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"As Louie opened his shirt, he braces himself, expecting to be shot, but no shot came. The man had only wanted to see if they were armed" (page 171).

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"He showed up with a ridiculously comprehensive assortment of safety items, including a heavy duty plastic man to use as a flotation device, a float able flashlight, a six-foot lanyard, a whistle, and a pocket knife, which he imagined flailing at any sharks who tried to eat him" (page 388).

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https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2014/12/24/louis-zamperini-the-story-of-a-true-american-hero/

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https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/ZAMPERINI-and-the-1936-OLYMPICS-Unbroken-Louis-Zamperini-Story

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"Unbroken's" Louis Zamperini: The Rest of the Story

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Laura Hillenbrand has written two great big books about exceptional athletes and inspiring survivors that the world somehow managed to forget for a while. The first was Seabiscuit, the tale of the Depression-era racehorse.

Now she offers up the saga of Louis Zamperini, a former Olympic runner who became an American airman - and whose true laurels were the result of trials, endurance and will far from any stadium.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption followsZamperini as a bombardier during World War II. When a plane he is piloting disappears into the Pacific Ocean, years of starvation, imprisonment and brutality follow.

Hillenbrand tells NPR's Scott Simon that when Zamperini was a kid in Torrance, Calif., he was known for his unbridled energy. That verve would one day make him an Olympic athlete; at the time, it simply made him spirited to the point of delinquency.

"He was the Artful Dodger of his hometown from a very early age," Hillenbrand says. "He was a serial runaway; he was a brawler; he was a prankster."

Zamperini's delinquency often manifested itself in the form of theft, Hillenbrand says; the kid would steal anything edible he could find, even breaking into kitchens to make off with a family's meal moments before it was to be served.

When Zamperini took up track and field at the urging of his older brother, he finally had somewhere to channel his pent-up energy. He would go on to become the fastest high-school runner in history and an American record holder in the mile.

"Running saved him," Hillenbrand says. "He had the one thing that a good thief has - getaway speed. And it turned out Louis had world-class, historic speed."

He eventually competed at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Adolf Hitler took notice, and complimented him on his speed.
An Airman Falls Into The Sea

After Pearl Harbor, Zamperini would become a bombardier, serving in the Pacific theater during World War II. The bombers of the time had technical problems and limited navigation abilities, and as a result Zamperini was at high risk even when he wasn't in combat.

"It was extremely deadly just to fly in these things, much less to go into combat," Hillenbrand says. "Fifteen-thousand Air Corps trainees died in training, stateside. Once you got into the combat theaters, 36,000 airmen died in noncombat accidents."

In May of 1943, those realities would turn Zamperini's life upside down. Zamperini and his crew were flying a rattletrap B-24 called the Green Hornet - their usual aircraft was grounded for repair - to look for yet another plane that had already gone down. When the Green Hornet began to fall apart, they ditched the plane in the ocean - a move that Hillenbrand says almost certainly should have guaranteed the crew's demise.

"The odds of being rescued if you ended up on a life raft were terrible," she says. "The rafts were very poorly equipped. The raft that Louis ended up on was especially poorly equipped."

Zamperini's raft had just a few cans of waters, a few bars of chocolate, screwdrivers, and a set of pliers.Staying alive would require resourcefulness, and a bit of audacity.

Zamperini and his crew were audacious, though, and they did all manner of things to survive. For hydration, Louis made rain catchers out of air-pump cases. For food they caught birds. Louis snagged fish with a hook made from his lieutenant's pin, and once with a fish hook tied to his finger.

Sometimes the crew wrestled sharks onto their raft, then killed them with the pliers.
Sunk In Another Kind Of Hell
After 47 days, Zamperini and his crew made landfall, and were picked up by a Japanese boat. And after a short period of decent treatment, they were sent to hellish prison camps. Their only food: a ball of rice thrown onto a filthy floor.

"There were feces on the floor, and there were maggots and they would have to pick the rice out," Hillenbrand says. "Their water was a tiny cup of tea every day."

Zamperini and his men were also subjected to much physical brutality, Hillenbrand says - and to medical experiments. Much of that cruelty was inflicted at the hands of Mutsuhiro Watanabe, known among his prisoners as "The Bird."

("Watanabe didn't want to be spoken about, so they chose fake names for all of their captors," Hillenbrand explains.)

Watanabe was handsome, wealthy, young and prominent in Japanese society. But he had failed to make officer himself, and resentment was part of what fueled his brutality toward prisoners of war, and especially toward Zamperini.

"He had an obsession with POWs who had made officer, with those who were prominent in civilian life, with those who were defiant," Hillenbrand says. "Louis was an officer, he was a lieutenant, he was a world-famous Olympian, and he was a ferociously defiant man. Once these two met, it was more or less a showdown for the rest of the war."

Watanabe singled Zamperini out for terrible brutality, Hillenbrand says, and eventually Zamperini and his fellow prisoners hatched a murder plot against their captor. That plan, Hillenbrand says, was critical for the prisoners - as a means, not an end.

"There was a lot going on with the prisoners of war in terms of maintaining their dignity and finding ways to push back," she says. "One of the ways they did that was they hatched a murder plot against this man."

Whether the plan succeeded or not was almost beside the point; the goal was to maintain their dignity.
'A Deeply, Deeply Haunted Man'
Zamperini survived. But when returned to California, he found himself in a new battle: overcoming the impact of his experiences.

"Louis came home a deeply, deeply haunted man," Hillenbrand says. "Terrible, terrible nightmares where Louis would wake up screaming ... fighting with The Bird, being beaten by The Bird or trying to strangle The Bird."

Today Zamperini's struggles would be recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

"Once the war is over physically, it's not over emotionally," Hillenbrand says. "Not nearly."

Living in the midst of war, Zamperini knew exactly what he had to do to survive. Living in peace, however, was another story.

"What he was dealing with when he was in crisis, in the war, these were all physical things that he had to get over," Hillenbrand says. "He had to figure out how to get water on the raft; he had to figure out how to catch that next fish. Meanwhile, the damage was being done to him emotionally. It was something, I think, a lot of these men could kind of put off at the time, in the crisis, but once the crisis was over, that's when it all kind of exploded inside them."

Yet Zamperini prevailed. He's still alive today. He found closure, in part, in 1998, when he returned to Japan to carry the Olympic torch during the Nagano Winter Olympic games.

He carried the torch through Noetsi, a town where he had been held prisoner. This time, he arrived to cheers and clapping.

"It was a beautiful experience for him to come back and have that closure, and have all of that hatred behind him," Hillenbrand says.

Despite Zamperini's astounding triumphs, Hillenbrand rarely refers to him as a hero in her book. She wants his story to stand as just one example of its kind.

"Louis is definitely a hero," she says. "What he did for this country is something that really moves me. I don't, though, want to separate him from all the other men around him who did the same thing. They're all extraordinary. I want him to be representative of all of them, rather than somebody who stands apart from them."

The One- Boy Insurgency

In the predawn darkness of August 26, 1929, in the back bedroom of a small house in Torrance, California, a twelve-year-old boy sat up in bed, listening. There was a sound coming from outside, growing ever louder. It was a huge, heavy rush, suggesting immensity, a great parting of air. It was coming from directly above the house. The boy swung his legs off his bed, raced down the stairs, slapped open the back door, and loped onto the grass. The yard was otherworldly, smothered in unnatural darkness, shivering with sound. The boy stood on the lawn beside his older brother, head thrown back, spellbound. The sky had disappeared. An object that he could see only in silhouette, reaching across a massive arc of space, was suspended low in the air over the house. It was longer than two and a half football ﬁelds and as tall as a city. It was putting out the stars. What he saw was the German dirigible Graf Zeppelin. At nearly 800 feet long and 110 feet high, it was the largest ﬂying machine ever crafted. More luxurious than the ﬁnest airplane, gliding effortlessly over huge distances, built on a scale that left spectators gasping, it was, in the summer of '29, the wonder of the world. The airship was three days from completing a sensational feat of aeronautics, circumnavigation of the globe. The journey had begun on August 7, when the Zeppelin had slipped its tethers in Lakehurst, New Jersey, lifted up with a long, slow sigh, and headed for Manhattan. On Fifth Avenue that summer, demolition was soon to begin on the Waldorf- Astoria Hotel, clearing the way for a skyscraper of unprecedented proportions, the Empire State Building. At Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx, players were debuting numbered uniforms: Lou Gehrig wore No. 4; Babe Ruth, about to hit his ﬁve hundredth home run, wore No. 3. On Wall Street, stock prices were racing toward an all- time high.

After a slow glide around the Statue of Liberty, the Zeppelin banked north, then turned out over the Atlantic. In time, land came below again: France, Switzerland, Germany. The ship passed over Nuremberg, where fringe politician Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi Party had been trounced in the 1928 elections, had just delivered a speech touting selective infanticide. Then it ﬂew east of Frankfurt, where a Jewish woman named Edith Frank was caring for her newborn, a girl named Anne. Sailing northeast, the Zeppelin crossed over Russia. Siberian villagers, so isolated that they'd never even seen a train, fell to their knees at the sight of it.

On August 19, as some four million Japanese waved handkerchiefs and shouted "Banzai!" the Zeppelin circled Tokyo and sank onto a landing ﬁeld. Four days later, as the German and Japanese anthems played, the ship rose into the grasp of a typhoon that whisked it over the Paciﬁc at breathtaking speed, toward America. Passengers gazing from the windows saw only the ship's shadow, following it along the clouds "like a huge shark swimming alongside." When the clouds parted, the passengers glimpsed giant creatures, turning in the sea, that looked like monsters.

On August 25, the Zeppelin reached San Francisco. After being cheered down the California coast, it slid through sunset, into darkness and silence, and across midnight. As slow as the drifting wind, it passed over Torrance, where its only audience was a scattering of drowsy souls, among them the boy in his pajamas behind the house on Gramercy Avenue.

Standing under the airship, his feet bare in the grass, he was transﬁxed. It was, he would say, "fearfully beautiful." He could feel the rumble of the craft's engines tilling the air but couldn't make out the silver skin, the sweeping ribs, the ﬁnned tail. He could see only the blackness of the space it inhabited. It was not a great presence but a great absence, a geometric ocean of darkness that seemed to swallow heaven itself. The boy's name was Louis Silvie Zamperini.

Excerpted from Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand Copyright 2010 by Laura Hillenbrand. Excerpted by permission of Random House Inc.

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'Seabiscuit' Author's New Hero 'Unbroken' By War

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Laura Hillenbrand has written two great big books about exceptional athletes and inspiring survivors that the world somehow managed to forget for a while. The first was Seabiscuit, the tale of the Depression-era racehorse.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/arts/louis-zamperini-olympian-war-survivor-unbroken-dies.html?_r=0

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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/world-war-ii-isnt-over-talking-to-unbroken-veteran-louis-zamperini/382616/

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a World War II story of survival, resilience, and redemption

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Louis Zamperini was a poor boy from Torrance, California that stole from the neighbor hood to provide for his family.

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"In the early months of 1940, in a series of eastern indoor miles against the best runners in America, he was magnificent, taking two seconds and two close fourths, twice beating Cunningham, and getting progressively faster" (page 42).

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When Louis was a young boy, he would steal from his neighborhood and be chased down by the cops so he could provide for his very poor family. He started to become faster and faster the more he ran and people told him to use his talent and run on the track, and he did. He started to train for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and he ran at it when he was 19 years old. He ran the 5000 meter in 14:46.8 and finished in eighth place. After the Olympics are over, he gets injured in several ways and he quits to finish college.

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After he finishes college, Louis joined the Army on September 29, 1941 to fight against Japan and Germany. He fought against the Japanese planes in Oahu just moments before they bombed Pearl Harbor. and killed over 2,400 people. He fought for the next 5 years until he was on a ship that got shot down while on a rescue mission and stranded him and his crew out at sea for 47 days.

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Only three of the eleven flight members survived the plane landing and Louis was one of the survivors. His weight dropped below 100 pounds due to not having any food or water for the last 30 days. They drifted a total of 2,000 miles in those 47 days. He landed on the Marshall Islands that was occupied by the Japanese and was captured. He was taken to a prison camp in Japan and was badly tortured. He was later released from the camp after the war had ended. Soon after he returned home, he married Cynthia Applewhite and they had 1 son and 1 daughter.  He died from pneumonia at the age of 97 at his home on July 2, 2014

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"When he finished basic training, he had an unhappy surprise. Because he hadn't read his air corps washout paper, he had no idea that he'd agreed to rejoin the corps for future service" (page 45).

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"Few societies treasured dignity, and feared humiliation, as did the Japanese, for whom a loss of honor could merit suicide" (page 183).