I like to be the last person on the planet to read any given bestseller. I finally got around to reading Unbroken, about Louis Zamperini, a U.S. Olympic athlete-turned-World War II bombardier. He survives 47 days in an inflatable raft and then just barely survives being a prisoner of war in Japanese custody.
Japan had signed the Geneva Convention regarding treatment of prisoners, but hadn’t ratified it. Thus prisoners were beaten and starved and scheduled to be killed as whatever island they were held on was overrun by American forces. According to Unbroken, there were in fact mass executions of prisoners held on islands beyond the Japanese core islands.
What could have saved prisoners? A quick and Big Bang-ish end to the war. Something that wouldn’t give the Japanese sufficient time to carry out their execution plans.
The modern fashion among historians, including in the biography of Eisenhower that I finished recently, is to treat the atomic bombing of Japan as an unnecessary act shading into war crime territory. At best it is something to be regretted. Invading Japan wouldn’t have been that costly or have taken that long.
Unbroken is a good reminder that not everyone would regret the A-bombs dropped on August 6 and 9, 1945. Zamperini was within weeks of dying from malnutrition, dysentery, and beatings even if the Japanese had not planned an August 15, 1945 execution date. He ultimately lived through 2014 (aged 97).
The book is also a good reminder of how much more dangerous accidents were than combat during World War II. Zamperini’s plane went down due to the crew feathering a good engine after one quit (so they could have had three out of four running engines and a dead one with a feathered prop; instead they ended up with two running engines, both on the same wing, and a dead engine with a stopped prop generating a huge amount of drag; this is a classic problem when learning to fly multi-engine piston aircraft and has been mostly addressed by auto-feather props and/or turbojets that don’t need to be feathered after quitting (and they hardly ever quit). Despite auto-feather, TransAsia 235 came to grief in a similar fashion in 2015. A crew of five USAF pilots wrecked a C-5 cargo plane in Dover, Delaware via a similar mistake in 2006. Machines get better, but apparently humans do not.
Lauren Hillenbrand does a better job than 99 percent of America’s journalists and authors in explaining aviation concepts. She thanks her brother, a Private certificate holder, in the acknowledgments.
Some statistics:
Pilot and navigator error, mechanical failure, and bad luck were killing trainees at a stunning rate. In the Army Air Forces, or AAF,* there were 52,651 stateside aircraft accidents over the course of the war, killing 14,903 personnel. Though some of these personnel were probably on coastal patrol and other duties, it can be presumed that the vast majority were trainees, killed without ever seeing a combat theater. In the three months in which Phil’s men trained as a crew, 3,041 AAF planes—more than 33 per day—met with accidents stateside, killing 9 men per day. In subsequent months, death tallies exceeding 500 were common. In August 1943, 590 airmen would die stateside, 19 per day.
These losses, only one due to enemy action, were hardly anomalous. In World War II, 35,933 AAF planes were lost in combat and accidents. The surprise of the attrition rate is that only a fraction of the ill-fated planes were lost in combat. In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas theater in which Phil’s crew served, for every plane lost in combat, some six planes were lost in accidents. Over time, combat took a greater toll, but combat losses never overtook noncombat losses.
As planes went, so went men. In the air corps, 35,946 personnel died in nonbattle situations, the vast majority of them in accidental crashes.*1 Even in combat, airmen appear to have been more likely to die from accidents than combat itself. A report issued by the AAF surgeon general suggests that in the Fifteenth Air Force, between November 1, 1943, and May 25, 1945, 70 percent of men listed as killed in action died in operational aircraft accidents, not as a result of enemy action.
The book is also a good reminder of how enthusiastic the U.S. has become regarding imprisoning people. Although some Japanese war criminals were executed, hardly any were imprisoned longer than the Green Card holding woman who tried to vote in Texas. The worst criminal described in the book escapes punishment altogether. He went into hiding after the war and came out after an amnesty was declared.
Then, one day in March 1952, as he read a newspaper, his eyes had paused over a story. The arrest order for suspected war criminals had been lifted. There on the page was his name. The lifting of the apprehension order was the result of an unlikely turn in history. Immediately after the war, there was a worldwide outcry for punishment of the Japanese who had abused POWs, and the war-crimes trials began. But new political realities soon emerged. As American occupiers worked to help Japan transition to democracy and independence, the Cold War was beginning. With communism wicking across the Far East, America’s leaders began to see a future alliance with Japan as critical to national security. The sticking point was the war-crimes issue; the trials were intensely unpopular in Japan, spurring a movement seeking the release of all convicted war criminals. With the pursuit of justice for POWs suddenly in conflict with America’s security goals, something had to give. On December 24, 1948, as the occupation began to wind down, General MacArthur declared a “Christmas amnesty” for the last seventeen men awaiting trial for Class A war crimes, the designation for those who had guided the war. The defendants were released, and some would go on to great success; onetime defendant Nobusuke Kishi, said to be responsible for forcibly conscribing hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Koreans as laborers, would become prime minister in 1957.
Mutsuhiro Watanabe’s flight was over. In his absence, many of his fellow camp guards and officials had been convicted of war crimes. Some had been executed. The others wouldn’t be in prison for long. In keeping with the American effort to reconcile with Japan, all of them, including those serving life sentences, would soon be paroled. It appears that even Sueharu Kitamura, “the Quack,” was set free, in spite of his death sentence. By 1958, every war criminal who had not been executed would be free, and on December 30 of that year, all would be granted amnesty. Sugamo would be torn down, and the epic ordeals of POWs in Japan would fade from the world’s memory. Watanabe would later admit that in the beginning of his life in exile, he had pondered the question of whether or not he had committed any crime. In the end, he laid the blame not on himself but on “sinful, absurd, insane war.” He saw himself as a victim.
Watanabe married and had two children. He opened an insurance agency in Tokyo, and it reportedly became highly profitable. He lived in a luxury apartment worth a reported $1.5 million and kept a vacation home on Australia’s Gold Coast. Almost everyone who knew of his crimes believed he was dead.
Watanabe died in April 2003.
More: read Unbroken.
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