Louis Zamperini - obituary

Louis Zamperini, who has died aged 97, was a teenage American track star at the 1936 Berlin Olympics but went on to be more sorely tested as a prisoner of the Japanese during the Second World War, an ordeal he narrowly survived by drawing on extraordinary inner reserves of resilience in the face of appalling brutality and degradation.

Presumed dead after crash-landing in a USAAF bomber in the South Pacific in 1943, Zamperini survived by clinging to a raft for 47 days, only to be captured by the Japanese, incarcerated in a series of prison camps and beaten almost daily for two and a half years while kept on a near-starvation diet.

More than a third of the 35,000 US servicemen in Japanese captivity died, having been beaten, starved, dehydrated, made to take part in medical experiments or forced into slave labour. This compared to the American death rate in German PoW camps of barely one per cent. But in spite of his dehumanising treatment, Zamperini could be counted lucky: his modest fame as an Olympian and his consequent potential as a propaganda tool almost certainly saved his life when he was captured after nearly seven weeks adrift as a castaway and held at Kwajalein, a Japanese-held atoll in the Marshall Islands known as Execution Island.

Louis Zamperini running in 1940

After being moved from one camp to another, Zamperini arrived at Omori outside Tokyo where he met the man who nearly proved to be his nemesis, a psychotic corporal called Mutsuhiro Watanabe, known as “the Bird”. This spectacularly cruel guard beat Zamperini every day and ordered his fellow PoWs to do the same. Once, on Watanabe’s orders, Zamperini was punched in the face by each of 220 of his comrades in turn.

Displaying a weird streak of sexual frisson, Watanabe himself would often beat Zamperini on the temple with the heavy brass buckle of his belt, then helping him staunch the blood and whispering words of comfort before attacking him again in exactly the same way.

As the tide of war turned against Japan, “the Bird” grew increasingly violent towards Zamperini; the pair became locked in a race for survival, with Zamperini not knowing whether Watanabe would break him before liberation, or whether the Japanese would enact the emperor’s order in the event of surrender to “kill all” prisoners.

After the war, Watanabe’s name appeared on a list of Japanese war criminals, ranked alongside that of the country’s prime minister, Hideki Tojo. In the immediate postwar years Zamperini made strenuous efforts to track him down, only to learn that his captor had either committed suicide or had disappeared without trace.

Louis Zamperini during the war

As hard as he tried, Zamperini could never erase the memory of his cruel treatment at Watanabe’s hands. A full half-century had passed when, in 1996, Peter Hadfield, a British journalist based in Tokyo, tracked Watanabe down and published an interview with him in the Daily Mail.

When a producer with the CBS American television network told Zamperini that Watanabe was still alive, he was dumbfounded. CBS filmed an interview with the former prison camp guard, but although Zamperini agreed to meet his captor in a Tokyo hotel, Watanabe refused point blank. Having evaded justice by slipping into hiding, Watanabe died a free man in April 2003. Although Zamperini had become a born-again Christian many years earlier, he could never forgive his former tormentor.

The son of working-class Italian immigrants, Louis Silvie Zamperini was born in Olean, New York, on January 26 1917. When the child was two, his father moved the family to Torrance, California, finding employment as a railway electrician. Known at home as Toots, Louis spent a delinquent boyhood brawling, thieving, running rackets, selling stolen scrap metal, and assaulting police officers. By the time he enrolled at Torrance High School he was a serial troublemaker.

But encouraged and coached by his elder brother, Pete, Louis excelled at athletics and shattered several school records, running a mile in an impressive 4 mins 42 secs. In 1934, when he was 17, he broke the national high school record at the Southern California Track and Field Championship with a time of 4 mins 21.3 secs, earning himself the nickname “the Torrance Tornado”.

Louis Zamperini (left) with his brother Pete Zamperini in 1934

When he graduated in December 1935, Louis determined to run at the Berlin Olympics the following year, and began training for the 1500 metres (the Games offered no mile race).

Although he failed to qualify for the 1500 metres event, he became the youngest distance runner to make the American Olympic team, finishing seventh in the 5000 metres final, having run the last lap in 56 seconds. Louis was presented to Adolf Hitler, who congratulated him with the observation: “Ah, you’re the boy with the fast finish.”

Returning home to Torrance and a hero’s welcome, Louis had already set his sights on the 1940 Olympics in Tokyo. But his dreams of a four minute mile were destroyed by the approach of war, the cancellation of the Games, his enlistment in the US Army Air Force in 1941 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the following December.

In August 1942 Zamporini graduated from the Midland Army Flying School and was commissioned a second lieutenant, posted to the USAAF air base at Ephrata, Washington. Assigned to the No 372 Squadron of the 307th Bomb Group, Seventh Air Force, he was forward bomb aimer in a B-24 Liberator bomber nicknamed Super Man but dubbed “The Flying Coffin” on account of its excessive weight, cramped cockpit and all-round unreliability. Deployed to Hawaii, he ran laps of the airfield between practice sea searches to keep himself in Olympic condition.

On Christmas Eve 1942, having been moved to Midway, his unit attacked the Japanese base on Wake Atoll in what was then the biggest raid of the Pacific war. A few weeks later, Zamperini was aboard Super Man when it was attacked by a group of Japanese Zero fighters during a bombing raid on the phosphate-rich atoll of Nauru. The aircraft limped back to its base on the tiny island of Funafuti, where the astonished ground crew found Super Man’s fuselage riddled with 594 bullet holes.

When Zamperini’s Liberator was badly damaged in a Japanese bombing raid on Funafuti in April 1943, he and his pilot, Russell Allen Phillips, were transferred to the No 42 Squadron of the 11th Bomb Group and assigned to another B-24 bomber nicknamed Green Hornet, based at Kuala on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. They were joined by a new tail gunner, Francis McNamara.

On May 27 Green Hornet took off on a search and rescue mission some 200 miles north of Palmyra, but ditched in the ocean when both port engines failed. Although eight crew died, Zamperini, Phillips and McNamara managed to scramble on to two life rafts. That night McNamara panicked and ate the last of their emergency rations (a chocolate bar), forcing the others to catch seabirds and eat them raw. For the following 47 days, apart from a handful of fish and the liver of a small shark, they survived the baking equatorial heat on trapped rainwater from the occasional shower.

Louis Zamperini perched on B-18 Bomber

On day 27, when a passing Japanese bomber strafed them, Zamperini dived into the water, only to be attacked by a shark which he punched on the nose before scrabbling back aboard the one remaining raft. More marauding sharks circled closer, and for the first time since his childhood, Zamperini, a long-lapsed Roman Catholic, began to pray, aloud.

After 33 days adrift in the South Pacific, McNamara died of starvation. Two weeks later, Zamperini and Phillips were picked up by a Japanese patrol boat off the Marshall Islands, having drifted for 2,000 miles and losing half their normal body weight. During 42 days on Execution Island, Zamperini was questioned about US military tactics and equipment, and injected with a strange green fluid which resulted in dengue fever.

Transferred to the secret interrogation centre at Ofuna near Yokohama on the Japanese mainland, Zamperini was listed as an “unarmed combatant” beyond the jurisdiction of international law. Because news of his capture was suppressed, he was officially posted missing, presumed dead. In time his obituaries appeared, life insurance benefits were paid and posthumous medals posted to his mother by the US military.

At Ofuna, Zamperini found that the smallest violation of the rules resulted in severe beatings, often at the hands of the medical officer, the pitiless Sueharu Kitamura, known as “the Butcher” or “the Quack”. Starvation rations were infested with maggots, rat droppings and sand and grit that split and cracked the captives’ teeth.

In September 1944, after a year and 15 days at Ofuna, Zamperini was transferred to Omori, a prison camp on an artificial island in Tokyo Bay. It was there that he encountered among the guards Corporal Mutsuhiro Watanabe, “the Bird”. Watanabe soon became obsessed with Zamperini and his fame as an athlete, resenting him on sight and identifying him as his “number one prisoner”.

Corporal Mutsuhiro Watanabe, known as “the Bird”

For months Zamperini lived in daily fear of the man he came to regard as an inhuman monster. But late in 1944 Watanabe was posted to another camp. In March 1945, with American B-29 bombers raining incendiaries over Tokyo, Zamperini and a group of fellow prisoners were moved to a camp known as 4B at Naoetsu, an industrial village on Japan’s west coast. On arrival Zamperini was dismayed to find that Watanabe, too, had been transferred to the same camp. It was, Zamperini told his biographer Laura Hillenbrand, the darkest moment of his life.

After the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, the Japanese surrendered, but Watanabe had already vanished from the liberated camp at Naoetsu.

Louis Zamperini (right) falling into the arms of his family on his return home (Courtesy of Louis Zamperini, published in Unbroken)

Repatriated in October, Zamperini was lionised by the American media, married and settled in Hollywood, where he took a low-paid job at the Warner Bros film studios, teaching actors to ride horses. But during training for the 1948 London Olympics, he aggravated an old war wound to his ankle and was told by doctors that he would never run again.

Haunted by wartime memories, a traumatised Zamperini took up drinking and smoking, and grappled with a series of mental health problems; in the meantime he determined to find and kill “the Bird”. In 1950 he returned to Japan and looked for Watanabe at Sugamo prison, where many former prison guards were held as war criminals, only to be told his tormentor was dead.

Louis Zamperini on his wedding day in 1946

Furthermore, a newspaper story in 1946 had reported that Watanabe had taken his own life in a lover’s pact. In fact, “the Bird” had gone into hiding in Japan, emerging only after an amnesty for Japanese war criminals was declared in 1958. He went on to set up an successful insurance agency in Tokyo, and made regular visits to the United States.

Zamperini with his wife

In 1949, at the insistence of his wife, Zamperini reluctantly attended a Billy Graham rally in Los Angeles, experienced a religious conversion, and became a born-again Christian. Although determined to settle his score with Watanabe, Zamperini forgave the Japanese people for his wartime sufferings, and devoted himself to charitable work and speaking engagements. In 1954 he helped establish the Victory Boys Camp, a non-profit making scheme for troubled teenagers in Los Angeles. Later he ran a lunch club for pensioners at the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood.

In 1998, on his 81st birthday, Zamperini ran a one-kilometre stretch of the Olympic torch relay in Japan for the Winter Olympics at Nagano. He was still running a mile uphill every day well into his eighties.

Zamperini displaying his fitness in later life (Courtesy of Louis Zamperini, published in Unbroken)

He published his memoirs in 1956 (updated in 2003) under the title Devil at My Heels. In 2011 he was the subject of a full-scale biography, Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, the author of Seabiscuit, the bestselling story of a Depression-era American racehorse. Although Zamperini had been interviewed exhaustively by Laura Hillenbrand in the course of some 75 telephone conversations, the two never actually met, mainly on account of the author’s battle with chronic fatigue syndrome. The book has been turned into a film, directed by Angelina Jolie, which is to be released in December.

Louis Zamperini married, in 1946, Cynthia Applewhite, who died of cancer in 2001. Their daughter survives him.

Louis Zamperini, born January 26 1917, died July 2 2014

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