Unbroken Essay

The Horrors of the Naoetsu POW Camp
Throughout Laura Hillenbrand’s Book Unbroken: An Olympian’s Journey from Airman to Castaway to Captive, Louie is sent to numerous POW camps but eventually ends up at the Naoetsu POW Camp, where he is finally liberated. This camp, the last that Louie has to endure, does not come without struggles and beatings that can put anyone over the edge. Although all parts of the Naoetsu POW camp were horrible, the worst parts were the dreadful living conditions, a wretched prison guard, and extensive torture sessions that caused men to lose all hope of survival. Living conditions at the Naoetsu POW Camp were deplorable and unsanitary, causing Louie’s mental health to decline and his life to worsen. On page 201 of Unbroken,

Each night of shivering ended before dawn, when Louie was forced outside for roll call in deep snow and howling wind” (Hillenbrand 201). “The beds were planks; the bedding was loose straw” shows how the Japanese treated the men like animals. This dehumanizes the men causing them to feel hopeless and not want to go on. To show how cold it was in the barracks, we see that the last POWs had burned the floorboards so that they could create a fire to have a small source of heat. However, this caused the cold weather of the Naoetsu Camp to come into the holes that were burned in the floor, causing the prisoners to always be cold and more prone to sickness. When it says, “each night of shivering ended before dawn,” it shows how they were so cold that they eventually became numb throughout the night and that most of their already weakened energy went into warming them. The guards forcing them to live in their filth showed how they treated

In an article about Watanabe’s torture style, he is described, “His punishments were ruthless because they were psychological and emotional, not just physical. In addition to horrendous beatings, he’d destroy photographs of POW’s family members and force them to watch as he burned their letters from home, often the only personal belongings these tortured men had” (All That). Since his punishments were psychological too, it made most men go crazy and caused them to not want to go on anymore. It was also rare for a guard to be this damaging to the POWs’ mental health so most men were not ready for this kind of torture making their experience even worse. The most precious thing to these men were the pictures of their family but when the Bird destroyed them, they lost all hope to keep on living. They only had a few belongings and when all of their outside life was ripped away from them, they just saw the camp and not the world beyond. It caused them to have no hope of escape. They also were losing hope that the Americans would be able to come to save them as an American airship had passed over them multiple times but could not see them. “Oh God, God, an American plane!’...The bomber had simply passed over Tokyo” (184). Even though Louie had a fever and couldn’t do his best work, the bird chose to punish him for it