NO ONE MAKES AN ENTRANCE like the Americans. One of the first indications that they were closing in was the crash of a heavy wooden crate of Cashmere Bouquet soap plunging through the roof of the Omori prison barracks, missing Army Air Forces Major Robert F. Goldsworthy by three feet. "I thought, what a hell of a thing, to live through prison life only to get killed by a case of soap," he wrote in 2000, in a comment posted to a B-29 website. Until a few weeks before, there had been little hope among the approximately 600 prisoners at the Omori main camp. On the manmade prison island in Tokyo Bay, rumors were nearly as thick as the lice and the rats. Most of the prisoners speculated that when the Americans got too close, the guards would gather them together and gun them down. And by the summer of 1945, there was little doubt that the Americans were now very, very close. From their barracks, the prisoners had seen the night skies glow from fires in Yokohama and Tokyo as they burned from massive B-29 bomber raids. Later they caught glimpses of smaller airplanes, launched from U.S. aircraft carriers, shuttling through angry puffs of anti-aircraft fire to pummel nearby airfields, port facilities, and storehouses. Their comrades were tantalizingly near.
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