unbroken-laura-hillenbrand

Thirty-three
Mother’s Day
THE NAOETSU POWS HAD CONTROL OF THE TRAIN. AT EVERY town
on the line, the train squealed to a stop and the men piled
off, then piled back on, laden with liberated sake and
whatever else they could steal. The journey went on, sake
coursed through skinny bodies, and the men grew rowdier.
A lieutenant stood up and, with solemn officiousness,
warned the men to behave themselves. He didn’t want
anyone falling off the train, he said.
At about three in the afternoon, the train stopped and began
backing up. Just as the lieutenant had feared, a man had
gone overboard. As the train rolled backward, the errant
POW came into view. It was the lieutenant himself, at least
three sheets to the wind. He was lucky. All afternoon,
drunken POWs staggered off the train, but the train didn’t
stop for them. They had to find their own way.
From the top of Japan to the bottom, trains packed with
POWs snaked toward Yokohama. Men pressed their faces
to the windows to catch their first glimpse of what all of those
B-29s had done. Once-grand cities were now flat, black
stains, their only recognizable feature a gridwork of burned
roads, passing nothing, leading nowhere.
At the first sight of the destruction of their enemy, the POWs
cheered. But after the first city there was another, then
another, city after city razed, the survivors drifting about like
specters, picking through the rubble. The cheering died
away. On Louie’s train, the silence came as they passed
through Tokyo. A week after Louie had left Omori, sixteen
square miles of Tokyo, and tens of thousands of souls, had