unbroken-laura-hillenbrand

mountain to the nearest villages. They found mostly ghost
towns. The civilians had seen the bonfire, abandoned their
homes, and fled. The POWs hiked back up and waited for
help to come.
——
At Naoetsu, most of the guards stayed in camp, their
haughtiness replaced by gushing obsequiousness. There
was almost no food and no tobacco. Fitzgerald went to the
Japanese commander three times a day to demand more
food, and was rejected each time. POWs left camp in
search of something to eat. Someone came back with a
cow. Someone else herded in pigs. It wasn’t enough.
Fitzgerald wrote a dispatch to the Swiss consul in Tokyo,
telling of the terrible conditions in camp and asking for
immediate help, but the Japanese commander refused to
send it. Livid, Fitzgerald threatened to inform the American
forces about the commander’s behavior, but the
commander still refused.
At about ten in the morning on August 26, six days after the
war’s end was announced in Naoetsu, Fitzgerald was just
stepping out of the commander’s office when a crowd of
American fighter planes, sent from the carrier Lexington,
shot overhead and began circling. The POWs charged
outside, yelling. They hastily cleared an area, fetched some
white lime, and painted two giant words on the ground: FOOD
SMOKES. Messages dropped from the cockpits. The planes
had been hauling emergency supplies to POW camps but
had exhausted their loads. The pilots promised that food
would soon come.
Unable to feed the POWs, the pilots did the next best thing,
putting on a thirty-minute air show while the prisoners
shouted their approval. Fitzgerald stood among his men,
moved by their joyful upturned faces. “Wonderful?” wrote J.