By Ashley Dunn
News Editor
WESLEY CHAPEL — Samuel Lum can’t recall where he was or what he was doing the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, but he does remember how it made him feel.
“‘I’m not gonna sit down and take it,” he said he remembers thinking. “‘I’m gonna fight.”
From his kitchen table in the Seven Oaks neighborhood of Wesley Chapel, 90-year-old Lum summoned up memories of World War II — flying over Germany in 1944, being captured by enemy soldiers and becoming a prisoner of war. His aging mind is beginning to lose these fascinating stories, but he and his 87-year-old wife, May, live with their son, Wally, and daughter-in-law, Robin, who helped Lum fill in the blanks.
Lum, a mild-mannered man, was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, and became a boat builder. The events that took place at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 inspired him to join the military, and he became a plane navigator.
“I flew both kinds — B-17 and B-24,” he said. He was in a B-17 the first and last time he ever had to bail out. It was his 18th mission. The date was Aug. 4, 1944.
Lum and six other soldiers were flying over Hamburg, Germany, when their plane was hit. The two starboard engines were on fire, and the pilot ordered everyone to jump out. The others began to bail, but Lum looked back at his bombardier, Joe Richter.
“My bombardier was hit,” he said, “and I had to help him.”
As the plane fell toward Earth, Lum patched Richter’s wounded leg, dragged him over to the side door and pushed him out.
“I had to get him out,” Lum said slowly, as if he was reliving the moment in his mind. “He was in bad shape. He would have died. I had to get him out. We trained together. He was like a brother to me.”
Now alone in the plane, Lum smelled gasoline. He turned off all the switches to make sure nothing sparked. Then, he strapped on his parachute and jumped.
Was he scared?
“Yeah, but I was more afraid of being blown up,” he said. “High octane gasoline — you know, it’s very dangerous.”
As Lum drifted toward the ground, the broken plane above him exploded. But that was only the beginning.
When Lum touched down and rejoined his group, the seven U.S. soldiers were surrounded by members of the German army. But, Lum said, they were lucky. If the group had been found by civilians, they probably would have been killed.
Lum and the others were taken to a prisoner of war camp in Sagan, Germany. It was dirty and cold, especially at night, he said. Prisoners often went hungry.
“Outside of that, they treated us fairly,” he said.
Lum was a prisoner for nine months, during which time he was moved from the camp in Sagan to a camp in Nurnberg, Germany. The prisoners were forced to march through the freezing snow, which Lum said was the worst part of his captivity.
“We tried to conserve our strength because just in case you had to go on a long march like that,” he said.
Another of Lum’s secrets to surviving: maintaining a positive attitude.
“I was never pessimistic,” he said. “You can’t afford to get down, down, down and feel like ‘I’m gonna die,’” he said. “Your body gets weak.”
In April 1945, German soldiers and guards started leaving the camp. They knew something was going to happen, Lum said after Wally helped jog his memory. Sure enough, tanks from Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army drove in and freed all the prisoners.
“It was a very nice feeling,” Lum said.
When Lum got back to the states, he married May, whom he had met on a blind date just before he had shipped out. She was from New York and was happy to see him return safely.
“I thought he was worth waiting for,” she said, and then smiled.
The couple had two children — Wally and his older brother, Wesley.
On Jan. 5, 1950, Lum was awarded an Air Medal for saving the life of his bombardier. Still, he doesn’t consider himself a hero.
“He is the most honorable man I’ve ever met,” Robin Lum said, “and to have my children grow up with him and learn the qualities you don’t see anymore in this generation is really cool.”
Lum also doesn’t feel bitter about what happened to him during the war or after. About 15 years ago, he lost his bladder to cancer. Doctors said the cause was likely linked to all the cigarettes he smoked in the POW camp. Prisoners didn’t always have enough to eat, but they were provided with plenty of cigarettes. Lum stopped smoking after he was freed.
“I’m lucky I’ve got my arms and legs and that they didn’t get shot off,” he said. “… I didn’t lose my marbles. A lot of guys had it bad.”
“I am a very lucky guy to live through that, and I didn’t have any major problems,” he later added.
Lum is an only child, and his father died when he was just nine months old. Lum’s mother wasn’t happy when she learned he would be going off to war. But Lum said he doesn’t regret his decision.
“When your country — if you lose, you’re in the dog house. You’re nobody. You lose everything, and I wasn’t going to take that,” he said. “I felt it was my duty.”