US National Archives shares records behind UNBROKEN

National Archives Meets Hollywood: Shares Records Behind UNBROKEN!

Free screening, document display, and article highlight National Archives’ connection

Washington, DC

Special free screening of UNBROKEN
Tuesday, February 10, at 7 PM, William G. McGowan Theater

Join us for a free screening of the film UNBROKEN (2014; 137 minutes; trailer), based on the 2010 book by Laura Hillenbrand, UNBROKEN: A World War II Story of Survival Resilience and Redemption. The film, a World War II action drama, was produced and directed by Angelina Jolie and stars Jack O'Connell, Takamasa Ishihara, and Domhnall Gleeson. Presented in partnership with NBCUniversal and in conjunction with the UNBROKEN Featured Document display, February 5 through March 4, 2015.

Register online or call 202-357-6814. Theater doors will open 45 minutes prior to start time. Walk-ins without reservations will be admitted 15 minutes prior to start time, depending on available seats. Attendees should use the Special Event entrance on Constitution Avenue and 7th Street, NW.

UNBROKEN Featured Document Display*
February 5 through March 4, 2015, National Archives East Rotunda Gallery

The National Archives welcomes UNBROKEN with a special display of Olympian Louis "Louie" Zamperini’s wartime service records and his Purple Heart, which he gave to UNBROKEN author Laura Hillenbrand. The display is free and open to the public at the National Archives Museum in Washington, DC, on Constitution Avenue at 9th Street, NW.

On May 27, 1943, Army Air Force bombardier Louis “Louie” Zamperini’s B-24 airplane crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Louie survived 47 days at sea, only to be taken as a prisoner of war by the Japanese. His fate unknown, Louie was declared dead a year and a day after his plane went down. His family received a condolence letter from President Franklin Roosevelt and a Purple Heart medal for “wounds that resulted in his death.” Against all odds, Zamperini survived and was liberated at the end of the war. The National Archives Museum’s “Featured Documents” exhibit is made possible in part by the National Archives Foundation.

Display highlights include:

-Letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Zamperini Family after Louis was mistakenly declared deceased, May 28, 1944.* National Archives at St. Louis
-Certificate awarding the Purple Heart medal to Louis Silvie Zamperini after he was mistakenly declared deceased, October 12, 1944.* National Archives at St. Louis
-Purple Heart medal awarded to Louis Silvie Zamperini, ca. 1944. Courtesy of Laura Hillenbrand, author "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption," who received it as a gift from Louis Zamperini.

Online resources: Zamperini’s Paper Trail at the National Archives
The National Archives holds hundreds of millions of records created or received by the U.S. Government during World War II, including the original records of hero Louis Zamperini. See:
Air Crew Report on the disappearance of the Green Hornet, Zamperini's B-24 plane.
Smithsonian.com “Deep Dive” on the Air Crew Report that includes an interview with archivist Eric VanSlander.
National Archives blog post “Louis Zamperini: The Story of a True American Hero.”

The East Rotunda Gallery and William G. McGowan Theater are located in the National Archives Museum in Washington, DC. Metro accessible on Yellow or Green lines, Archives/Navy Memorial station. To verify the date and times of the programs, call the National Archives Public Programs Line at: 202-357-5000, or view the Calendar of Events online.

* Please note: a July 12, 1973, fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, MO, destroyed approximately 16-18 million Official Military Personnel Files (OMPF) of Army and Air Force service members, including Zamperini’s file. In reconstructing his service record, official copies of these original records were incorporated into Zamperini’s OMPF by the National Archives.

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‘Unbroken’ tells half of Japan’s war story

See HERE for more picture of Omori POW Camp,
One of Camps where Zamperini was held

“Unbroken” describes not just Louis Zamperini’s spirit, but the resilience of Japan’s rightists.

By James Gibney, Editorial Writer on international affairs for Bloomberg View and APP Member.

First Published by Bloomberg News, December 31, 2014


In the just-released film “Unbroken,” as in real life, U.S. Army Air Corps Lt. Louis Zamperini was beaten, starved and forced to work as a slave laborer by his Japanese captors.

Things could have been worse. Like some other war prisoners held by the Japanese, Zamperini could have been used in biological warfare experiments. Or vivisected. Or beheaded, with parts of his body then eaten by his captors. As the historian Daqing Yang notes, 9 out of 10 U.S. POWs who died in captivity in World War II did so at the hands of the Japanese.

In Japan, where “Unbroken” does not yet — and may never — have a release date, right-wing nationalists have protested the film as racist and inaccurate. “It’s pure fabrication,” asserted a representative of one such pressure group, the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact. Online petitions have described director Angelina Jolie as a “demon” and called for her to be banned from Japan.

Unfortunately, the attacks on Jolie’s film, which is really much less about Japanese brutality than the resilience of the human spirit, are part of a revisionist recrudescence under the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Several of his Cabinet members and appointees have pushed to whitewash or deny the Japanese military’s forced wartime recruitment of women as prostitutes, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops and other wartime atrocities, targeting journalists and scholars who dare to disagree.

Such behavior has roiled Japan’s relations with China and South Korea and undermined its alliance with the United States. And it has cast an ugly shadow over the impending 70th anniversary of World War II’s end. Yet that occasion also offers an opportunity for both Japan and the U.S. to relearn lessons about the uses and abuses of history, beginning with the folly of trying to cover it up.

In the two weeks following the end of hostilities on Aug. 15, 1945, and the arrival of the first U.S. troops on Aug. 28, Japan’s military engaged in a wholesale destruction of its files. Some Japanese historians estimate, for instance, that as much as 70 percent of the army’s wartime records were lost. Although the Americans, British, Chinese, Dutch, Filipinos and Russians each held separate war-crimes trials of Japanese defendants, their documentation has never been gathered in one place, making it harder to access. Meanwhile, Japanese rightists have sought to discredit the remembered accounts of Korean “comfort women” as anecdotal or concocted memory. They have also exploited inaccuracies in sensationalist best-sellers such as Iris Chang’s “The Rape of Nanking” to try to discredit larger truths.

Yet not only have many Japanese contributed unflinching histories of Japan’s wartime behavior — many available in English — but voluminous, and damning, official records exist that have yet to be fully exploited. In 2006, the U.S. government’s National Archives and Records Administration published “Researching Japanese War Crimes,” a guide to U.S. intelligence reports, captured Japanese documents and contemporary news accounts contained in various U.S. public archives.

It’s not the kind of stuff you want to read on a full stomach: In the National Archives, for instance, you can find the transcript of the trial of Japanese officers who ordered the execution, and then the cooking, of four U.S. Navy airmen downed in raids on Chichi-Jima — a fate that Lt. George H.W. Bush, who was also shot down on the raid, barely avoided.

To their credit, many Japanese scholars have drawn on such materials in their own work: U.S. documents on Japan’s biological warfare experiments on Chinese prisoners, for instance, helped to blunt the 1980s attempt by Japan’s Ministry of Education to censor references to such crimes in history textbooks.

Any forthright exploration of Japan’s wartime cruelties, of course, must be matched by an acknowledgment of the battlefield savagery of U.S. troops in the Pacific, where some members of the Greatest Generation pried gold teeth out of the mouths of still-living Japanese soldiers, strafed airmen in their parachutes, shot surrendering soldiers and sent Japanese skulls home to their sweethearts as table ornaments. Compared with the European theater, it was not exactly the Good War: “Subhuman, inhuman, lesser human, superhuman — all that was lacking in the perception of the Japanese enemy was a human like oneself,” observed the historian John Dower.

Moreover, U.S. archives lay bare another troubling aspect of U.S. wartime history: the willingness to collaborate with Japanese war criminals in the name of larger strategic interests. As Michael Petersen documents, Gen. Charles Willoughby, a die-hard anticommunist who was Douglas MacArthur’s intelligence chief, oversaw a (remarkably feckless) postwar spy network that included Masanobu Tsuji, the Imperial Army officer who helped organize the Bataan Death March that killed so many of the U.S. soldiers that MacArthur abandoned in the Philippines.

Still missing are documents showing what happened to data from the human experiments by Unit 731, the notorious Japanese chemical and biological warfare outfit headed by Gen. Shiro Ishii, who was never prosecuted by the Allies. The records also shine a light on the expedient clemency policies toward suspected war criminals such as Nobusuke Kishi, a postwar prime minister who also happens to be Abe’s grandfather.

That raises a final historical irony worth pondering over the coming anniversary year: the U.S. responsibility for shielding the progenitors of Japan’s latter-day revisionists from accountability and prosecution. Even as late as the 1990s, the U.S. State Department was arguing against releasing information on early Cold War payments by the CIA to right-wing politicians from Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Such behavior helps explain why “Unbroken” describes not just Louis Zamperini’s spirit, but the resilience of Japan’s rightists.