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    33 Incredible True Stories of Survival
    33 Incredible True Stories of Survival
    33 Incredible True Stories of Survival
    Ebook146 pages1 hour

    33 Incredible True Stories of Survival

    By Martin Ettington

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    About this ebook

    I have my own survival stories and maybe this is part of the reason why all these other stories interest me so much.

    Everyone loves to learn about survival stories because it confirms the importance of the human spirit to live through trying and deadly situations.

    I’ve included thirty three true life stories in this book. The criteria was that the persons in these events had to make a conscious decision to live. They decided not to give up and some did truly incredible things to survive.

    We need to ask ourselves could we do some of the things they did to survive. For example, how many of us could cut off a hand to live if we were trapped in the wilderness?

    How many of us could survive a raft in the sea for a month to then be put into a POW prison and survive harsh treatment and torture there.

    These people have all illustrated the power of the human spirit to live through these experiences. And these experiences made them more confident people and better able to live through difficult situations in the future.
    These stories are divided up into six categories:

    Survival In War
    Survival in the Wilderness and Mountains
    Survival in the Ocean
    Survival in the Arctic and Antarctic
    Surviving the Desert
    More Survival Stories for Ones which don’t fit a category

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMartin Ettington
    Release dateJun 18, 2020
    ISBN9780463498002
    33 Incredible True Stories of Survival
    Author

    Martin Ettington

    The owner Martin K. Ettington is an Engineer by training and has had multiple careers. These include technical sales for GE and HP. Martin also Owns his own software and consulting business.Martin’s interest in the Paranormal and Occult goes back to his childhood. He has had many paranormal experiences and has been a student of Eastern Philosophies and Meditation for 35 years.Seeking Enlightenment; he knows that we are already all Enlightened. We just have to realize this deeply.His books are expressions of his creativity to help others understand what he has internalized through study, experience, and membership in different societies.Not many technical persons or scientists spend a lot of time in parallel studying the Metaphysical and have had many spiritual or psychic experiences too.Therefore, Martin believes that he can provide a unique vantage point to integrate Western Scientific thinking with Eastern exploration of the mind and spirit.

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      Book preview

      33 Incredible True Stories of Survival - Martin Ettington

      I have my own survival stories and maybe this is part of the reason why all these other stories interest me so much.

      Everyone loves to learn about survival stories because it confirms the importance of the human spirit to live through trying and deadly situations.

      I’ve included thirty three true life stories in this book. The criteria was that the persons in these events had to make a conscious decision to live. They decided not to give up and some did truly incredible things to survive.

      We need to ask ourselves could we do some of the things they did to survive. For example, how many of us could cut off a hand to live if we were trapped in the wilderness?

      How many of us could survive a raft in the sea for a month to then be put into a POW prison and survive harsh treatment and torture there.

      These people have all illustrated the power of the human spirit to live through these experiences. And these experiences made them more confident people and better able to live through difficult situations in the future.

      These stories are divided up into five categories:

      Survival In War

      Survival in the Wilderness and Mountains

      Survival in the Ocean

      Survival in the Arctic and Antarctic

      Surviving the Desert

      More Survival Stories for Ones which don’t fit a category

      2.0 Survival in War

      War produces lot of people who survive deadly and dangerous situations. The examples in this chapter are of people who struggled and lived through war conditions which would cause many persons to just give up hope and perish.

      2.1 Louis Zamperini in World War Two

      World War II service

      Japanese-occupied Nauru Island under attack by Liberator bombers of the Seventh Air Corps, April 1943.

      Zamperini enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps in September 1941 and earned a commission as a second lieutenant. He was posted to the Pacific island of Funafuti as a bombardier on the Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber Super Man.

      Zamperini examines a hole in his B-24D Liberator Super Man made by a 20 mm shell over Nauru.

      In April 1943, during a bombing mission against the Japanese-held island of Nauru, the bomber was badly damaged in combat. On May 4,1943 Zamperini appeared in the New York Times where he was credited with administering first aid to five wounded members of his Liberator bomber crew and saving the lives of two on the return flight from the April 21, 1943 Nauru raid.

      Following the successful raid, in which Zamperini participated as bombardier, his craft was attacked by three Japanese Zero’s. The Zero’s were fought off but not before five of the crew were wounded, one of whom died, and the bomber was severely damaged. Ground crewmen counted 500 bullet and shell fragment holes in the fuselage and tail structure of the big four-engine bomber after it had skidded to a stop with a flat tire.

      Lost during search mission

      With Super Man no longer air-worthy, and a number of the crew wounded, the healthy crew members were transferred to Hawaii to await reassignment. Zamperini, along with some other former Super Man crewmates, was assigned to conduct a search for a lost aircraft and crew. They were given another B-24, Green Hornet, notorious among the pilots as a defective lemon. (Aircraft records show several B-24s with the name: Green Hornet and The Green Hornet; in this case the name was verified from Zamperini's diary before the mission.)

      On 27 May 1943, while on the search, mechanical difficulties caused the bomber to crash into the ocean 850 miles (1,370 km) south of Oahu, killing eight of the 11 men aboard.

      The three survivors were Zamperini and his crewmates, pilot Russell Allen Phillips and Francis McNamara; with little food and no water, they subsisted on captured rainwater, small fish eaten raw, and birds that landed on their raft. McNamara ate all the chocolate they had in a panic, but he later redeemed himself by using an oar to defend the survivors from a shark attack. They attempted to gain the attention of a search plane but failed. With the few tools they were able to salvage from the crash, the men were able to manage on two small rafts that got released. They caught two albatrosses, one of which they ate, and used pieces as bait to catch fish, all while fending off constant shark attacks and nearly being capsized by a storm. They were strafed a number of times by a Japanese bomber, which punctured their life raft, but no one was hit. After 33 days at sea, McNamara died; Zamperini and Phillips wrapped up his body and pushed it overboard.

      Prisoner of war

      On their 47th day adrift, Zamperini and Phillips reached land in the Marshall Islands and were immediately taken prisoner by the Japanese Navy. They were held in captivity, severely beaten, and mistreated until the end of the war in August 1945. Initially held at Kwajalein Atoll, after 42 days they were transferred to the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp at Ōfuna, for captives who were not registered as prisoners of war (POW). Zamperini was later transferred to Tokyo's Ōmori POW camp, and was eventually transferred to the Naoetsu POW camp in northern Japan, where he stayed until the war ended. He was tormented by prison guard Mutsuhiro The Bird Watanabe, who was later included in General Douglas MacArthur’s list of the forty most wanted war criminals in Japan.

      Zamperini was held at the same camp as then-Major Greg Pappy Boyington, and in his book, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Boyington describes the Italian recipes Zamperini wrote to keep the prisoners’ minds off the food and conditions.

      Post-war life

      Zamperini had at first been declared missing at sea, and then, a year and a day after his disappearance, killed in action. When he eventually returned home, he received a hero's welcome.

      Zamperini and Cynthia Applewhite were married in 1946, until her death in 2001; they had two children, Cissy and Luke.

      Evangelism

      In a televised interview on the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2003, Zamperini related that after the war, he had nightmares about strangling his former captors and began drinking heavily, trying to forget his experiences as a POW. His wife Cynthia attended one of the evangelistic crusades led by Billy Graham in Los Angeles, and became a born-again Christian. In 1949, at the encouragement of his wife and her Christian friends, Zamperini reluctantly agreed to attend a crusade. Graham's preaching reminded him of his prayers during his time on the life raft and imprisonment, and Zamperini committed his life to Christ. Following this, he forgave his captors, and his nightmares ceased.

      Later Graham helped Zamperini launch a new career as a Christian evangelist. One of his recurring themes was forgiveness, and he visited many of the guards from his POW days to let them know that he had forgiven them. This included an October 1950 visit to Sugamo Prison in Tokyo, where many war criminals were imprisoned, and expressed forgiveness to them. Zamperini told CBN that some became Christians in response.

      2.2 Five Americans On A Lifeboat Sailed Through A Typhoon

      Calvin Graef, a prisoner of war aboard a Japanese vessel, was cooking rice when he heard his captors in a panic. US ships had

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