P-47 fighter pilot Dennis Chambers had been shot down over northern Kyushu in May 1945. The twenty-six-year-old Army Air Corps captain had endured harsh interrogations from his captors, during which, in accordance with new air force policy, he told them everything he knew rather than resist until the information was pulled from him, piece by bloody piece. Like many downed airmen, he fabricated wild stories that seemed to satisfy the Japs rather than the bland truth that he didn't really know much at all about grand strategy.

Routine beatings left him bloody but not badly hurt, and then he was taken to the prison camp just outside the port city of Nagasaki.

Dennis was left counting his advantages. First, he understood a smattering of Japanese, courtesy of an immigrant houseboy his parents had employed. He gradually picked up enough from his captors to be reasonably fluent, which he kept secret.

A couple of his friends were beaten to death for minor infractions, and he'd watched in horror as one man was beheaded for some unintended insult to a guard. At least that kind of death would have been swift. All too often, punishment consisted of having rations reduced, and since the rations were already below subsistence level, that meant lingering death by painful starvation.

Although bruised and cut, he still had his health, and being a small man a little under average height and build, he didn't require much in the way of food to keep him going. Early in his captivity, Chambers realized that he could stomach eating anything if it meant surviving, and he made a point of digging up worms and eating insects to supplement the small balls of rice the Japanese provided.