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I am going to the same well this week as last...Laura Hillenbrand's brilliant new book, Unbroken. I have another person for you to meet...
Thirty-five year old American Commander John Fitzgerald was the ranking allied officer in Ofuna, a Japanese prisoner of war camp during World War II. After scuttling his damaged submarine, he was taken by the Japanese.
I cannot do justice to the suffering of allied POWs in Japanese camps here. (For that read the book, I can't recommend it highly enough.) Suffice it to say, that for up to four years these POWs subsisted on starvation, gruesome torture and sadistic random bloody beatings. The suffering was inhuman, their dignity trashed and agony was their constant cellmate.
After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan finally relented. One of the first orders of business for the allies was to find all POW camps and airdrop food and supplies to the all-but-dead men held captive.
Supply pilots were making their way to Ofuna where the freed men waited helplessly, but got held up unexpectedly.
Then one American plane appeared over the horizon. The former prisoners watched, hoping. But, instead of supplies, the pilot hurled a note down to them saying that the supplies would be dropped the next day.
And then he dropped something else. Tumbling down from the plane, end over end and spinning gently, was a small rectangular object...a single chocolate candy bar with one bite taken out.
One candy bar and seven hundred starving, skeletonized men. One commander as emaciated as the rest.
Some leaders reward themselves first. Some leaders consider rank a privilege. Some forget the responsibility they have for the people they lead.
Not Fitzgerald.
The commander asked for the bar. Hillenbrand writes that he then had it "sliced into seven hundred slivers."
Share and share alike; no one more important than the other from the least to the greatest everyone gets a taste of the spoils. "Each man licked his finger," Hillenbrand continues, "dabbed it on a bit of chocolate, and put it in his mouth."
They savored the taste...the down payment of what was to come. In reality, the gesture did their bodies little good, but it did wonders for their spirits.
Supplies and food showed up in overwhelming quantities beginning the next day.
If I may, one more thing about this Commander Fitzgerald: When it came time for them to finally leave the disgusting hellhole called Ofuna, when the men were ready to march down to the trains on which they would begin their long journeys home, there were several men too infirm to go yet.
Hillenbrand writes that, though healthy enough to go himself, the commander watched his subordinates march off. As for those too sick to go, "Fitzgerald stayed with them, unwilling to leave until the last of his men was liberated."
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