‘Where there’s still life, there’s still hope.’
LOUIS ZAMPERINI
THERE ARE DIFFERENT types of courage. There’s the courage to endure the hardships that fate throws your way. There’s the courage to face your demons, and confront your fears. There’s the courage to fight.
But there’s another, quieter kind of courage. It’s perhaps more difficult than the others. It’s certainly rarer. By the time you’ve finished reading the story of Louis Zamperini, I think you’ll understand what I mean.
The Second World War was a time when ordinary people were called upon to do extraordinary things. The young Zamperini was far from extraordinary, unless you count his ability to get into trouble. He was a tough, unruly little kid. He was drinking and smoking by the time he was eight. He also became an adept thief and scam artist. The name Louis Zamperini was well known to the local police of Torrance, California.
All in all, he was not the kind of youngster who seemed destined for great things.
As a teenager, however, he turned his life around. He became a champion long-distance runner, and qualified for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He finished eighth in the 5,000 metres, thanks to a final spurt of speed. Not fast enough for a medal, but he was still the fastest American, and his performance caught the interest of Adolf Hitler, who asked to meet him.
‘Ah,’ Hitler said, as they shook hands. ‘The boy with the fast finish.’
Zamperini didn’t think much of the Führer, and his success on the track hadn’t entirely killed off the cheeky kid inside. To make his feelings clear, he climbed a 50-foot flagpole outside the Reich Chancellery one night and stole a Nazi swastika – a souvenir of the Games that he would keep for the rest of his life.
Zamperini had challenged Hitler once. Like many of his fellow Americans, he would soon be called upon to do it a second time …
*
Zamperini’s intention was to take part in the 1940 Tokyo Olympics, but they never happened. War got in the way. The young Zamperini found his career heading in a very different direction. He trained as a bombardier in the American Air Force, before becoming part of a B-24 crew stationed in Hawaii.
On 27 May 1943, his life changed.
An American aircraft had crashed near Palmyra in the northern Pacific. The call came in for Zamperini and his B-24 crew to mount a search-and-rescue mission. But about 800 miles south of Hawaii, things went very wrong. One of the B-24’s engines failed. In a moment of panic, another crew member accidentally switched off a second engine. Bad move. The plane fell from the sky. Like a stone.
From a height of 1,000 metres the aircraft entered freefall. Imagine the violence as it hit the water. It did a half-cartwheel in the air, then exploded and broke up as if it had crashed into solid rock. Zamperini would later compare it to being hit on the head with a sledgehammer. It was a miracle that anyone survived the impact.
As the remains of the aircraft sank below the waves, Zamperini lost consciousness. He woke up moments later to find himself stuck in the sinking, twisted remnants of the B-24’s fuselage. Somehow he managed to squeeze himself out of the wreckage and into the water, ripping all the skin from his back as he did so.
When he emerged above the surface he saw smoke, blood and twisted chunks of deformed metal. Of the eleven members of the B-24’s crew, he saw only two other survivors.
Russell Phillips was the pilot, Francis McNamara the tailgunner. Phillips was in a very bad way. Blood was pouring from his carotid artery and Zamperini used all his strength to pull him aboard a life raft. McNamara joined them. After the horror of the plane crash, the three survivors must have been thanking God that they were alive and safe.
They were alive, but they weren’t safe. Not by a long chalk. In fact, their problems were only just beginning.
*
It didn’t take long for the sharks to find them, attracted by the human blood in the water. Zamperini later recorded feeling them rub the underside of their raft. As the raft deteriorated, the creatures started thrusting themselves over the sides, forcing the castaways to beat them back with their oars. They were under constant threat of shark attack. But terrifying though that was, far more dangerous was the threat of thirst, starvation and exposure.
The lifeboat had a few provisions: a handful of chocolate bars, some tins of water, a flare, some pliers, a few fish hooks and line. The chocolate was fortified with the vitamins and minerals they needed to survive. They were supposed to eat one square a day. During the first night, McNamara gorged the whole lot. Leaving them with nothing to eat.
The water lasted less than a week. It must have been agony, to be surrounded by seawater, knowing that to drink it would be suicide. They managed to catch a little water in their tins when it rained, but they were forced to hydrate themselves by other means. They were able to catch the occasional sea bird that landed on their raft – including albatrosses. They would devour the meat raw – the feet, the eyeballs, the lot – and drink the blood to stave off their thirst.
On one occasion, Zamperini ripped off the head of an albatross and held the neck over the open mouth of the ailing McNamara, squeezing the bird’s body so every last drop of thick, warm blood trickled down his parched throat.
But even with the occasional fish or bird, food was horribly scarce. The trio grew painfully thin as their bodies used up their fat reserves and started to waste away.
They had to be inventive. On one occasion Zamperini grabbed the tail of a four-foot shark. It reared up, mouth wide open, ready to attack them. Phillips shoved a flare canister in its mouth to stop it biting them, and Zamperini gouged the pair of pliers through its eye and into its brain, killing it.
They couldn’t eat the whole beast: thankfully Zamperini knew that raw shark meat would make them very ill. The only bit you can eat raw is the liver, which is full of essential vitamins. Ravenous, they ripped it from the shark’s carcass and devoured it, shovelling lumps of raw, warm, quivering liver down their throats in a blood-soaked, frenzied feast.
The days and nights passed. The raft drifted. The men clung to life and sanity. And then things grew even worse.
After twenty-seven days, a bomber appeared in the sky. It must have spotted the raft. They soon discovered the aircraft was Japanese. For the next forty-five minutes it strafed overhead, firing on them mercilessly. They were like sitting ducks in a pond.
Zamperini jumped into the water, and dived down as deep as he could to avoid the machine-gun bullets that ripped through the raft and water. As he surfaced, he beat off the sharks that were attacking him by thumping them with all his might on the nose and gills.
Phillips and McNamara had no strength left and could only lie in the raft awaiting death. Astonishingly, none of the Japanese bullets hit them, though many punctured the already sinking raft. This only encouraged the sharks to try their luck at the stricken craft, now semi-submerged beneath the waves.
As the aircraft disappeared over the horizon, Zamperini found himself praying for the first time.
He made a pact with God: if you save me, he promised, I’ll be yours for ever. It was the desperate prayer of a desperate man.
Painstakingly Louis began to patch the raft, one puncture at a time. If he failed in this task, he knew that they would eventually be taken by the sharks.
McNamara passed away on the thirty-third day. By this point he looked like no more than a skeleton with a thin covering of skin. His remaining companions spoke a few solemn words, then tipped him overboard. Now they were two.
Phillips had astonishingly survived the awful injuries he sustained in the crash. Now he and Zamperini clung to life as they continued to drift, not knowing where they were or what would become of them. Two more weeks passed. They must have felt like months. But on the forty-seventh day, they spotted land. The raft had drifted south-west more than 2,000 miles. By sheer courage and endurance, they had survived the longest known journey ever in a life raft.
They were now approaching the Marshall Islands. The relief they felt at seeing land must have been incalculable.
But if they hoped their hardship was over they were sorely mistaken. Instead, they were about to enter hell itself.
The Marshall Islands were controlled by the Japanese. Zamperini and Phillips were immediately picked up by the Japanese Navy. These two men on the brink of death were tied to a mast and whiplashed with a pistol until they were unconscious.
They were alive – just – but now they were in the hands of the enemy and about to be delivered bound and broken to the infamous ‘Execution Island’.
*
Its real name is Kwajalein. It’s part of the Marshall Islands, 4,000 kilometres south-west of Hawaii. It was not a good place for Zamperini and Phillips to end up. Nine American Marines had previously found their way there. They’d all been tortured then beheaded with a samurai sword. Zamperini’s Japanese captors beat him and tortured him daily. For the following six weeks, he expected every day to be his last. Part of him must have wished it was.
He was kept in a cell six feet long, six feet high and thirty inches wide. At one end was a small hole that served as a toilet. It was infested with maggots. When he wasn’t being tortured or beaten, his captors made him lie with his head in the hole. His guards pushed whatever leftovers hadn’t been served to the pigs into his cell, so he had to scramble around among the faeces on the floor to pick it up.
He had persistent diarrhoea. Mucus dripped constantly from his backside. The cell was full of flies that laid their eggs in the mucus. He was infested from top to toe. All the while, the guards pierced his broken body with sharp sticks and, between the beatings, conducted perverse medical experiments on him, injecting him with agonizing unknown substances. They were stripping him of all dignity. All hope.
After six weeks of this, Zamperini and Phillips were put on a boat to the Japanese mainland. Over the next twenty-five months Zamperini would see the inside of three of the most brutal Japanese POW camps. The conditions were truly horrendous. Intentionally so. Prisoners, to the Japanese, were beneath scum, they were a scourge to their own dignity.
The prisoners were forced to sleep on wooden planks infested with huge lice and bugs that would emerge at night and crawl all over their bodies, biting them incessantly. This alone was enough to drive any normal man insane. But this was before – at the second of the POW camps, Omori, in Tokyo Bay – Zamperini met ‘the Bird’.
The Bird’s real name was Mutsuhiro Watanabe. He later appeared high in General MacArthur’s list of the forty most wanted war criminals in Japan. The Bird saw to it that Zamperini endured tortures and indignities that no man should ever have to suffer.
It started off with the beatings. Mostly, the Bird used his fists or a stick. Sometimes he used a kendo stick – a sturdy cudgel the size of a long baseball bat. If he thought Zamperini had failed to stand to attention, he would remove his belt, which had a heavy steel buckle weighing more than a pound, and, with all his strength, the Bird would whack Zamperini across the head. Each time Zamperini struggled to his feet, the Bird hit him again. Harder.
During one spell, the Bird personally beat Zamperini all day every day for a period of ten days.
The Bird pushed men to the limits of their endurance, attacking their minds as well as their bodies with continued mock executions.
The prisoners’ days were filled with brutal forced labour. And there were no exceptions, even for the very ill. If you had a temperature of 103 or less, you worked until you dropped. Then you were beaten and forced to work some more. The men were forced to walk the two miles to the steel mills every day, twice a day. Even when there was snow and ice on the ground, they went barefoot. Why? Because if the Bird saw that they had dirty shoes, not only would he beat them, he’d also make them lick the shoes clean.
The latrines were disgusting and when they were full, the prisoners had to scoop out the faeces with their hands and spread it as fertilizer on the fields. When it rained, the latrines overflowed. All over the concrete floor where men had to step. And when the Bird saw that their boots were filthy he made them lick the soles of them clean too.
‘Or die,’ he told them.
*
It started out being a day like any other. One of Zamperini’s guards ordered the prisoners to line up. They all assumed they would have to endure some new brutality.
But they didn’t.
‘The war is over,’ they were told.
At first, Zamperini didn’t believe him. But they were told to paint the letters POW on the roof of their barracks. Then they were told to wash themselves in the river.
Surely that meant something.
It did.
An American plane flew overhead. Its lights were flashing in Morse code. The flashes spelled out: ‘The war is over.’
Zamperini and his fellow POWs – those who had survived, like his crew mate Phillips – had just received their ticket out of hell.
*
Back in America, Zamperini married a beautiful young girl he had fallen in love with before he had left for war. But his years of incarceration and degradation had taken a terrifying toll on his mind.
Although the world might have seen a war hero who had finally made it home, there was much more going on below the surface. It’s so common, even today, for soldiers to come home suffering terribly from the effects of what they have survived. These days we have a name for it: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSO). Back then, they didn’t. There is little doubt, after everything Zamperini had endured, that he was suffering badly from this condition.
He started to drink heavily, and every night his dreams were haunted by the horrors he’d experienced and the people who had inflicted them upon him.
Especially the Bird.
His sadistic captor came to him every night, filling Zamperini with feelings of hate and revenge.
Hate and revenge are not good companions. They can poison our lives. Nobody, I think, would have blamed Zamperini for succumbing to this. It would take a power greater than himself to open his eyes.
In 1949, Louis Zamperini was taken by his then desperate wife, to a talk by the young Christian evangelist Billy Graham. He sat there filled with anger at the words of forgiveness he heard being preached. Then something happened. Like a lightning bolt. In his rage he remembered the prayer he’d offered up on that lonely life raft six years previously as the Japanese bomber had disappeared into the distance.
If you save me, I’ll be yours for ever.
That night he knelt and prayed for God’s help and mercy to heal him. And God answered. He found himself being given the courage to confront his past, and to embrace the one quality that would help him regain his life.
That quality was forgiveness.
He knew he had to forgive his tormentors. And he didn’t just pay lip service to the idea. He really forgave them. Face to face.
In 1950, Zamperini travelled back to Japan. There, he met many of the guards who had terrorized him in the Japanese POW camps. He told them that he bore them no ill will. And he meant it. So far as he was concerned, the slate was wiped clean. As he wrote in his autobiography: ‘The one who forgives never brings up the past to that person’s face. When you forgive, it’s like it never happened. True forgiveness is complete and total.’
But what of the Bird? Did Zamperini ever come face to face with his arch-torturer? Did he ever manage to look him in the eye and tell him that he forgave the indignities that man had inflicted upon him? He wanted to, and he tried to do so on several occasions. But the Bird would never meet with him. He couldn’t face Zamperini’s forgiveness. To confront such mercy was too overwhelming.
As for Zamperini, his life’s journey was complete.
*
Louis Zamperini’s life had been one of unimaginable challenges that required almost superhuman feats of courage and endurance to overcome. The courage to remain alive when cast adrift on that ocean. The spirit to endure the pain, suffering and dehumanizing indignities inflicted upon him by a war criminal and his ruthless fellow guards.
But the courage Louis showed during time of war is only surpassed by the courage he showed in time of peace.
It takes far more guts to forgive than to fight. To maintain peace requires more grit than to perpetuate war. But how many of us could imagine finding the strength and spirit to shake the hand of those who might have brutalized us in such a fashion, and act as if the past had never happened?
Louis Zamperini did. And for me, that was the bravest thing he ever did.