News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: From Olympic athlete to POW

Date: February 16, 2002

"From Olympic athlete to POW, Zamperini's seen, done it all

By Rick Chernitzer, Stars and StripesStripes Sunday magazine, February 10, 2002

For Lou Zamperini, life couldn’t be any richer at age 85.

Olympic track star. World War II B-24 crewmember. Olympic torch bearer … twice.

A reed-thin man with a wide grin, Zamperini moves about like a man half his age. Which, he jokes, is still pretty old.

Recently, Zamperini traveled to the tiny Army outpost of Kwajalein on the Republic of the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific to revisit where he was held for 43 days by the Imperial Japanese navy. It was part of a trip to see if the remains of nine men possibly executed on the island can be found.

Zamperini said he saw nine names etched on his prison wall that claimed they were "marooned" on Makin Atoll, 1,000 miles south of Kwajalein, and then transported here. Guards told him the men were beheaded. Zamperini is credited with getting the Army’s Central Identification Lab involved in recovery efforts.

"None of this would have been if it wasn’t for Zamperini’s actions," said Ben Carson, a former Marine who participated in the raid where the nine Marines were captured. Carson has been the leading force for opening an investigation into the location of their remains. "I want him to get credit for that."

Poor country boy turns Olympic runner

Zamperini grew up near Los Angeles. He had a knack for running, and in high school, set a record for the mile. Selected for the 1936 U.S. Olympic team, Zamperini sailed across the Atlantic to join his teammates, among them the legendary track star Jesse Owens, his roommate during the Berlin Games.

He said Owens "was a true gentleman. And we didn’t look at him as being a black man. All of us athletes treated each other as equals."

But the Games weren’t foremost on his mind, Zamperini said. What mattered most was the great food. Growing up a poor country boy, he had to shoot rabbits and ducks for stew. He put on weight by the time he reached the Games.

"I couldn’t lose the weight I’d put on when we reached Germany," he told one biographer. "I got into the final of the 5,000 meters, but couldn’t keep up the pace."

He forced himself to sprint harder, and finished the final lap in 56 seconds, a record. But his poor performance earlier in the race kept him from a medal — he finished eighth. Zamperini’s performance was still enough to draw attention — Adolf Hitler wanted to meet the young American.

"I didn’t think much about it at the time," Zamperini recalled. "He was just another person to me. It was only later that I thought about where I was and what I had done."

Besides, he said, his mind was on how close he’d come. He figured there was another chance for him during the 1940 Olympics. But that never happened.

Adrift on the Pacific

Graduating from the University of Southern California, Zamperini joined the Army Air Corps once America entered World War II. A captain, Zamperini was a member of a B-24 crew based in Hawaii. On May 27, 1943, his commander ordered a search-and-rescue mission for a B-25 crew who reported going down in the Pacific. Their own aircraft had just returned from a mission and was being worked on, so the commander told them to take an older plane, known as "the Green Hornet."

"The Green Hornet was a lemon. We used it for … picking up lettuce and stuff for the cook," he said, adding the plane had just barely passed its last inspection.

Sure enough, the aircraft developed engine trouble and crashed into the Pacific. Zamperini got tangled up in cables and started going down with the sinking aircraft.

"I felt this was a hopeless situation and I knew it. This was it," he said. "My life didn’t pass before my eyes, but I knew I had had it."

Suddenly, the cable dragging Zamperini down snapped and he frantically swam for the surface. The plane’s life raft had just floated out of range of him, but he saw the last three feet of cord attached to it slither by. He grabbed that and hauled himself to the raft. He made his way to the tail gunner and pilot, both injured, and got them aboard the raft. At the time, he believed their rescue was imminent.

But the days stretched into weeks. They learned to be adept fishermen, killing fish by jamming their eyes with a screwdriver.

On the 27th day, a plane spotted the crew. But as the plane came closer, it became recognizable as a Japanese dive bomber, which then spent the next half-hour strafing the hapless raft. Zamperini, the only one still physically fit, dived under the raft. The other two couldn’t move, so he prayed for their safety. Amazingly, no one was hit.

But the situation was desperate. Fighting off sharks, dehydration and exposure, the tail gunner grew very ill, and Zamperini took more extreme measures to keep the man alive.

"When I caught an albatross … I would tear off their head, and hold the bird upside down and just let it drain" into the gunner’s mouth, to give him nutrients, "which kept him alive for 33 days."

Despite his efforts, the gunner succumbed to the elements. The trio were sleeping on the raft, fighting off the bitter cold of evening, when Zamperini noticed the man had no pulse.

"That next morning, the sun came up, and we buried him at sea. He just sank and disappeared out of sight."

The names on the wall

After 47 days adrift, they saw land for the first time. Zamperini and the pilot, figuring they were near the Marshall or Gilbert islands, carefully approached the shore, aware these islands were in Japanese hands. A patrol boat spotted them and took them to an island.

"They treated us OK," on that island, he said. He weighed in at about 65 pounds, having lost about 100 pounds. They remained overnight before being taken to Kwajalein, a Japanese air field at the time, and held there another 43 days. When he first made it to his cell, "I sat there, and I looked down and saw my skeletal frame. Two months before, I was a world-class athlete. And here I was, skin and bones. I just started to cry."

What was worse, perhaps, was etched into the cold stone walls of his cell were the names of nine U.S. Marines under the heading "Nine Marines marooned on Makin Island August 18, 1942."

The first person to see Zamperini was an island native. In perfect English, the native asked him if he was Lou Zamperini, the Olympic runner. Astonished, he said yes, and the pair talked for about 10 minutes about his career. As the man left, Zamperini asked him about the nine Marines. The man told him they were beheaded, and that it was most likely what would happen to him.

When he asked the guards about the nine names and what had happened to the them, they ran their fingers across their necks, indicating they had been beheaded.

He was interrogated about airplanes and the airfields on Oahu. While he never told them anything of importance, he did tell them about several decoy airfields as if they were legitimate targets. That spared him some torture and got him some nourishment.

"I played on like I was reluctant to tell them anything," he recalled. "They were so excited to get something out of me."

Declared dead

After six weeks on Kwajalein, Zamperini was spared certain death and sent to a prison near Yokohama, Japan.

On his way there, he was kept in an officer’s stateroom, where he found a large bottle of sake. Still thinking he was going to be killed eventually, he decided to have a drink or two. Or three. Eventually, he finished the bottle.

"If I’m gonna go," he said. "I’m going to drink that sake."

The officer found him and broke his nose.

When he got to the Yokohama prison, he discovered why he had been spared. A Japanese friend of Zamperini’s from USC, who had been a spy at school, had become an officer in the Japanese army. He convinced his leaders that Zamperini would be of better use if he was used as a celebrity on the radio.

"He never asked me any military questions, just talked about sports," Zamperini said. "That was why."

After 18 months, he was declared dead by the U.S. government. The plan, as it was explained to him, was that he would be forced to make a broadcast to tell the world he was alive and the Japanese had rescued him. Knowing he wouldn’t do something like that willingly, the Japanese, according to him, mistreated him so badly in the camp, "that they figured I would be willing to do anything to make them stop."

Where The Bird came in

One man, dubbed "The Bird," routinely sought out Zamperini to hit him. "We called him that because we couldn’t think of a name mean enough to describe him, so we just took that," he explained.

One day, two men from Radio Tokyo showed up and asked Zamperini if he thought his parents missed him, and how sad it was that they probably thought he was dead, "a real sob story." They asked him if he wanted to make a broadcast to let them know he was alive. He was taken to Tokyo, where he got an American-style meal and read a brief statement he drafted, telling listeners he was alive and had been rescued by the Japanese.

"Nothing wrong with that," he said, as he felt it wasn’t a propaganda statement.

Two weeks later, the men from the station returned and asked him to do another broadcast. They returned him to the studios, where they handed him a script.

"I picked it up and read it, and it was propaganda," he said. "I said, ‘There’s no way I can read this.’"

Since he refused, Zamperini was transferred to a more severe camp elsewhere in Japan. The Bird followed him to the new camp.

"My knees were buckling," he said when he saw the Bird come out to address the new prisoners.

The Bird continued his mistreatment of Zamperini, making him hold a heavy wooden plank over his head, among other punishments.

He spent the rest of the war at this camp, doing odd work for the guards, including sewing and cutting their hair. He was repatriated in late 1945 after 21&Mac218;2 years of imprisonment.

A new life

After the war, Zamperini said he had a hard time making peace with himself enough to forgive the Bird.

It was only after his conversion to Christianity and a missionary tour of Japan in 1950, before he was able to forgive the guard. By then, however, he had heard the Bird killed himself after the war ended, possibly to avoid a war crimes trial.

Zamperini wrote a book about his experiences as a prisoner, published in 1954, and is working on a revised edition. The revised book will serve as the basis for an upcoming movie about his experiences, starring Nicolas Cage.

"It’s funny," he told a group of well-wishers at an honorary dinner on Kwajalein recently. "One of the movie producers said, ‘We have to get this movie rolling; Nicolas Cage isn’t getting any younger.’ Well, I laughed, and said, ‘In that case, I’ll play the role.’"

Last April, Zamperini returned to Kwajalein for the first time since the war. He wandered around the old Japanese bunkers, visited the cemetery and spoke with historians on the island.

At the time, he told the base newspaper, "When I first thought about coming back to Kwajalein … I got chills up my spine. Coming here is full circle. I will only have good thoughts of Kwajalein now." "