Mutsuhiro Watanabe.
- And by greeted, we mean they have the snot beat out of them.
- "This man, thought Tinker, is a psychopath" (4.23.9).
- Watanabe flies into a rage at the slightest provocation, and he singles out Louie as the subject of his wrath for some reason.
- But sometimes he also brings them candy and cigarettes.
- And, of course, other times he threatens to behead them.
- The camp accountant, Yuicho Hatto, believes that Watanabe is a sexual sadist who gets pleasure from punishing the men.
How It All Goes Down
Hunted
- The men nickname Watanabe "the Bird" (4.24.2) because it's an innocuous name that can't get them into any trouble.
- The Bird likes to run around screaming "Keirei!" (4.24.3) and clubbing people who fail to salute.
- Louie is forced to empty benjos with a ladle, which is like emptying porta-potties with a spoon.
- Once again, the men do what they can to sabotage the camp and regain their dignity: stealing sugar, shredding clothes, stuffing dirt in gas tanks.
- Some of the guards are nice though, and they sneak food and blankets to the POWs and make sure they get adequate medical treatment.
- Poor Louie can't get a break from the Bird though, and being bullied by him brings back memories of childhood bullying. Louie dreams about killing the Bird.
- Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Louie, the Japanese create a fake propaganda broadcast with a message from Louie, saying that he is "uninjured and in good health" (4.24.33).
- A man in South Africa hears the broadcast and sends a card to Louie's parents, but he gets the address wrong and it takes months for the card to arrive.
How It All Goes Down
B-29
- Pushing a wheelbarrow into Tokyo, Louie sees the phrase "B Niju Ku" (4.25.3) scrawled on a wall: B-29.
- It's a new American bomber—ironically named the Tokyo Rose—that has been flying over Japan.
- The bomber flies over the camp and gives the POWs hope.
- Unfortunately though, this angers the Bird, and he beats Louie with a belt buckle, rendering him temporarily deaf in one ear.
- In November, Louie is driven to Radio Tokyo studios and given the opportunity to tape a message for broadcast, which will correct the NBC radio broadcast announcing his death.
- A woman named Lynn Moody, who was with Louie at USC in 1940, hears the broadcast and contacts his parents.
- They're worried the broadcast is fake, but when they hear it being re-aired, they know it's his voice.
- Plus, he asks them to take care of his guns. Louie grew up hunting, and his family knows that's not a detail the Japanese would have known.
- They finally know that Louie is still alive.
How It All Goes Down
Madness
- Radio Tokyo propositions Louie again, but this time to read a message they wrote.
- Louie doesn't want to be made into a propaganda tool, so he refuses—then they threaten to send him to a punishment camp, as though Omori wasn't punishment enough.
- Back at camp, the Bird is going crazier and crazier (like a loon…) as B-29s cross overhead every day.
- Meanwhile, Phil and one-legged Fred Garrett have been transferred to Zentsuji, which is every bit as posh as Omori (all the amenities you've come to expect: contaminated rice, dysentery, abuse) but Phil is allowed to send letters home and tell his family that he's still alive.
- Back at Omori, the men discover a theatre trunk and put on a production of Cinderella. (What is this, Slaughterhouse-Five?)
- After Christmas, a dignitary arrives and is told about the Bird's abusive behavior. The Bird is ordered to leave Omori, and Louie is ecstatic to watch him leave the nest.
How It All Goes Down
Falling Down
- Life is good with the Bird gone. Well, as good as life in a POW camp can get.
- Bill Harris is transferred to Omori, but he still has trouble with his memory after repeated beatings at the hands of the Quack.
- In February, an air battle breaks out over Omori, and the Japanese planes are decimated. The Americans bomb Tokyo, and Louie is to be transferred to another POW camp.
- Louie says goodbye to Bill Harris, and will never see him again.
- The transfers are put on a train and taken through the snow-covered Japanese countryside.
- Instead of arriving at Hogwarts though, they arrive at Naoetsu—and instead of being greeted by Dumbledore, it's much, much worse.
- "Keirei!" (4.27.27) It's the Bird.
How It All Goes Down
Enslaved
- Not only is the Bird present to terrorize the POWs at Naoetsu, but the conditions are terrible—the barracks don't even have floorboards, because prisoners have pulled them up and burned them for heat.
- Louie is somewhat lucky that he gets regularly beaten by the Bird since it keeps him from the difficult labor that often works other men to death.
- Eventually, though, even Louie is expected to participate in this back-breaking work, shoveling coal and salt and anything else that needs shoveling.
- One day, Louie falls off the barge where he's been shoveling salt, tearing something in his ankle and knee.
- Unable to work, his rations are halved.
- He begs the Bird for work, and the Bird gives him a job: clean the pig sty… with only his hands.
- You may have heard the phrase happy as a pig in… we'll let you finish that one, but suffice it to say that Louie is about as unhappy as can be.
How It All Goes Down
Two Hundred and Twenty Punches
- The POWs decide they need to kill the Bird.
- They manage to poison his rice with dysentery, and he gets sick, but recovers after ten days.
- One day, Louie, Tinker, and Wade are blamed for the theft of some fish, and orders are given for every man to punch them in the face.
- They're each punched about 220 times.
- There's one small ray of light at least: American victory in the war is getting closer.
- The downside is that everyone in the camp will probably be executed on August 22.
How It All Goes Down
The Boiling City
- Louie's job as pig man is over, but the Bird continues to torture him.
- He puts him in charge of a goat, saying, "Goat die, you die" (4.30.4).
- Surprising no one, the goat dies.
- Louie is ordered to hold a six-foot-long wooden beam over his head, and a guard is told to whack Louie with his gun if he drops his arms.
- Louie is only jabbed once, and manages to hold the beam up for thirty-seven minutes.
- This just angers the Bird more, and he runs toward him and beats the snot out of him.
- The Bird continues torturing Louie, saying he's going to kill him.
- So the men renew their plans to kill the Bird, and he gets paranoid.
How It All Goes Down
The Naked Stampede
- The men at the camp hear about something atomic wiping Hiroshima and Nagasaki off the map.
- A week before the August 22 kill-all date, the Bird leaves the camp… and Louie gets beriberi.
- Weirdly, later that day, all the Japanese guards leave—the men believe "The war is over" (4.31.15).
- Meanwhile, up in the mountains, Phil, Fred Garrett, and the other POWs at Rokuroshi are led into the mountains with no explanation given.
- Back at Naoetsu, the Bird returns, looking like a different person.
- The camp commander, Kono, tells the men "The war has come to a point of cessation" (4.31.29).
- The men strip naked to bathe in the river; bomber planes fly overhead and drop rations of food, clothing, and magazines.
- At some point that day, the Bird slips away into the countryside and disappears.
How It All Goes Down
Cascades of Pink Peaches
- The men feast on food falling from the sky as they wait to be rescued.
- Louie is almost squished by a drum full of shoes (delivered by Amazon's drone program?) but other than that everything is going fine.
- Finally, on September 2, 1945, Japan signs a formal surrender: "The Second World War was over" (4.32.27).
- "All Louie felt was rapture." (4.32.29) Cue second Blondie video in two chapters.
- After two-and-a-half years, Louie is finally going home. On September 5, a train comes to take the POWs away.
How It All Goes Down
Mother's Day
- The train stops at almost every town so the soldiers can glug sake and whatever else they can get their hands on.
- Louie is eventually brought to an airfield to be flown to Okinawa.
- In Okinawa, it finally sinks in that most of the men Louie knew are now dead.
- Also, he's examined in the hospital and realizes that he'll "never run again" (4.33.23).
- On September 9, Louie's family finds out that he's finally coming home. "September 9 is going to be Mother's Day to me, because that's the day I learned for sure my boy was coming home to stay" (4.33.29), says his mom. Aw…
- Phil, one-legged Fred, and the others of Rokuroshi get to go home on September 11. In Yokohama, before they ship out, they're fed pancakes and greeted by a band playing "California, Here I Come."
- On the way home, Louie flies over Kwajalein, which has pretty much been wiped off the face of the map.
- On October 16, Phil arrives home, and gets to marry Cecy four weeks later.
- Louie finally gets transferred to Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco in October.
- Pete meets him there and brings him home, finally reuniting the Zamperini family.
How It All Goes Down
The Shimmering Girl
- The Zamperinis have a huge homecoming party for Louie.
- And it's a miracle: as soon as Louise found out Louie was coming home, her rash disappeared.
- Unfortunately, Louie is haunted by memories of war, and he sees the Bird every time he tries to sleep.
- Back in Japan, the Bird is on the run—Japanese military men are being arrested for war crimes, and the Bird is in hiding.
- The police trail his mother, hoping she'll lead them to the Bird, but the search is futile.
- Back home, Louie becomes a national sensation, like an American Idol contestant.
- To cope with fame, and the loss of so many friends, he starts drinking.
- In March 1946, Louie meets Cynthia Applewhite at a bar and the two hit it off beautifully.
- Cynthia is an artsy-fartsy type "dressed in bohemian clothes, [she] penned novels, painted, and yearned to roam forgotten corners of the world" (5.34.37).
- After only two weeks, Louie talks Cynthia into marrying him. Her parents are not happy.
- But he tries to convince her parents to like him, and starts training for the 1948 Olympic Games.
- Although Cynthia tells her parents she won't marry Louie until the fall, they have a secret ceremony on May 25.
- That night, Cynthia cries on the phone all night with her mother, and Louie drinks himself to sleep.
How It All Goes Down
Coming Undone
- In late 1946, Louie and Cynthia meet Phil and Cecy and Fred Garrett for dinner.
- Unfortunately, Fred starts screaming hysterically when the waiter brings them a plate of white rice (he really wanted brown).
- Louie, too, is suffering from flashbacks and PTSD, in a time before "PTSD" is a term.
- He also has trouble finding a regular career.
- His training for the Olympics fails when he exacerbates his ankle injury.
- His solution is just to drink more and more, and he becomes obsessed with the idea of going to Japan and hunting down and killing the Bird.
How It All Goes Down
The Body on the Mountain
- Back in Japan, a man from the Ministry of Home Affairs knocks on a door and interrogates the family inside—a farmer, his wife, and their live-in laborer—about Mutsuhiro Watanabe.
- He has no idea that the laborer he is talking to is Mutushiro Watanabe.
- Watanabe is living under an alias (Jennifer Garner) and has grown a moustache to avoid detection.
- He's having trouble sleeping, but more because he's being pursued than because he actually feels remorse.
- One day he tells the farmer who he really is and the farmer advises him to keep his mouth shut.
- Meanwhile other men, like Shithead and the Quack (if you need a good name for your punk band, there you go), are being tried for war crimes.
- Even Jimmie Sasaki is sentenced to six years' hard labor.
- The next summer, Watanabe helps the father's son sell leather straps around the countryside. (Did he put "beat American POWs with a belt" on his resume under relevant experience?)
- He manages to sneak away and visit his family.
- Detectives arrive while he's there, and he hides in the closet.
- Leather strap sales fail (they just don't beat people like they did during the war), so the farmer's son opens a coffee shop and makes Watanabe his waiter.
- A woman falls in love with him, but he doesn't want to marry her, seeing himself as "a burden which would make her unhappy" (5.36.33).
- In 1946, two bodies are found at the base of a mountain. The woman isn't identified, but the man is Mutsuhiro Watanabe. He killed himself.
How It All Goes Down
Twisted Ropes
- Here's what Louie's life looks like: drinking, falling prey to scams, losing all his money, drinking some more, plotting to find and kill a man in Japan.
- One night he even gets so disoriented that he can't find his way home.
- His relationship with Cynthia turns abusive—she throws dishes at him, and he chases after her and grabs her by the neck.
- When Louie can't pay for his car, he thinks that God is toying with him, and he forbids Cynthia from going to church.
- Cynthia ends up pregnant, and Louie realizes that he has to take responsibility.
- However, one night he wakes up from a dream in which he's strangling the Bird, and he's actually strangling Cynthia. Yikes.
- Baby Cynthia, nicknamed Cissy, is born at the end of December.
- Louie's a great dad… except for that time Cynthia walks in and finds him shaking the baby. Cynthia files for divorce.
- Meanwhile in Japan, Shizuka Watanabe opens the door to find her supposedly dead son, the Bird, standing on her doorstep.
How It All Goes Down
A Beckoning Whistle
- Billy Graham (yes, that Billy Graham) pitches his tent in Los Angeles.
- Cynthia goes to see him, and when she comes home she says she's not going to divorce Louie.
- He's relieved about this, but angry that she's had a religious awakening.
- She manages to drag Louie to one of Billy Graham's sermons, but when it comes time to pray, Louie leaves. That night, he has another nightmare about the Bird.
- Cynthia gets Louie to go to another sermon, and Louie remembers a still day he experienced on the raft with Phil: "That day, he had believed that what lay around them was the work of infinitely broad, benevolent hands, a gift of compassion" (5.38.33).
- When they're asked to pray, Louie tries to leave again, but he has a flashback to his time on the raft.
- He says, "If you will save me, I will serve you forever" (5.38.40).
- It is the last flashback he has—he comes back to reality, and walks toward Billy Graham a saved man.
- He realizes that "He was not the worthless, broken, forsaken man that the Bird had striven to make of him" (5.38.56). Instead he is… unbroken. Boo ya.
- He dumps out all his alcohol when he gets home, and feels like "a new creation" (5.38.46).
How It All Goes Down
Daybreak
- Louie becomes a Christian speaker and, in 1950, travels to Japanto face the guards accused of war crimes.
- He's told that Mutsuhiro Watanabe, the Bird, has died.
- Louie no longer hates the man; he feels compassion for him now.
- Forgiveness is quite the feeling of peace. For Louie, "the war was over" (5.39.16). Finally.
How It All Goes Down
- Louie opens up the Victory Boys Camp to help juvenile delinquents.
- Later in life, Louie receives tons of awards and honors, has places named after him, and carries the Olympic torch in five different Games.
- He hikes and skateboards in his seventies.
- Everyone loves him.
- Phil becomes Allen again, and he lives a generally happy life with Cecy and their two children.
- He's often recognized as "that guy who was with Louie during the war," but manages to live free of resentment toward Louie.
- Allen dies in 1998 of diabetes and heart disease.
- Bill Harris stays with the marines and disappears in Korea in 1950. No one knows what happened to him.
- Louie's brother, Pete, marries a woman named Doris and assembles a scrapbook of Louie's life.
- Pete dies in 2008. Cynthia dies in 2001.
- In 1996, Louie gets a call from Draggan Mihailovich, a CBS producer—in preparation for the 1998 Winter Olympics, he wants to do a profile on Louie, who will be running the torch past Naoetsu.
- But Mihailovich has a startling revelation: "The Bird is alive" (Epilogue.30).
- He'd been in hiding for seven years, only to resurface when the arrest order for war criminals was lifted. He's married and has two kids.
- In 1995, at seventy-seven years old, Watanabe speaks to a reporter at the London Daily Mail. He apologizes, and says that former prisoners can come beat him if they want to.
- Although he doesn't want to beat him, Louie does want to meet him.
- In 1997, CBS producers meet with Watanabe, saying they have a message from Louie Zamperini. He agrees to an interview, but this time seems a lot less remorseful about the beatings he dealt out at the camp.
- When Louie goes to Japan to carry the torch, he carries with him a letter to Watanabe. In the letter, he tells the Bird that he stripped him of his rights and his dignity, but that he has forgiven him.
- Watanabe refuses to meet Louie.
- Louie sends the letter, but if Watanabe receives it, he never replies.
- Watanabe dies in 2003.
- In 1998, Louie carries the Olympic torch past Naoetsu, "through the place where cages had once held him" (Epilogue.84).
- But the cages are gone, and Louie is simply an "old and joyful man, running" (Epilogue.84).
Unbroken Theme of Perseverance
When Winston Churchill said "If you're going through hell, keep going," he might as well have been talking about Louie Zamperini, whose picture should come up every time someone Googles perseverance. If Laura Hillenbrand wrote "Louie went through hell," she would have been glossing over a lot, but she still would have been accurate.
In Unbroken, we see Louie survive crash landings, shark attacks, Japanese POW camps, and PTSD with a little luck and a heck of a lot of personal strength and tenacious determination.
Questions About Perseverance
- What inspires Louie to keep going and push through impossible odds?
- Do you think you would have the strength to persevere through the same trials that Louie does?
- Does everyone have the same drive Louie has? Do people around him ever give up?
- What trials does Louie have to persevere through after the war?
You probably don't need Unbroken to tell you this, but crash landing in the Pacific is not fun. Fending off shark attacks? Nope, not fun either. And neither is being forced to clean up a pig sty with your bare hands in a Japanese POW camp, or chronic alcoholism. Louie Zamperini's life sees a whole lot of suffering over the course of a few very long years. However, the book is called Unbroken, not Broken--so though Louie suffers, he doesn't let it keep him down.
Questions About Suffering
- How does the pain Louie suffers through during his running career help prepare him for the pain experiences during war?
- How does Louie's family suffer while Louie is away? How do they cope with it?
- What do you think is the worst event Louie has to suffer through? Would you be able to deal with it?
- Why does the Bird get pleasure from inflicting suffering on others?
One of the most misguided ad campaigns in recent history is the U.S. Army's creation of the slogan "Army of One." Because do you know what happens to an army of one? He dies.
The people who survive at war are the ones who work together, the teams that manage to communicate with each other almost telepathically and who are teammates on the battlefield and friends in the barracks. In Unbroken, Louie's friendships aren't just fun—they keep him alive.
Questions About Friendship
- Who are Louie's closest friends?
- How does Louie's friendship with his crewmates grow during the war? How does it change after the war?
- Could the crew of the Super Man be as effective if they weren't friends? Is it possible to have a strong team without friendship?
- Would Louie have been able to survive if he hadn't made friends along the way?
Take a look at the cover of Unbroken.
Oops. Wrong Unbroken. Take a look at this cover. "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption"—it's right there on the cover: World War II. So of course war is a theme.
Unbroken is less about the politics of war, however, and more about the horrors of war. Atrocities weren't just committed by the Japanese, and Louie often falls victim to mishaps caused by his very own country, the one he's sworn to protect. It feels like all is un-fair when it comes to war.
Questions About War
- Imagine Louie's life if WWII hadn't happened. How would it have been different? Would he have been a track star? Would he have met Sylvia?
- Do you wish Unbroken had gone into more information about the world politics around WWII, or are you glad it focused mostly on Louie's story?
- Why were some of the Japanese guards nice to the POWs? Does war turn good people bad, or does it only bring out the bad in people who already have it in them?
War is kind of a competition. Different teams fight each other for a variety of reasons, whether it's to claim resources, earn new territories, or resolve political differences. Louie is well equipped for war because of his innate competitive spirit (that's part of why the book is called Unbroken...a less equipped person's story would've required a different title). The same drive that pushes him across the finish line in his track days helps him stay in the race, so to speak, during the war. Like Buzz Lightyear, real competitors never give up, never surrender.
Questions About Competition
- When Louie is a runner—before the war—what motivates him to compete so hard?
- How is Louie able to utilize his running skills and competitive nature during the war?
- Is Louie still competitive after the war, and after the end of his running career?
Even if it isn't Memorial Day (remembering men and women who died while serving) or Veterans Day (remembering all veterans), people almost always admire and respect war heroes. It's the least we can do for people who sacrifice so much for their country, and for causes they may or may not believe in.
In Unbroken, Louie spends a lot of his life searching for admiration, so all the accolades he receives after his miraculous survival must be rewarding indeed.
Questions About Admiration
- What are Louie's most admirable qualities?
- Is there anything Louie does that lessens your admiration of him?
- Who looks up to Louie? Who does Louie admire?
- How does the men's admiration of each other help them stay strong and survive during the war?
Unbroken Theme of Language and Communication
War is pretty much a failure to communicate on a global scale. Men in power fail to make a peaceful compromise, and instead decide to sentence thousands of others to death to get they want. Miscommunication trickles down to the soldiers too. In Unbroken, English-speaking men are taken prisoner by Japanese-speaking soldiers, and their inability to talk to one another only builds tension that is already thick enough to cut with a butter knife.
It's difficult to have peace when the world doesn't speak a common language.
Questions About Language and Communication
- How do the nicer Japanese guards make efforts to communicate with their prisoners?
- In what ways to the POWs use the language barrier in order to rebel against their captors?
- Would the POW camps have been a different place if the guards shared the same language as their prisoners?
- How does miscommunication cause a delay in information being transmitted around the world at this time?
On television, from The Brady Bunch to Modern Family we often see families that all live together (and don't even have a toilet) or live in the same town. But the powerful thing about families is how they stay strong even when separated—and in Unbroken, the Zamperinis show incredible strength. They're able to survive a couple of troublemaking teenage boys, distance, death, and even war. Just like Louie, his family remains unbroken.
Questions About Family
- How does Louie's family come together to support each other when Louie disappears?
- Would Louie have been as determined to survive at war if he didn't have such strong family bonds?
- Why does Louie's family, especially Pete, have a harder time coping with what Louie suffers during the war than Louie does?